Help with Year of Wonders and The Crucible Prompt

[Omarrr_2163]

Hey guys,

My SAC is next week and one rather challenging topic I encountered left me thinking for days, unable to come up with robust topic sentences, ideas for my body paragraphs. If anyone has any ideas they'd like to share, or even a detailed structure of how you would go about this topic, pleaseeee do so!

"No man may longer doubt the powers of the dark are gathered in monstrous attack upon this village." (The Crucible)
"Oh yes, the Devil has been here this night! But not in Anys Gowdie!" (Year of Wonders)
Compare how these texts explore people's fear of evil forces.

Some ideas I had were:
-Fear of the unknown, people come very narrow-minded relying on religion to explain the predicament, binary thinking. How the leaders approached this. Mompellion tries to keep the community united midst the crisis to reduce the hysteria whereas Danforth in the crucible exacerbates the problem by putting hundreds of people to trial who are "accused" of doing something beyond the lines of religion and encourages fear in people.
-The plague in YW and the witch trials in TC leads to ignorance, hysteria and scapegoating within the communities. Anyone that sought an alternative, or deviated from the social norms was accused and seen as evil. Anys Gowdie, mob mentality. Shows that the hysteria was created internally from people rather than external. Similarly, Abigail uses the binary thinking and understands the fear of accusations to stir up hysteria in the community, also showing how the evil forces can come from people turning on each other and blame others.
-Others do not conform to societies binary thinking and view the crisis with a new and varied understanding and dont fall into the trap of ignorance. Anna grows from the evil forces, as she sees the plague as "perhaps a thing of nature" and pursues scientific understanding. Proctor can also be mentioned here.

Thank you!!!!

[OZLexico]

You've got some really good ideas for your initial planning. So when you consider the two quotes they are both expressing the idea that there is some kind of negative, evil, destructive element that has entered the environment of the two villages in the texts. Your suggestion is that these elements foster fear in those communities because they are faced with circumstances that are difficult to rationalise. As you say, Mompollion and Danforth react in different ways. Danforth expresses his confidence and certainty that is developed by Miller into an uncompromising stance on his own (Danforth's) authority to judge people as witches.  Mompollion is expressing a different view - that the devil in their midst is not in a person (like Anys Gowdie) but in a response to fear and uncertainty cused by the plague. Your first main point could discuss the reactions of the two leaders to their acknowledgement of the presence of irrational fears (that they label 'the devil'). Your second main point could discuss the community response to the fearful events they face - Rebecca Nurse say "Let us rather blame ourselves" in Act 1, and as you say, people fail to look at themselves ("the judge that sits in your heart that judges you") and try to see witchcraft as an external influence on Salem when personal greed (Thomas Putnam)and "the vengeance of a little girl" (Abigail) have a role, as well as an inflexible theocracy that cannot acknowledge individuality. In Eyam, the scapegoating of the Gowdies is clearly an attempt to blame 'someone' for the plague, even though George Viccars' customers fail to burn his work and suffer the consequences, superstition and folk magic are exploited by Aphra and the flagellants take on "God's wrath" as a (futile) personal punishment. Your third point suggests that some characters escape this binary thinking and your example of Anna is a good one to use. Don't forget to mention her later life with Ahmed Bey. Using Proctor in this part of your comparison should also work well as his refusal to sign the false confession shows that truth is more important to him than the binary structure of Danforth's form of justice.