Friday, May 30, 2014

Friday, May 30 The Crucible and HUAC

Arthur Miller testifies before HUAC, June 21, 1956




On this day in 1956, playwright Arthur Miller testified before the House Committee on Un-American Activities about his political leanings but refused to name others who had joined him in his pro-Communist undertakings.
The committee had subpoenaed Miller after he sought to renew his passport. Miller planned to go to London with movie star Marilyn Monroe, whom he married four days after appearing before the panel. The newlyweds were then to travel to Brussels, Belgium, for the opening of Miller’s new play, “The Crucible,” which dissected the 1692 witch hunt trials in Salem, Mass.


Miller readily conceded the committee’s right to inquire into his own political activities. However, unlike most other uncooperative witnesses, he did not invoke the Fifth Amendment’s protection against self-incrimination but rather cited the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech and, by implication, the right to remain silent.Rep. Francis Walter (D-Pa.), the committee’s chairman, promised Miller that he wouldn’t be asked to name names but broke his word. With Monroe by his side, Miller told Walter: “I could not use the name of another person and bring trouble on him.”
Asked why the Communist Party had produced one of his plays, he said, “I take no more responsibility for who plays my plays than General Motors can take for who rides in their Chevrolets.” Asked about his brief flirtation with Communism, he said, “I have had to go to hell to meet the devil,” after which one wag quipped that he must have gone there as a tourist.
In 1957, Miller was found guilty of contempt of Congress, denied a passport and sentenced to a $500 fine or 30 days in jail. But the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned his conviction, ruling that Walter had misled him.
Miller and Monroe were divorced in 1961. Miller died in 2005 at age 89.
SOURCE: WWW.HISTORY.COM

Note: anyone who either had a score of under 65 or a score between 65 and 70 must retake the Regents Exam on Thursday, June 19 at 8:15.  I have submitted your names.

The Common Core Exam for ELA students will take place next Tuesday, June 3. You will follow your regular schedule for periods 1-5 . You should report to the 4th floor at 12:30 for the exam.

Remember: my students get 2 points to their bottom line grade for participating in the exam. Keep in mind that this will help you have an understanding of what you need to do to prepare for your academic future.

Those who normally eat period 8 will lunch as follows:

Last names A-M will eat period 5

Last names N-Z will eat period 6
Important:
English Common Core Regents Exam
Tuesday, June 3
A418- Adams-Elliot
A419-Feldman-Johnson
A420- Kelly-Milian
A421   Monday-Rapoza
A430 Rattray-Sloan
A433  Smith-Zeugel

In class: be aware that you are responsible for any material that is covered in class. You have only one more grade this marking period and that is an assessment on the play, which will count in the writing (50% category). You will need to know it very well. To read the whole play would only take you two hours.
Finishing Act I and moving on to Act II.






Thursday, May 29, 2014

Thursday, May 30 The Crucible act 1





Note: anyone who either had a score of under 65 or a score between 65 

and 70 must retake the Regents Exam on Thursday, June 19 at 8:15.  I

 have submitted your names.


The Common Core Exam for ELA students will take place next Tuesday, 


June 3. You will follow your regular schedule for periods 1-5 . You should 

report to the 4th floor at 12:30 for the exam.

Remember: my students get 2 points to their bottom line grade for 


participating in the exam. Keep in mind that this will help you have an 

understanding of what you need to do to prepare for your academic future.

Those who normally eat period 8 will lunch as follows:


Last names A-M will eat period 5


Last names N-Z will eat period 6



In class: You need your play everyday.A short film clip to make sure you 

understand the setting of 1692in Salem.

We are continuing reading the play, beginning on page 15 with

Mr. Putnam speaking.

Important note: if you are absent, you are responsible for the material.  

Your final assessment on the play will consist of several examples of

 dialogue. You will have to identify the speaker and the situation to which 

it refers, as well as its larger significance.  

Wednesday, May 28, 2014

Wednesday, May 28 The Crucible overture and beginning act 1

cru·ci·ble


: a pot in which metals or other substances are heated to a very high temperature or melted
: a difficult test or challenge
: a place or situation that forces people to change or make difficult decisions


Note: anyone who either had a score of under 65 or a score between 65 and 70 must retake the Regents Exam on Thursday, June 19 at 8:15.  I have submitted your names.

The Common Core Exam for ELA students will take place next Tuesday, June 3. You will follow your regular schedule for periods 1-5 . You should report to the 4th floor at 12:30 for the exam.
Remember: my students get 2 points to their bottom line grade for participating in the exam. Keep in mind that this will help you have an understanding of what you need to do to prepare for your academic future.
Those who normally eat period 8 will lunch as follows:
Last names A-M will eat period 5
Last names N-Z will eat period 6

Due from yesterday: questions from The Guardian article.  
In class: Overture to act 1 and beginning of text reading.

Tuesday, May 27, 2014

Tuesday, May 28 background reading for Arthur Miller's The Crucible



Stairway by M.C. Escher

In class: everyone should have picked up a copy of Arthur Miller's The Crucible last Thursday. If you have not, pick one up outside of class time. Make sure to bring your copy each day.

