Character
Analysis of Abigail Williams in The Crucible by Arthur Miller
Analyse
the Character of Abigail Williams in Arthur Miller's "The Crucible"
Abigail
Williams is a vamp or a victim? Discuss
Abigail Williams Character Analysis
Miller
says that the “structure” of The Crucible “centres on John, Elizabeth, and
Abigail.” Reverend Parris’s niece Abigail has been dismissed from service by
Elizabeth Proctor after she found out the illicit affair between Abigail and
her husband seven months ago. Since then Abigail has been living with Parris.
But she still lusts for Proctor and, by involving his wife in the rampant
rumored practices of witchcraft in Salem and getting her hanged, she plots to
become Proctor’s wife. She thus orchestrates the behaviour of the girls who
follow her blindly in raising the bogey of witchcraft and by involving several
innocent citizens in the witch hunt. Her motivation is a blend of private
vengeance and desire. She proves that people’s terror could be manipulated
to meet her own selfish ends.
Abigail
Williams, Reverend Parris’s seventeen-year-old niece and antagonist of the
play, is a “strikingly beautiful girl … with an endless capacity for
dissembling”. The sexual repression of the times drives Abigail and a group
of teenage girls to secret outings in the woods, where they dance naked. When
Parris spies them, guilt and fright cause two of them, Ruth Putnam
and Betty Parris, either to pretend or experience catatonia. Betty
lies mysteriously ill and Parris is worried because Doctor Gregory has failed
to diagnose the cause of her illness. News spreads fast, hymn-singing villagers
crowd the parlor below, and Reverend Hale arrives, summoned as an expert on
witchcraft. But Abigail tells Parris, “It were sport, uncle!” When her
accomplices Marry Warren and Mercy Lewis arrive, Abigail bullies them into
submission. Later as the girls are questioned, Abigail, to clear her own
name, accuses, as a tool of the Devil, Parris’s black West Indian slave Tituba
.
She
keeps up the pretense that her name is “good”, it is not “soiled”,
and there is “no blush” about her “name”. She was dismissed by
Good Proctor, “a gossiping liar” and “a bitter woman, a lying,
cold sniveling woman” because she refused to “slave” for her. As for her not
being able to find a job after that, she loftily declares:
“They
want slaves, not such as I. Let them send to Barbados for that. I will not
black my face for any of them.”
But
she stands “as though on tiptoe, absorbing his presence, wide eyed”, when John
Proctor enters. She had a brief affair with him seven months ago when she
worked as his housemaid and was dismissed by Elizabeth Proctor when she
discovered it. She entreats John, “Give me a word, John, a soft word.” A
brief exchange between them reveals Abigail’s desire for John, her hatred for
his wife Elizabeth, and her determination not to resume the relationship. She
reminds him:
“I
know how you clutched my back behind your house and sweated like a stallion
whenever I come near! … I saw your face when she put me out, and you loved me
then and you do now!”
He
has also been standing below her window for the past seven months at nights and
looking up, “burning in your loneliness”. Proctor reluctantly admits that:
“Abby,
I may think of you softly from time to time. But I will cut off my hand before
I’ll ever reach for you again.”
But
she persists. Bursting into tears, she tells him,
“I
look for John Proctor that took me from my sleep and put knowledge in my
heart!…You loved me, John Proctor, and whatever sin it is, you love me yet! …
John, pity me, pity me!”
Her
past illicit relationship has driven a wedge between John and his wife; she
still does not trust him. She believes, and rightfully so, that Abigail has
raised the bogey of witchcraft in order to accuse her and get her hanged so
that she can take her place in John’s life and household. Elizabeth wants her
husband to go and tell Ezekiel Cheever, the tailor turned warrant officer of
the court.
The
second scene in Act Two, deleted from the published text, reveals more about
both Abigail and John. Abigail’s opportunism has been evident since the
opening scene, when she deflects to Tituba Hale’s questions. She is amoral,
with no concern for the good-hearted servant, whom she herself asked for a
charm but whom she now denounces as a witch.
