However, this dominant reading of the play presents a tainted view of a young girl, a girl who has experienced the perfume of death in more ways than one. Miller emphasizes the theme of good vs evil through the contrast and parallelism of the characters in The Crucible – such as Abigail Williams, an unwed orphan who is set on a path of destruction by spreading death and hysteria throughout the town of Salem. The McCarthy Hearings were referred to as ‘witch-hunts’, this is because of their similarity to the Salem witch trials- they both struck fear and trepidation due to the guilty until you confess attitude, which dominated the courts. The play’s connections to the ‘Red Scare’ of the 1950s and the phenomenon known as McCarthyism, which created widespread panic across the United States, made people make false confessions of communist activity to avoid punishment. The Crucible, written by Arthur Miller in 1953, is a partially fictionalized allegory created to comment on the Salem witch trials that took place in Massachusetts in 16.
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