Tragedy, Integrity,

Guilt, and Shame:

Understanding John Proctor
David Palmer
Perhaps Arthur Miller’s most famous essay on theater is “Tragedy
and the Common Man,” which appeared in The New York Times on
February 27, 1949, slightly more than two weeks after the opening of
Death of a Salesman on Broadway. In it Miller defined tragedy in the
following way:

I think the tragic feeling is invoked in us when we are in the

presence of a character who is ready to lay down his life, if need
be, to secure one thing—his sense of personal dignity. ….The
[tragic] flaw, or crack in the character, is really nothing—and
need be nothing—but his inherent unwillingness to remain
passive in the face of what he conceives to be a challenge to his
… image of his rightful status.….The quality of [tragedy] that
[shakes] us.….derives from the underlying fear of being
displaced, the disaster inherent in being torn away from our
chosen image of what and who we are in this world. (Theater
Essays 4-5)

Certainly this idea of a person being displaced and torn away from a
chosen self-image is central to many of Miller’s greatest tragedies. It
is Joe Keller’s retort to his son Chris, “Who worked for nothin’ in
that war? When they work for nothin’, I’ll work for nothin’” in act 3
of All My Sons (1947) (Miller, Collected 1944 156). It is Willy
Loman’s tirade at Biff toward the end of Death of a Salesman (1949):
“I am not a dime a dozen. I am Willy Loman and you are Biff
Loman” (Miller, Collected 1944 251). It is Eddie Carbone’s demand
in A View from the Bridge (1956) when he screams, “Wipin’ the
neighborhood with my name like a dirty rag. I want my name,
Marco” (Miller, Collected 1944 635). It is Victor Franz’s angry
rejection of what he takes to be his older brother’s condescending
attempt to repair their relationship, “You’re not turning me into a

The Arthur Miller Journal Volume 7, Nos. 1 and 2 Fall 2012

24 David Palmer

walking fifty-year-old mistake,” in The Price (1968) (Miller,

Collected 1964 263). It is a theme as old as Oedipus at Thebes.
Gerald Weales has suggested that this is one of the most useful lenses
for examining Miller’s writings:

… the most profitable way of looking at [Miller’s] work is

through his heroes and through the concern of each, however
inarticulate, with his identity—his name, as both John Proctor
and Eddie Carbone call it. (334)

Christopher Bigsby elaborates on this idea in his discussion of

Miller’s conception of tragedy:

… [Miller] implicitly draws from tragedy the notion that it deals

with the need for the individual to retrieve his good opinion of
himself, that the tragic hero is willing to lay down his life to
sustain a vision of himself sometimes profoundly at odds with his
former actions. (201)

A month after “Tragedy and the Common Man” was published, a

second Miller essay, “The Nature of Tragedy,” appeared in The New
York Herald Tribune. Here Miller added to his vision of tragedy by
distinguishing between the tragic and the merely pathetic:

Tragedy, called a more exalted kind of consciousness, is so

called because it makes us aware of what the character might
have been.… it is the glimpse of this brighter possibility that
raises sadness out of the pathetic toward the tragic. (Theater
Essays 10)

In writing about Willy Loman, Weales also recognizes this element of

failing to meet a personal ideal in Miller’s conception of tragedy: …
“What the play gives us is the final disintegration of a man who has
never even approached his idea of what by rights he ought to have
been (340).”
Willy Loman, like so many of Miller’s heroes, had a vision of
what he thought it was to be a successful human being, a person
worthy of respect. But as events unfold, he discovers that rather than
achieving this ideal, he is seeing it slip away into the unattainable.
The ideal can be only glimpsed, never realized. That perhaps is what
Bigsby meant in the quotation above when he speaks of the
 Understanding John Proctor 25
character’s need to “retrieve his good opinion of himself.” In many of
Miller’s plays, the character’s confrontation with challenges to his
sense of self happened in the past. The tragedy Miller shows us is the
character’s struggle to retrieve or reconstruct a self that he already
sees as lost.
In this essay I focus on Miller’s sensitivity to the need for the
“glimpse of this brighter possibility” of what the character might have
been as a fundamental element in the particular kind of tragedy that
Miller wrote. To do that, I explore the relationship between tragedy
and integrity, which I see as connected as either failure (tragedy) or
success (the maintenance of integrity) at the same task: the task that
all people must engage in of being able to accept as both true and
honorable the narrative that constitutes their sense of self.
The core idea in integrity is grounded in the root “int,” which
also is found in the words “integer” (a whole number) and “integrate”
(to take separate parts and combine them into a single whole). A
person has a sense of integrity when all the pieces of his story hold
together in an integrated whole; no piece of the story seems to falsify
it. The particular type of tragedy in which Miller specialized occurs
when a person loses the ability to maintain this sense of integration.
This experience that the wholeness is disintegrating, that the self-
narrative is delusional, is the “glimpse of a brighter possibility” of
what the character might have been that Miller speaks of. His plays
often focus on this period after the collapse of the self—after the fall,
as Miller might have put it—as the character struggles to find his way
back to a workable personal narrative.
This collapse of the self-narrative results not in mere guilt but in
a much deeper negative experience: shame. The character does not
experience himself merely as guilty of some wrong doing that can be
repaired and forgiven; rather, the character experiences himself as
fundamentally flawed as a human being.
To develop these ideas on tragedy, integrity, guilt, and shame, we
need to understand the foundation of the narrative that constitutes a
person’s self, which, in turn, help us to understand John Proctor’s
crisis in The Crucible.

