miranda ferris

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Miranda Ferris

Mrs. Krehbiel

La III

December 14, 2012

The Afflicted Girls of The Salem Witch Trails,

A Comparison and Contrast between The Crucible and Real Life.

Youre in court, confused, and scared. Next to you, a group of girls are choking

and gagging; their lips are turning blue, their eyes are bulging, and their cheeks are

flushed. You are the accused, and these suffering girls are the afflicted, the accusers,

thevictims? The afflicted girls were portrayed in The Crucible by Arthur Miller as

a love story gone wrong, but what really happened was much, much worse. Who

were these girls? How old were they really? What really could have caused them to act

out? Who truly was the ringleader in this event? How accurate is The Crucible in its facts

about these girls?

Similarly as in The Crucible, the ages of these girls ranged widely from 12-20.

For example, it mentions in Act 1, Abigail Williams, seventeen-enters, (Miller 9).

However, In Witch Hunt, author Marc Aronson, describes some of the afflicted girls, and

their ages. For example, Twelveyear-old Ann Putnam Jr., her mother, Ann Sr., a

seventeen-year-old servant living with the Putnams named Mercy Lewis, and another

seventeen-year-old relative and neighbor named Mary Walcott all showed signs of

affliction. Elizabeth Hubbard, the seventeen-year-old niece of a local physician, and


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Mary Warren, a twenty-year-old servant, did too, (Aronson 62). So between the

Crucible and what is believed in real life, just Abigail alone had a five-year age

difference! But can you really blame these girls for starting something like this? It is

believed that the Puritans lived just like that. Pure. Miller and other authors have

described their life in the same way. In Salem Witch Trials, author Kalek Magoon talks

about how truly minimalistic their life really was; Puritans turned completely away from

what they saw as the old props of religion...Instead, they built their faith on clean, simple

planks, like the timber of their churchesReligion for them was not a moment here or

there-a sermon on the Sabbath Day...Each household was considered a little

congregation, with the father as a kind of minister. He would lead the family in prayer...

Children were viewed as prideful and stubborn(Magoon 26). Miller makes a good

point about the Puritan life as well: No one can really know what theyre lives were

like, they had no novelists and wouldnt have permitted anyone to read a noveltheir

creed forbade anything resembling theater or vain enjoyment..,(Miller 2). These people

had a very, very strict life, and Im sure that that could have left some of the girls stressed

and bored.

So what could have caused the girls to act this way? Miller portrays Abigail

Williams as a scorned-by-love vengeful teen, who accuses women of witchcraft just to

get a much older, reluctant, MARRIED man. But what really started this terrible event?

Miller mentions in The Crucible that Betty Parris is the first to fall ill, likewise Magoon

does the same, Betty Parris and hercousin Abigail Williams were the first to fall ill in

January 1692. Betty was just nine years oldEleven-year-old Abigail lived with the

Parris family. The girls may have played around with fortune-telling and folk magic in


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the months before the fits began, so the idea of witch craft was not new to them,

(Magoon 2). He also mentions that the hysteria and torture that the girls experienced

could have been a real epidemic of a very real disease: ..At the time, the animals illness

was suspected to be the work of witchesindicates that there may have been a

widespread outbreak of illness in Salem...historians have explored the idea that the

afflictions were caused by some physical illness..theory is that there was an outbreak of a

serious disease called encephalitis lethargica, (Magoon 80). So Millers and Magoons

opinions definitely differ on how this event started.

But another question is, who really was the ringleader in this? Could it really

have been a 17-year-old girl? Or maybe someone younger? Miller definitely makes

Abigail a deadly threat. In Act III, the afflicted girls, John Proctor, the judges, and a few

other officials are in the court, discussing whether or not Mary Warrens deposition is

truthful about the girls pretending. Abigail is determined to keep Mary from ruining her

plan and so she acts out in this way: Abigail, [looks] about in the air, clasping her arms

about, as though cold, (Miller 49). But Magoon differs from this theory, believing that,

Ann Jr. [named Ruth By Miller] and the whole family-perhaps some of them

reluctantly-joined herAnn was cunning and quick-thinking. She claimed that the

specter [of Martha Corey] had spoken clearly, naming itself as Martha, but had blinded

the girl and refused to describe its clothes, (Magoon 96). Either way, the girls were

obviously crazy. But even though the stories are similar in some ways, they are mainly

hugely different.

What started out as either a jealous young woman, or a vengeful child, it all

turned out worse than either Ruth or Abigail anticipated. Many people died, and


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The Crucible and real accounts both show it. There are many theories about what

happened, but I would say Miller was close, he did have many different aspects of the

girls, but the similarities are there, and the differences as well. Whether her name was

Abigail, or Ruth, or Ann, its easy to tell that between real life and The Crucible, there

was one ringleader, and that this was probably the result of too much control, too much

restraint.

Works Cited

Aronson, Marc. Witch Hunt: MYSTERIES OF the salem WITCH TRIALS. New York:

Atheneum Books For Young Readers, 2003. Print.

Magoon, Kekla. The Salem Witch Trials. Edina: ABDO, 2008. Print.

Miller, Arthur. The Crucible. Austin: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 2005. Print.


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