The Crucible

The Crucible by Arthur Miller

Miller’s The Crucible speaks to a society where narrow mindedness and provincial thinking clouds vision. The Crucible takes place in 1600s where Abigail Williams accuses multiple women in the town of Salem of witchcraft. The judges in the town support Abigail for all of her accusations and blindly accept what she says merely because she says that her word is trustworthy. 

Miller’s book speaks directly to McCarthyism, but the message still holds true today. In an era of social media, it is all too easy to only listen to what one wants to hear. Just like how Judge Danforth only saw the evidence to help him find witches and how McCarthy only saw the evidence to help him find Communists, people can cherry pick the information that supports their point of view. When Facebook finds news articles that a person might be interested in, it isn’t looking for the most credible piece of information, it is looking for what the user wants to see based on previous preferences. Facebook’s current solution for fighting fake news is to tag questionable pieces in order to provide context. However, the mere-exposure effect shows that simply reading the headline plants that seed of false information. Individuals can’t get their news from just social media. They need to make sure that their news comes from credible and respected sources to get all types of information, not just the ones that users are exposed to through their friends.

The Handmaid's Tale

The Handmaid’s Tale  by Margaret Atwood

Fiction

Under the religious military dictatorship, the Republic of Gilead, Offred lives as a Handmaid to serve her Commander (the head male of the household). Women occupy one of five roles in society. Four of the roles available are that of wives, Aunts (teachers), Marthas (maids), and lower-class workers. Pollution and disease has made many of the Commander’s wives sterile which opens up a new position for women in society, as a Handmaid. Handmaids are required by law to have sex with their Commanders once a month in hopes of getting pregnant. The women in the Republic of Gilead are unable to read, write, wear what they want, go outside alone, and they have to obey their Commander. Through a series of flashbacks, Offred tells the story of how the Republic of Gilead slowly came to be as women’s rights were gradually stripped away. Offred laments how passively people accepted their loss of power and didn’t take action until it was too late.

Brave New World

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

Fiction

            Huxley’s book Brave New World eerily predicts a future saturated in hedonism and disregard for higher thinking. The main character, Bernard Marx, finds himself at odds with this society and the book follows his conflict in a culture consumed with consumerism and brainwashed into submission. A key component of Huxley’s society is soma, a pill that citizens take when they feel unsettled or stressed. Through this pill, Huxley implicitly says that how we deal with our discomfort sets us apart. Our struggles push us to question and gain knowledge which lets us grow. Engaging with the unknown leads to emotional maturity, which is something that many of the characters in Huxley’s society lacked.

The Lowland

The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri

Fiction

Lahiri’s novel, The Lowland follows four generations of one Indian family over time and distance and through personal turmoil and national conflict. The events in the characters’ personal lives mirror the historical context of the book.  Personal conflicts reflect the larger political conflict that India faced during the same time period and Lahiri juxtaposes the personal drama with the political and social turbulence of Indian and American society during the seventies.  It prods readers to examine their personal lives to find the key moments in their past that continues to affect them in the present. It also prompts the reader to consider how personal events are shaped by political events and the times in which they are lived.  The Lowland is a story of how our lives are shaped by our context, how history continues to shape the future, both on an individual and a societal level, and how personal history can continue to haunt one’s life because of the threads that tie the past to the present.