FAMILY VALUES AND AFFINITY IN THE WORKS OF
ARTHUR MILLER – A THEMATIC STUDY
A thesis submitted to the
BHARATHIDASAN UNIVERSITY
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the award of the Degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
IN ENGLISH
By
D. PRASAD
Supervisor
Dr. K. SUNDARARAJAN
POST GRADUATE AND RESEARCH DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH
AVVM SRI PUSHPAM COLLEGE (AUTONOMOUS)
POONDI – 613503
THANJAVUR
TAMILNADU – INDIA
OCTOBER - 2011
ABSTRACT
Family is an integral part of the society. Every individual attaches
importance to his family. He showers love and affection on his family
members and strives for the upliftment of his family.
In this context, most of the plays of Arthur Miller depict the life of an
individual in the society, and the values he attaches to his family, the
emotions shared with his family members.
Arthur Miller’s plays reveal his deep concern for ordinary people and
their values. His plays are obviously family concerned. His heroes are failed
husband and fathers because, Miller has recognized that the most impressive
family plays from Oedipus have modified the concept of family and of the
individual under the pressure of society.
The first chapter gives an introduction to Arthur Miller and his plays. His
contemporary American writers, the themes handled by them. It also deals
with the role of family in the plays of the writer.
Family in Arthur Miller’s plays has a vital and major role. Miller regards
family as a polis. He treats family as a means to delineate the affectional ties
among the members of the family. Also he uses family relationships as
something wider in social context. He always sees the family as related to
the larger group, the society in inseparable and life-giving ways. Miller uses
family as a microcosm of society. He feels that there is something beyond
family; the society is to be treated as a larger family.
The second chapter analyses the fatherly affection, love, and
responsibility shared in a family situation in All My Sons.
All My Sons may be considered as a drama of family relationships.
Though it appears to be arguing strongly in favour of certain positive
relationship between the individual and society, in All My Sons, family
relations are predominant. The play deals with the relationship between the
mother and the son, the father and the son, the husband and the wife, the
brother and the sister and so on.
All My Sons deals with large social issues which reveal interaction of
various family relationships and their interlinked sentiments and affection
for one another.
The third chapter brings out the familial affection and mutual love,
dedication and sacrifice, portrayed in Death of a Salesman. It depicts the
keen interest shown by the father of the family on the upliftment of his sons
and to eradicate poverty from his family. In this drama, his emotional
attachment and sentiments are brought before our eyes.
The nobility in Willy, the protagonist is found not in Salesman, the
symbol for the dream of success, but in father, the symbol of love. Till the
end of the play, he tries to buy his son’s love and respect at the cost of his
own life. He realizes that he cannot sell himself in life, but can sell himself
only in death, by bequeathing to Biff, his paid up life insurance.
Thus Death of a Salesman projects Willy’s obsession with bringing
his family up and his great affinity and responsibility for his family member
The fourth chapter discusses the love and passion of the
protagonist of A View from the Bridge, Eddie Carbone for his niece
Catherine which leads to his disaster. Eddie informs his wife that her two
cousins Marco and Rodolpho, the illegal immigrants have safely arrived in
the country. Catherine also has a surprise for Eddie, she has been offered a
job. Eddie protests for a while as he feels that she should continue with her
studies, but finally yields to her desires. However his love for Catherine
tends to be over-protective.
Eddie and his family are essentially decent, hard working people,
hardly criminals in the usual sense. He wants to help his Italian relatives,
Marco and Rodolpho who come to this country (America) to get work.
Eddie even agrees to their plan of breaking the immigration rules to enter
into America. This shows Eddie’s affection for his cousins.
Due to his too much of love and care for Catherine, Eddie becomes
possessive. He is not able to tolerate the fact that Rodolpho and Catherine
have fallen in love. Eddie’s love for Catherine changes into hatred for
Rodolpho. He tries very hard to break this relationship but in vain. He learns
that Rodolpho and Catherine have set plans to marry each other. When he is
not able to find any other solution, he calls the Immigration Bureau and
informs about the illegal immigrants.
Eddie’s problems in the beginning are predominantly domestic rather
than public. His main problem is his love for his niece Catherine. His
attitude of protection and fatherly concern is slowly replaced by
possessiveness and passin for Catherine as a young woman.
Thus the chapter traces the love, affection, passion, possessiveness of
Eddie Carbone.
In the fifth chapter the study shows that love, affection, dedication,
sacrifice for family, passion, interest to bring up the family are predominant
in the plays of Arthur Miller.
The study makes it clear that family values, sentiments, love for one
another are predominant in the plays of Arthur Miller.
INTRODUCTION
Of all the literary genres in America, the Drama has the shortest and
most sparse tradition. But in the United States of America, Drama was
always incapable of keeping pace with the progress in other branches of
literature. Although by the nineteenth century, the puritan prejudice against
theatre had completely vanished and a great many plays had been produced,
they were anything but insignificant. The majority of the plays transcended
mediocrity. If the plays were poor, the playwright was also neglected. The
tyranny of the actor and the producer held sway in America too, as it did in
England. The people’s need for drama was satisfied often by imported stuff.
The period preceding the end of the nineteenth century was a period
of dearth in the history of English drama too. The standards of drama had
fallen and the theatre had become impoverished. Henry James, to his
dismay, felt that the audiences in London demanded nothing but melodrama.
But by the end of the nineteenth century, English drama had felt the
envigorating influence of Strindberg and Ibsen. A sudden revival in drama
took place and George Bernard Shaw, more than any other single
playwright, contributed to this revival, but the American theatre was found
far behind the times. There were playwrights of some ability like Clyed
Fitch whose plays such as The Truth were very popular.
By the next decade the playwrights became increasingly aware of the
richness of the American scene. William Vaughan Moody’s The Great
Divide contrasts East and West. In The Faith Healer also, Moody shows
signs of the fact that he was feeling his way towards adult-theatre. Themes
of wide interest and contemporary significances found their way into the
theatre by this time. Edward Shelton’s play The Nigger has as its theme
racial tension, whereas in The Boss, the central idea is the antagonism
between labour and capital. Augustus Thomas, another playwright sought to
dramatize regional peculiarities thus introducing local colour into drama. All
these writers however were handicapped by a tendency towards
sentimentality and a readiness to follow theatrical convention. The much
needed break with conventions took place only with O’Neill. The rise of the
Little Theatre Movement marked in America, the liberation of drama from
conventional shackles imposed by the commercial theatre. The Provincetown players, a group of young artists and playwrights got dynamism from
the leadership of O’Neill.
Broadly speaking, the modern American drama originates from the
Little Theatre Movement of the second decade of the present century. By the
early twenties, the modern drama was already an old story in major
European capitals. Ibsen and Shaw had their hey-day. Ibsen was already a
classic and Shaw had left his impact on the English managers. America was
behind the times although the American stage knew well Ibsen, Shaw and
the rest chiefly in so far as certain isolated plays had succeeded on
Broadway. These foreigners, however, were deeply influencing modern
American playwrights.
In 1929, the American theatre experimented multi directions. It tried
to represent life more concretely through abstractions, tried to moralize,
satirize, lyricize in terms of new manipulations of space and movement, new
concepts and sequences of dialogue, new versions of characterization. It also
experimented brilliantly on the matter of stage design; the settings in many
cases proved more revealing of theme and motivations than the characters
themselves. The novelty was not exclusively a matter of techniques, but part
of the general stir of experimental activity in the arts. The most important
characteristic of the American theatre after 1916 is its relentless
experimentalism – desire to avoid clichés of plot, characterization, dialogue,
acting and staging, which had hitherto tended to make the theatre dull and
lifeless. In the list of experimentations in dramatic form, T.S Eliot’s attempts
at the revival of poetic play and the works of Paul Green and Thornton
Wilder can be mentioned.
The major playwrights of this period are Maxwell Anderson,
Behrman, Robert E. Sherwood, Philip Barry, Clifford Odets and Lillian
Hellman. Anderson wrote plays of many sorts – tragedy, comedy with and
without music and melodrama. In one play, Both Your Houses, he
successfully caught the tough, slangy, debunking style popular at that time.
This play, produced in 1933, suggested that personal and regional concerns
carry more weight with legislators than the national interest.
It is not until the early part of the twentieth century that an original
American drama came into being, with the emergence of Eugene O’Neill.
The other most important Americans writing for the theatre in the twentieth
century were Thornton Wilder, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller and
Edward Albee. Of the five, only O’Neill achieved the reputation and stature
of a major playwright. But among the playwrights since the emergence of
Eugene O’Neill, the two playwrights of the post war American theatre who
gained the status of major dramatist were Arthur Miller and Tennessee
Williams.
By the mid-twentieth century, American drama had developed into an
entity in world drama. The factor that contributed to this struggle is the
American playwrights’ selection of agony, the emotions and the struggle for
success on the part of the American people, as subject matter of their plays.
This man-centred literary endeavour can be termed as social drama, for it
concerned itself with man’s role in the society. Much playwrighting of this
period was socially thoughtful and purposeful.
Arthur Miller has been studied from different perspectives – as a
moralist, as a social dramatist, as a dramatist of ideas and his contribution to
modern American drama has been universally accepted and applauded.
Miller never forsakes realism as an attitude. His aim and intention as a social
dramatist, focused on the career issues like man’s ultimate status in the
society, a search for stable human relationships and an endeavour to
synthesize human dignity with social needs and challenges. His constant
preoccupation in his plays with people who are in one way or other denied a
sense of community, has its origin in his own experience and his own social
attitude. Miller’s early background and some of the biographical facts give
an account of the shaping influences of his young imagination and his
concern for themes like personal integrity and social responsibility are
revealed right through his earliest amateur plays and radio- scripts.
Arthur Miller, born in 1915 in a middle-class Jewish family in New
York City, grew up in a religious and conservative background. As a young
boy used to the security of the family, Miller was personally affected by the
economic crash of 1929 and the events which followed it. His father who
had been a prosperous businessman suffered great losses during the
Depression and was forced to move the family to Brooklyn. His father’s
image as a man and an American, diminished for the boy when the
Depression brought poverty to the family. After graduation from High
School in 1932, Miller had to discontinue his studies and take up odd jobs to
help his father. He worked as an errand-boy where he did not distinguish
himself. The young Miller, who planned to go to Cornell or Michigan
University, when refused admission, ended up in working for his father.
Working in his father’s factory was a revelation. If the economic effects of
the Depression have begun to awaken his social conscience, the social
conditions shocked him. The arrogance, cruelty, hardness and vulgarity of
the buyers in particular, affected him in a way he never forgot. He saw his
father and salesman of the company treated like dirt. In a sketch written at
that time, In Memoriam, he describes a salesman who committed suicide by
jumping in front of a train. The salesman in the sketch for whom he felt
sympathy in the 1930’s was the basis for the salesman on whom he based
Willy Loman some seventeen years later. His first serious description of the
Depression years and the effect of the crash on his family appeared in an
autobiographical piece A Boy Grew in Brooklyn (1955)
At the University of Michigan, to which he was finally admitted, he
got the chance of getting exposed to the articulation of the despair and
analysis of the Depression. The plays, Honors at Dawn (1936) and No
Villain (1937) won Miller the Avery Hopwood Award. Both plays,
reflecting the spirit of the decade, and the influence of Clifford Odets, were
social protest plays, stressing the necessity of integrity and responsibility of
the individual at the time of crisis. They Too Arise (1938), an expanded and
revised version of No Villain, is the work of the playwright at the beginning
of his career. Essentially autobiographical, it focused on a family driven by
Jewish values and American values. The protagonist, Abe needing to hold
his family together, ultimately has to struggle for his integrity. The play
reveals Miller’s belief in the family, his Jewish heritage and the values of the
Jewish people.
After graduating from the Michigan University in 1943, he began a
new play called The Man Who Had All the Luck. In writing it, according to
Miller,
The crux of All My Sons…was formed; and the roots of
Death of a Salesman were sprouted.
(Introduction to Collected Plays 15)
In 1945, Miller published Focus. It tells the story of Lawrence
Newman, a middle-class worker who on getting a pair of glasses suddenly
appears Jewish. As a result, he loses his job, his neighbours shun him and he
is harassed unbearably.
These early works of Miller prove beyond doubt that it is the
Depression experience that formed the basis of the conception of his family
drama. He was a witness to the inevitable changes which accompanied the
Depression – mass unemployment, poverty and the gathering social tensions
leading to familial breakdown and disharmony. In causing such a sudden
disjunction in his life, the depression introduced him to a disturbing
dimension of outer reality which plays a shaping role in his formative years.
It also unfolded before Miller, a facet of capitalism and revealed the basic
vulnerability of the social system based on greed and oriented towards
profit. Miller’s effort, as a playwright, was to universalize the horrors and
absurdities of the Depression into an image of human suffering, in his plays.
Dennis Welland who published the first full length study of Miller’s
plays maintained that:
It was the Depression that gave him his
compassionate
understanding of the insecurity in modern industrial
civilization, his deep-rooted belief in social responsibility
and the moral earnestness that has occasioned
unsympathetic and often unjust criticism at the age of the
Affluent Society.
(Dennis Welland pp 6-7)
The tragedy of the Depression years taught Miller that there was some
vital connection existing between the private destiny of the individual and
the vaster economic and social forces and work in the world outside. While
in the drama of the 1930’s, the problem of social and political responsibility
was most sharply and clearly delineated, Miller is notable for his searing
drama of personal and societal failure.
Arthur Miller’s fame as one of the most celebrated American
dramatists of our times derives primarily from the four plays of 1947 to 1955
– All My Sons, Death of a Salesman, The Crucible and A View from the
Bridge. These plays deal with man’s relation to his family and society, his
reason for existence, his personal significance and his morality. Apart from
the influence of the Depression, Miller encountered the profound appeal of
Henrik Ibsen, the Norwegian dramatist of the nineteenth century. Miller
found in the dramatic method of Ibsen, the exact way of realizing some of
his concerns. He felt drawn towards Ibsen’s art of realism and it is the Ibsen
of the middle period with whom Miller identifies himself, that is, with the
author of The Pillars of Society, A Doll’s House, Ghosts and The Wild Duck.
In these plays Ibsen deals with the perennial tragic problem of the individual
versus society and it held profound implications for Miller as he was in
search of his own version of drama in the early phase of his artistic career. In
the context of American drama, with the exception of O’Neill and Williams,
the vital dualism of man and his world is often ignored. That is why
Raymond Williams in the essay “Realism of Arthur Miller” praises Miller’s
views of the world:
The Key to social realism … lies in a particular
conception of the relationship of the individual to society,
in which neither is the individual seen as a unit nor the
society as an aggregate, but both are seen as belonging to
a continuous and in real terms inseparable process. My
interest in Arthur Miller is that he seems to have come
nearer than any other post-war writer … to this
substantial conception.
(Raymond Williams 141)
The critics are of the opinion that Arthur Miller, as a playwright, has
emphasized the idea of familial responsibility in most of his writings. Miller
has borrowed Ibsen’s technique of the realistic drama to articulate his
obsessive preoccupation with the life of the middle-class. He is a descendant
of the playwrights of the Depression thirties.
Miller belongs to a generation which experienced history as a terror.
His generation passed through a series of terrible experiences like Jewbaiting in America, economic disaster of the collapse of the share market or
the Great Depression of 1929, the Nazi holocaust, the Second World War,
the McCarthy hysteria and the crisis of American idealism during the
Vietnam War etc. Hence the contemporary history happens to be the main
reason for the family-centredness of the protagonists of his plays.
Miller, in his interview with Robert Martin in 1969, reflected upon the
spirit of contemporary significance which informs his theatre. Recalling that
his plays were mostly expression of ‘What is in the air’ Miller said:
Now look at Death of a Salesman. I don’t know of
any
other play which deals with the question of what one
could call the ordinary man’s strangulation by the system
of values that was going on.
(Robert Corrigan 98)
The humanistic angle which characterized the first half of his artistic
career was the result of his deep involvement in the struggles of his times.
His concern for moral integrity has revealed the articulation of
Miller’s public consciousness for nearly quarter of a century. At a time when
the American democratic institutions became dehumanized under the impact
of Red-Scare, Miller, through his plays and articles like A modest proposal
for specification of the public temper (1954), pleaded for rational sense and
sanity. Miller has chosen a position of moral humanism which gets its
strength from the values of justice, compassion and respect for the individual
conscience.
Arthur Miller insists that the dramatist must not conceive of man as a
private entity and his social relations as something thrown at him but rather
he must come to see that society is inside man and man is inside society.
Each of his heroes is involved, in one way or another, in a struggle that
results from his acceptance or rejection of an image that is the product of his
society’s values and prejudices. That society may be as small as Eddie
Carbone’s neighbourhood or as wide as the contemporary America of Willy
Loman. Miller’s work has followed such a pattern from the beginning. Even
Ben, the hero of They Too Arise has to decide whether he is to be the man
that his middle-class small businessman father expects or the comrade that
his radical brother demands, the play ends, of course, in leftist affirmation,
but the conflict has been in terms of opposed images, both of which are
assumed to have validity for Ben. The hero of The Man Who Had All the
Luck (1944) accepts the town’s view of him as a man who has succeeded
through luck not ability. In All My Sons (1947), the hero, Joe Keller, fails to
be a good man and the good citizen that his son Chris demands. His fault,
according to Miller and Chris is that he does not recognize any allegiance to
society at large. Willy Loman of Death of a Salesman, regularly confuses
labels with reality. This happens with Miller’s other heroes too.
Miller criticizes the society, a business-oriented society in which
corruption, selfishness, indifference, a system that turns men into machines
or submarines, yet it is increasingly clear that his primary concern is with
personal morality. The individual’s relation to a society in which the various
goods are almost as suspect as the vicious methods. So the theme that recurs
in his plays is the relationship between a man’s identity and the image that
the society demands of him.
Arthur Miller’s first successful play was All My Sons. It illustrates the
theme that a man should recognize his ethical responsibility to the world
outside his home as well as in his own home. It is the story of Joe Keller, a
successful businessman who had earned a lot of money during the war by
manufacturing defective cylinders for airplane engines. In the course of the
play, the discovery is made that his pilot son Larry, believed to have died in
an air-crash, had deliberately smashed his plane to pay for his father’s evil
which had taken the lives of several other pilots. It is left to the other son
Chris, to bring home the truth to his father. At the end, Joe Keller kills
himself by way of doing his penance to his son and the society.
All My Sons is a drama of family relationship. Though Miller appears
to be arguing strongly in favour of a certain positive relationship between
the individual and society, in All My Sons family relations are predominant.
The play deals with relations between the mother and the son, the father and
the son, the husband and the wife, the brother and the sister and so on.
All My Sons shows the influence of Ibsen. Its theme may be described
as the idea of guilt from the past permeating and destroying the present. The
guilty protagonist Joe Keller, and industrialist who, during the war supplied
the government with a batch of faulty cylinder heads, when these brought
about the death of twenty-one pilots, Keller committed the second crime of
putting all the blame on his innocent manager Deever. Deever goes to jail
and Keller prospers. This irony is supported by other instances that Miller
affords in the example of those who suffer fighting for their country and
those who, staying behind flourish. But the success of Keller is not lasting.
