Image by John Hain from Pixabay
It’s an arduous task for us to truly follow our values (also known as Personal Integrity), and the characters inside Arthur Miller’s The Crucible is no other. In fact, one can see that the characters inside The Crucible have to give up their personal integrity to save the ones they love from religious persecution, therefore making personal integrity a whole lot important than any other perspective inside the story.
In The Crucible, many of the characters were suffering from a series of religious persecution and were forced to confess their wrongdoings to God without any proof behind or they would be sentenced to death for conducting witchcraft (apparently with no reasonable reason behind the claim). Here, John Proctor is desperate trying to save his wife from being sentenced, thus he decided to confess even though he didn’t conduct any witchcraft or denounceable wrongdoings.
PROCTOR. I want my life
HATHORNE, electrified, surprised: You’ll confess yourself?
PROCTOR. I will have my life
HATHORNE, with a mystical tone: God be praised! It is a providence! He will confess! Proctor will confess!
PROCTOR, with a cry, as he strides to the door: Why do you cry it? It is evil, is it not? It is evil.
ELIZABETH, in terror, weeping: I cannot judge you, John, I cannot!
PROCTOR. Then who will judge me? (127)
Another example of characters giving up their own beliefs occurs when Reverend Hale, the wisest among all, decided to back away from this incident even though he has wanted to help resolve this situation with those who are affected:
PROCTOR. You are a coward! Though you be ordained in God’s own tewars, you are a coward now!
HALE. Proctor, I cannot think God be provoked so grandly by such a petty cause… Think on cause, man, and let you help me to discover it. For there’s your way, believe it, there is your only way, when such confusion strikes upon the world. Let you counsel among uyourselves; … I shall pray God open up your eyes. (74~75)
I have recently heard the song “bad guy” by Billie Eilish, and one of its lyrics clearly shows up a situation of being a hypocrite: a person full of inner struggling within his heart.
“My mommy likes to sing along with me
But she won’t sing this song
If she reads all the lyrics
She’ll pity the men I know”
Watch the MV for “bad guy” below. The lyrics above appears in the 1:50 mark.
Deprecating your own beliefs can be a real issue to deal with throughout your life. Therefore, I feel like both The Crucible and “bad guy” both ranked the idea of personal integrity above anything else. It can be a difficult moment to determine whether to stick with your own beliefs or deprecate them to suit other’s needs indeed.
Work cited
- Miller, Arthur. The Crucible. Penguin, 2003.
- “Billie Eilish – bad guy.” Youtube, uploaded by Billie Eilish, 29 March 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DyDfgMOUjCI