Arthur Miller For The Twenty-First Century: Contemporary Views Of His Writings And Ideas [1 ed.] 3030372928, 9783030372927, 9783030372934

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AMERICAN LITERATURE READINGS IN THE 21ST CENTURY

Arthur Miller for the Twenty-First Century Contemporary Views of His Writings and Ideas Edited by Stephen Marino · David Palmer

American Literature Readings in the 21st Century Series Editor Linda Wagner-Martin University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, NC, USA

American Literature Readings in the 21st Century publishes works by contemporary critics that help shape critical opinion regarding literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the United States. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14765

Stephen Marino · David Palmer Editors

Arthur Miller for the Twenty-First Century Contemporary Views of His Writings and Ideas

Editors Stephen Marino Department of English St. Francis College Brooklyn, NY, USA

David Palmer Massachusetts Maritime Academy Buzzards Bay, MA, USA

American Literature Readings in the 21st Century ISBN 978-3-030-37292-7 ISBN 978-3-030-37293-4  (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37293-4 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG, part of Springer Nature 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover credit: Ronald Grant Archive/Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Preface

This book is a project of the Arthur Miller Society, a group of academics committed to furthering the study and performance of Miller’s plays and the exploration of his ideas. The Miller Society was founded by Steven R. Centola in 1995, growing out of conferences on Miller he had organized at Millersville University in Pennsylvania. Since then the Miller Society has hosted twelve more conferences devoted to Miller and his work in addition to organizing panels on Miller at national and international literature conferences, such as the American Literature Association Conference, the Comparative Drama Conference, and the International Conference on American Drama and Theater, which generally is held in Europe. In 2006, the Miller Society launched the Arthur Miller Journal, a semi-annual periodical containing articles about Miller and his works, reviews of productions of Miller’s plays, and notices of new books relevant to Miller studies. The journal is published by Penn State University Press. The Miller Society invites as new members anyone with an interest in Miller’s life and plays, his other writings and his role as a public intellectual, or the development of twentieth- and twenty-first-century American theater. More information about the Arthur Miller Society, upcoming events related to Miller, and the Arthur Miller Journal can be found at the following websites: The Arthur Miller Society: https://arthurmillersociety.net/. The Arthur Miller Society on Facebook: https://www.facebook. com/arthurmillersociety/. v

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The Arthur Miller Journal at Penn State University Press: http:// www.psupress.org/Journals/jnls_ArthurMiller.html. New York, USA

David Palmer President, The Arthur Miller Society

Acknowledgements

The Arthur Miller Society gratefully acknowledges the guidance and encouragement of Allie Troyanos, our editor at Palgrave Macmillan, who first suggested that our proposal for an anthology on Arthur Miller could be suitable for the series American Literature Readings in the TwentyFirst Century and who coordinated our proposal’s review by Linda Wagner-Martin, the series’ academic editor. We also are grateful to Rachel Jacobe at Palgrave, who shepherded the manuscript through the final phases of its editorial development and the production process. We thank Bloomsbury Publishing PLC and its imprint Methuen Drama for permission for Matthew Roudané to adapt his introduction to their book The Collected Essays of Arthur Miller (2015) for publication here. We also thank Bloomsbury for its permission for Claire Conceison to draw material from her introduction to the 2015 centennial edition of Miller’s 1984 book Salesman in Beijing, retitled Death of a Salesman in Beijing.

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Praise for Arthur Miller for the Twenty-First Century

“Presenting a variety of essays on his writings, this collection convincingly demonstrates Arthur Miller’s continuing importance in the history of American dramatic literature, making an excellent case for his ongoing relevance for twenty-first century readers and audiences. The contributors are thoroughly familiar with current Miller scholarship, and because many of them regularly teach Miller’s work, their essays also will be especially useful in the classroom.” —Jackson R. Bryer, Professor of English, University of Maryland, USA

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Contents

1 Introduction 1 Stephen Marino Part I  Arthur Miller and the American Dramatic Canon 2

Arthur Miller and American Tragedy 13 Livia Sacchetti

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Pipe Dreams and the Self: Eugene O’Neill’s and Arthur Miller’s Conceptions of Tragedy 27 David Palmer

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Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, and the American Family 51 Brenda Murphy

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Arthur Miller, Edward Albee, and Crises of the American Family: American Civilization and Its Discontents 65 Michael Y. Bennett

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Arthur Miller and Contemporary American Women Dramatists 75 Ellen B. Anthony

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Shaming, Rebellion, and Tragedy: Arthur Miller and African American Drama 99 David Palmer

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“Some Men Don’t Bounce”: Miller’s The Price, Mamet’s American Buffalo, and Shepard’s The Late Henry Moss 123 E. Andrew Lee

Part II  Arthur Miller, the Writer 9

Approaches to Teaching All My Sons: Making the Play Matter Across the Curriculum 141 Jan Balakian

10 Irish Immigrant Rebellion in O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape and Miller’s A Memory of Two Mondays 161 Joshua E. Polster 11 Before the Empty Bench: The Equivocal Motif of “Trial” in Arthur Miller’s Works 177 Rupendra Guha Majumdar 12 Reaganism in The Ride Down Mt. Morgan 197 Thiago Russo 13 Arthur Miller, Essayist 211 Matthew Roudané 14 Viewing the Playwright Through a Different Lens: Miller’s Fiction and How It Connects to His Life and Drama 219 Susan C. W. Abbotson

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15 Miller in China 237 Claire Conceison Part III  Arthur Miller and Contemporary Issues 16 Human Rights and the Freedom to Write 263 Christopher Bigsby 17 “What a Man”: Performing Masculinity in Arthur Miller’s and Tennessee Williams’ Plays 277 Claire Gleitman 18 Devouring Mechanization: Arthur Miller and the Proto-Posthuman 293 Peter Sloane Index 311

Notes

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Contributors

Susan C. W. Abbotson is a leading scholar on the work of Arthur Miller and has published three books on the playwright, A Critical Companion to Arthur Miller (2007), Student Companion to Arthur Miller (2000), and Understanding Death of a Salesman (with Brenda Murphy) (1999); edited the Methuen Drama Student Edition of The Crucible (2010), as well as the Collected Essays of Arthur Miller for Penguin (2016); and published numerous articles on Miller in books, journals, and databases. Her most recent book was for Bloomsbury/ Methuen, Modern American Drama: Playwriting in the 1950s (2017). Ellen B. Anthony is an adjunct assistant professor of theater history and Shakespeare studies at Marymount Manhattan College. She earned her MFA in dramaturgy from Columbia University’s School of the Arts and a Ph.D. in theater history from the Graduate Center, the City University of New York. Her current research area is celebrity culture and its influence on play adaptation on the eighteenth-century British stage. She recently authored a chapter on Katherine Philips, one of the first women dramatists to be produced in Ireland, entitled “Corneille in Dublin” for the anthology The Senses in Medieval and Renaissance Europe, Vol. 1, edited by Ann Buckley, forthcoming from Brepols Publishers. Jan Balakian is Professor of English at Kean University, where she teaches literature and writing. She has published essays on American drama (Cambridge University Press); a cultural studies book about Wendy Wasserstein’s plays (Applause); hosted an international xv

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conference with the NEA, “Why American Plays Matter;” and written screenplays and plays. Her current play, Dreams on Fire, set during the election of 2016 on a college campus, explores the transmission of trauma through the Armenian Genocide. Michael Y. Bennett is an Associate Professor of English and Affiliated Faculty in Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. He also will be a Life Member of Clare Hall, University of Cambridge, where he will be a Visiting Fellow in 2020. Known for his work on absurd drama and his work on the philosophy of theater, he is the author or editor of eleven books in the fields of drama, theater, and performance studies. Christopher Bigsby an award-winning academic, novelist, biographer, journalist, and broadcaster, is a Professor Emeritus of American Studies at the University of East Anglia, where he founded the Arthur Miller Center for American Studies. A fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Society of Arts, he has published more than 50 books, among them the three-volume The Cambridge History of American Theatre (edited with Don B. Wilmeth); the threevolume Critical Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Drama; Modern American Drama, 1945–2000; a major commentary Arthur Miller: A Critical Study; his acclaimed two-volume biography of Arthur Miller; and his multivolume series Writers in Conversation with Christopher Bigsby. As a broadcaster, he has had regular series on BBC radio and has done television documentaries on John Steinbeck, Mark Twain, and Edith Wharton. Published widely in academic journals and anthologies on many twentieth-century American dramatists, he recently has turned to exploring drama on American television. His most recent book is Staging America: Twenty-First Century Dramatists (Bloomsbury, 2019). Claire Conceison  is Quanta Professor of Chinese Culture and Professor of Theater Arts at MIT. Her book Significant Other: Staging the American in China (2004) examines representations of Americans on the Chinese stage from 1987–2002. She is editor of the anthology I Love XXX and Other Plays by Meng Jinghui (2017). Her play translations include contemporary Chinese plays as well as Gao Xingjian’s French plays into English. As a director, she has staged contemporary Chinese plays at several American universities. Her 2009 book Voices Carry: Behind Bars and Backstage During China’s Revolution and Reform (Chinese version 水流云在: 英若诚自传) is the autobiography of the

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late Chinese actor and cultural diplomat Ying Ruocheng, Arthur Miller’s partner in staging Death of a Salesman in China in 1983. She wrote the introduction to “Death of a Salesman” in Beijing (Bloomsbury, 2015), a new edition of Arthur Miller’s 1984 book “Salesman” in Beijing. Claire Gleitman is a Professor in the Department of English at Ithaca College. She has published numerous articles on modern and contemporary drama, with an emphasis on gender and masculinity studies as well as historiography. Her work has appeared in Modern Drama, Comparative Drama, the Arthur Miller Journal, Eire/Ireland, and The New Hibernian Review, among other journals, as well as in anthologies published by Bloomsbury Methuen, Cambridge, Blackwell, and others. She is the founding director of the On the Verge theater company at Ithaca College. Currently, she is at work on a book-length study of anxious masculinity in American drama. Rupendra Guha Majumdar  retired as Associate Professor, Department of English, Delhi University, India, in 2016. A Visiting Fulbright Fellow in the Department of English at Yale University (1981–1982; 1992–1993) and Fulbright Scholar-in-Residence at Suffolk University, Boston (2014–2015), his book, Central Man: The Paradox of Heroism in Modern American Drama, was published by Peter Lang (Brussels, 2003). He has published four books of poetry in English between 1971 and 1990; he has contributed to the Columbia Encyclopedia of Modern Drama (2007); Critical Companion to Eugene O’Neill, ed. Robert M. Dowling (New York, 2008); Critical Insights: Eugene O’Neill. Ed. Steven F. Bloom (New York, 2012); Intertextual Exchanges: Recent Scholarship on Eugene O’Neill et al, ed. Drew Eisenhauer and Brenda Murphy (McFarland, 2013); and articles to several anthologies and journals in India and abroad; he has translated Rabindranath Tagore’s play, Roktokorobi (Red Oleanders) into English for The Essential Tagore (Harvard University Press, 2011). His “An Unpublished Interview with Arthur Miller,” appeared in The Arthur Miller Journal, Vol. 11, No. 2 (November 9, 2016). E. Andrew Lee is Professor of English at Lee University in Cleveland, Tennessee, where he has taught for twenty-six years. He has published in the Eugene O’Neill Review and the Arthur Miller Journal. He is a member of the Eugene O’Neill Society, the Arthur Miller Society, and the Edward Albee Society. His other scholarly interests include Faulkner, Joyce, Proust, and Dostoyevsky. He is currently helping to develop a

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financial literacy course at Lee University, and he writes a monthly personal finance column entitled “Money Matters” in a regional magazine called GoodNews Tennessee. Stephen Marino is the founding editor of the Arthur Miller Journal. He teaches at St. Francis College in Brooklyn. His work on Arthur Miller has appeared in many journals and essay collections. He is the author of A Language Study of Arthur Miller’s Plays: The Poetic in the Colloquial and the editor of the Methuen critical student edition of Miller’s A View from the Bridge. His recent essay collection, Arthur Miller’s Century, Essays Celebrating the 100th Birthday of America’s Great Playwright was published in summer 2017 by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. His book, Essential Criticism, Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman and The Crucible, was published in the fall 2015 by Palgrave Macmillan. Brenda Murphy is Distinguished Professor of English Emeritus at the University of Connecticut. She wrote Miller: Death of a Salesman in the Cambridge Plays in Performance Series and edited After the Fall for the Methuen Drama Miller edition, as well as Critical Insights: Arthur Miller and Critical Insights: Death of a Salesman. On Williams, she wrote The Theatre of Tennessee Williams and Tennessee Williams and Elia Kazan: A Collaboration in the Theatre and edited Critical Insights: Tennessee Williams and Critical Insights: A Streetcar Named Desire. Her most recent books include Eugene O’Neill Remembered and Becoming Carlotta: A Biographical Novel. David Palmer taught philosophy and literature at the Massachusetts Maritime Academy, where he developed the course The Brain, Narrative, and the Self: A Cognitive Science Approach to Tragedy. He is the current president of the Arthur Miller Society and a board member of the Eugene O’Neill Society. He recently edited the anthology Visions of Tragedy in Modern American Drama: From O’Neill to the Twenty-First Century (Bloomsbury, 2018). Joshua E. Polster  is Associate Professor of Theater at Emerson College. He was president of the Arthur Miller Society and currently serves on its board of directors. His publications include Stages of Engagement: U.S. Theatre and Performance 1898–1949, The Routledge Anthology of U.S. Theatre 1898–1949, Reinterpreting the Plays of Arthur Miller, a critical edition of Miller’s A Memory of Two Mondays, and numerous articles on Arthur Miller and U.S. theater.

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Matthew Roudané, Regents’ Professor of English and Theater at Georgia State University, Atlanta, has published more than a dozen books on various aspects of American Drama, including Conversations with Arthur Miller (1987), Approaches to Teaching Miller’s “Death of a Salesman” (1995), and The Collected Essays of Arthur Miller (Bloomsbury, 2015). He is currently at work on The Cambridge Introduction to Arthur Miller. His most recent book is Edward Albee: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge University Press, 2017). Thiago Russo  is a psychoanalyst and a doctoral candidate in Linguistics and Literary Studies at the University of São Paulo. He is a lifetime member of the Arthur Miller Society. His theater research focuses on American drama and its relation to politics and history. His master’s thesis compared the works of Arthur Miller and Henrik Ibsen, highlighting their sociopolitical essence. His doctoral dissertation concerns Arthur Miller’s critique of the neoliberalism of the Reagan-Bush eras. During 2018–2019, he developed his doctoral dissertation at the University of Louisville with funding from a CAPES fellowship. Livia Sacchetti earned her Ph.D. from Sapienza, University of Rome, with a thesis entitled “Stoppard’s Theater: The Baseless Fabric of a Vision.” Her main research interests are postwar and contemporary theater and Shakespeare studies. She currently is working on a book project evaluating the impact of the Copernican revolution on the structure of Shakespeare’s late plays and a second project investigating the impact of Einstein’s theories on twentieth-century theater and the dramatization of time on stage. Her essays include a chapter in The Palgrave Handbook of Shakespeare’s Queens entitled “A Gap in Nature: Rewriting Cleopatra through Antony and Cleopatra’s Cosmology and Illusions and Stage Magic in Romeo and Juliet” (Memoria di Shakespeare). She has been teaching literature and creative writing for the past twelve years. Peter Sloane is a Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Lincoln, UK. He teaches and writes on contemporary fiction, drama, and film, with a particular interest in modernization, the body, and literary experimentation. His first monograph, David Foster Wallace and the Question of the Body, appeared with Routledge in 2019, and he currently is working on his second book, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Radical Poetics, for Bloomsbury.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction Stephen Marino

In his autobiography, Timebends , Arthur Miller recalled his feelings as he wrote his first play, No Villain, the drama that won an Avery Hopwood Award at the University of Michigan and launched his career: From the beginning, the idea of writing a play was entwined with my very conception of myself. Playwriting was an act of self-discovery from the start and would always be; it was kind of a license to say the unspeakable, and I would never write anything good that did not somehow make me blush. From the beginning, writing meant freedom, a spreading of wings, and once I got the first inkling that others were reached by what I wrote, an assumption arose that some kind of public business was happening inside me, that what perplexed or moved me must move others. (Miller 1987, 212)

Miller’s intuitive awareness of the capability of his art to move an audience remained an inviolable impetus for every play he wrote over the next seventy years. Moreover, his nascent inkling that others were reached by what he wrote was prophetic, for Miller’s work—written mostly in the

S. Marino (B) St. Francis College, Brooklyn, NY, USA © The Author(s) 2020 S. Marino and D. Palmer (eds.), Arthur Miller for the Twenty-First Century, American Literature Readings in the 21st Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37293-4_1

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twentieth century—continues to be relevant to twenty-first-century audiences. Indeed, Arthur Miller was a man of the twentieth century: His life and career immersed in the cataclysmic events that defined what often is called “America’s Century.” Miller’s ninety years spanned almost the entire time period. Born in 1915 while World War I raged, he died in 2005 in the Age of Terrorism. His world view and moral principles were formed in the crucible of the political, economic, and social events of the era: the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression, World War II, the Red Scare and Communist Witch Hunts, the cultural revolution of the 1960s and Vietnam, the Cold War, Reaganism, the Arab-Israel conflicts, the fall of the Soviet Union, and the New World Order. In his professional and personal life, Arthur Miller boldly confronted the conflicts of his time. In his plays, fictions, and essays, he frequently took stands, popular and unpopular, on moral, social, and political problems—whether we liked hearing them or not. The great themes of his work and career—family and society, individual and social conscience, private and public responsibility, and guilt and betrayal—are what engaged societies throughout the world in his time and continue to do so in our own. At the start of his career, Arthur Miller was grouped with his contemporary and near-contemporary American playwrights. Tennessee Williams and Miller dominated the 1940s and 1950s on Broadway with such plays as The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, All My Sons, Death of a Salesman, The Crucible, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and A View from the Bridge—although both were often in the shadow of Eugene O’Neill’s earlier successes and the posthumous production of Long Day’s Journey Into Night in 1956, when O’Neill’s reputation resurged. Edward Albee was included in the 1960s with the successful Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf and A Delicate Balance, enshrining the four as the major mid-twentiethcentury American playwrights. When Miller died in 2005, just short of his ninetieth birthday, the worldwide headlines in the media proclaimed his status. The period since Arthur Miller’s death has provided ample time for critics to consider his ultimate place as one of the major dramatists of world theater. As his biographer Christopher Bigsby noted, “When he died, all manner of people suddenly realized, what they should have known all along, that losing Arthur Miller was like losing Chekhov, or Ibsen, or Strindberg” (Bigsby 2005, 17). His world vision, large social themes, and his connection to the universal human condition make him

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so attractive to worldwide audiences. His plays flourish in American and international productions because his great themes cross all borders. The 2015 centennial of Arthur Miller’s birth was celebrated around the globe with acclaimed revivals of his plays, media documentaries, academic conferences, and new criticism. Much of Miller scholarship is fed by performance, and the last years have seen striking productions of Miller’s major and lesser-known plays, including the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford-upon-Avon staging Death of a Salesman and the London production of avant-garde director Ivo van Hove’s remaking of A View from the Bridge. English audiences also saw world premieres of dramas that never had been produced: a staged version of The Hook (the screenplay that Miller wrote about the Sicilian American dockworkers in Brooklyn, which he and Elia Kazan peddled in Hollywood in 1951), and his first play, No Villain. In New York, a Yiddish production of Death of a Salesman played off Broadway, as did Incident at Vichy, featuring Richard Thomas as Von Berg. Von Hove directed an acclaimed revival of The Crucible, and a Broadway revival of The Price starred Mark Ruffalo, Tony Shaloub, Jessica Hecht, and Danny DeVito. Interest in Miller’s work remains unabated. Most contemporary drama scholars are familiar with the adulation of Miller in Britain where, as the director David Thacker famously said regarding Miller’s reputation: “We consider him only a little lower than Shakespeare, but a little higher than God” (Brater, 7). In 2019, London—always a hotbed of Miller activity—witnessed an unprecedented five productions of his plays in stunning new performances: A mixed race staging of Death of A Salesman at the Young Vic, an all-female casting of The Crucible by The Yard, a race-blind production of The American Clock at the Old Vic, a revival of The Price featuring David Suchet as Solomon, and a major revival of All My Sons with the American actors Sally Field and Bill Pullman and the English stars Jenna Coleman and Colin Morgan. In Miller’s native New York, a major revival of All My Sons, featuring Tracy Letts and Annette Benning, caused considerable controversy when director Gregory Mosher withdrew from the production over a casting dispute. Off Broadway theatres also mounted The Archbishop’s Ceiling and two productions of The Crucible. Also, Brave New World produced a staged theatrical reading of The Hook, Miller’s unproduced 1949 screenplay. The American premiere of the work, which also spawned A View from the Bridge, took place at the Waterfront Barge Museum, docked in Red Hook, the Brooklyn neighborhood where Miller researched the waterfront. Thus, Miller’s

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drama continues—and will continue—to be relevant in the twenty-first century and consequently generate much theater and literary criticism. Miller wrote many of his plays as social and political commentary on twentieth-century events. Since his death, it is tempting to ask, “What would Miller say?” about current national issues or international crises: for example, How would he have viewed the 2016 presidential election? What does his work say about our current political climate? Miller’s powerful voice, stopped by death, still speaks to us about these. In 2001, Miller gave the annual Jefferson Lecture in Washington, DC, and caused a stir with his controversial opinion on the disputed 2000 election between Al Gore and George W. Bush. His speech, “Politics and the Art of Acting,” skewered both political parties and their candidates for their insincere performances and were strikingly prophetic about the 2016 election: ….Whether he admits it or not, the actor wants to be not only believed and admired, but also loved; what may help to account for the dullness of the last campaign was the absence of affection for either [candidate]….By the end it seemed like an unpopularity contest, a competition for who was less disliked by more people than the other, a demonstration of negative consent. (Miller 2001, 44)

Today his plays, stories, essays, and speeches are filtered through the lens of twenty-first-century events, and there has been a surge of revivals instigated by contemporary events. The U.S. political climate keeps Miller’s work much in the news. Remarking on the frequent productions of The Crucible, Miller realized that the play is produced in a country whenever a political coup appears imminent or a dictatorial regime has just been overthrown (Miller 1996, 162). Certainly, America’s political divisions, which continue unabated after the bruising presidential election, make it seem that Ivo Van Hove’s 2016 Broadway production was prescient. In 2018, when the accusations broke against Judge Brett Kavanaugh after his nomination to the Supreme Court, the hearings and investigations were compared to witch hunts, and many references were made to The Crucible. In an op-ed piece in The Washington Times , conservative columnist Suzanne Fields offered striking parallels to the play, maintaining that Brett Kavanaugh could play John Proctor. Moreover, one of President Trump’s favorite descriptions of the press and media is to call them the “Enemy of the People.” In 1950, Miller wrote his version of the Ibsen play of that title because of the Communist Witch Hunts. The

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President’s repeated use of the phrase spurred revivals of Miller’s drama on many world stages. Who would have thought that Donald Trump could promote Arthur Miller? At his core, Arthur Miller was always an autobiographical writer whose many works illustrate the conflict between the private and public. Miller scholarship is on the cusp of reinvention as new resources about his personal and professional life become available to scholars. In 2018, the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin announced its acquisition from the Miller Estate of the remainder of his papers, which includes not only drafts and original scripts of his plays, but also a cache of diaries, letters, notebooks, and personal correspondence. The center completed its cataloging in 2019 and the material is now available. Also, his daughter, Rebecca Miller, directed a critically acclaimed 2018 HBO documentary, Arthur Miller, Writer, that gave the opportunity to see an intimate portrait of her father in his own voice and love letters written to his wives: Mary Slattery, Marilyn Monroe, and Inge Morath. In addition, in 2019 the Arthur Miller Trust announced that Rebecca Miller is donating her father’s writing studio, which was located on his Tophet Road property in Roxbury, Connecticut, to the newly forming non-profit Arthur Miller Writing Studio organization, which will locate the studio next to the town library in Roxbury. Miller had this studio built when he moved from his original home in Roxbury at 153 Tophet Road to 232 Tophet Road in the spring of 1958. The studio was designed as a small space and then expanded slightly in the 1960s. There he wrote and revised plays such as After the Fall and The Price, screenplays including The Misfits, his autobiography Timebends , and his later plays. As the center of Miller’s creative life for almost half a century, this writing studio holds a signature place in American literary history. The studio will contain the original furnishings and the studio library of Miller and his third wife, the photographer Inge Morath.1 Thus, scrutiny of his letters, diaries, and correspondence at the Ransom Center and Miller’s studio promises to offer new perspectives on his life and especially his work. In a special centennial section of The Arthur Miller Journal in 2015 titled, “Why Miller is Important,” Miller’s biographer Christopher Bigsby offered a fitting commentary as to why Miller will continue to be relevant: “This is his centenary. It will soon pass, but his plays will not, being reimagined, re-invented and embraced by every generation, in every country, not as so many relics from a bygone age but as urgent messages about who we are and the world in which we live” (2).

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∗ ∗ ∗ Miller’s large dramatic canon has always drawn scholars and theater critics from all disciplines with diverse approaches. Current Miller scholarship offers striking evaluations, increasingly from perspectives not seen before. This anthology brings together a group of established and emergent Miller scholars to provide new views of the relevance of Miller’s ideas to contemporary issues and to analyze why his works continue to resonate in cultures throughout the world. The collection includes a cross-section of critical perspectives and theories. We have divided the collection into three parts. Part I: Miller and the American Dramatic Canon contains essays seeking to understand Miller and his continuing influence in the twenty-first century by exploring his role, along with Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams, in shaping American cultural themes and establishing an American dramatic tradition that influenced the playwrights who followed them. Livia Sacchetti examines how Miller created contemporary American tragedies by grounding them in the Greek classics and Ibsen. At the same time, he deeply imbued the plays with the political and social contradictions of his time, bending the laws of classical tragedy accordingly and bringing to the stage protagonists who are not immediately recognizable as heroic. She shows how the structure of three of his foundational plays—Death of Salesman, The Crucible, and A View from the Bridge— place his characters in a tragic position by having them face an ineluctable “devouring time.” Three essays connect Miller to his fellow major American playwrights. David Palmer traces how Eugene O’Neill created a new American theatrical ethos in which tragedy focused on how characters search for personal meaning. Examining O’Neill’s exploration of pipe dreams and relating this to Miller’s ideas about personal dignity in his 1949 essay “Tragedy and the Common Man,” Palmer argues that O’Neill and Miller together constructed one of the central elements in the conception of tragedy that emerged in many of the American dramatists who followed them. The distinguished scholar Brenda Murphy examines the visions of Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller in structuring their complicated family dramas, often depicting troubling relationships among parents and between siblings to challenge the dynamics of the American nuclear family. She shows how the families these two playwrights wrote about were markedly different. Miller’s conception of the family is fundamentally

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patriarchal. The families in his plays tend to be tight-knit units centered on a father who is a dominant presence, psychologically if not physically. On the other hand, Williams often represents the family as a postpatriarchal structure that has already disintegrated, resulting in a tenuous family unit characterized by dysfunctional relationships among its various members. Michael Y. Bennett compares how Arthur Miller and Edward Albee explored the hopes and illusions of the American Dream by investigating crises of post-World War II American family life. His essay juxtaposes how Miller dramatized the effects of disillusionment on the American familial unit in late 1940s with Albee’s depiction of the early 1960s, when the countercultural rumblings put the very notion of American familial stability into question. The final essays in this section focus on Miller’s influence on the American playwrights who followed him. Ellen B. Anthony explores how American women dramatists such as Lorraine Hansberry, Marsha Norman, Anna Deavere Smith, Suzan-Lori Parks, Lynn Nottage, and Annie Baker reconfigure and enhance two central themes in Miller’s drama: the family and the betrayal of the American Dream. David Palmer demonstrates how the act of shaming works in Miller’s conception of tragedy and connects shaming to racism and other forms of bigotry. Grounding his argument in August Wilson’s contention that much of African American drama involves a “warrior” response to racist reduction, Palmer examines how Wilson’s warrior-rebellion theme can be found in many of Miller’s plays and how it operates in key African American dramas: Langston Hughes’s Mulatto, Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman, Adrienne Kennedy’s Funnyhouse of a Negro, August Wilson’s Fences, Suzan-Lori Parks Topdog/Underdog, and Lynn Nottage’s By the Way, Meet Vera Stark. In the final essay of Part I, E. Andrew Lee shows how Miller’s rejection of pessimism seems to distinguish his plays from the work of later American dramatists such as David Mamet and Sam Shepard, whose plays often seem more recalcitrant and unforgiving. Yet, Lee argues that Miller’s The Price evinces intriguing parallels with works by these two iconic postmodern dramatists: Mamet’s American Buffalo and Shepard’s The Late Henry Moss. An examination of the parallels reveals The Price to be a harbinger of postmodern dramatic themes employed by both these writers. Part II: Miller, the Writer includes essays that examine not only Miller’s drama but also his extensive output of fiction and essays. The

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first essay by Jan Balakian considers how to teach Miller in the college classroom. Departing from his most popular classroom plays, Death of a Salesman and The Crucible, Balakian shows how his first Broadway hit, All My Sons, offers students the opportunity to read a powerful dramatization about social responsibility, acts and consequences, past and present, and the individual and society. She provides a blueprint for showing the relevance of these themes in contemporary culture. Joshua E. Polster compares the Irish immigrant characters in Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape and Miller’s one-act A Memory of Two Mondays. The discussion provides a greater understanding of the plays through their Irish characters and the important influence of O’Neill’s work on Miller’s playwriting, in addition to exploring similarities between the playwrights’ immigrant family histories. Rupendra Guha Majumdar traces how one of Miller’s primary stage tropes—the trial—operates throughout his oeuvre. Majumdar focuses on the protagonist’s trauma as he struggles to regain his personal dignity before the “empty bench” of an impersonal social law. He shows how Death of a Salesman, An Enemy of the People, The Crucible, and After the Fall dramatize the existential significance of trials as sources of both trepidation and reflection in the characters. Thiago Russo examines Miller’s late play The Ride Down Mt. Morgan as Miller’s lampooning of a pernicious individualism that arose in America during the 1980s. The Reagan era celebrated self-centeredness and greed and undermined the ideals of community and social justice that had been essential political guideposts for Miller. Russo also shows the play as a significant piece in Miller’s ongoing analysis of conflicting aspects of the American Dream. The next two pieces in this section examine Miller’s non-dramatic writing. Matthew Roudané considers Miller’s substantial output of literary and non-literary essays. Like Bernard Shaw and Bertolt Brecht, Miller was not only a playwright but also a prolific essayist who enjoyed the role of public intellectual. Roudané shows how Miller’s essays reveal his passionate commitment to social justice and human rights, his lifelong civic engagement with national and international politics, and his unwavering commitment to his art. Similarly, Susan C. W. Abbotson examines Miller’s prodigious output of fiction. Although best known as a dramatist, Miller was also a skilled fiction writer, producing a novel, a novella, many short stories, and a children’s book. Abbotson’s essay explores how Miller’s central concerns

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about identity and commitment, guilt and responsibility, hope, and individual potential in his plays are illustrated in new and interesting ways in his fiction, exploring alternate avenues and formulas. Paying closer attention to his fictional output suggests new ways of looking at and understanding Miller’s career as a whole. In this final essay of this section, Claire Conceison explores the significance of Miller’s encounters with China, including translation and dissemination of his texts in the People’s Republic, stagings of his plays by Chinese theater companies, his own 1983 direction of Death of a Salesman in Beijing in collaboration with Ying Ruocheng, and current retellings of that watershed event in new theater projects outside of China. This essay illuminates the important influence Miller’s involvement with China continues to have in the twenty-first century. Part III: Miller and Contemporary Issues focuses on the relevance of Miller’s ideas to issues in twenty-first-century contemporary culture. Miller’s biographer Christopher Bigsby declares that: “Human rights were a central concern of Arthur Miller.” Bigsby’s essay addresses Miller’s significance as a lifelong, outspoken public intellectual and defender of human rights in political activities, such as his stand against HUAC and the Vietnam War, and his work as president of International PEN. Bigsby also traces the political underpinnings of Miller’s art. Claire Gleitman’s essay examines the “suggestive similarities” between Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire and Miller’s Death of a Salesman. Both plays feature as their central male character a traveling salesman facing the potential collapse of his patriarchal status within his home. In each drama, females to some degree operate as an obstacle to the male’s quest to view himself as a successful, self-reliant male even as they operate as crucial ballasts for his self-esteem. Gleitiman’s discussion focuses on how the plays illustrate mid-twentieth-century anxieties about masculinity. In the final essay in the collection, “Devouring Mechanization: Miller and the Proto-Post-Humanism,” Peter Sloan explores the profound and irresolvable antagonism that Arthur Miller strives to understand and articulate between human beings and their changing environment. Many of his plays address people’s alienation from themselves and others amid urbanization and industrialization. In the twenty-first century, these issues come into sharper focus as we move into a post-human digital age where machines as extensions of the person and presumed enhancements of personal experience become more prevalent.

