"Arrivals... There Goes the Neighborhood"
Luke Mallette
H. English P. 6
9/5/13

             I have to admit, I cant really blame the Indians for not resisting against the settlers. From what we have seen, they were mostly welcoming, but were also unsure of what to do when the settlers began acting crazy. In the Crucible, we can see that many of the settlers attitudes and behavior probably would have been so scary and frightening that they would not have known what to do. In act 1 of The Crucible, by Arthur Miller, we are introduced to a very interesting cast of characters, to say the least. They live in Salem during a time of extremely strict and harsh Puritan theocracy, within a society with an uncompromising view towards any dissidence or variation from its rules, many of which would have seemed unusual and unnecessary to the Native Americans. However, every character that we are introduced to is more and more sneaky, deceitful, and distrustful of his neighbors than the last. Our main character, Reverend Parris, is the leader of the town and the upstanding and uncompromising vision of moral and spiritual character. However, in reality he is a hesitant, vain and tempermental man who is angered at the drop of a hat and refuses to see the truth even when it is staring him in the face. He, and people like him, were also was extremely harsh towards the Native Americans for their unwillingness to immedietely convert. His daughters, Betty and Abigail, seem like sweet innocent girls who do what their told and are good little girls like all upstanding Puritan women should be. However, they are probably some of the most screwed up characters in the play, who are liars, deceitful, manipulative, people who dance naked in front of a fire while drinking blood in an attempt to summon the dead back from the grave and fly from their windows. That would scare anyone, especially the natives, who already believed the white settlers to already have some magical prowess. Also, the older one is apparently sleeping with a man in his bed while his wife wastes away in the next room from disease. The rest of the town is no better, accusing each other at every turn of treachery, thievery and witchcraft, and are desperate to quench their apparently insatiable blood lust for their neighbors to be strung up or cast out. This town is messed up in so many ways that "there goes the neighborhood" barely covers 1/4 of the screwed up stuff that happens here. Its no suprise that instead of trying to fight them, the native americans fled in horror farther and farther inland to escape the craziness of the settlers.