Mimetic Rivalry and the Scapegoat Mechanism in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible

Arthur Miller’s The Crucible (1953) is the embodiment of René Girard’s “mimetic theory” par excellence. A drama about tangled human relations in an inchoate society of Salem village in colonial North America. The plethora of societal competitions among the members of the close-knit community give rise to an uncontrollable chaos, which manifested itself in the calamitous Salem witch trials of 1692; as a result, in order to restore social order, Salem’s semi-primitive society had no choice but to victimize some of its members. The present article studies the nature of the character conflict and the essentiality of “the scapegoat” in The Crucible through Girard’s philosophical anthropology.