Narrative and the Evolution of the Self

There are significant debates today about the nature of consciousness,

but one point seems to be coming clear: consciousness is a kind of
narrative. Human beings evolved as social creatures; they depended
26 David Palmer

on the group for survival. Individuals who had the ability to negotiate
more effectively the social dynamics of group living had an adaptive
advantage. One key to this social skill seems to have been having a
brain that could construct a theory of mind, which is a narrative that
enables the individual to understand the thoughts and emotions of
others and to anticipate their actions. Those who lacked the brain
structures to have this social skill failed to thrive in the group and
thus failed to survive long enough to procreate and pass on the genes
that gave them these disadvantageous brain structures. As a result, the
human brain evolved as an organ that, among other tasks, creates
narratives that help the individual organize his experience of his
environment, including his social environment. The human brain does
not passively perceive the world; rather, it develops a story that
guides the person’s interactions with the world (Bering). What we
call our “self” is not a special mental entity that creates the narrative;
rather, the physical functioning of the brain creates a narrative that
includes the self as a protagonist. The self is not a storyteller; the self
is part of the organizing story of experience the brain is creating as it
engages with the environment (Damasio chaps. 3 & 8).
According to William James’s famous and still-influential theory
from 1890, consciousness is a stream of moments created by the
brain, each with its own momentary narrative of the organism’s
engagement with the current environment. What gives us our sense of
being a single, unified, continuous person through time is the fact that
each moment’s narrative contains memories of the moment prior to it
(157-59). There is no self-telling the narrative, nor is the self an entity
that is having the thoughts and thus binding them together as
belonging to a single, distinct individual. Rather, the brain is creating
the thoughts and simultaneously the self. As James says, “the
thoughts themselves are the thinkers” (209). That is, the self is a
character in the narrative the brain creates as the individual engages
with an environment. The self emerges as part of the story (See also
Feinberg chaps 7-10; Hood chaps. 6-7; LeDoux chaps. 2 & 7).
Sometimes in this ongoing narrative of consciousness that makes
sense of our experience, there are moments when we focus on our self
as an object in the environment: this is self-consciousness. At these
times, James says, we experience the self as present for us in two
ways: An “I,” the subjective experiencer, the one doing the
examining; and a “me,” a mental objectification of the self that is put
before us as an object to be examined by the subjective I (James 195-
99, 208-09). Self-consciousness leads to the possibility of an
 Understanding John Proctor 27
experience the ancient Greeks called eudaimonia (often translated as
“happiness”), which we will discuss shortly, and also its absence, the
experiences of both shame and guilt. To understand this, we need to
consider the way in which people use their sense of self as what
philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn called a “paradigm.”

Thomas Kuhn: Paradigms and the Self

According to Kuhn, normal science always functions within a

background paradigm: an unproved but generally accepted theory or
narrative of how the world works. For example, in Newtonian
physics, space is assumed to be a shapeless, continuous void, and
gravity is conceived as an invisible force operating between objects
within this void. This background model provides a context for
making sense of observations and also is the foundation for questions
that direct further investigation.
There are times, however, when anomalies occur: events that the
narrative cannot explain adequately. If only a few anomalies exist, a
paradigm generally continues to be accepted, and scientists seek ways
to explain the anomalies through further research within the
paradigm’s guiding background narrative. However, when a
sufficient number of anomalies arise, the paradigm itself goes into
crisis and a scientific revolution takes place in which the entire
paradigm is ultimately rejected and a new paradigm arises to replace
it. This is what happened, for example, in the shift from an Earth-
centered theory of the universe to the Copernican theory, or the shift
from Newton’s theory of space as a uniform void to Einstein’s theory
that space is warped around objects with large mass, such as stars and
planets (Kuhn 16-20, 43-51).
The self operates much like a personal paradigm. If large
anomalies arise—pieces of experience that the self-story cannot
integrate—our self goes into crisis, our narrative disintegrates into
incompatible pieces. This disintegration of the self is Miller’s
“glimpse of the brighter possibility” of the character that might have
been. The self the person thought she possessed now seems
unattainable, and the person must find a new narrative to continue
with her life. It is this period after the collapse of a personal narrative
that Miller focuses on in many of his dramas.
To understand what happens to a person during this collapse, we
first need to understand what the person experiences when her self is
28 David Palmer

intact and functioning as it should to guide her life. This state, I

believe, is what Aristotle meant by eudaimonia.