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Taken together, these essays not only contribute to the ongoing consideration of Miller and his work, but also affirm his relevance to contemporary and future generations of students, scholars, theater audiences, and practitioners.

Note 1. See “Editor’s Note,” The Arthur Miller Journal, Spring 2019, vol. 14, 1.

Works Cited Bigsby, Christopher. 2005. Arthur Miller: Un-American. The Arthur Miller Journal 1:1, 17. Bigsby, Christopher. 2015. Why Miller Is Important. The Arthur Miller Journal 10:2, 1–2. Brater, Enoch. 2007. Cross-Cultural Encounters. Arthur Miller’s Global Theater. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P. Fields, Suzanne. 2018. Kavanaugh in the Crucible. Washington Times, October 3. Miller, Arthur. 1987. Timebends: A Life. New York: Grove Press. Miller, Arthur. 1996. Why I Wrote The Crucible. The New Yorker, October 21: 155–64. Miller, Arthur. 2001. On Politics and the Art of Acting. New York: Viking, 2001.

PART I

Arthur Miller and the American Dramatic Canon

CHAPTER 2

Arthur Miller and American Tragedy Livia Sacchetti

“Theater’s ancient burden, and sometimes its glory, [is] the moral illumination of society and the human condition” (Miller 1994a, xv). This is the burden that Miller sees as the timeless force of drama, and the burden he chooses to carry. This choice is especially daring in Miller’s case, as he wittingly refuses the darkly parodic bend of absurdism—the genre of his time—and looks instead to create the contemporary American tragedy, grounding it in the Greek classics and Ibsen. His plays are deeply imbued with the political and social contradictions of his time, bending the laws of classical tragedy accordingly and bringing to the stage protagonists who are not immediately recognizable as heroic and who take root in the common experience of ordinary people. However, the structure of three of his foundational plays—Death of Salesman, The Crucible, and A View from the Bridge—places his characters in a tragic position by having them face an ineluctable “devouring time” (Shakespeare, Sonnet 19), triggered by an action that cannot be undone, while simultaneously uncovering the moral floundering of a society nestled in consumeristic and voyeuristic countervalues. The plays portray the paradoxical temporality of the postmodern world, and they absorb and reshape the idea of a chorus. Both these ideas

L. Sacchetti (B) St. Stephen’s School, Rome, Italy © The Author(s) 2020 S. Marino and D. Palmer (eds.), Arthur Miller for the Twenty-First Century, American Literature Readings in the 21st Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37293-4_2

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are used to illuminate the societal structures underlying the action and to rupture immediate empathy, making the tragic position of the characters evident and memorable. Miller’s approach to tragedy is poignantly significant because it seeks to shape “the social drama of this generation” based on the simultaneous understanding that it cannot be “the same” as it was in the past but that a notion of the tragic is necessary to humankind’s process of self-awareness (Miller 1994b, 61). This combination generates Miller’s specific approach to tragedy, which is intelligently self-aware and creates a lens through which to explore the “paradox of modernity,” as defined in philosophical terms by Heller (15). The roots of Miller’s characters are intrinsically contemporary, hence their relationship with the tragic can serve to illuminate the postmodern experience. In A Theory of Modernity, Heller explores the postmodern mindset by responding to the theories of modernity created by Hegel, Marx, and Weber and rooting her own theory in an understanding of the specific principle generating the postmodern perspective, as well as its relationship with temporality. “The moderns are sitting on a paradox,” she writes, “the modern world is grounded in a principle [freedom] which, in principle, does not ground anything. The fundamental paradox of modernity is [this] freedom, all other paradoxes of modernity, […] truth included, are grounded in [it].” She continues by postulating that all “paradoxes of modernity can be temporalized.” It is in the relationship with time that the postmodern mindset inherently differs from the modern and becomes most interesting in terms of Miller’s approach to the tragic. Heller defines the moderns’ relationship with temporality as based in a “faith in progression” and movement toward a “betterment of the world.” Conversely, the postmodern mindset—which stems from the “ultimate apocalypse,” Auschwitz, which “eroded” the “progressivist legitimation of modernity”—develops a “disbelief in linear progression, even in the case of the natural sciences, makes all models of ‘infinite progression’ suspect.” For Heller, “the postmodern accept life at the railway station. That is to accept living in an absolute present. […] The absolute present includes the future—the future of the present. And it includes the past—the past of the present” (Heller, 9–15). The condition thus described is inescapable and carries in this ineluctable present its tragic core; this is the elemental tragic experience at the heart of Miller’s plays, which he entwines with a sharp political commentary. Miller anchors his tragedies in the characters’ relationship with time and forges their experience of time as a perpetual standstill. In this his

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plays are akin to Beckett’s, which is interesting given how deliberately Miller distances himself from theater of the absurd. Time for both these writers becomes the relentless agent of an unavoidable fall, while breaking out of time becomes the only possible action to untangle an otherwise suffocating web. “We enter a time warp,” Bigsby says of Miller’s plays, adding “few writers have been as interested in time, its various ramifications, as Arthur Miller” (2005, 124). This warp allows Miller to bring the tragic sentiment to the stage in utterly contemporary terms, contributing to the reshaping of the form of tragedy by dramatizing a novel relationship between temporality and action. The action in Miller’s plays consistently takes place at Heller’s metaphorical train-less train station, and hence cannot generate change. The “absolute present” in the plays springs from memories of a haunting and conditioning past, which is, as Bigsby remarks, “the burden [the characters] bear,” (2005, 102) and which holds the protagonist’s “moral mistake or hamartia” (Palmer, 3), engulfing any future prospect. Death of a Salesman shapes this structure, with the “presentness of the past,” (Bloom, 30), absorbing the play’s temporal evolution. Time becomes both the only agent of the action and the only villain; Willy’s tragic fall precedes the action on stage and cannot be undone (see Roudané), subsuming the “ontological fall from Grace” that Steiner sees as necessary to the structure of a tragedy (1996, 4). Although, as Bigsby notes, “there is no crime,” (2004, 111), the audience nonetheless witnesses the effect of Willy’s fall and the inescapability of its consequences as a tragic condition. The political implications (see Sell) in the play enhance and expand its portrayal of temporality by imbuing it with a poignant search for morality rooted in the ancient relationship between tragedy and the polis. As Brater notes, Miller’s moral search is extensive and deeply indebted to his study of American culture, “creating landscape as vast as Whitman’s [and] a moral center as lucid as Emerson’s” (3). In this light, Charley, Willy’s neighbor in Death of a Salesman, functions as a chorus juxtaposing popular wisdom to Willy’s pursuit of illusions and thereby explicitly forcing the audience to question the societal constructs and urgings underlying Willy’s character. The combination of Willy’s innocent belief in an exquisitely American mythology (see Roudané)—the idea that one might “walk into the jungle” only to “walk out with diamonds” (Miller 2015, 159)—and Charley’s measured approach to events illuminates the societal web as the catalyst of Willy’s past and the conditioning force in his present, tinging Willy’s fall with universal hues and political undertones.

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Miller designs the pace of the play through the characters’ lines rather than their actions, so that both the stillness of Willy’s condition and the progression of time around him are constantly obvious, in what is “the beginning of many explosions of form” (Miller 1994c, 14). The characters’ entrances and exits and the juxtaposition of phantasmagorical characters with real ones become crucial in the audience’s experience of the combined agency of time and of a corrupt mythology. Charley first comes on stage between the Woman’s first appearance and Ben’s. Thus positioned, Charley’s presence—which is radically unnecessary to the plot—creates a baseline against which the “collapsed time” (Miller 1994d, 35) Willy experiences can be measured. Further, the Woman’s and Ben’s entrances and exits mark the different scenes in each act and introduce the myths Willy has fallen prey to, thus having the past shape the timing of the action in the present and making time—or rather the memory of past times—the agent of its own stillness. The Woman’s first appearance brings to the stage the shadow of Willy’s fall in Biff’s eyes, as well as the moment when Biff renounces his dream; this specific moment looms over the present and is projected on the future of the play, where it will come into focus. On the other hand, Ben’s first appearance gives a voice and a palpable presence to the mythology that has shaped Willy’s self-awareness; in Bigsby’s words, this is the myth “of a society built on social performance and wedded to the idea of transforming the future.” Simultaneously, it presents “characters whose hopes and illusions seem instantly recognizable and archetypal” (Bigsby 2005, 101). Through this structure, Miller creates a past that is paradoxically both a timid and a bold presence on stage. The Woman first appears as an intrusion in the present, her influence over it invisible, and her lines hardly remarkable. She thanks Willy “for the stockings. I love a lot of stockings” (Miller 2015, 175). Her presence is wittingly ambiguous; she seems to be a sign of Willy’s breakdown, while she is also the palpable presence of a past that is still shaping the present. In this light, she grants the audience access to Willy’s subconscious awareness. The Woman mentions the quantity of silk stockings she has, while Linda “mends her stockings” in the next scene. In an essay on the “dream tissue” in the play, Livesay notes that “language has always been the structuring field on which [Miller’s] imagination operates” (22). This is particularly significant here as the stockings become both the linguistically signified and a physical signifier. Their physical mending by Linda is symbolic of the economic failings of Willy’s life, while their mentioning by the Woman portrays the cause of

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that mending both in personal terms—Willy cannot move past the incident with the Woman—and in collective terms—the seduction of easy money. Ben’s presence is specular to the Woman’s and gives corporeal presence to the mythology that underlies both Willy’s dream and the societal constructs in which it is grounded, giving Willy’s individual fall a collective and political quality. Willy defines the myth that Ben brings to the stage as foundational to America: walk into a jungle and walk out with diamonds. Through Ben, Miller embeds what Otten has called “the corrosive ethos of American capitalism” (133) into the play’s fabric. The smokey implausibility of Ben’s story casts it as the blueprint of an irrational, potentially damaging belief in the power of personality, while Ben’s physical presence and his existence as Willy’s brother grounds the phantasmagorical story in the play’s plot, making it a catalyst for the characters’ actions and reflecting the power of a pervasive but corrupt system on the individual. Miller’s use of Charley is also fundamental in the audience’s understanding of the dynamic interplay of personal and political implications and in the creation of a motionless temporality. Charley takes on the role that was assigned to the chorus in Greek tragedy and becomes a mediator between the audience and the action presented on stage. The problematic definition of the chorus has been written on extensively (see Foley); however, certain key aspects occur repeatedly across Greek tragedies and have come to define the term. Primarily, “by the conventions of the tragic, state choruses cannot initiate, control, or take action” and their “effective interventions are verbal rather than physical.” Further, “choral identity is defined by the questions that choral action and behavior might obliquely raise about leadership in a democracy” and “all choruses gravitate towards traditional wisdom” expressing “cultural memory” or “political views” (Foley, 22–24). This position is Charley’s position in the play: external to the action, his verbal interventions serve to illuminate the play’s political implications and to question Willy’s choices from the point of view of cultural wisdom. Miller himself has frequently addressed the significance of Charley’s character as “the other,” the possible alternative to Willy’s way of life, bringing to light the possibility to choose an alternative to the myth of “personality” that conditions Willy (Miller 1994d, 150). While Miller presents through Willy’s own words the mythology that has shaped the frozen time that impedes his capacity to act, it is Charley’s

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reaction that shows those stories’ corrupt roots. Charley’s lines consistently punctuate Willy’s shortcomings, gently underscoring their implications. His first words in the play are “Everything all right?” after Willy has introduced him as “a man of few words” and after the Woman first appears. That simple question serves to underscore the evident crack in Willy’s ability to live in the present; it also turns Charley into a reliable presence for the audience as he clarifies the Woman’s ambiguous appearance. This allows Miller to embed a commentary on the nature of Willy’s fate that is political and makes it the outcome of a societal unconscious combined with an individual shortcoming. Further, when Willy recounts the figure of the salesman by describing Dave Singleman’s funeral, he is constructing an alluring fable, capturing an image of glamor in the shiny, green, velvet slippers the audience never sees. As he says elsewhere, recalling Biff’s offers of college scholarships, “that’s the wonder, the wonder of this country, that a man can end with diamonds here on the basis of being liked!” Charley’s line, “Willy when are you going to grow up?” breaks past these myths and brings their absurdity to light (Miller 2015, 169). Willy’s blindness to the falsity of the promise is tragic precisely because Charley’s words identify Willy’s needs, but Willy refuses to hear them. Their confrontation turns time into an oracle, announcing an ending that is fixed and a destiny that has become star-crossed, creating the “elemental condition of tragedy” (Otten, 133), or in Miller’s own words, a notion that “birds [will] come home to roost” (Miller 1994e, 9) Willy’s tragic fate exists specularly in Biff; their confrontation in the present is but a reflection of their confrontation in the past—in the only moment when Willy was forced out of his blindness and into a sharp instant of self-awareness. Willy’s faith in the potential for Biff to achieve greatness is nestled in the need to retract the specific moment when he fell in Biff’s eyes, and hence it is doomed to fail. Further, it springs from the necessity to perpetuate the myth, thus corroborating its truth and undoing the squalor of the present. Willy presents Biff by seaming together his son’s destiny and the country’s: “In the greatest country in the world a young man with such—personal attractiveness, gets lost” (Miller 2015, 159). The presentation of Biff’s destiny as a natural effect of his personality is clearly juxtaposed to Bernard’s figure; Bernard’s success shows the falsity of the myths that have guided Willy and Biff. Further, Willy’s relationship with Biff bends backward in time, with their greatest proximity coming

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before the beginning of the play, and perhaps having never existed. As Willy looks offstage, he speaks to a son who does not exist in the same way that he addresses a brother who is not there. Aristotle viewed drama as the imitation of action. In Salesman, the tragedy is presented as the action of time: set in motion by an individual’s fall spawned by a flawed myth, it is set to generate its own unchangeable future. As Steiner suggests in The Death of Tragedy and again in “‘Tragedy,’ Reconsidered,” the notion of tragedy in contemporary terms is problematic, and Miller himself acknowledges this in multiple essays. Nonetheless, the tragic sentiment is present—if in exquisitely contemporary terms—in Death of a Salesman. Steiner identifies the problem with creating a contemporary notion of tragedy in the progressive waning of the idea of Fate. He finds “the axiomatic constant in tragedy [to be an] ontological homelessness,” an “estrangement from life … man’s ontological fall from grace [without which] there can be no authentic tragedy” (2004, 3). A secular world, he argues, loses this state. Interestingly, though, the collapsed time that imprisons Willy—and that Heller carefully identifies as a definitive marker of the postmodern mindset— reconceptualizes the idea of Fate or of a fall from Grace by rooting it in a scientific, and hence secular “ontological homelessness.” The cause of Willy’s fall is not divine; it lies in the spell of time, which he can neither undo nor break out of without dying. Steiner closes “‘Tragedy,’ Reconsidered” by stating that our “bewilderment with grief in the world [will find] new expressive forms growing out of Woyzeck, out of Godot,” reading the latter as the possible point of transition into “post-metaphysical, post-metaphoric modes” (9). It is in this light that Death of a Salesman is inherently tragic in that it frames the tragic sentiment in a postmodern world, much as in Beckett’s works, despite Miller’s concerns about theater of the absurd. Further, while Willy’s character certainly slips into pathetic moments, as Heilman notes (15), his position in time never does. Constantly reminded of a painful past, he experiences his life as an unstoppable march of time that he no longer can control or overturn. When the defining scene in the play finally is revealed, it is set in the past but relived in the present, revealing it as the action of time. The Woman’s laughter in the Boston hotel room brings to the stage the mockery of time. In being revealed to Biff, the squalor of Willy’s life becomes real and inescapable. The greatness to which Willy aspires—the personality, the popularity, the green slippers, the fortune—morphs into a pathetic delusion, coloring the presence of the “little rubber pipe” that Linda

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removes and returns to the gas furnace in the basement. If “death lies at the end of tragedy like the ultimate promise of form [offering] a retrospective grace” (Bigsby 2005, 118), the death that befalls Willy is more complicated and less liberating. Death breaks him out of time; as such, it liberates him and, as Bigsby remarks, Willy’s life “is drained of the tragic” (2005, 118) because Willy dies hopeful. However, Willy’s death does not resolve the paradox of a temporality that is constraining in its unfolding; therefore, it is not cathartic for the audience, although it does touch upon a human universal: the condition of existing in time. The structure of The Crucible is in many ways nestled in the study of temporality and the tragic sentiment that emerges in Death of a Salesman. In The Crucible, Miller deliberately expands his study of a corrosive mythology by exploring the possibility for a “knowledgeable campaign” to create “not only a terror, but a new subjective reality, a veritable mystique which gradually [assumes] a holy resonance” (Miller 1994f, 153). The play’s historical backdrop morphs into an archetypal study in the mechanics of a pervasive mythology that undoes individual conscience and thought; this shift projects the play onto a timeless canvas. The plot itself is as historical as it is allegorical and abstract; it operates simultaneously on a symbolic plane—by virtue of the deliberate parallels with both McCarthyism and Nazi Germany—and on a realistic plan, becoming a kind of morality play. In this light, it stands as a symbolic warning of the potential for rational thought to come undone at the hand of skilfull propaganda, a hauntingly prophetic message for our own times. Further, Miller distorts the historical account, by reshaping Abigail’s character and story to interlace the private and the public, heightening the tragic sentiment in the play. Thus constructed, the play shares a core element with Othello, with a “witchcraft of the wit” replacing the hand of fate as the source of tragedy. The fall is then grounded in the individual’s inability to break past the blinding fabric of words used to corrupt and the society that is easily bent by them (See Lombardo on Othello as the first modern tragedy in this sense). Miller lifts Salem out of its historical context, using it to shed light on a “paradox in whose grip we still live. […] For good purposes, even high purposes, the people of Salem developed a theocracy […] to prevent any kind of disunity that might open it to destruction by material or ideological enemies,” he argues, “and the theocracy designed to protect them then became the agent of destruction” (Miller 2015, 350). In a similar way to Death of a Salesman, the crucial action that embodies Proctor’s

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moral fall precedes the play, hence the play’s arc lacks an evolution and is only a summation of effects, with time never moving away from the influence of the past. The mythology that moves The Crucible rests on principles that are seamlessly projected into the future and that are inherently American. Bigsby speaks of the “kinetic energy [which] surges through the wormhole from 1692 to 1953” and of a moment that is “both in time and outside of time, which is to say within a myth” (2005, 128). Further, the “ontological homelessness” necessary in a tragedy morphs into an “ontological homelessness” with words, which can manipulate thoughts turning the mind onto itself. In writing about Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ? Bigsby notes “if George and Martha are capable of creating a complex mythology rather than face their situation, then so too is the society they represent;” their “faith in abstractions” is their ultimate undoing (1967, 261). Miller’s portrayal of abstractions is analogous, if more poignantly political; in many ways, it is rendered more unsettling precisely because of the ease with which 1692 is the shadow of 1953 and perhaps a prophetic shadow of today’s world. In order to heighten the connection between the individual and the collective, Miller rewrites Abigail’s character and introduces physical seduction in the story-line. This nests a powerful feminine tragedy within the public tragedy and makes the tragic sentiment emerge empathetically and more poignantly for the audience, bringing history onto an individual plane. Abigail is a makeshift Iago, who ignites the words in Hale’s book and brings the theocracy into action. On the other hand, it is the characters’ implicit need for a Devil that fuels events. In this light, the catalyst and agent of the tragedy is both individual and collective, each working in specular position, making the distinction between public and private obsolete. The interplay between the public actions that shape the polis and cause its doom and the individual choices that trigger and underlie the communal ones makes The Crucible a kaleidoscopic tragedy, where a private blindness to consequences reverberates in a public one. Miller addresses the community’s need for a Devil explicitly by writing that “like Reverend Hale and others on this stage, we conceive the Devil as a necessary part of a respectable cosmology.” He then concludes “the necessity of the Devil may become evident as a weapon, a weapon designed and used time and time again […] to whip men into surrender.” He also notes that no audience ever has laughed at the line that introduces Hale: “We cannot look to superstition in this. The Devil is precise” (Miller 2015, 349–50).

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This comment makes the collective sentiment that underlies the actions of the community extend, at least potentially, to the audience. Abigail’s effect on the children is specular to the effect that Hale’s books have on the community. The gravitas in Hale’s language makes both the community’s fear and the rhetoric used to heighten it palpable. His books are “weighted with authority,” while his ability to identify the Devil’s work comes from the fact that “the marks of his presence are definite as stone.” The corporeal quality Miller gives to ephemeral qualities characterizes the transition from simple politics to a “political policy equated with moral right, and opposition to it with malevolence” (Miller 2015, 350–53). The weight in Hale’s books and words is the weight of malevolence brought into action; the destruction of this comes shrouded in an archetypal force. It is in this respect that the “ruling orthodoxy” performs a “ritual of conformity.” (Bigsby 2005, 149). The action of fate is triggered therefore not by the will of the gods but by an inability of the people to have a will outside the dogma they are fed. Most remarkably, on an individual plane, The Crucible is truly a feminine tragedy. Where on a public level, Proctor, Hale, and Danforth are the dominant characters, privately, the confrontation is between Abigail and Elizabeth Proctor. Abigail’s manipulation of the children only to imprison Elizabeth gives the play an active villain and a personal intent to destroy. Conversely, Elizabeth’s staunch morals make her akin to Antigone in terms of defiant heroism, even in the face of death. Abigail’s ability to transform Betty’s accusation that she “drank blood” into an advantage by telling the girls that she will “come to [them] in the black of some terrible night” defines her character (Miller 2015, 340–41). Further, her power over the girls mirrors Hale’s power over the community; her lies run parallel to his refusal of reason, creating the spine of a community so fragile that it cannot know itself, again like today. Proctor’s refusal to lie publicly, and hence lose himself, is specular to Elizabeth’s refusal to yield privately. The mirroring of themes and characters throughout the play is pervasive. The feminine is juxtaposed to the masculine, much as the public is juxtaposed to the private; their constant interlacing in a cosmology where balance rests on the interaction of the parts gives The Crucible a timeless quality. The tragic sentiment that emerges is the one that Cassius discusses with Brutus in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, finding the fault “not in our stars but in ourselves” (Act 1, Scene 2).

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The collapsed timeframe and the use of a chorus to create a timeless comment are reprised and extended in A View from the Bridge. Although the balance between the intimate, psychological tragedy, and the political is reversed, the structure remains analogous. The temporal standstill is created by a veritable chorus, whose interventions explicitly move the play onto a mythological and allegorical plane. The structural progression from Death of a Salesman, through The Crucible, and culminating in A View from the Bridge increases in terms of the audience’s responsibility in evaluating the events. All three plays lack a catharsis and a clear resolution of the central conflict, as that conflict is embedded in the action of time and is thus ineluctable. However, the level of abstraction of the tragic arc consistently increases, lifting empathy from the characters and transforming them into a comment on the tragedy of existing in time while blind to the vicissitudes time brings. Alfieri’s interventions condition the audience’s experience of the play. He expands time infinitely, nodding to the story’s ancient roots: “I often think that behind that superstitious little nod of theirs lie three thousand years of distrusts” (Miller 2015, 440). This lifts the events on the stage and projects them onto an archetypal canvas more powerful and more prominent than that of the previous two plays. Time is a strong agent in this play; it is presented as a loop, with the action having already taken place both in terms of Alfieri’s knowledge of the story and in terms of its roots in ancient history—yet it is also about to begin. The societal implications in this play reach the very core of the American nation, laying bare the difficulty of handling integration in a society rooted in immigration. Further, the play’s beginning contains the play’s ending not just in Alfieri’s introduction but also in the action on stage. The opening scene introduces both the individual and the political plan; the “two submarines,” whose lives need saving and whose condition can be “snitched to the Immigration” are presented alongside Eddie and his “strangely nervous” interest in his niece, nodding to the play’s ending on both planes (Miller 2015, 440–43). Alfieri defines Eddie’s character in terms of his condition, heightening the tragic implications of existing in time with little personal agency, of having to reckon with moments accrued blindly, of mindlessly becoming the catalyst of a destiny. Eddie is presented as “as good a man as he had to be,” and as having “never expected to have a destiny” (Miller 2015, 451). The audience’s responsibility in the moral grounding of the play is heightened, as they must judge the societal fabric Eddie is born in as

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well as his personal choices. “The law is only a word for what has a right to happen,” Alfieri warns the audience, placing both the play’s political implications and the personal choices in the hands of a kind of fate that time inevitably will reveal. Thus structured, Miller’s tragedies create a foundational study on the ineluctable action of time both in political and individual terms, offering an illuminating view of the postmodern paradox of time as an agent of stillness, on the fabric of American mythology, and on the resurfacing of a tragic mode centered around a rational but blind cosmos.

Works Cited Bigsby, Christopher. 1967. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Edward Albee’s Morality Play. Journal of American Studies 1:2, 257–68. http://www.jstor. org/stable/27552789. Bigsby, Christopher. 2005. Arthur Miller: A Critical Study. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Bloom, Harold. 2004. Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman”. New York: Chelsea House. Brater, Enoch. 2007. Cross-Cultural Encounters: Arthur Miller and the International Theater Community, in Enoch Brater, ed., Arthur Miller’s Global Theater. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 3–12. Foley, Helene. 2003. Choral Identity in Greek Tragedy. Classical Philology 98:1, 1–30. Heilman, Robert. 1968. Tragedy and Melodrama. Seattle: U of Washington P. Heller, Agnes. 1999. A Theory of Modernity. Oxford: Blackwell. Livesay, Lew. 2007. Arthur Miller’s Dream Tissue: From “The Testament of Dr. Mabuse” to Dreams of Power in Death of a Salesman, The Archbishop’s Ceiling, and Everybody Wins. Arthur Miller Journal 2:2 (Fall), 21–52. Lombardo, Agostino. 1996. L’Eroe Tragico Moderno. Roma: Bulzoni. Miller, Arthur. 1994a. Author’s Foreword to the 2nd Edition, in The Theatre Essays of Arthur Miller. New York: Methuen Drama. Miller, Arthur. 1994b. On Social Plays, in The Theatre Essays of Arthur Miller. New York: Methuen Drama. Miller, Arthur. 1994c. The Salesman Has a Birthday, in The Theatre Essays of Arthur Miller. New York: Methuen Drama. Miller, Arthur. 1994d. The American Theater, in The Theatre Essays of Arthur Miller. New York: Methuen Drama. Miller, Arthur. 1994e. The Nature of Tragedy, in The Theatre Essays of Arthur Miller. New York: Methuen Drama.

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Miller, Arthur. 1994f. Introduction to the Collected Plays, in The Theatre Essays of Arthur Miller. New York: Methuen Drama. Miller, Arthur. 2015. The Penguin Arthur Miller, Collected Plays. New York: Penguin. Otten, Terry. 2012. The Legacy of Arthur Miller. Arthur Miller Journal 7:1–2, 131–42. Palmer, David. 2014. Miller, O’Neill, Moral Despair, and Tragedy. Arthur Miller Journal 9:1–2, 27–42. Roudané, Matthew. 1997. Death of a Salesman and the Poetics of Arthur Miller, in Christopher Bigsby, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Arthur Miller. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Sell, Mike. 2005. Arthur Miller and the Drama of American Liberalism, in Enoch Brater, ed., Arthur Miller’s America. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P. Steiner, George. 1996. The Death of Tragedy. New Haven: Yale UP. Steiner, George. 2004. “Tragedy,” Reconsidered. New Literary History, vol. 35. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP. https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2004.0024.

CHAPTER 3

Pipe Dreams and the Self: Eugene O’Neill’s and Arthur Miller’s Conceptions of Tragedy David Palmer

The opening lines of Nebraska poet David Ray’s “Thanks, Robert Frost” capture a central idea about tragedy. In the poem, Ray recounts Frost’s response when he was asked toward the end of his life whether he still had hope for the future. Frost replied that he did—and also hope for the past: “that it will become something we can bear.” At first it seems odd to think of the past as something that can change and become, but Frost’s response expresses the idea that memory is not the retrieval and mental reproduction of past information and events but a “reconstructive process,” as Marya Schechtman calls it (124): memory, especially longterm memory, is the creation of stories that help us make sense of our actions and lives. This idea rests on a broader conception of the self as a narrative: our brains create us as ongoing selves, or persons, by giving the events in our lives coherence—literally having them cohere with each other in meaningful ways. Thus, we connect our present to the past and have these connections provide direction for the future. We exist for ourselves as the central character in this story, and it is the story itself that

D. Palmer (B) Massachusetts Maritime Academy, Buzzards Bay, MA, USA © The Author(s) 2020 S. Marino and D. Palmer (eds.), Arthur Miller for the Twenty-First Century, American Literature Readings in the 21st Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37293-4_3

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gives events meaning, makes them our own, and holds them together as interrelated elements of a single ongoing life rather than merely isolated disparate events of which we have some kind of awareness. There are other conceptions of the self (see Part 1 of Schechtman 1996 and Galen Strawson’s critique of the narrative view of the self in his 2004 essay, for example), but tragedy itself has a narrative structure. As Arthur Miller pointed out in his 1949 essay “The Nature of Tragedy,” tragedy, unlike melodrama, portrays conflict not just between characters but within a character (11–12). Eugene O’Neill expressed a similar idea in his 1932 essay “Memoranda on Masks”: “One’s outer life passes in a solitude haunted by the masks of others; one’s inner life passes in a solitude hounded by the masks of oneself.” For both O’Neill and Miller, the experience of tragedy involves a crippling disruption and ultimate failure of a person’s self-story. Tragedies need not always depict these problems of the self. Consider Sean O’Casey’s Dublin plays from the 1920s, for example; these are stories of people being caught up and destroyed by the accidents of events they had only a small role in shaping: think of Bessie Burgess being shot by British troops at the end of The Plough and the Stars (243–46). O’Casey’s plays are not about people confronting their own responsibility for the ways their delusions have destroyed their lives. In American tragedies since O’Neill, Williams, and Miller, however, confrontations with personal responsibility and our delusions about ourselves often are the core of the plot. As a result, American tragic dramas tend to be the story of the collapse of a person’s self-narrative: her confrontation with the fact that the values and beliefs that she assumed had been guiding her life are merely delusional pipe dreams, that as a person, she is someone more shameful than she had assumed. That perhaps is what David Ray meant when he had Frost say that he hoped the past would “become something we can bear.” Tragedy occurs when the only story that seems real to us about ourselves and our actions is one we find unbearable. This paper is about pipe dreams, the role they have in protecting our self-narratives and sense of personal dignity, and the way in which the collapse of our pipe dreams often is depicted as the essence of tragedy in modern American drama. After a brief discussion of how a self is a narrative, the paper turns to Eugene O’Neill’s exploration of pipe dreams and tragedy in The Iceman Cometh and then to the role of pipe dreams in Miller’s plays. I’ll argue that O’Neill and Miller share the view that tragedy involves confrontations with pipe dreams and the collapse of a

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person’s self-narrative, but that Miller’s plays more often depict the tragic hero’s indignation—a righteous anger and rebellion against the forces that challenge his self-narrative—rather than the despair that is central to O’Neill’s works. ∗ ∗ ∗ Let us begin by looking more closely at how a person constructs a sense of self, the role that narratives have in this process, and how pipe dreams as O’Neill understands them are involved. The views of a variety of thinkers could be cited here, from William James to Richard Wollheim, Harry Frankfurt, and David Velleman, among others. For reasons of brevity, however, let us concentrate on Marya Schechtman’s ideas, which in some ways encapsulate these views in general. According to Schechtman: Individuals constitute themselves as persons by coming to think of themselves as persisting subjects who have had experience in the past and will continue to have experience in the future, taking certain experiences as theirs. […] A person’s identity […] is constituted by the content of her self narrative, and the traits, actions, and experiences included in it are, by virtue of that inclusion, hers. (94) To say that a person’s self -conception is narrative is to say that she understands her own life in this way—interpreting the individual episodes in terms of their place in the unfolding story. A person’s self-conception is a narrative self-conception, then, insofar as the incidents and experiences that make up his life are not viewed in isolation, but interpreted as part of the ongoing story that gives them their significance. (97) The sense of one’s life as unfolding according to the logic of a narrative is not just an idea we have, it is an organizing principle of our lives. It is the lens through which we filter our experience and plan for actions. (113) Creating an autobiographical narrative is not simply composing a story of one’s life—it is organizing and processing one’s experience in a way that presupposes an implicit understanding of oneself as an evolving protagonist. (142) There is a strong movement in contemporary psychology to look at memory not as a reproductive but rather as a reconstructive process. […] We do

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not need to resort to crude, literal reproduction of our physical and psychological histories, but can pick and choose the important elements, use sophisticated representational devices, and shape a story that can express what we take to be the basic and essential information about our lives. (124–25) The experiences woven together into a person’s narrative interact and alter one another in such a way that the narrative itself becomes the primary unit. The narrative is like the soup into which the experiences are thrown, seasoning and altering one another—the past is reinterpreted and experienced in a new light in virtue of the present. (143–44) Persons do not exist in a vacuum. The very concept of personhood is inherently connected to the capacity to take one’s place in a certain complex web of social institutions and interactions. […] One needs a self-concept that is basically in sync with the view of one held by others. […] It is this recognition which leads to the constraints on an identity-constituting narrative—to be identity-defining an individual’s self-narrative must conform in certain crucial respects to the narrative others tell of his life. (95)

Schechtman’s basic idea is that we create ourselves by selectively incorporating certain past events into a personal narrative that places these events in a continuous, coherent account, relating them to each other, and thus giving each of them significance and meaning for us. By bringing these events together and including them in our personal narratives, we make the events our own, as opposed to seeing them as events independent of us, and in doing so we create a self: the self being the entity that has experienced these events directly and thus owns them. That is what Schechtman means on page 142 quoted above when she says we experience ourselves as a “protagonist” in a story. The self is a creation in the story itself. It is the character at the center of the story, the entity that all the events are about. As William James says at the end of his chapter “The Self” in Psychology: Briefer Course: “the thoughts themselves are the thinkers” (1892, 209). The “thinker”—that is the self, the entity we experience as having the thoughts—is itself a thought, an element created in the story. Our self-narratives can change over time as new events lead us to reinterpret our understanding of the past. That is what Schechtman means on pages 124–25 quoted above when she says memory is “reconstructive” rather than “reproductive.” Memory is not like pulling unchanging

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file folders about past events from some repository in our minds, files that merely reproduce and present static, old stories of those happenings. Memory is more like reconfiguring our understanding of those past events, leading us to reinterpret who we take ourselves to be. This is why David Ray, in the poem mentioned at the beginning of this essay, can say that Frost expressed hope about the past, that it could “become something we can bear.” The hope is that we can find stories about the past— and thus about who we are in the present, the person who has arisen from that past—in which we can find peace and contentment. The fact that these stories we tell ourselves about who we are can change as we confront new events provides not only “hope for the past,” as Ray has Frost say, but also the psychological space for the experience of tragedy. Tragedy occurs—at least this particular kind of tragedy—when we find ourselves confronted by a story about ourselves that we cannot bear and that we find inescapable. The story is experienced as an unbearably shameful truth about ourselves that destroys our sense of who we are and how we have lived our lives, creating a kind of psychological death and leaving us incapable of continuing to engage with the world as we had in the past. Our old self is dead; its values and beliefs have been shown to be false; they no longer can guide us. Without a coherent self-narrative, we find ourselves adrift without purpose or direction. That is one of various ways tragedy can be experienced, one as old as Oedipus and Macbeth, and one that is central to plays by O’Neill or Miller. Our ability to maintain a self-narrative and avoid this kind of tragic collapse of the self depends significantly on whether other people accept the narrative about ourselves we present to them. Schechtman comments on this in the quotation from page 95 above about the social context of the self. This idea will be important for our understanding of the psychological safety the denizens of Harry Hope’s flophouse provide each other in Iceman and the devastating threat Hickey brings. In her discussion of the self, Schechtman analyses self-blindness or selfdelusion by drawing a distinction between what she calls “implicit” and “explicit” self-narratives (115–19). An “explicit” narrative is the one the person consciously accepts; it is the story he tells himself about who he is and what is guiding his action. But people also are guided by “implicit” narratives: values, attitudes, and beliefs they are less likely to acknowledge but which nonetheless are powerful drivers of choices they make and how they live their lives.