The climax of the play is the suicide of his son in the army on hearing the
news of his father’s crime. And Keller stripped of his sentimental defences,
kills himself. Keller’s crime, which he claims to have done for his family,
and its complications, are vividly drawn by Miller.
Death of a Salesman was Miller’s next play and an instant success. It
was hailed as a modern classic and has put Miller among the foremost
playwrights of this century. In Death of a Salesman, as in All My Sons,
Miller deals with the father’s concern for his sons, his love and affection,
dedication in a family situation. Miller is also concerned with the
exploitation of the individual and the evils of a commercial society.
However the individual is humanized in detail and depth. The ultimate
feeling is that although in many respects man is a victim of society, he
himself may be a weak individual who is partially responsible for his
failures.
Willy Loman, the protagonist, is an aging salesman whose dreams and
fantasies of success and wealth are accompanied by failure and
disillusionment in his professional and private life. The company he works
for, fires him because he has become too old and useless for business. At the
same time, Willy’s dreams of wealth and power become desperately more
frequent. At home, Willy’s two sons Biff and Happy grow up to be two
average non-entities who belie their father’s desire of greatness and
grandeur. The only person who loves and understands Willy is his wife
Linda. Willy kills himself in an auto accident in the hope that the insurance
money from his death will bring to his family all the comfort and luxury
which he could not provide them during his life. Thus the play ends in a
heart rending situation.
In Death of a Salesman, Miller only describes the last day in Willy’s
memories and day dreams. It was because of this that Miller had at first
given this play the title, The Inside of His Head and because of the technique
he has employed, the play is said to be written in expressionistic style.
A View from the Bridge was a drama which was a great success and
brought Miller several awards. It presents a rough type of realism. The scene
is that of a poor neighbourhood on the waterfront. Eddie Carbone, a middleaged sailor, gives shelter in his house to two illegal immigrants, Rodolpho
and Marco from Italy, who are his distant relatives. Also living in his house
is his wife’s niece Catherine for whom Edie shows a strong protective
paternal attitude. But hidden behind that is also an almost uncontrollable
Freudian passion for the girl.
Gradually Eddie becomes jealous of Rodolpho’s interest in Catherine
and his hostility towards the two visitors from Italy grows. Finally, in order
to get rid of them, he informs the police so that Rodolpho and Marco are
arrested. But Eddie has violated the communal code of honour and
hospitality by betraying the guests and therefore he is isolated and draws the
hostility of everyone in the neighbourhood. In the last scene, Marco
challenges him to a fight in which Eddie is killed.
A View from the Bridge is a drama of passion in which Miller
introduces a new aspect of human personality – hidden forces of instinct and
passion. It is a drama concerning the tragic consequences of Eddie
Carbone’s incestuous love for his eighteen-year old niece Catherine, whom
he adopted after her mother’s death. Eddie’s wife Beatrice hides her cousins
Marco and Rodolpho, illegal Sicilian immigrants, in the Carbone apartment
while they await forged papers. Young and handsome, Rodolpho falls in
love with Catherine. Eddie’s unconscious jealousy drives him to violent
outbursts of rage and to sneering comments about Rodolpho’s lack of
masculinity. Finally, he betrays the two men to the immigration authorities.
Although the young couple’s hasty marriage prevents Rodolpho’s
deportation, Marco, who has wanted only to earn money for his family in
Italy, must return. Engaged by Eddie’s violation of his trust, Marco appears
before Eddie’s house and demands vengeance for Eddie’s cowardly betrayal.
Catherine and Rodolpho, fearing bloodshed, plead with Eddie not to answer.
But Eddie, also bound by Marco’s conception of honour, cannot ignore the
accusation made against him and must face Marco to preserve his pride.
Beatrice hysterically blurts out Eddie’s real motive for the betrayal; his
repressed love for Catherine. Eddie, unable to face the truth and compelled
to face his accuser, runs into the street to die at Marco’s hands. Thus the play
depicts the love, affection, emotion and passion of Eddie Carbone and other
members in the family.
Family is an integral part of the society. Every individual attaches
importance to his family. He showers love and affection on his family
members and strives for the upliftment of his family.
In this context, most of the plays of Arthur Miller depict the life of an
individual in the society, and the values he attaches to his family, the
emotions shared with his family members.
Arthur Miller’s plays reveal his deep concern for ordinary people and
their values. His plays are obviously family concerned. But his heroes are
more than failed husband and fathers because, he has recognized that the
most impressive family plays from Oedipus have modified the concept of
family and of the individual under the pressure of society.
Family in Arthur Miller’s plays has a vital and major role. Miller regards
family as a polis. He treats family as a means to delineate the affectional ties
among the members of the family. Also he uses family relationships as
something wider in social context. He always sees the family as related to
the larger group, the society in inseparable and life-giving ways. Miller uses
family as a microcosm of society. He feels that there is something beyond
family; the society is to be treated as a larger family.
In All My Sons Keller, the protagonist of the play says that family is
everything to him. He even goes to the extent of justifying his criminal act of
sending defective cylinders to the Army Air force that he did it for the sake
of his family.
Chris, his son, on the other hand thinks above the level of the family.
His agony is caused by his realization that he does not have the courage to
get his father sent to jail.
Kate is a traditional mother. She is unable to bear the idea that her
husband is a criminal, nor she can see her sons in distress. Also she is not
prepared to believe that Larry is dead. Nobody can convince her of the
reality that Larry is no more.
All My Sons deals with large social issues which reveal interaction of
various family relationships and their interlinked sentiments and affection
for one another.
Death of a Salesman depicts the keen interest shown by the father of
the family on the upliftment of his family especially his sons and to eradicate
poverty from his family. In this drama, his emotional attachment and
sentiments are brought before our eyes.
Willy Loman, the protagonist is introduced as Salesman, who has lost
his ability to sell and therefore in the danger of losing his job as well. He
also faces the risk of losing his livelihood and above all his self-respect. He
is a little man, a low-man in the eyes of the society, as his name indicates.
Since Willy’s career is based on things that are ephemeral, he is not a
success in business. His devotion to his family stands on his way to success
in business. His sons fail to understand him though they love him
thoroughly.
The work concentrates on family values and especially the father’s
affection for his sons. He does not want his sons to become failures in life as
he is. Willy and Biff are more like brothers than father and son. The nobility
in Willy is found not in Salesman, the symbol for the dream of success, but
in father, the symbol of love. Till the end of the play, he tries to buy his
son’s love and respect at the cost of his own life.
Willy tries to earn the best for his sons, but unconsciously he tortures
them with his ambition for them. He realizes that he cannot sell himself in
life, but can sell himself only in death, by bequeathing to Biff, his paid up
life insurance.
In the play, A View from the Bridge Eddie, shares a good relationship
with his wife Beatrice and niece Catherine. Catherine greets him when he
returns home from work. Eddie informs his wife that her two cousins Marco
and Rodolpho, the illegal immigrants have safely arrived in the country.
Catherine also has a surprise for Eddie, she has been offered a job. Eddie
protests for a while as he feels that she should continue with her studies, but
finally yields to her desires. However his love for Catherine tends to be
over-protective.
Eddie and his family are essentially decent, hard working people,
hardly criminals in the usual sense. He wants to help his Italian relatives,
Marco and Rodolpho who come to this country (America) to get work.
Eddie even agrees to their plan of breaking the immigration rules to enter
into America. This shows Eddie’s affection for his cousins.
Due to his too much of love and care for Catherine, Eddie becomes
possessive. He is not able to tolerate the fact that Rodolpho and Catherine
have fallen in love. Eddie’s love for Catherine changes into hatred for
Rodolpho. He tries very hard to break this relationship but in vain. He learns
that Rodolpho and Catherine have set plans to marry each other. When he is
not able to find any other solution, he calls the Immigration Bureau and
informs about the illegal immigrants.
Eddie’s problems in the beginning are predominantly domestic rather
than public. His main problem is his love for his niece Catherine. His
attitude of protection and fatherly concern is slowly replaced by
possessiveness and passin for Catherine as a young woman.
Miller has created a dramatic theory and critical comment on
contemporary serious drama. Miller’s aesthetic philosophy may not be on
par with Brecht and as a thinker, he may be behind Sartre. But he shares
with writers like Brecht and Sartre, a conscious intellectual effort over three
decades to formulate the role of the writer. He has formulated a dramatic
theory of tragic art which forms yet another aspect of his view of drama.
Miller’s search for an exact dramatic method for realizing his
depression-born view of the American situation made him turn to the basic
strategy of the plays of Ibsen and the leftist drama of the thirties like Odets,
Hellman and Rice. It can be termed as Miller’s traditions in his search for
the model for the social drama. Miller has given critical comments on drama
and the theatre spanning over three decades, in his book entitled The Theatre
Essays of Arthur Miller. He wrote about 1929 as “Our Greek Year” in terms
of determinist powers in the universe:
A reality had been secretly accumulating its climax
according to its hidden laws to explode illusion at a
proper time. In that sense 1929 was our Greek year. The
gods had spoken, the gods whose wisdom had been set
aside or distorted by a civilization that was to go onward
and upward on speculation, gambling, graft and the dog
eating dog. Before the crash, I thought ‘society’ meant
the rich people in the social register. After the crash it
meant the constant visits of strange men who knocked on
our door pleading for a chance to wash the windows and
some of them fainted on the back porch from hunger in
Brooklyn, Ney York, in the light of week day afternoon
(Theatre Essays 117)
This comparison between a passing social phenomenon and the
metaphysical absolutes in classical tragedy reveals an aspect of Miller’s
aesthetic thinking. From Miller’s point of view, the conviction which lay
behind this metaphor was a tested one. This conviction grew out of a whole
number of impressions associated with the Depression years which gave him
an ominous hint of insecurity. The economic collapse of the decade taught
Miller, as it taught a whole generation of artists and intellectuals who turned
to Marxism as a possible alternative, the basic vulnerability of a social
system based on greed and profit. The slump was a system of a wider
malaise which spread over on the ethos of the entire nation. It would be
Miller’s effort to uncover this malady.
It was the peculiar destiny of some of the literary generations of the
twentieth century to have raised similar cries over the disappearance of the
systems of faith which had once provided a near religious feeling of secure
bliss. Miller, with intensity, perceives the breakdown of what was once
thought to be a way of living. He sought to find in the lessons of the
Depression the coordinates of a higher sense of human destiny. Again in one
of his theatre essays, Miller said,
My standard is, to be sure, derived from my life in
the thirties, but I believe that it is as old as the drama
itself and was merely articulated to me in the accent of
the thirties. I ask of a play, first, the dramatic question,
the carpenter-builder’s question – what is its ultimate
force? How can that force be released? Second, the
human question – What is its ultimate relevance to the
survival of the race?
(Theatre Essays 137)
Though in his long career, Miller has reached other frames of
references like psychological and metaphysical, to articulate his shifting
insights into the contemporary situation, the Depression philosophy
remained a constant element in his dramatic vision. The depression forms
part of the social background in his plays like Death of a Salesman (1949)
and A Memory of Two Mondays (1955). It becomes an element of the family
tragedy and an aspect of the American situation in After the Fall (1964). The
Depression experience formed the basis of Miller’s social drama. Certain
forms of his creative agony as well as critical intuition spring from a
tendency on his part to universalize the horrors and absurdities of the
Depression into an image of human suffering.
Dennis Welland in his book Arthur Miller says:
it is the depression that gave him compassionate
understanding of the insecurity of modern man in
industrial civilization, his deep rooted belief in social
responsibility and moral earnestness that has occasioned
unsympathetic and often unjust criticism in the age of the
affluent society
(Dennis Welland 67)
The tragedy of the Depression years taught Miller that there was a
connection between the private destiny of the individual and the vaster
economic and social forces at work in the world outside. This feeling of
sequence or connection is at the centre of the whole technique of
retrospective narration formed by Miller in his social plays. This explains his
constant concern with causes, actions and the consequence of action. It is
found in All My Sons, Death of a Salesman and The Crucible. The characters
and incidents are deeply rooted in the past; the plays cannot move forward
without moving backward to dig up these roots. In the words of the critic
Laurence Kitchin in his book Mid-Century Drama which gives a comparison
from architecture about Miller’s plays:
These plays remind one of contemporary
architecture where it relies for stability on the central
pillars unseen from outside
(Laurence Kitchin 152)
The post-war America used modern psycho-analytical ideas in the
theatre. Miller also tried to give a measure of sophistication to the realistic
theatre through the use of Freudian motivation and symbolism. It is evident
in his plays Death of a Salesman and After the Fall. In Death of a Salesman,
the buried guilt in Willy Loman is located in the hotel scene in Boston where
Biff witnesses the traumatic destruction of his father-god. This scene which
occupies a crucial place in the play’s structure carries clear Freudian
overtones. In After the Fall, the playwright makes a subdued effort to trace
back his protagonist’s neurotic disaffection to a scene in his childhood where
his mother betrayed him by lying about her trip to Atlanta. The lurking
memory of the experience of abandonment, which is viewed as a kind of
unhealing wound, later turns out to be a source of the numerous betrayals in
Quentin’s life. Also the stage mechanics through which Joe Keller’s guilt is
brought to light in All My Sons, involving Kate’s ‘slip of the tongue’, carry a
hint of psychological method. Hence Miller has used psychological motifs
for the evocation of a guilt-laden past which intrudes into the present
situation in the true manner of the domestic tragedies of Ibsen.
Apart from Depression, the theatre born out of the Depression
influenced Miller’s inner development. The Depression era in American
literature is known as ‘The Angry Decade’. Malcolm Goldstein in his
perceptive study of this decade in his book The Political Stage: American
Drama and the Theater of the Great Depression states:
The theater of this period was affected by an
urgent sense of historical crisis; and its moral stridency
and ideological ardour, its insistent topicality and single
minded rhetoric arose out of a belief shared by many that
drama was essentially a weapon in the great struggle of
the day. This decade witnessed the rising popularity and
a number of young playwrights influenced by the Marxist
ideology who seized upon the issues affecting the
contemporary society and delivered a warning to the
American people faced with the chaos of Depression
(Malcolm Goldstein 309)
There are interesting parallels between Odets’ Waiting for the Lefty
and Death of a Salesman. The theme of work-alienation and its
depersonalizing effects on the individuals runs like a dark thread through the
visions of social disarray conjured up in these plays. Also, the ending of
Odets’ Awake and Sing and Death of a Salesman is suggestive of Odets’
influence on Miller. The ending in both plays turns an act of suicide which
takes place under similar circumstances. In Awake and Sing, Jacob commits
an accident-suicide in a frantic effort to supply the scion of the family with
the much needed insurance money. In Death of a Salesman, Willy Loman
commits suicide in order to help his younger son Biff to make a new start in
life. Robert Bechtold Heilman, in his book on Tragedy and Melodrama on
the Modern Stage, in a study of the melodramas in the contemporary theatre,
interprets the gesture of Jacob and Willy as another version of “death as an
opportunity” motif which figures in same of the “money plays” of Odets and
Miller belonging to the Great Depression.
Odets, while articulating the dilemma of the society, frustrated by
economic breakdown, has offered above all a fervent faith in the possibilities
of a new world in which all mankind could awake and sing, a world in
which “happiness isn’t printed on dollar bills”. The element which lends
strength and maturity to Death of a Salesman is Miller’s avoidance of the
simple minded propaganda of the drama in his honest probing into the
sources of human failure in an alien social system. Willy Loman is not, like
Jacob, stirred by the hope that his suicide is going to change the society and
the young generation will triumph over the money orientation which
destroyed his life still his act of sacrifice remains as a question mark thrown
to a materialistic society ruled by the business sense of life where the death
of Willy Loman is worth twenty thousand dollars while his continued
existence does not seem to be, in such quantified terms, worth anything to
anybody.
Miller is always concerned with larger issues, values, morality and
justice. His interest is that attention must be paid to the aspiration, worries
and failures of all men especially, of the little man who is the representative
of the society. According to Miller, truth, courage, responsibility and faith
must be the central values of men. In most of his plays, he has dealt with the
individual’s relation to his family and society which demands his
responsibility to maintain social equilibrium.
In his plays, Miller analyses the individual’s social relationship and
the social needs of an individual is exteriorized in terms of social concept.
He differs from his contemporaries by forming the concepts of moral
responsibility with in the family. He emphasizes that, it is immoral for one
man to accumulate more wealth at the expense of many. His plays are
mainly concerned with the inner life of an individual which is substantial.
But in the modern society, where science has brought many developments,
modern man has begun to serve the machine. This, in turn, has made man
give first place or importance to the needs of efficient production than of
human values.
The present study aims at analyzing the nature of familial
responsibilities and the familial values like love, affection, passion,
dedication, sacrifice etc. shared by the members of a family among one
another in a family situation as depicted in Miller’s plays.
CHAPTER - II
LOVE AND AFFECTION IN
ALL MY SONS
Arthur Miller’s drama is the drama of ideas. In his plays, Miller has
focused upon a single subject – the struggle of the individual attempting to
gain his rightful position in his family and society. In simpler words, his
plays deal with man’s relationship with his family and society. His chief
plays are built on family situation. His plays can be treated as domestic
dramas, because they obviously criticize or comment upon the structure of
the society and they must be considered conventional social plays.
Arthur Miller insists that a dramatist must not conceive of a man as a
private entity and his social relation as something thrown at him, but rather
he must come to see that society is inside of man and man is inside society.
Man’s profound social needs and the meaning of his life are always
determined by his relation to his society.
According to Carolyne Railay,
an individual can maintain his own and society’s stability
by resisting hatred and exclusiveness or an individual can
upset the social equilibrium by forcing the exaggerated
demands of narrow egoism
(Carolyne Railey 54)
Miller’s plays serve to explicate the essential theme – to show the
difference between the private life and social life. His concern for social
problems, social injustice and its effects on the lives of characters can be
seen in his plays. Lawson states that in any meaningful play, there should be
a focus on the social and economic environment which must be probed for
its own sake.
To Miller, the true social drama must recognize that man has both
subjective and objective existence and that he belongs, not only to himself
and his family but also to the society and the world beyond. To quote the
words of Nelson Benjamin:
the fascination of All My Sons lies precisely in its
dramatization, not good versus evil, but of a conflict between
two forces and society each of which is inherently good.
(Nelson Benjamin 47)
Opening his discussion on the nature of Miller’s dramatic art in his
early four plays, Henry Popkin wrote:
Arthur Miller’s regular practice in his plays is to
confront the dead levels of banality with the heights and
depths of guilt and to draw from this strange encounter, a
parable of hidden evil and social responsibility
(Henry Popkin 38)
Arthur Miller’s first successful play was All My Sons which illustrates
the theme that a man should recognize his ethical responsibility to the world
outside his home as well as his own home. The play was staged in January
1947. Ward More House, a drama critic says:
This new drama (All My Sons) put on last night at
the Coronet is a play to be welcomed and respected, one
that has a great deal to say on the subject of responsibility
in wartime and one that says it vigorously.
