What was the author's purpose in writing Act 2 of The Crucible?

There are many important things that happen in Act Two. 

1.  It gives us a glimpse at the fragile state that Elizabeth and John's relationship is in.  We see right off the bat that they are awkward with one another, and tensions are right under the surface.  As soon as Abby is brought up, John blows up and Elizabeth reveals her insecurities.  We see that John's actions have had an impact on their family.

2.  Mary Warren reveals, secondhand, what has been going on in the courts for the past while.  Miller takes it from Abby and the girls calling out names at the end of Act One, to Mary Warren saying that "there be thirty-nine" arrested, and that "Goody Osburn-will hang!"  We see just how much the accusations have gotten out of control.

3.  Elizabeth is arrested: "Abigail Williams charge her" with witchcraft.  This is crucial to the tension in the play, because her arrest is the catalyst that sends John to the courts for all of the action that happens in Act Three, including his revelation of his affair with Abby.

All of these events are crucial in increasing the tension, moving the story along, and revealing pertinent information about the characters and main action. 

What was the author's purpose in writing Act 2 of The Crucible?

One of the main purposes for Act 2 is that it reveals the relationship of John and Elizabeth Proctor at this point in the play.  In the beginning of the act the audience can tell that the relationship between the two is distant and strained -- Elizabeth seems very cold and unloving toward John while John tries his hardest to make Elizabeth happy and seeks her forgiveness.  The two get angry with each other very easily and raise their voices because of this strained relationship. 

A second purpose for this scene is to reveal the accusation of three major characters -- Rebecca Nurse, Martha Corey, and, most importantly, Elizabeth Proctor. 

Finally, one of the themes of the play -- greed and jealousy -- are easily seen in the evident accusation of Elizabeth Proctor by Abigail through the use of a poppet and a needle that Abigail used to stab herself. 

What was Miller's purpose for writing Act 3 in The Crucible?

I think that the primary motivation behind the third act was to explore the level of personal and political injustice that existed in Salem at the time of the Witchcraft Trials.  Act III is the first time we actually see the trials, themselves.  Miller has to bring out the courtroom in order for the reader to fully grasp a couple of things.  The first would be the fradulent nature in which "spectral evidence," evidence that consisted of visions, seeing demons and ghosts, and supernatural phenomena were allowed to be used against those accused.  Miller is able to display this with Abigail seeing "the yellow bird" in the courtroom to contradict Mary Warren's testimony.  At the same time, Act III allows the reader to really understand how the "trials" were actually fraudulent in that they did not allow for full representation for those accused.  It also gives insight into how flimsy the cases against many of the accused actually were.  In the forms of Judges Hathorne and Danforth, Act III is able to fully show how those in the position of power in Salem were more concerned with substantiating their own position than any real adjudication of justice.  The reader does not see this in any other point except in Act III.  Finally, it is the moment when Proctor can no longer be silent.  Throughout the play, Proctor had been shown as someone who understood what he needed to do, but lacked the initiative to do it.  Act III is the moment when he has to confront Abigail once and for all and also face down the hypocrisy of Salem, something that he had been willing to live with for some time. Act III is the moment where we see Proctor transformed from an ordinary man into someone of extraordinary capacity, a transformation that will be completed in Act IV.

What was Arthur Miller's purpose for writing The Crucible?

The most obvious reason Arthur Miller wrote The Crucible (or anything else, really) is because he had a story to tell. Without that, he would not have been inspired to write. It is true, however, that what inspired him to write this particular story is quite personal.

As a Jewish man, Miller was a political advocate against the inequalities of race in America, and he was vocal in his support of labor and the unions. Because he was such an outspoken critic in these two areas, he was a prime target for Senator Joseph McCarthy and others who were on a mission to rid the country of Communism.

Miller was called before the House Committee on Un-American Activities because of his connections to these issues but refused to condemn any of his friends. This experience, a rather blind and sweeping condemnation of anything even remotely connected to Communism without sufficient (or any) evidence, is what prompted him to write about the Salem Witch trials.

In a later interview, Miller said the following:

It would probably never have occurred to me to write a play about the Salem witch trials of 1692 had I not seen some astonishing correspondences with that calamity in the America of the late 40s and early 50s. My basic need was to respond to a phenomenon which, with only small exaggeration, one could say paralysed a whole generation and in a short time dried up the habits of trust and toleration in public discourse.

However, the more he began to study the tragic events in Salem, the more he understood that McCarthy's hunt for Communists was nothing compared to the fanaticism which reigned in Salem in the 1690s.

