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In The Crucible, neighbors suddenly turn on each other and accuse people they've known for years of practicing witchcraft and devil-worship. The town of Salem falls into mass hysteria, a condition in which community-wide fear overwhelms logic and individual thought and ends up justifying its own existence.
3 paź 2024 · In Act 3 of The Crucible, mass hysteria is depicted when the court believes the girls' spectral evidence without question. Fear is evident when Mary Warren succumbs to peer...
4 paź 2024 · In The Crucible, Arthur Miller explores themes of mass hysteria and the misuse of power during the Salem witch trials. Hysteria manifests through characters like...
Hysteria. Another critical theme in The Crucible is the role that hysteria can play in tearing apart a community. Hysteria supplants logic and enables people to believe that their neighbors, whom they have always considered upstanding people, are committing absurd and unbelievable crimes—communing with the devil, killing babies, and so on.
The Crucible, Act 2. The ramblings of Mary Warren provide a flavor of the mass hysteria, fear and panic enveloping the town of Salem and the court. Letting her imagination run riot, she vividly describes to the Proctors an episode in court that prompted her to accuse homeless woman Sarah Good.
The power of mass hysteria is further revealed when Mary is unable to faint outside of a charged courtroom environment. She believed she had seen spirits earlier because she was caught up in the delusions of those around her.
The play is set in the Puritan town of Salem, Massachusetts, during the Salem witch trials of 1692, but it is widely recognized as an allegory for the Red Scare and McCarthyism of the 1950s. The play explores themes of mass hysteria, persecution, and the dangers of groupthink.