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What O’Neill means by “pipe dream” can be understood in terms of Schechtman’s implicit and explicit self-narratives. A pipe dream is a part of a person’s explicit self-narrative that turns out to be false. The person explicitly explains his actions in terms of one set of motivations or beliefs when in fact those actions actually are being driven by an unacknowledged implicit self-narrative that contains different elements, a different story of who the person really is, his values, and what drives him. In Iceman, tragedy involves a confrontation with that implicit self-narrative and the collapse of the explicit narrative. As we will see, Miller’s vision of tragedy and of pipe dreams (although he does not use this term explicitly in relation to his plays) is related to this. In many of Miller’s plays, characters have a strong self-narrative, a story they tell themselves about a goal they have that defines who they are or a story that explains to them their place in the world, how they came to be in that place, and what they are doing. Tragedy occurs when they are forced to admit that their story is false: a pipe dream rather than a reality. For Miller, tragedy does not necessarily involve a confrontation with the implicit narrative; it can involve merely the collapse of the explicit narrative, the realization that some fundamentally important goal never can be achieved or that a basic belief has been a delusion. Miller’s tragedies also involve depictions of indignation more than O’Neill’s. Miller depicts his character’s rebelling against the forces that challenge their self-narratives; O’Neill tends to focus more on his character’s despair. There are, then, three modes or depictions of tragedy in O’Neill and Miller’s plays that we will consider this paper; all of them arise from challenges to characters’ self-narratives. The first is a confrontation with the collapse of a self-narrative and the resulting despair; this is what happens to Larry Slade in Iceman and also can be seen in many of Miller’s characters. The second is an indignant rebellion against challenges to a self-narrative, which is found in many of Miller’s tragic heroes and less frequently in O’Neill’s. The third is a character’s confrontation with the complexity and internal inconsistency of his original self-narrative, a working through to acknowledgment of that complexity, and finally an acceptance of a new and more complicated sense of self that allows for inner peace and the reestablishment of psychological equilibrium; this is what happens to Parritt in Iceman, and we will see similar characters in Miller’s plays. With this as a theoretical background, let us turn to O’Neill’s exploration of pipe dreams and tragedy in The Iceman Cometh (1939, 1946). ∗ ∗ ∗

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In this play, the traveling salesman Hickey makes his annual visit to Harry Hope’s bar and flophouse to celebrate Hope’s birthday, but this year he is different. He now believes he has found inner peace by abandoning his pipe dreams, and rather than jollying along with the denizens of Hope’s place, he now challenges them to confront their own pipe dreams as a way, as he understands it, of bringing them peace also. O’Neill presents four ways in which characters deal with this attack on their explicit self-narratives, the challenge that these stories are merely delusional pipe dreams, and the characters’ resulting confrontation with their unacknowledged implicit self-narratives as the real drivers of their actions: 1. Hickey himself 2. Harry Hope and the other residents of his flophouse 3. Don Parritt, a young anarchist who recently betrayed his mother, Rosa, and other anarchists to the police 4. Larry Slade, an old anarchist, current resident of Hope’s flophouse, and Rosa’s lover years ago when her son Don was a boy. To understand O’Neill’s analysis of pipe dreams and tragedy, we need to start with Hickey. Hickey arrives at Harry Hope’s believing he finally has confronted and overcome a pipe dream that has burdened his life. As Hickey tells the story in act 4 (693–703), he has loved his wife Evelyn deeply since their youth: “I loved Evelyn better than anything in life” (701). But Hickey is a drunk and a philanderer, and when he returns home from his repeated binges, he sees clearly how much his actions hurt Evelyn. She always forgives him, and he promises to reform, but he never does; he finds overcoming the desires that drive those binges impossible. Hickey castigates himself: How can he truly love Evelyn as deeply as he does and continue to cause her this pain; if he truly loves her, he must find a way to alleviate her suffering. Then he has what he thinks is a revelation. His delusion, his pipe dream, a pipe dream he has shared with Evelyn, is that he is capable of reforming and that reforming is a possible route for him to stop hurting her. He now admits that path is impossible. He must give up that hope and seek some other way to stop hurting his wife. The solution he comes to is murdering her while she sleeps. He says he saw this murder as an act of love and proudly takes responsibility for it, calling the police afterwards to

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have them pick him up at Harry Hope’s. This is the explicit self-narrative with which Hickey arrives at Hope’s. It leaves the core of his sense of self intact: he remains in this story the man who loves Evelyn. The pipe dream he has destroyed is the delusion that he is capable of reform as a way of ending Evelyn’s pain, and having confronted and abandoned that pipe dream, he feels liberated from the painful pursuit of unattainable goals. It is that sense of liberation and peace that he thinks he will bring to the people at Hope’s by getting them also to abandon their pipe dreams. But Hickey’s plan does not work out for the people at Hope’s. By forcing them to confront the delusions in their explicit self-narratives— and forcing them to see the fears and resentments in their implicit ones— he brings them only psychological death, an inability to maintain even the modicum of hope that is required for any kind of continued engagement with the world. All Hickey has done is destroy their self-narratives and left them adrift without any sense of possible goals or purpose. Hickey did not have a similar experience because the pipe dream he gave up—the one about reforming—was not part of his core selfnarrative, not a fundamental piece of the story he told himself about who he was. But that attack on the core self is what he has asked the people at Hope’s to endure. Hickey’s explicit self-narrative is that he loves Evelyn, and it is only toward the end of his speech at Hope’s that he confronts that narrative’s falseness. As he describes the moment after the murder, he says he blurted out to his wife’s dead body: “Well, you know what you can do with your pipe dream now, you damned bitch” (700). Only then does Hickey confront his implicit self-narrative, the attitudes and beliefs that actually were driving his action. He murdered Evelyn not out of love but driven by a raging vengeful hatred that had arisen from his experience of her constant forgiveness as a mocking condescension. With this realization, Hickey loses his sense of self and collapses into babbling confusion: No! I never—! […] No! That’s a lie! I never said—! Good God, I couldn’t have said that! If I did, I’d gone insane. Why, I loved Evelyn better than anything in life. (700–701)

In the production of Iceman directed by George C. Wolfe and starring Denzel Washington as Hickey on Broadway in spring 2018, many of Hickey’s lines after this were cut. Hickey wandered around the stage

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in confusion before finally exiting with the police, as Hope and the others responded with joyful relief to Hickey’s suggestion that he is insane. This eliminates a major line of Hickey’s in which O’Neill expresses most succinctly his views on the role pipe dreams often have as we strive to maintain a stable sense of self. Hickey says he now wants to go to the electric chair. The policeman Moran responds, “Crap!” to which Hickey replies “exasperatedly”: God you’re a dumb dick. Do you suppose I give a damn about life now? Why, you bonehead, I haven’t got a single damned lying hope or pipe dream left! (703)

Often the lies we tell ourselves in our explicit self-narratives are necessary for our preservation of a stable sense of self and the hope that is required for our continued engagement with the world. Confrontation with the realities of our implicit self-narratives—the beliefs and attitudes that actually drive our actions—may lead only to the collapse of our sense of self and a resulting crippling stasis. There are times when the truth does not make us free; it psychologically kills us. As Blanche DuBois says to Stanley in scene 2 of A Streetcar Named Desire, speaking as we all must understand not just for women: “I know I fib a good deal. After all, a woman’s charm is fifty per cent illusion” (Williams, 41). O’Neill would add that self-delusion often is required to charm ourselves into continuing to engage with life, in addition to the illusion we present to charm others. Despite cutting this significant line, the fine Wolfe/Washington production made excellent use of this scene. It made the audience focus on Hickey’s confusion as he confronted the collapse of his explicit selfnarrative into falsehood and the humiliating truth of his implicit one. This confusion is the first type of response to challenges to our self-narrative that O’Neill asks us to consider. It takes us only to the edge of tragedy, for confusion here is a kind of defense. It is a hesitancy to admit that the new humiliating self-narrative that threatens us must be accepted. The new, threatening self-story consumes our attention, but we still are examining whether its truth must be acknowledged. We have not yet experienced the tragedy of actual, seemingly irremediable collapse as the truth of the shameful new story becomes inescapable. The second type of response to a challenge to our self-narrative is denial: an attempt to preserve the self-narrative by rejecting as ill-founded

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the ideas that would undermine it. After a debilitating confrontation with the collapse of their self-narratives because Hickey as the social mirror failed to accept or to be “in sync” with them, as Schechtman says (95), this is the response that Harry Hope and other residents of his flophouse take once Hickey suggests that he must have been insane when he expressed hatred for Evelyn just after killing her. If Hickey is insane, then Hope and the others need not take seriously the various things he said to challenge their self-stories; they can return once again to embrace those narratives and continue their lives. The third type of response to challenges to our self-narratives is depicted in Don Parritt, the young anarchist who has betrayed his mother to the police. To understand Parritt’s response, we need to understand why he left his home on the West Coast to seek Larry Slade, his mother’s former lover, in New York, and to do that it may be helpful to consider briefly Søren Kierkegaard’s ideas about the “teleological suspension of the ethical” in Fear and Trembling (1843). This book is Kierkegaard’s analysis of the story from Genesis 22 of Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son Isaac in obedience to God’s command. Kierkegaard argues that sometimes we pursue an end or a goal (a telos in Greek) that is so valuable that actions in its pursuit are placed outside accepted moral norms; the ethical from this perspective is suspended. This is not a rejection or undermining of those moral norms; the norms remain intact as ethical guidelines for praising and condemning actions. But we also must judge these acts from a perspective outside these moral precepts if we are to understand them. For Kierkegaard, this is the situation in which Abraham was placed. Clearly, Abraham’s willingness to murder his son must be ethically condemned; it violates accepted and well-grounded moral norms. But Abraham’s act cannot be judged from this perspective alone if it is to be understood; beyond the perspective of these moral norms, it also must be seen as an act of devout faith in God. Only by looking at Abraham’s act in both these ways simultaneously, as incompatible as these two perspectives may be, can we understand the act correctly. Parritt seeks out Slade hoping not for forgiveness—Parritt understands that his act is morally reprehensible and cannot be forgiven—but rather hoping for something like the understanding that Kierkegaard suggests we pursue in the teleological suspension of the ethical (O’Neill, 578). Parritt seeks someone who knew his mother well enough to understand how infuriatingly self-centered, distant, and loveless she could be as she

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wrapped herself in anarchist ideals and myopically ignored the way her actions were hurting the people around her. He believes that Slade, as his mother’s former lover who found himself unable to bear living with her, might understand the psychological pain that Parritt felt as her son. Throughout the play, O’Neill draws parallels between Parritt and Hickey, each having the sense that they share some private bond that remains to be revealed (653). Only after Hickey has confronted the hatred he had for Evelyn when he killed her can Parritt confront the rage and hatred that drove his betrayal of his mother. Finally, Slade admits he understands how Rosa could have driven Parritt to such rage; he acknowledges both the infuriating psychological pain Parritt felt while living with his mother and the guilt Parritt now feels having betrayed her—both perspectives of Kierkegaard’s teleological suspension of the ethical are acknowledged, although they are incompatible (704–705). Having found this understanding of his complex situation in another person—the “in sync” social mirror that Schechtman mentions in the quotation from page 95 above—Parritt now can accept both these elements as part of his self-narrative. Slade has acknowledged that Parritt is not crazy to own both his rage and his moral guilt, as incompatible as these are. Parritt now goes upstairs to commit suicide, gratified that he has been understood but also accepting punishment for his betrayal (705). Parritt’s is a kind of tragedy that moves beyond mere tragic confrontation with the collapse of the old self-narrative to a new kind of peaceful acceptance. It is something like Oedipus’s move from Thebes toward Colonus. Larry Slade is O’Neill’s fourth portrait here of a confrontation with pipe dreams and a collapsing self-narrative. An old anarchist and Parritt’s mother’s former lover, Slade has smugly retreated from life, priding himself on being a “philosophical drunken bum” (581) who is less self-deluded than the people around him and beyond dealing with the hypocrisy, misguided pipe dreams, and essentially chaotic hopelessness of the human condition. He says all his pipe dreams—his sense of the possibility of significant engagement and goals in life—are behind him, “dead and buried;” he has taken “a seat in the grandstand of philosophical detachment to fall asleep observing the cannibals do their death dance” (570). Parritt, however, frightens and therefore angers Slade, for Parritt challenges him to engage, to hear Parritt’s story, make a judgment, and give Parritt guidance. But Slade no longer can bear that kind of genuine human connection and responsibility.

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Hickey challenges Slade to recognize that his stance of having retreated from life, of no longer caring or being engaged, of waiting only for death, is his pipe dream (629). But it is Parritt who forces Slade to recognize his implicit self-narrative and to experience the falsehood and irreparable collapse of his explicit self-narrative of detached superiority. Through Parritt, Slade is forced to see that his retreat from life was driven only by cowardice, a frightened attempt to avoid the painful confusion and disappointment that, at moments, engaging with life must cause all of us, and that Parritt confronted in his betrayal of his mother. In hearing Parritt’s story and acknowledging the complexity of emotions that Parritt confronted and acted on, Slade must acknowledge that he was unable to cope with such complexity and simply tried to run from it. His current retreat to Harry Hope’s is not the result of a superior understanding of life but simply of cowardice. The play ends with Slade sitting alone to one side of the stage as Hope and the other flophouse residents celebrate Hickey’s claim that he has gone insane and their release from his threats to their self-narrative-saving pipe dreams. Along with Parritt and perhaps Hickey himself, Slade is the character who follows Hickey’s advice, recognizes his explicit self-narrative as a fallacious pipe dream, and confronts the implicit narrative, the cowardice, that in fact has been driving his life. Unlike Parritt, Slade has no Colonus; he does not find a new self-story to embrace of understanding, self-acceptance, and peace. Slade simply dies as a person; he must admit he merely is adrift, without values or purposes to guide his life, crippled by fear, incapable of genuine engagement. In confronting his cowardice, he is forced to admit that he in fact ended a realistically human life for himself years ago by trying to retreat from the world’s sometimes painful complexity and disappointment. Parritt and Slade are models of two types of tragic characters who come to pervade American drama. Slade is a figure who confronts the collapse of his self-narrative and descends into drift and despair. Parritt moves through this tragic confrontation to discover a new self-narrative that acknowledges the falsehood of his past self-story, accepts ownership of his past actions and their complexity, and finds a new self-story with which he can make peace. That past becomes for Parritt, as poet David Ray says, “a story we can bear.” Not so for Slade. Let us turn now to consider how these two types of tragic figures are developed by Arthur Miller and the ways in which Miller’s vision of tragedy is similar to and yet also different from O’Neill’s. ∗ ∗ ∗

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Unlike Eugene O’Neill, Arthur Miller published many essays about theater, several explicitly presenting his theory of tragedy. The most famous of these is “Tragedy and the Common Man” (1949b), which he published in The New York Times when he was only 33, just 17 days after his second successful play, Death of a Salesman, had opened on Broadway. He wrote this essay in response to a debate the play had engendered among theater critics about whether a true tragedy could be written about an ordinary man. Here, Miller explains tragedy in terms of assaults on a person’s sense of personal dignity: I think the tragic feeling is evoked in us when we are in the presence of a character who is ready to lay down his life, if need be, to secure one thing—his sense of personal dignity. […] Sometimes he is one who has been displaced from it, sometimes one who seeks to attain it for the first time, but the fateful wound from which the inevitable events spiral is the wound of indignity, and its dominant force is indignation. […] Tragedy, then, is the consequence of a man’s total compulsion to evaluate himself justly. […] Insistence upon the rank of the tragic hero, or the so-called nobility of his character, is really but a clinging to the outward forms of tragedy. […] The quality in such plays that does shake us, however, derives from the underlying fear of being displaced, the disaster inherent in being torn away from our chosen image of what and who we are in this world. (8–9)

“Our chosen image of what and who we are in this world” in Schechtman’s terms is our “explicit self-narrative.” Being “torn away” from that narrative is the collapse of the self; that potential displacement is the threat that Hickey presented to all the residents of Harry Hope’s in Iceman. Hickey confronts this displacement himself and is confused by it when he realizes the rage he expressed toward Evelyn after he killed her. Slade experiences the narrative being “torn away” when he is forced to admit at the end of Iceman that cowardice, not some superior understanding of the human condition, has in fact driven his retreat from the world. In this way both O’Neill and Miller share a vision of tragedy, one that is based on the collapse of what Schechtman calls a person’s “explicit self-narrative.” However, toward the beginning of the passage quoted above, Miller also mentions indignation—a rebellion driven by righteous anger against the threat to the self—as the focus of tragic action. For Miller tragedy often involves presenting the story of a character’s indignation as “the inevitable events spiral”—in some ways caused by the character, in other

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ways beyond his or her control—into suffering. This indignation generally is not presented by O’Neill, although it might be argued that we see the beginnings of it in Parritt’s quest for understanding or in Hickey’s response to Evelyn’s forgiveness. Rather than indignation, O’Neill’s tragedies tend to depict loss and despair, the kind of recognition Slade confronts at the end of Iceman. Mary Tyrone summarizes this view in act 2, scene 1, of Long Day’s Journey Into Night . Speaking of her elder son Jamie—but thinking also of herself—she says: But I suppose life has made him like that, and he can’t help it. None of us can help the things life has done to us. They’re done before you realize it, and once they’re done they make you do other things until at last everything comes between you and what you’d like to be, and you’ve lost your true self forever. (63)

There are, then, three types of tragedy—each of them a variation on problems of the self—that we should trace in understanding Miller’s characters. The first involves a collapse into despair like Larry Slade’s; the second involves indignation, a righteous rebellion against assaults on the self; and the third, like that of Don Parritt, a coming to acceptance of the complex often incompatible elements of a self and the emergence of a new kind of psychological equilibrium or peace. Certainly, there are characters in Miller’s plays who sink suddenly into despair as they see their self-narratives collapse, the way Slade does at the end of Iceman. Often these are secondary characters. Consider Amos Beeves, the elder brother in The Man Who Had All the Luck (1944), who has spent his youth and early 20s training alone with his father in a basement to become a pitcher in professional baseball. When a scout for a professional team comes to see him pitch in a game, however, the scout realizes that this way of training has made Amos easily distracted when men are on base, to the point where Amos loses his otherwise remarkable control in these situations, and his pitches become wild. As a result, a career in professional baseball is not possible for Amos. That self-narrative has become a pipe dream for him; recognizing this, Amos sinks into despair and loses his way in life (54–56, 64). Think also of Linda Loman in the “Requiem” at Willy’s gravesite at the end of Death of a Salesman (1949a). Considering this scene, I had had trouble understanding why Linda says she cannot cry over Willy’s suicide (256). Then I saw a fine production of the play in the late winter of 2014

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by the Lyric Stage Company in Boston in which the actress portraying Linda (Paula Plum) delivered the play’s final lines, “We’re free,” not as if they referred to being free from the mortgage or other debts but as if she felt cut free, cut adrift from the self-story that had guided her life— as if she felt her self-narrative had collapsed. Linda throughout her life, through all her struggles to be frugal, to bolster Willy’s sinking spirits, to hold the family together, had thought that she and Willy were committed to each other, were building a life together; but now toward its end, Willy has abandoned her. In killing himself to secure life insurance money to give to Biff, Willy has shown that he never loved Linda with the depth with which she loved him; Biff was Willy’s dearest love, and he viewed Linda merely as a resource who had instrumental value in the project of building Biff’s life but no real value in herself (see Palmer 2014b). Reverend Hale in The Crucible (1953) also can be seen as undergoing this kind of tragedy. Hale arrives in Salem with a deep belief that he has a method for identifying acts of the Devil and that he is doing God’s work, but as the Puritan trials develop, he comes to see the investigations as fraudulent and his own role as reprehensible (443–44). He says to Elizabeth Proctor near the end of the play: Let you not mistake your duty as I mistook my own. I came to this village like the bridegroom to his beloved, bearing gifts of high religion; the very crown of holy law I brought, and what I touched with my bright confidence, it died; and where I turned the eye of my great faith, blood flowed up. (444)

Hale’s frenzied confusion about what to do at the end of the play as John Proctor is taken away for execution is reminiscent of Hickey’s state when he realizes the angry hatred he had for Evelyn. Both men are confused and terrified in confronting the falseness of the stories they had been telling themselves of who they were and what they were doing. All three of the above examples may be taken as secondary characters in Miller’s plays, but Miller also applies this model to central characters. In Broken Glass (1994), Sylvia Gellburg resents her husband’s role in her life and believes she is a victim of his insecurities, leading to a psychosomatic paralysis in her legs:

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What I did with my life! Out of not wanting to shame you in front of other people. A whole life. Gave it away like a couple of pennies—I took better care of my shoes. (373)

But by the end of the play both Sylvia and her husband, Phillip, have come to understand more clearly their own responsibility for their resentments and the stifling cowardice with which they have lived their lives. Sylvia says to Phillip: I’m not blaming you, Phillip. The years I wasted I know I threw them away myself. I think I always knew I was doing it but I couldn’t stop it. […] I’ve been tip-toeing around my life for thirty years and I’m not going to pretend—I hate it all now. Everything I did is stupid and ridiculous. I can’t find myself in my life. (385)

In the play’s final scene, Phillip, having come to confront his own insecurities, is begging Sylvia for forgiveness when he slumps to the floor having a heart attack. Sylvia screams: “Wait! Phillip! There’s nothing to blame! There’s nothing to blame!” (386). Only then does she realize that she has risen from her wheelchair and is standing, something she has done only once before in the play: her angry and terrified response to Kristallnacht when she screams, “Where is Roosevelt? Where is England? Somebody should do something before they murder us all!” (371). Miller seems to be saying of Sylvia something that is true of many of us: her paralysis is an expression of her resentment, an expression of a self-narrative in which she seeks to avoid responsibility for the direction of her own life. Both times Sylvia stands, her speech is about responsibility, and to take responsibility is to confront the delusional pipe dreams of a victim story and recognize the fears and resentments of the implicit narrative, the sources for our actions and suffering that we must admit are our own. Sylvia at the end of Broken Glass is in a position much like Larry Slade’s at the end of Iceman, although through her experiences she may be able to move beyond his despair to finding a new direction in her life. Perhaps the Miller character who is most like Slade is Victor Franz, the policeman younger brother, in The Price (1968). In this play two estranged brothers come together 16 years after their father’s death to clear the attic in his house of old furniture and settle his estate. When the father’s business failed during the Great Depression in the 1930s,

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Victor dropped out of college, gave up on his dream of becoming a scientist, and joined the police force to help support his father. His older brother, Walter, kept his money to himself, providing little support to the family, pushed on to complete his medical degree, and is now a wealthy surgeon. Victor has resented Walter all his adult life. His self-narrative is that Walter abandoned the family while Victor sacrificed his dreams to honor his moral obligation to support their father. As the play unfolds, however, Walter forces Victor to see that the story is not that simple. Their father still had significant savings after his business failed, and there were other assets, such as their deceased mother’s harp, which could have been sold to enable Victor to continue his education. Walter points out that they both were terrified of experiencing the kind of financial distress their father had endured; they merely took different approaches to avoid it: Walter pursued extreme wealth, even becoming a financial partner in nursing homes, as a way of having the resources to dominate other people and avoid bad luck or downturns; Victor chose a simpler but financially secure life as a policeman on a safe and boring beat (261–62). By the end of the play, Walter has convinced both Victor and his wife, Esther, that they themselves must bear much of the responsibility for the dissatisfaction they have with their lives. As Walter says, in what is an explicit reference to pipe dreams, “We invent ourselves, Vic, to wipe out what we know” (262). Certainly, Sylvia Gellburg and Walter and Victor Franz experience indignation as they feel their self-narratives come under attack: Sylvia at Phillip’s struggles to protect his own sense of self in his discussions about their relationship with Dr. Hyman, and the two Franz brothers at each other as they confront their conflicting stories of their family’s past. But the trajectory of the plots in these two plays ends in the collapse of Sylvia’s and Victor’s old narratives of who they are and how they came to be these people. Each play primarily is about their coming to that collapse and the despair that follows. That makes these plays different from a second type of Miller tragedy, ones in which Miller is more concerned with depicting the indignation itself; in those plays the story is more directly focused on the characters’ attempts to maintain their old self-narratives. Often, but not always, Miller has the character use a variation on the phrase “I want my name” in these plays. The following might be included in this type of tragedy: Joe Keller and his focus on the primacy of family ties in All My Sons, Willy Loman and his sense of Biff’s spite in Death of a Salesman, John Proctor’s struggle with the tension between his own sense of

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moral culpability for his affair with Abigail Williams and his anger at the moral blindness and corruption of the Puritan court in The Crucible, and Eddie Carbone’s sense that he is upholding his moral obligations and his life-long commitment to protecting Catherine in A View from the Bridge. This focus on indignation is a second kind of tragedy for Miller, different from the ones that are more like Larry Slade’s collapse into despair discussed above. These tragedies show a similarity in theme to much of African American drama, so let me put off a more detailed discussion of them until a later article in this volume that considers that theme. A third kind of tragedy for Miller involves characters who are much like Parritt in Iceman: characters who experience a collapse of the old self-narrative due to the complexity of their actions and the situations in which they find themselves but who then move on to embrace a new, more complicated self-narrative—despite what may be its incompatible elements—and find a new kind of self-respect and peace. Three characters Miller depicts in this way all come from his plays of the 1960s: Prince Von Berg in Incident at Vichy (1964b), Quentin in After the Fall (1964a), and the doctor Walter Franz in The Price (1968). It is worthwhile noting that all these plays are from the 1960s, the years after Miller’s divorce from Marilyn Monroe in 1961 (after an on-again, off-again affair in the early 1950s, they were married for five years, from 1956–1961) and her suicide in 1962. It seems that during this marriage Miller experienced himself as being morally criticized by Monroe for failing to give her the emotional support she needed. Von Berg, Quentin, and Walter all confront a similar kind of criticism as an assault on their senses of self, and each finds a way to a new, more stable self-narrative that involves greater self-understanding, much like Parritt (see Palmer 2014a, especially pages 35–41). Incident at Vichy is about a group of people who have been rounded up in 1942 France in a sweep by the Nazis, who are looking for Jews to send to forced labor in concentration camps. As the play develops, each person is taken individually into a back room, where he must prove his non-Jewish identity, in which case he is given an exit pass. Nearly all the people are in fact Jewish, but Prince Von Berg is not; he is a Catholic Austrian aristocrat from a venerable family. The central moral tension Miller depicts at the end of the play is between a wounded Nazi major and Von Berg. When the major is morally criticized by one of the prisoners, the psychiatrist Leduc, for not taking a risk and helping people to escape, the major replies with a sad and cynical speech characterizing the world as

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merely interlocking sets of victims each of whom can do no more than look out for himself (170–73). He asks why he should take a risk for Leduc when Leduc, supposedly like anyone else, would not make a similar sacrifice: If you were released and others were kept … would you refuse? […] I am trying to understand why you are better for the world than me. […] Would you go out that door with a light heart, run to your woman, drink a toast to your skin? … Why are you better than anyone else? (173)

Von Berg, however, is changed by Leduc’s requests and criticism. He despises the Nazis, considering them vulgar barbarians, and he had felt these attitudes were sufficient expressions of anti-Nazism (146–49, 159– 60). But he is forced to recall that he did nothing to protect the Jewish members of his orchestra who were taken away by the Nazis (165–66), and he comes to understand that maintaining his self-narrative requires actions beyond mere attitudes. When he is given a pass by the Nazis, he gives it to Leduc, enabling him to escape. The play ends with Von Berg and the major tensely facing each other as if in a silent debate about whose ideas on our moral obligations to other people are correct. We can imagine Von Berg at this point being much like Parritt. He has come to understand more clearly his situation, what he has done, why he has done it, and what he now needs to do. His old self-story has collapsed, but he has found a new story to which he can commit with new-found equilibrium, peacefully accepting even the harsh consequences that story demands. Something similar happens to Quentin in After the Fall . Quentin is unable to make peace with his past and the patterns of moral weakness and betrayal it seems to contain: betrayals in his family in his youth; difficulties with his former wife, Louise; his moral condemnation of his friend Mickey for naming names during the McCarthy hearings, while Quentin himself was reluctant fully to stand by their friend Lou when he was confronted with blacklisting; confusion about personal responsibility when visiting Holocaust sites and wondering whether he would have stood up to the Nazis; guilt over his inability to cope with his second wife Maggie’s drug addiction and demands for attention. Unable to maintain a sense of his own moral integrity, Quentin is on the verge of losing his self-narrative, of collapsing into a person he has no choice but to despise. But he comes finally to accept his shortcomings and flaws as part of being human:

