General Introduction: 1.1 Miller and Modern American Drama
General Introduction: 1.1 Miller and Modern American Drama
General Introduction
American drama has established its unique identity in world literature today.
drama is considerable. It is true that Eugene O'Neill and Tennessee Williams have
influenced the American theatrical landscape in the former half of the twentieth
century and Edward Albee, Sam Shepard and among others, Wendy Wasserstein
enhance the later portions of the century. But only Arthur Miller's influence on
American drama begins in the American colonies in the seventeenth century and
continues to the present. In the American colonies settlement was sparse and living
conditions were arduous, and therefore, little theatrical activity took place before the
mid-eighteenth century. Most American plays copied British models until the early
twentieth century. By the end of the nineteenth century, American drama was moving
steadily toward realism, illuminating the rough or seamy side of life and creating
more believable characters. Realism remained the dominant trend of the twentieth
century in both comedies and tragedies. The most prolific of prewar playwrights with
a social agenda was Rachel Crothers, who addressed such issues as society's double
standards for men and women in A Man's World (1909). The New York Idea
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(1906), a social satire by Langdon Mitchell managed to entertain while commenting
disintegration was a recurring theme of playwrights at this time and it would dominate
much of American playwriting for the rest of the twentieth century. Social tensions in
the United States began to preoccupy dramatists in the years leading up to World War
I (1914-1918).
with dramatic style and form, while also writing serious sociopolitical commentary.
From this time onwards Britain's influence, although never absent, became much less
important to American drama. One of the first groups to promote the new American
Massachusetts.
The most prominent dramatists of the canon were Eugene O'Neill and Susan
Glaspell. The drama that they produced prominently featured oppositional political
depiction of reality. During the 1920s and early 1930s, American audiences saw
incisive and exciting American drama satirizing the often romanticized vision of
warfare. Also, in the 1920s and early 1930s, comedies of manners made a comeback
through delightfully glib, light satirical plays such as Phillip Barry's Holiday. The
economic collapse of the Great Depression of the 1930s closed many theatres
permanently. The austerity of the 1930s inspired a new way of hard edged drama that
tackled economic suffering, left-wing political ideologies, fascism and the fear of
another World War. The well-known playwright of this time was Clifford Odets. The
plays of Lillian Hellman also display a social conscience. During the Second World
War (1939-45), little drama of note appeared. It was neither escapist nor wartime
propaganda. However, two playwrights who dominated dramatic activity for the next
fifty years were Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams. Tennessee Williams, one of
America's most lyrical dramatists, wrote many plays dealing with social misfits and
Arthur Miller's reputation and stature as a writer of unusual talent and insight,
has increased steadily with the appearance of each of his plays and books. Over the
past few decades, Arthur Miller has become a well-known American playwright. He
has won numerous awards and is credited for doing amazing work. He is highly
regarded for his intellectual and political contributions to Modern America and the
rest of the world. According to James Houghton, "[h]e is one of the finest writers of
the twentieth century." `. . . . What he did with his plays was really bold. He was
breaking new ground all the time. His work was hailed as a watershed, bringing a
stinging humanist realism to the American stage." 2 In his plays, Miller attempts to
extend the limits of conventional realism. He has been studied from different
perspectives, however, there are no book-length studies dealing with the landscape of
realism in his plays. Here is an attempt to trace the two dominant strains of realism -
Jewish immigrant family. His parents belonged to the middle class community in the
industrial area of the sprawingly metropolis. He was the son of a coat manufacturer
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who suffered financial ruin in the Great Depression. Arthur, a thin boy, was hardly
studious but rather athletically inclined. As a child he was an avid baseball fan, and by
the time he reached high school - a tall, rangy teenager - he became a football star. He
saw the societal and economic decay caused by the Depression, as well as his father's
desperation due to business failures, which had an enormous effect on him. Until the
Depression of the 1930s, the Millers were a moderately well-to-do family. He worked
He often went to the library during his lunch hour. He was a voracious reader.
Like most New Yorkers, he had always enjoyed the theatre, going to Broadway
shows. But now he felt an urgent desire to write plays. Arthur Miller plunged into
knowledge of the theatre. The Lydia Mendelssohn Repertory Theatre had opened in
rehearsals, performance sessions in lighting and set designing. Ideas came to him and
words, dialogue flowed from him. When he went to Chicago during a vacation, he
saw a performance of Clifford Octets' Awake and Sing and the core message was
"life should have some dignity." It made a deep and lasting impression on him. He
thought a great deal about the change the Depression had wrought in his family as in
so many others. He contemplated on the values that had caused so many Wall Street
suicides when men were forced to face financial failure. He was forming the concept
of moral responsibility within the family, which was to furnish the central theme of
his plays, particularly the relationship between father and son. He placed the
responsibility for the general welfare of the masses on individuals. It was, therefore,
immoral for one man to amass great wealth at the expense of the many. This in turn
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led him to an appraisal of the injustices and the sins committed in the name of 'free
enterprise.' The tendency was to condone any means to achieve success. In his plays,
Miller questioned and sat in judgment on the false values of the past and present. In
1934, he enrolled at the University of Michigan and spent much of the four years
embodies a penchant for justice that animates his plays. For one thing, he has
travelled widely in order to observe foreign systems of government and report upon
them. He has also engaged in political activities - for example, as a delegate to and a
and novelists (1965-1969). In 1956, Miller was summoned by the House Un-
American Activities Committee when he applied for a routine renewal of his passport.
