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Theme of The Crucible

Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work. The novel The Crucible contains three central themes. The first being hysteria and how it can rip apart what seems like a content community. The second theme of the story, reputation, plays a key role because in theocratic Salem, it was extremely important to have an untarnished reputation. The third theme is based on intolerance and how because of the community thinking in solely "black and white."
Once the word of witchery became known, a mass paranoia swept the town of Salem. People who have known each other for years turned on each other. Citizens of Salem become involved with this hysteria to act on long-held grudges. The most apparent act of this is Abigail crying witchery on Elizabeth Proctor to have her killed in order to be with John. Hysteria can only survive if people feed off it. It allows people to take advantage of a situation and act out every dark desire......

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Approximate Word Count: 504
Approximate Pages: 3 (250 words per double-spaced page)

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