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There’s something in me that could dare to love this world again! […] To know, and even happily that we meet unblessed; not in some garden of wax fruit and painted trees, that lie of Eden, but after, after the Fall, after many, many deaths. (129)

He says to Maggie just before this: We got to have some humility toward ourselves; we were both born of many errors, a human being has to forgive himself! (124)

At the end of the play, having gone through this journey of selfrecrimination and doubt, Quentin is greeted by Holga, the woman with whom he now is in love, simply with the word “Hello” as the ghosts of his past gather in the background. Holga has accepted and understood who he is, what he has done, and the pressures that drove him to act. In doing that, she enables him to make peace with the complexities of his past and his self-narrative. This is similar to what Slade does for Parritt toward the end of Iceman. It is a theme Miller repeats in many of his plays. It is in Elizabeth Proctor’s lines to her husband John toward the end of The Crucible (1953), when he asks her forgiveness: It is not for me to give, John […] it come to naught that I should forgive you, if you will not forgive yourself. […] Whatever you will do, it is a good man does it. (447–48)

Forty years later, Miller has Dr. Hyman say much the same thing to Phillip Gellburg in Broken Glass (1994). After a long speech in which Hyman expresses his amazement at how many of his patients feel persecuted while none believe they are persecutors, he says our only way out will be to forgive each other, but the hardest part will be to accept our own guilt and learn to forgive ourselves (383–34). To engage with this difficult maze through forgiveness is why Parritt comes to Slade, and the way out toward peace is what Slade, through his understanding of the pain and complexity of Parritt’s situation, finally helps Parritt achieve. Walter Franz, the doctor in The Price, has made a journey similar to Parritt’s, Von Berg’s, and Quentin’s. In understanding this play, it is important to pay attention to Miller’s production note, and not see Walter as a selfish villain who simply deserted his family while Victor is a moral hero:

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A fine balance of sympathy should be maintained in the playing of the roles of Victor and Walter. The actor playing Walter must not regard his attempts to win back Victor’s friendship as mere manipulation. From entrance to exit, Walter is attempting to put into action what he has learned about himself, and sympathy will be evoked for him in proportion to the openness, the depth of need, the intimations of suffering with which the role is played. […] As the world now operates, the qualities of both brothers are necessary to it; surely their respective psychologies and moral values conflict at the heart of the social dilemma. The production must therefore withhold judgment in favor of presenting both men in all their humanity and from their own viewpoints. (Miller 1981, 760)

Walter admits he has made mistakes in his life. His old self-narrative of being better than other people and struggling to prove it led him only to crisis, the loss of family, and eventual mental collapse (241–44). He admits to Victor that his actions when Victor asked him for a loan to attend college were “despicable” and that he cannot defend what he did, but he has come to Victor because “I would like to be understood, if that’s possible,” (251), a phrase reminiscent of Parritt. The situation was not as simple as Victor tries to pretend it was. Walter has come to a new understanding of who he is, and given that new self-narrative, he now seeks to reconnect with his brother (252–54). Walter’s exit at the end of the play should be seen not as a retreat in shame having been forced by his brother to face his moral failure; rather, Walter exits in righteous disgust. He has come to Victor in good faith, as Miller himself says in his production note quoted above, but Victor is unable to accept his own cowardice. Walter, although angry, is self-assured when he says to Victor and Esther: Vengeance. Down to the end. He is sacrificing his life to vengeance. […] To prove with your failure what a treacherous son of bitch I am. […] You quit; both of you. You lay down and quit, and that’s the long and the short of all your ideology. It’s all envy. And to this moment, you haven’t the guts to face it! But your failure does not give you moral authority! Not with me! […] You will never again make me ashamed. (263–64)

Like Parritt, Walter has struggled to justify to himself some of his past actions, but he now has found a new and more stable self-narrative. That narrative still is fragile; it can collapse easily when confronted, which is why he has hesitated to reconnect with his younger brother and is a bit

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fearful and hesitant in their encounter now (242). But he now has found that inner peace. Walter, like Parritt for O’Neill, is one of Miller’s portraits of the struggle from collapse to a new self-narrative and equilibrium. ∗ ∗ ∗ Confronting pipe dreams—flaws and delusions in our self-narratives— has been central to American tragedy at least since the plays of Eugene O’Neill. In The Iceman Cometh, O’Neill presents four separate ways in which people deal with this confrontation. Harry Hope and the other denizens of his flophouse attempt to retreat into denial. Hickey flounders in confusion, unable to believe what he now sees about himself. Larry Slade collapses into despair when forced to face his own cowardice as the source of his actions. Don Parritt finds equilibrium in a new self-narrative, having attained peace with a new, more complex self-story by having Slade acknowledge that he understands Parritt’s actions. Characters who resemble Slade and Parritt in their confrontations with a collapsing self also are depicted by Arthur Miller as models of tragedy in many of his plays. To these two models, Miller adds a third: one based on characters’ indignation in the face of challenges to their self-narratives. For both O’Neill and Miller, despite their differences, confrontations with delusions about personal responsibility are central to tragedy. This is not true of tragedies by dramatists from other cultures: for example, Sean O’Casey. This fascination with delusions about our responsibility for our actions and the course of our lives may be a theme that is distinctive of American tragedy and deeply grounded in the way our culture influences the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and the sources of our place in the world. As Miller suggests in many of his plays, the most difficult challenge may be the struggle to forgive ourselves. That struggle for selfforgiveness, so central for O’Neill and Miller, becomes a major theme for later American dramatists.

Works Cited Frankfurt, Harry G. 1971. Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person. Reprinted in The Importance of What We Care About: Philosophical Essays, 80–94. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988. Frankfurt, Harry G. 1982. The Importance of What We Care About. Reprinted in The Importance of What We Care About: Philosophical Essays, 80–94. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988.

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James, William. 1892. The Stream of Consciousness (Chapter 9) and The Self (Chapter 10) in Psychology: Briefer Course. Reprinted in William James: Writings, 1878–1899, 152–209. New York: Library of America, 1992. Kierkegaard, Søren. 1843. Fear and Trembling. Trans. Alastair Hannay. New York: Penguin Books, 2003. Miller, Arthur. 1944. The Man Who Had All the Luck. Reprinted in Arthur Miller: Collected Plays, 1944–1961, Tony Kushner, ed., 1–84. New York: Library of America, 2006. Miller, Arthur. 1947. All My Sons. Reprinted in Arthur Miller: Collected Plays, 1944–1961, Tony Kushner, ed., 85–158. New York: Library of America, 2006. Miller, Arthur. 1949a. Death of a Salesman. Reprinted in Arthur Miller: Collected Plays, 1944–1961, Tony Kushner, ed., 157–257. New York: Library of America, 2006. Miller, Arthur. 1949b. Tragedy and the Common Man. The New York Times, 27 February. https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/ 00/11/12/specials/miller-common.html. Reprinted in Arthur Miller: Collected Essays, 7–10. Introduction by Susan C. W. Abbotson. New York: Penguin, 2016. Miller, Arthur. 1949c. The Nature of Tragedy. Reprinted in Arthur Miller: Collected Essays, 11–14. Introduction by Susan C. W. Abbotson. New York: Penguin, 2016. Miller, Arthur. 1953. The Crucible. Reprinted in Arthur Miller: Collected Plays, 1944–1961, Tony Kushner, ed., 343–455. New York: Library of America, 2006. Miller, Arthur. 1964a. After the Fall. Reprinted in Arthur Miller: Collected Plays, 1964–1982, Tony Kushner, ed., 1–130. New York: Library of America, 2012. Miller, Arthur. 1964b. Incident at Vichy. Reprinted in Arthur Miller: Collected Plays, 1964–1982, Tony Kushner, ed., 131–83. New York: Library of America, 2012. Miller, Arthur. 1968. The Price. Reprinted in Arthur Miller: Collected Plays, 1964–1982, Tony Kushner, ed., 343–455. New York: Library of America, 2012. Miller, Arthur. 1981. Author’s Production Note: The Price. Reprinted in Arthur Miller: Collected Plays, 1964–1982, Tony Kushner, ed., 760. New York: Library of America, 2012. Miller, Arthur. 1994. Broken Glass. Reprinted in Arthur Miller: Collected Plays, 1987–2004, Tony Kushner, ed., 317–386. New York: Library of America, 2015. O’Casey, Sean. 1926. The Plough and the Stars. Reprinted in Sean O’Casey: Three Dublin Plays, 149–247. Introduction by Christopher Murray. London: Faber & Faber, 1998.

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O’Neill, Eugene. 1932. Memoranda on Masks. Excerpt reprinted in Eugene O’Neill: Complete Plays, 1932–1943, Travis Bogard, ed., 982. New York: Library of America, 1988. O’Neill, Eugene. 1939. The Iceman Cometh. First performed 1946. Reprinted in Eugene O’Neill: Complete Plays, 1932–1943. Travis Bogard, ed., 561–711. New York: Library of America, 1988. O’Neill, Eugene. 1941. Long Day’s Journey Into Night: Critical Edition, William Davies King, ed. New Haven: Yale UP, 2014. Palmer, David. 2014a. Miller, O’Neill, Moral Despair, and Tragedy. Arthur Miller Journal, 9:1–2, 27–42. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/ arthmillj.9.1-2.27. Palmer, David. 2014b. Death of a Salesman, Lyric Stage Company, directed by Spiro Veloudos. Review. Arthur Miller Journal, 9:1–2, 127–32. https://www. jstor.org/stable/10.5325/arthmillj.9.1–2.127. Ray, David. 2006. Thanks, Robert Frost in Music of Time: Selected and New Poems. Omaha, NE: Backwaters Press. Reprinted on Garrison Keillor, The Writer’s Almanac, 31 January 2007. https://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/ index.php%3Fdate=2007%252F01%252F31.html. Schechtman, Marya. 1996. The Constitution of Selves. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP. Strawson, Galen. 2004. Against Narrativity. Reprinted in his Real Materialism and Other Essays, 189–208. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. Velleman, David. 2005. The Self as Narrator. Reprinted in his Self to Self: Selected Essays, 203–23. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006. Williams, Tennessee. 1947. A Streetcar Named Desire. New York: New Directions Books, 2004. Wollheim, Richard. 1984. The Thread of Life. New Haven: Yale UP.

CHAPTER 4

Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, and the American Family Brenda Murphy

Arthur Miller met Tennessee Williams in 1940, when they both were enrolled in the Playwrights’ Dramatic Workshop at New York’s New School for Social Research. Williams’s Battle of Angels was a focal point of the New School seminar because John Gassner and Theresa Helburn, who ran it, had recommended the play for production by the Theatre Guild. Battle of Angels was a failure that year, but Williams’s success with The Glass Menagerie in 1945 established him firmly in America’s cultural consciousness as a writer of family drama with a Southern bent. After the failed production of The Man Who Had All the Luck in 1944, Arthur Miller’s 1947 success with All My Sons also fixed his identity as a writer of family drama, although with more direct, journalistic, social and political application than Williams’s more “poetic” work. Toward the end of the forties, A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) and Death of a Salesman (1949) solidified the playwrights’ cultural identities, and largely because of their growing international reputations, American drama was already being spoken of as a drama of the family. As Henry Schvey puts it, “the

B. Murphy (B) University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT, USA © The Author(s) 2020 S. Marino and D. Palmer (eds.), Arthur Miller for the Twenty-First Century, American Literature Readings in the 21st Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37293-4_4

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narrative arc that forms the indisputable connective tissue of modern American drama is its preoccupation, even obsession, with the home” (Schvey, 116). But the families these two playwrights wrote about were markedly different. In keeping with his Jewish heritage and personal experience, Miller’s conception of the family is fundamentally patriarchal. The families in his plays tend to be tight-knit units centered on a father who is a dominant presence, psychologically if not physically. Joe Keller, Willy Loman, Eddie Carbone, and John Procter are the central figures in their families as well as in their plays. With the tragic demise of the father, the Miller family unit becomes dysfunctional and often disintegrates. Within the decaying patriarchal structure, Miller dramatizes the intense dynamics of sibling dyads, often triangulated with the father, and these sibling pairs often have a biblical resonance that gives them mythological force. Most often, he evokes the Cain and Abel motif, which resonates with his own family relationships, especially that with his older brother Kermit, who had been a better student than Arthur but had dropped out of college after his father lost his fortune and his business following the 1929 stock market crash. According to Miller, Kermit “had romanticized [their father] into a fallen giant” and “was intent on rebuilding the family fortunes” (Miller 1987, 108). Kermit’s support of their parents freed Arthur to go off to the University of Michigan, which launched his very successful career as a playwright, although he always felt guilty that, despite Kermit’s sacrifice, it was he who was the favored son. “I wanted and did not want to excel over my brother,” he wrote, “or more precisely, the little boy in me did not want to, even as I knew perfectly well what pride Kermit took in my success. But the first church is in the skull, and the gods face in two directions” (Miller 1987, 276). Miller’s guilt over the situation with his brother animates the dynamics of David and Amos Beeves in The Man Who Had All the Luck, Chris and Larry Keller in All My Sons , Biff and Hap Loman in Death of a Salesman, Walter and Victor Franz in The Price (1968), and of course, Cain and Abel in The Creation of the World and Other Business (1972). On the other hand, in keeping with his experience of a domineering but often absent father, an emotionally suffocating mother, a codependent sister, and a brother he resented for his father’s preference of him, Williams often represents the family as a post-patriarchal structure that has already disintegrated, resulting in a tenuous family unit characterized by dysfunctional relationships among its various members. The Glass Menagerie has an absent father whose image hovers over the set, a

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smothering mother trying to hold the family together, and a brother and sister whose love for each other is ineffectual in the face of the conditions they face. To assert control over his own future, Tom Wingfield must ultimately betray his sister Laura, reenacting their father’s abandonment. A Streetcar Named Desire’s older generation is all dead, but Blanche and Stella DuBois are still victimized by their male forebears’ having squandered the family fortune on their epic fornications. The older generation has been such a burden on Blanche, economically, physically, and psychologically, that it has nearly destroyed her. Like Tom, Stella must in the end betray her sister in order for the new Kowalski family to survive. With its depiction of the dominant patriarch, Big Daddy, Cat on Hot Tin Roof appears to be the exception among Williams’s plays. But the Pollit family has only the appearance of a strong patriarchal unit, depending on Gooper’s lies to Big Daddy about his terminal cancer to prop it up. As he succumbs to cancer, Big Daddy is literally in the process of disintegration throughout the play. With the exception of Brick and Big Mama, his family’s pretense of love for him and for each other is unmasked, revealing the raw self-interest, fueled by feelings of jealousy and resentment, that animate Gooper, Mae, and Maggie. And Brick is no alternative. His selfdestruction is so advanced that he could not possibly fulfill his parents’ deluded dream that he could take over the plantation and run it. The intense focus on the sibling dyads in two of Williams’s later plays, Kingdom of Earth (1968) and The Two-Character Play (1975), signal ultimate freedom from the traditional patriarchal family. Kingdom may be the apotheosis of the family’s disintegration for Williams. The Ravenstock family consists of two half brothers, Chicken and Lot. Their father, who, according to Lot, died “howling like a wild beast” (Williams 1968, 629), first fathered Chicken, who is a self-described “woods-colt … my son of a bitch of a daddy got me offen a dark-complected woman he lived with in Alabama” (Williams 1968, 678). Chicken affirms that his mother “had colored blood in her. She wasn’t black but she wasn’t white neither” (Williams 1968, 695). Because of that, in the Mississippi Delta, he lives “the life of a dawg that nobody owns and owns nothing” (Williams 1968, 695). Chicken’s great desire in life is to get their father’s farm away from Lot, the legitimate son, who is fixated on his dead mother, Lottie, and regularly tries to merge into his mother by putting on her clothes and sitting in the parlor talking as if he were Lottie addressing him. It was Lottie who ordered Chicken off the farm after her husband died, telling him,

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“Chicken, I don’t want my son to be known as half brother to a nigra” (Williams 1968, 698). Since her death, Lot, who is dying of tuberculosis and incapable of dealing with the farm, has brought Chicken back to run the place. Chicken has returned on the condition that the farm will go to him on Lot’s death, and carefully guards the will that Lot has made out to that effect. Lot, however, has the same elemental drive to own the family farm his half brother has. As floodwaters rise in the Delta and he is in the last throes of his illness, Lot fights his way back to the farm with Myrtle, a show-girl and sometime prostitute whom he has married with the idea of overturning the will and reserving the farm for his widow, and, he hopes, his future heirs. But Lot is impotent with Myrtle, and he dies wearing his mother’s clothes and “transfigured” by “sexless passion” (Williams 1968, 702) as the flood threatens to engulf the house. Although Lot has enlisted Myrtle as a surrogate in the fight for the farm, the battle between the brothers is won by Chicken, who has what Lot does not, physical vitality and sexual potency. He wins Myrtle away from Lot, and the two of them share the survival instinct to stay alive in the flood, as Chicken has before, perched on the roof with the chickens that gave him his name and ready to drink warm chicken blood to stay alive. The essential importance of survival at the end of the play is accentuated by Chicken and Myrtle’s plan to have a baby, thus, much like Stanley and Stella Kowalski, constituting a family based on vitality and sexual potency to replace the weak and disease-ridden family of the old South but devoid of any understanding or appreciation of culture or beauty. Like Stanley, Chicken places sex at the center of human existence, insisting that “there’s nothing in the world, in this whole kingdom of earth, that can compare with one thing, and that one thing is what’s able to happen between a man and a woman, just that thing, nothing more, is perfect. The rest is crap, all of the rest is almost nothing but crap” (Williams 1968, 701). In this kingdom of Earth, the family is reduced to a structure for enabling the elemental drives for sexual satisfaction, ownership, and selfreplication. Williams’s final sibling dyad, in the Two-Character Play, comes from a family in which the older generation has literally destroyed itself. Felice and Clare are a brother and sister, the principal actors in a traveling theater company. They have been deserted in a far-flung theater by the rest, who left behind a cablegram saying they are insane. The autobiographical playwithin-the-play they enact in their last, desperate performance has been

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written by Felice and is about a brother and sister who cannot get free of their family, try though they might. Despite their attempts to step into the wider world, the two characters are imprisoned in the family home that has “Father’s voice in the walls and his eyes in the ceiling” (Williams 1976, 20). Their father has shot their mother and then himself in the house, a scene their daughter Clare has witnessed. Since then the house has become a prison they are terrified to leave. As Felice says, it feels like a “warm, loved person” that whispers, “You can’t go away. Give up. Come in and stay” (Williams 1976, 46). Yet what the siblings fear most is being confined. The frame play reflects the same situation, as the actors Felice and Clare are eventually locked in the empty theater, and the actor Clare remarks, “so it’s a prison, this last theatre of ours? … I’ve always suspected that theatres are prisons for players” (Williams 1976, 57). The conflict in the play-within-the-play is between the fear of confinement that sparks an intense need to get out of the house and an agoraphobia that sends Clare and Felice immediately back inside when they do try to leave. The mirror conflict in the frame play is between the desire to end their psychic imprisonment with a murder-suicide that reflects their parents’ end and a bond of feeling that keeps each in turn from shooting the other. After each of them tries and fails to shoot, there is “a tender admission of defeat. They reach out their hands to one another, and the light lingers a moment on their hands lifting toward each other. As they slowly embrace, there is a total dark” (Williams 1976, 63). There would seem to be no hope for a future in this bleak end. The family will die with this brother and sister, unable to reach beyond the sterile bonds that imprison them in their parents’ destruction of themselves and their children. Within the family structure, Miller’s sibling dyads (always brothers) are often animated by a combination of love, jealousy, and guilt that is descended from the biblical Cain and Abel. In the Genesis story, Cain and Abel are born in the desert and forced to labor for their sustenance after their parents, Adam and Eve, have been expelled from the Garden of Eden because of their original sin. Cain kills Abel because he is jealous that God prefers his brother’s sacrifice to his and is condemned to the life of a restless wanderer far from his family. Like their biblical precursors, Miller’s brothers suffer from the guilt of their fathers, whose devotion to their sons is often the ironic cause both of the sons’ failures in life and of the ultimate disintegration of their families. Over a period of almost thirty years, Miller played many variations on this motif. In his first Broadway

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Play, The Man Who Had All the Luck, Amos Beeves would seem to be the favored brother. His father Pat has lavished all his paternal attention on him since he was a small child, training him to be the major league pitcher that Pat is convinced he is destined to become while virtually ignoring his brother David. When Amos was an infant, Pat says, “I felt his body and I saw it was strong. And I said to myself, this boy is not going to waste out his life being seventeen different kind of things and ending up nothing. He’s going to play baseball. And by ginger he’s been throwin’ against the target down the cellar seven days a week for twelve solid years! That’s concentration. That’s faith! That’s taking your life in your hands and molding it to fit the thing you want” (Miller 1989, 9–10). On the other hand, “I always left David to concentrate for himself” (Miller 1989, 9), Pat says. Like Abel, however, David has been the lucky one, favored by whatever powers may be. While Amos has been fulfilling his father’s dream, David has trained himself to be a mechanic and has built a successful repair shop. Ironically, it is just the attention and training Pat lavishes on Amos that proves his undoing as a major league pitcher, when all those years of throwing alone in the basement prove to have made him unable to deal effectively enough with runners on base to pitch in the major leagues. Pat’s unequal treatment of the two brothers has had a negative effect on David as well. Invested in the family belief that it was Amos who was destined for success, David worries about the cosmic balance of things, as one piece of luck after another propels him to financial success. “What is it about me? … I never lose. Since we were kids I expected Amos to rise and shine. He’s the one, he knows something, he knows one thing perfect” (Miller 1989, 47). When Amos gets the bad news that he will never have a major league career, David’s anxiety coalesces into the conviction that he, too, must face some disaster: “A man is born with one curse at least to be cracked over his head” (Miller 1989, 56). David comes to be driven by the fear that his child will be born dead. When the baby is healthy, he compulsively brings on his own catastrophe by investing everything he and his wife own in raising mink, a business so precarious that they could be wiped out overnight. David has come to believe that there is nothing but chance shaping his destiny: “The world is a madhouse, what can you build in a madhouse that won’t be knocked down when you turn your back” (Miller 1989, 77). David is freed from his compulsive dread when he saves his mink by his own careful methods while his mentor’s mink die. He comes to see his luck not as a piece of

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cosmic whimsy, but as good fortune that he has worked for and brought about. As his wife Hester says, “this wasn’t something from the sky, dear. This was you only” (Miller 1989, 79). David comes to see that his fear of a supernatural curse that will fall on him and his fear that the universe is driven by random chance are not the only alternatives. A human being can assert himself through willed action that brings about his good fortune. This belief saves his sanity and his family, but Miller suggests that David’s anxiety has not completely disappeared. At the end of the play, as his wife calls to him, he says, “Yes, I’m here … To himself: For now” (Miller 1989, 80), and he faces the thunder outside the window with “the old apprehension in his face” (Miller 1989, 80). In All My Sons , Joe Keller shows a devotion to his sons that is similar to Pat Beeves’s. He says, “my only accomplishment is my son” (Miller 1947, 122) and asks his son Chris, “What the hell did I work for? That’s only for you, Chris, the whole shootin’-match is for you” (Miller 1947, 94). Chris has survived World War II with a burden of shame, feeling that it was “wrong to be alive, to open the bank-book, to drive the new car” and that “what you have is really loot, and there’s blood on it. I didn’t want to take any of it” (Miller 1947, 110–11). He works with his father in the family business, but he has come to believe that, unlike the war, in which the soldiers survived because they loved and sacrificed for each other, business is “the land of the great big dogs, you don’t love a man here, you eat him! That’s the principle; the only one we live by” (Miller 1947, 149). Although Joe Keller invests everything in Chris after his brother Larry has died in the war, it was Larry who was the favored son. Joe believes that, if Larry had lived, “he wouldn’t act like [Chris]. He understood the way the world is made. He listened to me. To him the world had a forty-foot front, it ended at the building line. This one, everything bothers him…. Larry. That was a boy we lost. Larry” (Miller 1947, 146). Neither Joe nor Chris is comfortable with the reality that it is Chris who has been the fortunate son and Larry the casualty of war. The play’s great irony, of course, is that it is Joe who is responsible for Larry’s death because he put the survival of the business ahead of the safety of the pilots who would be flying the planes with the defective parts he allowed to be shipped out. His defense to Chris is, “I did it for you, it was a chance and I took it for you. I’m sixty-one years old, when would I have another chance to make something for you?” (Miller 1947, 141). Joe famously says that nothing is bigger than the family. “I’m [Chris’s] father and he’s

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my son, and if there’s something bigger than that I’ll put a bullet in my head” (Miller 1947, 145). But it is Larry who causes Joe to shoot himself, when hearing Larry’s last letter finally convinces Joe that there is something bigger than the family, and “to him they were all my sons. And I guess they were” (Miller 1947, 131). Like Amos Beeves, Larry has suffered by his father’s teaching. His realization that the deaths of the pilots are the result of his father’s business practices is what precipitates Larry’s suicide. But like David, Chris escapes his brother’s fate. Instead of killing himself as his father and brother do, he is able to embrace a larger perspective. As he tells his mother, the import of Larry’s death is that “you can be better! Once and for all you can know there’s a universe of people outside and you’re responsible to it” (Miller 1947, 151). His mother’s final words after Joe’s suicide give Chris permission to escape the curse of the Keller family: “Don’t take it on yourself. Forget it now. Live” (Miller 1947, 152). In both of these plays, it is the favored son of the father (Amos, Larry) who suffers, while the other son ultimately prospers by rejecting the father and finding his own principles to live by. Miller’s triad of father and sons is, of course, at the center of Death of a Salesman. Steven Centola has even suggested that it is Willy Loman’s “inspiring pursuit of his ever elusive identity as the perfect father [that] makes him a tragic figure” (Centola, 33). Like the two earlier patriarchs, Willy Loman has invested everything in his sons. Willy teaches his gospel for business success to both of his boys. He thanks Almighty God that they are “both built like Adonises” (Miller 1949, 171). But it is Biff who is the favored son. In high school, his father tells him, “You got a greatness in you, Biff, remember that. You got all kinds a greatness” (Miller 1949, 196). And even while Willy decries the adult Biff’s failure to deliver on his early promise, he still believes that “a star like that, magnificent, can never really fade away!” (Miller 1949, 197). Meanwhile, Happy has always been reduced to pathetic attempts to get his father’s attention. (“I’m losing weight, you notice, Pop?” [Miller 1949, 168]). In adulthood, for Happy, Willy has only an offhand “Keep up the good work” (Miller 1949, 196). As Cain and Abel, Biff and Hap have eventually switched places. Biff has been ordered out of the house by Willy while Hap stayed at home and outwardly played the role of dutiful son. But Hap is a very flawed Abel. Miller makes it clear that, in his thirties, he is a thoughtless, selfish boyman who does nothing for his parents beyond the occasional Christmas

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gift, and is driven to “ruin” the girlfriends of his superiors at work and to take bribes because he has what he describes as “an overdeveloped sense of competition or something” (Miller 1949, 165). It is Hap who casually deserts Willy in a restaurant with the words, “that’s not my father. He’s just a guy” (Miller 1949, 231). As Biff puts it, “you just don’t give a good goddam about him” (Miller 1949, 230). It is Biff, who, after his disillusionment with Willy when he sees him in a hotel room with a woman, has lived the wandering life of Cain. It is a life of self-defeat, beginning with his refusal to go to summer school so he could accept his athletic scholarship to the University of Virginia, then being kicked out of the house by Willy and drifting in and out of “twenty or thirty different kinds of jobs” (Miller 1949, 163), finally ending up in jail for stealing a suit, presumably so he could go back to New York and get a “real” job. His life is a continual pattern of trying to please his father by “making good” in business, doing something to sabotage it, leaving New York and finding work that he really enjoys, and then “running home” because he is suddenly overcome by the sense that “I oughta be makin’ my future” (Miller 1949, 163). As he tells Hap, “I’ve always made a point of not wasting my life and every time I come back here I know that all I’ve done is to waste my life” (Miller 1949, 163). Like Cain, Biff is best at farming, and he realizes that he will never please his father with the fruits of that labor. Like Pat Beeves and Joe Keller, Willy is partly responsible for his son’s arrested development, precisely because of the favor he showed him and the business gospel he passed on to him. As Biff says, “I never got anywhere because you blew me so full of hot air I could never stand taking orders from anybody. That’s whose fault it is!” (Miller 1949, 243). And it is not hard to find the source of Hap’s “overdeveloped sense of competition.” Like Chris Keller, Biff Loman is freed by his father’s death to leave the family and define his own future, even as Hap clings to the belief that Willy “had a good dream. It’s the only dream you can have—to come out number-one man. He fought it out here, and this where I’m gonna win it for him” (Miller 1949, 248). The implication is that Cain, in breaking free of the need to please the Father, is more fortunate than Abel, who remains in thrall to his gospel: “I’m gonna show you and everybody else that Willy Loman did not die in vain” (Miller 1949, 248). It was nearly twenty years after Salesman that Miller wrote his most directly autobiographical treatment of this father and sons triad in The Price. Here the extraneous matter is stripped to a bare minimum, and we

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are presented with the drama of two brothers who are filled with resentment against each other. Victor Franz has resented his brother Walter since Victor quit college to stay home and support their father after he was ruined in the stock market crash while Walter broke away to go to college and become a successful doctor. The focal point of his resentment is Walter’s refusal twenty-eight years before the play’s present to lend him five-hundred dollars so he could go back to school, which precipitated his joining the police force and giving up all hope of the career in science that he had always dreamt of. Victor, the “good” son, stayed at home and supported his father, who was seemingly unable to recover from his business failure, while the selfish Walter escaped and built his own comfortable life. The play’s familiar irony is that it is Walter the father admires. As Victor says, “the few times he’d come around, the expression on the old man’s face—you’d think God walked in. The respect, you know what I mean?” (Miller 1968, 669). Victor has lived a life of sacrifice for his father, even while he knew he was being exploited. When Walter, who had refused Victor the tuition loan because he knew his father had four thousand dollars tucked away while they were “eating garbage here” (Miller 1968, 707), had told him to ask their father for the money, Victor was met only with his father’s laughter. On hearing this story, Victor’s wife Esther is furious, believing that he has always known his father’s desperate state was an act and that he denied comforts for his wife and son to support “a calculating liar … a miserable cheap manipulator” (Miller 1968, 707). Victor’s explanation for tolerating his father’s deception is based on his Depression memory of all the ruined men sleeping in Bryant Park next to the New York Public Library: “He loved me … he just didn’t want to end up on the grass! It’s not that you don’t love somebody, it’s that you’ve got to survive” (Miller 1968, 708). Victor’s ultimate defense for sticking by his father, that “you’re brought up to believe in one another … you can’t help trying to keep it going” (Miller 1968, 708), is aggressively challenged by Walter. “Were we really brought up to believe in one another? We were brought up to succeed, weren’t we? Why else would he respect me so and not you?” (Miller 1968, 709). Walter brutally exposes the fantasy that Victor has constructed around their family. What was unbearable, he says, “is not that it all fell apart, it was that there was never anything there … what you saw behind the library was not that there was no mercy in the world, kid. It’s that there was no love in this house. There was no loyalty. There was nothing here but a straight financial arrangement” (Miller 1968, 709).