He acquitted himself with honour during his interrogation, testifying that he had allied
himself with liberal causes for many years. Miller's belief that "you change society
Miller married Mary Slattery in 1940. In 1956 they had a bitter separation.
Later, he married Marilyn Monroe. The marriage was brief and far from idyllic and
Miller was to examine it (exploit it, some have said) in his most important
contributions to the cinema, the screen play for John Huston's The Misfits, which
was Monroe's last completed film. He followed this with his play After the Fall
which appeared two years after her death. His third and happy marriage to Austrian
Miller's amazing literary career spans more than six decades. He wrote his
first play No Villain in 1936 and followed it with a series of plays in which he tested
his skills and explored his response to private and public issues. A year later, it won
the Theatre Guild's award for best work by an unknown playwright. Arthur Miller's
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recognition as a professional playwright came with the production of The Man Who
Had All the Luck (1944). It introduced the major themes of Miller's later work. It
was a contrived tale of a man, whose constant source of good luck causes him great
misery until he suffers a setback which makes him aware, he could go ahead on his
own volition. In 1945, he wrote a novel Focus and two years later he came out with
All My Sons.
All My Sons (1947) is Miller's Ibsenite melodrama written during the Second
World War. It appealed to a nation having recently gone through a war and a
depression. It dealt with the basic concept of moral responsibility in the family,
linking it to the inner struggle of men in authority during the war. His major
achievement, Death of a Salesman (1949) deals with the themes of needs, desires
and responsibilities of the American family and even more specifically the American
male. His achievement rests in successfully bridging the gulf between a social
situation and human drama. The two elements are well fused. An Enemy of the
People (1950) depicts a respected resort-town doctor, who finds himself shunned by
He wrote The Crucible in 1953. It dealt with the Salem witchcraft trials. It
was actually aimed at the then wide spread Congressional investigation of subversive
personal integrity and bureaucratic injustice. Miller achieves a fine balance between
private guilt and public conscience. It is an allegorical re-telling of the McCarthy era
red scare that occurred in the United States after the Second World War.
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where he worked to save money for college. The play takes a look at his co-workers
and the various people he met who stumbled through life in a haze of hopelessness
and despondency.
In A View from the Bridge (1956) Miller retained the basic theme of a
flawed protagonist. Eddie Carbone's problem is his guilt of incest. The hero of the
the emotions with the same painful intensity, as the play jolts the intellect. In his later
plays Miller turns away from the primary unit of the family as a direct cause of the
In After the Fall (1964) 'the fall' is from a state of economic security as well
as from childhood innocence. The play uses the Holocaust as an important symbol.
For Miller, the Holocaust is one of the most central events of the twentieth century,
and one from which everyone can learn much about human nature. It is Miller's
Two one-act plays — Incident at Vichy (1964) and The Price (1968) — deal
with the universality of human responsibility and the guilt that often accompanies
survival and success. Incident at Vichy explores the theme of self-sacrifice and
honour. He depicts the individual struggling with forces greater than him, and
powerfully condemns the restriction of any man's freedom through tyranny. The
Price is a play about two brothers who are pinned in positions of flight from their own
histories. One of his later dramatic works, The Creation of the World and Other
Business (1972) seemed too openly didactic for both critics and audience. In The
Creation of the World and Other Business (1972) Miller follows the early events of
the Bible only with a comic twist beginning with the creation, the story of Adam and
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Eve and their temptation and culminating with the slaying of Abel by his brother
Cain. The Archbishop's Ceiling (1977) studies the erosion of personal integrity in
East and West. It also examines the psychological and social coercions of a
totalitarian state and extends its concerns to question the nature of the reality we
Miller wrote Playing for Time (1980) based on the autobiography of Fania
Second World War. The American Clock (1980) focuses on the family in crisis
trapped in moments of stress and conflict resulting from present and past actions that
the Great Depression on American society and the values which helped it to survive.
Two Way Mirror (1982-1984) consists of two plays Elegy for a Lady and
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Some Kind of Love Story. Another title Danger: Memory (1987) consists of two
other plays I Can't remember Anything and Clara. I Can't Remember Anything
usual touches of disillusion with the world. Miller's career began to see resurgence
with the production of his The Last Yankee and The Ride Down Mt. Morgan. The
Last Yankee (1991-1993) stems from the inability of the partners in two marriages to
reconcile their dissimilar emotional and worldly needs. The Ride Down Mt. Morgan
(1991) depicts what motivates a man who constructs an elaborate network of lies in an
attempt to keep two wives. He revisits the themes he dealt in Death of a Salesman,
fifty years later through the social climate of the 1990 in Ride Down Mt. Morgan. It
also explores aspects of Nixon and Reagan's America. The play, like so many of his
late works, is a mixture of the personal and the public, the realistic and the fantastic.
