McCarthyism is marked with ungrounded accusations, Red Scare, the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings and the Hollywood blacklist, which included several celebrated people in American film production, like Arthur Miller. In 1953, Miller responded to McCarthyism through The Crucible, a play that depicts a similar craze in the justice system, but from a different period of American history: the Salem witch-hunt trials in the Massachusetts Bay Colony that started in 1692. It is not surprising that Miller chose the Salem witch-hunt trials for a comparison with McCarthyism, because they prove how insanity can turn into both a discourse of power and a social norm. In addition, Miller’s play is ironic due to the Puritan intolerance of stage performances, since the depiction of the trials mirrors a spectacle. However, it is most importantly language through which insanity and irrationality manifest themselves and assume the role of reason. Miller writes an allegory of the event, focusing on the helplessness of the rational intellectual against the irrational justice system. Throughout the play, several characters are charged with witchcraft, some of them hanged, and some forced to confess. But although the events of different historical periods coincide, Miller’s interpretation of the McCarthy era highlights the discourse of power, particularly through the words and actions of Abigail Williams, John Proctor and Reverend Parris. In the judiciary procedures, one can observe that madness takes over the rational and confines it in and through language; as a result, the Puritan colony and serves as evidence for witchcraft, and is
circulated in the verbalisation of the supernatural, as well as oral and written texts like testimonies, verdicts and allegations. Therefore, in Miller’s play, narration and performance are devices for power that establish insanity as a social norm