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Walter says that he himself gave up his ambition to do pure science and spent thirty years trying to protect himself from repeating his father’s catastrophe by accumulating money, only to realize that there had been no catastrophe. Victor, he says, invented a life of self-sacrifice, a life of duty, to support his fantasy of their family: “You were not upholding something, you were denying what you knew they were” (Miller 1968, 709). In the end, Walter confesses to his jealousy of Victor when they were young, and a desire to hold him back, but Victor refuses to acknowledge that his deep desire was to see Walter destroyed, as Walter says, “to destroy me with this saintly self-sacrifice, this mockery of sacrifice” (Miller 1968, 711). Victor evades Walter’s charge against him by insisting that his sacrifice for his father was simpler than that. In the end, he says, he “just didn’t want him to end up on the grass. And he didn’t. That’s all it was” (Miller 1968, 711). While Victor and Esther come to an understanding that will allow their marriage to continue, The Price ends in irresolution as far as the brothers are concerned. After trying in vain to ease his own guilt by getting Victor to accept some of the responsibility, Walter essentially has a tantrum and leaves, perhaps completing the inevitable disintegration of the dysfunctional Franz family. Four years after The Price, Miller finally treated the Cain and Abel motif directly in The Creation of the World and Other Business, his adaptation of the biblical narrative. Dramatizing the biblical story itself allowed Miller to strip it to the fundamental elements undergirding the family dynamics he had been returning to over and over again for thirty years. In Creation, Adam and Eve clearly bear the guilt for the unhappy situation into which their sons are born. It is their sin that gets them expelled from the Garden by God and sends them wandering in the desert. The situation between the sons is equally straightforward. Cain is the dutiful son, the harder-working one who has to do all the back-breaking farm work while Abel just follows the flocks around as they graze. Cain is also the more pious one. It is he who invents the Sabbath, insisting they all must pray for forgiveness after Adam confesses his and Eve’s original sin to the sons. “We must give this day,” he says, “not to the animals or the crops; this day we must give to God. I tell you—he looks up tenderly—if we will open up our sins to Him and cleanse ourselves, He might show His face and tell us how we are supposed to live” (Miller 1972, 768). And it is Cain, not Adam or Eve, who says the prayer for forgiveness: “Almighty God,

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seeing that our parents were thrown out of Paradise for their transgressions against Thee, we, Cain and Abel, beseech Thy forgiveness. Let this family live, let us be innocent again!” (Miller 1972, 768). Despite Cain’s efforts, it is Abel who is the preferred one. Eve admits to Cain, “I loved him more … Yes, more than you” (Miller 1972, 786). And even though the sacrifice to God is Cain’s idea, God prefers Abel’s lamb to his onions. God says, “That […] is a good onion, Cain,” but to Abel, he says, “Young man, this is undoubtedly the sweetest, most delicious, delicate, and profoundly satisfying piece of meat I have ever tasted since the world began” (Miller 1972, 776). Adam calls this “our proudest moment” (Miller 1972, 776). When Cain protests to God that he has not even tasted his corn, God’s reply evokes Willy Loman talking to Hap: “Oh, I can see it’s all very nice. You have done quite well, Cain. Keep it up” (Miller 1972, 777). Overcome with shock and resentment that God would not appreciate “what goes into an ear of corn” (Miller 1972, 777), Cain kicks down the altar he’s built and kills his brother. After Cain kills Abel, he tells God he has done “what had to be done. As the Lord surely knew when I laid before Him the fruit of my sweat— for which there was only Thy contempt” (Miller 1972, 780). When God responds that he had approved his offering, Cain’s resentment for Abel erupts. “Abel’s lamb was not ‘approved,’ it was adored, like his life!” (Miller 1972, 781). God tells him it was just a matter of his preferring lamb to onions, but “let a man do well and he shall be accepted.” Cain insists, “I have done well, and I am humiliated” (Miller 1972, 781). But God silences him with his sin: “You hated Abel before this day, so you cannot say you have done well” (Miller 1972, 781). After the murder, God reveals what his plan was, suggesting the possibility of salvation for all envious and hateful brothers. “I saw that Cain was pious,” he says, “yet in him I saw envy too. And so I thought—if Cain were so enraged that he lift his hand against his brother, but then, remembering his love for Abel and for me, even in his fury lay down arms? To Cain: Man! You would have risen like a planet before the generations, the victory of God, first brother and the first to reject a murder. Oh, Cain, how I hoped for thee” (Miller 1972, 782). But God’s hope has been in vain. Cain remains unrepentant. At the play’s end, despite his parents’ pleading, Cain is unable to ask forgiveness for his crime. As Eve says, “You can’t even weep for [Abel]. You are still full of hate!” (Miller 1972, 786). Cain’s resentment of his brother is still paramount: “How will I weep?” he says, “You never loved

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Cain!” (Miller 1972, 786). Cain’s final words are, “I am not to blame!” (Miller 1972, 786). In using the Cain and Abel motif directly, Miller has flipped the previously represented roles of the two brothers. The dutiful son who stays at home and laboriously tills the ground for his parents, the pious inventor of the Sabbath and leader of the prayers, is Cain the murderer. The boy who wanders with his flocks and raises the lamb that pleases God by finding “the sweetest grass” (Miller 1972, 776) is Abel, favored by God and beloved by his parents. This version fully realizes the idea that is suggested and evaded in The Price, that the dutiful son is driven by resentment, the wanderer his victim. This treatment of the motif seems to have purged Miller’s guilt for his brother’s sacrifice and his own good fortune, for, apparently, he never felt the need to revisit it again. Although the differences between the American families that Miller and Williams dramatize are evident upon close inspection, the families of both are rife with favoritism, resentment, jealousy, disloyalty, desertion, guilt, violence, and hatred. Most of their families have either disintegrated or are in the process of doing so, despite the love for each other that survives among some of the family members. In the mid-twentieth century, their plays actually served as a counter to America’s popular conception of itself as a nation built on the foundation of a happy and stable family unit, a conception disseminated through the mass media in shows like One Man’s Family (radio 1932–1955, television 1949–1952 and 1954–1955), Father Knows Best (radio 1949–1954, television 1954–1960), Leave It to Beaver (television 1957–1963), and The Donna Reed Show (television 1958–1966), which assumed the intact patriarchal family unit. The “family drama” of Williams and Miller was a testament to the need to look more deeply into America’s sunny self-conception and see the family as the complicated, often torturous set of relationships it really was.

Works Cited Centola, Steven R. 2007. Family Values in Death of a Salesman, in Harold Bloom, ed., Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman: Updated Edition, 25–34. New York: Chelsea House. Miller, Arthur. 1947. All My Sons. Reprinted in The Penguin Arthur Miller: Collected Plays, foreword by Lynn Nottage. New York: Penguin, 2015. Miller, Arthur. 1949. Death of a Salesman. Reprinted in The Penguin Arthur Miller: Collected Plays, foreword by Lynn Nottage. New York: Penguin, 2015.

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Miller, Arthur. 1968. The Price. Reprinted in The Penguin Arthur Miller: Collected Plays, foreword by Lynn Nottage. New York: Penguin, 2015. Miller, Arthur. 1972. The Creation of the World and Other Business. Reprinted in The Penguin Arthur Miller: Collected Plays, foreword by Lynn Nottage. New York: Penguin, 2015. Miller, Arthur. 1987. Timebends: A Life. New York: Grove Press. Miller, Arthur. 1989. The Man Who Had All the Luck: A Fable. Reprinted in The Penguin Arthur Miller: Collected Plays, foreword by Lynn Nottage. New York: Penguin, 2015. Schvey, Henry I. 2015. Under House Arrest: The Family in American Drama, in Miriam López Rodríguez, ed., Old Stories, New Readings: The Transforming Power of American Drama. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press, 15–24. Williams, Tennessee. 1968. Kingdom of Earth. Reprinted in Plays 1957–1980, Mel Gussow and Kenneth Holditch, ed. New York: The Library of America, 2000. Williams, Tennessee. 1976. The Two-Character Play. New York: New Directions.

CHAPTER 5

Arthur Miller, Edward Albee, and Crises of the American Family: American Civilization and Its Discontents Michael Y. Bennett

While not the exclusive theatrical commentators of the American family and American family life, Arthur Miller (1915–2005) and Edward Albee (1928–2016) did sit on unique perches to view families in the United States. Miller and Albee wrote their early plays during back-to-back historical moments, each of which exhibited noted change in American family life. This essay juxtaposes Miller’s late 1940s postwar United States— and how disillusionment affected the American familial unit—with Albee’s early 1960s United States—and the countercultural rumblings that put the very notion of American familial stability into question. Both Miller and Albee explore the hopes and illusions of the “American Dream” by investigating crises of post-World War II American family life. However, the thirteen-year difference in Miller’s and Albee’s ages gave Miller and Albee, half a generation apart, distinctive perspectives on their contemporary crises facing American culture and the changing cultural mores affecting family life. Focusing on seminal plays at the beginning of

M. Y. Bennett (B) University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, Whitewater, WI, USA © The Author(s) 2020 S. Marino and D. Palmer (eds.), Arthur Miller for the Twenty-First Century, American Literature Readings in the 21st Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37293-4_5

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both of their theatrical careers—Miller’s All My Sons (1947) and Death of a Salesman (1949) and Albee’s American Dream (1961) and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962)—I argue that both Miller and Albee recognize that changing conceptions of family and family life arise from this crisis of American familial units. This essay examines the emerging disillusionment and destabilization of the American family from the late 1940s through the early 1960s through Miller’s and Albee’s critiques of the so-called “American Dream.” By dwelling on the American Dream narrative that was, in part, fantasy in the post-World War II the United States, both Miller and Albee observe how the illusory status quo that emerges from the notion of the American Dream had very real and harmful effects on American families. In their back-to-back historical moments, and taken together, Miller’s and Albee’s critiques of the American Dream work analogously to the biblical narratives of Eden and the Expulsion from Eden. Miller’s All My Sons and Death of a Salesman explore, respectively, “The Temptation” and then “The Fall” of the American Dream, while Albee’s American Dream and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? examine the “Expulsion” of American families in relation to the American Dream.

States of the Union/Births of a Nation In short, Miller’s work reflects and symbolizes the American family that birthed the early “Baby Boomers” (mid-1940s to mid-1950s); Albee’s work does the same for the American families that gave birth to “Generation Jones” (mid-1950s to mid-1960s). Miller, especially in All My Sons and Death of a Salesman, tends to see individuals as driven by American cultural values, mores, and biases. In writing about families, Miller’s focus really is on American culture as subtly pernicious and destructive of people’s lives, resulting in tragic outcomes. Albee views the problems with families, instead, in a tragicomic and humanistic manner: while there is something about human beings that makes them fundamentally incapable of genuinely loving each other, this does not prevent some from continuing to try to connect. The tragedy of the human condition for Albee is not driven by cultural factors—such as the shallowness or fraudulence of the American Dream, as Miller might suggest—but stems from people’s inability genuinely to connect with each other in honest and fulfilling ways. However, Albee’s humor, while biting, does demonstrate that

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the will to live—to connect and love—is there and that however disconnected humans may feel from one another, that insatiable desire to love and be happy cannot be suppressed by the status quo. Miller’s earliest theatrical successes occurred in the middle of Harry S. Truman’s presidency (1945–1953). Premiering on Broadway just two years apart, Miller’s two most famous plays at the beginning of his career—All My Sons (1947) and Death of a Salesman (1949)—sit on opposite sides of one of President Truman’s greatest successes: his advocacy and implementation of the Marshall Plan. In a sense, Miller’s two plays, down-to-the-year, reflect societal disillusionment and its effects on American families. All My Sons demonstrates an America that comes out on top, but one that has left devastation in its tracks: Europe is in shambles, and Americans, despite all best (and not always best) intentions, had had a hand in much of the destruction, with scars that still were felt at home: Keller: She’s out of her mind. Mother: Altogether! […] Your brother’s alive, darling, because if he’s dead, your father killed him. Do you understand me now? As long as you live, that boy is alive. God does not let a son be killed by his father… (Miller, 139)

All My Sons shines a light on the psychological shrapnel the war left in American families. Death of a Salesman comes at a time when the implementation of the Marshall Plan is just starting to show rewards for Europe. While America generally prospered after the war, some Americans felt left behind at home: Biff: Baby, together we’d stand up for one another, we’d have someone to trust. Happy: If I were around you— Biff: Hap, the trouble is we weren’t brought up to grub for money. I don’t know how to do it. Happy: Neither can I! Biff: Then let’s go! Happy: The only thing is—what can you make out there? Biff: But look at your friend. Builds an estate and then hasn’t the peace of mind to live in it.

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Happy: Yeah, but when he walks in front of him. That’s fifty-two through the revolving door, and than he’s got in his head. (Miller,

into the store the waves part thousand dollars a year coming I got more in my pinky finger 164–165)

The Lomans are one of these representative tragic families left to dry in the new postwar US economy, not touched by the same prosperity that has swept up many in its rising and powerful wake. A little over a decade later, Albee’s early plays emerge in a quite different United States. John F. Kennedy is President and the postwar economic windfall that blossomed in America in the 1950s is being felt by more and more families. Albee’s American Dream (1961) and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962) are less concerned with the tragedy of people who fail to achieve success as defined by the American Dream than with the hollowness and shallowness the pursuit of this Dream has brought about in our society. By the early 1960s, a desire for “keeping up with the Joneses,” and what happens to individuals because of the status quo, becomes tragicomic for Albee. He thinks there is something petty, and also funny, about this quite-silly quest to be a part of the hegemony. Trying to keep up with the Joneses, too, is sad because that quest is meaningless and distracts attention away from where the attention needs to be focused: on relationships that matter.

America’s Prelapsarian Era in Its Death Throws The change in focus from Miller to Albee—the move away from a focus on cultural values to one on individual psychology (making Albee perhaps more like Eugene O’Neill than Miller)—is driven by changes in American culture. In post-World War II America, the focus really was on the triumph of American culture, and Miller was one of the critics suggesting that self-congratulations may rest on only a shallow or delusional sense of how that culture actually operates in people’s lives. By the early to mid-1960s, the focus is much more on a kind of individualism and selfexpression: a rejection of the accepted culture, a counterculture movement, so the culture itself is no longer the driving force it had been for Miller in the 1940s. The metaphorical Fall in the late 1940s—when there is a feeling that America, the victorious de facto superpower, was on an inevitable rise—affected those who could not envision their lives as part of this Eden. Appropriately, then, All My Sons and Death of a Salesman

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examine an American climate that either propagates excess and greed as a natural extension of capitalism, as in All My Sons, or that leaves behind those who are not equipped for the ways that capitalism helps only the strongest to survive and leaves behind those who are weak, flawed, or naïve, in Salesman. In these two plays, the loss comes about either by exploitation or by unawareness, both of which are possible only because of innocence and lack of knowledge. American culture moved between the 1940s and the 1960s to this more virulent form of individualism, which extended on into the Reaganism of the 1980s and the Trumpism of today. Albee traced much of this throughout his career by continuing to explore the dark side of that self-centered individualism. Albee is post-prelapsarian in that, working in the tradition of Miller, he also exposed the dark side of the individualism that Americans always had assumed was a fundamental ideal of American democracy, one without any negative consequences. The main difference between the two playwrights, however, comes down to their differing worldviews, which can be attributed to the differences in the America each playwright experienced in the formative years of his early adulthoods. Perhaps this is why Miller, after exploring what leads his characters to a Fall in the early years of his career in the late 1940s and early 1950s, looks back in hindsight across the world that Albee explores and names his 1964 autobiographical play, After the Fall . As Brenda Murphy has argued (314), in After the Fall, writing for Miller is a therapeutic way to forgive oneself or others, and this play, turning back to our Eden and post-Edenic metaphor, appropriately focuses on individual toil, its effects on the individual, and the need to forgive. To extend our Eden analogy, Miller focuses on the prelapsarian moment. All My Sons is a play about temptation. War and unfettered capitalism offer opportunistic deals with the devil, which precipitate a fall and can end only in tragedy. In Death of a Salesman, Willy’s past infidelity, his temptation well before the present in which the play is set, is largely what brings about Willy’s fall. In both All My Sons and Death of a Salesman, the loss comes with the gift of knowledge of our past shortsightedness–which ultimately is the very goal of tragedy. In The American Dream and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Albee’s focus is on families who must face the world after the Fall. He encourages us not to delude ourselves into blindly thinking we are still in Eden, pleading for humans to use their ability to see the world as it is—a harsh place— but one that can be cultivated by humans. Humanity, Albee implores,

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must toil to cultivate humanity, and that begins by cultivating one relationship at a time. Unlike in Miller’s elegant tragedies, this Edenic and post-Edenic analogy is not immediately self-evident from the basic plot of Albee’s plays. The source of Albee’s “absurd tragicomedy” (Bennett, 19–20) and “humanis[m]” (Bennett, 68), or, what I call here, Albee’s tragicomic humanism in a post-Expulsion world derives from the challenge of connecting to other humans against the backdrop of an American culture of rugged individualism without the balance of genuine social networks, the supports that are required for humans to belong to and feel a sense of community. The American Dream is Beckettian in its use of non-sequiturs, and this represents, much like Harold Pinter’s small talk, a failure of communication. But while the failure of communication for Pinter is due to the lack of a “questioning voice” (Pinter, qtd. in Ford), for Albee both the play The American Dream and the American Dream in people’s lives are dream-like: non-linear, illogical, delusional, and illusory. Like O’Neill’s pipe-dreams, the American Dream causes a fracturing of families who, as its result, cannot communicate as a unit, which is simultaneously the cause and the effect of building both a national myth and the society’s familial units around a flimsy illusion. Albee’s families are not cohesive units but, like the nation itself, collections of disparate individuals who have differing agendas. This contrasts with a healthy family: a group of people, brought together by blood or by choice, who have interwoven goals and a mutual support system that provides an environment in which individuals grow and flourish through their interrelationships. Especially in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Albee explores the American Dream’s demand that this familial health depends upon the presence of a husband and wife raising two children with a dog in a house with a white picket fence. Here Albee examines a particularly American First Couple: not Adam and Eve but a George and Martha who not accidentally share the names of our first President and his wife. In Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? the demonic illusion is that George and Martha need a child, an idyllic son—“…the apple of our eye…the sprout…the little bugger…” (Albee, 210)—to complete their own American Dream. This delusion has to be exorcized in order for them to move beyond the pain, anger, and frustration in their marriage to realize that they, too, can be a beautiful American family, Instead of filling a lack that is a societal lie in the first place—thinking the Joneses have it all and one must do as the Joneses do and have what

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they have in order to be happy—we all need to embrace what we do have, even if it’s just the two of us: “MARTHA: Just…us? / GEORGE: Yes” (Albee, 311). George and Martha are all George and Martha need, which at first is scary, for it opens a world that is free of predetermined illusory social values and gives each of us the responsibility to create real value for ourselves in our own lives. If George and Martha can do this, they will be just fine, just the two of them.

Conclusion: Apocalypse, Now? While the critical exploration of traditional and non-traditional families occupies many pages of Albee’s oeuvre and, particularly, his most iconic plays—in addition to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? think of A Delicate Balance, Seascape, and The Goat —arguably the most vivid image that Albee ultimately leaves us near the end of his career is the bloody dead goat, Sylvia, an image that, in a fashion, bookends Albee’s career with Jerry from his early play The Zoo Story (1959). Jerry often is seen as a Jesus-like character, running into the knife to save Peter from the status quo. Sylvia, like Jerry, is a metaphorical second coming, not this time of Jesus but of the Apocalypse. Miller’s tragedies are just that: Tales of humans with tragic flaws coming up against not fate but the ever-present unfeeling touch of American culture. In this respect, Miller is really an American version of a Greek tragedian, where American culture acts as unrelenting and inescapable, much like Fate. But unlike Greek tragic heroes and heroines, who cannot escape their tragic fate because they cannot escape their tragic flaw, Miller understands that American culture and society can change for the better. Tragedy can be averted. Miller’s tragedies, then, do come with an ounce of hope. Albee, on the other hand, spent his career having his characters journey through the morass of American illusions in search of other characters with whom to connect and journey on. And in this way, Albee really is a tragicomic humanist. But with The Goat , Or Who is Sylvia? (Notes Toward a Definition of Tragedy) (2000) Albee asks, what we mean by “tragedy”? I am not suggesting that Albee is defining “tragedy” in the theatrical sense but pondering something like the following. Albee spent his career seeing tragedy and joy and laughter arising simultaneously; that is how life generally operates. What then would something that is pure tragedy look like to Albee? Of course, Albee’s The Goat is quite possibly

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Albee’s funniest and most uproarious play, but that is essentially what makes everything more tragic by the time we get to the end. The bloody end signals not just tragedy but apocalypse: everything and everyone is destroyed. Genuine human connection is impossible. Ultimately, we all merely are alone, merely observing other’s lives but not authentically part of them. The Goat is a tragedy because Albee created a situation that is too absurd, too hopeless, moving past contradictions about love and its limits to a tragic confrontation with the ultimate impossibility of genuine connection, an apocalypse of all we thought we valued. This is not merely the absurd, and here I differ with Kuhn (5). In The Zoo Story, though it seems irrational to Peter, Jerry makes sense of his murder-suicide. In Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, George and Martha are in an absurd situation: they want children but the world will not give them any. The play is not a full tragedy because George and Martha ultimately make sense of their situation and realize that they have each other and that might be enough. However, in The Goat , the situation cannot be resolved. Stevie’s murder of Sylvia resolves nothing; it merely expresses her rage at the fact that nothing can be resolved. All the way back to the Greek dramatists, that irreconcilability has been the heart of tragedy. Similarly, Miller’s Resurrection Blues (2002), a satire about a dictator who hopes to crucify one of his political prisoners, whom the local people believe to be Jesus, so that he can sell the film rights for a huge profit, also depicts people as ensnared by human nature. Human will and moral courage are depicted here as far from capable of overcoming the other forces that drive our actions. As Jeffrey D. Mason notes, the play “closes with a renunciation of expectations, of any belief that the future could constitute progress beyond the present” (657). At the end of this play, there is no progress possible: the “blues” of this “resurrection” mourns the fact that the Resurrection is, subsequently, followed by Judgment Day, when humanity’s fate is sealed. Miller bemoans the lack of progress that humans have made, and should Judgment Day come, there would be a need to sing the “blues.” Despite this pessimistic interpretation of the endings of The Goat and Resurrection Blues , I do not believe that either Albee or Miller saw our futures as hopeless. Indeed, that is why each of them wrote. Both authors believed that by showing the apocalyptic effect of our failures to genuinely connect with other people they would encourage us to pursue

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more authentic ways of engaging. Empathically finding each other may be the only way to find our humanity and ultimately ourselves.

Works Cited Albee, Edward. 2007. The Collected Plays of Edward Albee: 1958–1965. New York: Overlook Duckworth. Bennett, Michael Y. 2015. The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre and Literature of the Absurd. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Ford, Anna. 1988. Pinter, Plays & Politics, BBC television interview. Kuhn, John. 2004. Getting Albee’s Goat: “Notes toward a Definition of Tragedy.” American Drama 13:2, 1–32. Mason, Jeffrey D. 2003. Miller’s Ironic Resurrection. Theatre Journal 55:4 (December), 657–77. Miller, Arthur. 2015. The Penguin Arthur Miller: Collected Plays. New York: Penguin Books. Murphy, Brenda. 2002. Arendt, Kristeva, and Arthur Miller: Forgiveness and Promise in After the Fall. PMLA 117:2 (March), 314–16.

CHAPTER 6

Arthur Miller and Contemporary American Women Dramatists Ellen B. Anthony

All theater artists who write for the twenty-first-century stage in America are, either consciously or unconsciously, in conversation with Arthur Miller. Often credited with focusing what became two central themes in American drama, the family and the betrayal of the American Dream, Miller is an undeniable force in the establishment of a new kind of American theater. This chapter explores the way these themes are reconfigured and enhanced by several American women playwrights: Lorraine Hansberry, Marsha Norman, Anna Deavere Smith, Suzan-Lori Parks, Lynn Nottage, and Annie Baker. Some of these writers openly acknowledged Miller’s dramas as inspirational, while others are more subtle inheritors, but all share a common commitment to theater as a vehicle for social change. What does it mean to be a man in twentieth-century America? All Miller’s narratives primarily tell stories about a male protagonist who determines the play’s central reality; his most recognizable works, All My

E. B. Anthony (B) Marymount Manhattan College, New York, NY, USA © The Author(s) 2020 S. Marino and D. Palmer (eds.), Arthur Miller for the Twenty-First Century, American Literature Readings in the 21st Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37293-4_6

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Sons , Death of a Salesman, The Crucible and A View From the Bridge, dramatize the tragic lives of middle-aged, working husbands or fathers who struggle against not only themselves but unjust political systems; wives, mothers, or daughters are rarely front and center. Yet, many of the most important women dramatists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries speak and write passionately about Miller’s influence, his commitment to theater as a vehicle for change, and his unique ability to dramatize the aspirations and disappointments of the underrepresented, unappreciated, and forgotten. In her introduction to The Penguin Arthur Miller: Collected Plays, Lynn Nottage writes, “I found myself drawn to Miller’s work because he wrote with a sense of purpose—an evangelical fervor rooted in his overarching concern about the shifting moral fault lines that threatened to fracture the foundation of American culture in the twentieth century” (Miller 2015, 13). Miller’s incredible contribution to the American stage is that he establishes a vocabulary, as no other American writer before him, well-suited to tackling injustice. Still, many view Miller’s tragedies as primarily concerned with the question, “What does it mean to be a man in America?” It is a common reading of Miller’s body of work that women are depicted as adjuncts to their husbands and sons and are primarily defined by male characters; and it is true that in Miller’s dramatic world, women’s experiences are frequently dramatized as mere addendums to the main plot. Miller himself admits in a 1999 BBC interview, “I didn’t know much about girls then.” Although Miller often is criticized for his depictions of women, a more nuanced reading of Miller’s work, and the degree to which women playwrights are influenced by his contributions to the American stage, reveals that there is considerable depth and complexity in his female characters that perhaps has been underestimated. Several of Miller’s women actually serve as anchors and truth tellers in Miller’s dramatic world—his narratives often reflect the sexism of midcentury, American life, but his women are often the most insightful characters. For example, the character Kate Keller, from Miller’s first Broadway success, All My Sons (1947), has a subtle yet deep reservoir of strength. At first, she seems naïvely to believe her missing son (Larry) will return home alive from World War II despite his long absence, yet we find out later that she has known all along that her husband, Joe, is guilty of shipping defective airplane parts overseas and of lying about it. She holds on to the illusion of hope for her son’s return as a way of getting back at her ambitious husband. She will not confront Joe about

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his criminal actions as long as he allows her to live with the illusion that their son is alive. Kate’s belief is not weakness or passivity but a choice, a method for survival. American playwright and director Theresa Rebeck, who directed All My Sons at Houston’s Alley Theatre in 2015, said in an interview with American Theatre Magazine’s Carey Purcell on March 16, 2016, entitled, “All His Daughters: Arthur Miller’s Strong, Truth-Telling Women”: “My experience of All My Sons is that [Miller] doesn’t skim over their [women’s] experiences. He doesn’t make them secondary characters. I think he is one of those great writers who fully inhabited those women … Arthur Miller knew more about the strength and courage of women than he often gets credit for.” She goes on to describe Ann (Larry’s ex-girlfriend and now Chris’ fiancée), “She’s got a lot of the period corny sweetness, but you realize the further you go with her that she continually makes choices that get her deeper and deeper into the story … [Ann] saves [Chris’s] life. There are so many moments in the play that he could be lost, and she stands there and holds him together…” In his next play, Death of a Salesman (1949), Linda Loman speaks some of the most poignant lines Miller ever wrote for the stage: I don’t say he’s a great man. Willy Loman never made a lot of money. His name was never in the paper. He’s not the finest character that ever lived. But he’s a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid. He’s not to be allowed to fall in his grave like an old dog. Attention, attention must finally be paid to such a person. (Miller 1949a, 185)

Her admonition to their two sons, Biff and Happy, reveals a woman who is both perceptive and knowledgeable about what is happening to her husband. It is her language and understanding that echoes the message of the tragedy: the humanity of all people is worthy of respect. Similarly, in The Crucible, Miller portrays Elizabeth Proctor as a smart, principled, strong woman caught equally with her husband in the net of the Salem witchcraft trials—in this tragedy, both Proctors are tragic heroes. Bea Carbone in A View from the Bridge, though subservient to her husband in the most traditional ways, is also a tragic component of Miller’s portrait of the Italian American neighborhood of Red Hook, Brooklyn, in the 1950s; this portrait shows us that women living in working-class, immigrant communities didn’t have a lot of choices. It would be almost impossible for Bea to move out and get a job or a

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divorce. When she eventually confronts Eddie with the fact that he is in love with her niece, the tragic consequences in the play begin to unfold. Overall, it is Miller’s men who are portrayed as victims; it is the men whose lives often end in suicide. His women are perceptive, intelligent, and resilient. Kate Keller, Linda Loman, Elizabeth Proctor, and Bea Carbone speak some of the most introspective poetry in the plays in which they appear.

Lorraine Hansberry In Lorraine Hansberry’s March 1, 1959, speech, “The Negro Writer and His Roots: Towards a New Romanticism,” she says: All art is ultimately social…The writer is deceived who thinks that he has some other choice. The question is not whether one will make a social statement in one’s work – but what that statement will say – there are no plays which are not social, and no plays that do not have a thesis.