In Broken Glass (1994) Miller repeats the dramaturgical strategy of After
the Fall after a gap of thirty years and attempts to mould the horrors of Kristallnacht
expressionistic drama which laments the loss of youth. It is about a man who has lost
his sense of roots and his connections. Resurrection Blues (2002) is a satiric piece in
which the local dictator on a fictional island plans to televise the crucifixion of a local
rebel whom people believe to be Jesus. Even the mainland television crew became
Miller's writings outside the theatre have been prolific and varied. His novel
Focus (1945) is an ironic tale of anti-Semitism. The screenplay for the Misfits (1961)
is only one of the several he has written. He wrote In Russia in 1964 which is a travel
piece with illustrations by his wife, the photographer Inge Morath. Chinese
account of the production of his play in Chinese. The Theater Essays of Arthur
craftsmanship and social explorations. The book was translated into fifteen languages.
The book's dominant themes are the origins of creativity, the dangers of fame, the
Broadway and the betrayal of American idealism. Arthur Miller was pleased with its
reception.
In 2000, Echoes Down the Corridor was published (collected essays from
1944-2000). Finishing the Picture (2004) drew on his brief marriage to Marilyn
Monroe. These are the essays of a lifetime from America's greatest playwright. This
is also a record of Arthur Miller, the private man as well as the playwright, who has
created some of the most abiding dramatic and literary masterpieces in English
language.
lectured widely, wrote articles on the theatre and its relation to world affairs, and
participated in political movements of the day. In 1956, when he appeared before the
attended a meeting to which he had been invited as a guest. It was believed that some
of whom he had met were members of the Communist Party. On this account, he was
Supreme Court in 1958. In 1965, Miller was elected international president of P.E.N,
understanding through literature and of freedom for writers everywhere that he was
critics have described his death as a great loss for World literature.
1949. In 1959, Arthur Miller was awarded Gold Medal for drama by National
Institute for Arts and Letters. He also won the 1984 Kennedy Center Honors and the
1991 Mellon Bank Award, both for lifetime achievement. In 1995, he received the
Edward Albee Last Frontier Playwright Award. In 2001, Miller was awarded a NEH
Fellowship and the John H. Finley Award for exemplary service to New York City.
He has also received three Tony Awards, a George Foster Peabody Award, the
National Institute of Arts and Letter's Gold Medal for drama, the New York Public
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Library's Literary Lion Award and the Pell Award for excellence. He holds honorary
plays, from Shakespeare through Russian writer Anton Chekhov to American novelist
Sinclair Lewis. The clearest influences, however, are those whom Miller himself has
playwright, Henrik Ibsen, nineteenth century Russian novelists, Leo Tolstoy and
While studying at the University of Michigan Miller was attracted to the sense
of form and symmetry of events in classical Greek plays. Although he did not always
understand what the plays were about, they made him feel aware of the nature and
function of drama itself. "I had no background at that time to know really what was
involved in those plays, but the architecture was clear. One looks at some building of
the past whose use one is ignorant of, and yet it has modernity. It had its own specific
gravity. That form has never left me; I suppose it just got burned in." s
There are a number of critical studies over the years which show that Ibsen's
influence was pervasive in Miller's early career. Critics have recognized from the
and others have pointed out that the story of Joe Keller and Steve Deever in that play,
is derived from that of Hakon Werle and Old Ekdal in The Wild Duck. 6 These
studies only begin to indicate the extent to which Ibsen's ideas and images permeated
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Miller's creative imagination at the beginning of his career. In an interview with
Gerald Weales, Miller once observed: "I not only read Ibsen in Joseph Wood Krutch's
drama class at Columbia but I squeezed into cheap balcony seats at the International
Theatre to see Eva Le Gallienne's production of John Gabriel Borkman." 7 Ibsen was
not a big box office success on Broadway. After the success of All My Sons and
Death of a Salesman, Miller was hoping to introduce Ibsen to that wide, welcoming
Broadway audience.
and the classical Greek playwrights at the same time. He explains the connection
between these two to Christopher Bigsby: "I assumed then that everyone was aware
that [Ibsen] was carrying the Greeks into nineteenth century Europe, principally
because they were both obsessed with the birds coming home to roost..... there's
something in me that understood that very well." 8 Miller has also written several
times about Ibsen most significantly in the "Introduction to his Collected Plays"
(1975) and in a New York Times article entitled, "Ibsen's Message for Today's
world." Miller carefully laid out elements of Ibsen's dramatic technique, which he
thought had influenced him in his writing of All My Sons (1947), his most
consciously Ibsenesque play. They include what is commonly referred to as the "late
point of attack," or what Miller calls "bringing the past into the present." 9 Miller sets
devils as well as his belief in a just universe. He also rejects the view of some of his
action and an absence of human responsibility for one's actions. In the face of a
universe, where luck is a matter of random chance, Miller placed his faith in the
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efficacy of praxis-willed action. He rejected what he saw as an increasing retreat into
social plays like The Pillars of. Society, Ghosts and An Enemy of the People. Ibsen
articulated in his social plays the conflict between individual desire and social
responsibility that has been at the center of Miller's own work throughout his career. 1°
ability to forge a play upon factual bedrock. Miller observes thai: "situation in his
[Ibsen's] plays is never stated but revealed in terms of hard actions, irrevocable deeds,
and sentiment is never confused with the action it conceals." 11 He also appreciates
Ibsen's solution to the "biggest single dramatic problem, namely, how to dramatize
what has gone before," or to achieve "a viable unveiling of the contrast between past
and present, an awareness of the process by which the present has become what it is . .
