of thoughts: 1. Freudian school: personality comprises of a series of tentative psychological states. 2. Anthropological/sociological school: Identity is co-related with status, sex, age, family, profession and nationality. Characters are involved in difficult moral choices. Man is conditioned by prevalent circumstances, and above all he is leashed by the different context-based psychological Moral Religious and political values all the push man into a world of alienation and make him grope for real identity. Act I: seeks to locate blame for both private and public problems Act II: dramatizes the gradual invasion of proctors home by court Act III: dominant action of establishing the reliability of the accuser and the accused. Act IV: affirms the virtue of proctor when he chooses to go to God through death Miller has tried to balance the personal and the social. John Proctors search for identity is characterized by two phases. At first, he gets involved in the socio-judicial process of the trials voluntarily. In the second phase, his involvement in the public controversy was what activated and necessitated his quest for identity. From the periphery, he moves to the center of the controversy. 2 important aspects in Proctors quest for identity: 1. His transformation from a private to a public man. 2. Necessity he feels for moving from guilt to responsibility. Proctor makes his last attempt to retain his self. As Miller himself said in an interview: (Nobody wants to be a hero, you go through life giving up parts of yourself..) At the end He decides to face death, not because of his GUILT, but because of SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY. Why??? Because he does not want to defame his friends names, who are dying SAINT instead of false confession.
SO, we can say that Proctor is a MAN OF CONSCIOUS,
who prefers to die rather to defame his friends. Elizabeth Proctor Cold wife Responsible for provoking her husband to indulge in adultery. Elizabeth too undergoes a self-realization of guilt when she was in prison within three months. (I have read my own heart this three months, John. I have sins of my own count. It needs a cold wife to prompt lechery. It was a cold house I kept) Elizabethlast speech of her self-realization becomes a triumphant note on Proctors death, in which she proclaims his goodness Danforth
There is a crisis of Self in Danforths personality.
These people regarded themselves as holders of light. If this light were extinguished, they believed, the world would end. Danforth is reluctant to acknowledge the presence of any new knowledge other than the one he possesses. He presents contrast to both Proctor and Elizabeth.