The Crucible: Act 1

During The Crucible: Act 1, there were multiple things that didn't make sense to me or were very boring. Unfortunately this happens to me a lot and I need to work on this. Along with there being some boring parts in the book, there were some very interesting ones too. As the story starts out Betty was ill or not feeling well and was laying in bed. Then Mr. Paris is curious and looks into her illness and has some doctors look at her. The more and more they searched, the more and more it looked like it had to do with witchcraft. Normally, now-n-days, people wouldn't really care, but back then it was a huge deal. The Puritans were very strict about everything and had many rules to follow by. A couple of these about witchcraft were significant to the book. The whole goal of the Puritans was to "purify" the church, and it was very difficult with the practice of witchcraft going around. Since most of the people in Salem were strict Puritans, they did not tolerate this. If they were to find out about Betty being involved in witchcraft, the social status of her and her closes relatives would drop drastically and they could quite possibly be kicked out of the community. In order for this to not happen, Mr. Paris worked very hard for only a select few to know the truth and what happened. I think this is very important, because he not only risked his reputation, but the reputation of the entire household in order to save Betty's. This just proves that she must have been something special to him. Once Abigail did fess up to practicing witchcraft with Betty in the woods, Mr. Paris was disappointed, but not furious. This made me think that the story was trying to tell us, that he understood what it was like being a young adult curious about everything comes your way. He must have understood that they were just curious and not trying to be bad or cause any harm. I think that he too tried it once and was able to relate to them. Since the communities that the Puritans would live in were made up of not very many people, everyone would know their neighbor as a family member, and everyone knew everyone. This is why Mr. Paris was so paranoid at first about the whole witchcraft thing. He was afraid word would get around about their family and what Betty did. Luckily the people that knew kept their mouths shut. Another bad thing that came from knowing everyone so closely, was they could get on your nerves very easily and you might want to be mean to them back. An easy was to doing this was passing the blame of something like practicing witchcraft for instance off to them. This is exactly what Abigail did to Tituba in The Crucible: Act 1. In the end, I enjoyed the beginning of the book mostly because it isn't something you read every day. Plus it has a good meaning when you think about it too. I would be interested to learn more about witchcraft, not for me to practice, but for me to have more knowledge about.

Miller, Arthur. The Crucible. New York, NY: Penguin, 1996. Print.