We do not know if the girls in The Crucible have
drawn a circle on the ground, but a circle sometimes separates space and time: inside
the circle is a space without time and space. Within the social milieu, women
automatically hide in this kind of construction, but once they become witches and
get rid of the traditional shackles, they can do a lot of things that ordinary women
and even men cannot.
27
26 Luhrmann, T. M. Persuasions of the Witch's Craft: Ritual Magic in Contemporary England, p.223.
:
As can been seen in this painting, there are three naked witches sitting around a
smoking cauldron preparing a revel for the demons at midnight. The triangle (the
way the three witches sit) symbolizes the bewitchment of sex. Another naked witch
sits on a goat’s back and holds a broomstick, flying into the sky. The basic elements
of the witches’ Sabbat are known to include nudity, broomsticks, and rituals for
conjuring demons. The following quotation is a vivid image of the Sabbat written by
John of Salisbury, a diplomat and the bishop of Chartres.
There are people who claim that a certain Herodias or Mistress of the Nights holds nocturnal gatherings and feasts, where she lords it over her various servants, and that witches there are offered babies, - some to be torn to bits and eaten, others to be laid back in their cradles. Who is so blind as not to see that this is all a mischievous illusion caused by demons? This is shown, if by nothing else, and those less firm in the faith, that believe these things.28
The demons in Sabbat are sometimes shown as androgynous beings whose sexuality
may reinforce men’s fears. Thus, the aspect of Sabbat which is most vilified is not
what they eat but the women’s sexuality and copulation. The inherent instincts of
28 http://www.onlinekunst.de/februarzwei/fasching_hexen3.html
women’s bodies and nature give birth to vicious demons and women who have sex
with the demons have cravings for improper desire or unnatural pregnancy. Sabbat is
a women’s or witches’ carnival of evil and degeneration. As for the unnatural
intercourse, it is, in my view, what men yearn to hear about, the description of
sexual intercourse between the witches and the demons or Satan. In fact, the devil is
just the incarnation for men to materialize their fancies and to accomplish their
excessive desires. And it is not hard to find out that the devils almost appear in an
image or a shape of men.
According to hearsay, women seduced by the demons make a compact to
exchange the soul, that is, women would give their soul to gain sexual jouissance. In
addition, the festival of Dionysus and the witches’ Sabbat have some similarities
with each other: for example, the aura of revelry, the emancipation of women or
witches’ bodies, and the floating sexuality in the Sabbat. Celebrating the superiority
of female body and ignoring earthly restrictions echo the unlimited Dionysus who
transcends the boundary. The demons and Dionysus, in some ways, invoke people’s
or women’s inner potency by destroying and reproducing it to awaken them.
In The Crucible, Arthur Miller arranges the gathering or ritual to be the curse
of the witch-hunt to emphasize the little girls’ devilish characters. These girls are
caught by Samuel Parris, the minister of religion in Salem, and the dancing-party is
diabolized. Witchcraft is deeply believed by the townspeople to be the original cause
of Betty’s losing consciousness, and no matter what Abigail says, the gathering
rapidly assumes the mantle of a witches’ Sabbat. That is, this event has reference to
the repulsive issues of body and sexuality. The following dialogue takes place
between Samuel Parris and Abigail in Parris’s house after his daughter Betty
pretends she is in a coma. We can see how Parris firmly refuses to accept Abigail’s
statement.
Abigail: Uncle, the rumor of witchcraft is all about; I think you’d best go down and deny it yourself. The parlor’s packed with people, sir. I’ll sit with her.
Parris, pressed, turns on her: And what shall I say to them? That my daughter and my niece I discovered dancing like heathen in the forest?
Abigail: Uncle, we did dance, let you tell them I confessed it- and I’ll be whipped if I must be. But they’re speakin’ of witchcraft. Betty’s not witched.
Parris: Abigail, I cannot go before the congregation when I know you have not opened with me. What did you do with her in the forest?
Abigail: We did dance, uncle, and when leaped out of the bush so suddenly, Betty was frightened and then she fainted. And there’s the whole of it.29
According to Puritan law, dancing is a heathen practice which is strictly forbidden,
and that’s why Samuel Parris’s reaction is so strong. For example, Mercy Lewis,
who is “a fat, sly, merciless girl of eighteen,”30
29 Arthur Miller. The Crucible: A Play in Four Acts, p.9.
30 Arthur Miller. The Crucible: A Play in Four Acts, p.16.
takes her dress off to be naked.
From what Arthur Miller describes about her it is not hard to detect that Mercy
Lewis possesses some characteristics of the witch. In addition, Abigail drinks blood
that night. The following dialogue occurs after Betty awakes and denounces Abigail
for drinking blood.
Betty: You drank blood, Abby! You didn’t tell him that!
Abigail: Betty, you never say that again! You will never—
Betty: You did, you did! You drank a charm to kill John Proctor’s wife! You drank a charm to kill Goody Proctor!31
31 Arthur Miller. The Crucible: A Play in Four Acts, p.18.
For the witches, drinking blood is not only a symbol of releasing the one’s power but
also of purification. Because the power of blood is the absolute purification, Abigail
drinks chicken’s blood to reinforce her self power to gain the faith. On the other
hand, the blood also signifies that the evil power enters Abigail’s body.
As we know, the cauldron is the basic tool for witches to make magical
medicine, and in The Crucible the tool appears in their little games. When Hale
diagnoses Betty’s symptoms and then asks Abigail about the Sabbat for more
evidence, Parris tells him that he found some soup near them.