Aristotle on Eudaimonia

A person’s sense that the various parts of her self are integrated and
that the narrative as a whole is coherent is the foundation of what
Aristotle called eudaimonia (Book 1; Book 10, chaps. 6-8). This
often is translated as “happiness” or as the “sense of flourishing,” but
the core concept seems to be something like self-respect. Aristotle
says that eudaimonia is the highest good, the ultimate goal, at which
all human lives aim: although people take many different individual
paths through life, all these paths are guided by each person’s sense
of what it is to be a good person (1094a, 1097a). A person who has
eudaimonia has the conscious experience of doing a good job of
being a human being.
In outline, Aristotle builds his conception of eudaimonia in the
following way. Every object has a certain ergon: a function or
purpose. For example, the ergon of a knife is to cut. To be good, an
object must perform its function well: a good knife is a knife that cuts
well. To perform its ergon well, an object must possess certain traits
that enable good performance. These traits are aretai: virtues or
excellences. For example, among its various excellences, a good
knife has the areté of being sharp.
To understand what it is to be a good human being, we need to
understand the human ergon and the various aretai that enable a
person to perform this ergon well. This is the topic of Aristotle’s
Nicomachean Ethics. A good person is a person who possesses the
appropriate traits of character and other skills that enable him to
perform well as a human being (1097b22-1098a18). A person who
pursues the acquisition of human areté and is not diverted from this
pursuit by distracting passions or other undermining character traits is
what Aristotle calls spoudaios (1098a7-12). Often this is translated as
“serious,” but it also carries connotations of being authentic or worthy
of respect, as when we say a person made a serious attempt to do
something.
William James may formulate Aristotle’s conception of
eudaimonia as follows: eudaimonia is an experience the subjective I
has when it considers the narrative that constitutes the objectified me
and finds that me honorable or worthy. Eudaimonia is the experience
of self-respect: the feeling of happiness that arises in a person when
 Understanding John Proctor 29
she has conscious awareness of being successful in her serious
attempt to be a worthwhile human being.
If the I considers the me and experiences the me as defective—as
falling short of ideals embodied in the self narrative—the person
loses the ability to experience eudaimonia, and as Miller says, these
ideals become for the person “merely a glimpse of this brighter
possibility” that might have been. The experience of this failure to
measure up often is depicted in Miller’s plays as an event in the past.
The present, continuing struggle to rebuild a viable narrative of the
self that could once again support the experience of eudaimonia is the
focus of the particular kind of tragedy in which Miller specialized: his
are tragedies of life after the collapse of self-respect. How does this
collapse of the self occur?

Regret, Guilt, Shame, Reconciliation, and Forgiveness

Bad things happen, and there are a variety of ways in which people
can feel responsible for these negative events. As the Georgetown
philosopher and psychoanalyst Nancy Sherman has pointed out
(“Moral Logic”), the most remote of these is regret. Here the person
admits having a role in the chain of causes that brought about the
event and feels bad about the event having occurred, but the person
feels no moral responsibility for it. The person feels passively or
unavoidably involved in bringing about the event, but the person does
not have the sense of being an agent who caused the event actively
through a purposeful intention that is an expression of his character.
The person feels more caught up in the chain of events than a driver
of them. An example of this is a person who accidentally breaks a
lamp at a party at a friend’s house because he steps back to allow a
caterer to pass with a tray and bumps the table behind him on which
the lamp is standing. The person is sad the lamp is broken and
recognizes himself as part of the chain of causes that led to its
breaking. He may even decide to pay to replace the lamp as a way of
reconciling with his friend. But he does not view the breaking of the
lamp as an act of his in the full sense, as it would be had he picked up
the lamp and smashed it to the floor with the intention of breaking it.
The person is involved as a cause but he does not have a sense of
owning the act; he has no sense of moral responsibility.
Bernhard Schlink, the German jurist and author of the novel The
Reader, has noted that in these cases the person may seek only
reconciliation rather than feeling a need for forgiveness (67-88). To
30 David Palmer

