Key Quotes and Character Motivation in The Crucible

Analyzing Key Quotes from Arthur Miller's The Crucible

Abigail Williams: Passion, Pretense, and Revenge

"I look for John Proctor that took me from my sleep and put knowledge in my heart! I never knew what pretense Salem was, I never knew the lying lessons I was taught by all these Christian women and their covenanted men! And now you bid me tear the light out of my eyes? I will not, I cannot! You loved me, John Proctor, and whatever sin it is, you love me yet!"

Abigail Williams utters these words in an Act I conversation with John Proctor, revealing her past affair with him. For Proctor, their relationship belongs firmly to the past; while he may still be attracted to her, he is desperately trying to put the incident behind him. Abigail, on the other hand, has no such sense of closure, as this quote makes clear.

As she begs him to come back to her, her anger overflows, showing the roots of what becomes her targeted, destructive campaign through Salem. Her motivations are twofold:

1. Her intense jealousy of Elizabeth Proctor and her fantasy that if she could only dispose of Elizabeth, John would be hers.
2. A fierce loathing of the entire town, encapsulated by the phrase: “I never knew what pretense Salem was, I never knew the lying lessons. . . .”

Abigail hates Salem, and in the course of The Crucible, she makes the town pay for its hypocrisy.

Danforth and the Infallibility of the Court

You must understand, sir, that a person is either with this court or he must be counted against it, there be no road between. This is a sharp time, now, a precise time—we live no longer in the dusky afternoon when evil mixed itself with good and befuddled the world. Now, by God’s grace, the shining sun is up, and them that fear not light will surely praise it.

This statement, given by Deputy Governor Danforth in Act III, aptly sums up the attitude of the authorities toward the witch trials. In his own right, Danforth is an honorable man, but, like everyone else in Salem, he sees the world in absolute terms: black and white. Everything and everyone belongs to either God or the Devil.

The court and government of Massachusetts, being divinely sanctioned, necessarily belong to God. Thus, anyone who opposes the court’s activities cannot be an honest opponent. This is the fundamental flaw of a theocracy: one cannot have honest disagreements because God (and by extension, the court) is infallible.

Since the court is conducting the witch trials, anyone who questions the proceedings, such as John Proctor or Giles Corey, is immediately deemed the court’s enemy. The logic is simple and devastating: the court does God’s work, and so an enemy of the court must, necessarily, be a servant of the Devil.