In time to come, the notion of equating the red-hunt with the witch-hunt would be condemned as a deception. There were communists and there never were witches. The deeper I moved into the 1690s, the further away drifted the America of the 50s, and, rather than the appeal of analogy, I found something different to draw my curiosity and excitement.

Anyone standing up in the Salem of 1692 and denying that witches existed would have faced immediate arrest, the hardest interrogation and possibly the rope. Every authority not only confirmed the existence of witches but never questioned the necessity of executing them. It became obvious that to dismiss witchcraft was to forgo any understanding of how it came to pass that tens of thousands had been murdered as witches in Europe. To dismiss any relation between that episode and the hunt for subversives was to shut down an insight into not only the similar emotions but also the identical practices of both officials and victims.

In his note about the historical accuracy of the play, Miller writes:

I believe that the reader will discover here the essential nature of one of the strangest and most awful chapters in human history.

Though his interest in the comparisons between the trials and McCarthyism began with his own experience, it was the horrific nature of the trials themselves which motivated Miller to write The Crucible.

What was Arthur Miller's purpose for writing The Crucible?

Arthur Miller is an American playwright who wrote The Crucible in 1952. Thus, the play was written on the heels of World War II, which ended in 1945, and was written during a time in which the United States was becoming increasingly concerned about the rising power of the Soviet Union. Worries that the Soviet Union's communist ways would infiltrate the United States led to a significant amount of paranoia within the American government (compare the paranoia about witchcraft in Miller's play).

Accordingly, a number of governmental committees and investigations arose. The most famous of which were those conducted by Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy, who, early in 1950, just two years before Miller's play, claimed to have a list containing the names of many communists and Soviet spies who worked for the American government.

Given the air of paranoia present in the late 1940s and early 1950s about America being infiltrated by communists, it is easy to see why Miller could comment on this societal situation by comparing it to the witch trials that occurred in America some two and a half centuries earlier. Interestingly, and perhaps not surprisingly, Miller himself became the target of one of these anti-communist investigations four years after The Crucible appeared.

What was Arthur Miller's purpose for writing The Crucible?

Miller wrote his play about unwarranted persecution in response to the "Red Scare" of the 1950s, in which many artists (himself included) were accused of Communist ties or at least Communist sympathies, spearheaded by Senator Joseph McCarthy (in the play, McCarthy's role is analoguous to that of Revered Paris).  Many a career was ruined by these largely unfounded attacks.  Miller saw many parallels to the attacks of his time and the Puritan witch hunts.  He hoped that by presenting our past, the future might not continue to repeat itself. 

What was Arthur Miller's purpose for writing The Crucible?

In 1692, Salem, Massachusetts, one of the most distasteful times in America occurred.  There were nineteen people hanged as witches.  Each had been accused of witchcraft. For various reasons and testimony by hysterical children and wicked people, innocent people were found guilty.  Many more had been imprisoned; but when the governor’s wife was accused, the hysteria came to an end.

The play The Crucible by Arthur Miller is an historical fiction drama based on the events in Salem in 1692.  Using dramatic license but based on historical facts, Miller consolidated characters and changed the ages so that fewer actors would be on the stage. 

Written in 1952, Miller intended his play to be an allegory of the current times.  The anti-communist congressional hearings were taking place at the time with Senator Joseph McCarthy as the leader. Realizing that the verbiage thrown around by this UnAmerican Activities Committee sounded similar to the language used in the Salem Witch Trials. From the government to Hollywood--McCarthy convinced America that communists had infiltrated everywhere.

His scare was not entirely an illusion. The Soviet Union was growing, and their government was in direct opposition to America.

In an article for the New Yorker magazine, Miller explains his reasons for writing the play:

…by 1950, when I began to think of writing about the hunt for Reds in America, I was motivated in some great part by the paralysis that had set in among many liberals who were fearful, and with good reason, of being identified as covert Communists if  they should protest too strongly.

In the early 1950s, the Red hunt, led by the UnAmerican Activities Committee and McCarthy, was dominating the American psyche. It reached Hollywood when the studios agreed to submit actors’ names to the House Committee for "clearing" before employing them.

There were actors who named other actors.  Some writers were charged with being communists who had signed up in the 1930s but had since served in the army in World War II.  There were blacklists of writers and actors who were not able to work in the movies for many years after the end of the committee's work. This was the climate in which Arthur Miller wrote his play.