(Ward More House 16)
All My Sons (1947) was the first major success for Miller as a
playwright and it made its impact in the later forties as a social thesis play.
The play contained the characteristics of a social thesis play and this feature
became an essential part of Miller’s theater in the later years. The three act
play portrays events from a Sunday morning to the early hours of Monday.
All My Sons deals with the story of Joe Keller, a small factory owner. In
a position of wartime responsibility, he allows hundred and twenty cracked
cylinder heads for airplane motors to be shipped to the Air force. His hopes
of escaping detection are shattered to pieces when twenty one pilots crash to
death. With in a short period, the damage is traced back to his plant. He is a
successful manufacturer and his judgements are dredged out of experience
and a peasant’s insulary loyalty to family which excludes more generalized
responsibility to the society or to making in general. He not only fails to
recognize his social responsibility at the time of crisis, but also makes his
partner Deever take the blame and undergo imprisonment for the crime.
Everyone in his community knows that he is equally guilty, but he is
undaunted by the surreptitious whispering of the people. At the moment of
decision, when his business seems to be threatened, he is not much
concerned about the profit or loss, but what concerns him is a responsibility
to the family, particularly his sons, to whom the business can give security
and joy and also his responsibility to the unknown who are engaged in the
social action of war, who may suffer for his dishonest act. When the worst
consequence follows, that is, twenty one pilots were killed in Australia,
Keller argues that he can never admit his mistake, because it will drive him
out of business and at the age of sixty one, he will not have another chance
to make something for his family, which is his highest priority. He seems to
remain safe from any serious assault of conscience so long as he can believe
that his family is most important and what he has done in the name of family
has its own justification. But his unwillingness to oppose his unhealthy
refusal to accept his son Larry’s death, his protest against Ann Deever’s
rejection of her father and his insistence that Chris should use what he, the
father has earned with joy and without sorrow, reveal his attempt to betray a
deep seated fear. He thinks that his world is bounded by the picket fence that
encloses the suburban backyard in which the actions of the play take place,
and to him his commitments and allegiances do not extend beyond its
boundaries. He is proud of being a self-made man whose material success
has made something for his son. He claims that other businessmen also have
behaved no differently during the war. He says:
If money’s dirty, there aint’s clean nickel in
the United States. Who worked for nothing in that war?...
Did they ship a gun or a tank out a Detroit before they
got their price?.... It’s dollars and cents nickels and
dimes; war and peace, it’s nickels and dimes, what’s
clean?
(AMS 119)
Keller appeals to the general ethics of the business community which
has failed to provide any substantial values. But this appeal becomes
irrelevant to his personal defense because he has betrayed the society and
even betrayed his responsibility as a parent. Though he fulfils his role as a
provider, bread-winner, husband and father, he fails to do his duty as a
citizen. He has glossed over his betrayal of society with the argument that
everybody has to take risk in business. He does not like to lose his large
contract and a life time accumulation of business tactics or knowledge
gained through experience. Though the pressures of the materialistic society
have loomed large behind his decision, the responsibility becomes entirely
his own.
Keller’s family-based business ethics made possible for Keller to
profit by the suffering and death of others. He advises Ann, not to hate her
father, he begs her to ‘see it human’. But no one can see Keller’s act as
human, because he has sacrificed others in order to fulfill his familial
obligation, the father’s duty to create something for his son. Though he is an
engaged man only to his family more precisely to his sons, he should have
considered the precious lives of others who have been destroyed by his
criminal act. He evades from his responsibility in order to save his own
family from the horrible disaster. He begs his son to understand the reasons
by rationalizing his deed; he tries his best to justify it. His reasons are
irrelevant but Joe makes use of the materialistic principles of business ethics
and argues to justify his criminal act.
What could I do, I’m in business, a man is in
business; a hundred and twenty cracked, you’re out of
business, you got a process, the process don’t work
you’re out of business; you don’t know how to operate,
your stuff is no good; they close you up, they tear up
your contracts, what the hell’s it to them? You lay forty
years into a business and they knock you in five minutes,
what could I do, let them take forty years, let them take
my life away…. Chris I did it for you. I’m sixty one
years old you don’t get another chance do you?
(AMS 115)
This is the root of Joe’s action. He does not like to over throw his
sixty years of thinking and feeling in a minute. To him there is nothing
bigger than the family. His arguments in self-defense are shattered because
they can’t satisfy Chris’ conscience. Chris, who is a returned army officer, is
his father’s antagonist. He questions his father’s very humanity. To Chris,
social responsibility of an individual is a demand of the purposive life. He
rejects Joe Keller’s reasons which seem to justify the criminal act. Keller’s
passionate involvement in his sons’ lives has turned him a criminal. Chris is
torn between his love for his father and his loyalty to humanism. He cannot
love a guilty father. He questions Keller’s very humanism.
For me! Where do you live, where have you come
from? For me! I was dying everyday and you were
killing my boys and you did it for me? What the hell do
you think I was thinking of the Goddam business? What
is that, the world, the business? What the hell do you
mean you did it for me? Don’t you have a country? Don’t
you live in the world?
(AMS PP 115-116)
Joe Keller, manufacturer and central figure in All My Sons has a moral
perspective no larger than the fence that surrounds his factory. Joe is not a
selfish, disagreeable or greedy industrialist. He is really a good-natured and
kindly man whose love for his wife and family is genuine. Yet, the great
love and family-centredness have alienated him from the larger society
around him.
Barry Gross in the essay All My Sons and the Larger Context
maintains that:
Joe Keller is guilty of an anti-social crime not out
of intent but out of ignorance; his is a crime of omission,
not of commission
(Barry Gross 16)
The collision between father and son over an issue reverberates
through Miller’s plays: the conflict the social and the personal. In this play,
as in Death of a Salesman, a man’s personal integrity, even his survival,
depends on his denial of his social responsibility. Had Joe not wanted so
desperately to pass on the family business to his son, he might not have been
so profit-oriented as a businessman. He might have halted the production of
cylinders and not met the government contract, despite the financial
consequence. But due to his love and affection for his sons, to earn
something for them, he risked processing the faulty parts and lost the bet.
Then faced again with moral crisis – whether to confess his complicity or to
look Deever a scapegoat – he chose the latter necessitating a life of
deception afterwards.
Chris even attempts to make Joe Keller realize the enormity of his
irresponsible act. Chris’ criticism of the business ethics followed by Joe
Keller reveals the enormity of the sin committed by Joe against the society.
This is the land of great big dog, you don’t love a
man here, you eat him. That’s the principle, the only one
we live by… This is a zoo, a zoo!
(AMS 120)
Joe Keller argues that his other son Larry, who has been reported to be
missing during the war, would have approved of his action because,
according to Keller, Larry had understood the way, the world is made. He
could maintain his arguments only for a short time. When the full truth of
Keller’s irresponsibility is exposed, his touch resilient character crumbles
quickly after Larry’s former fiancée Ann discloses Larry’s last letter in
which he expresses his intention to acknowledge any viable connection with
the world leads to his destruction. In Miller’s words:
Joe Keller’s trouble, in a word, is not that he
cannot tell right from wrong but that his cast of mind
cannot admit that he personally, has any viable
connection with his world, his universe, or his society.
(Introduction to Collected Plays 31)
Chris has learnt a kind of responsibility from the mutual self-sacrifice
among the men whom he commanded. So he could not accept his father’s
irresponsible act and hence rejects him for his irresponsibility. Joe Keller’s
conscious dedication to his standards and his narrow egoism make him
estranged from family and society. He views his act as private and the
horrible consequences of his family make him rationalize his criminal act as
a justifiable one. To him, the end justifies any means. This enables him to
visualize a simple atonement. He will give Deever, a job in his firm as and
when he is released. He is not able to visualize any atonement for the death
of twenty one fliers because, to him, they were all outsiders who belong to
the society. His total self concern at the time of crisis leads to his total
destruction. The conflict between his own instincts and the social necessity
brings out the importance of social responsibility which alone can give
security which Keller seeks. His arguments in self-defense that he has
expected the defective parts to be rejected, that what he did, was done for the
family, that business is business and none of it is clean, are all shattered
when the understanding of his responsibility is brought forth by Larry’s
letter. Larry’s letter finally brought to Joe Keller, a realization of his
responsibility to his society. His realization widens his awareness of his
social connection. Finally fulfilling his responsibility to the universe of
people outside his family circle, Joe Keller seeks expiation in death.
Joe Keller’s world is his family and so he is not concerned with the
larger and more complex issues of ethics and morality which a society ought
to consider. There is little doubt that Joe’s values are derived from his social
environment which prevailed during the war time and his crime had its roots
in the morality of American capitalism.
Joe expressed his love for his son in the only way he knew and his
choice was for his family and not for his own selfish motives. Joe attempts
to cover up the secret crime by pleasantry and his ignorance of the world
increasingly becomes a sign of his myopia. In a sense, his myopic vision is
Joe’s tragedy for he cannot see that a larger world exists outside his small
family. In caring too much for the prosperity of his own family, he
jeopardizes the safety and security of the society at large. It is this attitude
which brings out the conflict of values in terms of a struggle between
generations. This results in a confrontation between father and son.
Miller has almost divided the thematic focus between the father and
son. The necessary conflict between a father’s unflinching sense of authority
and his son’s desperate need for acceptance on his own terms forms a
perennial source of tragic harmony in Miller’s family plays.
Joe and Chris are separated by communication gap between two
generations and the main trouble with All My Sons lies in the fact that the
playwright has chosen to render the problem of the conflict of generations in
rather direct and explicit terms.
Joe fails to understand what the people of the younger generation have
come to accept as the motive of the Second World War. For Joe’s sense of
alienation from anything beyond his home prevents him from
comprehending Chris’ feelings of a broader responsibility. Joe struggles to
convince Chris by saying that he had no choice but to ship out the cracked
cylinder heads or otherwise his forty-year old business would have been
ruined; that he had intended to notify the authorities and that he did it all
only for his family, for his wife and to save the business for Chris.
Chris can only respond in terms of a wider responsibility that there is
something larger than the family, a human commitment that goes further.
Chris barely in control shouts:
Is that as far as your mind can see, the business?
What is that the world, the business? What the hell do
you mean, you did it for me? Don’t you have a country?
Don’t you live in the world?
(AMS 116)
Kate is a traditional mother. She also plays an important role in the
drama. She is highly emotional and sometimes to the extent of being frantic.
But even in her frantic mood, her motherly feelings are not absent. She is a
woman of uncontrolled inspirations and overwhelming capacity of love who
is firm in her conviction that Larry is not dead and that he will come back
one day. Nobody is able to convince her that Larry is dead. She ascribes
every incident to Larry’s being alive. She says to Chris:
It’s so funny….. everything decides to happen at
the same time. This month is his birthday; his tree blows
down. Annie comes. Everything that happened seems to
be coming back. I was just down the cellar, and what I
stumble over? His base ball glove. I haven’t seen it in a
century.
(AMS 17)
Kate tries her best to convince her husband and her son that Larry is
not dead. She tells Chris that even Ann is waiting for Larry! When Ann asks
Kate, why in her heart she believes Larry to be alive, Kate says:
Because certain things have to be and certain
things can never be. Like the Sun has to rise, it has to be.
That’s why there’s God otherwise anything could
happen. But there’s God, so certain things can never
happen.
(AMS 27)
The third act opens with contemplative Kate rocking on the porch
chair in moon light. She is waiting for Chris to return. Jim talks with her as
she rocks revealing that the neighbours always knew and assuring her that
Chris will come back. While they wait, the elderly Kellers try to salvage
what is left of their lives. Joe turns meekly to Kate for guidance and she
counsels yet another lie: if he told Chris, he was willing to go to prison,
Chris surely would not ask him to go, but perhaps he would forgive him.
Even now Joe cannot accept responsibility self righteously asking
what there was that Chris needed to forgive him. Acknowledging that Kate
as the accomplice, he characteristically shifts the blame once again, faulting
her for wanting money. Kate understands that her husband is trying to
exonerate himself on familial grounds:
Mother:
Joe, Joe….. It don’t excuse it that you
did
it for the family.
Keller:
It’s got to excuse it.
(AMS 120)
The moment is more critical for Joe than the revelation of his guilt in
the earlier act. As Miller notes it in the ‘Introduction’ to Collected Plays,
Joe Keller’s trouble, in a word, is not that he cannot tell
right from wrong but that his cast of mind cannot admit
that he, personally has any viable connection with his
world, his universe, or his society. He is not a partner in
society, but an incorporated member, so to speak, and
you cannot sue personally the officers or a corporation
(Introduction to Collected Plays 19)
Joe Keller maintains certain fictions, that is, believing in things which
do not exist in reality. The fictions he maintains through out the play reveal
his sense of guilt and his mental anguish which is the result of his failing to
fulfill his responsibility as a social being. One such fiction is that of the
existence of a jail in the basement of his house as he swears to the eightyear-old Bert, though Bert never finds it. Joe Keller shows him an ‘arresting
gun’ and here again Bert is convinced that no one is ever arrested and put in
jail. Even Joe’s wife Kate feels unhappy over the fiction of the jail which is
maintained by her husband. She vehemently denies its existence. The
existence of the jail may perhaps remain as a symbol of Joe’s own guilt.
Another fiction he maintains is that of the money he has earned.
According to Joe Keller, the money he has earned is good and that there is
nothing wrong with it. Even Ann is convinced of that and tries to persuade
Chris that his father has earned his money honestly by putting hundreds of
planes in the air and so Chris should be proud of it. She thinks that her father
Deever has earned money by shipping the cracked cylinder heads to the
Army Air force. So she hates her father and has stopped writing letters to
him thinking that her father alone is responsible for that criminal at and not
Joe Keller. Joe also maintains another fiction connected with this, is that, he
was suffering from flu on the day when the cracked cylinder heads were
being shipped to the Air force. But his wife Kate unwittingly exposes this
when she tells George, Ann’s brother and Deever’s son, that Joe had never
fallen ill for many years. Only Ann believes in all these fictions because, she
thinks that her father alone is responsible for this criminal act. But Keller
begs her to see her father’s act as human frailty and not as an intentional act
to accumulate wealth. However, Chris does not believe his father’s fiction
because he suspects that his father may be responsible for causing many
deaths, even if he ‘bears the façade of respectability and success’. His
father’s proposal of changing the name of his concern to his son is turned
down by Chris. Even when Joe assures Chris that there is nothing wrong
with his money, Chris suspects him.
To Joe Keller, his family is more important than the society in which
he lives. He even evades from his responsibility as a social being in order to
save his family from the clutches of economic depression. He sacrifices the
social ethics to safeguard those who are dear to him. He strictly adheres to
the materialistic principles of the business ethics which is devoid of any
moral values and human consideration. His total self-concern, affection for
his family and interest on the upliftment of his sons, have made him deceive
his partner Deever and sell cracked cylinder heads to the Army Air force.
The disastrous consequences of his act, not only destroy the lives of twenty
one pilots with whom, as he thinks, he has no connection, but also becomes
the cause for the death of his dear son Larry.
Though Joe Keller has declared, “I never believed in crucifying
people”, his total self concern at the time of crisis has made the public
suffer. When Chris comes to know about the hidden truth, about the
inhuman activities of his father, he feels humiliated and wants to run away
from the whole thing. This shocks Joe Keller, because he thinks that what he
has done in the name of the family, that is, the criminal act which he
committed to save his family from the financial depression is justifiable and
it must be the way of the world, which Chris would have known already. By
placing his family above everything else and strictly following the principles
of the successful business, Keller paves the way for the destruction of his
society. But the living son Chris believes that the values, the notion and the
lives of other people are greater than the family.
Joe Keller expects his son and wife to forgive his criminal act because
he has done it for their welfare. Chris attempts to make his father realize his
mistake which ends in a fiasco. Only after the revelation of Larry’s letter in
which he has stated the reason for his suicide, Keller realizes his mistake.
In the climactic scene of the play, it is discovered that Keller was
himself responsible for his elder son’s death; that Larry killed himself when
he discovered his father’s incredible responsibility in the defective engine
scandal. Chris, trying to explain the significance of it all to his father,
exclaims:
…once and for all you can know there’s a universe
of people outside and you’re responsible to it and unless
you know that, you threw away your son because that’s
why he died.
(AMS 126)
Keller’s son Larry committed suicide because he could not endure the
thought that his father had been responsible for the death of a large number
of air-pilots who had flown the aircrafts which had been fitted with the
defective cylinder heads supplied by his father. Evidently Larry had not
expected that his father would go to this extent for the sake of making
money through the production of his factory which had been given a
contract by the Air Force to supply a certain type of equipment to them.
Larry’s letter to Annie makes it clear to her that he was going to commit
suicide because he could not endure his feeling of shame at his father’s
crime.
The conflict between the father and son creates a tension in the
family. Chris cannot shake the realization that whatever his father did is for
him. Chris’ shame and rage are not solely directed against his father but with
in his own generation, with in himself. Chris’ is the conflict between who
and what he is and who and what he wants to be, or ought to be, different
from his father and yet he remains his father’s son. He spends his life in a
business that does not inspire him. He is torn by guilt and shame because he
had suspected his father all along and did nothing about it. For Chris
thought, his father was better than most other men who profited through
wrong means during the war time.
I never saw you as a man. I saw you as my father. I
can’t look at you this way. I can’t look at myself!
(AMS 125)
What Chris cannot forgive Joe for is that by his crime, the father has
robbed the son of his distinction. Chris laments that he is like everyone else
now. He insists upon a public act of repentance by asking his father go to
prison. Chris is in fact asking Joe to give back his self respect so that he may
be free to marry Ann and carry on with his life away from his father’s home.
At the time of crisis, Joe is isolated in his suffering. Both his wife and
son insist upon a public act of repentance by asking him to go to prison.
It is towards the end of the play, he understands that not only Larry
but all the pilots who were killed by his act of betrayal are his sons. Keller,
speaking to Kate, here says:
Sure, he (Larry) was my son. But I think to him
they were all my sons. And I guess they were. I guess
they were. I will be right down
(AMS 126)
The speech points up to Joe’s sincere conversion and after recognizing
his responsibility to a world beyond the family, Joe commits suicide. Joe’s
suicide seems to be imminent because his character and situation in which
he finds himself there seems to be no alternative. In his final days, he is a
lonely man fighting a losing battle. Even his devoted wife does not come to
his rescue. In spite of everything going against him, Joe arrives at a genuine
recognition of his actions and taking full responsibility for his war-time
crime, shoots himself to death. That he acts out of a sense of guilt is
unquestionable but his death is not just the result of a wounded conscience.
He tries to regain his name and integrity through his death for Joe was
always guilty in the eyes of his community.