When A Raisin in the Sun premiered in New York in 1959, no play by an African American woman ever had been produced on Broadway. Her drama is the story of the Younger family and their struggle to survive in a roach-infested tenement on the South Side of Chicago. Like Miller, Hansberry’s characters are dreamers, some even victims to false illusions, full of hope—despite poverty and other cruel material realities. The dramas of Miller and Hansberry clearly have much in common, and there is, not surprisingly, already a large body of scholarship published about the obvious parallels between Miller’s earliest tragedies and A Raisin in the Sun; both Miller and Hansberry depict the financial and emotional struggles in post-World War II America and the nation’s failure in the years after to move toward a true politics of reform, either for African Americans or for the white working class. The Younger family’s dream—like the dreams of many of Miller’s characters—is to live in an America where hard work allows an ordinary man to provide a home for his family without having to sacrifice his dignity. In A Raisin in the Sun, however, Hansberry’s protagonist is a strong, newly widowed woman—Lena Younger—who is trying to change her life and the lives of her children and grandson. As the first African American woman to have a play produced on Broadway, Hansberry, not surprisingly, builds on and develops themes common in Miller’s early work: she

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writes the story of an American family, focusing this time on the matriarch. Mama’s chief conflict in the play is her relationship with her troubled yet ambitious son, Walter, who is quick to dismiss his mother’s wisdom. Evoking the words of her dead husband, she tries to explain her past to him: “Big Walter use to say…‘Seem like God didn’t see fit to give the black man nothing but dreams – but He did give us children to make them dreams seem worthwhile’” (48). Walter is restless, dissatisfied with his inability to make ends meet, and troubled in his relationships with women and marriage. He implores his mother to let him control the family’s financial future by investing in a new business scheme, a plan to which she ultimately relents. Predictably, the situation turns sour when an associate absconds with the family’s inheritance, including the money that was to have been saved for his sister’s medical school education, depriving the rest of the family of their dreams. This portrait of a disaffected, “lost” son has parallels to Miller’s rendering of Biff Loman, who also stands to inherit from his father in the end. Biff speaks about his inability to “get settled,” or to make a living and start a family. Biff admits to his father: “I am not a leader of men, Willy, and neither are you. You were never anything but a hard-working drummer who landed in the ash can like the rest of them! I’m one-dollar an hour, Willy!” (111). Though Biff comes to a place where he finally tries to break through his father’s illusions, to get him to understand reality, Willy is incapable of seeing reality when it comes to his sons. Like Walter, Biff is a catalyst for the action of the play; his attempts to shatter the longheld illusions of “promise,” of personal prestige, trigger Willy’s memories, which are frequently about Biff as a younger man, full of charisma and adoration, representing a kind of magical time in their relationship. But Biff soon learns of Willy’s affair in Boston, causing Biff to lose faith in his family. He considers Willy a “fake,” and no longer believes in, or goes along with, Willy’s grand fantasies of success. Biff’s problems lie in the fact that even though he desires to forget his own identity, he cannot change the fact that he is his father’s son. It is true that Biff is not a womanizer like his brother Happy, but he has incorporated Willy’s tendency to exaggerate and manipulate reality in his favor; Biff, temporarily, even believes he was a salesman for his former boss, Bill Oliver, rather than a shipping clerk. It is not until their awkward confrontation that Biff is jolted into remembering his own past accurately. Yet, Biff is ultimately different from Willy because he does finally accept and embrace the fact that he has been living a lie all of his life. Biff is

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relieved—even if he is still “lost”—once he realizes who he is and what he wants; when Biff finally declares to his parents, “We never told the truth for ten minutes in this house” (104), he severs himself emotionally from the past. Though he tries valiantly to open his father’s eyes, he fails to make his father understand and accept his own mediocrity, and the play ends in a place of uncertainty with regard to Biff’s future. Walter—in language that is strikingly similar to Biff Loman’s—says to his mother, “I want so many things that they are driving me kind of crazy” (75). But Walter is unique in that he evolves and learns from his tragic mistake. Though he lost much of the family’s inheritance and his chance at starting a business, he is, in a sense, reborn by the necessity of facing the racism they encounter in trying to move into their new home. Mr. Linder, supposedly a man from a Clybourne Park “welcoming committee,” comes to visit the family at their apartment house and though seemingly “polite,” tries to buy the family out of their purchase in order to keep the neighborhood racially segregated. To this vile request, Walter replies, “We have decided to move into our house because my father – my father – he earned it for us brick by brick. We don’t want to make no trouble for nobody or fight no causes, and we will try to be good neighbors. And that’s all we got to say about that. We don’t want your money” (Hansberry, 131). This moment, more reminiscent of the assertions of a John Proctor than a Biff Loman, demonstrates a pivot for Walter who, for much of the play, bullies and berates his wife, sister, and mother. His financial loss is an excruciating lesson that seems impossible to recover from, but in Hansberry’s world there is an even greater evil than Walter’s own pride and misogyny, and that is the external racism the family confronts. In this place of humiliation, Walter is most vulnerable. Consequently, he finds a kind of moral center and is reborn as he begins the arduous process of facing down Mr. Linder and the systematic, institutional racism that threatens to control the family’s future. There is no parallel rebirth or realization for Biff Loman. His father’s death and the insurance money he is set to inherit should free him, but there is no indication that Biff’s inheritance is liberating. The tragedy of the play is not just Willy’s suicide but also that Biff is not inclined to start out in business; he sees his father’s gesture not as heroic but misguided and fruitless. We do not know where Biff’s life will go at the end of the play or how he will come to understand his father’s legacy. Charley tries to make sense of Willy for Biff: “You don’t understand: Willy was a salesman. And for a salesman, there is no rock bottom to the life. He don’t put a

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bolt to a nut, he don’t tell you the law or give you medicine. He’s a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine” (111). But Biff is angry and defeated by his father’s blindness, lamenting more than once, “He had the wrong dreams. All, all, wrong” (111). Happy, who has lived his life in the shadow of his older brother, is still intoxicated by Willy’s delusions—he does not possess the self-reflectiveness of Biff and lacks self-knowledge. Emotionally attached to his father to the end, his loyalty is still moving. In this scene, Happy, having no knowledge of his father’s affairs is still “under the spell,” and angrily says to Biff, “I’m not licked that easily. I’m staying right in this city, and I’m gonna beat this racket! [He looks at Biff, his chin set.]…I’m gonna show you and everybody else that Willy Loman did not die in vain. He had a good dream. It’s the only dream you can have – to come out number-one man. He fought it out here, and this is where I’m gonna win it for him” (111). Neither son’s perspective on their father’s suicide satisfyingly comes to terms with the meaning of Willy’s life, but Biff’s refrain, “he had the wrong dream” points to a key theme in the play: Willy’s obsession with external recognition as a defining force in terms of his own identity destroys his life and the life of his sons. His constant longing for wealth and acceptance—his desire to “win,” in the metaphoric jungle of New York—prevents him from developing any sense of true identity. Linda, Bill, and Charley see what Happy tragically cannot, that Willy denied his own natural talents— working with his hands—in pursuit of what he thought America expected a “successful” man to be and do. Biff reminisces: There were a lot of nice days. When he’d come home from a trip; or on Sundays, making the stoop; finishing the cellar; putting on the new porch; when he built the extra bathroom; and put up the garage. You know something, Charley, there’s more of him in that front stoop than in all the sales he ever made. (110)

In the end, both plays wrestle with the idea that that the American Dream is inexorably tied to success in the marketplace. Walter, Happy, and Biff speak a similar language, and Hansberry, like Miller, understands the danger of America’s obsession with money. The insistence that business is the only way to achieve true success is aligned specifically with masculinity; buying, selling, get rich quick schemes, are portrayed as dangerous sirens, barriers to self-knowledge and humility. Mama Younger’s wisdom still reverberates in today’s world:

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Mama: Oh – So now it’s life. Money is life? Once upon a time freedom used to be life—now it’s money. I guess the world really do change … Walter: No – it was always money, Mama. We just didn’t know about it. Mama: No … something has changed. You something new, boy. In my time we was worried about not being lynched … You ain’t satisfied or proud of nothing we done. I mean that you had a home; that we kept you out of trouble till you was grown; that you don’t have to ride to work on the back of nobody’s streetcar – You my children –but how different we done become. (Hansberry, 61)

In the end, his tragic flaw is the same as Willy Loman’s. Biff words, “He had the wrong dream,” reverberate throughout Hansberry’s portrayal of Walter. The difference between Miller’s and Hansberry’s vision is that Walter learns and changes; he learns what Biff tragically already knows but cannot act upon, and what Willy Loman never understood. There is hope for the future in A Raisin in the Sun and the family departs for their new home unified, determined, and ready to face an uncertain future. Hansberry’s life was tragically cut short when she died of pancreatic cancer in 1965. A few months before her premature death, she spoke publicly about an unprinted letter she had sent to the editor of The New York Times : I wrote to The Times and said, you know, “Can’t you understand that this is the perspective from which we are now speaking?” It isn’t as if we got up today and said, you know, “what can we do to irritate America?” you know. It’s because that since 1619, Negroes have tried every method of communication, of transformation of their situation from petition to the vote, everything. We’ve tried it all. There isn’t anything that hasn’t been exhausted. (Tillet)

This image of Hansberry just six years after the premiere of her play— frustrated, exhausted, perhaps less hopeful than she was when she wrote A Raisin in the Sun at the age of twenty-nine—might surprise those who know her only through the success of this play. She continued to work in the theater and for civil rights causes, but A Raisin in the Sun is her only widely known drama to receive major Broadway productions.

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Marsha Norman A Raisin in the Sun’s success on Broadway should have opened doors for more women writers in the immediate decades to follow, but it wasn’t until the 1980s that women gained more widespread recognition as playwrights. During this decade, three plays by women—and primarily about women—won Pulitzer Prizes: Crimes of the Heart (1981) by Beth Henley, ’night, Mother (1982) by Marsha Norman, and The Heidi Chronicles (1989) by Wendy Wasserstein. All three works use variations on realism to dramatize feminist perspectives on twentieth-century American women’s lives. Of the three, Marsha Norman’s work most obviously echoes Miller’s tragic ethos, but in her play she writes about suicide and lost dreams, not of a tragic or disgraced father or son, but of an isolated, American woman and her relationship with her mother. ’night, Mother is a powerful drama about a woman’s decision to commit suicide and is the play for which Norman is best known. Just as Miller writes poignantly about father–son relationships and suicide, ’night, Mother depicts the complex relationship between a mother (Thelma) and her daughter (Jessie). Like Hansberry’s, Norman’s connection to Miller is well studied. Norman herself credits Miller as an influential forerunner, and ’night, Mother is a deeply personal tragedy about a “common” woman who is neither great nor heroic. Miller’s narratives of suicide tell a similar story of disenfranchisement and disillusion—and both Norman and Miller are highly influenced by Greek tragedy. In July 2004, Arthur Miller was given the first Lifetime Achievement Award by the Dramatists Guild of America. Norman, in her introductory remarks at the ceremony, referenced Miller’s famous essay “Tragedy and the Common Man” (1949b), saying: “In writing about Willy Loman, Arthur Miller writes about all of us, about our indestructible will to achieve our humanity, about our fear of being torn away from what and who we are in this world, about our fear of being displaced and forgotten.” These words are strikingly similar to the ones she uses in her interviews about Jessie and suicide. The action of ’night, Mother is almost exclusively a negotiation between Jessie and her mother, Thelma, about Jessie’s plan to end her life. But in a broader sense, it’s about one’s right to choose to live or die. Jessie has resolved from the beginning of the play that she does not want to continue to live. She tells her mother, “I’m just not having a very good time and I don’t have reason to think it’ll get anything but worse” (28).

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As the discussion progresses, in response to the pleas of her mother, Jessie argues that suicide is an empowering choice, a way of defining her future: “It’s all I really have that belongs to me and I’m going to say what happens to it” (36). In defense of her play, Norman describes Jessie as one who clearly, “acts against a sense of things that degrade [her].” She is a “a woman grappling with what she sees as an ‘unchangeable’ environment—and Jessie’s way of fighting degradation is to question what has been previously unquestioned.” Jesse’s suicide at the end of the play is depicted as an act of rebellion, or rather, an act of self-assertion. Norman states, “Jessie has taken action on her own behalf that, for her, is the final test of all that she has been” (Betsko and Koening, 339). Willy Loman’s final action is not unlike Jessie’s; in his own mind, his suicide is one of self-preservation, an act against what degrades him, a way of reclaiming his dignity. This is also true of Joe Keller in All My Sons, who similarly seeks to preserve his personal dignity in the face of rejection by his sons. The reasons for his suicide are slightly different than Willy Loman’s, however. When Joe first hears of his oldest son’s, Larry’s, death by suicide during the war—which was prompted by his realization that his father has sold defective airplane parts and caused the deaths of his fellow pilots—he cannot live with that reality. That discovery combined with his ensuing rejection by his younger son, Chris, drives him to shoot himself. His whole life has been to build up his business to have something to give to his sons. When he realizes that act has failed and that he has, in fact, isolated and humiliated his sons rather than giving them a business that can be a source of pride and prosperity, he is devastated. His sense of self—and his “American Dream” is destroyed. All that he lived for, to be honored and respect by his children and to have something material to hand down, is now gone, and he has lost what he worked hard to build. In this play, the Greek idea of the tension between the individual and the collective is explored. One is reminded of Agamemnon’s costly choice to sacrifice his daughter, Iphigenia, for the sake of the Trojan War. Chris’s expression of disillusionment with his father is a gut-wrenching moment when his father began to realize that the very thing he’s worked for his whole life, prosperity and the respect of his sons, is no longer his. He then resolves to take his life. In response to the question of whether Joe should turn himself in and face prison time, Joe questions Chris: Who worked for nothin’ in that war? When they work for nothin’, I’ll work for nothin’. Did they ship a gun or a truck outa Detroit before they

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got their price? Is that clean? It’s dollars and cents, nickels and dimes; war and peace, it’s nickels and dimes, what’s clean? Half the Goddam country is gotta go if I go!” (82)

Moments later in the scene, Joe realizes that his sons held him to an almost Greek ideal—to them he was a kind of Odysseus or Agamemnon. Chris replies to his father: “I know you’re no worse than most men but I thought you were better. I never saw you as a man. I saw you as my father” (82). Larry’s and Chris’s naivete, their initial belief in their father’s heroism and the unveiling of that reality, is what makes Joe decide to kill himself. He indicates he’s going to turn himself in and asks Chris to wait for him outside a moment, but tragically he never emerges from the house again. He says to Chris, “Get the car. I’ll put on my jacket.” Kate pleads with him, “You’re so foolish. Larry was your son too, wasn’t he? You know he’d never tell you to do this.” And Keller, now realizing the discrepancy between what his sons thought of him and who he really is, replies: “Then what is this if it isn’t telling me? Sure, he was my son. But I think to him they were all my sons. And I guess they were, I guess they were” (83). The realization that he had a higher calling he did not hear, that his true duty in the war was to the collective, that his sons believed he lived by a moral obligation to each and every soldier as if they were his own, makes him unable to live with himself. Joe has done too much for his sons; he’s built individual wealth at the expense of others and sacrificed himself morally in the process. Both sets of father–son relationships are inherently different than Norman’s depiction of suicide and the moral questions of taking one’s own life. Norman’s play is not a critique of the family dynamics or social conditions that lead to Jessie’s decision, interwoven in her narrative is not a deconstruction of an impersonal capitalist system and its effects on the American family; instead, in ’night, Mother her focus is on the story of a single woman authoring the last chapter of her life. Jessie has resolved the central question of the play before the action even begins, having thought out her discussion with her mother well before hand. She compares her life to a radio, there is no song playing that she cares to hear. Or, perhaps more famously, she sees her life as an uncomfortable bus ride, one that is too long and too crowded, and she merely wants to get off instead of enduring the discomfort. It is as if Jessie, Hamlet-like in her questioning, comes back with a clear resolution to the iconic question, “For who would bear the whips and scorns of time…when he himself might his

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quietus make” that is ultimately unlike Miller’s depictions of suicide in his dramas of duty, family, and society (127). That said, Norman’s play is most certainly the tragedy of a common woman. She reminds us—as does Miller—that not all heroes are Danish kings or Roman generals. To borrow Miller’s own words, Jessie is someone who has been displaced, and her death is the consequence of her compulsion to evaluate herself.

Anna Deavere Smith and Suzan-Lori Parks Arthur Miller’s The Crucible premiered on Broadway at the Martin Beck Theater in 1953 and has been revived twice on Broadway since 2002. The original production won the Tony Award for best play, despite a tepid response from The New York Times . Written as an analogue of the McCarthy trials of the early 1950s, The Crucible often is read as a kind of Aristotelian historical tragedy in which an actual story—the story of the Salem, Massachusetts, witch trials of 1692—is retold for the purpose of shining light on a contemporary issue. In his introduction to The Crucible, “A Note on the Historical Accuracy of this Play,” Miller states: This play is not history in the sense in which the word is used by the academic historian. However, I believe the reader will discover here the essential nature of one of the strangest and most awful chapters in human history. (Miller 1953, 2)

Miller makes an attempt toward accuracy, but that is not the ultimate goal. Rather, The Crucible is a scathing political criticism of the actions of contemporary figures and is his response to the actions of the House UnAmerican Activities Committee (HUAC) and those who testified, including his own friend and director Elia Kazan. In 1956, three years after the play’s premier, Miller himself defied the Committee and refused to name suspected Communists, much like Proctor, who also refused to lie before the court, speaking the now iconic phrase: “Because it is my name. Because I cannot have another in my life! Because I lie and sign myself to lies” (Miller 2016, 392). Miller himself was convicted of contempt, but later the ruling was overturned by the U.S. Court of Appeals. In setting up America’s own Puritan forbears as near equivalents of McCarthy and his collaborators, Miller demonstrates the dangers of a political regime that aligns itself with a moralistic view, one that sees itself as a savior of American culture but is instead tragically misguided by prejudice and fear.

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It is in this way that Miller shares a theatrical space with Anna Deavere Smith, who also dramatizes political/historical events as a way of critiquing contemporary American life, employing a style that has been termed “documentary theater.” Her two most well-known works, Fires in the Mirror and Twilight Los Angeles: 1992 both feature Smith performing all the roles, often transforming from one character to another without ever leaving the stage. In a recent interview with Second Stage Theatre entitled “Let Me Down Easy: Asking Questions with Anna Deavere Smith,” she states: “To me, the most important doorway into the soul of a person is her or his words…I am a student of words.” And later she says, “My main concern is theatre, and theatre does not reflect or mirror society. It has been stingy and selfish, and it has to do better.” This certainly echoes Miller’s demands of the theater, suggesting that drama has a moral obligation to explore new ways of holding a mirror up to nature, of addressing social injustices by reflecting our images for us to see clearly. Twice, Smith has been the recipient of the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding One-Person Show and Twilight Los Angeles: 1992 was nominated for a Tony Award in 1994. Often portraying characters with varying, even conflicting, memories and perspectives on real-life events, her plays, like Miller’s The Crucible, are built on material from historical documents, interviews, and news broadcasts. Her characters often talk of their dreams and aspirations, of the inequities in American life and, like Miller’s characters, of a flawed justice system. Even though Smith’s narrative technique is unique, her work resembles Miller’s in that her stories are comprised of the deeply personal experiences of American families struggling with racism, poverty, and cruelty; ultimately, her plays engage with history in ways more similar than different from Miller’s The Crucible. Emerging as a playwright a decade after Smith, Suzan-Lori Parks also dramatizes historical characters and events in innovative ways that retell, revise, or reconstruct history as a means of taking political action. The America Play (1993) and Topdog/ Underdog (2002) contain characters who share names with two historical figures: Abraham Lincoln and John Wilkes Booth. The America Play is told in two acts and depicts the life of an African American gravedigger (often referred to as the “Foundling Father” or the “Lesser Known to the Great Man”) who is “thinly built, just like the Great Man.” He sets out for the “West,” re-enacting John Wilkes Booth’s assassination of Lincoln as a traveling vaudeville performance. He charges his customers a penny to participate in reenactments of the events at Ford’s Theatre, where President Lincoln was shot by

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Booth while watching the popular melodrama Our American Cousin. In her play Topdog/ Underdog , Parks explores some of the same ideas, also telling her story via characters named Lincoln and Booth. The play premiered on Broadway in 2002 and won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama as well as the Outer Critics Circle Award. This time, Lincoln and Booth are positioned as brothers who struggle to cope with poverty, women, racism and a troubled past. Parks says of the play, “…I think it’s about who the world thinks you’re going to be, and how you struggle with that” (Reich). Famous for the stylistic element she describes as “rep and rev,” Parks relies on devices from ancient oral traditions and music as well as elements of vaudeville and absurdist theater. Although Park’s plays use primarily avant-garde techniques—both The America Play and Top Dog/Underdog stylistically closely resemble Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, or Ionesco’s Exit the King —central to her work is a commitment to issues of inequality and injustice as well as a preoccupation with the past as a way of understanding the present. This is true of Miller’s The Crucible, of course, but it is also characteristic of his late play, The American Clock, which experiments with vaudeville and absurdism. One of Miller’s dominant themes has always been memory and the past—and how to look forward in light of the historical conditions that shape the present. Toby Zinman points out in her essay “Vaudeville at the Edge of a Cliff,” that Miller worked on The American Clock for over a decade, but it was not until 1986 when the play was being mounted at the British National Theatre that he began to experiment with form as a way of exploring history and memory. She argues that there is a significant shift in Miller’s late plays in the way he dramatizes history and that in The American Clock he “has given way to the acknowledgement of the human mystery, the muddle that memory makes of the illogical life” (Zinman, 164). It is in this way that Miller’s work most resembles Parks’s: in The America Play, it is the absurd repetition of Booth’s attack that causes the audience to awkwardly laugh, all the while conscious of the tragedy of the American President’s assassination being re-enacted. Both Miller and Parks engage with the idea of the cyclical yet ever-changing nature of history, progress, and individual agency. What Miller, Smith, and Parks share is an ability to dramatize historical events for the purpose of making audiences question contemporary life. All three, albeit in different ways, use history to elucidate or otherwise problematize a particular political moment as a way of highlighting

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contemporary injustices. Miller, Smith, and Parks each engage with the dead as a way of understanding the living. Although the works of these artists bear striking differences, they each acknowledge the improbability of constructing an accurate account of history and so instead write historical dramas as a way of reinterpreting the present.

Lynn Nottage In a 2017 interview with The Wall Street Journal, Lynn Nottage described the process of interviewing the people of Reading, Pennsylvania, for Sweat : “When I sat in rooms with middle-aged white men, I heard them speaking like young black men in America.” Her Pulitzer Prize-winning drama raises many of the same concerns depicted in Miller’s work: the dehumanization of the American worker and the cruel treatment of immigrants in America. At the time she began researching the play, Reading was one of the most impoverished cities in America due to the decline in the steel industry and the ultimate closure of the factory that had long been the largest employer in town. As the trade union goes on strike, new tensions arise. The play has been characterized by many reviewers and theatergoers alike as an emotional look at identity, race, the economy, and humanity. It received a Tony nomination for best play in 2017 and won the Pulitzer Prize later that same year. First performed at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in 2015, Sweat eventually moved to the Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., and ultimately to New York in the fall of 2016. In a 2016 interview with Fortune, Nottage says, “They had been solidly middle class for the majority of their working careers, but now they were feeling angry, disaffected, and in some cases, they actually had tears in their eyes.” Lynn Nottage’s work, though also concerned with family, the American Dream, and political injustice, extends the conversation in new directions. One key similarity between Lynn Nottage and Arthur Miller is that they each depict a clear vision of what is causing the elusive American Dream to be continuously out of reach—a broken economic and political system. In the printed version of the play, Nottage prefaces the play with the words of Langston Hughes, “Our of the rack and ruin of our gangster death, / the rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies, / We, the people, must redeem / the land, the mines, the plants, the rivers/ The mountains and the endless plain— / All, all the stretch of these great green states—/ And make American again!” The emphasis for Nottage is not tragedy but finding redemption.

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In Sweat, much of the action takes place in a bar in Reading. In this exchange, two men, the bartender Stan and his friend, former factory worker Brucie, are watching the presidential debates on television in March 2000. Stan asks Brucie, “Who are you liking?” to which Brucie replies, “Don’t matter. They’ll all shit on us in the end” (34). Though Nottage’s play is a treatise on anger and the emotional challenges when one’s dreams slip away, there is a specific and palpable antagonistic force— the broken political and financial systems that are ruining the lives of America’s workers and an impotent union that is no longer effective in protecting its members. Unlike many of Miller’s protagonists, Nottage’s characters are not searching for something inside themselves that will enable then to access the American Dream. They are diligent workers who have put in years, in some cases decades, learning a trade, only to have their way of life threatened by changes to a capitalistic system that works only for the elite. Even the title Sweat signals this emphasis on the work ethic of the citizens of Reading, the hours logged, the sacrifices made. This diverse group of men and women have worked peacefully together one generation to the next, only to be cheated by unjust trade policies and corporate greed. Nottage’s characters become lost when their world starts to change, and her play depicts that gradual disillusionment, the way in which racism flares when hopelessness sets in. It is a narrative not of an elusive dream but of one once possessed, now destroyed. Nottage’s narrative of race is particularly complex in her dramatization of the story of Cynthia, an African American woman who gets a promotion and temporarily joins the management team. She represents an ambitious and hard-working woman who finally reaches a position of leadership within her company. Sadly, and perhaps without her realizing it until it’s too late, she is a pawn in a clever scheme to defraud those with whom she’s shared her life. Tragically, she hopes that she is capable of being the voice of the workers (her closest family members and friends) but begins to understand that she’s been used. She says, “When I started at the plant it felt like I was invited into some exclusive club…And when I got my union card, you couldn’t tell me anything. Sometimes when I was shopping, I would let it slip out of my wallet onto the counter just so folks could see it” (77). Still believing she is finally getting what she’s entitled to, she abandons those with whom she’s spent her life, including her own son. She is not only tragically ineffective but now the one doing the dirty work of the duplicitous corporate managers. Her fate at the end of the play is much like everyone else’s: after three decades of work, she

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has little money, no future, and is working two menial jobs just to scrape by. When her son returns home after eight years in jail (the result of a conflict brought on by layoffs), she has little hope or financial assistance to offer him. Talking to her friend, the bartender, Stan, she says: “I’m scared, Stan. I got a mortgage to meet, car payments…” (78). But giving up is not an option for her; even though she’s clearly been used by the corporate machine, she cannot let go: “Shit. I locked out my friends, Stan. I explained, I fought, I begged. But those cowards upstairs still have me tape a note to the door telling ‘em they weren’t welcome. Ninety-five degrees. I’m standing in the door watching some irritable fat guy change the locks. Shut outta the plant. And you know what? I wonder if they gave me this job on purpose. Pin a target on me so they can stay in their air-conditioned offices” (77). Yet, in response to the call from her friends to quit the management team and join them in the strike, Cynthia cannot bring herself to do it, “I’ve absorbed a lot of shit over the years, but I worked hard to get off that floor. Call me selfish, I don’t care…” (83). As an African American woman, Cynthia is caught in her own desire to get ahead, to break through and gain success and status in the company she’s given her life to; yet, she becomes a kind of pawn in a corrupt, corporate scheme. Another interesting similarity between Sweat and Miller’s work is the way in which the plays dramatize characters who use immigrants as scapegoats or as pawns to solve their own grievances. The narratives of immigration that Miller dramatizes in A View from the Bridge take a slightly different but familiar turn as Nottage develops the character of Oscar, a Spanish-speaking American worker who becomes the object of hatred and violence. He is the victim of a brutal beating by Jason and Chris when he crosses their picket lines and works briefly at the plant. Having always been treated as an outsider, he explains his logic to his boss Stan. Having always been an outsider, he considers himself a marginalized member of the community: I’m just trying to get paid, that’s all. For three years, I’ve been carrying nothing but crates. I’ve got twenty dollar bills taped to my wall, and a drawer full of motivational tapes. Got a jar of Buena Suerta from the botanica, and a candle that I keep lit 24/7. I keep asking for some good fortune. That’s it. A little bit of money. That’s it. My father, he swept up the floor in a factory like Olstead’s – those fuckas wouldn’t even give

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him a union card. But he woke up every morning at four a.m. because he wanted a job in the steel factory, it was the American way…. (92)

Ultimately, because of his “crossing the line,” he is mercilessly beaten in what is the defining action of the play, a barroom fight between Jason, Chris, Oscar, and Stan. Not unlike the final scene in A View From the Bridge, lives are forever altered by the violence. In Nottage’s play, the assailants, Jason and Chris, ironically suffer the most: imprisoned, they face long term psychological and financial damage. This mirrors Eddie Carbone’s own journey. He dies, much like a Roman general, by literally and proverbially falling on his own sword. The American Dream for Rodolpho, Marco, and Oscar is temporarily interrupted by selfish racism. Carbone’s homophobia, as well as Jason and Chris’s violence toward Oscar, is ignited by either transgressive, sexual passion (in Miller) or the corrupt economic practices of corporate America (in Nottage). Even though the crises are ignited by different causes, the action is the same— immigrants, or those believed to be immigrants, are easy targets who often pay the price for other’s unhappiness or economic misfortune. Nottage’s plays, however, possess a kind of fragile optimism—Sweat is not a tragedy and resembles Miller’s Enemy of the People (an adaptation of the Henrik Ibsen play of the same name) more than any Miller play in that it displays a kind of uneasy ambiguity about the future. Her communities, though ravaged by corporate greed, racism, and violence, show tentative signs of resilience. In the last scene of Sweat, the four men confront each other again. Chris: Don’t’ walk outta here. I didn’t think you’d come. We have – Hey Stan. Stan. Oscar: He can’t really hear good. Chris: Jesus Stan: (Garbled). Thank…you. Jason: It’s nice that you take care of him. Oscar: That’s how it oughta be. (There’s apology in their eyes, but Chris and Jason are unable to conjure words just yet. The four men, uneasy in their bodies, await the next moment in a fractured togetherness. Blackout ) (112)

Nottage’s characters at least begin a process of reconciliation, and it is in this way that they are not exactly counterpoints to Miller’s tragic heroes. Although, the American political and economic system has indeed failed

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the workers of Reading, they somehow persevere—like An Enemy of the People’s Dr. Stockmann, they seem to be searching for a way to begin again. Though at times violent and angry, Nottage’s characters are not lost in illusion; they speak, act, and relate to each other with blunt accusations and harsh truths about the struggles of getting ahead in the twentyfirst century.

Annie Baker Annie Baker’s dramaturgical style is uniquely her own and does not immediately call to mind the dramatic world of any particular American dramatist. In fact, at first glance, her plays seem to share an ethos with midcentury British writers such as Harold Pinter, Caryl Churchill, or John Osborne. Her connection to Arthur Miller, for some, is harder to identify. She does not write tragedies; rather, her work is well known for its somber yet sensitive depictions of people who experience isolation and alienation as they struggle to achieve the elusive American Dream. But the way in which her work is quite like Miller’s is that Baker beautifully stages the minutiae of the everyday lives of “underachieving” people, reminding us that tragedy isn’t something reserved for Greek heroes or Shakespearian kings. Her works reject the heightened theatricality of narratives of crisis; she does not write antagonists or protagonists but has been praised instead for capturing the self-conscious linguistic style of twenty-somethings who are stuck in dead-end jobs or relationships, whose lives are strikingly devoid of grandeur or poetry—who may not seem particularly articulate or extraordinary. Yet, all of Baker’s plays offer a serious critique of American culture and beautifully portray the isolation of those living in the urban or suburban Northeast. She dramatizes the stories of common people and the quiet tragedies they endure, often with a sense of humor. Her characters are depicted as run down by the routine nature of their lives or trapped in endless cycles of dysfunction. The Flick clearly reconfigures some of the core themes and techniques of Miller’s most famous plays, A View from the Bridge, The Crucible, All My Sons, and Death of a Salesman. Linda Loman’s heartbreaking observation, “A small man can be just as exhausted as a great man” is something one could imagine a character in an Annie Baker play saying. But Miller’s less well-known work A Memory of Two Mondays may be the most striking forerunner to The Flick, the play for which Baker won the Pulitzer Prize in 2014. Inspired by Miller’s own work experiences in his early

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adulthood, A Memory of Two Mondays dramatizes the lives of a group of desperate workers trying to earn a living at an automobile parts warehouse during the Great Depression. Baker’s The Flick is set in a rundown movie theater in small-town Massachusetts and is the story of four underpaid movie theater employees: Sam, in his mid-thirties, who lives at home with his parents and struggles with questions about alienation, employment, and his future; Rose and Avery, both disenchanted college students who love film and are, for different reasons, taking a break from school; and Skylar, a new employee at the movie theater who is described as the “dreaming man.” As the private dramas of each character converge, the narrative touches on issues of underemployment, economic instability, racial inequality, and disappointed expectations. A Memory of Two Mondays is similar in that it also concentrates more on character than plot, and explores the failures, challenges, and dreams of a variety of kinds of people, most of whom are barely stumbling through as they battle alcoholism, lost relationships, or financial troubles. In this play, Miller communicates not in the language of tragedy or myth, but rather in a series of impressions. Instead of focusing on a single protagonist’s story, or even a particular psychological or moral crisis, the narrative unfolds slowly as a series of vignettes more reminiscent of Chekhov than a Greek tragedy. One particularly striking way that the works of Miller and Baker intersect is that they both stage the grotesque as a way of highlighting the themes of alienation and isolation in the workplace. In A Memory of Two Mondays, for example, there are two key central images in the play— a rodent infestation in the common area and the large windows long clouded by dust, which Miller describes as, “the factory type which reach from floor to ceiling are encrusted with the hard dirt of years. These windows are the background and seem to surround the entire stage” (5). Later in the play, the windows are cleaned, and what is exposed are the operations of a flourishing house of prostitution that both repels and fascinates. When the workers finally clear the dirt, when they actually push through the pollution and filth, there is nothing on the other side but another symbol of corruption and decay. A scene from The Flick that closely resembles this episode is an awkward, confessional moment between two characters that is interrupted by an off-stage event in the bathroom: the two workers are interrupted by the entrance of a third coworker who is “trying not to dry-heave…and says, ‘Someone took a shit on the floor of the men’s bathroom and they’ – he is bent over—‘and they – spread it all over the’ – he tries to breathe” (Baker 2014, 126). Both

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scenes are moments when the characters must confront the grotesque, which is depicted as that which divides us from one another, from authentic human connection. In this scene, intimacy is interrupted by an ugly reality, and throughout the narrative true human connections are continually forestalled by the careless or disgusting actions of others. The symbolism of someone who shits on the floor and then is seen no more, who has absented himself from the filth, leaving others behind to clean it up, is a shocking and devastating allegory for the life of hard-working Americans who are more often than not left behind, also by corruption and decay. There is a moment at the end of The Flick when Skylar suddenly stops, moves down the aisle, and raises his hand to the imagined film screen. For the audience, it feels as if he is going to reach out and break the fourth wall. Sam asks what he’s doing, and Skylar replies: “I always just kind of want to touch it. Don’t you?” “Uh…no, says Sam, incredulously” (166). Using the screen as an imaginary barrier actually engages the audience in ways that Miller’s work often does—the lines between reality and illusion collide and both Miller’s and Baker’s characters are tasked with sweeping away the garbage left behind by either a voyeuristic crowd or an impersonal populace. Yet, they are in essence swept away themselves by mind-numbing work, by the impersonal nature of the worlds in which they live, reminding us, again, of so many of Miller’s iconic characters. In multiple ways, Sam is a millennial version of Biff Loman, whose declaration to his father sounds as if it could be spoken in 2014: “It’s a measly manner of existence. To get on that subway on the hot mornings in summer. To devote your whole life to keeping stock, or making phone calls, or selling or buying. To suffer fifty weeks of the year for a two-week vacation” (11). Biff’s awareness of the mundaneness of his working life seems to hover over all of Baker’s plays, as does the tragedy of Willy Loman. As he is being fired at the end of Death of a Salesman, Willy says to his boss, “You can’t eat the orange, and throw the peel away—a man is not a piece of fruit” (61–62). Through this awkward use of metaphor, Willy’s words draw our attention to something devastating: yes, indeed, this can happen and, in essence, must happen. When eating an orange, there is nothing else to do with the peel but throw it away.