. What is precious in the Ibsen method is its insistence upon valid causation." 12
American dramatist of the depressed thirties. Odets understood the people he wrote
about "from the inside out" and consequently created characters exhibiting an
intensity of life that "lift[ed] them into another realm" and endowed them with an
younger writers such as myself, Odets for a couple of years was the trailblazer . . . he
had dared to invent an often wildly stylized stage speech. . . It was as though Odets
was trying to turn dialogue into jazz . . . It was an invented diction of a kind never
believed that playwrights need not have invented new or original ideas, "which are
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already in the air, for which there has already been a preparation . . . Which is to say
that once an idea is 'in the air,' it is no longer an idea but a feeling, a sensation, an
emotion, and with these the drama can deal."" As noted by Alice Griffin: "When
Miller began his career he found in Eugene O'Neill a writer who, like himself, was
Williams. As he once put it, viewing a preview performance of A Street Car Named
Desire, "opened one specific door for me. Not the story or characters of the direction,
but the words and their liberation, the joy of the writer in writing that, the radiant
eloquence of its composition moved me more than all its pathos." "I did learn things
from Tennessee, although I'm not sure if he learned anything from me. His early
plays, especially, Streetcar, were truly unique. Before Williams, the full throated
voice of the author was muted on the American stage. The author of a play in
imitate street speech, that is, ordinary daylight speech. Tennessee infused his plays
People never really spoke the way they did in Tennessee's plays, but it
gave it his own twist. The only other writer - one of a quite different
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1.4 Art and Dramatic Theory
a key to understanding his aims and appreciating his art. From the fifty-two page
"Introduction to his Collected Plays," which appeared in 1957, to the 1993 essay
"About Theater Language," Miller's theatre essays are considered major contribution
to modern dramatic theory. 19 These are some of the major documents of American
theatre. They reveal an eminent playwright having struggled to understand and perfect
his craft. They show him eager to use the theatre to express his evolving ideas. Miller
discusses not only the aesthetic of his plays, but also what was 'in the air,'
surrounding and prompting their composition, the artistic, commercial, political, and
Miller chose theatre because he believed that "it was the cockpit of literary
activity and you could talk directly to an audience and radicalize the people.' 2° Miller
states: "I suppose that to me a play is the way I sum up where I am at any particular
moment in my life. I'm not conscious of that when I'm working, but when I look back
at what I've written, its quite clear to me that's what I'm doing is to find what I really
think about life." 21 This indicates that he has interwoven the events from his life into
There was something real about theatre which appealed to a man like Miller,
who beyond anything, liked to make things. From the age of six, he had worked with
wood. He has continued to do so, building the shed in which he wrote Death of a
Salesman and subsequently, he also built a bed, a dinner table, and an array of chairs
and cabinets. Miller believes that writing a play resembles making furniture: "It has
an architectural structure. You could walk around in it. I like to make things, mostly
15
furniture, and create as I go along. I improvise designs. I never make a drawing. I just
get a couple of pieces of wood and start to fiddle around until something happens. A
He felt that in order to be the part of the main stream of drama, one had to be a
Miller replied: "first the Greeks, for their magnificent form, the symmetry . . . . I had
no background at the time to know really what was involved in these plays, but the
architecture was clear . . . That form has never left me; I suppose it just got burned
in."24 Over the years, Miller had come to see that it was not only form that he learnt
from the classical Greeks, but a sense of the nature and function of drama itself.
When Miller started his career, American theatre was pre-occupied with the
individual, and with psychological analysis divorced from the social context beyond
the domestic confines of the family. In a theatre, where the works of Tennessee
Williams and William Inge held sway, Miller was trying to define a tradition that
would encompass both the psychological and the social. He found this in classical
drama. As he explained: "The Greek dramatists had more than a passing interest in
psychology and character on the stage but for him these were means to a larger end,
and the end was what we isolate today as social. That is, the relations of man as a
social animal, rather than his definition as a separated entity was the dramatic goal." 25
responsibility informs Miller's works from beginning to end. A View from the
Bridge was written keeping in mind the classical Greek drama. This shows that Miller
had a clear sense of the dramatic agenda from the Greek tradition.
change people for the better, and he feels that, it is his responsibility as an artist to
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encourage such change. Miller views society as a complicated network of individuals
who need to balance their needs and desires against those of the wider social group in
order to live fulfilled and contented lives. His plays reveal that American society has
examine ourselves and reassess our true responsibilities to both self and the other.