The dramatist has provided little symbolic detail which serves to
illuminate the character and philosophy of Joe Keller. The hedged-in
backyard setting in the play helps to dramatize his insularity and his narrow
withdrawal from the community around him. Joe is not inherently evil; there
is no vice in him, but only banality and his own sense of limiting selfishness.
He is characterized by simple geniality and high spirits. His sense of fun,
bonhomie and good nature, dominate much of the conversation in the first
two acts. In fact, the playwright has done everything possible to emphasize
the ordinariness of the protagonist through his dress, speech and values. It is
precisely his dullness and comprehensibility which render Joe into a
fascinating object of attention when he is on trial, matched with
extraordinary demands and accusations.
Miller wrote while explaining the didactic design of All My Sons in
his ‘Introduction’ to Collected Plays:
The fortress which All My Sons lays siege to is the
fortress of unrelatedness.
(Introduction to Collected Plays 19)
The word ‘unrelatedness’ describes Joe’s malady which was the main
spring of his anti-social crime. Because of his narrow and out-dated loyalty
to business and family, he betrayed the larger loyalties by shipping out
defective engine parts for the aircraft causing the death of many American
pilots. Joe acted with in the confines of his family-based philosophy of life.
His crime was quite in conformity with his inauthentic and unexamined
mode of life which is unsettled by a strange turn of events in the play. Max
Learner in his Actions and Passions, an early criticism of All My Sons,
emphasized the point:
The whole history of American Practicality – a
combination of the business spirit and common sense – is
distilled in Joe Keller
(Max Learner 57)
When confronted with the bullying anger of Chris, Joe blurts out the
truth about his motive behind the shady business deal:
Joe: Chris, I did it for you, it was a chance and I took it
for you. I’m sixty-one years old, when could I have
another chance to make something for you? Sixty-one
years old you don’t get another chance, do you?.... for
you, a business for you!
(AMS 115)
According to Joe, there is nothing bigger than the family. At one stage
in his fight with Chris, Joe even promises to put a bullet in his head if there
is something bigger than the family.
Miller in his book, The Family in Modern Drama, asserts that all great
plays deal with a single problem:
How many a man make of the outside world a
home? How and in what ways must he struggle, what
must he strive to change and overcome with in himself
and outside himself if he is to find the safety, the
surroundings of love, the ease of soul, the sense of
identity of honor which, evidently, all men have
connected in their memories which the idea of family?
(Arthur Miller 37)
Several critics have been disturbed by the abruptness of Joe’s
conversion, by the manner in which Miller has shown him overthrowing his
sixty years of thinking and feeling in a minute. CWE Bigsby has criticized
Miller for his failure to dramatize Joe’s final statement that “they were all
my sons” comes as a bald assertion rather than as a compelling proof of his
change of heart. The play is based on Joe’s admission of legal guilt and on
the discovery of a direct connection between his crime and Larry’s death.
When the realization comes to Joe Keller that the concept of family
which he has been nurturing all his life is not a right one, he feels uneasy. He
realizes that he has been too narrow in his beliefs. Before he accepts his
responsibility to the society, he is torn between his love for family and his
duty to the society. To accept his criminal act would be to negate all the
activities and beliefs of his life time and that could be a loss for him. Not to
accept, it would be to lose even his second son Chris who has threatened to
go away from his father because he can’t admit his father’s irresponsibility
and enjoy the fruits of the criminal act. It is here and in this sense that the
public issues, a Miami maintains,
…….. impinging on the individuals consciences have, so
to speak thrown filial relations out of gear and put
instinctive loyalties and pieties to a severe moral test.
(Miani Darshan Singh 90)
Though Joe Keller realizes the significance of Chris’ concept of social
responsibility, he is conscious of the fact that he who has spent many years
in the manifest world of innocence can’t live as a criminal in reality, so he
tells Chris:
It is your money, that’s not my money. I’m a dead
man. I’m an old dead man, nothing’s mine.
(AMS 117)
Though this statement seems incorrect on the surface, it is the typical
outburst of an old man who is hinting at the possibility of his death in the
future and of his son inheriting the property. With in a short time, Joe’s
words become true when he accepts his mistake and seeks expiation in
death.
Edward Murray remarks that there is a shift of dramatic focus from
Joe to Chris in the third act as a result of which Joe’s movement towards
suicide is not made dramatically credible.
In his title, Miller gives us to understand that Joe commits suicide
because of his final recognition of all who fought as his sons. Thus Joe’s
outburst ‘they were all my sons’, according to Samuel A. Yorks, ‘is surely
the key thematic statement of All My Sons if the drama is accepted as an
expression of the then popular view, that national and international ideals
were superior to family values and that one who failed to see this was indeed
a traitor to the democratic one-word just over the shining horizon’ (Samuel:
406)
Arthur Ganz, in his article, The Silence of Arthur Miller, has
mentioned the lack of psychological probability in the scene of Joe’s ethical
conversion. The concealed letter of Larry which is used by the dramatist to
destroy Joe, is little more than theatrical contrivance. Also the pattern of
strength through self-knowledge supposedly undergone by Joe, does not find
dramatic realization in great depth.
According to Arthur Ganz, Joe’s arguments in self-defense are
evasive in nature. When he is forced to admit his responsibility, in a
confrontation with Chris, for sending out the defective plane parts, Joe tries
to shift the blame to the capitalist system which demands that the industrial
production should go on even at the expense of human lives.
Joe: You want me to go to jail? If you want me
to go say so! Is that where I belong? Then tell me so...
who worked for nothing in that war? When they work for
nothing, I’ll work for nothin’. Did they ship a gun or a
truck out a Detroit before they got their price? Is that
clean? It’s dollars and cents, nickels and dimes, what’s
clean? Half the Goddam country is gotta go if I go!
(AMS 124)
Joe’s values are derived from his social environment and that his
crime had its roots in the American capitalism. Raymond Williams in his
critical study ‘the Realism of Arthur Miller’ states that Joe’s alienated
consciousness is essentially derived from the false values of his society.
Joe’s ideology was in one sense, created for him by the callous business
world of which he is a part.
The notion that the individual does owe a sense of allegiance to
society at large is implied by Miller in the play. But in the case of Joe, he is
not entirely to blame. He is a victim of his social environment and it is clear
that his anti-social activities have behind them the human motivation of a
father’s love for his son.
Williams Goode, in a sociological inquiry into the Marxist theme of
work-alienation, states about Joe’s estrangement from his work and from the
larger society around him. He remarks that Joe’s specific act of crime could
be traced back in part to his relationship to his work which encouraged
unrestrained individualism, a social indifference and measuring of values in
terms of wider social values (William Goode 115)
.
There is a sense in Kate’s words, “we are all struck by the same
lightning”. The lightning was the experience of the Second World War – a
massive social action in which they were all involved. It was the war that
made it possible for some to profit by the suffering and death of others and
that created the special occasion for Joe Keller’s temptation. Superficially,
there is not much difference between Joe Keller and others. Like the
immediate neighbours and the community at large, he is a man with
common, personal loyalties which are inherently normal. In his heart of
hearts, Joe considers his act as private and accepts his minor fault as
necessary for the continued welfare of the family. Joe represents a certain
social value system and he stands by this system till the end of his life in
spite of all opposition and more importantly, he is willing to die for it. He
dies in order to regain his conscience and to establish an integrity defined by
a new moral commitment.
Joe, like Willy Loman, in Death of a Salesman is a pathetic victim of
the ubiquitous influence of the ethos of American capitalism. But the major
difference between him and Willy Loman is that from the victim role, he
advances into being a victimizer. Joe’s amoral individualism is counter
balanced by a different sort of morality in All My Sons. Miller has presented
four disillusioned and somewhat self-righteous young men – Larry, Chris,
George, Jim – who convey a sense of revolt against the suffocating influence
of the existing social values.
The characters of Jim, Larry and George and their attitudes,
viewpoints and experiences are used by the dramatist to reinforce the stand
point of Chris who articulates towards the end of the play with much
didactic rhetoric, the message of universal brotherhood.
(Julian Wulbern 43)
The role of Chris, as the name indicates, is that the saviour figure. He
supports the idea of interrelatedness, like Paul Newman a character in
Miller’s novel, Focus, who also proclaims in abstract terms, the
interrelatedness of all human beings.
Miller asserts that the social truths proclaimed by his characters in the
play are not subversive but of a humane and progressive nature. Miller’s
primary concern appears to be impinging of the public issue on the private
conscience leading to some signs of moral awakening. Even at the end of the
play, nothing is suggested to remove the ‘bad faith’ indulged in by people
like Joe who are the victims of the illusions imposed on them by the outer
world.
The title of the play involves a message which is as old as the
Christian message of brotherhood and love. Some critics point out that the
title conveys the idea of ‘one-worldism’ which was popular in America
during war years.
In this play, All My Sons, Keller’s betrayal of his paternal
responsibility is exposed. There is a great moral in the irony that Keller, who
justifies his conduct on the ground that he has preserved his small business
for his sons, is exposed as a malefactor by his own son. It is significant that
this man who harms the society due to his paternal love and devotion to his
family’s welfare is exposed as a manifestation of egotism.
The texture and aliveness of All My Sons consists of the reality of
family life observed by Miller. Joe Keller is depicted as a shrewd little man
with a feeling for family and sense of cleverly concealed desperation of his
wife, who is presented as the affectionate little woman.
The reading of the play makes it clear that All My Sons is not simply a
domestic play. With in the structure of a family drama, Miller raises larger
social issues and significant questions of choice and values, justice and
responsibility. The play depicts the distorted values of both the individual
and society caught in a moment of crisis. Though the play focuses on the
crime of an individual, it also brings to issue the attitude the society adopts
towards him.
Miller has made the play realistic by presenting the neighbourliness of
the suburban neighbours and out of various other details, down to a blast tree
in a cramped backyard, which is symbolic of the Keller family’s narrow way
of life.
CHAPTER – III
DEDICATION AND SACRIFICE IN
DEATH OF A SALESMAN
Miller’s plays reveal his deep concern for ordinary people and their
values. He is concerned with larger issues, values, morality and justice.
Though Miller started writing in 1930, he totally differs from his
contemporaries in many aspects. His passionate concern is that attention
must be paid to the aspiration, worries and failures of all men especially, of
the little man who is the representative of the society. According to Miller,
truth, courage, responsibility and faith must be the central values of men.
Death of a Salesman is a play which centres round the problems of an
ordinary common man of the society.
It was in Broadway, on February 10, 1949, that Death of a Salesman
was first produced. It was excitingly staged by Elia Kazan and given
memorable performances by Mildred Dunnock, Arthur Kennedy and the
excellent Lee J. Cobb as Willy Loman. To many spectators, the play seemed
to be the most meaningful and moving statement made about the American
life upon the stage in a great many years. Since then to the people who have
seen the play, the vision of Willy Loman has been overpowering, shattering
and unforgettable. It is generally considered as Miller’s masterpiece.
In Death of a Salesman, Miller has managed to rise above the
ordinary flat-lands of moralization and thesis drama. This play is a
consummation of virtually everything attempted by that part of the theatre
which has specialized in awareness and criticism of social realities. It is the
climax of all efforts since the 1930’s to observe the American scene and
trace, as well as evaluate its effect on character and personal life. Miller’s
achievement lies in bridging successfully, the gulf between a social situation
and human drama. The elements in this play are so well fused that the one is
the other. The play succeeds as a character drama and an exceptionally good
example of so-called ‘middle-class tragedy’. It follows the fate and final
reckoning of a commonplace man in a commonplace environment.
Miller’s intention was to write a monodrama – a play called The
Inside of his Head – which would re-create a man’s entire life in terms of
past and present – by means of his recollections at a particular point of selfreevaluation, late in life. Death of a Salesman is a drama of man’s journey
into himself. It is a man’s emotional recapitulation of the experiences that
have shaped him and his values.
The plot in Death of a Salesman delineates the hero and arranges the
events of action. Americans consider success as a requirement of life and
every free citizen; irrespective of his being genius or mediocre, must treat it
as his ideal towards which he should constantly strive. So Willy’s search for
success is the central idea of the play.
Death of a Salesman depicts the life of Willy Loman, a traveling
salesman, aspiring for things beyond his reach. He not only lives in a world
of illusions, but also draws his family into it. The competitive spirit, the rat
race of modern life is regarded as something disgusting by Willy. His sons
not only fail to live up to his expectations but also they insult and blame him
for their failures. The personal responsibility of the individual to the society
and the society failing the individual is the theme of this play. Miller, by
bringing the downfall of Willy, strikes at the very roots of the modern
society.
Willy Loman is a modern everyman as Miller himself once remarked.
Being a man of ideals, he is disappointed to find that his ideals are not
recognized by the larger world in which he lives. His dreams (which occupy
half of the play), destroy him and he dies in order to turn them into reality.
His futile philosophy is opposed by three main alternatives; the pioneering
adventurous nature of Ben, the sensible practicality of Charlie and the
loyalty of Linda.
In Death of a Salesman, Miller employs new techniques of style, in
order to depict the inner reality of his characters. The subtitle, Certain
Private Conversations in Two acts and a Requiem, indicates that a good part
of action in the play is intended to be internal. Miller’s attempt is to give a
glimpse into the mind of the central character. Hence the psychological
aspects of human behaviour are more in prominence. The setting and
representation of the action of this play, therefore, represent a new approach
adopted by the playwright. At the same time, Miller is still concerned with
the theme of man being a victim of the evils of a commercial society.
However the individual is humanized in detail and depth. The ultimate
feeling is that although in many respects man is a victim of society, he
himself may be a weak individual who is partially responsible for his fate.
The play Death of a Salesman is studied as a profoundly symbolic
criticism of the worship of material success. Willy Loman, a rounded and
psychologically motivated individual as well as a familiar American Babbitt
embodies the stupidity, immorality, self-delusion and failure of middle class
values. He is not a man who has a definite aim in life or one who strives
desperately to achieve his goal. He is a man who has accepted an ideal
shaped for him and forced on him, by the making of his society. His love for
his delinquent sons has made him, in John Gassner’s apt phrase, “a King
Lear in mufti”
(John Gassner 102)
In the race of the survival of the fittest, Willy Loman is unable to keep
pace with the ‘high man’ of the American commercial civilization and hence
dies unnoticed. He is often seen as a deluded victim rather than as a dear
sighted heroic challenger. As such, Willy Loman is a much more interesting
victim of the American success myth because when he dies, he still
embraces the dream that is killing him. Willy has little choice than to
conform and be destroyed in the process. Choudhuri, a critic, in his book, An
Outsider’s View, says:
Willy Loman’s artificial optimism, his innocent
acceptance of modern business morality, his illusion of
success, his bewilderment over a failure and his final
collapse neatly sum up the possible life history of an
American little man who lives a kind of dual existence in
the world of his dreams and in the world of reality
(Choudhuri 68)
The play centres round Willy Loman, a traveling salesman for
Wagner Company for thirty-four years. He likes to think of himself as being
indispensable to the company, especially in the New England territory which
was his beat. Many years ago, Willy had met another traveling salesman
Dave Singleton who would go into town, check into a hotel and do all his
business over the phone. When he died, people from all over his territory
came to attend his funeral.
When the play opens, Willy has just come back from New England,
tired and exhausted. He tells his wife Linda that he can no longer
concentrate on his driving. He also asks about his son Biff who has just
come home after having been away for quite a long time. It is after fourteen
years that Biff has returned home. He and his brother Happy try to think of
some job that he could do and settle down in New York. Biff thinks that he
could ask Bill Oliver with whom he had worked, some years ago, for a loan
of ten thousand dollars, with which he could start a business. Willy says
confidently that his two sons could conquer the world. He also says that the
important thing in life is ‘to be liked’ and ‘to have personal attractiveness’.
Willy Loman’s experience in his material ambition reflects the illusion
which is the product of a society based on commercial morality. The original
American dream is the promise of a land of freedom with opportunity and
equality for all. Ever since the civil war, the American dream has become
distorted to the dream of business success.
The central theme of Death of a Salesman is derived from an
explanation of a particular aspect of culture, the twentieth century culture in
which illusions take the place of dreams and fantasy substitutes reality. This
phenomenon, ignorance of reality or non-recognition of facts, has been a
potent source of European theatre since the time of Greeks; Loman’s whole
life has been shaped by his commitment to success ideology.
Arthur Miller has emphatically portrayed in this play Death of a
Salesman, that illusions are the product of a society based on commercial
morality. But he has carefully focused our attention more on the sorrow and
humiliation of Willy Loman that on the denunciation of a social system.
However in condemning Willy Loman to die by his own hand, Miller is
actually condemning the economic system that fashioned his end. Hence the
play has become ‘a signal event’ in the theatre and has given a true dramatic
intensity to the theatre of ideas.
In Death of a Salesman, the entire action takes place in one day, that
is, the last day of Willy Loman’s life. But a larger portion of this action is
devoted to the projections of Willy’s memory. They depict various incidents
and developments of Willy’s past so that the background story gradually
unfolds itself on the stage along with the happenings of the last day. Thus a
major part of the play consists of action in retrospect. In his ‘Introduction’ to
Collected Plays, Miller describes this technique as “the form of
confession… now speaking of what happened, then suddenly following
some connection to a time twenty years ago”. (Introduction to Collected
Plays 32)
The goal of a salesman is to make a deal, earn profit – accumulation
of profit being an unquestioned end in itself. Willy Loman is a devout
believer in this concept of salesmanship which has brought about a rat race
competition.
Willy:
…. Because the man who makes an
appearance in the Business world, the man who creates
personal interest is a man who gets ahead. Be liked and
you will never want.
(DOS 145)
In another occasion Willy remarks:
Willy:…. The wonder of this country is that a man can
end with Diamonds here on basis of his being liked.
(DOS 185)
In the words of Ronald Hayman in his book on ‘Arthur Miller’:
Willy’s faith in magic of personal attractiveness as a way
to success carries him beyond cause and effect to
necessity.
(Ronald Hayman 40)
Willy’s obsession with ‘personal attractiveness’ is revealed when he
speaks to Linda. He says:
Willy:
Biff Loman is lost. In the greatest country in
the world a young man with such personal attractiveness
gets lost.
(DOS 50)
He has a firm belief that success falls inevitably on the man with the
right smile, the most charm – the man who is not just liked but “well liked”.
Gerald Weales observes this point in his critical essay, Arthur Miller: Man
and his Image:
Nothing is more important to Willy Loman than
his family; but his main idea in bringing up his sons is to
teach them to cash in on their personal attractiveness – to
equip them in effect, for successful careers in selling.
(Gerald
Weales 70)
Willy’s dialogue with his children substantiates this:
Willy:
Bernard is not well liked, is he?
Biff:
He’s liked, but he’s not well-liked
Happy:
That’s right pop.
Willy:
That’s just what I mean…
You’re both built like Adonises.
(DOS 146)
He tells Biff that his brother Ben always liked him and also that he
should be aware of how much personal attractiveness he had.