One of the things that The Crucible drives home is how often history repeats itself. Senator  McCarthy tried to find every single communist in the U.S.  There seemed to be a moral upset that would allow suspects to be put on trial and forced to “name names” in order to keep from going to prison. 

To prove the futility of charging the innocent and the repercussions that it rains down on their lives forever, the protagonist of the play, John Procter answers why he will not sign a confession that he was a witch:

Danforth: You will give me your honest confession in my hand, or I cannot keep you from the rope.

Proctor: Because it is my name! Because I cannot have another in my life! Because I lie and sign myself to lies! Because I am not worth the dust on the feet of them that hang! How may I live without my name? I have given you my soul, leave me my name!

The play’s intent was to make the audience examine how they would handle themselves if they were accused but innocent.  Miller also wanted  the audience think about the emotional makeup of a human being when he is accused of something that he did not do.  If justice and truth are on the line, those who are innocent will rise to the occasion and stand up for what is right.

What was Arthur Miller's purpose for writing The Crucible?

Arthur Miller wrote his second play, The Crucible, as a response to his distaste of McCarthyism during the 1950s. Miller believed that people were getting worked up and blaming others without any real reason or evidence. He wanted to show how irrational the large fear of Communism was and demonstrate that people were getting to the point where it becomes violent and destructive. He wrote the play as a means to set up a mirror in which the public could see that what the Puritans did in the 1600s, pointed fingers without evidence, let their long-standing feuds be a basis for false accusations, let boredom, ignorance, jealousy, and money become sufficient for sentencing and murdering, was being repeated in the modern day with accusations of Communism.

Miller was accused of being a Communist but never actually joined the Communist party.

What was Arthur Miller's purpose for writing The Crucible?

A crucible can be defined as a container capable of withstanding intense heat. In the play The Crucible a number of characters finds themselves having to do much the same thing. Heat in this sense is not just allegorical; it's also literal. The standard punishment for those convicted of witchcraft was public burning. Anyone so condemned effectively had to go through three crucibles, or trials: first, the trial of public opinion; then, a formal criminal trial in a court of law; and finally, the trial of the actual execution itself.

Each test is significant as it removes the individual's outer shell—the first two metaphorically, the last one literally—to reveal the true self underneath. The feverish witch-hunt hysteria exposes the mental and emotional depths of each individual to sustained and uncomfortable public scrutiny. Psychologically, this is the toughest test of all, as damaging secrets and lies come bubbling to the surface to be picked over and minutely examined by the townsfolk's withering gaze.

Just as the crucible cannot control the heat to which it is subject, the people of Salem can no longer control the level of frenzied hysteria that has descended upon their town. In such a toxic, over-heated environment, all each individual can do is to withstand the burning intensity.

What was Arthur Miller's purpose for writing The Crucible?

A crucible is a small bowl or cup that must withstand the extremely high temperatures used in order to melt the substance within it. We can certainly think of Salem in 1692 as a figurative crucible. Miller describes the developing antagonism between political rivals, and then there is the anxiety created by the possibility of Indian raids and the ever-present Puritan fear that the Devil is in their midst, trying to corrupt them: all of these create tension that seems to slowly "heat up" the town, making it ready to respond to the girls' outlandish accusations in the terrible way it does.

Moreover, the accusations begin with women who are already outcasts in the community, people who it is easy to believe could be witches in league with the devil. But then, the accusations become more and more high profile, and soon, highly respected members of the community suddenly find themselves in trouble. This also seems to mirror the idea of a crucible slowly heating up and whatever's inside getting more and more volatile as its temperature increases. Certainly, the people of Salem become more and more volatile as the accused grow in number and importance, and the situation worsens as some individuals, like Mr. Putnam, realize the use to which these accusations could be put. Just as the temperature rises in a crucible, so do the tensions rise in the crucible that is Salem.

What was Arthur Miller's purpose for writing The Crucible?

A "crucible" is a severe test or trial, which is exactly what happens in the play. Miller intended "The Crucible" as an allegory to McCarthyism. The events that took place during the time the play was written were very similar to the Salem witch hunts. Innocent people were being put on trial or jailed practicing or being associated with what people believed to be evil- communism. Miller himself was accused of being a communist sympathizer. Like the people put on trial during the witch hunts, McCarthyism accused also had their reputations damaged or even their lives ruined.

What was Arthur Miller's purpose for writing The Crucible?

“Crucible” can mean a test or a container used to heat up chemicals to high temperatures in order to reach a melting point or create a chemical reaction.

