Hypocrisy In The Crucible

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Why Lie? In Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, theme after theme are revealed as the story begins to unravel. Greed, jealousy, lust, and hatred are shown several times. However, hypocrisy is shown far and wide throughout the drama, especially by Abigail Williams, Judge Danforth, Reverend Paris and Mary Warren. Abigail Williams is one of the biggest hypocrites out of all the characters. She is a teenage girl whom had fallen in lust with a married man. As she was working for John Proctor as his servant she went head over heels for his charm. She then had an affair with him and was soon put out of their home by Goody Proctor. The affair was denied to many. This makes her a hypocrite because she did wrong and did not say a word of it. Abigail…show more content…
When told that his daughter, Betty, was ill because of "unnatural causes," Paris quickly interjected, "No, no. There be no unnatural causes here." The Reverend denied this all even with seeing the girls dancing in the woods. With Reverend being in denial, he was unable to consider all causes of the problem. He was so quick to blow off the idea that witchcraft caused her sickness because he was too worried his reputation would get shot with that possibility. In the court while Mary was being questioned about fainting Paris was looking for the first chance to accuse her of witchcraft and he eagerly said, "Then you will confess, will you not?" Mary Warren had no relation to Paris therefore he would not hesitate to point his finger at her. Paris was like Danforth in that he also could not realize his hypocritical ways because of his…show more content…
When Danforth is questioning Mary about telling the truth in court, she states, "I cannot lie no more. I am with God, I am with God." Mary would tell the truth to a person higher than her, but only when there was no one around to persuade her to do otherwise. Abigail falsely accused Mary of seeing spirits that then led Mary to scream, "Let me go, Mr. Proctor, I cannot, I cannot—“ Mary threw her morals out the window when she realized that if she did not pretend to be possessed, she will be convicted. Mary did not care if she was being dishonest or a hypocrite. It was more important to her to live and tell them what they wanted to hear. Mary Warren had herself to blame for showing hypocrisy. In The Crucible hypocrisy tended to be used as an “excuse” to save someone’s life or in contrast, take someone’s life. In that day in age no matter what morals one had they were “dead” when being questioned. People would tend to judge someone for one thing, then turn themselves around and do the exact same thing. Pride or greed or selfishness is typically the reason for hypocrisy as they were for Abigail, Danforth, Paris, and
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