Salem at Its Worst

Adrian Vences
English 11a
Miss Rollingier
September 28, 2011
Salem at its Worst
A liar begins with making falsehood appear like truth, and ends with making truth it’s self-appear like falsehood- William Shenstone.   In the play The Crucible, Arthur Miller relates to this quote by showing how the truth is turned into lies. This play is about a girl named Abigail who has an affair with John Proctor and later accuses him and other townsmen of witchcraft.   Abigail perpetually lies and manipulates the community of Salem to ease her way out of burdensome situations.
In Spite of this Abigail is held the most responsible for the Salem trials, although she is not the only bad person during the trials. Danforth has to be partly at blame too. For example, Danforth is so gullible to Abigail’s lies and lets other people get pulled into her falsehood, till Hale exclaims “It is a natural lie to tell; I beg you, stop now before another is convicted… From the beginning this man has struck me true. By my oath to heaven, I believe him now” (1311). If Danforth would have realized sooner that Abigail was lying innocent lives could have been saved. At the end of the day Abigail is still held most responsible for all the confusion on who is truly the witch.
Abigail has repeatedly given false accusations towards various members of the community in her pursuit of revenge. For example, when Abigail is revealing everything to Parris she says “Sometimes I wake and find myself standing in the open doorway and not a stitch on my body! I always hear her laughing in my sleep. I hear her singing her Barbados songs and tempting with me-“(1260). She is trying to blame this on Tituba first because she is most likely not to rebel against her. Although tituba is her servant she accuses he of witchcraft because she’ll exiled back to Barbados and won’t be able to tell anyone about the affair she had with John Proctor. In addition, she bursts out during court “in a genuine conversation with the...