We are reading an article in class today, written by Arthur Miller. This will give you an understanding of the context in which the play was written. As you read, underline words with which you are unfamiliar and figure out their meaning through the context.  There are seven accompanying questions. This is independent work. You have class time today only. It is due by the end of the day. I will be here after school.


Arthur Miller, "Are You Now Or Were You Ever?"
from The Guardian/The Observer (on line), Saturday, June 17, 2000

Are you now or were you ever...? The McCarthy era's anti-communist trials destroyed lives and friendships. Arthur Miller describes the paranoia that swept America - and the moment his then wife Marilyn Monroe became a bargaining chip in his own prosecution
Saturday June 17, 2000
It would probably never have occurred to me to write a play about the Salem witch trials of 1692 had I not seen some astonishing correspondences with that calamity in the America of the late 40s and early 50s. My basic need was to respond to a phenomenon which, with only small exaggeration, one could say paralysed a whole generation and in a short time dried up the habits of trust and toleration in public discourse.
I refer to the anti-communist rage that threatened to reach hysterical proportions and sometimes did. I can't remember anyone calling it an ideological war, but I think now that that is what it amounted to. I suppose we rapidly passed over anything like a discussion or debate, and into something quite different, a hunt not just for subversive people, but for ideas and even a suspect language. The object was to destroy the least credibility of any and all ideas associated with socialism and communism, whose proponents were assumed to be either knowing or unwitting agents of Soviet subversion.
An ideological war is like guerrilla war, since the enemy is an idea whose proponents are not in uniform but are disguised as ordinary citizens, a situation that can scare a lot of people to death. To call the atmosphere paranoid is not to say that there was nothing real in the American-Soviet stand-off. But if there was one element that lent the conflict a tone of the inauthentic and the invented, it was the swiftness with which all values were forced in months to reverse themselves.
Death of a Salesman opened in February 1949 and was hailed by nearly every newspaper and magazine. Several movie studios wanted it and finally Columbia Pictures bought it, and engaged a great actor, Frederick March, to play Willy [the central character].
In two years or less, with the picture finished, I was asked by a terrified Columbia to sign an anti-communist declaration to ward off picket lines which the rightwing American Legion was threatening to throw across the entrances of theatres showing the film. In the phone calls that followed, the air of panic was heavy. It was the first intimation of what would soon follow. I declined to make any such statement, which I found demeaning; what right had any organisation to demand anyone's pledge of loyalty? I was sure the whole thing would soon go away; it was just too outrageous.
But instead of the problem disappearing, the studio actually made another film, a short to be shown with Salesman. This was called The Life of a Salesman and consisted of several lectures by City College School of Business professors - which boiled down to selling was a joy, one of the most gratifying and useful professions, and that Willy was simply a nut. Never in show-business history has a studio spent so much good money to prove that its feature film was pointless. In less than two years Death of a Salesman had gone from being a masterpiece to being a heresy, and a fraudulent one at that.
In 1948-51, I had the sensation of being trapped inside a perverse work of art, one of those Escher constructs in which it is impossible to make out whether a stairway is going up or down. Practically everyone I knew stood within the conventions of the political left of centre; one or two were Communist party members, some were fellow-travellers, and most had had a brush with Marxist ideas or organisations. I have never been able to believe in the reality of these people being actual or putative traitors any more than I could be, yet others like them were being fired from teaching or jobs in government or large corporations. The surreality of it all never left me. We were living in an art form, a metaphor that had suddenly, incredibly, gripped the country.
In today's terms, the country had been delivered into the hands of the radical right, a ministry of free-floating apprehension toward anything that never happens in the middle of Missouri. It is always with us, this anxiety, sometimes directed towards foreigners, Jews, Catholics, fluoridated water, aliens in space, masturbation, homosexuality, or the Internal Revenue Department. But in the 50s any of these could be validated as real threats by rolling out a map of China. And if this seems crazy now, it seemed just as crazy then, but openly doubting it could cost you.
So in one sense The Crucible was an attempt to make life real again, palpable and structured. One hoped that a work of art might illuminate the tragic absurdities of an anterior work of art that was called reality, but was not. It was the very swiftness of the change that lent it this surreality. Only three or four years earlier an American movie audience, on seeing a newsreel of Stalin saluting the Red Army, would have applauded, for that army had taken the brunt of the Nazi onslaught, as most people were aware. Now they would look on with fear or at least bewilderment, for the Russians had become the enemy of mankind, a menace to all that was good. It was the Germans who, with amazing rapidity, were turning good. Could this be real?
In the unions, communists and their allies, known as intrepid organisers, were to be shorn of membership and turned out as seditious. Harry Bridges, the idol of west coast longshoremen, whom he had all but single-handedly organised, was subjected to trial after trial to drive him back to his native Australia as an unadmitted communist. Academics, some prominent in their fields, were especially targeted, many forced to retire or fired for disloyalty. Some were communists, some were fellow travellers and, inevitably, a certain number were unaffiliated liberals refusing to sign one of the dozens of humiliating anti-communist pledges being required by terrified college administrations.
But it is impossible to convey properly the fears that marked that period. Nobody was shot, to be sure, although some were going to jail, where at least one, William Remington, was murdered by an inmate hoping to shorten his sentence by having killed a communist. Rather than physical fear, it was the sense of impotence, which seemed to deepen with each week, of being unable to speak accurately of the very recent past when being leftwing in America, and for that matter in Europe, was to be alive to the dilemmas of the day.
As for the idea of willingly subjecting my work not only to some party's discipline but to anyone's control, my repugnance was such that, as a young and indigent writer, I had turned down lucrative offers to work for Hollywood studios because of a revulsion at the thought of someone owning the paper I was typing on. It was not long, perhaps four or five years, before the fraudulence of Soviet cultural claims was as clear to me as it should have been earlier. But I would never have found it believable, in the 50s or later, that with its thuggish self-righteousness and callous contempt for artists' freedoms, that the Soviet way of controlling culture could be successfully exported to America.
