Essay about The Crucible: the Evilness and Selfishness of Abigail Williams

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The Crucible: The Evilness and Selfishness of Abigail Williams

In Arthur Miller's The Crucible, there is one character who, because of her selfish and evil ways, causes the destruction of many people in the town of
Salem. This character is Abigail Williams. In the play, jealousy, and self- interest are the two characteristics that are seen constantly throughout the play. These characteristics pertain particularly to Abigail, and give a graphic description of her life, and how she deals with things in it. Throughout the play she gets worse and worse each time something major happens. After her affair and failure with voodoo, she was overcome by love and jealousy, and she was willing to do anything to get John back to her own

John wants to stop Abigail so he can save his wife. Hale wants to save innocent lives from being unreasonably killed. Hale is a great man who tries to save lives but John was the opposite and is selfish by just caring about his wife's life. At the end of the play, however, John realizes his selfishness and dies while saving his honesty. Abigail's actions show that once a person begins to do evil things, and sins, it becomes almost second nature, and they don't really mind it so much. In time they even don't care at all, and they may even continue to do sins just for the fun of it. This is shown when Abigail continues to sin, and continues the witch trials even after she realizes that the plan she hatched to kill Elizabeth didn't work, and she had not planned to have her love, John, killed. From Abigail's actions we learn that a person shouldn't base their whole life on one love or a feeling of jealousy. If they do they can change their whole life for the far worse. For example, Abigail started to become a complete villain and the whole course of everyone's life in Salem was changed for the worse or terminated all together because of her selfishness. We should all learn to not hook onto any one individual because there are many other fish in the sea.
Besides the fact that it can ruin your life on a personal level it can ruin many of the people that you deal with on a everyday