seek forgiveness, the person must admit guilt and morally own the
negative event as his own act. He then goes to his victim as the only
person who can lift this guilt from him. That is what the act of
forgiveness does: the victim simply absolves the person who
committed the act, and only the victim can perform this absolution.
To grant forgiveness, the victim need not understand why the act
occurred; forgiveness does not involve understanding, merely
absolution (69).
Reconciliation, on the other hand, does not require an admission
of guilt or moral responsibility by the perpetrator, but it does require
understanding on the part of the victim. For the perpetrator and the
victim to be reconciled, the victim must come to see the events as
something the perpetrator caused but for which he is not morally
responsible. That is, the victim must perceive the perpetrator as
someone like himself who could have been caught up in this chain of
causes without having fully purposefully intended to bring about the
event. The perpetrator comes to be seen by the victim as somehow
passive in the event, not fully an active agent. The victim and
perpetrator, having reached this perspective, then can move on with
their relationship without needing to resolve any questions of guilt or
intent.
Even when the perpetrator does admit guilt and assumes moral
responsibility, the act still can be seen as an anomaly, as Kuhn would
say: the event is a mistake or an aberration; it is not indicative of the
perpetrator’s actual character. There is no reason why this experience
of guilt must lead the perpetrator to experience a crisis of his personal
paradigm: a disintegration and collapse of his self-narrative.
That disintegration occurs only with shame. In cases of shame,
the event pushes the perpetrator to a tipping point (Gladwell Intro. &
ch. 1): either this event is seen as so important or the number of
similar events is so numerous that the perpetrator no longer can
maintain the view that the event is merely an anomaly. The event is
not merely some act the perpetrator has done; it indicates who the
perpetrator really is in a way that is incompatible with the
perpetrator’s earlier vision of his self. As a result, the old self-
narrative collapses, and the person goes into a psychological crisis
similar to what Kuhn sees as the crisis of a paradigm shift in a
scientific revolution. The perpetrator now experiences himself as
exposed, not just to himself but to all others, as fundamentally flawed
as a person (Williams 89-94; Sherman, Untold 180-185). His only
way forward is to find a new self-narrative: a new personal paradigm.
 Understanding John Proctor 31
In her work with combat veterans who suffer from survivor guilt,
Nancy Sherman has noted that confronting the shame of a collapsing
self is so traumatic that people will embrace a kind of irrational guilt
to avoid it. The individual takes on a sense of guilt for some event he
could not have avoided as a way of sidestepping a shame-inducing
sense of being impotent to avoid it:

The tacit thought here, perhaps, is that no matter how good

he was it still wasn’t good enough to save lives. And so there is
the replay of the gnawing counterfactual: “If I could have done
something more, or done this rather than that, I should have.”
This is the thought I have heard from many soldiers. They feel
that they have fallen short of an idealized sense of courage or
valor or performance skill. And guilt and self-blame, the taking
on of responsibility where one has strictly speaking done no
wrong, becomes a way of coping with the harder-to-uncover
feeling of shame, and its companion feelings of impotence and
helplessness. (“Shame”)

John Proctor will make a move something like this in his attempt to
avoid his own sense of shame for his sexual engagement with
Abigail. He first will try to dismiss it as a regrettable event, then
accept guilt for it and seek forgiveness, and only late in the play
confront his own shame about the act and his collapsing sense of self.
That journey to shame and Proctor’s eventual reconstruction of a new
sense of self is at the core of the plot’s development in The Crucible.

Understanding John Proctor

There are many ways to approach The Crucible. Often integrity is

discussed here in the context of the play as a political statement about
the individual’s confrontation with a corrupt and overbearing
bureaucracy. As Thomas Adler has suggested, some commentators
make this the central theme of the play and accuse Miller of failing to
make “the adultery integral to the larger plot and the development of
his protagonist’s character” (96). Along with Adler, I think this
political focus is a misreading. The play is at heart a love story about
Proctor’s adulterous betrayal of his wife, Elizabeth, and what that
means for the story he can tell himself and other people about who he
is—and clearly this reflects events in Miller’s own marriage to Mary
Slattery and his affair with Marilyn Monroe in 1951-52. The issue for
32 David Palmer