Some greatly talented people were driven out of the US to work in England: screenwriters like Carl Foreman and Donald Ogden Stewart, actors like Charlie Chaplin and Sam Wanamaker. I no longer recall the number of our political exiles, but it was more than too many and disgraceful for a nation prideful of its democracy.
Writing now, almost half a century later, with the Soviet Union in ruins, China rhetorically fending off capitalism even as in reality it adopts a market economy, Cuba wallowing helplessly in the Caribbean, it is not easy to convey the American fear of a masterful communism. The quickness with which Soviet-style regimes had taken over eastern Europe and China was breathtaking, and I believe it stirred up a fear in Americans of our own ineptitudes, our mystifying inability, despite our military victories, to control the world whose liberties we had so recently won back from the Axis powers.
In 1956, the House Un-American Activities Committee (Huac) subpoenaed me - I was cited for contempt of Congress for refusing to identify writers I had met at one of the two communist writers' meetings I had attended many years before. By then, the tide was going out for Huac and it was finding it more difficult to make front pages. However, the news of my forthcoming marriage to Marilyn Monroe was too tempting to be passed. That our marriage had some connection with my being subpoenaed was confirmed when Chairman Walters of the Huac sent word to Joseph Rauh, my lawyer, that he would be inclined to cancel my hearing if Miss Monroe would consent to have a picture taken with him.
The offer having been declined, the good chairman, as my hearing came to an end, entreated me to write less tragically about our country. This lecture cost me $40,000 in lawyer's fees, a year's suspended sentence for contempt of Congress, and a $500 fine. Not to mention about a year of inanition in my creative life.
My fictional view of the period, my sense of its unreality had been, like any impotence, a psychologically painful experience. A similar paralysis descended on Salem. In both places, to keep social unity intact, the authority of leaders had to be hardened and words of scepticism toward them constricted. A new cautionary diction, an uncustomary prudence inflected our way of talking to one another. The word socialism was all but taboo. Words had gotten fearsome. As I learned directly in Ann Arbor on a 1953 visit, university students were avoiding renting rooms in houses run by the housing cooperative for fear of being labelled communist, so darkly suggestive was the word cooperative. The head of orientation at the university told me, in a rather cool, uninvolved manner, that the FBI was enlisting professors to report on students voicing leftwing opinions, and - more comedy - that they had also engaged students to report on professors with the same views.
In the early 50s, along with Elia Kazan, who had directed All My Sons and Death of a Salesman, I submitted a script to Harry Cohn, head of Columbia Pictures. It described the murderous corruption in the gangster-ridden Brooklyn longshoremen's union. Cohn read the script and called us to Hollywood, where he casually informed us that he had had the script vetted by the FBI, and that they had seen nothing subversive in it. But the head of the AFL motion picture unions in Hollywood, Roy Brewer, had condemned it as untrue communist propaganda, since there were no gangsters on the Brooklyn waterfront. Cohn, no stranger to gangsterism, having survived an upbringing in the tough Five Points area of Manhattan, opined that Brewer was only trying to protect Joe Ryan, head of the Brooklyn longshoremen (who, incidentally, would go to Sing Sing prison for gangsterism).
Brewer threatened to call a strike of projectionists in any theatre daring to show the film. Cohn offered his solution to the problem: he would produce the film if I would make one change - the gangsters in the union were to be changed to communists. This would not be easy; I knew all the communists on the waterfront- there were two of them (both of whom in the following decade became millionaire businessmen). So I had to withdraw the script, which prompted an indignant telegram from Cohn: "As soon as we try to make the script pro-American you pull out." One understood not only the threat but also the cynicism: he knew the mafia controlled waterfront labour. Had I been a movie writer, my career would have ended. But the theatre had no such complications, no blacklist - not yet - and I longed to respond to this climate of fear, if only to protect my sanity. But where to find a transcendent concept?
The heart of the darkness was the belief that a massive, profoundly organised conspiracy was in place and carried forward mainly by a concealed phalanx of intellectuals, including labour activists, teachers, professionals, sworn to undermine the American government. And it was precisely the invisibility of ideas that was frightening so many people. How could a play deal with this mirage world?
Paranoia breeds paranoia, but below paranoia there lies a bristling, unwelcome truth, so repugnant as to produce fantasies of persecution to conceal its existence. The unwelcome truth denied by the right was that the Hollywood writers accused of subversion were not a menace to the country, or even bearers of meaningful change. They wrote not propaganda but entertainment, some of it of a mildly liberal cast, but most of it mindless, or when it was political, as with Preston Sturges or Frank Capra, entirely and exuberantly un-Marxist.
As for the left, its unacknowledged truth was more important for me. If nobody was being shot in our ideological war but merely vivisected by a headline, it struck me as odd, if understandable , that the accused were unable to cry out passionately their faith in the ideals of socialism. There were attacks on the Huac's right to demand that a citizen reveal his political beliefs; but on the idealistic canon of their own convictions, the defendants were mute. The rare exception, like Paul Robeson's declaration of faith in socialism as a cure for racism, was a rocket that lit up the sky.
On a lucky afternoon I happened upon The Devil in Massachusetts, by Marion Starkey, a narrative of the Salem witch-hunt of 1692. I knew this story from my college reading, but in this darkened America it turned a completely new aspect toward me: the poetry of the hunt. Poetry may seem an odd word for a witch-hunt but I saw there was something of the marvellous in the spectacle of a whole village, if not an entire province, whose imagination was captured by a vision of something that wasn't there.
In time to come, the notion of equating the red-hunt with the witch-hunt would be condemned as a deception. There were communists and there never were witches. The deeper I moved into the 1690s, the further away drifted the America of the 50s, and, rather than the appeal of analogy, I found something different to draw my curiosity and excitement.
Anyone standing up in the Salem of 1692 and denying that witches existed would have faced immediate arrest, the hardest interrogation and possibly the rope. Every authority not only confirmed the existence of witches but never questioned the necessity of executing them. It became obvious that to dismiss witchcraft was to forgo any understanding of how it came to pass that tens of thousands had been murdered as witches in Europe. To dismiss any relation between that episode and the hunt for subversives was to shut down an insight into not only the similar emotions but also the identical practices of both officials and victims.
