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abstract: The chief allegorical correlation between the text of The Crucible and Miller's testimony before HUAC three years later in 1956 seems to center around the refusal of both the fabricated John Proctor and the real Arthur Miller to name names. This parallel has been cited by critics and scholars alike as one of the most ironic moments in the history of HUAC's twenty-two-year existence. Each man, in his own era, publicly questioned the authority of the governmental agency entrusted with determining the guilt or innocence of members of the community. Each also defined themselves as martyrs in terms of their opposition to that authority. For Miller and Proctor, the moral dilemma involved a refusal to falsely confess and betray a sense of oneself to escape punishment. Forced to expose their private selves in a public arena, both felt the need to criticize the public challenge to their private consciousness.
keywords: HUAC, Communism, The Crucible, Marilyn Monroe, Arthur Miller
Life in the 1950s, according to Arthur Miller, had become a "moral tangle" It was a confusing era of growing government impatience with any dissent to official political policy, security checks, FBI investigations, tapped phones, loyalty oaths, secret dossiers, naming names as ritual proof of disassociation with the Communist Party, spy scandals, and book burnings. When Joseph R. McCarthy, senator from Wisconsin, gave a speech on February 9, 1950, in Wheeling, West Virginia, waving a briefcase at television cameras and announcing that it contained the names of some two hundred "cardcarrying" Reds in the State Department of the U.S. Government, an epoch of suspicion, anonymous accusation, and nameless anxiety commenced.
Amid this domestic turmoil, Miller began his research into the Salem witchcraft phenomenon of 1692. Miller's disgust at the ritualistic nature of both the Salem witch trials and the proceedings in Washington centered around what he saw as the forcing of an act of public contrition, which involved the naming of confederates as well as the Devil master himself, to guarantee loyalty and a rejoining of a society of decent people.
For the Puritan of 1692, public confession was a mechanism for selfpurgation as well as for self-definition-a familiar, even routine, procedure in seventeenth-century New England. Confessing your sins in front of the community was...