Proctor of whether to cooperate with the court and confess to

witchcraft in order to save his life begins as an issue of whether he, as
an adulterer, is worthy to claim the moral integrity necessary to make
opposing the court an act of principle and not merely a grandstanding
act of hypocrisy. Proctor is a classic Miller hero: his old self has
collapsed, and the drama we see is his struggle to construct a new self
that he will find worthy of respect.
John Proctor is a proud man who had thought of himself as
spoudaios, to use Aristotle’s term: a serious man worthy of respect.
Proctor’s problem, as Miller describes in the stage directions when he
enters for the first time in act 1, is that despite his commanding
presence and respect in the community, Proctor “has come to regard
himself as a kind of fraud.” He feels he is “a sinner not only against
the moral fashion of his time, but against his own vision of decent
conduct” (Miller, Collected 1944 361). His sense of self is beginning
to collapse. The narrative he used to use as the basis of his self-
respect is beginning to seem incoherent.
Proctor loves and respects his wife, Elizabeth, but during her
recovery from her recent pregnancy she was ill for a long time, and
he had a sexual relationship with a hired girl in their house, Abigail
Williams. Elizabeth discovered this, dismissed Abigail, and for the
past seven months Proctor and Elizabeth have been trying to put their
marriage back together. As in many of his plays, Miller brings the
audience to the central event of the adultery after it has happened.
This way of structuring plays reflects Miller’s emphasis on history:
on not deluding oneself about the causal connections between the
present and the past. It is what makes hypocrisy such a central theme
in his writings (“Ibsen and the Drama of Today” in Theater Essays
544-551; “The Price—The Power of the Past” in Echoes 296-299).
The Crucible is the story of Proctor and Elizabeth trying to recover a
viable self-narrative after their old narrative has disintegrated.
The first detailed discussion of the adultery and its effect on
Proctor’s sense of self is at the beginning of act 2, and the problem
here is Proctor’s confusion concerning differences between regret,
guilt, and shame. At first Proctor seems to have wanted to view his
act as a merely regrettable event in which he was involved but for
which he need feel no significant guilt nor take any moral
responsibility: like backing into the table as the caterer goes by and
breaking the lamp. That seems to be what he means when he says to
Elizabeth that he made no promise in his sexual engagement with
Abigail other than “the promise that a stallion gives a mare” (394): he
 Understanding John Proctor 33
was overcome by lust; that happens to people occasionally; it is
unimportant.
Nonetheless, Proctor, despite his willingness to rebel against the
norms of the village, is still a Puritan: he senses the story he now is
trying to tell is hypocritically self-serving and incapable of being the
foundation of a viable new self. He has moved beyond that story to
accept his act as a transgression for which he is guilty but for which
reparations can be made and forgiveness can be received. But in
doing this, he still wants to see the act as an “anomaly” in Kuhn’s
sense; it is not an event that pushes his self-paradigm of being
spoudaious (serious, worthy) over a tipping point into collapse. He
becomes angry with Elizabeth for what he believes is her unjustly
withholding forgiveness when he feels he has made significant
attempts at reparations:

Spare me! You forget nothin’ and forgive nothin’. Learn charity,
woman. I have gone tiptoe in this house all seven months since
she is gone. I have not moved from there to there without I think
to please you, and still an everlasting funeral marches round your
heart. I cannot speak but I am doubted, every moment judged for
lies, as though I come into a court when I come into this house.
… Look you sometimes for the goodness in me, and judge me
not. (388)

Proctor feels Elizabeth is unwilling to treat the act as an anomaly; he

fears that she sees it as indicative of his true lack of character, as a
sign that his sense of himself as upright and worthy is hypocritically
deluded.
Elizabeth replies, “I do not judge you. The magistrate sits in your
heart that judges you. I never thought you but a good man – with a
smile – only somewhat bewildered” (388). Elizabeth understands that
Proctor is struggling with a sense of shame—a collapse of his self-
narrative that he is a good man—not merely with a regrettable event
or with guilt over a particular mistake. Proctor at this point has not
achieved Elizabeth perspective. He is not ready to confront his shame
and his collapsing sense of self. He is hoping to cope with the
situation merely as a transgression—a Kuhnian anomaly—that can be
repaired so that his sense of self can remain intact.
Proctor’s hesitancy later in act 2 to go to the court in Salem to
denounce Abigail as a liar arises from his fear of having his sexual
relationship with her exposed. If it is exposed, his act no longer
34 David Palmer

