The Crucible and the Production of Fear in the Contemporary World: The Future and Persistence in Culture

Although Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible (1953) was written centuries after (‘post’) the events in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692, it was through this play that we could relate to those events. In this sense, the play was ‘before’ (pre-) the past itself. The dynamic of preposterousness serves, I argue, to work through the past from the viewpoint of the present. The play, then, does not capture or describe a historical reality, but, in its relation to the past, it serves as an analysis not unlike psychoanalysis, as a ‘working through.’ Consequently, the things of the past are not ‘past.’ They are alive in an enacted or dramatized past, and they need to be relived for the purpose of a cure. The Crucible is self-consciously ‘presentist’ or contemporary and not historical in the conventional sense of the term, as Mieke Bal argues. According to the Dutch theorist, the past is present in the present in the form of ‘traces,’ not ‘influences’ (Bal, “Memories in the Museum” 179). However, as we saw in the US during the congressional anti-Communist hearings in the 1950s, such a cure does not materialize at the level of the play’s contemporaneous present, at least not at a collective level.