Arthur Miller's plays reveal that he sees dramatic art "not as poetry of escape
from process and determinism, but as a timeless form in its ability to bind isolated
human beings together into their essential corporateness." His plays emphasize the
idea that he puts forth elsewhere, that "we are made and yet are more than what made
us." The most salient feature of his plays is his efforts to bring "back into the theatre
in an important way, the drama of social questions." "Great drama," Miller declares,
questions" that Miller has been most interested to explore throughout his work.
His questioning is not merely reformist but possesses deep insights into the
resistance to our 'souls' sloth dramatized by Miller defines "his single contribution to
Miller discusses the form of his major plays and generalizes on the subject.
Form is literally the body that holds the soul of the play. He considers his "most
`the full flow of inner and outer forces that are sucking the man.' The melting together
of social time, personal time and psychic time in Death of a Salesman is its unique
power.
17
In response to an audience question and answer session, Miller said, "[a]rt is
an imitation of life, and the whole writer is involved in whatever he is doing. In his
case, some of the inspiration came from simply imitating a character or maybe,
exploring a feeling that I have about the times we are living in. But, generally, it's all
method into one confusing mush, and to give it form and make it understandable to
other people is the art of writing. Where that comes from, God only knows." 28
His writing despite its aggressive intentions, does not attempt to startle society
with new ideas. Indeed, he does not believe that the theatre can promulgate entirely
new ideas, because it must gather the assent of its audience as it moves along, and this
is impossible with the radically new. The theatre should enunciate "not-yet-popular
ideas which are already in the air, ideas for which there has already been a preparation
by non-dramatic media." It follows that the theatre binds isolated human beings into
their essential corporateness: "I regard theatre as a serious business, one that makes or
should make man more human, which is to say less alone." 29 Miller has spoken of his
concerns to penetrate his own feelings about himself and the times in which he lived.
So, he asserted that the job of the artist was to remind people of what they have
chosen to forget. In a series of essays during the fifties, Miller laid out his ideas on the
relationship between dramatic form and the conflict between what he called "private"
Miller thought the realism of the previous half century "could not, with ease
and beauty, bridge the widening gap between the private life and the social life" while
Collected Plays," "realisms hold on our theatre," for what he considered the moral
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vacuum in American plays. He believed that "Nealism as a style could seem to be a
encompass a wider and deeper segment of human life was the imposition of
biological determinism on realistic stage language: "The idea of realism has become
wedded to the idea that the man is, at best, the sum of forces working upon him and of
given psychological forces within him." 33 Miller, on the other hand, asserted that "an
innate value, an innate will does in fact posit itself as real not alone because it is
systematically accounted for, he is more than the sum of his stimuli and is
conditioning" he asserted, "is not reflecting reality." 35 He was seeking a new dramatic
form in which "a new balance has been struck which embraces both determinism and
paradox". 36 He found the answer to the need for a theatrical idiom in expressionism,
in which one could address social and political concerns in the fifties. It was the most
representational realism. Despite his discovery of subjective realism and his belief
which rejected "Art for Art sake" in favour of the more current "Drama is a weapon"
19
tendencies are noted in the writings of Odets, Elmer Rice, William Saroyan and
Tennessee Williams. He, like Odets, succeeded in fusing the temporary with the
poetic, realistic dialogue with symbolic force, anger and despair with warmth,
In "The Family in Modern Drama" Miller discusses the critical debate about
the early modern realistic drama whether dramatic prose is "less artistic" 38 than
dramatic poetic verse forms. The core of this essay consists of Miller's contention that
a poetic drama must be built upon a poetic idea. 39 Miller always had great concern for
the social implications of his plays and he believed that the great poetic plays must
connect to the outside world of the characters and the play must go beyond the family
circle that it originates in. Citing Streetcar, Hamlet, Oedipus, The Great God
Brown and The Hairy Ape as examples, Miller declares that when a play opens itself
When one is speaking to one's family, for example, one uses a certain
inflection suited to the intimacy of the occasion. But when one faces an
most social of men - it seems right and proper for him to reach for the
well-turned phrases, even the poetic word, the aphorism, and the
metaphor. And his gestures, his stance, his tone of his voice, all
become larger than life; moreover, his character is not what gives him
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society permits us, or even enforces upon us, a certain reliance upon
ritual similarly with the play. The implications of this natural wedding
of form with inner relationships are many, and some of them are
complex. It is true to say, I think, that the language of the family is the
Miller's 1993 essay "About Theatre Language" exhibits his sustained interest in the
style of language. In this essay, Miller has the elder statesman's advantage of
reflecting on both his career and the whole of twentieth century American drama. He
puts forth ideas similar to those he expressed in "The Family in Modern Drama,"
inclusion of the larger world beyond that naturally opens a play to the
poetic . . . . How to find a style that at one and the same time deeply
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considerations of public morality and the mythic social fares - in short
the invisible. 42
Miller's explanation in this essay gives insight into his use of poetic language and
shows how it goes far deeper than mere mechanics. Miller states that he came out of
the 1930s — the formative years of his career — "sure that a good play must move
forward in its depth as rapidly as on its surfaces; word-poetry wasn't enough if there
was a fractured poetry in the structure, the gradually revealed illuminating idea behind
the whole thing." 43 For Miller, the ideas behind his plays most often are his social
themes, which the figurative language consistently illustrates. Miller has himself
pointed to his criticism: "A drama ought not to be looked at first and foremost from
literary perspectives merely because it uses words, verbal rhythm, and poetic
images.""