There were witches, if not to most of us then certainly to everyone in Salem; and there were communists, but what was the content of their menace? That to me became the issue. Having been deeply influenced as a student by a Marxist approach to society, and having known Marxists and sympathisers, I could simply not accept that these people were spies or even prepared to do the will of the Soviets in some future crisis. That such people had thought to find hope of a higher ethic in the Soviet was not simply an American, but a worldwide, irony of catastrophic moral proportions, for their like could be found all over the world.
But as the 50s dawned, they were stuck with the past. Part of the surreality of the anti-left sweep was that it picked up people for disgrace who had already turned away from a pro-Soviet past but had no stomach for naming others who had merely shared their illusions. But the hunt had captured some significant part of the American imagination and its power demanded respect.
Turning to Salem was like looking into a petri dish, an embalmed stasis with its principal moving forces caught in stillness. One had to wonder what the human imagination fed on that could inspire neighbours and old friends to emerge overnight as furies secretly bent on the torture and destruction of Christians. More than a political metaphor, more than a moral tale, The Crucible, as it developed over more than a year, became the awesome evidence of the power of human imagination inflamed, the poetry of suggestion, and the tragedy of heroic resistance to a society possessed to the point of ruin.
In the stillness of the Salem courthouse, surrounded by the images of the 1950s but with my head in 1692, what the two eras had in common gradually gained definition. Both had the menace of concealed plots, but most startling were the similarities in the rituals of defence, the investigative routines; 300 years apart, both prosecutions alleged membership of a secret, disloyal group. Should the accused confess, his honesty could only be proved by naming former confederates. The informer became the axle of the plot's existence and the investigation's necessity.
The witch-hunt in 1692 had a not dissimilar problem, but a far more poetic solution. Most suspected people named by others as members of the Devil's conspiracy had not been shown to have done anything, neither poisoning wells, setting barns on fire, sickening cattle, aborting babies, nor undermining the virtue of wives (the Devil having two phenomenally active penises, one above the other).
To the rescue came a piece of poetry, smacking of both legalistic and religious validity, called Spectral Evidence. All the prosecution need do was produce a witness who claimed to have seen, not an accused person, but his familiar spirit - his living ghost - in the act of throwing a burning brand into a barn full of hay. You could be at home asleep in your bed, but your spirit could be crawling through your neighbour's window to feel up his wife. The owner of the wandering spirit was obliged to account to the court for his crime. With Spectral Evidence, the air filled with the malign spirits of those identified by good Christians as confederates of theBeast, and the Devil himself danced happily into Salem village and took the place apart.
I spent 10 days in Salem courthouse reading the crudely recorded trials of the 1692 outbreak, and it was striking how totally absent was any sense of irony, let alone humour. I can't recall if it was the provincial governor's nephew or son who, with a college friend, came from Boston to watch the strange proceedings. Both boys burst out laughing at some absurd testimony: they were promptly jailed, and faced possible hanging.
Irony and humour were not conspicuous in the 1950s either. I was in my lawyer's office to sign some contract and a lawyer in the next office was asked to come in and notarise my signature. While he was stamping pages, I continued a discussion with my lawyer about the Broadway theatre, which I said was corrupt; the art of theatre had been totally displaced by the bottom line, all that mattered any more. Looking up at me, the notarising lawyer said, "That's a communist position, you know." I started to laugh until I saw the constraint in my lawyer's face, and I quickly sobered up.
I am glad that I managed to write The Crucible, but looking back I have often wished I'd had the temperament to do an absurd comedy, which is what the situation deserved. Now, after more than three-quarters of a century of fascination with the great snake of political and social developments, I can see more than a few occasions when we were confronted by the same sensation of having stepped into another age.
A young film producer asked me to write a script about what was then called juvenile delinquency. A mystifying, unprecedented outbreak of gang violence had exploded all over New York. The city, in return for a good percentage of profits, had contracted with this producer to open police stations and schools to his camera. I spent the summer of 1955 in Brooklyn streets with two gangs and wrote an outline. I was ready to proceed with the script when an attack on me as a disloyal lefty opened in the New York World Telegram. The cry went up that the city must cancel its contract with the producer so long as I was the screenwriter. A hearing was arranged, attended by 22 city commissioners, including the police, fire, welfare and sanitation departments, as well as two judges.
At the conference table there also sat a lady who produced a thick folder of petitions and statements I had signed, going back to my college years, provided to her by the Huac. I defended myself; I thought I was making sense when the lady began screaming that I was killing the boys in Korea [this was during the Korean war]. She meant me personally, as I could tell from the froth at the corners of her mouth, the fury in her eyes, and her finger pointing straight into my face.
The vote was taken and came up one short of continuing the city's collaboration, and the film was killed that afternoon. I always wondered whether the crucial vote against me came from the sanitation department. But it was not a total loss; the suffocating sensation of helplessness before the spectacle of the impossible coming to pass would soon help in writing The Crucible.
That impossible coming to pass was not an observation made at a comfortable distance but a blade cutting directly into my life. This was especially the case with Elia Kazan's decision to cooperate with the Huac. The surrounding fears felt even by those with the most fleeting of contacts with any communist-supported organisation were enough to break through long associations and friendships.
Kazan had been a member of the Communist party only a matter of months, and even that link had ended years before. And the party had never been illegal, nor was membership in it. Yet this great director, left undefended by 20th Century Fox executives, his longtime employers, was told that if he refused to name people whom he had known in the party - actors, directors and writers - he would never be allowed to direct another picture in Hollywood, meaning the end of his career.
These names were already known to the committee through other testifiers and FBI informants, but exactly as in Salem - or Russia under the Czar and the Chairman, and Inquisition Spain, Revolutionary France or any other place of revolution or counter-revolution - conspiracy was the name for all opposition. And the reformation of the accused could only be believed when he gave up the names of his co-conspirators. Only this ritual of humiliation, the breaking of pride and independence, could win the accused readmission into the community. The process inevitably did produce in the accused a new set of political, social and even moral convictions more acceptable to the state whose fist had been shoved into his face, with his utter ruin promised should he resist.