The next day Willy Loman plans to take his sons out for a dinner. He
is so pleased with himself that he decides to ask Howard Wagner, the owner
of the firm with whom he worked, for a job based in New York. Wagner
tells him that there is no vacancy in New York and besides that he could no
longer represent the firm in New England because he was doing harm to the
company. Willy’s fortunes change drastically: he is now without a job and
has to go to an old friend, Charley to borrow money to pay his insurance
premium. It is now understood that Willy had been borrowing fifty dollars a
week from Charley and then pretending that this amount was his salary.
Charley offers Willy a job in New York but he says that he could not work
for him. Willy now leaves to meet his sons.
Biff and Happy meet in a restaurant. Biff tells his brother that he had
been living under an illusion all these years and that he never held a regular
job and he wanted to tell everyone of the state he was in; especially his
father who still thinks that he was capable of great things. When Willy
arrives, he tells his sons that he had been fired and refuses to listen to Biff’s
story. Willy thinks that Biff has an appointment the next day and when he
learns that there was no such thing, he gets angry. Biff and Happy leave the
restaurant and Willy is left alone.
When Biff comes home at night, he finds his father planting seeds in
the garden and talking to his brother, Ben. But this is just an illusion
because Willy had not seen his brother at all for years and Ben had actually
died before nine months. Biff tells his father that it would be best that they
part company because he was no longer a great leader of men but a simple
ordinary person. But Willy refuses to accept this and says that he would
become a great man. Biff breaks down when he sees that his father
incapable of seeing the truth. Willy thinks Biff is still a child and needs him.
He then decides to commit suicide because with twenty thousand dollars as
insurance money, Biff could make a grand success of himself. Thus Willy
commits suicide. He is seen as a forgotten man because no one attended his
funeral.
The brief ‘Requiem’ shows the Willy family and Charley paying their
homage to Willy. Linda, full of remorse, does not understand why Willy
killed himself. Biff blames Willy for having the wrong dreams and is ready
to go away on his wanderings. Happy is determined to carry on his struggle
to realize Willy’s dream of success. He understands that Willy was the
product of a commercial society and he could not help being a salesman. A
salesman, according to Charley, “is a man way out there in the blue riding
on a smile and a shoe shine. A salesman is got to dream, boy”. (DOS 222)
This description of Willy makes him a universal character.
Willy’s problems as a father are shown to be a direct result of his own
deprivation as a son. As his father left when Willy was a child, he remains a
dim figure in his son’s imagination. Willy’s resolve to give strong guidance
to his sons is a result of his sense of the lack of such guidance in his own
life. He says:
Dad left when I was such a baby…. I never had a chance
to talk to him and I still feel a kind of temporary about
myself.
(DOS 159)
Much of Death of a Salesman is devoted to recreating the happy past,
when Willy Loman’s sales were bigger. Miller introduces Loman right from
the beginning as a salesman, who has lost his small ability to sell and is
therefore in the danger of losing his job as well. He also faces the risk of
losing his livelihood, and above all his self-respect. He is a little man, a low-
man in the eyes of the society, as his name indicates. He is introduced as a
salesman but there is no mention of what he sells; the information, perhaps,
is held back by Miller. Willy Loman stands for ‘all low-men of American
community’.
Since Willy’s career is based on things that are ephemeral, he is not a
success in business. His devotion to his family stands on his way to success
in business. To add to this, he is found carelessly sure of himself. His sons
fail to understand him though they love him thoroughly. Willy wants his
sons to succeed where he has failed. Thus he ruins Biff’s life with
impossible aspirations and false ideals.
As Arthur Miller says, the trouble with Willy Loman is that he has
tremendously powerful ideals. The fact is that he has values and the fact that
it cannot be realized drives him just as it is driving a lot of other people also.
Willy is shown as lacking human decency in many respects, but is still a
tragic figure.
The play has often been approached as a psychological drama with
strong Freudian colouring. From this point of view, it is found that the work
concentrates on family values and especially the father’s affection for his
sons. Willy and Biff are more like brothers than father and son and it is Biff
who attains mental maturity first. It is Willy’s own faults which ruin him.
All the flashbacks and hallucinations in Death of a Salesman are in Willy’s
own anguished conscience. As is often said, every great tragic figure has
been true to his fault and precisely this is Willy Loman’s commitment. His
tragedy becomes unbearable because Miller has drawn the portrait of a good
man driven by false ideals, but who still represents the homely, decent,
kindly virtues of middle-class society. Willy may not be a great man but the
pressures of society make him a tragic figure. When Willy’s mistake is
viewed in the light of the present, it is inferred that he lacks moral stamina in
his character through the years which has resulted in his present irrational
behaviour.
In the ‘Introduction’ to Collected Plays, Miller says that the tragedy in
Death of a Salesman grows out of the fact that,
Willy Loman has broken a law without whose
protection life is insupportable if not incomprehensible to
him and to many others; it is the law which says that a
failure in society and in business has no right to live.
Unlike the law against incest, the law of success is not
administered by statute or church, but it is very nearly as
powerful in its grip upon men.
(Introduction to Collected Plays 35)
The nobility in Willy is found, not in the salesman, the symbol for the dream
of success, but in the father, the symbol of love. Till the end of the play, he
tries to buy his son’s respect and love at the cost of his own life and refuses
to accept himself for what he is. Success becomes an obsession with him and
when he fails to succeed, he shifts his ideal to his son, on whom it sits as a
burden intolerable as death.
Regarding Willy’s dream, Neil Carson says:
It seems clear from the rest of the play, however,
that we are intended to blame Willy (as Biff certainly
does) for having all the wrong dreams or perhaps it
would be more accurate to say that we are to blame him
for holding on to those dreams long after they cease to
correspond with any possible reality.
(Neil Carson 57)
When the play is analysed, the inevitable question comes to mind. Is
the play primarily a socio-political criticism of American culture or does
Willy Loman fall far enough to be a tragic figure? According to Miller
himself, either of these two views is too simple and each destroys the
possibility of the other. Certainly the play Death of a Salesman cannot be
both tragic and social for the two forms conflict in purpose. Social drama
treats the little man (Willy Loman) as victim and arouses pity and no terror
(for man is too little and passive to be tragic figure). Tragedy on the other
hand, destroys the possibility of social drama, since the tragic catharsis
reconciles or persuades to disregard precisely those material conditions. Jean
Gould in his critical book Modern American Playwrights has rightly stated:
The brilliance of Death of a Salesman lies
precisely in its reconciliation of these two apparent
contraries. Miller has created a sort of narrative poem
whose overall purpose can be understood only by a
consideration of its poetic as well as narrative elements.
Death of a Salesman remains unequalled in its brilliant
and original fusion of realistic and poetic techniques, its
richness of visual and verbal structure and its wide range
of emotional impact.
(Jean Gould 110)
In Death of a Salesman Miller finds appropriate symbols for the social
realities of his time and place. He achieves through a series of emotional
confrontations among the members of a single family an emotionally valid
psychological statement about the particular conflicts of the American
family as well as the universal psychological family struggle. By placing all
these events, with in the context of one man’s thoughts, rambling over his
past and present life, he achieves an internal drama of man’s epic journey to
self-knowledge through experience. The entire play, in this sense, is a
recognition scene.
Though Willy is a tragic hero in the action of the play, he never
achieves heroic stature because of Miller’s strong criticism of his society. In
the end, it is not Willy Loman as a man, but the image of the salesman that
predominates. It is the man, who, from selling things has passed to selling
himself and has become, in effect, a commodity which like other
commodities will at a certain point be economically discarded.
Willy’s memories do not materialize at random.
They are triggered by certain incidents in the present and
Willy is changed by remembering
them.
(Neil Carson 48)
The behaviour of Miller’s characters is controlled by the constant
threat of economic and political crisis that has made society what it is.
Willy is obsessed with bringing his family up. He is mesmerized by
two romantic images: first of his brother, Ben who walked into the jungle at
the age of seventeen and walked out again, rich at the age of twenty-one; the
second, of a eighty four year old salesman who was still so popular, that in
any of the thirty cities, he could just pick up the phone and wait comfortably
in his hotel room for the buyers to come to him. The actual Willy, as he is
understood, is far away from what he conceives of himself. The play reveals
to us the final disintegration of a man who has never even approached his
idea of what by rights he ought to have been. Willy’s ideal may have been
the old salesman in his green velvet slippers, but his model is that mythic
figure, the traveling salesman of the dirty joke.
The sons are Willy’s divided self of the future; one asserting the
continuing validity of Willy’s dream, the other rejecting it. As is common in
most Miller’s plays,
The central situation centres around the childfather relationship, in which the children at an age when
it is about to break loose from the family; in each case
the father is faced with the constant consequent
breakdown of the family world he had tried to create; in
each case the conflict between the child and father takes
place in terms of the wider world breaching the walls of
protection, the father had built around the family
(Brooks Atkinson 70)
The play repeats, that archetypal plot in which the
son looks up to his father for moral direction, instead
finds corruption that shatters the bond of mutual respect.
(Tom Driver. 48)
Miller’s stage direction for this play makes it obvious that the setting
is going to be non-realistic. He makes a rather important use of music which
symbolizes the bucolic aspect of life which is one of the prominent themes
of the play. That is why even before any action starts on the stage, a flute is
played and its melody is “small and fine, telling of grass and trees and the
horizon” (DOS 130). It is romantic in contrast with which the set is that of
towering, angular buildings in the midst of which the salesman’s house
appears like a cage. Another aspect of the set is that the foreground area is in
sky blue light whereas the background is to be in orange light. Miller is
trying hard not to be realistic as he states clearly in his ‘Introduction’ to
Collected Plays, “An air of the dream clings to the place, a dream rising out
of reality” (Introduction to Collected Plays 29).
The critic John Gassner in his book, The Theatre in our Times has
noted,
a great deal of the richness in Death of a Salesman
derives from the intermingling of the real with the unreal.
(John Gassner 107)
Even Miller says that the dramatic projections of Willy’s memory
should not be regarded as flashback in a novel or film where the past scenes
are re-created independently and outside the consciousness of the characters.
But in Willy’s case, the quick changing scenes on the stage are the
projections of Willy’s memories. And sometimes, two memories project
themselves simultaneously that along with the present action, the total effect
is that of multiple action. Consequently there is not time sequence in them,
because in real life too, memories do not flash to the mind in a continuous
time bound sequence.
The ‘American dream’ is symbolized by Dave Singleman, the
salesman who lived on trains and in strange cities and who by virtue of some
dazzling, irresistible personal lovableness built his fame and fortune. Finally
the American dream is symbolized, in its most noble embodiment, by
Willy’s father, who not only ventured into a pioneer’s wilderness with no
security or assurance of success but who was also a creator. He made flutes
and high music. The music of flute also plays a significant role in the play.
This motif is skillfully employed to reinforce the meaning of the play. The
play both opens and closes with the music of the flute. In other words, the
music of the flute encompasses the entire action. It is heard at various other
times too. The flute becomes more important when, in the course of the play,
it is understood from Ben that his (and Willy’s) father used to manufacture
and sell flutes. Willy’s father too was a salesman. But there is an essential
difference between Willy and his father. Willy sells goods manufactured by
others while his father produced his own flutes to sell them, traveling with
his whole family in a wagon and driving across the country. So Willy’s
father was both an enterprising and adventurous man, while Willy seeks
success only through a social charm, amiability and contacts. Towards the
end of the play, when Willy is planning for his suicide and then later Willy’s
funeral, the flute music captures Willy’s inability to emulate the example of
adventurous father and brother Ben. This flute music also suggests the world
of illusion in which Willy has spent his life.
Willy is a victim of this merciless social system which drives people
to frantic, all-consuming dreams of success. Willy is doomed not only by the
grandiose nature of these dreams but also by their inherent contradictories.
The play seems to condemn a system that promises and demands total
commitment to success without regard to human values. It is a system as
Willy says to Howard, will, “eat the orange and throw the peel away” (DOS
181). It is a society, in which the cruel inhuman son (Howard) can replace
his kindly father (Wagner) and say to a long time employee (Willy) who
gave him his Christian name: “Look kid, I’m busy this morning” (DOS 177).
Willy, with his limited sense of truth, does not realize the ethical
implications of his cry of protest. The blend of pathos and irony which
marks the encounter between the two, precludes any simplistic moral anger
on the part of the spectators. But its troubled echoes point at a social system
which treats human beings as expendable and demands from Willy, his final
sacrifice.
Due to his affection, Willy tries to get the best for his sons, but
unconsciously spoils them, overlooks their dishonesty and tortures them
with his ambition for them. Willy always has a guilty consciousness of not
having earned anything for his sons. He realizes that he cannot sell himself
in life, but can sell himself only in death, by bequeathing to Biff, his paid up
life insurance.
Miller sees Willy as a tragic figure as long as the
intensity, the human passion to surpass given bounds, the
fanatic insistence upon a self-conceived role is present.
(Allan Lewis 47)
The only member of the family who distrusts Ben is Willy’s
wife Linda. To her, the words of Ben are disgusting as they pose a
threat to the family’s stability and security. The strength and tenacity
of her love for Willy and her determination to hold her family together
appear to be in reassuring contrast to those around her. She represents
the older values of decency, courage, sacrifice and devotion. She has
chosen a difficult path and has stuck to it. Indeed, it is possible to
suggest that part of the power of the play can be found not in the way
other members of the family tear each other apart, but in the way
Linda attempts to hold them together.
Linda is often oversimplified by critics and audiences. Her role
in the play is denigrated and caustic criticism is hurled on her,
pointing to the obvious bewilderment in her heart-breaking ‘I don’t
understand’ (DOS 222) at the funeral, she does understand Willy but
only those aspects which are perceptible to her. Other facets of his
personality are beyond her comprehension of it is precisely this
uneasy combination of perception and incomprehensibility that is
integral to her relationship with the men in her family.
Miller, in describing her character in the stage direction, says:
Most often jovial, she has developed an iron
repression of her exception to Willy’s behaviour – she
more than loves him, she admires him, as though his
mercurial nature, his temper, his massive dreams and
little cruelties, served her only as sharp reminders of the
turbulent longings with in him…
(DOS 131)
Linda has a painfully realistic insight into the character and situation
of the man she married. She knows that the fifty dollars, which he gives her
as his pay cheque, has actually been borrowed from Charley. She allows him
his lie as she does not want to rob him of his remaining dignity by informing
him of her awareness of his petty deception. She is also aware of his
obsession with the idea of suicide. She quietly subverts his plans instead of
shaming him by revealing to him her knowledge of it. Fully cognizant of his
weaknesses, Linda can also comprehend Willy’s decency, loneliness and
heart-break. In her overwhelming devotion to him, she has helped to build a
doll’s house around him and consequently, has done to Willy, what he has
been doing to Biff and Happy. Also she has been spurred by the same
motivation: love. In being a good wife, Linda has extended her devotion to
an extreme that has become destructive not only to her husband but also to
her sons, who have also become victims of her gingerbread house.
Describing her as ‘the mother earth’ Lois Gordon explains:
In her love Linda accepted Willy’s greatness and
his dreams, but while in her admiration for Willy, her
love is powerful and moving, in her admiration for his
dreams, it is lethal. She encourages Willy’s dreams, yet
she will not let him leave her for the New Continent, the
only realm where the dream can be fulfilled. She wants to
reconcile father and son, but she attempts this in the
context of Willy’s false values: she cannot allow her sons
to achieve that self hood that involves denial of these
values.
(Lois Gordon 105)
To a great extent, Linda’s follies are attributable to her longing for
security and relatedness.
Willy could never deceive his wife with quite the same facility with
which he had impressed his sons. His wife Linda serves as a kind of
conscience making him confess his true earnings and his real sense of
inadequacy. He succeeds in gaining sympathy because more than for wealth
or fame, he longs for friendship.
It is a poignant scene when Linda talks to her sons about Willy’s
pitiable condition. She describes the crisis which Willy is facing:
But he’s a human being, and a terrible thing is
happening to him. So attention must be paid. He is not to
be allowed to fall into his grave like an old dog.
Attention must be paid to such a man.
(DOS 162)
Linda’s loyalty and affinity for her husband Willy is seen in the
impeccable scorn she shows towards her sons after their behaviour with
Willy in the restaurant.
Linda:
You’re a pair of animals! Not one, not
another living soul would have had the
cruelty to walk out on that man (Willy) in a
restaurant.
(DOS 211)
May be the wife in Linda wants to be kind to the ‘unlucky husband’
even after accepting all his faults.
Willy is also equally affectionate on his wife Linda. The love of Willy
for his wife Linda is realized from his conversation with Ben.
Willy:
Now look, Ben, I want you to go through the
ins an outs of this thing with me. I’ve got
nobody to talk to, Ben, and the woman
(Linda) has suffered.
(DOS 212)
Linda also points out to her sons the painful difference between
Willy’s past and present circumstances which proves her affection for her
husband:
He (Willy) drives seven hundred miles and when
he gets there no one knows him any more, no one
welcomes him. And what goes through a man’s mind,
driving seven hundred miles home without having earned
a cent.
(DOS 163)
Bechtold Heilman, a critic points out that:
Our reaction to Willy is like the experience we
suffer in contemplating on the highways a run-over and
killed dog
(Bechtold Heilman 87)
According to this critic, there is pathos, but no elevation of spirit;
there is no expansive sense of the possibilities of human kind, only an acute
sense of limitation. Had Willy like Oedipus, come to understand his errors,
to see through his delusions to a clear vision of self, the audience might have
got the full sense of tragic irony that comes when a tragic hero acquires selfknowledge only at a point when he cannot stop the consequences of his
earlier ignorance. It might have been left with the feeling that there was yet
potential in Willy who might have finally abandoned his futile dream and
pursued a life of gardening or carpentry. But Willy dies in service of the
dream he has worshipped all his life, the dream has nurtured a vision of self
that bears little resemblance to reality and he leaves that dream as legacy to
his sons who‘ve no more chance of success than Willy has had. Willy’s
weary form casts an immense shadow over all modern drama, but because
he goes to his death without the wisdom of self-discovery, he remains a
pathetic ‘low-man’.
Biff’s sympathy for his father’s suffering finally does overcome his
resentment. He makes a last and desperate attempt to open Willy’s eyes to
the truth – to make him understand that neither of them can achieve success
for which Willy has hoped. In the final encounter Biff says:
Pop I’m nothing: I’m nothing, pop,
Can’t you understand that? There’s
no spite in it any more..
I’m just what I am, that’s all
(DOS 217)
Willy realizes that Biff does not totally hate him for his failures but in
fact loves him. This realization leads him to his enlightenment. His false
image of fatherhood is torn by the truth that Biff loves him as he is in
himself and not as he would appear to be.