Miller's awareness of the organic necessity of a text also points out exactly
Rhetoric discussed the "organizing" activity of figurative language, pointing out that
figurative language relies heavily on the tension between the literal and metaphorical,
between the abstract and the concrete, between the denotative and connotative
meaning of words. Miller often uses images, symbols, and metaphors as central or
depicts the social fabric by which the individual is bound to the group and by which
society is created out of the weave of individual will. In Miller's plays the social
22
argues that "drama . . . must represent a well defined expression of profound social
needs, needs which transcend any particular form of society or any particular historic
moment." 45 Since it is "an organism that expands one's awareness to life's continuity
and meaning for Miller, is a contentious issue." 46 Further, Miller astutely observes
that Odets' dialogue was not realistic but poetic. 47 Likewise, although Miller's
dialogue often has been praised for its realism, it is carefully crafted to fit his
characters. His best lines have become familiar and oft used quotations not because
they sound like everyday speech but because they are embedded in 'poetic realism.'
For example: "Attention must be paid." "He's liked, but he's not well liked" (Death
of a Salesman). "Is the accuser always holy now?" (The Crucible), "I never saw you
as a man. I saw you as my father" ( All My Sons), and "It's not your guilt I want, it's
"My own tendency," writes Miller, "has been to shift styles, according to, the
nature of my subject . . . . In order to find speech that springs naturally out of the
characters and their backgrounds rather than imposing general style." 48 Miller points
out that New Englander in The Last Yankee does not speak like the working men
and women in A Memory of Two Mondays or even like Eddie Carborne and his
fellow Longshoremen in A View from the Bridge. For The Crucible he invented a
language that began with the syntax and idiom of the verbatim court records of the
period and proceeded to take on poetic flavour of its own which is stark, strong and
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1.6 Background
background of the socio-economic and political issues of his time. Arthur Miller is a
man who saw the Depression, World War II, the Holocaust, the Cold War and the fall
of Communism. All these events were grist for his mill. More importantly, he always
wrote about these things with a moral sense. He lived the way he wrote. Many
American novelists, poets and dramatists have made use of the American Dream
symbolically. Arthur Miller is not an exception because the American Dream is very
much present in plays like Death of a Salesman. Arthur Miller was personally
affected by McCarthyism, and he has made use of it in his play The Crucible. The
Great Depression also provides a backdrop to his plays. He has examined the ethical
ramifications of the Holocaust in four plays, one screenplay, one novel, and has
American Dream
The American Dream is the concept widely held in the United States of
America which believes that through hard work, tenacity and determination one can
achieve prosperity. These were the values of the original pioneers who crossed the
American plains when Europeans first came to America. What the American Dream
constantly fluctuating set of ideals, reflecting the ideas of an era. America is seen as
the land of promise and the American Dream is commonly associated with the
freedom and opportunity of gaining wealth, fame, power, glory and happiness. On the
24
surface, this dream seems almost enchanted, offering people the unprecedented
prospect of achieving success regardless of one's race, religion or family history. The
life. It has become the major focal point of many works of American literature. For
instance, in F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel The Great Gatsby the pursuit of the
moments. For instance, the Great Depression caused widespread hardship during the
twenties and thirties, and was almost a reverse of the dream for those directly
affected. Racial discrimination did not disappear and in some parts of the country,
racial violence was almost commonplace. There was concern about the undemocratic
sought to live in relative bourgeois comfort in the suburbs that they built up since the
end of the Second World War. The possibility of great wealth has remained more of a
distant dream in the recent century, while the widely held goal of home ownership,
financial security and civil and international stability have come to take the place of
Great Depression
The Great Depression was the global economic slump that began in the United
States following the Wall Street panic of October 1929. On twenty-ninth October
1929 share prices on Wall Street collapsed catastrophically, setting off a chain of
25
bankruptcies and defaults that quickly spread overseas. The events in the United
States triggered a worldwide depression, which put hundreds of millions out of work
across the capitalist world throughout the 1930s. On the global scale, the market crash
in the U.S. was a final straw in an already shaky global economic situation. Germany
was suffering from hyperinflation, and many of the Allied victors of World War I
were having serious problems paying off huge war debts. In the late 1920s, the U.S.
economy at first seemed immune to the mounting troubles, but with the start of the
McCarthyism
communism, also known as the Red Scare, which occurred in the United States from
1948 to 1956 when the government of the United States actively persecuted the
Communist Party USA, its leadership and others suspected of being Communists.