The
change in Abigail is apparent to Proctor, as she tells him, “The jab your wife
gave me’s not healed yet”, referring to the disproved needle in the poppet.
While
John’s conscience suffers for his adultery and for jeopardizing Elizabeth’s
life, his guilt can only be intensified by Abby’s outburst as she vows,
“Oh,
John, I will make you such a wife when the world is white again.”
She
then starts shivering and pretends that Mary Warren has sent her spirit in the
form of a yellow bird up to the ceiling of the court room and that she is
frozen by the cold wind. Touching her hand, Judge Hathorne confirms this. The
other girls also start seeing the yellow bird on the ceiling which has come to
attack them, and they are equally terrified. So is Danforth as Proctor keeps
protesting: “They’re pretending!” Mary Warren is so affected by
the shivering girls that she appears to have been hypnotized. She
starts pleading: “Lord save me! … Abby, don’t do that!”She becomes
hysterical and rushes toward the door as Proctor tried to hold her. So strong
is Abigail’s malevolent influence that she ends up by retracting her testimony
and accusing Proctor of practicing witchcraft on her as Abigail looks up and
cries, “Oh, Heavenly Father, take away this shadow!” Proctor is taken
aback at this sudden turn of events. He roars at her:
“How
do you call Heaven! Whore! Whore!”
Danforth
is “dumbfounded” but Abigail coolly tells him that Proctor is lying. He
then confesses to lechery and charges her to falsely accusing his wife of
witchcraft and getting her hanged.
Proctor is supported in her display of hysterics by Reverend Hale,
who is by now disgusted with the court proceedings and who eventually quits the
trial: “I believe him! … This girl has always struck me as false.” Abigail
again whips up the hysteria of being attacked by the yellow bird on the
ceiling. The others join her and start screaming. John Proctor is proclaimed as
“the Devil’s man”, arrested and eventually hanged for practising
witchcraft on Mary Warren.
The
last we hear of Abigail is when a crestfallen Proctor informs Danforth that
Abigail has robbed him of 31 pounds and fled with Mercy Lewis. Opportunistic to
the last, she provided for her sea trip by breaking open his strongbox and
decamping with nearly his half-year’s salary. In the epilogue we are informed:
“The legend has it that Abigail turned up later as a prostitute in
Boston.”
Sometimes
literature throws us a bone in the form of a really awesome antagonist. Someone
we hate, but find totally magnetic. Someone who chills us to the core, but we
can’t stop watching. Abigail Williams is vengeful, selfish, manipulative, and a
magnificent liar. This strikingly beautiful young lady of seventeen years old
seems to be uniquely gifted at spreading death and destruction wherever she
goes. She has an eerie sense of how to manipulate others and gain control over
them. She is the pebble that gets the avalanche of the Salem witch trials
started. She sends nineteen innocent people to their deaths. These things make
her an awesome antagonist.
In
addition to being an accomplished liar, Abigail is also extremely
single-minded. When she wants something, she goes for it; if one method doesn’t
work, she’s happy to go with Plan B. A good example of this is Abigail’s
pursuit of John Proctor. Because Abigail wants John Proctor for herself, she
gets Tituba to make her a potion to kill Goody Proctor. When that doesn’t work,
she pleads with John to take her back; when that doesn’t work she accuses
Elizabeth of witchcraft and manages to get her arrested.
An
easy, surface explanation of Abigail’s character is to label her as a
calculating sociopath, and there is some evidence that supports this claim. In
Act 1, Abigail does seize upon the opportunity to divert blame from herself
to first Tituba and Ruth, then just Tituba, then to women with
questionable reputations like Sarah Good, Goody Osburn, and Bridget Bishop.
She doesn’t care at all about the fates of the women being blamed – she’s just
accusing them to further her own ends.
For
Miller, Abigail, says David Levin, is
“a
vicious wench who not only exploits her chance to supplant Elizabeth Proctor
when the time comes, not only maintains a tyrannical discipline among the afflicted
girls, but also sets the entire cycle of accusations in motion for selfish
reasons”.