I had stopped by Kazan's house in the country in 1952 after he had called me to come and talk, an unusual invitation - he had never been inclined to indulge in talk unless it concerned work. I had suspected from his dark tone that it must have to do with the Huac, which was rampaging through the Hollywood ranks .
Since I was on my way up to Salem for research on a play that I was still unsure I would write, I called at his house, which was on my route. As he laid out his dilemma and his decision to comply with the Huac (which he had already done) it was impossible not to feel his anguish, old friends that we were. But the crunch came when I felt fear, that great teacher, that cruel revealer. For it swept over me that, had I been one of his comrades, he would have spent my name as part of the guarantee of his reform. Even so, oddly enough, I was not filling up with hatred or contempt for him; his suffering was too palpable. The whole hateful procedure had brought him to this, and I believe made the writing of The Crucible all but inevitable. Even if one could grant Kazan sincerity in his new-found anti-communism, the concept of an America where such self-discoveries were pressed out of people was outrageous, and a contradiction of any concept of personal liberty.
Is all this of some objective importance in our history, this destruction of bonds between people? I think it may be, however personal it may appear. Kazan's testimony created a far greater shock than anyone else's. Lee J Cobb's similar testimony and Jerome Robbins's cooperation seemed hardly to matter. It may be that Kazan had been loved more than any other, that he had attracted far greater affection from writers and actors with whom he had worked, and so what was overtly a political act was sensed as a betrayal of love.
It is very significant that in the uproar set off by last year's award to Kazan of an Oscar for life achievement, one heard no mention of the name of any member of the Huac. One doubted whether the thought occurred to many people that the studio heads had ignominiously collapsed before the Huac's insistence that they institute a blacklist of artists, something they had once insisted was dishonourable and a violation of democratic norms. Half a century had passed since his testimony, but Kazan bore very nearly the whole onus of the era, as though he had manufactured its horrors - when he was
surely its victim. The trial record in Salem courthouse had been written by ministers in a primitive shorthand. This condensation gave emphasis to a gnarled, densely packed language which suggested the country accents of a hard people. To lose oneself day after day in that record of human delusion was to know a fear, not for one's safety, but of the spectacle of intelligent people giving themselves over to a rapture of murderous credulity. It was as though the absence of real evidence was itself a release from the burdens of this world; in love with the invisible, they moved behind their priests, closer to that mystical communion which is anarchy and is called God.
Evidence, in contrast, is effort; leaping to conclusions is a wonderful pleasure, and for a while there was a highly charged joy in Salem, for now that they could see through everything to the frightful plot that was daily being laid bare in court sessions, their days, formerly so eventless and long, were swallowed up in hourly revelations, news, surprises. The Crucible is less a polemic than it might have been had it not been filled with wonder at the protean imagination of man.
The Crucible straddles two different worlds to make them one, but it is not history in the usual sense of the word, but a moral, political and psychological construct that floats on the fluid emotions of both eras. As a commercial entertainment the play failed [it opened in 1953]. To start with there was the title: nobody knew what a crucible was. Most of the critics, as sometimes does happen, never caught on to the play's ironical substructure, and the ones who did were nervous about validating a work that was so unkind to the same sanctified procedural principles as underlay the hunt for reds. Some old acquaintances gave me distant nods in the theatre lobby on opening night, and even without air-conditioning the house was cool. There was also a problem with the temperature of the production.
The director, Jed Harris, a great name in the theatre of the 20s, 30s and 40s, had decided that the play, which he believed a classic, should be staged like a Dutch painting. In Dutch paintings of groups, everyone is always looking front. Unfortunately, on a stage such rigidity can only lead an audience to the exits. Several years after, a gang of young actors, setting up chairs in the ballroom of the McAlpin Hotel, fired up the audience, convinced the critics, and the play at last took off and soon found its place. There were cheering reviews but by then Senator McCarthy was dead. The public fever on whose heatwaves he had spread his wings had subsided.
The Crucible is my most-produced play. It seems to be one of the few surviving shards of the so-called McCarthy period. And it is part of the play's history that, to people in so many parts of the world, its story seems to be their own. I used to think, half seriously, that you could tell when a dictator was about to take power, or had been overthrown, in a Latin American country, if The Crucible was suddenly being produced in that country.
The result of it all is that I have come, rather reluctantly, to respect delusion, not least of all my own. There are no passions quite as hot and pleasurable as those of the deluded. Compared to the bliss of delusion, its vivid colours, blazing lights, explosions, whistles and liberating joys, the search for evidence is a deadly bore. My heart was with the left. if only because the right hated me enough to want to kill me, as the Germans amply proved. And now, the most blatant and most foul anti-semitism is in Russia, leaving people like me filled not so much with surprise as a kind of wonder at the incredible amount of hope there once was, and how it disappeared and whether in time it will ever come again, attached, no doubt, to some new illusion.
There is hardly a week that passes when I don't ask the unanswerable question: what am I now convinced of that will turn out to be ridiculous? And yet one can't forever stand on the shore; at some point, filled with indecision, scepticism, reservation and doubt, you either jump in or concede that life is forever elsewhere. Which, I dare say, was one of the major impulses behind the decision to attempt The Crucible.
Salem village, that pious, devout settlement at the edge of white civilisation, had displayed - three centuries before the Russo-American rivalry and the issues it raised - what can only be called a built-in pestilence in the human mind; a fatality forever awaiting the right conditions for its always unique, forever unprecedented outbreak of distrust, alarm, suspicion and murder. And for people wherever the play is performed on any of the five continents, there is always a certain amazement that the same terror that is happening to them or that is threatening them, has happened before to others. It is all very strange. But then, the Devil is known to lure people into forgetting what it is vital for them to remember - how else could his endless reappearances always come as such a marvellous surprise?
� 2000 Arthur Miller