accusation, and of government attacks on the political minority. From the viewpoint
of the great majority of American citizens in the then fairly conservative political
climate, the suppression of radicalism and radical organizations in the United States
that posed a real danger to the security of the country, thus justifying extreme, even
extra-legal measures. From the radical viewpoint it was seen as class warfare,
who were caught up in the conflict without having done anything objectionable, it was
26
McCarthyism was the internal screening program on federal government employees,
conducted by the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover. This comprehensive program vetted all
provided by anonymous sources that the subjects of investigation were not allowed to
challenge or identify. From 1951, the programs required level of proof for dismissing
a federal employee was for "reasonable doubt" to exist over their loyalty; previously,
it had required "reasonable grounds" for believing them to be disloyal. The hearings
conducted by Senator Joseph McCarthy gave the Red Scare the name which is in
common usage, but the "Red Scare" predated McCarthy's meteoric rise to
1954, following his disastrous investigation into the U.S. Army which started on
twenty-second April of that year. McCarthy's name became associated with the
phenomenon mainly through his prominence in the media; his outspoken and
The term McCarthyism has entered the American vernacular as a general term
McCarthyism. Miller's play, The Crucible, written during the McCarthy era, used the
Salem witch trials as a metaphor for the McCarthyism of the 1950s, suggesting that
27
the process of McCarthyism-style persecution can occur at any time and place.
Holocaust
and loss of life" and also "as the Nazi program of exterminating Jews under Hitler." 49
TheHolcaust( dShinHebrw)fstohpidrme
January, 1933, when Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, to eighth May,
1945, when the war in Europe ended. During this time, Jews in Europe were subjected
to progressively harsh persecution that ultimately led to the murder of several Jews.
The Nazi Party conducted a vicious propaganda campaign against its political
opponents — the weak Weimar government and the Jews whom the Nazis blamed for
Germany's ills. Hitler began to restrict the Jews with legislation and terror, which
entailed burning books written by Jews, removing Jews from their professions and
public schools, confiscating their businesses and property and excluding them from
interpretative categories. The first position is the particularistic stance. This point of
view, championed by writers such as Elie Wiesel and Cynthia Ozick, maintains that
artistic representations. Lawrence Langer, Alvin Rosenfeld, Sidra Ezrahi, and Nora
Levin have argued that such efforts tend to simplify and reduce the magnitude of the
occurrence. They are particularly distressed by artists who deny the specificity of
Jewish suffering, treat the Holocaust as a symbolic metaphor for Western society and
28
who, in the words of Nora Levin, "pander to the craving for the sadistic, the
position. Such a view has been delineated by Hannah Arendt, Bruno Bettelheim and
George Steiner. It is also projected into the dramatic works of C.P. Taylor, Peter
perspective assert that the Holocaust was indeed a horrific historical catastrophe but it
not only appropriate, but also necessary to seek analogies, utilize metaphors, and
derive symbolism, in order to understand and transmit the universal qualities of the
event. 50
humanistic interpretation of the Holocaust. He places the event within the cultural and
models. Miller embraces both an existential and teleological view of the world. He
believes that the Holocaust has both historical importance and contemporary
relevance.
1961 marks the beginning of book-length studies of Miller's work and establishes the
format that was to become the standard in Miller scholarship. Welland revised and
updated his examination of Miller's plays in Miller: The Playwright in 1983. Sheila
Huftel, in Arthur Miller: The Burning Glass (1965) focuses on the character's quest
29
for self knowledge in plays like Incident at Vichy. Edward Murray's Arthur Miller
Dramatist (1967) adds a few new insights. Arthur Miller (1967) by Leonard Moss
on the other hand, focuses on the psychological dimensions of Miller's work. Ronald
Hayman's Arthur Miller (1972, reprinted 1983) concludes with a chapter on Miller
within the context of Modern European and American drama where he emphasizes
Miller as a social dramatist. Neil Carson in Arthur Miller (1952) presents Miller's
Miller's plays, fiction and contributions to film, the book places his work within the
context of the social and political climate of the times. Arthur Miller by Glassman
Bruce discusses the life of the main American Playwright and examines the common
themes in his works. Arthur Miller (1987) by Schlueter and Flanagan offers
insightful analyses of the plays like Dangers! Memory and examines his social
commitment, dramatic innovations and the interplay between his personal experience
A large number of collections of critical essays has been published over the
last five decades. Miller's plays began to attract the attention of theatre critics with the
critical essays that examine important aspects of each work. The Temptations of
Innocence in the Dramas of Arthur Miller by Terry Otten examines all of his plays
30
While Miller is most often compared with Williams, themes that appear in his
work have often been examined in relation to other writers as well. The Crucible is
often studied with The Scarlet Letter notably by David Bergeron. Thomas Adler
examines him in relation to Pinter. Leslie Kames examines his plays in relation to
particularly, on the concept of tragedy which Miller himself initiated in his essays like
"Tragedy and the Common Man" and "Arthur Miller on The Nature of Tragedy,"
both originally published in 1949 and reprinted in Robert A. Martin (ed), The
Arthur Miller (1964) argues that the significance of Miller's work is in the tragic
spirit that the plays embody. Much of the criticism of Death of a Salesman focuses
on a definition of tragedy and how this play achieves or fails to achieve the tragic
form.
A recent critical approach offering new insights into Miller's work is that of
gender studies. June Schlueter has edited two volumes exploring the plays from a
Iska Alter, Gayle Austin, Lillian Hellman, Centola, Nada Zeineddine and many others
have written from feminist perspectives. Critical attention has also focused on men's
issues. More sophisticated are the articles by David Savran and Steven .R. Centola.
