Content warning: This story mentions rape and sexual assault.
“We have to be the witches they’ve always said we are, and counter their magic with our own. So fine, if you insist. This is a witch hunt. We’re witches, and we’re hunting you.”
— Lindy West, The Witches Are Coming
John Proctor is the Villain — playwright Kimberly Belflower’s modern-feminist spin on Arthur Miller’s The Crucible — is now the most produced play for the second year in a row, according to American Theatre. Playbill writes that John Proctor captures “a generation in mid-transformation, running on pop music, optimism, and fury, and discovering that their future is not bound by the past,” but what I find more important is the message to women, teens, and young girls that doing the scary thing can make them scary to others, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
“Scary” or the act of “being scared” means that there is one being or force that is imposing upon another; it implies a power imbalance. To feel inferior in any context is mentally and physically diminishing, and it is a dangerous feeling to let fester over time.
The men who want to be scary want women to sit and suffer in silence. They want inferiority to fester into a norm, so much so that it is less of a feeling than it is a defense mechanism. Jane Doe hid herself in shame and in fear because of the intimidation of the men who allegedly assaulted her, as do the millions of other Jane Does across this country and the world, who feel they cannot share their stories. The potential violence of men is the cost that outweighs the relief and justice that could be brought by speaking up and speaking out against sexual harassment, assault, and the omnipresent rape culture every woman has experienced in some way or another.
John Proctor is the Villain tackles the desensitization to rape culture with the story of a group of girls who find solace in founding a “Feminism Club” at their rural high school in Georgia. Set in 2018 during the height of the #MeToo movement, Shelby Holcomb’s life seems to revolve around rape. The hot, unfortunate gossip at school is the lingering, unresolved sexual assault case involving another student’s father and his secretary, which is circulating while Shelby is attempting to navigate her life after being sexually assaulted six months prior.
The play opens with a sex-ed lesson. Mr. Smith, the supportive, kind, and fun teacher that all of the students seem to adore, is standing at the front of the classroom. Every student in the class recites the textbook definition of “sex” in a dry, why-are-we-doing-this kind of tone. That first scene ends with the students reciting the definition of “abstinence … the act or practice of choosing to refrain from sex and the only method 100% guaranteed to prevent pregnancy or disease.” Within the environment these students are currently in — whether they are aware of it or not — that is not true. It’s scary that abstinence, an active choice against sex, means nothing when rape is present and socially engrained in this community of characters, just as it is within our own society.
Shelby had been out of school for several months following her own experience with sexual assault. The audience meets her on her first day back, struggling to rejoin her social circles and to find herself again. She joins her honors literature class in reading The Crucible and devotes herself to finding nuances within the play and the female characters that dig much deeper than what Mr. Smith had intended to teach. What the audience discovers (spoiler) is that Shelby was raped by Mr. Smith, which she reveals in a heated moment of class discussion with the line: “My body remembers being touched by you, and I know your body remembers mine.”
In a name is reputation. We are given our first name by family, we carry a “family name,” we try our entire lives to “make a name for ourselves.” But any and all of those kinds of names are just concepts; they’re not tangible. “That’s what names are: they’re fiction,” Shelby says, criticizing John Proctor’s insistence to protect his name rather than spare his own life by lying. “But my body is a fact. I live inside of it…He [Proctor] is just pretending like his fiction is more important than her [Abigail’s] fact.”
You may think that Shelby’s name argument goes against the use of “Jane Doe” in the Cornell rape case. If a name is so invaluable, then why not call her by her real name? My answer to that would be: if names are invaluable, why does it matter who Jane Doe is? What value would using her real name in press releases and articles and social media posts have to her case? Must she be reachable or accessible to the people demanding or actively seeking out her identity in order for her to be believed? Why?
This is what scary is. It is unbridled rage that fuels people to seek out and attack a person because they feel that person dealt out their own attacks. Jane Doe’s attackers feel threatened by her actions; they find her scary. Jane Doe did not “attack” anyone by stating what happened to her or by reporting those who did it. The truth is not what’s scary. It is the heinous actions taken by those men that is scary, the actions that caused feelings of shame and defilement and guilt.
I find it ironic, though, that shame is mutually shared in this situation, by both the perpetrator and the victim. One’s shame is situational, and the other, to an extent, is socially manufactured. The Cornell rapists should be ashamed of what they allegedly did. Jane Doe should not have been shamed into silence.
Why does John Proctor get to be the “honorable hero?” Why is “flawed” one of several character attributes he carries, which many say makes him more complex, while Abigail is nothing but a whore for supposedly “having sex” with a married man? I emphasize “having sex” in quotation marks because, by today’s legal standards, Abigail was raped. Miller wrote Abigail as a 17-year-old girl who enticed the head of the household for dramatic effect, and to make it harder to definitively deny the statement: “She knew what she was doing.”
At the end of John Proctor is the Villain, Shelby and her best friend Raelynn perform a class project based on their interpretation of The Crucible. The assignment was to write a dialogue between two characters that never interact and imagine what they might find important to say to one another. Shelby chooses to act as Abigail, while Raelynn performs as Elizabeth Proctor — John’s wife. Elizabeth does not shame Abigail for John’s assault in their vision; in fact, she envies everything Abigail was able to do after the fact. “They were scared of you,” Raelynn says, as Elizabeth, “you made them scared.” The word “scared” comes with a natural association of malice, but it also comes with power. It was the only power Abigail felt she had.
“They actually paid attention when I was scary,” says Shelby, as Abigail. That is true for Shelby herself; she doesn’t feel seen or heard until she exposes the truth about what Mr. Smith did to her. Scary was a weapon for both girls. Scary is the defense on one side of a ‘defense spectrum,’ while inferiority is the opposite extreme. One of them makes it easier for men to protect their name, while the other will invoke their anger as their name is diminished.
The prominence of media of any kind that addresses the possibility of speaking up for oneself is crucial. So much real-life experience is hidden from us for the sake of “protection” — whether that is the protection of the viewers or the parties involved — but the experiences of others are often what we measure ourselves against the most. We cannot move in any direction if we do not learn, and we learn from experiences more than anything else. Young girls, teens, and women need to experience the success of other women. We need to see people do the scary thing. We need to do more of those scary things so that we do not have to be scary to be heard — so that we do not have to wield a power of intimidation that socially equates to the vile intimidation used by men against women, just to be seen and valued. We do not need to equate ourselves to the standards of men while wanting to be equal to them.
When it is necessary, let them deem you “scary.” When it is important, let the truth speak for itself. Someone will hear you, and it will inspire them to be heard by others.
If you or someone you know has been sexually assaulted, you can call the National Sexual Assault Telephone Hotline at 800-656-HOPE (4673) or visit hotline.rainn.org.