Accompanying questions

 Name _______________________________________
Pre reading questions for Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible. Respond to each of the following seven questions by incorporating specific text in a complete, well-written sentence.
1.       What was the ‘calamity in the America of the late 40s and 50s to which Miller responded with writing the play The Crucible?
_________________________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________________________
2.       Another of Arthur Miller’s great plays is Death of a Salesman, which was made into a film in 1949. However, the American Legion picketed the film, believing it to be anti-American. How exactly did the film studio handle this controversy?
_________________________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________________________
3.       To what is the radical right’s “free floating apprehension” directed?
_________________________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________________________
4.       What was the “heart of darkness” that Miller observed through his personal experience with the HUAC (House of Un-American Activities Committee), the film script about the Brooklyn Longshoreman’s Union and even the fact that students at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor had to avoid “renting rooms in houses run by the housing cooperative?”
_________________________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________________________
5.       How was “looking into a petri dish” that was Salem in 1692 similar to the Communist fears of the 40s and 50s?
_________________________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________________________
6.       Define Spectral Evidence and give some examples.
_________________________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________________
7.       In what way does The Crucible straddle two different worlds?
_________________________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________________________






Thursday, May 22, 2014

Thursday, May 22 reviewing multiple choice strategies for regents exam...collecting The Crucible



In class: reviewing the responses from yesterday's practice.  These will be collected as a classroom participation grade.
Collecting Arthur Miller's "The Crucible"    Make sure you bring it to class everyday. 