There are a large number of scholars working on Miller investigation or at least upon
the social concerns raised in his plays. Death of a Salesman in particular has aroused
the curiosity of psychological critics. The Crucible has sparked studies examining the
31
historical precedents of the play. There are a few studies that have examined Miller's
Miller's plays have been produced abroad. This has resulted in a new direction
examination of Miller's work from a British perspective. Several articles have been
1.8 Plan
themes as well as innovative forms of the selected plays of Arthur Miller in order to
trace the landscape of realism. It also aims at bringing out Arthur Miller's
expressionism, subjective and the objective, public and the private, individual will and
familial responsibility.
The thesis is divided into five chapters. The first chapter entitled "General
Introduction" presents an overview of American Drama till the arrival of Miller on the
dramatic scene and thus contextualizes Miller. This section depicts Miller's childhood
through the Depression years and his theatrical apprenticeship leading to eventual
fame and critical acclaim for his plays. It describes his plays as well as non-fiction.
The chapter outlines Miller's literary and dramatic precursors and discusses their
influence on his works. For Miller, the theatre was at once a near-sacred place and an
arena for ideas. He had his views on Art and dramatic theory. He has contributed a lot
to modern dramatic theory. An attempt is made here to understand his theatrical art
and craft. Like Odets, Miller succeeded in fusing realistic dialogue with a symbolic
32
force to forge a unique dramatic idiom. His views on language are also examined in
this section.
into social, political and economic condition of his times. Hence this section describes
in brief the Great Depression, the Holocaust, McCarthyism and the American Dream,
which have determined the thematic pattern in his plays. A brief survey of important
The second chapter entitled "Realism and the American Dramatic Tradition,"
introduces the concept of realism by focusing on the difficulties in defining the term.
It discusses some of the theories related to realism. It points out how the term realism
is one of the most frequently used but most problematic categories in the field of
to realistic drama and also describes realism in modern theatre. In terms of the
contributions of Shaw, Strindberg and Chekhov, it briefly refers to Brecht and the
German dramatic tradition and then it discusses the American tradition. The last
Miller's selected plays to trace social realism. At the outset it presents an overview of
his apprenticeship plays which also reveal his socio-political concerns in his master
works and later plays. The critical examination of the plays analyzed in this chapter
shows that Miller's plays are ineluctably social. He cannot conceive of the individual
outside of a social context. Art to Miller has to be responsible to social realities. The
33
chapter also points out that many of Miller's plays center on families and by
dissatisfied with the stage idiom of the theatre of the fifties. He was unable to find a
satisfactory theatrical idiom for the articulation of the public and the social. Through
on the stage at once. The analysis of the selected plays will show that despite his
discovery of subjective realism and his belief that expressionistic idioms were
inherently linked to the dramatization of public issues, Miller continued to use realism
The fifth and the last chapter, apart from bringing the loose threads together,
dramatic tradition.
Chapter Notes
03/05/04.
34
3
Arthur Miller, Timebends (New York: Grove, 1987) 248.
<www.college.hmco.com/history/readerscomp/rcah/html/ah_059800_millerarthur .
htm> 03/02/05.
5 Carlisle Olga, and Rose Styron, "Arthur Miller: An Interview," The Theater Essays,
6Brenda Murphy, "The tradition of social drama: Miller and his forebears," The
7 Gerald Weales, "Arthur Miller and the 1950s," Michigan Quarterly Review 37.4
49.
9 Arthur Miller, "Introduction to the Collected Plays," The Theater Essays of Arthur
Miller, ed. Robert A. Martin (New York: Viking Press, 1978) 135.
' °Brenda Murphy, "The tradition of social drama: Miller and his forebears," 18.
35
I6 Alice Griffin, "Understanding Arthur Miller," Understanding Arthur Miller
19 Arthur Miller, Introduction, Arthur Miller's Collected Plays ( New York; Viking
press, 1957), 3-55; "About Theater Language," The Last Yankee ( New York:
Penguin Books, 1993), 75-98. The earlier major essays including the 1957
2.
21
Arthur Miller, "The Good Old American Apple Pie," Censored Books: critical
Viewpoints, 1993.
23 Ibid.,2.
24
Olga Carlisle and Rose Styron, "Arthur Miller: Interview," 265-66.
25 Arthur Miller, A View from the Bridge (New York: Viking Press, 1955) 1.
Critical Essays, ed. Robert Corrigan (Englewood Cliffs, N.J Prentice Hall Inc.,
1969) 151.
36
31 Arthur Miller, " Introduction to the Collected Plays," 82.
32 Ibid.,160.
33 Ibid.,170.
34 Ibid., 170.
35
Ibid.,170.
36 Ibid.,170.
37
John Frick, "The 'Playwright of the Proletariat'," 134.
38 Arthur Miller, " The Family in Modern Drama," The Theater Essays of Arthur
Miller, ed. Robert Martin (New York : Viking Press, 1978) 70.
39 Ibid.,72.
43 Ibid.,84-85.
44 Ibid., 1 14.
46 Ibid.,16.
48 Ibid.,9 1 -92.
37