CP American Literature                       Crucible Test 

For each question, you will write in proper paragraph form using quotes and 
specific examples to support your statements. Make sure your examples connect 
to your thesis statement. All notes taken on this paper may be used during 
the test. 

1. Societal problems can often be traced to individual human failings. 
40 points 

Though the trial has religious and super-natural implications, Miller tends 
to show the troubles as stemming from recognizable human failings. Discuss 
one example to show how each of the following failings are conveyed in the 
play-greed, vengeance, jealousy, ambition, and fear/hysteria. 

2. Using the following excerpt from an interview with Arthur Miller, discuss 
how the girls were like wolves in sheep’s clothing and how the citizens of 
Salem were blind little lambs, willing to be taken to slaughter: 2 examples 
40 points 

Miller’s response to why he wrote the play: …I wished for a play that
would show that the sin of public terror as it divests man of conscience, 
of himself. I had known of the Salem witch hunt for many years before 
“McCarthyism” had arrived and it had always remained in inexplicable darkness
to me. When I looked into it now, however, it was with the contemporary 
situation at my back, particularly the mystery of the handing over of 
conscience, which seemed to me the central and informing fact of the time. 
The central impulse for writing was not the social, but the interior 
psychological question of that guilt rising in Salem which the hysteria 
merely unleashed, but did not create. Consequently, the structure reflects 
that understanding, and it centers on John, Elizabeth, and Abigail. 

3. Discuss the meaning of the title and its connection to the play. How is 
it an effective title? Discuss the importance and connotation of heat in 
the play with two specific examples. 

4. Compare the following statement to the play by specifically connecting 
three characters in the play and discuss one situation that associates the 
character to the statement: 40 points.

Miller made the following response when asked who the people were at 
Communist meetings:  
“When I say this I want you to understand that I am not protecting the 
Communists or the Communist party. I am trying to and will protect my sense 
of myself. I could not use the name of another person and bring trouble on 
him. I take responsibility for everything I have done but I cannot take 
responsibility for another human being.” “ Nobody wants to be a hero but in 
every man there is something he cannot give up and remain himself-a core, 
an identity, a thing that is summed up for him by the sound of his own name 
of his own ears. If he gives that up, he becomes a different man, not himself.”