Directions (1–18): Below each of the three passages, there are several multiple-choice questions.
Select the best suggested answer to each question. You may use the margins to take notes as you
read.
Passage A 

 It was eleven o’clock that night when Mr. Pontellier returned 
from Klein’s hotel. He was in an excellent humor, in high spirits, 
and very talkative. His entrance awoke his wife, who was in bed and fast asleep when he came in. He talked to her while he undressed, telling her anecdotes and bits of news and gossip that he had gathered during the day. From his trousers pockets he took a fistful of crumpled bank notes and a good deal of silver coin, which he piled on the bureau indiscriminately with keys, knife, handkerchief, and whatever else happened to be in his pockets. She was overcome with sleep, and answered him with little half utterances. 
 He thought it very discouraging that his wife, who was the sole 
object of his existence, evinced so little interest in things which 
concerned him, and valued so little his conversation. 
 Mr. Pontellier had forgotten the bonbons and peanuts for the 
boys. Notwithstanding he loved them very much, and went into the 
adjoining room where they slept to take a look at them and make 
sure that they were resting comfortably. The result of his 
investigation was far from satisfactory. He turned and shifted the 
youngsters about in bed. One of them began to kick and talk about a basket full of crabs. 
 Mr. Pontellier returned to his wife with information that Raoul 
had a high fever and needed looking after. Then he lit a cigar and 
went and sat near the open door to smoke it. 
 Mrs. Pontellier was quite sure Raoul had no fever. He had gone 
to bed perfectly well, she said, and nothing had ailed him all day. 
Mr. Pontellier was too well acquainted with fever symptoms to be 
mistaken. He assured her the child was consuming
 at that moment in the next room. 
 He reproached his wife with her inattention, her habitual neglect 
of the children. If it was not a mother’s place to look after children, 
___________________ 
1 evinced — clearly showed
2 consuming — wasting away

whose on earth was it? He himself had his hands full with his 
brokerage business. He could not be in two places at once; making a living for his family on the street, and staying at home to see that no harm befell them. He talked in a monotonous, insistent way. 
    Mrs. Pontellier sprang out of bed and went into the next room. 
She soon came back and sat on the edge of the bed, leaning her head down on the pillow. She said nothing, and refused to answer her husband when he questioned her. When his cigar was smoked out he went to bed, and in half a minute he was fast asleep. 
    It was then past midnight. The cottages were all dark. A single white light gleamed out of the hallway of the house. There was no sound abroad, except for the hooting of an old owl in the top of the water oak, and the everlasting voice of the sea, that was not uplifted at that hour. It broke like a mournful lullaby upon the night.


     Mrs. Pontellier was by that time thoroughly awake. She began
 
to cry a little, and wiped her eyes on the sleeve of her peignoir.

 Blowing out the candle, which her husband had left burning, she 

slipped her bare feet into a pair of satin mules at the foot of the bed 

and went out on the porch, where she sat down in the wicker chair 

and began to rock gently to and fro. 

     The tears came so fast to Mrs. Pontellier’s eyes that the damp 

sleeve of her peignoir no longer served to dry them. She was holding 

the back of her chair with one hand; her loose sleeve had slipped 

almost to the shoulder of her uplifted arm. Turning, she thrust her 

face, steaming and wet, into the bend of her arm, and she went on

crying there, not caring any longer to dry her face, her eyes, her 

arms. She could not have told why she was crying. Such experiences
 
as the foregoing were not uncommon in her married life. They 

seemed never before to have weighed much against the abundance 

of her husband’s kindness and a uniform devotion which had come
 
to be tacit and self-understood. 

An indescribable oppression, which seemed to generate in some
 
unfamiliar part of her consciousness, filled her whole being with a
 
vague anguish. It was like a shadow, like a mist passing across her
 
soul’s summer day. It was strange and unfamiliar; it was a mood. 

She did not sit there inwardly upbraiding her husband, lamenting at 

Fate, which had directed her footsteps to the path which they had 

taken. She was just having a good cry all to herself. The mosquitoes made merry

 over her, biting her firm, round arms and nipping at her bare insteps. 

 The little stinging, buzzing imps succeeded in dispelling a mood 

which might have held her there in the darkness half a night longer. 