would be merely a transgression against his wife that might be

repaired; it would require a fundamental change in the story he is able
to present to the world about who he is. He would in fact confront
shame and the collapse of his sense of self, and this confrontation is
what he hopes to avoid. This is why he becomes so angry when
Elizabeth suggests that he “has a faulty understanding of young girls.
There is a promise made in any bed” (393). Proctor shouts back,
“Woman, am I so base? Do you truly think me base?” That is, do you
truly think that I am defective and shameful as a person, not merely a
good man who made a particular mistake? Proctor struggles to keep
his sense of self from disintegrating. He feels he is not a bad man,
merely a good man who slipped into a single transgression. Even the
good can have momentary lapses, just as a few anomalies do not lead
to the collapse of a scientific paradigm.
At the end of the act, Elizabeth has been arrested for witchcraft
based on Abigail’s claims, and Mary Warren has warned Proctor that
she knows of his sexual relationship with Abigail and that Abigail
will charge him with lechery if he tries to challenge her. Proctor now
understands that public shame cannot be avoided if he is to act in
defense of the wife he loves. What he takes to be the shameful reality
of who he is will be revealed; his story will disintegrate. He will have
to confront that he is not who he has claimed to be. This begins a
more honest approach to dealing with his shame about his affair with
Abigail.
Proctor begins this journey at the end of act 2 by realizing that no
events have changed in his sexual relationship with Abigail. It is just
that now he will stop trying to disguise or run from them. He will
confront the collapse of his old sense of self due to this event and try
to move on: as he says, “We are only what we always were, but
naked now” (407). To be “naked” is to have the facts unavoidably
revealed—to oneself and to others—that now must be integrated into
a new narrative of the self. Delusion and hypocrisy are no longer an
option.
His admission in court in act 3 of his sexual relationship with
Abigail as a way of destroying her credibility (427) is his admission
of the collapse of his old self, “the glimpse of a brighter possibility”
of what he might have been. For Proctor the happiness (eudaimonia)
that comes from self-respect has slipped away. This is the core of
Miller’s approach to tragedy: the inability to achieve eudaimonia—a
peaceful satisfaction with one’s life. That peace is now just a
“glimpse of a brighter possibility” of what might have been. The rest
 Understanding John Proctor 35
of the play is the drama of Proctor’s struggle to find a new self-
narrative.
In act 4, Proctor emerges from weeks in prison to meet Elizabeth.
He has been thinking about whether to save his own life by
confessing to witchcraft. Certainly Elizabeth wants him to remain
alive. Proctor tries to convince himself that there is no reason not to
confess. To go to the gallows like a man of principle would be a
fraud, and being fraudulent is what his new search for self and its
rejection of hypocrisy demand he now avoid: “I am no good man.
Nothing’s spoiled by giving them this lie that were not rotten long
before” (447). He then asks Elizabeth for forgiveness. Her reply has
two parts, both of which enable Proctor to move out of his shame
toward a new self:

It is not for me to give, John. … it comes to naught that I should

forgive you, if you’ll not forgive yourself. Only be sure of this,
for I know it now: Whatever you will do, it is a good man does it.
I have read my heart this three month, John. I have sins of my
own to count. It needs a cold wife to prompt lechery. (447-48)

In the second part of the speech, Elizabeth takes shared responsibility

with Proctor for his affair with Abigail: “It needs a cold wife to
prompt lechery.” The adultery was just a regrettable event in which
they all were caught up during Elizabeth’s prolonged illness after
childbirth. It is not an act indicative of Proctor’s character; it is an
anomaly … and not even one for which Proctor must feel guilt or take
moral responsibility. Through this understanding, Elizabeth
reconciles with Proctor, as Schlink would say; there is not even a
need for forgiveness, which is what Proctor had thought he was
seeking from Elizabeth throughout the play.
The first part of Elizabeth’s speech deals with Proctor’s shame
directly. As Sherman (Untold 180-81) and Williams (78-9, 89-90)
point out, shame involves a sense of being perceived by others: the
person assumes he is seeing himself as others in fact justifiably see
him. He feels publicly inadequate or despised, not just privately
unable to meet a merely personal standard. Elizabeth tells Proctor that
his sense of being shameful in the eyes of others is false. She does not
see him as shameful: “Whatever you will do, it is a good man does it”
(448). The problem, she points out, is not that Proctor is seen as
shameful in the eyes of others but in his own eyes, and the only
person who can change that perception is Proctor himself:
36 David Palmer

… it comes to naught that I should forgive you, if you’ll not

forgive yourself.”
Do what you will. But let none be your judge. There be no higher
judge under Heaven than Proctor is! Forgive me, forgive me,
John—I never knew such goodness in the world. (448)

As Abbotson (115) has noted, Elizabeth begins Proctor’s path out

of shame to a reconstruction of his self by enabling him to see that he
is not despised by others. Proctor still feels he is not worthy to
consider himself a man of principle. Others, like Rebecca Nurse, are
people of principle whose sense of self requires them not to debase
themselves by confessing. Proctor struggles with what he should do
and decides he still could maintain his new sense of self even if he
confessed. He is no saint, like Rebecca, but a good-enough man, and
a good-enough man could confess to save his life:

I want my life. … I will have my life. … It is evil, is it not? It is

evil. … God in Heaven, what is John Proctor, what is John
Proctor? I think it is honest, I think so; I am no saint. Let
Rebecca go like a saint; for me it is fraud. (448-9)

