The Crucible

Teaching The Crucible today, a play I love, it occurred to me that even though it's likely John never loved Abigail, he must have made her feel that he did.  Whether it was their frantic clutches behind the barn, the furtive looks he threw up to her window when he was, as she says, "burning in his loneliness," or perhaps he even spoke words of love to her, he must have done something to make her believe.

I understand that she is unhinged, that her behaviors are inexcusable, that her desire to kill his wife and replace her is certifiable and that her threats to the other girls about bringing "a pointy reckoning that will shudder" them are reprehensible, but here is the piece I never thought about until today.  This is a girl who is alone--orphaned--living with an uncle who has no interest in children, who is only concerned about his own daughter because if she is witched it will ruin his reputation.  Abigail has seen her parents murdered, feels herself unwanted in her uncle's house, and has no real friends because the girls are all too afraid of her to have any real bond.  Add to that the affair she had with John and you've got the perfect storm for some serious mental illness, especially when you consider his total denial of their time together.

He sees her in Act I, flirts with her, allows the distance between them to close, acknowledges he has stood beneath his window in want of her, and then tells her three times to put it out of mind, that they never touched, that the physical relationship--the passion and heat and real feeling--they shared had never occurred.  He tells her to forget and erase the most important relationship of her life thus far, the one that opened her eyes and made her see the world for what it really was, the one that taught her who she wanted to be: passionate, engaged, wild, wanted, and--she thought--loved.

I don't think her actions are forgivable, but I do think his denial of their time together is equally cruel and inexcusable.  No matter what his reasons were for choosing to reconcile with Elizabeth--and let's face it, it could just be plain old fear at having to start over again under the strict Puritanical laws that would have crippled him emotionally--his denial that he ever shared those moments with Abigail points to a character more flawed than I had ever realized.  He uses his denial to absolve himself from any guilt at hurting her, and his lack of remorse is astoundingly selfish.  Should he have left his wife and children to be with the seventeen year old girl?  Probably not, but to tell her their relationship never occurred is to deny her the right to her story, to her truth, and so, today, I kind of get why she loses it.

No one has the right to take your story from you, and those who try--because they aren't comfortable with who they are in it--aren't comfortable with who they are at all, and who needs them?