Shifting Blame in Salem
Boon Chew
Long ago, people who were presumed witches were held captive and forced to confess or die. This is especially well illustrated in The Crucible by Arthur Miller, where innocent women were framed as witches and taken from their families. The girls in Salem confess to seeing the Devil and make things up about witchcraft to shift the blame onto others for personal gain, which they get away with because logic and beliefs are closely entwined.
In Act 1 of The Crucible, when the first accusations of witchcraft arrive, no one wants to take the blame. Hale says, “Abigail, it may be your cousin is dying. Did you call the Devil last night?” (p. 40). Abigail responds, “I never called him! Tituba, Tituba…” (p. 40). When Tituba enters the room, Abigail yells, “She makes me drink blood!” (p. 41) and proceeds to accuse Tituba of sending her spirit on her in church, making her laugh at prayers, and corrupting her dreams. Abigail knows she is being accused and will eventually have to confess to witchcraft, so she shifts the blame on Tituba. Tituba is an easy suspect because she is enslaved, and Abigail knows she can take advantage of her. When someone gets accused of witchcraft, they rat someone else out to save themselves. This starts to become a theme as more accusations arise. Avoiding confessing to witchcraft isn’t the only reason Abigail frames others, though.
In Act 2, after the characters confess to working with the Devil, they are able to manipulate others to their advantage. Ezekiel Cheever says, “the girl, the Williams girl, Abigail Williams, sir. She sat to dinner in Reverend Parris’s house tonight, and without word nor warnin’ she falls to the floor like a struck beast, he says, and screamed a scream that a bull would weep to hear. And he goes to save her, and, stuck two inches in the flesh of her belly, he draw a needle out. And, demandin’ of her how she come to be so stabbed, she–to Proctor now–testify it were your wife’s familiar spirit pushed it in” (p. 70-71). Abigail likes Proctor, and wants to frame and replace his wife, Elizabeth. Abigail presumably stabs herself with a needle, then blames Elizabeth for doing so to make her seem guilty. Later in the text, Elizabeth is taken into custody despite Proctor’s attempts to save her. People today would realize Abigail was crazy and had stabbed herself, but peoples’ beliefs in The Crucible overruled their logic. Of course, Abigail isn’t the only one that tried to shift the blame onto others.
In Act 3, blaming others proves to be a useful way to get revenge on others and escape accusations. The Salem girls are pretending there is a bird trying to kill them controlled by Marry Warren. So she points at Proctor and says, “He come at me by night and every day to sign, to sign, to–” (p. 110). Danforth interrupts her, asking her what Proctor tells her to sign, and Parris asks her if it’s the Devil’s book. She continues, “My name, he want my name. ‘I’ll murder you,’ he says, ‘if my wife hangs! We must go and overthrow the court,’ he says!” (p. 110). Mary Warren shifts all the suspicion people had of her onto Proctor by accusing him of working for the Devil. Proctor had been abusing her previously, and she seizes her opportunity when tension is built up to avoid the blame and get revenge on Proctor. There are even more instances of the girls in Salem blaming others to save themselves, but these were some of the main ones that show how peoples’ religious beliefs overturn logic.
The girls in Salem always had an escape card from a bad situation or an easy way to get what they wanted by accusing someone else of witchcraft or of doing the Devil’s work, and people believed them because they were scared of witchcraft. Because of peoples’ great fear of witchcraft, they were very easy to manipulate/blackmail. This even extends to court cases by corrupting them, as some women were imprisoned or taken captive due to accusations about witchcraft. Today, we are privileged to have a court system that doesn’t rule based on peoples’ beliefs on witchcraft, and instead relies more on logic.