But as Proctor is pressed by Judge Danforth to implicate other people

and through his confession to disparage the honor of those who refuse
to confess, he sees that his confession is not merely about his own
honor but about the honor of others. He cannot engage in the dishonor
of others and still maintain his fragile new sense that while being no
saint he still is a good-enough man: “I speak my own sins; I cannot
judge another. Crying out with hatred: I have no tongue for it” (451).
Proctor hesitates signing a document admitting only to his own
witchcraft—“You have all witnessed it—it is enough” (451) —finally
signs the document, and then snatches it back, refusing to give it to
Judge Danforth. Proctor’s thinking and motives in the next two pages
to the end of the play are complicated—at one point Miller’s stage
direction says of Proctor, “he knows it is insane”—but they seem to
proceed in a way that relates to Proctor’s understanding of the
difference between guilt and shame.
Reverend Parris supports Judge Danforth’s demand for the
signed document saying “the village must have proof” of Proctor’s
confession. Proctor replies:
 Understanding John Proctor 37
Damn the village! I confess to God, and God has seen my name
on this. … I have confessed myself! Is there no good penitence
but it be public? God does not need my name nailed upon the
church. God sees my name. God knows how black my sins are.
(452)

Although there is little direct textual evidence, Weales (344) probably

is correct in claiming that Proctor here runs together all his sins, the
sin of adultery and the sin of lying before God in the confession. In
his own mind, what Proctor confesses to are all the acts that
transgress his personal vision of what it is to be a good man. But he
hopes that these are only individual acts that God can forgive:
anomalies that, even when taken together, are insufficient to falsify
his self-narrative and drive him to shame. He can confess and accept
guilt for all these transgressions and still hope for God’s forgiveness
of the acts and the maintenance of his sense of self in his own mind.
However, Proctor understands that his personal salvation is not
really what Danforth and Parris seek: his relationship to the village,
not to God, is the actual issue. The court seeks to implicate him in the
public humiliation and destruction of those who will not bend to its
terrorism and confess to witchcraft. To be complicit in this harm to
others is something that would destroy Proctor’s integrity: that act
would be of sufficient magnitude to destroy his emerging narrative of
being a good-enough man. Before Danforth and Parris can elaborate
and restate their demands, Proctor springs back at them, showing he
understands that their real intent is not his salvation and that the price
of what they demand is his sense of self:

You will not use me. I am no Sarah Good or Tituba, I am John

Proctor! You will not use me! It is no part of salvation that you
should use me! … I have three children—how may I teach them
to walk like men in the world, and I sold my friends. (452)

Danforth then asks why the signed confession is so important to

Proctor. Proctor has been seen signing it. There will be reports of the
signing: “It is the same, is it not? If I report it or you sign to it” (452).
Proctor replies, “No, it is not the same” —and here Miller’s stage
direction says of Proctor, “he knows it [his response] is insane—
“What others say and what I sign to is not the same (453). Despite
Miller’s stage direction, we can have some vague sense of Proctor’s
point. How other people interpret our actions is something they do,
38 David Palmer

not something we do. Other people may or may not have the facts
straight about our actions, they may misinterpret our motives, they
may slander us, but as far as the story we tell ourselves about who we
are and what we have done, other people cannot be deluded or
hypocritical: only we can do that to ourselves. By signing the
confession, Proctor has shown that he can be intimidated into lying
… even lying to God. He is an adulterer. Those are not accidents, like
breaking a lamp by bumping a table; those are actions he owns and of
which he is guilty. But perhaps they are isolated transgressions that
can be forgiven—certainly Elizabeth has forgiven the adultery—not
deep indications of a fundamentally defective self.
If, on the other hand, he allows his signed confession to be
posted on the church door and used indisputably as a weapon to
humiliate and condemn those who refused to confess, his whole self
is complicit in harming others. He allows himself to be intimidated
into selling who he really is in his own eyes and in the eyes of others
for the price of his life, knowing that in doing so he disparages the
lives of others whose courage he admires as greater than his own. He
cannot deny that this is what he is doing; to do so would be a
hypocrisy he could not fail to recognize while maintaining a coherent
self-narrative. This is the context in which he replies to Danforth’s
concern that his refusal to hand over the signed confession reveals his
hidden intention to deny it:

I mean to deny nothing! … Because it is my name! Because I

cannot have another in my life! Because I lie and sign myself to
lies! Because I am not worth the dust on the feet of them that
hang! How may I live without my name? I have given you my
soul; leave me my name! (453)

Proctor still feels guilty for confessing; it is a lie to God, and as

such, it is a sin. By being intimidated into this sin, he has given them
his soul. This action and his adultery make him “not worth the dust
on the feet of them that hang.” But Proctor still hopes these
transgressions can be forgiven, that they do not strike at the very
being of who he is. That being—that fundamental self-narrative—is
what he means by “my name.”
Danforth demands that Proctor return the signed confession or
hang. Proctor hesitates only briefly then tears and crumbles the
document. His closing remarks show his recovery of his sense of self
 Understanding John Proctor 39
and the irony of the way in which Danforth and Parris have brought it
about:

I can [hang]. And there’s your first marvel, that I can. You have
made your magic now, for now I see some shred of goodness in
John Proctor. Not enough to weave a banner with, but white
enough to keep it from the dogs. (453)

