Lie,or Die-Struggle Of Life And Death Instinct In The Disordered Social Space In The Crucible

Arthur Miller is one of the most outstanding drama masters in America in the 20th century. One of his master works, The Crucible, originating from the notorious Salem witch-hunt event, insinuates the after-war McCarthyism that caused social chaos and public panic in America. However, this political implication limits the work to a certain era and a certain event and greatly reduces its value. Over the years, quite a few scholars and critics have excavated profounder and broader subjects of the work:conflict between social authority and individuality, a man’s name, social and individual conscience, mass hysteria, truth and lie, knowing and innocence, female sexuality in patriarchal society and so on. These interpretations of the work reveal various social problems which in the final analysis, are caused by the disordered spatial order in Salem society.In this thesis, Lefebvre’s production theory of social space is applied to demonstrate the disorders in the conceptual triad:perceived space-conceived space-lived space in Salem, to argue the imbalance between social order and individual freedom caused by the overwhelming conceived space and the narrowing lived space. Based on this, the dualistic scheme of life and death instinct proposed by Freud is applied to interpret the drinking and lying behaviors of social subjects, to demonstrate the repression of conceived space on the life instinct of social subjects and the stimulation on the death instinct, especially the aggressive instinct. Thus the Salem space is interpreted in respectively macroscopic and microscopic views, in objective and subjective views, and the major cause of the tragedy is proved to be the excessive repression on life instinct of social subjects by overwhelming conceived space.This interpretation of The Crucible inspires us to balance the conceptual triad to maintain social order:establish power restriction mechanism and power supervision mechanism in conceived space to guarantee power in lived space, to make sure that the life instinct of social subjects are not unduly repressed, that their death instinct is properly internalized, and that the conflict between conceived space and lived space are weakened.