An Analysis of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible from Rene Girard’s Scapegoat Theory

Abstract

The Crucible, a representative work of Arthur Miller, the American Jewish playwright, is based on Massachusetts Salem witch case in American colonial times. Through the scapegoating mechanism and four paradigms of persecution texts proposed by René Girard, this paper reveals that The Crucible is a modern persecution text. By analyzing the specific manifestations of these four types of paradigms in this work, this paper interprets the victim’s scapegoat’s identity from different aspects, aiming to explore the recurrence mode of the scapegoat mechanism in the field of contemporary literature, and its deep reasons behind the incident.