What Danforth has done by pushing Proctor to hand over the signed
document is show how much he respects him and how much others
respect him. Proctor’s name has weight. Others will respect his
actions. If others take Proctor as, to use Aristotle’s term, spoudaios
(serious, worthy), perhaps Proctor can take himself that way. To
respect himself, he has to refuse to confess. With this recovery of his
sense of self-worth, Proctor destroys the document.
Reverend Hale urges Elizabeth to get Proctor to reconsider.
Elizabeth realizes that to retain his new-found sense of self and his
integrity, Proctor must go to his death. If he confesses, he will again
lose that self in hypocrisy—a painful state he already has been
through regarding his adultery and wants to avoid again. Her response
to Hale is a remarkable act of love and self-sacrifice: “He has his
goodness now. God forbid I take it from him” (454). Proctor’s
“goodness,” as Elizabeth says, is the sense of self-respect that is
fundamental to the contentment that is eudaimonia. Rather than
merely glimpsing a eudaimonia that might have been, Proctor now
has found his way back to attaining it.
Miller’s conception of tragedy rests on a fundamental vision of
human nature that has become clearer in recent decades through
research in evolutionary psychology and the study of consciousness.
Humans are story-telling animals. Our self is a story to which we
respond, a story created by physical processes in our brains caused by
our engagements with our environments. When we find the story
acceptable—when we experience it as the story of someone who is
doing a good job of being a human being—we experience what the
ancient Greeks called eudaimonia: a kind of peaceful satisfaction
accompanied by self-respect. If, on the other hand, we find the story
that is our self filled with incompatible anomalies, the self – like any
Kuhnian paradigm in crisis—collapses, and the person must struggle
to recover psychological equilibrium by creating a new and viable
narrative. The old self-paradigm has become, as Miller says, just “a
40 David Palmer

glimpse of a brighter possibility” of what the character might have

been.
Portrayal of the struggle to reconstruct a workable personal
paradigm after the old self has collapsed is the particular type of
tragedy in which Arthur Miller specialized. That is why integrity,
personal history, and hypocrisy are such central themes in his work.
Integrity is a person’s sense that her self-story is holding together:
that no pieces of the personal narrative are incompatible with the
coherence of the whole. Personal history is fundamental to this sense
of integrity and coherence: it is the story of how our present is
causally connected to the past. Hypocrisy is a rejection of that
connection: an attempt to deny the real causes of our present situation
and to slip into a more comfortable but delusional narrative.
Depicting people’s struggle through that delusion toward a new
honesty and authenticity after an old self has collapsed is the heart of
Miller’s drama.

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a Big Difference. New York: Little, Brown and Co., 2000. Print.
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200 Contributors

issue of The Arthur Miller Journal. His essay on the artistic

connections between Thornton Wilder and Arthur Miller appears in
the new collection, Intertextuality in American Drama. He is
currently completing a manuscript entitled Arthur Miller’s New York.

Jeffrey D. Mason retired as professor of Theater and Dance and

Dean of the College of Arts and Letters at California State
University, Sacramento. He is the author of Stone Tower: The
Political Theater of Arthur Miller. His previous books include
Performing America: Cultural Nationalism in American Theatre (co-
edited with J. Ellen Gainor), and Melodrama and the Myth of
America, which received an honorable mention for the Barnard
Hewitt Award for Outstanding Research in Theatre History. His
articles have appeared in Theatre Journal, TDR, New Theatre
Quarterly, Theatre Annual, Themes in Drama, and Pacific Coast
Philology. He has directed over fifty productions, including A View
From the Bridge, and he has played over two dozen roles, including
Danforth in The Crucible.

Joseph Masselli teaches at St. Francis Preparatory School where he

conducts the Senior Advanced Placement Program in English. His
previous work on Miller has appeared in the Arthur Miller Journal.

Terry Otten is Emeritus Kenneth Wray Chair in the Humanities and

Professor of English at Wittenberg University and now resides in
Santa Fe, NM. He is the author of The Temptation of Innocence in the
Dramas of Arthur Miller, three other books, and essays in various
anthologies and journals. Former CASE Ohio Professor of the Year
and National Bronze Medalist, he currently serves on the Advisory
Board of The Arthur Miller Journal.

David Palmer has taught philosophy in the Humanities Department

at the Massachusetts Maritime Academy since the fall of 2005. Prior
to joining the Academy’s staff, he was the editor in chief of a book
publishing company in New York. His central interests are ethics,
philosophy of mind, and theories of the self, which has led him from
philosophy to an exploration of the works of Samuel Beckett, Arthur
Miller, and Eugene O’Neill. The essay included here was developed
from an earlier version that was presented at The 4th International
Conference on American Drama and Theater hosted by the
University of Seville in May 2012.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without
permission.