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Conclusions It is not an accident that American drama grew enormously during and after Miller’s tenure as a writer for Broadway. He inspired a diverse range of writers and in particular encouraged them to use theater as a vehicle for social change, to take on the status quo and to challenge corruption, oppression, and social injustice. Miller’s legacy as a great writer of tragedy and as a courageous social critic who insisted that drama seek to answer important political and social questions makes him an influential forerunner for all later American dramatists. His most defining characteristic as a playwright is that his works, like the dramas of Henrik Ibsen, Clifford Odets, Sean O’Casey, or Bertolt Brecht, insist that the theater be a place where our ugliest problems are unveiled and made recognizable. He remains the foremost social dramatist of the American stage, and he is the American playwright who has most successfully, in Christopher Bigsby’s words, “touched a nerve of the national consciousness” (248). Even his critics agree, Arthur Miller is a playwright who believes that the theater must dedicate itself to public life. Beginning with his work as a student at the University of Michigan and ending only when he passed way at his Connecticut home in 2005, Miller consistently dedicated his writing to the exploration of the psychological, social, and political issues that defined America, and in doing this, he helped to define American theater.

Works Cited Baker, Annie. 2014. The Flick. New York: Theatre Communications Group. Betsko, Kathleen, and Rachel Koening, eds. 1987. Interviews with Contemporary Women Playwrights. Sag Harbor, NY: Beech Tree Books. Bigsby, C. W. E. 1984. A Critical Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Drama. Vol. 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Driver, Tom F. 1960. Strength and Weakness in Arthur Miller. Tulane Drama Review 4:4, 45–52. https://doi.org/10.2307/1124878. Garrett, Shawn Marie. 2017. The Possession of Suzan-Lori Parks. American Theatre Magazine, March 17. www.americantheatre.org/2000/10/01/thepossession-of-suzan-lori-parks. Hansberry, Lorraine. 1964. Journal Entry, September. https://www.lhlt.org. Accessed July 30, 2018. Hansberry, Lorraine. 1998. A Raisin in the Sun. New York, NY: Samuel French.

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Hansberry, Lorraine. The Negro Writer and His Roots: Toward a New Romanticism. Taylor and Francis Online. www.tandfonline.com. Hansberry, Lorraine. In Her Own Words. Lorraine Hansberry Literary Trust. www.lhlt.org/quotes. Lunden, Jeff. Anna Deavere Smith Brings One-Woman Show to D.C. NPR, February 1, 2011, www.npr.org/2011/02/01/133410095/Anna-DeavereSmith-Let-Me-Down-Easy. Miller, Arthur. 1949a. Death of a Salesman. Ed. Christopher Bigsby. New York: Penguin, 2005. Miller, Arthur. 1949b. Tragedy and the Common Man. The New York Times, February 27, reprinted in Arthur Miller: Collected Essays, Introduction by Susan C. W. Abbotson. New York: Penguin Books, 2016. Miller, Arthur. 1953. The Crucible. New York: Penguin Books, 2003. Miller, Arthur. 1955. A Memory of Two Mondays. New York: Dramatists Play Service. Miller, Arthur. 2013. The Words of Arthur Miller: “The theatre is so endlessly fascinating because it’s so accidental. It’s so much like life.” Circa Theatre. https://www.circa.co.nz/the-words-of-arthur-miller-the-theatre-is-soendlessly-fascinating-because-its-so-accidental-its-so-much-like-life/. Miller, Arthur. 2015. The Penguin Arthur Miller: Collected Plays. Ed. Lynn Nottage. New York: Penguin. Norman, Marsha. 1983. ’night, Mother. New York: Dramatists Play Service. Norman, Marsha. 2006. Introduction to Women Writing Plays: A Collection of Essays. Ed. Alexis Greene. Austin: U of Texas P. Nottage, Lynn. 2016a. How a Black Woman Ventured into the Heart of Trumplandia. Fortune, November 11. fortune.com/2016/11/11/trump-voterslynn-nottage. Nottage, Lynn. 2016b. Lynn Nottage’s Sweat and Blood. Interview Magazine, December 13. www.interviewmagazine.com/culture/lynn-nottage-sweat. Nottage, Lynn. 2017a. Sweat. New York: Theatre Communication Group. Nottage, Lynn. 2017b. Pulitzer Prize Winner Lynn Nottage Talks Broadway’s “Sweat”. The Wall Street Journal. Podcast. www.wsj.com/podcasts/pulitzerprize-winner-lynn-nottage-talks-broadway. Parks, Suzan-Lori. 1992. The America Play and Other Works. New York: Theatre Communications Group. Parks, Suzan-Lori. 2002. Topdog/Underdog. New York: Theatre Communications Group. Purcell, Carey. 2016. All His Daughters: Arthur Miller’s Truth Telling Women. American Theatre Magazine, March 16. Reich, Ronni. 2012. Topdog/Underdog: A Playwright Interpreting Her Own Words. NJ.com, September 7. www.nj.com/entertainment/arts/index.ssf/ 2012/09.

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Smith, Anna Deavere. 2017. Let Me Down Easy to Launch Second Stage’s 31st Season. New York Theater Guide, October 23. www.newyorktheatreguide. com/news-features/let-me-down-easy-to-launch-second-stages-31st-season. Smith, David. 2016. Lynn Nottage: “Nostalgia Is a Disease Many White Americans Have.” The Guardian, February 17. www.theguardian.com/stage/ 2016/feb/17. Tillet, Salamishah. 2018. For Lorraine Hansberry, “A Raisin in the Sun” Was Just the Start. The New York Times, January 12. www.nytimes.com/2018/ 01/12/arts/television/lorraine-hansberry-sighted-eyes-feeling-heart.html. Wada, Karen. 2011. Playwright Annie Baker Enjoys Filling in the Blanks. The Los Angeles Times, January 15. Zinman, Toby. 2005. Vaudeville at the Edge of the Cliff, in Enoch Brater, ed., Arthur Miller’s America: Theater and Culture in a Time of Change. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P.

CHAPTER 7

Shaming, Rebellion, and Tragedy: Arthur Miller and African American Drama David Palmer

Lynn Nottage’s By the Way, Meet Vera Stark (2011) is about an African American actress who struggles to break into movie roles in 1933 and her reflections from forty years later about the ups and downs of the career that followed. Stark’s breakthrough role was as the enslaved but devoted maid to the octoroon mistress of a White planter in a film that romanticized the antebellum South. Stark was celebrated for that role, but all the roles that followed for her were similarly stereotypical, degrading depictions of African Americans. In a 1973 television interview, Stark looks back on her life and recalls that first career-making role: “Tilly … Tilly is my shame … and my glory” (89). If we can understand that remark, we will understand not only a central theme in much of African American drama but also a dichotomy central to many of Arthur Miller’s tragic characters—an idea that has roots in W. E. B. Du Bois’s concept of “doubleconsciousness.” We need to understand how something experienced as shaming also can be grounded in a person’s sense of pride and how rebellion often is central to depictions of tragedy.

D. Palmer (B) Massachusetts Maritime Academy, Buzzards Bay, MA, USA © The Author(s) 2020 S. Marino and D. Palmer (eds.), Arthur Miller for the Twenty-First Century, American Literature Readings in the 21st Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37293-4_7

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Let us start by considering shaming. According to Swarthmore philosopher Krista Thomason, shaming involves the reduction of a person’s sense of self. Like the University of Illinois at Chicago philosopher Marya Schechtman, Thomason believes a person constructs a self-concept by sifting through events and relationships in her life and selecting some as important or valuable, building them into a coherent narrative that constitutes who she takes herself to be and how she sees herself positioned in the world (92–93, 94, 97). But, again like Schechtman (95), Thomason also understands that people are not the sole constructors of their self-stories; people live in groups and cultures, which not only provide but often demand that certain elements be included in building a self-concept: We are caught between how we see ourselves and how others see us, where those two points of view are sometimes radically at odds with one another. The reason that living in this way is so difficult is precisely because we feel that our identities are being shaped in ways that we reject or struggle against. Not only that, but the identities that are being ascribed to us further entrench the oppression we already face. (Thomason, 98–99. See also 100.)

The tension between these two perspectives is what W. E. B. Du Bois characterized as a “double-consciousness” for African Americans: a “sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others” (364). Thomason marks this division between the personal and the social perspectives by drawing a distinction between self-concept (the narrative we build for ourselves) and self-identity (the aspects of ourselves that we must acknowledge because of the perspectives forced on us by the groups of people with whom we live) (99–101). In addition, our personal self-concept has both “voluntary” and “nonvoluntary” elements. Voluntary elements are the ones that I have some choice about: the work or friends I chose, the ways I spend my leisure time. The nonvoluntary elements are the one’s about which I have no choice: the biological gender or innate athletic ability with which I am born, the fact that I am socially ostracized because of actions of other members of my family over which I have no control (70–71). Shame according to Thomason “is the experience of the tension between our [socially imposed] identity and our [personal] self-concept” (87, 125, 174). We shame people by reducing them to an aspect of

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their socially imposed self-identity with which they are uncomfortable and which obliterates all other aspects of their personally constructed selfconcept: We invite people to feel shame when we try to make part of their identity loom large in their sense of themselves. […] Shame is the experience of feeling overshadowed by some feature of our identities that we do not see as part of our self-conception. An invitation to shame, then, would be an invitation to confront some part of our identity that we have not confronted or do not want to confront. In other words, an invitation to shame is an invitation to unseat or shake our own view of ourselves. (179)

Shame’s painfulness comes from the fact that we must admit that the traits being ascribed to us that cause us shame are indeed our own. The ascription is not false: The painfulness of shame comes in part from the fact that we cannot deny or disavow the feature that defines us because we know that it is ours. It is a part of my identity even if I do not want it to be and even if I do not see it as part of my self-conception. The thing that causes me shame overshadows me, yet it is me and I know it. [Italic in original] (Thomason, 102)

For example, consider a grade-school boy who is teased and bullied by classmates for the large size of his ears (consider Thomason, 105). He may or may not have large ears, but ears are something he does in fact have; he cannot deny that. His ear size is part of his nonvoluntary identity: it is something over which he has no control but which nonetheless is a trait he has. Prior to the bullying, he may never have considered his ears as an element in his self-concept, but once the bullying starts, his awareness of that trait is inescapable. When he is being bullied, it is hard for him to focus on any others of his many traits; his entire identity for himself and for others is being reduced to his ears. That reduction in a disparaging way of his entire identity to a single trait he knows is in fact his—he does in fact have ears—and the resulting obliteration of all other aspects of his self-concept is experienced as shame. It is important to note here a point Ta-Nehisi Coates makes about racism in his foreword to Toni Morrison’s book The Origin of Others: “racism precedes race” (xi). This idea applies not just to racism but also to all kinds of social marginalization, such as the bullying of the boy above.

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Prior to the bullies’ teasing him about his ears, the boy never had paid attention to their size. The teasing by others—the social context—is what makes his ears an element of his identity of which he now is acutely aware and which he now must incorporate into his self-concept. The categories societies use to characterize individuals in part determine the self-concepts society members can construct for themselves. The result of this, as Thomason says, is that “members of marginalized groups struggle with questions about their identity in different ways from non-marginalized groups” (99). The emotional responses that need to be harmonized in constructing a self-concept are more complicated for marginalized people than for people who are not forced to deal with such social categories. One response to shame is to seek to hide; but given what has been said above about the sense of having one’s self-concept restricted and diminished, it also is easy to understand how being shamed or marginalized leads to rebellion. When our entire self-narrative is ignored and reduced to a single element that we feel is unimportant to the full story of who we are and what we do, rage is an obvious result. We seek to regain recognition for our broader self-concept, the story we have of ourselves as an agent who acts in the world; we reject being reduced to a mere object that can be used by others merely for their own purposes and for self-serving stories they seek to tell about themselves: We respond to shame with violence because it allows us to once again feel defined by our self-conception. Shame is painful because we feel overshadowed by some part of ourselves that we do not see as part of our own self-representation. Shame makes us feel powerless because even though we do not want to be defined by this feature of ourselves, we recognize it as ours. […] When some feature of me diminishes my sense of self, I want to do something that makes me feel diminished no longer. Violence and aggression can accomplish this same goal. […] [Violence] is an act of self-assertion. My sense of myself as an agent is closely connected to my self-conception. […] When I am seen as an agent, I feel as though my self-conception (not the parts of my identity that fall outside of it) is determining who I am. […] If others see me as an agent, then because my agency is a large part of my self-conception, they are now seeing me in terms of how I see myself. Becoming the object of resentment by doing something violent helps us regain the feeling of control we lose in shame because we once again feel that our self-conception determines who we are. Others surely respond negatively to me as the violent agent, but they

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are no longer seeing me as an object of amusement, disgust, or fascination. What we seek as a remedy to shame is not approval, but recognition. Violence gains us that recognition because in asserting our agency, we assert our self-conception. [Italic in original] (Excerpted from Thomason, 118–20)

These ideas about rage as demands for recognition in the face of shaming assaults on our self-conceptions are at the center of August Wilson’s views in his 1996 lecture at the Theatre Communications Group’s conference at Princeton, The Ground on Which I Stand. His core idea is that African American tragic heroes should be understood as representatives of “warriors on the cultural battlefield that affirmed their self-worth” (20). Wilson’s views are close to Arthur Miller’s in his most famous essay, “Tragedy and the Common Man” (1949), published shortly after Death of Salesman opened on Broadway. Here Miller speaks of tragic heroes as people who “act against the scheme of things that degrade them,” who are moved by “an inherent unwillingness to remain passive in the face of what he conceives to be a challenge to his dignity, his image of his rightful status,” who react with “indignation” in response to “the underlying fear of being displaced, the disaster inherent in being torn away from our chosen image of what and who we are in this world” (8–9). Wilson puts the same idea this way, “the ground I stand on” is “the ground of the affirmation of the value of one’s being, and affirmation of his worth in the face of society’s urgent sometimes profound denial” (11). Miller and Wilson agree in many ways about the causes and consequences of confrontations with tragic experience and the ways these are grounded in people’s reactions to assaults on their self-concepts. Wilson takes these ideas and adds to them the pernicious marginalizing effects of racism’s cultural proscription of African American self-identity, the vestiges of slavery and social segregation, and the “abuse of opportunity” and “truncation of possibility” (16). Like W. E. B. Du Bois, Wilson is sensitive to the complications of a “double-consciousness” that racism creates for African Americans in creating a self-concept: the fact that before African Americans can effectively get about the business of constructing a selfconcept, they first must negotiate the racist self-identity that American culture thrusts upon them. Du Bois puts it like this: How does it feel to be a problem? […] The Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world—a

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world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. (363–65; See also Young, 6–17, for discussion)

This double-consciousness is a race-based example of the broader condition Thomason describes as the tension between the personally constructed self-concept and the socially imposed self-identity. For Wilson, the racism of American culture—the fact that it makes race a significant social category—has made race the “the largest, most identifiable, most important part” of African Americans’ self-concept (14). He sees African American tragic heroes confronting this complex tension as warriors, both rebelling against the socially imposed stereotypes of racism and defending and celebrating the distinctive culture and historical experience of Africans in America (28). It is important to note the strong similarities between the warrior’s rage Wilson speaks of in African American tragic heroes who rebel against the shaming context of racism and the “indignation” that Miller addresses in “Tragedy and the Common Man.” Although Miller sometimes addresses anti-Semitism directly in his works—as he did, for example, in his novel Focus (1945) or his dramas Incident at Vichy (1964), Playing for Time (1985), or Broken Glass (1994)—his broader ongoing concern, and the center of his conception of tragedy, is with the tension Thomason identifies between our self-conception and the identities others impose upon us: as Miller says, “the disaster of being torn away from our chosen image of what and who we are in this world” (1949, 9). That tension—of which Du Bois’s race-based double-consciousness is an example—is the arena of tragedy for both Miller and Wilson. As Sandra Shannon has written: While thoroughly grounded in the unique, racially charged experience of African Americans, Wilson is working broadly in the tradition espoused by Arthur Miller in his now-classic 1949 essay “Tragedy and the Common Man.” Like Miller, Wilson writes of people whose lives are far from grand but who nonetheless have cherished aspirations that are fundamental to their sense of self, who struggle against powerful social forces engulfing

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them, and who strive to have their dignity recognized. These themes are not limited by ethnicity or nationality nor silenced by the devastation of world affairs. They are at the heart of human experience, and as such they give Wilson’s work its universal significance and appeal. (142–43)

We are beginning now to see what Lynn Nottage may have meant in having Vera Stark say her role as the maid Tilly was both, “my shame and … my glory.” As an African American actor in 1933, Stark could hope only for film roles that depicted the racist socially imposed identity of the times. To accept those roles was to acknowledge and accept that identity, and as such it was shaming. But accepting the role of Tilly did allow Stark to begin her career as an actor—to actualize the self-concept she had been building for herself since her youth—and several film critics recognized the ways in which her portrayal of Tilly challenged the stereotype (see act 2). In taking the role, Stark both was glorying in finally having triumphed in a difficult system to become an actor and, like Wilson’s warrior, was doing the best she could in that system to reject the racist identities the system imposed. Stark had to navigate her way through the racism-imposed double-consciousness Du Bois speaks of, which is a specific type of the tension between our self-concept and socially imposed identities that Thomason argues is the essence of shame. We’ll turn now to explore how that experience of shame and rebellion are displayed in Miller’s tragedies and in selected works by African American dramatists. The core idea is that rebellion against shame is a central element in American tragedy. ∗ ∗ ∗ Miller has two of his characters explicitly demand some variation on, “I want my name” (Miller 1956, 634): John Proctor in The Crucible (1953) and Eddie Carbone in A View from the Bridge (1956). This is a demand for recognition of the complex multiplicity of their self-concepts and a rejection of what they experience as a shaming socially imposed identity that is being forced upon them, an identity, as Thomason suggests, that reduces all of who they are to a single act or trait. Although they do not use the phrase, this experience also is true of other Miller characters throughout his career, among them Joe Keller in All My Sons (1947), Walter Franz in The Price (1968), and Phillip Gellburg in Broken Glass (1994). A brief examination of these five characters will reveal how central this experience of shame and the response of rebellion are to Miller’s

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vision of tragedy and how his vision of tragedy rests on the concept of shame as a tension between our personal self-concept and a socially imposed identity that Thomason, like Du Bois, proposes. As Nottage has Stark suggest toward the end of By the Way, Meet Vera Stark (89), the tragic situation here is the character’s confrontation with both shame and glory: the shaming socially imposed identity that reduces the person to a single demeaning element is confronted, and the character rebels against this reduction, claiming a broader and more complex self-concept which is her source of self-respect—that is, her glory. Joe Keller kills himself at the end of All My Sons (1947). Often commentators attribute this to an overwhelming sense of guilt he now experiences, having been forced by his son Chris to face his moral responsibility for the deaths of World War II pilots who died in plane crashes caused by defective engine parts he sold to the US military (See for example Centola, 51; Mason, 79. See also Casper for a survey of interpretations of Keller’s suicide). But this may oversimplify Miller’s views here, making them too final and moralistic. The actual last scene in the play is not Joe’s suicide but his son Chris’s running from the house after encountering his father’s body and screaming tearfully, “Mother, I didn’t mean to—.” As Christopher Bigsby points out (91), in writing this play Miller was thinking about Ibsen’s The Wild Duck (1885), a play about the catastrophic consequences of naïve moral self-righteousness that fails to consider the complexity of situations, something Miller never underestimates. Bigsby notes the tragic irony in Chris’s self-righteousness leading him to be as murderous as the father he criticized for shipping defective engine parts (95). Perhaps a clearer way to understand the emotions driving Keller to suicide than a sudden sense of guilt is to consider them in terms of the tension Thomason and Du Bois suggest between our personal selfconception and a shaming socially imposed identity that reduces us to a single element and obliterates the complexity and variety of who we are and what we are doing. Chris has reduced Joe to a self-centered businessman who sought only his own profit and ignored the risks to the lives of pilots; in that story Joe’s entire life has been reduced to that single simplified identity, much the way the bullied boy on the playground mentioned above is reduced to his ears. Joe rebels against this reduction. From Joe’s perspective, he has built a successful business from scratch, no small accomplishment, and he has done this out of love for his family as a

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way of giving them a comfortable and secure place in the world. The challenges of business require him to make tough decisions and often to take risks; those are just the realities of the world with which he is required to deal. Joe hears his son Larry’s letter, announcing that Larry killed himself in shame and solidarity with the pilots he believes his father killed by shipping the faulty engine parts, and Joe believes his surviving son, Chris, also despises him. As a result, Joe feels he has little left for which to live. His self-concept has been that he built a business of which he and his family can be proud and which he will pass on to his children. He now feels his children have rejected that gift and his self-concept. Joe enters the house shamed by his sons but also angry at the ways they have diminished him, reducing all he is and has done to the single act of risking pilots lives by shipping the defective parts; their view, he feels, is based on a naïve understanding of the complexity of his life and his decisions and a failure to appreciate the love he has for them as a motive for all his acts. As Joe enters the house, he says in reference to Larry’s letter about the pilots who crashed, Joe’s last line before he kills himself, “I think to him they were all my sons. And I guess they were, I guess they were” (157). But it is not clear from this line that Joe is accepting remorseful guilt for the pilots’ deaths. He merely is saying Larry thought that, and he “guesses” that may be a view worth considering. From Joe’s perspective, what killed those pilots was the entire system of how military purchasing works in a capitalist economy. For anyone to think that he alone personally is responsible simply shows their lack of understanding of the complexity of the real world of business. Joe kills himself perhaps from a broken heart over his sons’ rejection, but also in anger and rebellion against the limited identity his sons are ascribing to him; he feels his situation is so much more complicated than the oversimplified view they have of it, a view that serves nothing other their own comforting experience of their own self-righteousness. It is a leap to think we must attribute to Joe a new-found sense of guilt and remorse and debasing to Miller’s sensitivity to the complexity of moral situations to think that he wants us to take this leap. Instead, we can imagine Joe inside the house thinking of his sons and saying angrily to himself, “You spoiled, self-righteous, ignorant little punks. You have no idea how the real world works and the challenges it presents. After all my love for you, all I have done for you, who do you think you are to diminish and reject me? You have broken my heart.” Joe’s suicide is an act of anger at his sons; an act of rebellion against the ways they have

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reduced him to a single event of which they have little understanding; as Thomason says, it is an expression of his own agency and self-concept, a rejection of his sons’ attempts to diminish him (Miller 1947, 150–58). Bigsby is correct to focus on the play’s last scene as Chris exits the house after his father’s suicide and to recognize the similarities between this play and Ibsen’s The Wild Duck (91). All My Sons is as much about the suffering caused by Chris’s self-righteousness as it is about Joe’s need to consider his moral obligations to a broader society. John Proctor at the end of The Crucible (1953), having been brutalized in the Puritan prison, recognizing the futility of resistance to the court, and having now come to a new loving understanding with his wife and seeking to preserve their life together, has already signed the false confession stating that he was an agent of the devil. But he now snatches back the document, saying that the word of the judges that he signed will be sufficient for their purposes and explaining his refusal to allow the document to be posted by saying, “Because it is my name […] How may I live without my name?” (453). Given Thomason’s analysis of shaming, Proctor’s motive seems to be this. If the judges say he signed the confession, they merely are ascribing a shameful identity to him, one which he may or may not have accepted. But if the signed document is posted, it is presented as evidence that Proctor himself accepted this identity as his self-concept—and the self-concept he will be accepting is that of a coward who sought to save his own life while others were dying for principle. Throughout the play, Proctor has struggled with his sense of unworthiness to take a moral stand against the court because of his affair with the serving girl Abigail Williams: how can he present himself as a moral champion against the corruption of the court when he himself has corrupted his marriage? But now toward the end of the play, largely through his wife Elizabeth’s emerging understanding and forgiveness, Proctor has begun to recover his self-concept as a man of integrity, one morally worthy of standing against injustice, and he does not want to have that self-concept diminished, especially by an act, such as a signature, that is his own (See Palmer). If others ignore all he has gone through and reduce his identity to a single act of consorting with the devil or of having had sex with Abigail Williams, then that is their ascription and their diminution of his identity, but it fails to recognize the full complexity of who he is and it is not a self-concept to which he must agree. He announces his rebellion against that ascription by demanding

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that the court leave him his “name,” his ability to construct his own more complex self-concept—a legacy he hopes to pass to his children. Here again, tragedy arises from a tension between a person’s selfconception and a socially imposed identity. The tragic action is expressed in terms of a shaming socially imposed identity and the character’s glorying in a broader more complex self-concept. It is the depiction of a person who feels himself unjustly shamefully diminished and of his rageful rejection of that socially ascribed reduction. Elizabeth Proctor expresses this idea in the last line of the play. Responding to Reverend Hale, who frantically pleads with her to get Proctor to save his life by signing the confession, she recognizes that Proctor is demanding recognition of his broader self-concept in the face of the diminishing shaming. She replies to Hale, “He have his goodness now. God forbid I take it from him” (454). If we believe that Eddie Carbone in A View from the Bridge (1956) understands himself and his actions, he too fits this pattern of a tragic tension between a person’s self-concept and a socially imposed reduction of his identity. Eddie confronts two shaming challenges to his self-concept. The first is the suggestion by his wife Bea and later by the lawyer Alfieri that his overprotective actions toward his niece Catherine are driven by his unacknowledged sexual attraction to her (634). Eddie finds this outrageous and demeaning; it fails to recognize what he takes to be the truth of his self-concept: for his entire life Eddie has been Catherine’s protector; that role is the core of whom he takes himself to be, and he refuses to abandon that role now when he sees Rodolpho’s attention to her as a danger. From Eddie’s perspective, Rodolpho is a genuine threat; Eddie believes other people are simply naïve in not seeing this (603–604), and he demands they recognize the dignity of his self-concept as he stands firmly as Catherine’s protector. The second challenge to Eddie’s self-concept occurs after he has called the immigration authorities to report Rodolpho and Marco. Now his socially imposed identity is reduced to that of a snitch who has deeply violated the ethical mores of his community. Eddie responds to this with something like Kierkegaard’s concept of the teleological suspension of the ethical in Fear and Trembling (1843), a book that examines Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son Isaac because God has commanded it. Kierkegaard suggests that people may have a goal or purpose (a telos in Greek)—in Abraham’s case his faith and devotion to God—that is so

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important it places the person’s actions outside generally accepted ethical norms. This does not mean those norms are invalidated or destroyed; they merely are suspended in this situation. Some higher value needs to be honored here, something beyond the normal ethical guidelines. This is something like moving the concept of civil disobedience from the realm to law to ethics. An act of civil disobedience is not an act of revolution; it is not aimed at destroying the government and its entire legal system. A person who commits an act of civil disobedience expects to be arrested for violating the law and recognizes the right of the police to arrest him; the law remains intact, at least for the moment. But the person also believes that he should be seen not merely as a criminal, a violator of the law, but as someone whose act is serving a higher end that places him beyond the value of merely upholding the law. This is how Eddie views himself. Genuinely believing Catherine is in danger, Eddie goes to the lawyer Alfieri seeking ways for the law to prevent Rodolpho from continuing to see her. When Alfieri tells him there is no law on which he can act, Eddie takes the only path he sees as still open to him: he reports Rodolpho and Marco to the immigration authorities. He fully understands this is a violation of the mores of his community, which he continues fully to accept; this is why he places the call secretly. But he also believes he should not be seen simply as a morally reprehensible snitch. He believes anyone who understands the complete situation will see that he was being driven by a higher cause, one that places his action beyond the normal mores of his community. He feels the socially imposed identity that reduces him to a snitch unjustly fails to acknowledge the complexity of the situation and his self-concept of being Catherine’s protector from which he was acting honorably. That is what Eddie is saying when he demands his “name” or his “respect” (621, 632, 635). Again here, the tragedy turns on a tension between the character’s socially imposed identity and his self-conception. The social identity that shames Eddie—that of being a snitch—is also the glory of his self-concept: he devotedly and fearlessly is Catherine’s protector, regardless of what that may cost him. Miller presents the tension between a socially imposed identity and a personal self-concept explicitly in a key scene near the end of act 2 (pages 263–64) of The Price (1968). Walter, now a successful surgeon, has come after 16 years to reconcile with his younger brother, Victor, a policeman, as they sell old furniture from their father’s estate. When their father’s business failed during the Great Depression, Walter gave the

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family little help and focused on completing his medical education. Victor dropped out of college, giving up his dream of becoming a scientist, and joined the police force to help support his father. As a result, Victor has resented Walter all their adult lives and blames him for ruining his dream of completing his college education; Victor believes Walter is selfish and failed to accept his moral obligations to the family in the way that Victor himself did. As act 2 of the play develops, however, it becomes clear that the family’s situation in the 1930s may not have been as simple as Victor interprets it. Walter has a different view, which he presents as part of his attempt at reconciliation, but Victor cannot accept this; it is too threatening to his own self-concept and the narrative he has created explaining the course of his own life. He rejects Walter’s account and his attempted reconciliation contemptuously, seeing it as far from truthful and merely self-serving: “You came for the old handshake, didn’t you! The okay!” Walter then explodes in anger at this rejection of what he believes has been his goodfaith effort to confront the facts of their family’s past, to reconcile, and to move forward. Speaking to both Victor and his wife, Esther, Walter says: Vengeance. Down to the end. He is sacrificing his life to vengeance. […] To prove with your failure what a treacherous son of a bitch I am!—to hang yourself in my doorway. […] You quit; both of you. You lay down and quit, and that’s the long and short of all your ideology. It’s all envy. And to this moment you haven’t the guts to face it! But your failure does not give you moral authority! Not with me! I worked for what I made and there are people walking around today who’d have been dead if I hadn’t. […] You will never, never again make me ashamed. [Italic in the original] (263–64)

Victor shames Walter, reducing him to a set of demeaning traits based on murkily understood events from a single period in his life: for Victor, Walter is merely selfish and irresponsible, a man who deserted his family. Walter rebels in anger against this reduction of his identity, demanding that his fuller self-concept be acknowledged, and claiming that Victor’s failure to recognize him properly results merely from Victor’s own shame and cowardice. As Thomason suggests, there is a tension here between Walter’s broader self-concept and the narrow identity Victor seeks to thrust upon

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him. Thinking of Vera Stark, we can see that Victor seeks to shame Walter for abandoning the family, while Walter retorts that this is in fact his glory: he had the courage to take responsibility for his own life in difficult times and to build a career; he sees his brother as a coward who refuses to accept that kind of responsibility and has hidden his whole life in a victim story. Similarly, Phillip Gellburg in Broken Glass (1994) has struggled to make a successful career in the New York real estate industry in the 1930s, despite considerable anti-Semitism. He prides himself on being “the only Jew ever worked for Brooklyn Guarantee in their whole history” (330), and his self-concept rests on his loyalty to the company and the quality of his work there. When the company loses a real estate deal to a firm headed by another Jew, Gellburg feels his boss, Stanton Wylie Case, the Christian head of Brooklyn Guarantee and a world-class yachtsman, believes it is because Gellburg has cut some kind of side deal with a fellow Jew. Feeling his identity is being reduced to his religion—and that his full self-concept developed over years with the company of being a loyal and successful employee is being overlooked—Gellburg confronts Case and objects. A quarrel ensues, and Gellburg has a heart attack (375–76). Again, there is a tension here between a diminished socially imposed identity and a broader self-concept, and the diminished shaming identity also is part of the character’s glory: Gellburg is proud of being “the only Jew” to triumph as he has at his company. The point of this survey is to show that Thomason’s ideas about shame as a tension between a diminished socially imposed identity and a broader, more complex self-concept are central to Miller’s depiction of tragedy as well as to August Wilson’s concept of the rageful “warrior.” Often the diminished identity used to shame contains an element on which the character prides herself, as Nottage suggests about Vera Stark’s experience in portraying the antebellum maid Tilly in a 1930s film. The tension Thomason suggests is similar to what W. E. B. Du Bois called “doubleconsciousness,” an awareness of a personal sense of self and a more limiting socially imposed identity. With this as background, we now can move to consider a small selection of African American dramas, where we will see similarities to Miller’s ideas about tragedy. ∗ ∗ ∗

