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The Salem Witch Trials were an opportunity for neighbors to vent against neighbors, to publicly air long-standing jealousy, to accuse those they disliked. But by 1692 much that was good about the Puritans, the narrator suggests, has been lost to history.
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Because the Puritans sought a community, they managed to survive. The town saw itself as persecuted, a legacy of the persecution Puritans faced in the Old World (Europe).The narrator describes Salem as a new town with a strict Puritan way of life, its outlook on the rest of the world one of “parochial snobbery”-in other words, small-town small-mindedness.The narrator describes Reverend Parris as a suspicious man in his mid-forties, one who often imagines that the world is against him. The scene opens in Reverend Parris’s house, in a small upstairs bedroom, in the year 1692.
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