Waking up to thoughts on dialogue in The Crucible

[walkitout]

The interaction between the Reverend Parris and Abigail is absolutely bonkers in terms of how implausible it is. Miller — in text — notes that we have no novels from this community so we can’t know what it was really like, but that’s 100% bullshit because Miller is also drawing tons of analogies among variant oppressive cultures of unity that project evil onto everyone who isn’t a member and inevitably cannibalize. We _can_ know how someone like the Reverend — a man and leader of the group — would interact with Abigail — an orphan, a minor, and definitely not male, and while interrogation is certain, the idea that Abigail could make an argument that Goody Proctor and the other women in town were making her work too hard and the Reverend Parris would be sympathetic to that argument is risible. This interaction is between a boomer teen and her parent or in loco parentis, not anything that would ever happen in an actual religious community that valorized hard physical labor.

I’m sure I’ll have more to say later, but I’m a little surprised at how poorly this thing maps to what actually wound up being Another Fascist American Moment. It mapped a little better to our previous Another Fascist American Moment in the early 2000s, but only a little better.

R. is headed out to the site today; I’m going to do virtual. I made apple crisp last night and I may extract rent from the pan before sending it in.