Ironically, the girls avoided punishment by accusing others of the very things of which they were guilty. Rather than suffer severe and inevitable punishment for their actions, the girls accused other inhabitants of Salem of practicing witchcraft.
In particular he focuses on the discovery of several young girls and a slave playing in the woods, conjuring - or attempting to conjure - spirits from the dead. Miller bases the play on the historical account of the Salem witch trials. Whereas the conventional tragic hero is a deluded or obsessed individual in an ordered universe, Proctor is a just man in a universe gone mad.Inspired by the McCarthy hearings of the 1950s, Arthur Miller's play, The Crucible, focuses on the inconsistencies of the Salem witch trials and the extreme behavior that can result from dark desires and hidden agendas. Proctor’s story is not one of defeat and acceptance, but of triumph and vindication.
Miller’s play, while it subjects the central character to suffering as great as any tragedy, does so to different effect. Usually, too, this suffering leads to some kind of insight into the inevitable relationship between character and fate, and to an acceptance on the part of the protagonist and the audience of the ultimate justice of fate. In these latter, the hero’s suffering is seen to bear a direct relationship to some ‘flaw’ or error of judgement for which he must accept some responsibility. It is a dramatic pattern very different from the conventional design of Greek or Christian tragedy.
The movement of the play is reductive, stripping the central character of layers of protective covering until in the end he stands naked - totally exposed. John Proctor undergoes a metaphorical calcination in the course of which he is reduced to his essential, purified self. As the title suggests, the central action of The Crucible is comparable to the purification of a substance by heat.
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