According to the old, traditional view, the tragic hero is to be a person
of high rank or status, so that his downfall could produce the appropriate
emotional effect on the audience. Besides, the old view of tragedy
emphasized the element of fate as being responsible for the misfortunes of
the tragic hero. Even in the plays of Shakespeare, although character is
largely responsible for the undoing of the tragic hero, the mysterious
working of fate is distinctly brought into focus. In other words, Shakespeare
attributes human misfortunes mainly to the fault of the sufferers themselves
but partly to the hidden forces which are described as fate or destiny. Miller
seems to depart from both these concepts of tragedy. In the first place, the
tragic hero in Death of a Salesman belongs to the middle class which means
that this play is a bourgeois tragedy. Miller doesn’t believe in that a tragic
effect can be produced by the downfall of a highly placed individual. It is
not the high social rank of the individual but the intensity of his commitment
to an idea or system that is important. Secondly, although Willy is to some
extent himself responsible for his tragedy, the chief villain is society which
means that it is a social drama. Miller’s tragic vision is thus distinctively
modern because the emphasis in the play is firstly on an ordinary man and
secondly on the social context, in which he lives, suffers and dies. Death of a
Salesman is unquestionably a deeply affecting play. In the words of Eric
Bentley, it has been regarded as:
One of the triumphs of the Mundane American
stage. It moves its audience tremendously; it comes close
to their experience or observation; it awakens their
consciousness; and it may even rouse them to self
criticism.
(Eric Bentley 87)
Willy’s flaw and compensating virtues place him as a hero along the
classical lines. He, like Joe Keller in All My Sons, finds a readymade
‘society image’ to attach himself, and becomes a victim of the attachment.
Miller looks upon the salesman’s ideal of success with an angry but
discerning eye and he sees its hollowness and treachery. Even a casual
reader of Death of a Salesman would agree that Miller has very much
concerned with man and his family in this play. The success of the play has
proved his artistic achievement; Death of a Salesman ran into more than
seven hundred performances.
Death comes to Everyman, in the midst of life, and
of course is feared, the attempt made to avert it. But the
action, confidently, takes Everyman forward to the edge
of that dark in which he must disappear, and the most
remarkable aspect of this confidence is that physically,
on a scaffold above the dark room. God himself is
waiting for Everyman to come.
(Raymond Williams 88)
CHAPTER - IV
LOVE AND PASSION IN
A VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE
A View from the Bridge was originally published as a one-act drama
but it was later revised as a two-act tragedy by Miller and was first published
in 1957. Pursuing the line of social criticism, Miller centers his attention in
the play upon the plight of a longshoreman, who is torn between community
and the blind force of psychological obsession.
Drawing our attention to the classical outline of the story in the
preface to the play, Miller says:
When I heard the tale, first it seemed to me that it
must be some re-enactment of a Greek Myth which was
ringing in a long-buried bell in my own subconscious
mind
(‘Preface’ AVFB 31)
There were numerous references to the classical tragedy in the
prologue and epilogue of the original one-act version of the play which
substantiate the fact that Miller was consciously trying to emulate the Greek
masters. Miller is in favour of strong cognitive rhythm in his plays. A little
explanation is needed to understand this term ‘cognitive’ rhythm. Richard
Kuhn in his essay ‘Literature and Philosophy’ has stated:
Aristotle’s poetics implies that a work of art, if
properly made or structured, acquires two kinds of
rhythm; affective and cognitive. Though the proper
structuring of its various components which give it an
aesthetically pleasant shape, the work effects the
catharsis of emotions, as Plato feared it did, it brings
them into a harmonious balance and this is termed the
‘affective rhythm’. Viewed in Greek Context, the work
also provides simultaneously a fresh insight into an
already-known happening or story; the spectator, along
with the actor, re-cognises the truth of the story; from
ignorance he passes into knowledge. This constitutes
what could be called ‘cognitive rhythm’.
(Richard Kuhn 115)
Commenting on the drama before him, Miller says that it was based
too much on the working up of emotions which often resulted in melodrama
and cheap sentimentalism. This also created in the drama a sense of
artificiality which rendered it irrelevant to our lives. (Introduction to
Collected Plays 49)
The setting of A View from the Bridge is the Red Hook section of
Brooklyn, facing seaward from the Brooklyn Bridge. The central character,
Eddie Carbone is a Brooklyn longshoreman who lives with his wife,
Beatrice and his seventeen year old niece Catherine in a tenement building
in Red Hook. The action of the play is patterned through four movements.
The expository first movement opens with the narrator’s observations on the
main action in the representational mode. This is a device used in the form
of a modified Greek chorus. Miller creates Alfieri, a wise neighbourhood
lawyer of Italian ancestry as the “engaged narrator” of the story. In addition
to his choric role, Alfieri functions as Eddie’s confidant. Bored by his
“unromantic” present practice, he turns to memories of Eddie Carbone,
during the early Sicilian immigrations. In his initial address to the audience,
Alfieri brings out the aspect of the play’s world, relevant to the
dramatization of the identity crisis. The world of Red Hook enjoys
autonomy but it is subject to the pressure of the American secular law.
Alfieri goes on to explain that the people of Red Hook distrust the law and
much of the physical danger has diminished as he tells the audience, “ I no
longer keep a pistol in my filing cabinet” and the Italian Immigrants who
live in Red Hook are “quite civilized, quite American. Now we settle for
half” (AVFB 379). Ironically, the main action of the play involves Eddie
Carbone, who is a man who will not settle for half. In the prologue Alfieri
prepares the audience for the impending tragedy:
...... the thought comes that in some Caesar’s year in
Calabria perhaps or one the cliff at Syracuse, another
lawyer quite differently dressed, heard the same
complaint and sat there as powerless as I, and watched it
run its bloody course. This one’s name was Eddie
Carbone a longshoreman......
(AVFB 379)
This passage stresses the timelessness of Eddie’s tragedy and the
human condition and the inevitability of the happenings. In the beginning of
the play, Eddie shares a good relationship with his wife Beatrice and niece
Catherine. Catherine greets him when he returns home from work. Eddie
informs his wife that her two cousins Marco and Rodolpho, the
“submarines” of the play, the illegal immigrants, have safely arrived in the
country. Catherine too has a surprise for Eddie; she has been offered a job.
Eddie protests for a while as he feels that she should continue with her
studies, but he finally yields to her desires. However, his love for Catherine
tends to be over-protective. Her transformation into a beautiful young
woman poses a threat to Eddie. He cautions about her “walkin’ wavy” and
the looks the local cowboys give her. The second movement highlights the
arrival of the guests and the threat posed by them to the order of Eddie’s
home. Marco is a married man with children who has come to America to
earn a living to send money to his family in Italy. Unlike his brother,
Rodolpho is an unmarried and he is the blonde submarine to whom
Catherine takes a liking. She is fascinated by Rodolpho’s account of his odd
jobs at home, such as pushing taxis and singing in hotel courtyards.
Ultimately they fall in love and the male dominance in Eddie’s home is
challenged by the arrival of Rodolpho. The second movement, therefore,
traces the transformation of Eddie’s love for Catherine into hatred for
Rodolpho. He tries very hard to break their relationship but in vain. The
third movement in the play exposes the power of Eddie’s passion. When he
learns that Rodolpho and Catherine have set plans to marry each other,
Eddie’s problem becomes more acute. He begs Alfieri and his wife for a
solution, but finding no answer he uses the only option left; he calls the
Immigration Bureau to inform about the illegal immigrants. The fourth
movement traces the resolution of his identity crisis. With his informing act,
Eddie has become an outcast in the society. Marco publicly spoils his name.
He loses his respect even in his own house. He is now driven by a passion to
regain his name which Marco has destroyed. He tries it by fighting it out
with Marco but in the ensuing struggle, he is stabbed to death with his own
knife.
The play, A View from the Bridge depicts a man, Eddie Carbone,
helplessly but consciously becoming a victim of dark passions and by
expressing his guilt in an outburst of violence which inevitably destroys him.
A View from the Bridge is a grim tragedy and is an
intriguing psychological study that shows the selfdestructiveness of an inflexible, passionate individual
(Moss 47)
Eddie’s problems in the beginning are predominantly domestic rather
than public. His main problem is his love for his niece Catherine. His
attitude of protection, fatherly concern and affection are slowly replaced by
passion for Catherine as a young woman. He becomes extremely possessive
and his irresistible passion, in Miller’s own words, is
……the awesomeness of a passion, which despite
its contradicting the self-interest of the individual it
inhabits, despite every kind of warning, despite even its
destruction of the moral beliefs of the individual,
proceeds to magnify its power over him until it destroys
him.
(Introduction to collected plays 48)
It is the drama of an insignificant man, made significant by his
unconscious dark passion. Eddie’s guilty preference for his young niece,
Catherine, over his plain and estimable wife, Beatrice has its parallel in John
Proctor’s romance with young Abigail in The Crucible. Eddie broke the
community’s silence regarding the immigrants because of his guilty
preference to his niece. It is pathetic to watch the workings of a terrible
passion decimating the morally conscious and settled lives of a
longshoreman’s family.
The introduction of the two submarines, Marco and Rodolpho, into
the world of Eddie sets the action of the play in motion. Miller identifies
more with Beatrice and Catherine along with Eddie. His possessiveness for
Catherine is hinted in the opening scene which gives a clue to the line of
development of the story.
Eddie:
All right, go to work…….
And then you will move away.
Catherine:
No, Eddie.
Eddie:
(grinning) why not? That’s life.
And you come visit us on Sundays,
then once a month, then Christmas
and New Year finally.
(AVFB 386)
Eddie is reluctant to send her to job and asks her to wait for sometime.
But Beatrice advises her not to listen to him.
Beatrice:
Be the way you are Katie, don’t listen to him
(AVFB 384)
The difference of opinion between Eddie and Beatrice over this issue
is the beginning of the familial breakdown. Dennis Welland, an established
critic, makes the following observation in his critical book ‘Arthur Miller’:
The whole scene becomes more impulsive and
emotional and Eddie’s objections, by being made less
rational and plausible become more ambivalently
motivated.
(Dennis Welland 120)
Eddie’s incestuous love for Catherine exists prior to Rodolpho’s
appearance. But the irony is Eddie never acknowledges his passion. “you are
a baby”, he insists, although Catherine is eighteen. Even Alfieri, with his
sagacity and insight, realizes that the real problem involved is Eddie’s
excessive love for Catherine:
you know …….. we all love somebody, the wife,
the kids – everyman’s got somebody that he loves, hey?
But sometimes …….. there’s too much and it goes where
it mustn’t.
(AVFB 409)
But Eddie’s wife Beatrice is aware of his passion for Catherine and
warns her to dress and behave properly for she is a “grown woman” and
living in “the same house with a grown man”. When Catherine and
Rodolpho go to the movie, Eddie gets very upset. He waits jealously in the
street. Beatrice tries to focus his attention on the jealousy with which Eddie
is not quite conscious.
Beatrice:
(comes to him as the issue is broached now)
What is the matter with you? He is a nice
kid, what do you want from him?
Eddie:
That’s a nice kid? He gives me the heeby –
jeebies.
Beatrice:
(smiling) Ah! go on, you’re just jealous.
Eddie:
of him? Boy, you don’t think of me.
Beatrice:
I don’t understand you. What’s so terrible
about him?
Eddie:
you mean it’s alright with you? That is
gonna be her husband?
(ibid 398)
Eddie has developed an attitude that he has the basic right to control
Catherine’s action because of the enormous sacrifices he has made in order
to raise her. Hence he repeatedly accuses Rodolpho as having stolen
Catherine from him. His obsessive desire for Catherine makes him forget his
wife to the extent that Beatrice bursts out:
Beatrice:
When am I gonna to be a wife again Eddie?
Eddie:
I ain’t feeling good. They bother me since
they came.
Beatrice:
It’s almost three months you don’t feel
good. They are only here a couple of weeks.
It’s three months, Eddie.
(ibid 391)
Eddie is made helpless by this strange emotion. Certainly Beatrice is a
good woman and a faithful conscientious wife. She cares about her husband
and wants to be pleasing to him. Even when she is irked over his treatment
of Catherine and Rodolpho, she stops the girl from calling Eddie names. She
also accepts eventually, although with sadness, Eddie’s order that she remain
away from wedding. Yet, according to Catherine, she nags Eddie too much.
In this instance, it is clear that she does see his possessive attitude towards
Catherine and tries to warn him against it. But she is not the one to lavish
affectionate praise. Indeed there is some indication that Eddie turns to the
young, enthusiastic Catherine because she makes a fuss over him, whereas
Beatrice, decent and good-hearted as she is, is more apt to hand out advice.
Eddie worries about not receiving his due respect. Beatrice apparently, is not
able to make him feel emotionally secure. Hence he is drawn to Catherine
and the trouble ensues.
When he seeks the help of the lawyer, Alfieri refers his love more
directly to a sexual motive. Eddie is even more horrified by the lawyer’s
rhetorical question:
She wants to get married, Eddie. She can’t marry
you.. Can she?
(ibid 410)
But Eddie refuses to accept the presence of such a motive.
It is only with the arrival of Rodolpho, and his falling in love with
Catherine does Eddie’s passion become obvious to the audience. In the
beginning, he shelters both Marco and Rodolpho and even demands of
Catherine and Beatrice complete silence about their presence. But all this
changes, when Catherine falls in love with Rodolpho. He tries to convince
Catherine that Rodolpho is an irresponsible “hit and run guy” who wants to
marry her only to obtain his citizenship. Eddie’s hostility towards Rodolpho
is further revealed in his suspicion of Rodolpho as a homosexual, first
mentioned to Beatrice. Eddie calls him a weird, but Beatrice defends
Rodolpho against such accusations and dismisses their import. The
suggestion that Rodolpho is a homosexual, which Eddie never makes
concretely to Beatrice, is more directly made to Alfieri, through the word
homosexual is never used:
I mean he looked so sweet there, like an angel – you
could kiss him as he was so sweet.
(ibid 408)
Eddie attempts to construct a case against Rodolpho to convince Alfieri
that young submarine is a homosexual, and that there must be some law
which forbids Catherine’s marriage to a platinum blonde. But Alfieri tells
him that under the written law, Eddie Carbone has no recourse even if his
accusation is true. The only legal question according to Alfieri is the illegal
entry and Eddie loathes bringing on such a charge against Rodolpho, for he
is a believer in the community codes.
Eddie’s accusation reveals a mind tortured by the fear that he is about
to lose Catherine and his distress is aggravated by his suspicion that
Rodolpho is a homosexual. This suspicion ironically provides Eddie with a
seemingly innocent motive for opposing the marriage of Catherine and
Rodolpho. The zeal with which he takes up his hostility to Rodolpho
externalizes the intensity of his passion for Catherine and prevents any
necessity for self-examination which might expose this underlying passion –
an exposure Eddie is unable to face. For example, when Beatrice confronts
him at the end of the play with an open declaration of his subconscious
feelings for his niece, Eddie’s horror is witnessed:
Eddie, crying out in agony! That’s what you think
of me – that I would have such a thought? His fists
clench his head as though it will burst.
(ibid 438)
Alfieri never openly challenges Eddie’s genuine protective love for
Catherine but rather suggests that this excess of love may begin to overflow
in unnatural direction.
Alfieri seems sincerely interested in upholding the law. He is certainly
no clever moneymaker who takes advantage of Eddie’s plight to engage in
sharp practice and build up fees. He gives this troubled man, the son of an
earlier client, commonsense counsel to put out his mind a situation that no
legal statute covers. At the same time, he obviously knows about the
presence of the illegal ‘submarines’ and does not feel called upon to turn
informer. He embodies the social and secular law, the law governing the
civilized morality.
Alfieri is a perceptive man. He is not unusually friendly with Eddie’s
family. Yet when Eddie comes to him, he quickly divines the real source of
the difficulty. There is no indication that he ever takes Eddie’s charges
seriously. He sees that Eddie is unduly preoccupied with the young girl
Catherine. He is also tactful and considerate. He tries very gently to explain
to the anxious Eddie that he must let Catherine follow her own course.
Eddie’s frustration in learning that the law is uninterested in his case
against Rodolpho, breaks through in an impassioned speech:
And now I gotta a sit in my own house and look at
a son-of-a-bitch punk like that – which he came out of
nowhere: I give him my house to sleep! I take the
blankets of my bed for him, and he takes and puts his
dirty filthy hands on her like a goddam in thief!
(ibid 410)
Despite the fact that he recognizes the thoughtlessness of Eddie’s
action, Alfieri is nevertheless aware that others, namely, Eddie’s fellow
longshoremen, also suspect that Rodolpho is a homosexual. Eddie’s
longshoremen pals – whose background is similar to Eddie’s and whose
views are not distorted by any incestuous desire for Catherine also read
Rodolpho as a weird. Eddie Carbone is not isolated in his suspicion of
Rodolpho.
Now Eddie’s love for Catherine is replaced by hatred for Rodolpho.
Neither Beatrice nor Catherine, not even the secular law endorses his view
point. Eddie constantly itches for a fight with Rodolpho, but driven to a
combat on the most personal level, Eddie finds himself unevenly matched
with a new antagonist Marco. Rodolpho proposing to Catherine proves a
snapping point in Eddie’s patience. When he finds both Catherine and
Rodolpho alone in the bedroom, he mistakes otherwise and orders Rodolpho
out of the house. Eddie fully drunk, immediately pulls her close and kisses
her on the mouth. When spun round by Rodolpho, Eddie pins his arms and
kisses him too, forcibly. Eddie gets entangled so completely in his delusions
that he impulsively tries to prove to his niece that Rodolpho is a
homosexual. The grossness of this act results only in the further alienation of
Catherine from him and also indicates the intensity of Eddie’s passionate
love.
When Catherine is leaving with Rodolpho, Eddie’s final line is,
Watch your step, submarine. By rights they oughta throw
you back in the water
(ibid 423)
These words foreshadow his act of betrayal of the submarines.
After this incident, Eddie confronts Alfieri with what he considers to be
proof that Rodolpho “ain’t right”, for he did not resist Eddie’s grip. He also
justifies his action by saying that he did it because, “To show her (Catherine)
what he is! So she would see, once for all!” (ibid. 424). Eddie also reveals
that this incident has isolated him from others in the house: “Nobody is
talkin’ much in the house”. For Eddie however, the problem has become
more acute as Catherine has set a definite date for her wedding. Eddie has
always held the lawyer to be a “smart man” and therefore begs him for a
solution. He repeatedly asks:
So what do I gotta do now? Tell me what to do …….. so
what do I do?
(ibid 424)
But the lawyer cannot help him and appeals to Eddie to set Catherine
free and bless her in the wedding. In spite of the advice, finding no other
alternative, Eddie, in a trance, moves off to a phone booth, to call the
Immigration Bureau to report about the illegal immigrants, even as Alfieri
warns him:
you wont have a friend in the world, Eddie! Even
those who understand will turn against you, even the
ones who feel the same will despise you, put it out of
your mind! Eddie.
(ibid 424)
After this informing act, Eddie returns home, he finds that both Marco
and Rodolpho have moved upstairs. When asked by Beatrice what else he
wants, he answers, “I want my respect!” for in his own house he misses this
respect.
