Betty Parris

Betty has no complex interior motivation that the play explores at length. Her arc moves in two stages: prolonged, catalytic passivity, and then sudden, explosive participation. In the first stage she is the problem everyone tries to solve — a sick child whose condition no doctor can explain. In the second stage, at the close of Act One, she rises from the bed and joins Abigail in naming witches, transforming from victim into accuser. Her brief conscious moments in between reveal that she is frightened of Abigail and grief-stricken for her dead mother, crying "I want my mama!" and trying to fly to her through the window.

In Act One, Betty's first conscious action is to dart up in terror of Abigail and flatten herself against the wall, crying for her dead mother and declaring "I'll fly to Mama." She then exposes Abigail's most dangerous secret: "You drank a charm to kill John Proctor's wife! You drank a charm to kill Goody Proctor!" — for which Abigail strikes her across the face and silences her, and Betty collapses inert again. Later in the same act, the words "going up to Jesus" in a psalm cause Betty to clap her ears and whine loudly, then sit up screaming — a reaction seized upon by the Putnams as proof of witchcraft. Finally, as Abigail begins her ecstatic accusations, "Betty is rising from the bed, a fever in her eyes," and joins the chant: "I saw George Jacobs with the Devil! I saw Goody Howe with the Devil!" — escalating through several more names as the curtain falls. In Act Three, she enters the courtroom among the group of accusers alongside Abigail, Mercy Lewis, and Susanna Walcott.