The Crucible Fear Essay

In The Crucible by Arthur Miller, Miller uses his writing to emphasize how people will manipulate fear in order to obtain power. Abigail Williams is a young girl who finds herself in a socially and sexually oppressive environment; she is on the low rung of society, because she is an orphan and is unmarried. After falling in love with an already married man she is even more powerless, because she cannot love him openly or even get him to acknowledge her. She sees this fear of witches and the devil, a constant in Salem, and uses it as support to get rid of Proctor’s wife. Abigail and the other girls know well that there were not any witches, clear from all their planted, false, and spectral evidence. They take this fear that is found in many …show more content…
For children of divorced parents this can sometimes be an even greater fear, especially when one parent decides to move further away and can only be seen a short amount of time during the year. Me and my siblings were presented with this very same situation a few years ago after our father moved further away, and there was this fear that was ever-present about how we would handle this situation. My father decided to start by subtly telling us how if we did not decide to live with him it would break his heart. This eventually escalated to him telling us we would never be allowed to see him again if we stayed with our mom. He knew our mom would still talk to us if we decided to live with him, but he was not so forgiving. He gave us an ultimatum: either him or Mom. He took our fear of losing our parents and manipulated it in order to get us to go live with him. For some of us it worked, my sister went to go stay with him, but for my brother and I it had the opposite effect. We were able to see how easily our father tried to control us and how it had not bothered him a bit. My father took my siblings’ and I’s fear of alienating out parents and threw it back in our faces in order to achieve his own