But the ensuing action underscores the social dimension of his respect
and in the climactic scene, it fuses with the personal dimension. The
immigration officers arrive, and arrest both Marco and Rodolpho. But from
the look of terror in Eddie’s face, Beatrice realizes Eddie’s mistake and
looks at him accusingly. As Marco is led away, he spits on Eddie’s face and
shouts to the neighbours about Eddie’s betrayal. For betrayal, Marco’s
spitting on Eddie’s face is a symbolic murder which foreshadows his act of
murder at the conclusion of the play. The spitting, coupled with a public
accusation, “That one! He killed my children! That one stole the food from
my children” (ibid. 433), underscores the imagery of theft. According to
Eddie, Rodolpho has stolen Catherine; Marco has stolen Eddie’s good name
and he challenges him:
He’s gonna take that back or I’ll kill him! You hear me?
I’ll kill him!
(ibid 433)
It is ironical that Eddie betrays with the full knowledge of the
consequences of such an act. While sheltering Marco and Rodolpho, he
recounts the story of Vinny Bolzano, a boy who informed on his own uncle
and was set upon by his own family and dragged into the streets by his feet
and was never heard of again. Eddie’s narration of the circumstances of
Vinny Bolzano’s story dramatically foreshadows his own fate, when he is
similarly guilty of betrayal. His betrayal is the evidence of the intensity of
his passion and of his obsessive love for Catherine.
However, at the end of the drama, Eddie is driven by a passion, but of a
different kind. It no longer involves his niece and Rodolpho whose wedding
he is even willing to attend but his passion is to regain his identity and
integrity. It involves Marco, who had cursed and shamed him in front of the
community and who had publicly spat upon the name of Eddie Carbone.
Eddie’s burdens are further added up when Alfieri and Catherine bail Marco
and Rodolpho out of prison. Marco is a symbol of primitive justice. Like
Eddie, he will not settle for half. The symbolic murder of spitting on Eddie’s
face does not satisfy his appetite for revenge. He says to Alfieri:
In my country he would be dead now, he would not live
this long
(ibid 433)
It reveals his insistence upon a primitive form of justice. Ironically,
Marco is as dissatisfied with law as Eddie. Marco too wants Eddie to be
punished for degrading his brother, robbing his children and mocking his
work. Alfieri counsels him by saying that “only God makes justice” and
pleads with him not to harm Eddie. Interestingly enough, both Eddie and
Marco receive warnings from Alfieri but both men reject his advice.
Marco is now driven by a passion to avenge Eddie, but on the other
hand, Eddie is obsessed with the means of regaining his name and he must
have it back even at the cost of his life. When both Beatrice and Rodolpho
plead with him to get away from the house in order to prevent a meeting
with Marco, Eddie refuses to escape. When Beatrice asks him why he is so
adamant in meeting Marco, Eddie replies:
I want my name! Marco’s got my name. – to Rodolpho:
and you can run tell him, kid, that he’s gonna give it back
to me in front of this neighbourhood, or we have it out.
(ibid 437)
It is Marco who took his name and it is he who has to give it back in
public. Rodolpho warns him slyly by saying that Marco has prayed in the
church. All these threats do not deter Eddie from confronting Marco. When
Marco calls out his name, Eddie rushes out, demanding the return of his
‘name’. Miller’s stage direction is very significant:
Eddie, as though flinging his challenge: yeah Marco!
Eddie Carbone! Eddie Carbone! Eddie Carbone.
(ibid 438)
It is interesting to note that it is only Eddie, armed with a knife, who
provokes Marco into a fight. He enters into a duel with the full knowledge of
his life at stake. For him his ‘name’ in the eyes of his community is more
important than his life. Marco fights with Eddie only in self-defence and not
with the intention of killing him. But in the ensuing fight, Eddie is stabbed
with his own knife. His dying words reflect both his inability to understand
why Catherine let him down, and his reconciliation with Beatrice:
Catherine: Eddie I never meant to do anything bad to
you.
Eddie:
Then why …… Oh, B.!
Beatrice:
Yes. Yes!
Eddie:
My B.!
(ibid
439)
Alfieri’s requiem speech returns the main action to the present. He
points out the heroism of Eddie and without condemning the ugliness of
Eddie’s passion, Alfieri praises the integrity of the hero in the antithesis:
I confess that something perversely pure calls to me from
his memory – not purely good, but himself purely, for he
allowed himself to be wholly known and for that I think I
will love him more than all my sensible clients.
(ibid 439)
Reason was absent in Eddie’s behaviour, but the irony is that Alfieri, a
product of the compromising attitude of the Italian–American Community of
Red-Hook – “We settle for half” – still loves a man who did not settle for
half. Alfieri, the romantic, admires the purity of Eddie’s emotions not the
rightness or wrongness of them.
A surmise entertained by some critics is that the main situation in A
View from the Bridge is charged with significant autobiographical overtones.
Maurice-Zolotow, in her first authentic biography of Marilyn Monroe where
she discusses the effects of Miller’s encounter with Marilyn on his creative
life, attempts to relate the sexual triangle in the play – Eddie, Beatrice and
Catherine – to the critics in Miller’s life since he met the golden dream girl
of Hollywood in 1951. Zolotow looks beyond Miller’s political message to
perceive a recurrent motif working through the interior psychological
question posed in A View from the Bridge, the plight of a middle-aged man
who is trapped between a cold and unattractive wife and a sweet and sensual
girl. Zolotow’s hypothesis is that the emphasis on the wife – husband –
younger woman pattern in A View from the Bridge was coloured by Miller’s
intense feelings for Marilyn. Eddie Carbone’s dilemma in A View from the
Bridge, to quote her words, embodied the “hellish agonies of guilt and of
struggles with his guilt and his desire” (Harold Clurman 183) which Miller
went through before he made his decision to divorce his first wife and marry
Marilyn. An interesting sidelight on this phase in Miller’s life is thrown by
the fact that Marilyn played the role of Catherine in the London Premiere on
the rewritten version of A View from the Bridge in 1956.
One area in which Arthur Miller shows considerable interest in the
play A View from the Bridge is that of opposing cultural norms or standards.
Regardless of his inner feelings regarding Catherine, Eddie has old world
ideas as to how a young girl should be shielded and protected and how
courtships should be handled. Catherine, on the other hand, is an American
teenager eager to take a job and earn money of her own and also to get out
freely to see a film or take a walk with a boy who likes. The older Beatrice,
wife of Eddie, on the other hand although she sometimes argues with Eddie,
pays due heed to him as head of the house.
Eddie and his family are essentially decent, hard working people,
hardly criminals in the usual sense. Yet, to help poor Italian relatives who
come to this country (America) to get work, they think it only honourable to
violate immigration laws. Normally it might be an admirable action to call
the attention of the immigration authorities to some flagrant violation against
the law. But here the communal ethics or affinity is such that the informer is
considered the worst of traitors, to be ostracized for the rest of his life with
scorn and contempt. Understanding his clients, Alfieri makes no move to
interfere with the smuggling of aliens, which he knows is going on. At the
same time, he will not counsel anyone to break the law and makes every
effort to secure Marco’s pledge to take no violent action before securing his
release. In the long run, however, Marco and Eddie put personal and family
claims, just as they had put the latter before the American law. Eddie turns
out to be an informer ostensibly to protect his immediate household. Marco
fights to avenge his brother’s honour and his own.
The focus in the play is on the individual and as in Miller’s earlier
plays, the individual is presented as living under social pressure. As in All
My Sons and Death of a Salesman, Miller has carefully presented a picture
of the good society which stands in the background of the hero’s trials and
choices. The mind of Eddie Carbone is not comprehensible apart from its
relations to his neighbourhood, his fellow workers, and his social situation.
His self-esteem depends upon their estimate of him, and his values are
created largely by his fidelity to the code of culture. That culture is
European; not American but Sicilian. When Eddie betrays Marco and
Rodolpho to the other law’s representatives, the Immigration Bureau, in
order to be rid of the threat of his masculinity, the Sicilian law takes over
immediately condemning his betrayal of honour. His final “I want respect”
is the heart breaking cry of a man whose self-esteem depends entirely on the
society. The play also deals partly with the problem of illegal immigration
into America. The Immigration Bureau is shown to be callously indifferent
to the hopes and fears of the longshoreman and it also contributes to the
dramatic tension in the play. It is this society with ostracizes the informer
who has violated the unwritten code of honour out of the feelings of private
jealousy. Eddie acts in a specific social milieu that conditions his sense of
guilt and sense of dignity. Yet for Eddie, guilt and dignity derive from an
intimate attachment. His fatherly concern is obsessive as that shown by Joe
and Willy for their sons in All My Sons and Death of a Salesman
respectively. As in the earlier plays, the subjective reality of the
protagonist’s trial assumes central artistic importance but for the first time,
however “sexual desire and jealousy become the dominant components”
(Moss 67) of the reality.
In A View from the Bridge, Miller shifts the emphasis from the
external causes of catastrophe to the internal psychological causes. It is for
this reason that Eddie, more than any other character of Arthur Miller, is
prone to the emotions like sense of insecurity, fear, neurosis, guilt and
jealousy. First of all, he has this unusual love for his niece Catherine. With
the entry of Rodolpho, his very existence is in peril. He is jealous of
Rodolpho and fears the loss of Catherine who, he feels, is being snatched
away from him. Gradually he begins to realize that there is no place for him
in his world and family, and his whole life is at stake. Suddenly he starts
showing neurotic characteristics. All of a sudden, a sincere and honest
worker becomes a dishonest and revengeful person. Shame and hopelessness
drive Eddie to commit an irrational deed of informing. Thus A View from the
Bridge can be seen as an intriguing psychological study that shows the selfdestructiveness of an inflexible, passionate individual. In All My Sons and
Death of a Salesman, the individual psychology is not dramatized so well
and the heroes sometimes tend to look like pathetic victims of a cruel
society. Eddie is placed squarely in a social context and he is to be judged in
relation to the standards of social code of the world which he inhabits. The
play makes a deep study of the theme of human passion versus social
responsibility. However, Miller interfuses the personal element and social
element in such a manner that the play explores in depth the nature of man
as well as his relationship with the society.
In spite of some minor differences, the connection between this play
and the earlier plays goes further deep. At the centre of this play is a
character that shows a desperate concern for his personal identity, for his
‘name’. The ‘name’ theme in the play certainly carries its echoes back into
Miller’s earlier dramas where the protagonists struggle for preserving their
good name even at the cost of their lives. Eddie cannot break free from his
love for Catherine and is ready to go any length to get back his respect.
What isolates Eddie from his community is not his attempt to degrade
Rodolpho in front of Catherine, but his act of betrayal of informing the
immigration authorities that Rodolpho and Marco are submarines. By this
one decisive act, Eddie commits the unforgivable sin of informing with the
inevitable consequences of isolation from his social context.
At the centre of the drama is the form of relationship between parent
and child but here it is displaced by the vital relationship between a man and
the niece to whom he has been a father. The girl’s coming to adolescence
provokes a crisis in Eddie and he is shown being destroyed by forces which
he cannot control and which lead to his disintegration. The crisis paralyses
the directions and meanings in his life and he brings about his own death.
This establishment of significance after breakdown, through death becomes
a familiar dramatic pattern in Miller’s plays. At the heart of this tragedy is
the loss of meaning in Eddie’s life and the struggle to regain the meaning by
death. The loss of meaning is always a personal history and it is always set
in the context of loss of social meaning and a loss of meaning in
relationships.
In A View from the Bridge, Miller chose to enter the heroic world of a
classical tragedy and fit his melodramatic material with in the tragic
framework. This explains the introduction to the play of the narrator-figure
Alfieri, who performs the role of the ‘choric’ commentator in relation to
Eddie’s personal crisis. His references to Sicily, his frequent allusions to
antiquity and his heritage suggest that Miller wished to frame his action
through the persona of Alfieri. In the words of Dennis Welland,
This play is a view from the bridge, not only
because its setting is Brooklyn, but more importantly
because it tries to show all sides of the situation from the
detached eminence of the external observer. Alfieri is
essential to the play because he is the bridge from which
it is seen.
(Dennis Welland 105)
Because of the incest motif, the loves and hates with in the family and
the final violent clash as well as the choric function of Alfieri, some critics
have pointed out parallels between A View from the Bridge and ancient
Greek tragedies. It is also clear however, that the work is in line with the
concept of modern tragedy presented in such earlier Miller works as Death
of a Salesman. Again the hero is a contemporary ‘common man’ completely
devoid of wealth and influence of the traditional protagonist. Eddie lives in a
tenement and works on the docks. In addition, the hero’s goals are hardly
impressive from an objective angle. He does not seek great conquests or
lasting fame. He merely wants to stop an adopted daughter from marrying a
young immigrant. Yet, like previous Miller’s heroes, he too gives ‘full
commitment’ to his unfortunate convictions. His thinking may sometimes
make little sense than of Willy Loman of Death of a Salesman. But once he
is certain, however unreasonably, that he is right, he will sacrifice everything
for his beliefs. Even if Marco does not kill him, he is giving up his status in
the community. But he cannot do otherwise. And it is in this passionate
refusal to compromise that Alfieri and presumably Miller perceive the heroic
quality of the troubled, wrong-headed Eddie.
Further the title has interested a few speculations. The bridge can
literally be the Brooklyn Bridge, suggesting the water front area where
Eddie works. But there is also some symbolism intended. Perhaps Alfieri
himself is on the bridge between the old world and the new, between the
heroic society of powerful, unleashed passions and the modern era, in which
civilized controls may encourage compromise. Yet another interpretation is
that Alfieri is supposed to provide a view from the bridge of sanity and
moral wisdom into the unquiet depths of the primitive tale of lust and
revenge unfolding before the readers. His rational perspective is used to
measure the raw agony of Eddie’s tortured protests. The conflict of laws is
indirectly suggested by the title of the play, A View from the Bridge.
Eddie’s meetings with his confidant Alfieri provides a closer look into
Eddie’s private world. Of all the characters in the play, it is Alfieri who sees
anything of larger significance in Eddie’s tragedy. Alfieri, who symbolizes
reason, is a contrast to Eddie who symbolizes passion. Eddie is a man,
governed by his passion and in the play Miller shows the deficiencies of an
impulsive man who operates without the moderation imposed by reason.
Yet, one of the ironies in the play is that Alfieri, a symbol of rational
thought, wisdom and basic intelligence, is powerless to stop the onrushing
tide and sweep of the horrible events in the play. Alfieri realizes the
direction in which Eddie is heading, but is puzzled by his own inability to
halt him. In the play Alfieri represents commonsense relation to Eddie’s
extremity of passion. The hero’s struggle to achieve human dignity and
maintain his name unblemished in the society in the face of his own failure
to control his subconscious desire for his niece, helps intensify the tragic
effect. The play ultimately acquires the dignity of a classical tragedy.
Another area of difference between A View from the Bridge and the
earlier plays is that, as Leonard Moss has pointed out, for the first time
“sexual desire and jealousy become the dominant components” (Leonard
Moss 67) of Miller’s dramatic reality. This has a direct bearing upon the
play’s psychological centre of reality embodied in the very quality of
Eddie’s obsession. In his Introduction to collected plays, Miller, speaks of
the “neurotic patterns” underlying his tragedy and acknowledges the
presence of these elements in the play.
At the centre of the play is a character who is not only troubled and
guilty, but is sick with symptoms which resemble those in Tennessee
Williams plays – incestuous desire, sexual jealousy and hostility to
homosexuality. Eddie is the most inarticulate character among Miller’s
protagonists who is unable to comprehend the mystery of his
unacknowledged passion which turns him away from his family and
commits him to a course of action from which there is no turning back for
him.
In the final analysis, Eddie is not just a flawed person with feelings of
passion and revenge. He is something more than that. Miller gives the best
description of Eddie in his’ Introduction’ to Collected Plays:
……… However one might dislike this man, who
does all sorts of frightful things, he possesses or
exemplifies the wondrous and humane fact that he too
can be driven to what in the last analysis is a sacrifice of
himself for his conception however misguided, of right,
dignity and justice
(Introduction to Collected plays 51)
But the tragic irony is that Eddie refuses to let himself be wholly
known and goes to his grave without honestly confronting his feelings for
his niece and motives for betraying his cousins.
Miller tries to present that society is an image making machine, a
purveyor of myths and prejudices which provide the false faces and false
values. The individual has little choice before him; either to conform and be
destroyed, or refuse to conform and be destroyed as Eddie. In such a move,
Miller presents Eddie as a decent man. It is an indication of Miller’s
fundamental humanistic faith in potentialities of man. Despite his
recognition of Eddie’s moral flaw, he could not ignore the essential
humanity in his character. His faith in dignity of man makes him unable to
dismiss completely humanly fallible Eddie from the race of humanity. Eddie
is a man governed by his passion and Miller shows through Eddie, the
deficiencies of an impulsive man who operates without moderation imposed
by reason. Because of his impulsiveness and failure to maintain integrity,
Eddie is alienated from his family and community and also from his society.
Miller avails of every opportunity to present how Eddie has made enormous
personal sacrifices to raise Catherine and to provide shelter to the
submarines due to his affinity.
The nature of familial values and affinity, dramatized by Miller in A
View from the Bridge is not much different from that depicted by him in his
earlier plays but by blending together, the social and psychological aspects,
he elected a new pattern of tragic experience which is closer to the pattern of
the Greek classics.
CHAPTER – V
CONCLUSION
Tragedy in Miller’s hand is compatible with social drama. Each of his
plays represents Miller’s tragic view of life. In the plays which belong to the
early period of his artistic career – All My Sons, Death of a Salesman, and
A View from the Bridge – Miller reveals himself as a sensitive interpreter of
the anger and pathos which characterized the American scene in the decade
which followed the Second World War. Miller’s primary impulse in these
plays is his social consciousness which is an outcome of his family
consciousness.
Miller is concerned only with the tragedy of common man rather than
people of high rank like kings and princess. Joe Keller is a businessman,
Willy Loman is an ordinary salesman and Eddie Carbone is a longshoreman.
Miller, in his tragedies tries to show that his heroes are capable of attaining
tragic dignity and status with their basic passions and emotions. The
underlying struggle in these three tragedies is the individual’s attempt to
gain his rightful position in his family and society.
Arthur Miller’s works, in addition to being classified as
‘psychological dramas’ and ‘modern tragedies’, are sometimes listed as
social dramas. This refers to plays which deal with issues affecting the
contemporary society. Eugene O’Neill, John Steinbeck and Clifford Odets
were among the American playwrights before Miller who had taken up
various social questions. Miller’s early master, Ibsen, had done much to
establish the genre many years before.
The plays All My Sons and Death of a Salesman deal with different
forms of disfiguration of human reality brought about by the values and
institutions of the American capitalist society. They are theatrical
demonstrations of some pressing contemporary questions which have their
origins in the defeated origins of the American dream. Miller’s view of
human reality finds its defining edge in his socialist humanism which seems
to have offered an organizing principle to his dramatic experience. In the
first period of his artistic career, Miller develops on American tradition
which he derives directly from Clifford Odets and Lillian Hellman.
