It bears repeating that history repeats itself. Although Arthur Miller’s The Crucible is about the Salem witch trials in 17th century New England, it is also a scathing satire of McCarthyism in the 1950s. Just as the colonists tried to save their own skins by accusing members of witchcraft community, American citizens, who were blacklisted as communists in the late 1940s and 1950s, accused others to save their own reputations.
This ugly pattern is the result of a human defense mechanism known as projection, or the attribution of undesirable thoughts or emotions to one another, often expressed in the form of jealousy or prejudice. In layman’s terms, this is known as hypocrisy. And extended to sex and gender, it can take the form of castration anxiety. Also set in 17th-century Puritan New England, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter examines the story of yet another unlucky scapegoat. The novel explicitly encapsulates the supposed threat of a powerful woman to paternalistic society, which promotes that the political or religious order resides in domestic control, turning adultery into an exaggerated sin. Since these two classics cover a wide range of topics, including history, psychology, and literature, they are primary study material for AP exams.
When paranoia strikes, it spreads like wildfire throughout the community. In The Crucible, a small rumor turns into a giant web of witchcraft accusations, with people who want to hide their indiscretions blaming others. The rigid religious and social laws do not allow any kind of spontaneity; we can take our freedoms for granted, but then a simple act of joy like dancing in the woods could become a sin. What is the main reason for all this rumour? The most powerful impulse of human nature: sex. Abigail’s affair with John Proctor is the fuel for the flame. No matter what the social climate, human desire is hard to repress; it is the reason for the perpetuation of the human race. Despite its simple origins, the complexity of desire is a double-edged sword; it can fuel an epic love story or be the source of destructive manipulation.
In Hester’s case in The Scarlet Letter, it’s the latter. Hester is also a strong woman who is a force to be reckoned with in a time when Puritan religion was so pure that she was evil. The rigidity of society hypocritically makes cruelty to Hester acceptable. Although forced to wear a letter A and embarrassed by the community, Hester stands her ground and does not reveal to her lover that she is the ultimate hypocrite: a reverend who has committed adultery. Men are cowards, and the woman bears the blame so that her paternal order is maintained.
As history has shown time and time again, paranoia often spills over into all facets of society, which in the 1950s included what to wear and what to cook for dinner. More than anyone else at the time, the housewife was the emblem of anticommunism. This may sound strange, but let’s examine a term that was coined in the 1950s: bomb. It indicates that women were an explosive sexual threat and presents a tricky point: a woman’s sexuality was contained within an ideal domestic sphere as a means of calming anxieties about nuclear war, creating a set of national principles connecting virtue civic with domesticity, and on the contrary, atomic energy with promiscuity. As the strong connotations of adulteress and bomb demonstrate, sex is a powerful force, and in earlier times, but even now, it is seen as a danger to sociopolitical stability. Just look at how much of a stir President Clinton’s sexual indiscretions caused. All the chaotic emotions that surround sexual desire are a threat to order, and therefore transgressions can lead to unjust punishment and, in extreme cases, to war.