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Precision and Pseudo Precision in The Crucible

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

Stephen Fender
Stephen Fender
Affiliation:
University of Edinburgh
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Extract

Writing almost four years after The Crucible was first performed, Arthur Miller seemed uncertain how to describe the ethics of the society he had tried to reproduce in the play. He notes, for example, that the Puritans' ‘religious belief did nothing to temper [their] cruelty’ but instead ‘served to raise this swirling and ludicrous mysticism to a level of high moral debate’. ‘It is no mean irony’, Miller continues, ‘that the theocratic persecution should seek out the most religious people for its victims.’

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 1 , Issue 1 , April 1967 , pp. 87 - 98
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1967

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References

page 87 note 1 Introduction to Collected Plays (London, 1958), pp. 45–6Google Scholar. Subsequent references to this edition will appear in the text.

page 87 note 2 ‘Realism and intelligence: some notes on Arthur Miller’, Encore, 7 (1960), 15Google Scholar.

page 88 note 1 English Studies, 43 (1962), 430Google Scholar.

page 89 note 1 The doctrine was first popularized by William Perkins, Fellow of Christ's College, Cambridge, from 1584 to 1594; by his student, the Calvinist moral theologian William Ames; and by John Preston, the brilliant Fellow of Queen's College and later Master of Emmanuel. The works of all three men were widely read and admired in New England. One of the clearest of the early and basic statements of the Covenantal doctrine of salvation is Preston, 's The New Covenant or the Saints Portion (London, 1629)Google Scholar, a collection of sermons edited by Richard Sibbes and John Davenport.

page 89 note 2 For a fuller discussion of the extent to which Covenantal theology modified the Calvinist doctrine of salvation, see Miller, Perry, The New England Mind (New York, 1939)Google Scholar. Professor Miller argues that the modification was considerable: ‘… by conceiving of grace as a readiness of God to join in covenant with any man who will not resist Him, the theory declared in effect that God has taken the initiative, that man can have only himself to blame if he does not accede to the divine proposal’ (p. 395). For reasons given above and later in the paper, I should like to suggest that, essentially, or at least practically, the Covenantal Puritans retained the doctrine of the inefficacy of works.

page 90 note 1 Preston, vol. iii, p. 23.

page 90 note 2 Preston, vol. iii, pp. 26–8.

page 90 note 3 San Francisco (1930), pp. 51–2.

page 91 note 1 ‘Maule's Curse’, in In Defense of Reason (Denver, 1947), p. 159Google Scholar.

page 91 note 2 Magnalia Christi Americana (London, 1702), book vi, pp. 37–49Google Scholar. Subsequent references in the text.

page 93 note 1 ‘Politics and the English language’, Horizon (04, 1946), pp. 252–65Google Scholar.