In All My Sons, Miller had obviously considered the familial
responsibility. Joe Keller is a reasonably good American family man, who
has even lost a son in the war. But Keller will send out defective products to
the Army rather than lose contracts in order to save his family. He has a
normally credible ambition to leave something valuable to his surviving son,
Chris – and not obviously Miller insists that as a man, Keller has no right to
destroy the sons of others to protect the material interests of his own. In
developing this situation, Miller clearly indicates all those Americans who
take advantage of a national crisis to turn everything to their own selfish
profit. He insists that there is a call of duty beyond familial responsibility.
In Death of a Salesman, there are other aspects of American life that
Miller views with suspicion. He objects to the callous, inhuman attitude of
the business world, so competitive that it will lack all considerations for
workers as individuals. He also criticizes his countrymen’s overemphasis
upon material success and their overstressing of superficial personality traits
to the detriment of solid character building. The play reveals the amount of
dedication, love, care, that every member of the family has for one another
clearly. It also makes a keynote on the need for mutual adjustment, love,
dedication and sacrifice in a family.
Both Death of a Salesman and All My Sons are concerned with a
father in conflict with two sons whose love and respect he ardently desires.
Joe Keller wants to leave his sons a thriving business. But Joe Keller’s first
son, Larry dies in the war. The other son Chris is appalled to that while he
was fighting overseas, his father shipped out defective plane parts to the
Army. Rejected and condemned by his surviving son Chris, Joe Keller
commits suicide.
Never so prosperous as Joe Keller, Willy Loman brags to both of his
being well-liked and assures them of a great future awaiting them. Biff,
disillusioned upon discovering his father’s deceptions, drifts from job to job,
while Happy resentfully makes up for his insignificant position by sensual
self-indulgence. Being unable to accept their failures and his own, Willy
Loman kills himself so that he can at least leave some impressive insurance
money.
Of the two plays, All My Sons is more conventional in form, with
Death of a Salesman achieving fluidity by the skilled use of flashbacks. In
both the plays, the heroes are not highly intelligent and are not given to
much genuinely perceptive self-criticism. They mean well in general but
having accepted certain values uncritically find it hard to see where they
went wrong. In both instances their sons came to reject their standards and
angrily point out why. This means heartbreak for the older men, with Joe
Keller (All My Sons) seeing more of the light than Willy Loman (Death of a
Salesman) ever does. Dramatically there is more good lively conflict in such
father-son scenes. Also, through the opposed points of view, Miller is able to
make some telling comments upon the twentieth century American scene.
As for A View from the Bridge, Miller has chosen to deal with the
Brooklyn residents, culturally quite different from those in Death of a
Salesman and All My Sons. Again however the tone is tragic and conflict is
developed between family members of two generations. Again the father
figure would seek blindly to safeguard the future for the young and again be
rejected and go to his death violently. Eddie Carbone, a hardworking
longshoreman, is overly fond of his wife’s niece Catherine. When the girl
falls in love with Rodolpho, an illegal immigrant sheltered by the Carbone
family, Eddie convinces himself that the marriage would not be a good one
for Catherine. Unable to dissuade her, he eventually turns informer, breaking
the silence of the community and dies in a knife duel with Rodolpho’s irate
brother, Marco. Like Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman, Eddie is not
overly intelligent and cannot perceive his bias even when enlightened by the
wise lawyer, Alfieri. But once certain that his course is right, Eddie too gives
full commitment. So he is another unyielding Miller’s hero, willing to give
up everything for his tenaciously held belief. An interesting departure in this
work is the use of the cultivated Alfieri as chorus, suggesting interpretations
that could not be formulated by Eddie’s uneducated group. This too is a play
about a ‘common man’, passionately determined and uncompromising.
Miller’s plays are based on a single paramount assumption that man is
complete when he is an inalienable unit of society. Art is social and the force
of society not only determines the quality of art, but also plays a significant
part in shaping the personality and behaviour of man. His sense of
responsibility will be revealed on taking a close look at how Miller views
society, particularly in its interaction with the individual. Also this
relationship is perhaps the strongest motive for Miller to write.
At the outset, it is obvious that Miller, like many other American
writers conceives of two kinds of society – the ideal and the actual. One of
Miller’s sources for an ideal state of being is the biblical myth of man and
paradise before the ‘fall’ and the other is the myth of America as a new
world. These are the levels of existence to which his characters aspire. There
is, however, another model for Miller in which the society aspect of the ideal
society is deeply stressed. It is the ancient Greek model in which ‘the
individual was at once with his society’ (Martin 62). In such a small unit
known as the ‘polis’, the individual is easily assimilated. The social life of
man in a corporate life calls for a synthesis of the physical, intellectual and
the moral aspects of man. It is the kind of society that produces great art,
more specifically, tragic and heroic characters with whom members of the
society identify themselves in an inevitable and natural manner.
This vision of the perfect society constantly acts in Miller’s
imagination as a foil to what he observes in reality. The biggest flaw in the
modern society is that man has got separated from it and is thus no longer a
complete man. Society has become totally utilitarian; industrialization has
created a new value called ‘efficiency’. All other values have become
irrelevant. The old morality is gone and the new ethics fail to answer the
basic question: how are we to live? Thus, in the fragmented and atomized
society, men now live as ‘integers’ – weightless, incomplete, non-persons,
types whose only rationale for existence is their own individualism,
consisting largely of sexuality and neurosis and not of a social responsibility.
The rat race as depicted in the early plays, shows how the human
spirit is demeaned, such that amongst the members of society, family –
father, mother, brothers, sisters – what you have is manipulation, selfishness,
a ‘financial agreement, a separateness without love and loyalty. At best there
exists only a ‘truce’ between man and society. The ‘truce’ lasts as long as a
man stays out of trouble and does not question the prevalent ‘moral chaos’.
The truce breaks only in two cases: either the individual breaks out of his
ordained place as an integer (that is he tries to become human) or the society
breaks the law to his utter disadvantage. This means that in the literature that
society produces, man is pictured more or less as a victim whose condition is
pathetic rather than heroic. It sounds like a desperate cry of alarm when
Miller asks:
From what fiat, from what ultimate source are we
to derive a standard of values that will create in a man a
‘respect for himself’, ‘a real voice in the fate of his
society’, and, above all, an ‘aim’ for his life which is
neither a private aim for a private life nor one which sets
him below the machine that was made to serve him?
(Martin 52)
It is true that not even a single idea of Miller about modern society is
original. Every serious writer or thinker on either side of the Atlantic (from
the middle of the nineteenth century) has expressed the romantic
dissatisfaction with the way things are – the growing complexity of human
relationships, loss of values, absence of a genuine participatory, open social
content, privatization and internalization of human activity. It is true that
Miller has consistently repudiated the negativism of the Absurd, the
Existentialistic or the Pessimistic views of life. (Martin 71). Every word he
writes is a living proof of his total commitment to hope and a better future
for mankind, in spite of the bleak picture of society in his works. However,
he is not clear, unlike Shaw and Brecht for whom political action is the only
way to social reform, as to how a bright future should be achieved. Miller’s
plays convey the conviction that man may be helpless at times, but
The great bulk of the weight of evidence is that we
are not in command … but we surely have much more
command than anybody, including the Witches in
‘Macbeth’, could even dream of…
(Miller 62)
Since Miller consistently stresses the importance and overriding
relevance of the community in man’s life, one finds that by and large,
society in Miller’s reckoning is a ‘moral’ entity without which the private
life of the individual is incomplete and unsatisfactory. There is a powerful
sense of community in All My Sons and people know that Joe is guilty to
have fooled the law. Even in A View from the Bridge, one must accept
Miller’s declared intention of making Eddie Carbone answerable to the
justice of his community and his conscience as the “conscience of his
friends, co-workers and neighbours”. According to Miller, both A Memory of
Two Mondays and A View from the Bridge are “reassertions of the existence
of the community”. (Malcolm Goldstein 424). Actually, the lawyer
Alfieri advises Eddie to respect the law because “law is nature, the law is
only a word for what has right to happen” (AVFB 406). Here it refers to an
implicit but recurring suggestion in Miller’s works that in practical terms,
the moral nature of society is represented in its law, even though it may not
be a very adequate vehicle of that morality. An impression is obtained from
his plays that law is a reasonable measure of moral correctness but not as an
ideal form of social perfection.
While examining the picture of man that gradually emerges from
Miller’s plays and prose writings, it appears that Miller rejects the puritan
notion of man as a sinner unredeemed by the grace of God. Also, he rejects
the Darwinian concept of man as merely a creation of his heredity and
environment. In pointing out what he regards as the major shortcoming of
Realism – it expresses a deterministic view of man – Miller declares that
“Man is more than the sum of his stimuli and is unpredictable beyond a
certain point” (Seaver 51) “The will of Man” which Darwin did not take into
account enables him to overcome determinism. Shorey’s philosophy (in The
Man Who had All the Luck) that
A man is a jelly fish laying on the beach. A wave
comes along and pulls him back into the sea and he floats
a while on a million currents he can’t even feel and he’s
back on the beach again, never knowing why.
(Theatre Essays 180)
is countermanded by David’s advocacy of ‘doing things’ rather than
waiting for them to happen.
Man is a moral creature and the test of his morality is his ability to
relate himself to the community, to do the right thing, and to strike a balance
between the interest of all and the interest of self. In the ever changing
relationship between man and society, man will find peace when he
discovers the ‘hidden order’ which is to ‘live humanly’, in conformity to
those laws (of society) which decree his human nature (Theatre Essays 9).
Miller’s own attempt in creating his tragic characters is to bring them to
experience the “illumination of the ethical” (Theatre Essays 12) as part of
their discovery of the truth of life. In a meaningful existence, the inner man
becomes ‘inseparable’ from the outer man; the private and the public
become one. It is because “society is inside man and man is inside society”
(Theatre Essays 50)
Although this statement smacks of Darwinism, it is much more than
that. It conjures a picture of man beyond Darwinism and holds that the
‘goodness’ posited in society acts on man in a healthy manner. This is in
conformity with Miller’s committed view that a given society is essentially
moral in nature.
Miller’s term “hidden order” becomes in his plays – All My Sons,
Death of a Salesman and A View from the Bridge – the discovery of
“conscience” in the process of man’s rise towards a moral being. Miller
claims that he explores psychology merely to understand man’s social
nature. In other words it is the private conscience of man that is the key to
public morality. The awakening of Joe Keller’s conscience in All My Sons
through the moral prodding of his son Chris is an obvious example.
Miller’s view again finds expression when he declares that every
Greek hero embodies “the idea of the Greek people, their fate, their will and
their destiny” (Robert Corrigan 94). He is a creature of “all round excellence
– physical, intellectual and moral”. He is a citizen, father, son, husband and
also a man of inner spiritual and intellectual complexities. He is a man of
free will who, to a large extent makes or mars his own destiny; a creature of
hope which is essential for his life to be whole. The characters in Miller’s
writings aspire to such‘wholeness’ in art as its highest merit. Writing in an
age when Realism had opened up exciting possibilities of scope and variety
of subject matter, James believed that literature that presented the ‘whole
business’ or the ‘grand total’ of life was the best (Robert Corrigan 32). It
seems that here James refers to comprehensiveness, a totality in the
treatment of man and his life, a freedom newly gained by the writer and
hither to forbidden areas of human experience.
When Miller talks of the desirability of depicting the whole man, he is
reacting against his earlier restricted view of Realism in which man was a
captive of the deterministic, Darwinian forces or the Freudian picture of man
that focused on his morbidity and inner sexual Causation (Humphrey 10).
Both James and Miller advocate that literature is to depict man in all his
aspects, his fullness. But Miller goes out of the way to stress the moral role
of man which he regards to be the very essence of his wholeness.
Miller’s preoccupation with the idea of the moral man and his
commitment to family and society, at times, tends to make his characters and
plays dull and heavy. A perfect example that reveals the strength and
weakness of Miller’s idea of man is Miller’s adaptation of Ibsen’s An Enemy
of the People. Ibsen’s poetic treatment of the romantic, idealistic individual
who takes of “superior breeding” and is pitted against society – almost a
case of rebellion for its own sake – represented the temper of his age. Miller
considerably softens Ibsen’s attack on society. All the references in
Stockmann’s speech to the “compact majority” that is the enemy of truth and
poisons the moral life of man are taken out. Also Miller dropped
Stockmann’s outburst that the leading men of the community are vermins
and parasites and should be exterminated. Also Miller introduces a brand
new piece of dialogue, purely his own invention, in his effort to make
Stockmann a more morally consciouis person. At the end of Act I, Scene ii,
the following takes place between Stockmann and his son:
Stockmann:
You know what I’m going to
do, boys?
From now on I’m going to
teach you
Morten:
We learnt what an insect is.
Stockmann:
You know what I’m going to
do, boys?
From now on I’m going to
teach you WHAT A MAN IS?
(An Enemy of the People 19)
Miller’s Stockmann is also more class-conscious and talks of the
sufferings of Christ and Galileo. He argues for a ‘moral’ man as against the
theme of a ‘biological’ man is Ibsen. Ibsen saw the new man as isolated,
standing at “the outposts of society” and intellectually superior to the
masses, clearly a man of the future – an eccentric, irrational, humorous but a
more humane person. Miller reduces him to a flat, humorless moralist.
David Bronsen rightly concludes that because of “Miller’s overinsistence on a moral stance” his Stockmann turns to be “shallow and
uncomplicated” an ideal figure with the rough edges rounded off” “straight
laced” (David Bronsen 11)
The charge, usually leveled against Miller, is that his characters lack
complexity. The reason being that Miller’s idea of the ideal, morallyconscious man is more a picture of expectation, based on his own
intellectual perceptions. In his plays, he views actual society as ‘atomized’
and considers the modern man as an escapist, a dreamer, a misfit, having a
“fractured” personality, struggling with his guilt and above all “alienated”
because of his divorce or separation with society. In other words, Miller
shows as what happens when man is not “whole”. In his prose essays man’s
break from society is generally brought about by external circumstances, but
in the plays where his protagonists are more humane and complex, man is
shown to be equally a victim of his own greed, ambition, frustration,
psychological imbalance etc. it is these factors, as much as external causes,
that creates his separation from society.
This leads to a major aspect of personality and mental make-up of
man, that is, the role of guilt as a motive of human action (or inaction). In
the earlier plays – All My Sons, Death of a Salesman and A View from the
Bridge – Miller depicts “guilt” as the burden of a man’s conscience which
demands a release from this burden. The force of this guilt drives man to his
expiation, often his death, (Joe Keller and Willy Loman) in which he
attempts his reconciliation with society or himself.
Miller expects man to share his responsibility in the collective evil of
the society to which he belongs, regardless of his actual participation in it or
even his conscious disapproval of it. People passively watch street violence
in their own neighbourhood and feel that all the injustice and repression
going on in this world has nothing to do with them personally. This is a
dangerous sign of the ‘withering will’, a weakening of the innate goodness
in man. By feeling responsible and getting involved, man can redeem his
wholeness, his moral status. Miller thus attains the highest moral intensity,
almost a religious solemnity in his view of man.
Again Miller warns against another variety of guilt that is generated
when man is measured against the notions of innocence and perfection by
his fellow men. In After the Fall, Miller examines man’s despair arising out
of his sense of failure, his own selfishness and of the self-righteous
piousness of others. Among the several roots of Quentin’s (protagonist in
After the Fall) guilt, made intense by the accusations of those he loves, is his
own sensitivity to other’s sufferings, his own goodness. The question “… is
altogether good to be not guilty for what another does?” helps Quentin find a
way out of his private hell created by the imposition of a false guilt. (Robert
Corrigan 94). What Miller means here is that self-righteousness, innocence
or claims of perfection, either in an individual or in a group of society, are
unacceptable, especially because they tend to demean the human spirit when
it is condemned to be less perfect or fallen. In fact no one is perfect and no
one is to be judged harshly simply because he is weak and human.
Linda’s famous speech (in Death of a Salesman) that Willy Loman is
not the greatest or the most successful man but is a “human being and must
not be allowed to fall in his grave like a dog” (DOS 211) is the earliest and
strongest pronouncement in Miller for tolerance based on recognition of one
another’s failings.
Miller has created situation in which man is alienated and incomplete,
not because he has violated the social code or because society is unjust or
repressive but because at times man is, by his temperament and
consciousness, simply out of harmony with his environment. It is the idea of
the ‘misfitted’ man, the person who is either trapped in an alien environment
or escapes from it to become an eternal drifter. Willy Loman (of Death of a
Salesman) fits the first case: he has a sense of being stifled by the growing
urbanization that has surrounded his house – no light, no fresh air etc. His
lineage from a ‘wild-hearted man’ who drove a wagon and made flutes, also
explains Willy’s impatience with the city life. Willy’s character has thus an
existential aspect that explains his feeling out of joint with life. A person
who is good at doing things with his hands is somewhat a ‘misfit’ in the
selling business. Biff is the other kind of misfit who whistled in the elevator
and went swimming in the middle of a working day. As he tells his mother,
he doesn’t fit in any business; he just doesn’t have the right temperament to
‘belong’ to an organized society and function like its disciplined member.
In the final analysis, it may be said that the dominant image of man
that emerges from Miller’s early plays is that of the “eternal” man. This is in
spite of the fact that Miller attempts as consciously possible to set close to
Brecht’s idea of the relationship of man and society, in stressing man’s
oneness with the society, his ‘wholeness’ or his essentially social nature.
Brecht thought that the idea of man as eternal, as basically unchanged
through the ages although the circumstances change, is a product of the
bourgeois or decadent society. As against this, he thinks that his idea of man
as ‘historical’ is more convincing and scientific. Miller’s intellectual
closeness to this idea (“the fish is in the sea and the sea inside the fish”) does
not weaken the humanity or the individuality of man in his early plays. For
Brecht, man is a part of the society in a political sense; for Miller, man is
morally inalienable from society. Man in Miller’s concept remains a
mysterious complex creature, often a ‘mass of contradictions’, a man whose
strength of will and inherited ethical postulate would ultimately make him
‘whole’, that is, an integral member of society. Miller’s view of man is a
synthesis of the classical and the romantic notions of man. From the
romantic image, Miller draws the concept of man as basically good, capable
of achieving nobility and perfection, endowed with immense possibilities of
achievement through his strength of will.
For Miller, a social humanitarian, the social drama comes out of the
desire to make sense of the word “individual” in a mass society, increasingly
deprived of identity by machines, machine politics and machine values… the
word “individual” which once meant “inseparable” now means “alienated”.
What Miller is after is a drama in which the individual is not an “individual
in his own right” but in relation to universal substance (Herbert Blau 87)
Miller has portrayed in his plays his heroes being family-centred. The
reason may be a reflection of Miller’s own struggle in his personal life due
to the Great Economic Depression in the 1930s and its effect on his life. In a
way the reading of his plays opens up new possibilities of living in a world
of competition and rat race.
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