How Does Abigail Williams Play In The Crucible

Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible, portrays dire consequences when its characters pursue their own personal interests at the expense of the common good of society. This is evident throughout with characters such as Abigail Williams. The actions taken lead to the demise and suffering of many other characters. The actions of Abigail Williams are invoked due to the lust she feels to John Proctor. Her affair with him, and then his rejection of her, leads her to dancing in the woods with house servant Tituba and other protestant girls such as Betty Parris. Upon being discovered Betty faints and is in a coma like state, yet it is found that it was all just a hoax to not get into trouble. This is also a reason for Abigail to take to personal interest. By dancing in the woods Abigail hoped to accomplish the death of John Proctor's wife, Elizabeth Proctor, by casting a spell or charm on her. Of course this does not work, and so her actions of witchery lead her to trouble, which then evokes her to blame others in order to stay self-preserved. Abigail claims that Tituba forced her into witchcraft, and that once she was with the devil she saw others such as Goody Good and Goody Osborne with him, claiming them to witchcraft. As the story moves along Abigail blames more …show more content…
When they fail to do so, Abigail accused John of witchcraft and as he is taken in he tells Danforth that “God is dead!”and that he “hear[s] the boot of Lucifer, I see his filthy face! And it is my face and yours Danforth! For them that quail now when you know in all your black hearts that this be fraud. God damns our kind especially….” John shows here that he knows it is fraud and he knows Danforth knows it but will do nothing of it because it would tarnish his(Danforth) name, which is clearly found as his motive when he said before that he had already jailed and hung oh so