“Whilst we are appalled by Abigail Williams, we are intrigued and fascinated by her as well”
Abigail Williams is clearly the antagonist of Miller’s The Crucible. She manipulates others through her “endless capacity for dissent” in order to achieve her goal of being in a relationship with John Proctor, eventually leading the executions of many innocent people and the imprisonment of even more. However, even though the reader cannot defend her actions, there is no denying that she does impress us in ways related to her somewhat amazing brilliant control of the power dynamic in every situation she faces throughout the play. She defies both her troubled childhood and the patriarchal society she lives in to establish herself as the most powerful person in the play. She has a startling ability to flip any situations she faces into her favour, and her power is shown to be so significant that it has an overwhelming effect even when she is off-stage, mainly in Act 2.
Considering the conditions Abigail Williams’ life has been going through thus far, the reader definitely would not expect someone of her past and her place in society to be able to dominate the power in the play in the manner she does. One of the very first descriptions of Abigail in the play is “an orphan” showing how Miller wants the reader to feel a mixed reaction towards her; the fact that this is followed immediately by “with an endless capacity for dissembling” shows how she is portrayed in a varied light right from the beginning of the play. Abigail uses this troubled upbringing as a means to threaten the other girls into submission, claiming that she “saw Indians smash (her) dear parent’s heads on the pillow” at a young age. This has a significant effect on the other girls, as the panic displayed by the girls previously soon turns into “fright”. She uses the fact that she has “seen some reddish work done at night” in order to terrify the other girls into believing that she will “come to you in the black of some terrible night” if they ever “breathe a word”. This shows how ruthless she is when it comes to ensuring that she gets what she wants; she uses the method instilling fear into the girls as a way of assuming total dominance over those below her in society, making them believe that she can make them “wish you had never seen the sun go down”. However, aside from the other girls, very few people are below her in society, due to the patriarchal and theocratic society she is living in. As a young, unmarried, female, she is reduced to having to work as a maid to other families in order to keep her role in society. As Barnes writes, “Abigail is an orphan and an unmarried girl; she thus occupies a low rung on the Puritan Salem social ladder (the only people below her are the slaves, like Tituba, and social outcasts). For young girls in Salem, the minister and the other male adults are God’s earthly representatives, their authority derived from on high.” The fact that she was thrown out of the Proctor household further pushed her down the ‘social ladder’, shown from the fact that in the “seven month” since leaving the Proctors, “no other family has ever called for (her) service”. However her dissent with the structure of Salem’s society is also shown when she says that she “would not be a slave” and thus refuses to work in someone’s house for fear of turning her face “black”. Such a stance would be considered ridiculous in this society, as she was expected to conform to the tradition of a young, unmarried girl offering her “service” to established households such as the Proctors. Furthermore, the fact that she directly opposes this to the town’s reverend, Mr Parris, shows her power, even over those ranked much higher in society than her; if it were one of the other girls doing the same thing, Parris would have undoubtedly exacted some sort of punishment.
Williams’ ability to flip any situation into her favour is one of the key reasons why she gains so much power in
