Abigail Williams - Appearances in Fiction and Popular Culture

Appearances in Fiction and Popular Culture

Abigail is a major character in the play The Crucible, but she is portrayed as seventeen years old. It is gradually revealed that she had been dancing in the woods with the girls of Salem and performing voodoo rituals with her uncle's slave, Tituba. All of the girls are performing incantations so that the men in the town will marry them. When rumors begin to circulate that there is witchcraft in the town, Abigail and Betty Parris began to name people as having been in league with the devil, which was the most common way a "witch" was identified, to save themselves. Later, the girls of Salem became witnesses in the court trying the "witches". An added element (and perhaps a fictional one) is that Abigail had previously worked as a maid at the Proctor household and had an affair with John Proctor. In the play and the films made from it, Abigail accuses Goody Proctor, John's wife, of being a witch in order to get to him. In the 1957 and 1996 film adaptations of the play, Abigail was portrayed by Mylène Demongeot and Winona Ryder, respectively.

Abigail is also in the 2010 film The Sorcerer's Apprentice as a minor antagonist. Horvath, the film's main antagonist, releases her from a magical prison called "The Grimhold" and uses her to kidnap the love interest of the main protagonist Dave. After the kidnapping is complete, Horvath absorbs Abigail's powers and steals her pentagram amulet which channels her power. By doing so, Horvath becomes more powerful and is finally able to free his master, Morgana.

In the novel Deliverance from Evil by Frances Hill, Abigail is told by her uncle that she is going to be sent away like her cousin Betty Parris, so for a while she becomes depressed and accepts that she is being tormented and attacked by spectres and witches to the point where she takes a rope and hangs herself in a field near the Parris parsonage. It is unknown if this piece of writing in the story was actually true; others say that she died in 1697.

There is an American black metal band named Abigail Williams which is named after her.

Metalcore Band, Motionless In White, wrote a song called Abigail. It is adapted off of the story of The Crucible, written in the view of John Proctor.