You need look no further than Act One, when the girls are
all together at the bed of Betty Parris and she suddenly revives herself. This of course
is an excellent part of the play to analyse in terms of looking at the character of
Abigail and how she manipulates and controls the girls and threatens them. She uses
psychological fear to keep them in tight order and dominate them. Note how Betty reveals
Abigail's involvement with witchcraft:
readability="5">
You drank a charm to kill John Proctor's wife!
You drank a charm to kill Goody
Proctor!
Abigail's response,
after slapping Betty hard, is a desperate act of trying to limit damage when everything
seems to be falling around her:
readability="11">
Now look you. All of you. We danced. And Tituba
conjured Ruth Putnam's dead sisters. And that is all. And mark this. Let either of you
breathe a word, or the edge of a word, about the other things, and I will come to you in
the black of some terriblee night and I will bring a pointy reckoning that will shudder
you.
Thus we can clearly see
how Abigail was involved in witchcraft, but also how she tries to control that
information and limit the damage to not implicate herself any further than she already
is implicated.
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