In terms of a test, this was a test of the moral judgment of the town as a whole. They failed this test with flying colors. There is also a secondary satirical meaning on test. The trials themselves test the guilt or innocence of the accused. These tests are biased and flawed because they are controlled by religious fundamentalism and conformity.

As the hysteria increases, the accusations accumulate and Salem reaches a melting point where their identity changes. They define themselves by witch hunting more than religious belief. The parallel is between heating chemicals to a crucial degree and the rising hysteria of the mob mentality reaching a point of no return.

What was Arthur Miller's purpose for writing The Crucible?

I think that we have to go back to the definition of the term, "crucible," in order to better understand its significance. The word "crucible" refers to an object that withstands heat and does not melt easily.  It is able to withstand pressure, external forces, and can endure a great deal.  This applies to many of the characters in the play who either represent it or fail to do so.  Individuals such as Elizabeth and John Proctor or Giles Corey would find themselves as bearing similarity to a "crucible" as they endure an unimaginable lot in order to maintain their own sense of dignity and, to quote John, their very "name."  Others, such as Reverend Parris or Abigail, fail to uphold such ideals and are willing to melt under the social pressure applied by others or under the heat of their own passions and self interest.  In the end, the "crucible" ends up becoming how individuals respond to the pressures and elements applied to them in times of crisis.

What was Arthur Miller's purpose for writing The Crucible?

The above answer is the primary definition of the word 'crucible', and probably the best explanation for the title, but it's interesting to look at some of the secondary definitions.  The word 'crucible' also means 'a test or severe trial', 'a cross' (as in a cross like Jesus carried), 'a state of anguish or pain that tests resiliency and character', and 'forces working together to create an effect'.  All of these secondary definitions have direct connections to the events of the work as well.

What was Arthur Miller's purpose for writing The Crucible?

To understand what motivated Arthur Miller to write The Crucible, it helps to understand what was occurring in the United States in 1953, when the play debuted.

Ostensibly, The Crucible is about the Salem witch trials, which happened in seventeenth-century Massachusetts, when people were suspected of and put on trial for being witches. Several people were put to death because they were found guilty of conducting black magic, and the term "witch hunt" has since come to refer to the search for and persecution of people who hold unpopular views.

Roughly fifteen years before the play was published, the US government created the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) to find and investigate people who were suspected of being disloyal to the country and of having ties to communism. Under the guise of working with the HUAC, ambitious politicians and members of the judiciary conducted massive and very public investigations into the lives of many people and also put many on trial for failing to help root out communists in the US. The hysteria surrounding communism was bolstered by Senator Joseph McCarthy, who falsely stated that communist spies had infiltrated the federal government. The investigations and trials during this period have, in retrospect, come to be viewed by most modern scholars as a witch hunt—which is exactly the point Arthur Miller hoped to make through The Crucible.

Arthur Miller wrote The Crucible during a period when these investigations hurt not only him, but many of his colleagues and friends as well. In the theater and film community, there were hundreds of people who were investigated by the HUAC, and many were put on a blacklist that prevented anyone from hiring them. As a result, many writers, playwrights, actors, and others lost their livelihoods as well as their reputations. For example, the same year The Crucible premiered, Dalton Trumbo's screenplay for Roman Holiday won an Oscar. Because Trumbo was blacklisted, however, he was not officially credited for his work on the film until nearly forty years later, when he was awarded a posthumous Oscar.

In The Crucible, Miller metaphorically likens the actions of the HUAC and the hysteria stemming from McCarthyism to the Salem witch trials. In a 1996 article in The New Yorker magazine titled “Why I Wrote The Crucible,” Miller even reminisces about the fear he himself felt at the time.

What was Arthur Miller's purpose for writing The Crucible?

The late playwright Arthur Miller never did the public the favor of conveniently listing one or more of the reasons he decided to write his parable of the anti-communist hysteria sweeping the country during the early 1950s.  One can, however, get a good idea of the motivations behind his writing The Crucible from an article he wrote for The New Yorker (October 21, 1996).  In this article, titled “Why I Wrote The Crucible: An Artist’s Answer to Politics,” Miller describes the atmosphere in which he, a playwright, was immersed during a period in which actors, writers, producers, directors, and others affiliated with the film industry and with the theater were being pressured to implicate each other as communists or as individuals affiliated in some way with the Communist Party of the United States, which was funded by the Soviet Union.  Alarmed by the hysteria and by the injustices associated with this environment, while simultaneously fascinated by the history of the Salem Witch Trials of 1692 (“I had read about the witchcraft trials in college, but it was not until I read a book published in 1867 -- a two-volume, thousand-page study by Charles W. Upham, who was then the mayor of Salem -- that I knew I had to write about the period”], Miller chose to draw the parallel between the two eras.  As he wrote in that article:

“The Crucible was an act of desperation. Much of my desperation branched out, I suppose, from a typical Depression -- era trauma -- the blow struck on the mind by the rise of European Fascism and the brutal anti-Semitism it had brought to power. But by 1950, when I began to think of writing about the hunt for Reds in America, I was motivated in some great part by the paralysis that had set in among many liberals who, despite their discomfort with the inquisitors' violations of civil rights, were fearful, and with good reason, of being identified as covert Communists if they should protest too strongly.”

What struck Miller most about both periods were the convoluted and incredibly dangerous semantics involved identifying “the guilty.”  The pressure to name others was directly connected to the need to prove oneself guiltless.  Additionally, Miller found enormously interesting the concept of “spectral evidence” employed during the witch trials of the late 17th Century; in effect, admitting unholy influences in order to dispel the notion of something worse.  Again, the parallels between the Salem witch trials and the McCarthyism raging across the United States were unmistakable:

"The more I read into the Salem panic, the more it touched off corresponding ages of common experiences in the fifties: the old friend of a blacklisted person crossing the street to avoid being seen talking to him; the overnight conversions of former leftists into born-again patriots; and so on. Apparently, certain processes are universal. When Gentiles in Hitler's Germany, for example, saw their Jewish neighbors being trucked off, or in Soviet Ukraine saw the Kulaks sing before their eyes, the common reaction, even among those unsympathetic to Nazism or Communism, was quite naturally to turn away in fear of being identified with the condemned.”

That is a powerful motivator for fearful people to condemn others for the purpose of shielding themselves from scrutiny.  The atmosphere in which Miller conceptualized and drafted The Crucible was one of constant fear of being accused of having impure thoughts – not even actual acts, but thoughts. 

One final reason for the writing of The Crucible has nothing to do with political science or paranoia, but rather with the love of language.  Miller, in his article for The New Yorker, notes that he was “also drawn into writing The Crucible by the chance it gave me to use a new language -- that of seventeenth-century New England. That plain, craggy English was liberating in a strangely sensuous way, with its swings from an almost legalistic precision to a wonderful metaphoric richness.”

What was Arthur Miller's purpose for writing The Crucible?

One of the reasons that Arthur Miller wrote The Crucible was because he was trying to inform the public consciousness through theater.  He was trying to educate the population about social responsibility, conflict and injustice.

He was inspired by the events of the day, the McCarthy era, but he had a passion for creating characters who wrestle with personal conflict, passion and past mistakes. 

He writes to highlight the experience of the common man who, when his name, his sense of dignity is destroyed, the tragedy that tears apart John Proctor, also elevates him. 

Arthur Miller writes to celebrate the tenacity of the human spirit, to honor it, to revere it.

Arthur Miller speaks in the voice of the common man, about the injustices that befall him, about the tragic circumstances that sometimes engulf him, about the compassion and capacity of the human heart to rise above the most difficult of circumstances.  

What was Arthur Miller's purpose for writing The Crucible?

As defined in dictionary.com, one of the meanings of "crucible" is "a severe test, as of patience or belief; a trial. 

A "crucible" is also "a vessel made of a refractory substance such as graphite or porcelain, used for melting and calcining materials at high temperatures." 

Both these definitions add to our understanding of what is to happen in the play.  We have a society undergoing a severe test:  will they (and us --- remember, this is the McCarthy era, and Miller was intimately involved with the House Un-American Activities Committee) be influenced by an histerial witchhunt, or will reason prevail.  There is also an individual in the play, John Proctor, who will be severely tested in "The Crucible"  when he has to choose between his sense of integrity, his name,  and his wife and their unborn child.  

It is my suspicion that Miller saw himself in the crucible when he was pressed to reveal the names of his "fellow communists."  It is helpful to remember that Miller wrote an adaptation of Ibsen's "An Enemy of the People" at about this time, and Dr. Stockman was faced with a similar choice.  

Proctor, Stockman, Miller --- all facing the test of their lives.

What was Arthur Miller's purpose for writing The Crucible?

One definition for "crucible" is a severe test or trial.  This is the definition most often attributed to the play.  There is a direction connection:  within the play, the witch trials were very severe.  Also, many characters underwent severe trials, specifically John Proctor, who not only was put on literal trial, but his integrity, morals, honesty, and convictions were tested. 