    The following morning Mr. Pontellier was up in good time to 

take the rockaway which was to convey him to the steamer at the 
wharf. He was returning to the city to his business, and they would 
not see him again at the Island till the coming Saturday. He had 
regained his composure, which seemed to have been somewhat 
impaired the night before. He was eager to be gone, as he looked 
forward to a lively week in Carondelet Street. 
 Mr. Pontellier gave his wife half of the money which he had 
brought away from Klein’s hotel the evening before. She liked 
money as well as most women, and accepted it with no little 
satisfaction. … 
 A few days later a box arrived for Mrs. Pontellier from New 
Orleans. It was from her husband. It was filled with friandises,
 with luscious and toothsome bits—the finest of fruits, pates, a rare bottle 
or two, delicious syrups, and bonbons in abundance. 
 Mrs. Pontellier was always very generous with the contents of 
such a box; she was quite used to receiving them when away from 
home. The pates and fruit were brought to the dining-room; the 
bonbons were passed around. And the ladies, selecting with dainty 
and discriminating fingers and a little greedily, all declared that Mr. 
Pontellier was the best husband in the world. Mrs. Pontellier was 
forced to admit that she knew of none better. 

—Kate Chopin 
excerpted from The Awakening, 1899 


1 The primary purpose of the first paragraph is to 

(1) create a metaphor 
(2) foreshadow an event 
(3) establish a contrast 

(4) present a flashback 

2 Placed in the context of the rest of the text, Mr. and Mrs. Pontellier’s disagreement about 
Raoul’s fever (lines 21 through 34) reflects 
 
(1) Mrs. Pontellier’s resentment of her husband's night out 
(2) Mr. Pontellier’s belief in his authority over his wife 
(3) Mrs. Pontellier’s need for her husband’s approval 
(4) Mr. Pontellier’s concern for his wife’s well-being

3 In lines 29 through 34, the author presents Mr. Pontellier as a man who feels 
 
(1) defeated 
(2) anxious 
(3) distracted 
(4) arrogant 

4 The author’s choice of language in lines 42 through 50 serves to emphasize Mrs. 
Pontellier’s sense of 
 
(1) isolation 
(2) boredom 
(3) disbelief 
(4) inferiority 

5 One major effect of the simile used in line 50 is to emphasize Mrs. Pontellier’s 
 
(1) anger 
(2) distress 
(3) defiance 
(4) exhaustion 

6 Lines 57 through 61 demonstrate Mrs. Pontellier’s desire to 
 
(1) protect her reputation 
(2) question her situation 
(3) abandon her dreams 
(4) disguise her sorrow 

 
7 Lines 80 through 87 contradict a central idea in the text by describing Mr. Pontellier’s 
 
(1) generosity 
(2) honesty 
(3) sympathy 
(4) humility 

8 Based on events in the text, which quotation best reveals the irony of the statement that Mr. 
Pontellier’s wife “was the sole object of his existence” (lines 11 and 12)? 
 
(1) “From his trousers pockets he took a fistful of crumpled bank notes” (lines 6 and 7) 
(2) “Then he lit a cigar and went and sat near the open door to smoke it” (lines 22 and 23) 
(3) “He assured her the child was consuming at that moment in the next room” 
(lines 27 and 28) 
(4) “He was eager to be gone, as he looked forward to a lively week in Carondelet Street” 
(lines 78 and 79) 

SONNET Questions


 
9 The narrator’s use of the phrase “zealous pilgrimage”(line 6) emphasizes 
 
(1) an emotional attachment 
(2) a fatiguing journey 
(3) a religious conversion 
(4) an unpleasant memory 


10 As used in line 10, “shadow” most likely refers to the narrator’s 
 
(1) soul 
(2) surroundings 
(3) reflection 
(4) friend 


11 The poet’s use of figurative language in line 11 emphasizes his 
 
(1) regret 
(2) fear 
(3) desire 
(4) faith 

12 The couplet in lines 13 and 14 of the sonnet serves as 
 
(1) an exaggeration 
(2) a clarification 
(3) a summation 
(4) an allusion 

Passage C   Carnegie

13 The first paragraph (lines 1 through 12) serves the author’s purpose by 
 
(1) providing examples of alternative tax policies 
(2) contrasting the current taxation system with his proposal 
(3) comparing equal taxation with graduated taxation 
(4) distinguishing estate taxes from income taxes


14 The expression “sap the root of enterprise” (lines 16 and 17) refers to the 
 
(1) decline in consumer confidence 
(2) reduction in government funding 
(3) discouragement of private business 
(4) harm to international trade 

15 What evidence from the text best clarifies the author’s claim in lines 34 through 39 (“Even 
the poorest…amounts”)? 
 
(1) lines 40 through 42 (“Poor and restricted…inestimable boon”) 
(2) lines 52 through 54 (“This, then, … or extravagance”) 
(3) lines 63 and 64 (“The laws… distribution free”) 
(4) lines 65 through 68 (“Individualism…for itself”’ ) 



16 The author’s tone in lines 52 through 62 can best be described as 
 
(1) confident 
(2) indifferent 
(3) humble 
(4) sarcastic


17 A central idea in the text advocates that the wealthy should 
 
(1) be rewarded for their generosity to the public 
(2) contribute to the public during their lifetime 
(3) entrust their estates to charitable institutions 
(4) be focused on increasing their institutional worth 


18 Which statement best reflects a central argument used by the author? 
(1) There is no way to insure fair distribution of earnings. 
(2) People should only be paid what they actually earn. 
(3) Sharing wealth among all would limit large gifts from benefactors. 
(4) Equaling wealth among all would restrict the national tax base.