Miller John Proctor, as Arthur

Miller

John Proctor, as Arthur Miller's tragic hero in The Crucible, is essentially an honest and upright and honest man with just one weakness, a secret affair with Abigail Williams, which he at first hides in order to protect his public reputation as an honorable man and husband to Elizabeth (Miller 1953, Wikipedia 2006). The witchcraft hysteria occurs at this time when the spurned Abigail expresses her jealousy and vengeance by implicating Elizabeth as a witch to the court. John presents Mary Warren to the judge as a witness in an attempt at saving his wife but without exposing his adultery, but the attempt fails and John finds himself trapped in the turmoil when Mary accuses him of being a wizard himself. His huge pride and fear of public opinion compel him to withhold his guilt, until the final act when his personal integrity grows stronger than his desire for honor and reputation. He refuses to provide false confession as something that will dishonor his fellow accused and him personally. He redeems himself in the end by refusing to give up his personal integrity so that he will end up in heaven. He admits his guilt publicly but when the court asks Elizabeth, she denies it (Miller, Wikipedia).

The author himself commented that he wrote the play to establish a parallelism between the unjust Salem witch trials and the Second Red Scare from 1948 to 1956 when Communists were believed to have quietly infiltrated American life and security. The Red Scare hysteria was compared with that of the witch trials in Salem in 1692 when suspected dissidents were arrested and brought before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Miller, like his character John Proctor, kept his silence and refused to testify to the Committee in protecting his business and personal friends and was thus blacklisted by the American government. Miller expressed this conviction through his character in the fiction.

In his other play, The Death of a Salesman, Miller centers on the attainment of the American dream in the main characters, Willy Loman and his son, Biff (Miller 1949, Wikipedia 2006). In his twilight years, Willy succumbs to depersonalization and fantasy over his failure to achieve that dream of being well-liked and becoming prosperous and imposes the vision on his older son, Biff, whom he wants to establish a business. Willy, more than anything, desires to achieve greatness in his profession as a salesman so that he will be well-remembered after his death. He longs to be like his older brother, Ben, who succeeds and resents that Charley, whom he considers inferior, should achieve more than he has. He interprets the American Dream as the vision of a capitalist, materialistic modern society where he works, struggles and belongs to. He pushes Biff to pursue the vision too and worries that Biff is not amounting to it very much. Willy also heavily emphasizes the importance of being liked as a standard of a successful life. The fact of having lost work and failing to accomplish the great things he wanted from his profession has compelled Willy to fantasize over these great things and daydream. It becomes his way of escaping reality. The boundaries between the past and the present are withdrawn in his fantasies, where his illusions become real. But the truth is that the family is in severe financial condition and, in the end, Willy decides to commit suicide by driving and crashing himself to death so that his insurance money could be used to establish a business for his eldest son, Biff. He also intends to prove to Biff during his funeral that he is popular among people. Willy, in comparison to John Proctor in Miller's previous fiction, does not attain the status of a tragic hero because he does not come to full self-realization as does John Proctor. The play does not become a pure tragedy and Willy is viewed as an anti-hero, instead in that he fails to develop the nobility and magnanimity in traditional and tragic heroes. He falls short of the self-realization or self-knowledge of the typical tragic hero. His decision to commit suicide represents only a partial discovery of the truth. He fails to realize and confront his personal failure and to grasp a true, personal understanding of himself as an every man. Instead, he gives in to the force of a desperate mind and a distorted vision of a materialistic future for his family, especially Biff by killing himself (Miller, Wikipedia).