Other definitions refer to a container where metals are melted down and fused; the high heats melt most metals, but not all.  In this definition, we can see that many characters (Mary Warren, Goody Good and Osburne) "melted" under the severe heat and pressure of the witchcraft accusation.  But not John Proctor.  He was made of tougher metal.  He signs a confession at first, but in the end "tears the paper and crumples it" and then says, "You have made your magic now, for now I do think I see some shred of goodness in John Proctor".  Being under the severe heat and pressure of this trial, the "magic" he refers to, he is transformed into a stronger man who has withstood what so many others were not able to. 

Because of the various definitions of the word, and its applicability not only to the events, but also the characters within the play itself, "crucible" is an apt word to choose for the play.

What was Arthur Miller's purpose for writing The Crucible?

Arthur Miller wrote in an article for The Guardian in 2000:

It would probably never have occurred to me to write a play about the Salem witch trials of 1692 had I not seen some astonishing correspondences with that calamity in the America of the late 40s and early 50s. My basic need was to respond to a phenomenon which, with only small exaggeration, one could say paralysed a whole generation and in a short time dried up the habits of trust and toleration in public discourse.

He is referring to the infamous hearings conducted by the House Un-American Activities Committee, led by Senator Joseph McCarthy. McCarthy alleged that there were some two hundred "card-carrying Communists" who had infiltrated the United States and meant to spy on our government. He capitalized on the fear and even hysteria created by his words, wielding his power to ruin the careers of many of Hollywood's elite.

Miller noticed several similarities between the McCarthy era and the Salem witch trials (which he outlines in the article, and I've attached the link below). First, one's enemies are "disguised as ordinary citizens": one never knows who one can trust—anyone could be a witch or communist in disguise. Second, people were expected to name names of other people who were supposedly involved in suspect activities in order to make their own testimony credible. Third, the effect on the greater community—rampant fear and even hysteria —meant that people were asked to spy on one another, to report on one another, and so people began to distrust others who they'd known for a long time. Miller wrote The Crucible as both a response to and criticism of the McCarthy era, even to show the similarities between the two epochs in American history.

What was Arthur Miller's purpose for writing The Crucible?

Arthur Miller made it very clear that he wrote The Crucible as an allegory—a play which represents something much, much deeper than what is on the surface—to show the similarities between the Salem Witch Trials of 1692 and events that were occurring in the United States during the 1950s. A "witch-hunt" was happening in the United States during that time period; but instead of the accused being labeled as "witches" as they were during the Salem Witch Trials, they were labeled as followers of the Communist Party or Communist supporters. Because of all those pointing fingers, over 200 people lost their jobs (mostly actors, directors, and writers in the movie industry) and found it very difficult to find jobs again once their reputations were ruined. Miller wrote The Crucible to compare the similarities of the Salem Witch Trials to the events of the 1950s to warn readers that history is likely to repeat itself. 

What was Arthur Miller's purpose for writing The Crucible?

In the 1950's, the government conducted their own "witchhunt" of anyone they thought belonged to the American Communist party.  It was called the Red Scare (communist parties used the color red in their mottos, and red was a tag-name for communists).  They rounded people up, put them on "trials" in the form of senate hearings, where they were thoroughly questioned about their beliefs.  If they were found to have leanings that the senate deemed communistic, they were often "black-listed", meaning, they couldn't work anymore; anything they did was banned from public consumption.  They were also drilled to give names of other people they think might be communists.

Miller's writing of "The Crucible" was a reference to the red scare that happened, a social commentary on the witch-trial mentality, where fear of something (witches, communists), often prompts mass hysteria and the abandonment of logic in the pursuit of truth.

What was Arthur Miller's purpose for writing The Crucible?

Miller's choice of the term 'crucible' for his play concerning witchcraft, Puritanism, and morality often raises questions in the minds of the readers.  First, a crucible is a piece of laboratory or metallurgical equipment used for refining metals.  The metal would be placed into the container of the crucible and then was subjected to high temperatures which could be used either to burn away the metal's impurities or smelt some new compound of metal.  

With this information in mind, Miller's title becomes a startling metaphor for the events that occur in Salem.  The idea of the crucible suggests a trial by fire, in which the good and worthy are preserved and the false perish.  The characters of the town must face and overcome their fears as well as prejudice, all within the incendiary events of the Salem witch trials.