PODER, PERSEGUIÇÃO E SILENCIAMENTO: A CAÇA AO “OUTRO” EM “AS BRUXAS DE SALÉM” DE ARTHUR MILLER

Abstract

In current Brazilian and American political scenarios, practices and persecution speeches are widely disseminated by the media and often accepted by the population. Most of these speeches come from people in positions of power against a minority who have color, class and gender outside of what is considered normative. In 1953, Arthur Miller publishes the play “The Crucible” which fictionalizes, to some extent, events in Salem, Massachussets, in 1692, where several people, mostly women, were sentenced to death on charges of witchcraft. In the context of Miller's writing, Thomas P. Adler (1997) argues that there is a close relationship between the events of the play and the Red Scare, which occurred in the mid-twentieth century when the US government declared itself an enemy of every citizen somehow related to the communist party found in its territory. The present work proposes an investigation through three perspectives: historical, political and gender on Arthur Miller's dramatic text “The Crucible”, exploring puritanism as an oppressive system that has the fear of the “Other” as one of its bases. Thus, making a comparative analysis in order to relate Miller's play to the historical documents on which the narrative is based. For this, it explores the literature of Antonio Candido (2006), in his belief about the relevance of studying literature to understand the history and society of a given moment; the concepts and implications brought by Michel Foucault (1975;1976) about punishment and power relations; and Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar (1979), as well as Woloch (1984), when analyzing the way in which women are portrayed in literature throughout history.