Hale: Does someone afflict you, child? It need not be a woman, mind you, or a man. Perhaps some birds invisible to others come to you—perhaps a pig, a mouse, or any beast at all. Is there some figure bids you fly? The
child remains limp in his hands. In silence he lays her back on the pillow. Now, holding out his hands toward her, he intones: In nomine
Domini Sabaoth sui filiique ite ad infernos. She does not stir. He returnsto Abigail, his eyes narrowing. Abigail, what sort of dancing were you
doing with her in the forest?Abigail: Why— common dancing is all.
Parris: I think I ought to say that – I saw a kettle in the grass where they were dancing.
Abigail: That were only soup.
Hale: What sort of soup were in this kettle, Abigail?
Abigail: Why, it were beans—and lentils, I think, and ---
Hale: Mr. Parris, you did not notice, did you, any living thing in the kettle? A mouse, perhaps, a spider, a frog—
Parris, fearfully: I—do believe there were some movement—in the soup.
Abigail: That, jumped in, we never put it in!
Hale, quickly: What jumped in?
Abigail: Why, a very little frog jumped—
Parris: A frog! Abby!32
frog. And if we extend the parallel to becoming witches, women also experience
“evolution” to become witches. Under social and economic constraints, women have
to adapt to the repressive situation, so they have imbued their nature with binary
opposites: good versus evil, sweet versus savage, pure versus variable. Abigail and
the other girls allege that they are the messengers sent by God to help the
townspeople to wipe out the evil power. They are, at their age, sweet but dangerous,
innocent but shrewd. As for the spider, it is notorious for its poison, yet its web
symbolizes an image of women’s weaving. Women weave their dreams to
compensate for the drawbacks in their lives and the spider’s web circulates the Parris mentions a mouse, a spider and a frog because they are traditional witches’
pets believed to be the witches’ familiars, friends and servants. For example, the frog
is amphibian, living on land and water, which implies that it can exist in both
darkness and light.
Furthermore, it is born in the form of a tadpole which needs to evolve to be a
32 Arthur Miller. The Crucible: A Play in Four Acts, pp.30-40.
unique experiences among women. It is also a web, just like the one spun by Fates,
in which Abigail and the other girls weave their fate, revenge and death.
From the girls’ perspective, it is merely a frolic with madcap behaviors. In
their small world, it is not necessary to take any responsibility for the things they do
and the words they speak, and everything seems to be upside down. On the other
hand, from the religious and authoritative perspectives, the dancing-party which is
just like the witches’ Sabbat is a provocation to diverge from the norm. As Mikehail
Bakhtin says in Rabelais and His World, "The carnival offers the chance to have a
new outlook on the world, to realize the relative nature of all that exists, and to enter
a completely new order of things"33
33 Mikehail Bakhtin. Rabelais and His World, p.34.
Abigail and the other girls transgress the
existing social order and then create a world of madness, which will be discussed in
the following chapter. Somehow, their “new orders” are imbued with liminal status,
liminal time and space. We can say that witches live on this kind of boundary. What
does the word “liminal” mean? It comes from the Latin word limen, which means a
threshold or a border. For example, the girls’ party is held in the wild forest near the
civilized village at midnight. The liminal space takes place in-between two worlds,
the unknown wilderness and the civilized culture. Midnight is just on the cusp of
one day and the next and it is also the convergence of darkness and light.
With similar ambiguity, women’s bodies and sexuality are in some manner
liminal and uncertain, abundant with fluid of female desire. Victor Turner describes
the “antistructure” elements of rituals:
…ritual as the affirmation of communal unity in contrast to the frictions, constraints, and competitiveness of social life and organization. Rite affords a creative “antistructure” that is distinguished from the rigid maintenance of social orders, hierarchies, and traditional forms.34
The girls’ festival in the forest is imbued with what Turner calls “antistructure”,
which means that everything is upside down and a taboo is being transgressed. The
girls’ carnival strikes and blurs the subsistent boundary to dissociate it to be more
vitality. What is more, the girls can be, in some respects, deemed as “liminal
entities” termed by Victor Tuner. He argues that the so-called liminal entities stand
in a blurry space because they do not belong to a normal status or states in a
classified organization. And in some initiations “they may be disguised as monsters,
wear only a strip of clothing, or even go naked, to demonstrate that as liminal beings
they have no status, property, insignia, secular clothing indicating rank or role,
position in a kinship system.
35
34 Catherine, Bell. Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice, pp.20 -21.
35 Victor Tuner. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure, p.95.
” As mentioned, the girls somehow dress themselves
loosely, such as disheveled hair and pajamas, in abnormal way in the eyes of Puritan
society. However, it is also this kind of unlimited condition that furnishes them the
invisible power to transform themselves in the forest and helps them to find
possibilities of being new selves. According to Richard Schechner, performers can
be transformed through performing36
What is interesting is that Arthur Miller increases Abigail’s age from twelve to
seventeen, noting that it is only for dramatic effect, not for some special reason. We
may not learn his intention, but one possible reason, I think, is that Abigail in the
actual Salem witch-hunt was too young to commit adultery with John Proctor. In the
document of real events in Salem village, the sexual aspect is implicit, yet, in Arthur
Miller’s version, he reinforces the sexual roles and exaggerates the flowing desires
of the girls, especially the audacious Abigail. He adds to the event the love triangles
between Abigail, John Proctor and Elizabeth Proctor to rationalize the reason why
Abigail purposely circumvents Elizabeth. In the historical document, there is no . In The Crucible, the girls’ ritual is, in my view,
just like a transformative performance and the forest is their secret stage. By acting,
the girls/ performers feel more intimate with one another than before and are
liberated from the ordinary life. For the girls, this adventurous ritual allowing them
for nakedness does create a transient moment for them to strip off the fixed fetters of
a rigid society. What is important is that they re-build new identities in this liminal
status.