The Crucible By Arthur Miller - 1619 Words

E VERYONE KNOWS THAT OUR YOUNG, innocents need to be shielded from the big, bad world that envelops them on a daily basis. But are we taking this bubble wrapping too far? Has our initial need to protect our young become an irrational fear? Does the terror of having a paedophile lurking right outside our homes, roaming our streets eyeing our children escalated to an extent identical to the hysteria in The Crucible about witches? The answer is yes. Yes, the fear has and still is, on the rise as the hysteria stimulated by the ever-more threatening encroachment of paedophilia seems to closely follow in the footsteps of predecessors like McCarthyism and, ultimately, the Salem witch-hunts. Therefore, the central issue for us to examine is the†¦show more content†¦For this reason, McCarthyism acted as a catalyst, which catapulted the play into popularity in the 1960’s, a popularity that has survived to this very day. A Crucible: Ideology AN IDEOLOGY ACTS LIKE A CRUCIBLE AS IT IS AN essential element. An ideology consists of the identical beliefs of a group of people (which ultimately shapes their worldview and thus their behaviour and actions). In The Crucible, the root ideology was Puritanism, which is based on the belief that God was omnipotent. They strived to live by the teaching of the bible and achieve purity. As a result, there was a strong intolerance towards any type of error, a socially unforgivable intolerance that had to be squashed. Abigail was consumed by guilt – for the ‘sins ‘she had committed- in a society ruled by the dictates of the Puritanical ideals. So instinctively, she diverts the attention away from herself by blaming someone even more helpless than her, her slave Tituba by shouting that, â€Å"She made me do it. She made Betty do it.† (Page 45) Abigail then becomes blameless and innocent because of this. This is similar to the way the Catholic Church has tried to divert media attention away from their paedophilic actions of some of their priests. In a similar way to Abigail, the Catholic Church has used methods of diversion by hushing victims or as The Age reported, â€Å"moved (paedophilic priests) from Parish to Parish†. Such as (more evidence?)