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Set in the rural South of the 1930s, Langston Hughes’s play Mulatto (1931, first performed on Broadway in 1935) is about Robert Lewis, the eighteen-year-old mulatto son of white Georgia plantation owner Colonel Thomas Norwood and his black housekeeper, Cora Lewis. Robert now has returned home to the plantation after six years away at school (16). Although Norwood pays for Robert’s education, he rejects him as his child, as he does all his other children with Cora, and demands that Robert accept the demeaning status and deferential demeanor required of other blacks in his community. Robert refuses, defiantly using the front door to the plantation house, which is prohibited for blacks, getting into an argument with the white clerk in the post office, driving his car wildly through the village streets, and openly demanding that he be given his birthright of being recognized as Norwood’s proper biological heir (18). Norwood will tolerate none of this. A fight ensues in which Robert kills his father and then kills himself to deny the furious white mob that pursues him the satisfaction of capture. Webster Smalley suggests the play reflects the theme of the “tragic mulatto,” who struggles psychologically with being neither black nor white in a mixed-race society; Smalley cites Hughes poem “The Cross” about a mulatto who finds himself caught between worlds and wonders where he will die, “Being neither white nor black” (Hughes, x). A similar and often-cited interpretation is presented by Germain Bienvenu, who sees Robert struggling with his mulatto identity as he disparages other blacks in the play. But Jonathan Shandell, basing his ideas on an interpretation by Harry and Michele Elam, argues that Robert has no problem with his self-concept: he has a black mother and a white father, and like any other father’s son, he demands recognition of the status his patrimony should grant him. The play is not about a psychological crisis brought on by mixed-race parentage but a critique of how racism assigns social identity in America. Following Shandell’s interpretation, the play fits well in the model of shame, rebellion, and tragedy that we saw in Miller’s plays—plays that Miller began writing some 15 years after Hughes wrote Mulatto. Robert has a limiting social identity forced on him by his father’s racist society. He rejects that identity and demands recognition of his broader, more complex personal self-concept through acts of rebellion and violence, seeking to restore his sense of agency or self-control in a shaming situation that denies it. The pattern is much like the one Thomason describes and which we saw fit so well with Miller’s plays. Robert’s shame is his glory, as Nottage has Vera Stark say. The society seeks to

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shame Robert by limiting his identity to only his race; Robert embraces his race as part of his self-concept and then demands, like August Wilson’s warrior, that other parts of his self-concept, the fact that he is Norwood’s son, also be recognized. Many themes about the African American experience are presented in Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun (1958), but the play’s climax turns on Walter Lee’s confrontation with Karl Lindner of the Clybourne Park Improvement Association, who wants to dissuade this black family from moving into his white neighborhood by offering them a bribe (100– 102, 126–33). In doing that, Lindner reduces the family to nothing more than their race, despite his earlier admission, “Anybody can see that you are a nice family of folks, hard working and honest I’m sure” (101). Walter Lee has to find his way to standing up to Lindner; he gets guidance from his mother, Lena: Son—I come from five generations of people who was slaves and sharecroppers—but ain’t nobody in my family never let nobody pay ‘em no money that was a way of telling us we wasn’t fit to walk the earth. We ain’t never been that poor. We ain’t never been that—dead inside. (127)

When Walter Lee finally confronts Lindner, he has recovered the fullness and complexity of his self-concept, and with it his pride, the dignity Miller speaks of in “Tragedy and the Common Man.” He speaks to Lindner of this pride, introducing him to his young son, Travis, and saying: What I’m telling you is that we called you over here to tell you that we are very proud and that this—Travis, come here. This is my son, and he makes the sixth generation our family in this country. […] And we have decided to move into our house because my father—my father—he earned it for us brick by brick. (132)

Refusing to be demeaned and reduced to a socially imposed identity that fails to acknowledge any of his qualities beyond his race, Walter Lee demands recognition for the richer self-concept his family has helped him to recover. The element Lindner would use to reduce and shame him, Walter Lee now embraces as the glory of that self-concept. A similar pattern is easy to see in Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman (1964). When we first see Clay sitting alone on the subway car, he appears as a young, self-confident, accomplished, and prosperous black man. Lula, a

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white woman roughly Clay’s age, enters, sits next to him, and begins to flirt. But as their conversation continues, Lula denies Clay any part of his self-concept other than her stereotypical ideas about his race, claiming that everything about him is fake. Clay erupts in rage, defending both his race and other parts of his self-concept (34–36). Lula then stabs Clay to death, and other white passengers who have joined them on the subway throw his body off the train at the next stop, where another black man enters the car. This is the pattern we have seen before: Clay explodes in rage as his self-concept is restricted by a socially imposed delimiting identity that fails to acknowledge his broader self-concept. Unlike Hughes’s Mulatto, Adrienne Kennedy’s Funnyhouse of a Negro (1969) does directly address the psychological crisis that can arise from being mixed race in a racist society. Without trying to sort through details of this brilliant portrait of internal chaos, we can see that it is about the pain of feeling shamed by a socially imposed and delimiting racial identity, when Negro-Sarah’s self-concept is broader and more complex: I am an English major, as my mother was when she went to school in Atlanta. My father majored in Social Work. I am graduated from a city college […] I write poetry filling white page after white page with imitations of Edith Sitwell. […] My friends will be white. I need them as an embankment to keep me from reflecting too much upon the fact that I am a Negro. For, like all educated Negroes—out of life and death essential—I find it necessary to maintain a stark fortress against recognition of myself. (8–9)

Sarah’s violence toward others and toward the various aspects of herself in the play are an example of violent rebellion as a response to the experience of shaming as a socially imposed delimiting identity. Troy Maxon in August Wilson’s Fences (1985) is a bitter 53-year-old man who sees himself as a victim of racism. Not only is he struggling now to become the first African American to be promoted from loader to driver in the Pittsburgh sanitation department, he feels he was denied a career in Major League Baseball because of his race. An ex-convict who found himself unable to support his first wife and their child in any way other than robbery, he stifles the football dreams of his high-school-aged son from a new marriage because he thinks these dreams, like his own

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baseball dreams, will lead only to disappointment. He finds his life narrowly constraining, offering him the option only to go on stoically, sustaining a minimal life for his family but with little hope of real joy or progress. Other than meager survival, he has little left in which feels a sense of pride or accomplishment. He describes his life to Rose, his wife of 18 years, the real hero of the play, like this: Woman … I do the best I can do. I come in here every Friday. I carry a sack of potatoes and a bucket of lard. You all line up at the door with your hands out. I give you the lint from my pockets. I give you my sweat and my blood. I ain’t got no tears. I done spent them. We go upstairs in that room at night … and I fall down on you and try to blast a hole into forever. I get up Monday morning … find my lunch on the table. I go out. Make my way. Find my strength to carry me through to the next Friday. That’s all I got, Rose. That’s all I got to give. I can’t give nothing else. (40)

Troy feels victimized, shamed, and limited by the roles and identity he has been able to find in the world. But he has met another woman, Alberta, at a local bar. They flirt, have an affair, and Alberta becomes pregnant. He now must explain this betrayal to Rose. He tries to do so with a baseball metaphor about moving along the bases trying to get home—trying to score, trying to accomplish something that will bring him joy and pride— a metaphor he often uses at other places in the play. He believes he was born with two strikes against him as a black man. He needs to be cautious, keep his life limited, or a curve ball will get by him, and he will strike out: his life will be ruined—he will wind up back in prison or drunk and homeless in the street. So, he bunted in life, didn’t try for too much, but made it safely to first base, with a small but steady job, Rose as his wife, and their son. He is grateful to be safe on first base—grateful to Rose— but also he is waiting for some bigger opportunity to come from this: “I was on first looking for one of them boys to knock me in. To get me home” (66). That opportunity never seems to come. He feels thwarted and over 18 years continuously sinks further into bitter resentment and shame. Then he meets Alberta: Then I saw that girl … she firmed up my backbone. And I got to thinking that if I tried … I just might be able to steal second. Do you understand, after eighteen years, I wanted to steal second. (66)

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This is not a sufficient justification for Troy’s betrayal, and Rose is both quick and quite right to express her hurt and reject it (67). My point here is not to excuse Troy but to show how his experience fits the pattern of a socially imposed identity coming into conflict with a person’s self-concept and how the person’s response is a kind of rebellion in which the person tries to express independence, a sense of personal agency that rejects the constricting socially imposed identity. This is the pattern that Thomason has proposed: the one we saw fit so well both with Miller’s vision of tragedy and with tragedy in plays by other African American dramatists. In Topdog/Underdog (1999), Suzan-Lori Parks presents us with two brothers, Lincoln and Booth, both of whom are African American street hustlers. Lincoln, the older brother, is a master of three-card monte who has abandoned that hustle and now makes a living wearing whiteface and dressing as Abraham Lincoln in an arcade gallery that charges people to pretend they are John Wilkes Booth and reenact President Lincoln’s assassination. Booth, the younger brother, wants to move on from being a small-time thief to improving his skill at three-card monte by having his brother use his expertise to help him get better at dealing and hiding the cards. Throughout the play Booth bounces between outsized fantasies of how successful he can be and crippling, debasing self-doubt. In a threecard monte game at the end of the play, Lincoln hustles Booth out of his portion of the inheritance they had received from their mother. Booth, feeling betrayed and humiliated, flies into a rage and shoots Lincoln. The trajectory of Booth’s character here fits the pattern we have been following of tension between a broader self-concept and a shaming, socially imposed, reduced identity, followed by rebellion: Booth’s selfconcept of becoming a slick and wily card hustler crashes humiliatingly when he is hustled by his brother at the very game he thought his brother was helping him master, leading Booth to shoot Lincoln. In this way, Topdog/Underdog fits with the pattern of tragedy we have been tracing. Beyond this, however, Parks is using Lincoln and Booth to make points about American history and the way it has a similar structure of self-concept, debasing betrayal, and rebellion (See Colbert, 202–205, based on Park’s own “From Elements of Style” [1994] reprinted in her The America Play and Other Works ). Racism in America demeans and marginalizes African Americans. An example of this, Parks is saying, is the way we lionize President Lincoln for, among other things, “freeing the slaves.” We celebrate Lincoln’s heroism and nobility because it feels comfortable in our national myth; but focusing the story on Lincoln in this

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way fails to acknowledge the centuries of suffering of the slaves themselves, who exist in this narrative only as background to Lincoln’s greatness. It is as if those slaves had to put on whiteface and become Lincoln to be acknowledged in our national myth. Like Booth in the play, African Americans have been hustled out of their inheritance: their proper place in the narrative of America’s history. Their rightful self-concept, as August Wilson proclaims in The Ground on Which I Stand, is the richness of the culture and history of Africans in America. The socially imposed demeaning and delimiting historical identity they are offered by American racism is as background to Lincoln’s greatness. The result is the rebellion seen in the civil rights movement and in African American literature. Lastly, let us look at Dominique Morisseau’s Skeleton Crew (2016). Although Morisseau designates the characters in this play as black, the play is primarily about pressures on the working class in contemporary industrialized capitalist economies. Unlike the other plays by African American dramatists we have looked at, it addresses not racism as the source of a delimiting and shaming socially imposed identity as much as corporate economics in global capitalism. The play is part of a trilogy Morisseau wrote about her hometown of Detroit, but it easily could be moved to Reading, Pennsylvania, the setting for Lynn Nottage’s Sweat (2015), and be given an entirely white cast without significant changes to the text. This makes it an especially good play with which to end this section. It is written by an African American dramatist; it shows again the pattern of tension we have been examining—broad self-concept, delimiting socially imposed identity, and rebellion; it was written for black actors, but it could be done as easily with a white cast. This shows the universality of ideas we have been tracing from Miller’s conception of tragedy, just as Sandra Shannon suggested in the quotation toward the end of part one of this essay. African American playwrights often positions those ideas, themes, and dramatic structures within the context of the culture of Africans in America, but that need not be the case. The conception of tragedy we are tracing here applies more generally across American drama. Skeleton Crew is about a group of workers in an autobody plant who have experienced the layoffs of fellow workers and the closing of nearby similar companies. Rumors are circulating that their own company plans to close this plant and move manufacturing to more cost-effective places. For all the workers, their jobs are a necessity for playing their bills and also part of their self-concept: they take pride in their skill in operating complex machinery on the assembly line successfully. But that is not how

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corporate executives see them. Administrators are trying to cut back the number of employees so that the company can maintain a profit while sales and the production needed to support it slow. They actively are looking for reasons to fire people while releasing little information to employees about plans for the plant. They do not see the employees as people with lives that need financial support and a sense of personal dignity, nor do they recognize them as individuals who bring unique and differing skills and valuable experience to the plant. They see each employee merely abstractly as a potentially expendable cost center, and the corporation is in a situation where it needs to control costs. This leads to tension among the four characters in the play as each tries to sort through his or her personal self-concept not only in the context of the corporate demands but also regarding their personal histories with each other. Here again this is an American drama depicting a tension between individuals’ self-concepts and a socially imposed identity—in this case by the corporate administrators—that diminishes that identity to a single demeaning aspect: the individuals are seen as nothing more than interchangeable and expendable cost centers. In the end, the characters come together in mutual support and rebellion against the corporation. Their shame—their corporately imposed identity as mere pawns in a broader and more important corporate strategy—becomes their glory as they join in solidarity to rebel. ∗ ∗ ∗ This essay began with a question posed by Lynn Nottage’s depiction of the actor Vera Stark’s attitudes toward her breakthrough film role as an enslaved maid in the antebellum South: How could the role be both Stark’s shame and her glory? This took us to Krista Thomason’s ideas about the experience of being shamed as a tension between a person’s broad and complex self-concept and a socially imposed identity that reduces the person to a single trait, leading the person to rebel against this diminution. Thomason’s ideas fit well with Arthur Miller’s concept that tragedy involves a person’s struggle to maintain a sense of personal dignity and the person’s indignant rebellion against the forces that attack it. The core idea is that confrontations with shame are central to tragedy—at least as Miller envisioned tragedy. We noted similarities between Thomason’s views on the structure of shame and W. E. B. Du Bois’s ideas about “double-consciousness” in The Souls of Black Folk. With this as background, we were able to explore the role of shame and rebellion

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in tragedy both in Arthur Miller’s plays and in selected plays by African American dramatists. In both case we saw examples of what August Wilson called a “warrior” response to shaming. That response seems to be central to American conceptions of tragedy, both Miller’s and those of African American dramatists.

Works Cited Baraka, Amiri (LeRoi Jones). 1964. Dutchman. Reprinted in Dutchman and The Slave: Two Plays, 1–38. New York: Harper Perennial, 2001. Bienvenu, Germain. 1992. Intracaste Prejudice in Langston Hughes’s Mulatto. African American Review 26:2, 341–53. Bigsby, Christopher. 2005. Arthur Miller: A Critical Study. Oxford: Oxford UP. Casper, Vivian. 2017. Joe Keller’s Motivation for Suicide in All My Sons: A New Reading. Arthur Miller Journal 12:2, 86–102. Centola, Steven R. 1997. All My Sons, in Christopher Bigsby, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Arthur Miller. New York: Cambridge UP, 48–59. Coates, Ta-Nehisi. 2017. Foreword to Toni Morrison, The Origin of Others, vii– xvii. Cambridge: Harvard UP. Colbert, Soyica Diggs. 2018. Suzan-Lori Parks, in David Palmer, ed., Visions of Tragedy in Modern American Drama. London: Bloomsbury, 199–2011. Du Bois, W. E. B. 1903. The Souls of Black Folk, in Nathan Huggins, ed., W. E. B. Du Bois: Writings. New York: Library of America, 1986. Hansberry, Lorriane. 1958. A Raisin in the Sun. Introduction by Robert Nemiroff. New York: Modern Library, 1995. Hughes, Langston. 1931. Mulatto. Reprinted in Five Plays by Langston Hughes, Webster Smalley, ed., 1–35. Bloomington: Indiana UP, Midland Book Edition, 1968. Kennedy, Adrienne. 1969. Funnyhouse of a Negro. New York: Samuel French. Kierkegaard, Søren. 1843. Fear and Trembling. Trans. Alastair Hannay. New York: Penguin Books, 2003. Mason, Jeffrey D. 2008. Stone Tower: The Political Theater of Arthur Miller. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P. Miller, Arthur. 1947. All My Sons, in Tony Kushner, ed., Arthur Miller: Collected Plays, 1944–1961. New York: Library of America, 2006, 85–158. Miller, Arthur. 1949. Tragedy and the Common Man. The New York Times, Feb. 27. https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/00/ 11/12/specials/miller-common.html. Reprinted in Arthur Miller: Collected Essays, 7–10. Introduction by Susan C. W. Abbotson. New York: Penguin, 2016.

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Miller, Arthur. 1953. The Crucible, in Tony Kushner, ed. Arthur Miller: Collected Plays, 1944–1961. New York: Library of America, 2006, 343–455. Miller, Arthur. 1956. A View from the Bridge (Two-Act Version), in Tony Kushner, ed., Arthur Miller: Collected Plays, 1944–1961. New York: Library of America, 2006, 569–636. Miller, Arthur. 1964. The Price, in Tony Kushner, ed., Arthur Miller: Collected Plays, 1964–1982. New York: Library of America, 2012, 185–266. Miller, Arthur. 1994. Broken Glass, in Tony Kushner, ed., Arthur Miller: Collected Plays, 1987–2004. New York: Library of America, 2015, 317–97. Morisseau, Dominique. 2016. Skeleton Crew. New York: Samuel French, 2017. Nottage, Lynn. 2011. By the Way, Meet Vera Stark. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2013. Palmer, David. 2012. Tragedy, Integrity, Guilt, and Shame: Understanding John Proctor. Arthur Miller Journal 7:1–2, 23–41. Parks, Suzan-Lori. 1999. Topdog/Underdog. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2001. Schechtman, Marya. 1996. The Constitution of Selves. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP. Shandell, Jonathan. 2018. Langston Hughes, in David Palmer, ed., Visions of Tragedy in Modern American Drama. London: Bloomsbury, 45–52. Shannon, Sandra G. 2018. August Wilson, in David Palmer, ed., Visions of Tragedy in Modern American Drama. London: Bloomsbury, 141–52. Thomason, Krista K. 2018. Naked: The Dark Side of Shame and Moral Life. New York: Oxford UP. Wilson, August. 1985. Fences. Foreword by Samuel G. Freedman. The August Wilson Century Cycle. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2007. Wilson, August. 1996. The Ground on Which I Stand. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2001. Young, Harvey. 2013. Theatre & Race. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

CHAPTER 8

“Some Men Don’t Bounce”: Miller’s The Price, Mamet’s American Buffalo, and Shepard’s The Late Henry Moss E. Andrew Lee

In his autobiography Timebends , Arthur Miller describes his 1968 play The Price, as “an exorcism of this paralyzing vision of repetition”: They [the Franz brothers] think they have achieved the indifference to the betrayals of the past that maturity confers. But it all comes back; the old angry symbols evoke the old emotions of injustice, and they part unreconciled … doomed to perpetuate [their] illusions because truth was too costly to face. (Miller 1987, 542)

Yet despite this perceived pessimism, Miller remarks of his work generally that “my resistance to despair seems to have something Jewish about it … a ray of light has to remain after darkness has closed in, a glow of redemption must appear” (Miller 1987, xv). This “glow of redemption,” however subtle, distinguishes Miller’s work from that of later American dramatists such as David Mamet and

E. A. Lee (B) Lee University, Cleveland, TN, USA © The Author(s) 2020 S. Marino and D. Palmer (eds.), Arthur Miller for the Twenty-First Century, American Literature Readings in the 21st Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37293-4_8

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Sam Shepard, whose plays often seem more recalcitrant and unforgiving. Yet Miller’s The Price evinces intriguing parallels with works by these two iconic postmodern dramatists. Examining The Price alongside Mamet’s American Buffalo (1975) reveals thematic parallels that highlight the arbitrary and imaginary nature of monetary value. By incorporating economic theories of Slavoj Žižek, this essay analyzes Miller’s portrait of the Franz family heirlooms as a type of “junk shop” comparable to the setting of American Buffalo; moreover, the characters in both plays exhibit anxiety over the prospect of being taken advantage of by a subjective or otherwise arbitrary appraiser who can assign or repudiate the monetary value of material objects. In addition, The Price and Shepard’s The Late Henry Moss (2000) depict brothers who are traumatized subjects resulting from a father’s deficiencies. Borrowing from trauma studies, this essay analyzes how and why both sets of estranged brothers provide conflicting accounts of a dysfunctional father. An examination of these parallels reveals The Price to be a harbinger of postmodern dramatic themes employed by Mamet and Shepard.

The Price and Mamet’s American Buffalo: Money as Metaphor Both David Mamet and the late Sam Shepard greatly admired Miller’s work. Shepard agreed to be one of the featured celebrity readers at a Broadway gala on January 25, 2016, commemorating the centennial of Miller’s birth.1 In David Mamet: A Life in the Theatre, Ira Nadal describes Miller as an acknowledged influence on Mamet’s work, even a “touchstone” (36). Although Christopher Bigsby notes that “Mamet has attacked Miller for failing to identify the characters of Death of a Salesman as being Jewish,” Mamet’s relationship with Miller was both professional and personal (33). Mamet spoke at Miller’s 80th birthday celebration in 1995, and following the playwright’s death nearly a decade later, penned an op-ed piece in The New York Times , describing the extraordinary empathy elicited by Miller’s unforgettable characters: “We pity them as they are powerless to escape their fate. We feel fear because we recognize, in them, our own dilemmas” (Mamet 2005, n.p.). One of the dilemmas facing Victor Franz in The Price is deciding how to assess the value of the legacy left him by his deceased father; is it

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junk or is it valuable? This legacy is two-dimensional: the physical objects left behind to which monetary value may be assigned and the emotional and psychological legacy of memories with their concomitant guilt. When elder brother Walter Franz enters, he almost immediately dismisses their father’s furniture as the “same old junk,” a remark that appraiser Gregory Solomon later turns against him as they haggle over price (Miller 1968, 223). Walter attempts to defend himself by explaining, “When you’ve been brought up with things, you tend to be sick of them” (Miller 1968, 230); with possessions, as with relationships, familiarity often breeds contempt. In an earlier play, Incident at Vichy, Lebeau evinces a similar sentiment when explaining how his mother’s clinging obstinately to her material possessions caused them to remain in Paris even as the Nazis invaded: “Suddenly my mother wouldn’t leave the furniture … She had this brass bed, and carpets, and draperies and all kinds of junk” (Miller 1964, 136, 168). Walter’s repudiation of his father’s material legacy—he explains to Victor that he “didn’t want anything” (Miller 1968, 223)—mirrors his abandonment of their father twenty-eight years earlier. In an essay entitled “Objects, Objects Everywhere,” economics philosopher Slavoj Žižek employs the phrase “inherent transgression” to describe one who, like Walter, attempts to eschew or otherwise declines to participate in a commercial exchange or other socially contractual exercise. “Inherent transgression” refers to the decision of one who “does not take ideological injunctions seriously. He mocks them, dismisses them cynically, but this very resistance is in advance taken into account and serves the reproduction of the ideological edifice” (Žižek 2016, 182). Despite his insistence to the contrary, Walter does want something: he needs understanding and perhaps forgiveness from Victor, so the furniture that Solomon has appraised becomes a symbol—what Marx and Žižek refer to as “commodity fetishism”—for Walter’s relationships with his father and brother. For Marx, “commodity fetishism” is “a definite social relation between men that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things” (Žižek 1989, 23). One striking example of this phenomenon is their mother’s harp. As Victor stares at the harp, he confesses, “I can almost hear the music … But I can never see her face” (Miller 1968, 237). For him, the harp becomes a fetishized commodity representing his social relation to his mother. His inability to “see her face” suggests repression of a traumatic memory, which will be explored later in relation to Sam Shepard’s work. But for Walter, the harp serves as a vindication

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that their father was never truly in dire financial straits, nor should Walter feel any guilt over not contributing toward Victor’s college expenses. Walter points to their mother’s harp and declares to Victor, “Your degree was right there” (Miller 1968, 257). In this instance, the harp is valuable only insofar as it may be exchanged for money: “the value of a certain commodity, which is effectively an insignia of a network of social relations between producers of diverse commodities … assumes the form of … another thing [money]” (Žižek 1989, 23). In The Sublime Object of Ideology, Žižek explains: the real problem is not to penetrate to the “hidden kernel” of the commodity—the determination of its value by the quantity of the work consumed in its production—but to explain why work assumed the form of the value of a commodity, why it can affirm its social character only in the commodity-form of its product. (Žižek 1989, 11)

Actually, the brothers have not reunited in their childhood home merely to transact a furniture sale but rather to renegotiate and assess their relationships with their dead father and with each other. Thus, the commodity (furniture and the money assigned as its price or value) reveals the underlying relationships that the furniture represents: “in the structure of the commodity-form it is possible to find the transcendental subject” (Žižek 1989, 16). In other words, through his haggling with appraiser Gregory Solomon, Victor may discover how he himself values his memory of his father. Walter, through his “inherent transgression,” attempts to repudiate this process of social–relational discovery, although it may be argued that his attempts are not altogether successful since he does become entangled in animated discussions regarding their parents. Furthermore, Walter eventually suggests a tax deduction scheme in order for both Franz brothers to earn the maximum profit from their father’s estate, affirming Žižek’s observation that the “inherent transgression” turns against itself and inevitably “serves the reproduction of the ideological edifice”—in this case, capitalism. Indeed, for all his denunciation of his father, Walter cannot help but notice similarities between them: “my own apartment is so loaded up it doesn’t look too different from this” (Miller 1968, 236). For his part, Victor has “gotten to look a great deal like Dad” (Miller 1968, 225). Early in his negotiating with Solomon, Victor delivers his ultimatum regarding the ten rooms of his parents’ furniture—“All or

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nothing or let’s forget it” (Miller 1968, 208)—which may imply a subconscious desire for a sense of closure with his father’s legacy. This is Victor’s opportunity either to reconcile or to exorcize his conflicting emotions toward his father once and for all. When Solomon offers Victor eleven hundred dollars for the entire lot of furniture, we have no idea whether this is a fair offer. In Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics, Richard Thaler, 2017 Nobel Laureate in Economics, observes “There is clear evidence that people dislike unfair offers and are willing to take a financial hit to punish those who make [these unfair offers]. It is less clear that people feel morally obliged to make fair offers” (Thaler 2015, n.p.). Ultimately, the furniture will pass into the hands of another based on the transfer of money. Victor’s wife, Esther, affirms this by saying, “It’s like we never were anything, we were always about-to-be … I want it. Vic? I want money!” (Miller 1968, 198). Esther Franz suffers from what Žižek calls the “fetishistic illusion”: Money is in reality just an embodiment, a condensation, a materialization of a network of social relations … but to the individuals themselves, this function of money … appears as an immediate, natural property of a thing called ‘money’, as if money is already in itself, in its immediate material reality, the embodiment of wealth … When individuals use money, they know very well that there is nothing magical about it—that money, in its materiality, is simply an expression of social relations. (Žižek 1989, 31)

Esther is not to be blamed for her blind faith in the fetishistic illusion that seduces us all and is the de facto basis for human commerce and labor. Victor admits as much to Solomon: “… it all ends up she wants, she wants. And I can’t really blame her—there’s just no respect for anything but money.” Yet Victor claims for himself a privileged distinction as one capable of resisting cupidity: “I just don’t want to lay down my life for it [money]” (Miller 1968, 218), implying that Esther would lay down her life for money if she could and that his brother Walter already has done so. But even Victor’s ostensibly noble desire, according to Žižek, is disingenuous at best and involves a “misrecognition” of the dynamics of commercial exchange: “What the commodity owners do in an exchange relation is practical solipsism” because “if the participants were to take note of the dimension of ‘real abstraction’, the ‘effective’ act of exchange itself

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would no longer be possible” (Žižek 1989, 20). If Victor and Solomon were to realize fully that money never can placate nor compensate their conflicting memories, guilt, love, and (dis)loyalty associated with their father’s legacy, then this appraisal and transaction would be impossible. Ironically, Victor seems to intuit this in his indictment of Walter for leaving in pursuit of his medical career: You can’t walk in with one splash and wash out twenty-eight years. There’s a price people pay. I’ve paid it, it’s all gone, I haven’t got it anymore. Just like you paid, didn’t you? You’ve got no wife, you’ve lost your family …. (Miller 1968, 253)

“It” here refers to the price Victor paid—living in poverty with his father rather than abandoning him, “eating garbage,” and remaining on perpetual suicide watch. Victor implies that Walter’s family tragedies, which have left him emotionally bereft, were the just and appropriate consequences of Walter’s selfish decision, and that Walter’s abandonment of their father was a harbinger of his later estrangement from his wife and children.

Commodified Relationships in The Price and American Buffalo By 1975 when Mamet’s American Buffalo appeared, the frenetic cultural upheavals of the 1960s had left many Americans unmoored from traditional family and social paradigms. Mamet’s play emphasizes this more pronounced cultural estrangement, including an examination of the arbitrary and futile exercise of trying to re-envision personal relationships as economic transactions. The play takes place inside a “junk shop” where sundry items, sometimes stolen, are sold. The play’s title alludes not only to a valuable buffalo nickel but also (as a verb) to confusing or misleading someone—specifically, in this play, during a monetary transaction. Mamet’s “property list” for the play calls for a “Nickel wrapped in cloth” and a “Coin reference book,” not necessarily a buffalo nickel, but any nondescript nickel, and not a coin reference book of any particular authenticity or legitimacy, but any coin book (Mamet 1975, 85). These circumstantial details become prescient when examined in light of Žižek’s observations about the arbitrary and illusory nature of money exchange. Not only is the exchange of artifacts for money symbolic of the underlying social relations between

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the individuals engaging in the transaction, but furthermore “the transcendental subject … is confronted with the disquieting fact that it [the exchange] depends on some inner-worldly ‘pathological’ process—a scandal, a nonsensical impossibility” (Žižek 1989, 17). American Buffalo utilizes three main characters—Donny Dubrow, the junk shop proprietor; Bob, his drug-addicted protégé (“gopher”), and Walter Cole better known as “Teach,” who is a friend of Donny and a veteran criminal. In their attempts to justify the “scandal” and “nonsensical impossibility” of money exchange, the characters use familiar and comfortable definitions which affirm the social–relational aspect of commerce: Donny insists, “That’s all business is … common sense, experience, and talent” as well as “People taking care of themselves” (Mamet 1975, 8). These innocuous phrases naively imply that almost anyone is capable of assessing intrinsic value and turning a profit from a transaction. Moreover, Donny and Teach portray themselves as astute appraisers of value, but only if they are able to scrutinize various objects visually. Donny explains, “I got to look at it to know do I want it” (seeing is believing); Teach concurs, “Any business … You want it run right, be there” (Mamet 1975, 22). Yet the men’s earlier statements contradict these claims of pecuniary expertise, as when Teach laments his previous inability to assess competently the monetary value of things: “If I kept the stuff that I threw out … I would be a wealthy man today” (Mamet 1975, 18). This statement implies, of course, that Teach has since developed the acumen to evaluate and negotiate fair market value. In Miller’s The Price, Victor’s negotiations with Solomon (such as they are) likewise presume that Victor is able to determine whether or not Solomon is making a fair offer for his father’s estate. Furthermore, both plays allude—directly or indirectly—to the possibility of a son profiting from his father’s possessions. In American Buffalo, Teach regrets not recognizing the monetary value of “Shit my father used to keep in his desk drawer,” and Don affirms, “My Father, too” (Mamet 1975, 18). For these men, an opportunity was missed, gone forever, with nothing patrimonial ever gained for themselves. But Victor Franz will not leave empty-handed from his transaction with Solomon. The most obvious difference, economically speaking, is that Victor has goods-in-hand with which to negotiate, whereas Teach and Donny in Mamet’s play have only a hope of scoring a coin collection in a robbery that never comes to fruition. This distinction is crucial, for Donny intends to rely on two special circumstances when determining the

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value of the stolen coins, should he ever obtain them. First, he plans to solicit the opinions of prospective buyers as he did when the “man with the suitcase” initially expressed interest in a buffalo nickel. “You tell me,” Donny replied when the man asked him how much he wanted for the nickel, and Teach affirms that this technique is “Always good business” (Mamet 1975, 25). Secondly, Donny relies on the purported expertise of the coin reference book which he keeps nearby. Donny explains to Bob that the book is “an indicator” which “gives us ideas … The book gives us a basis for comparison” (Mamet 1975, 48). In fact, the coin reference book becomes “fetishized” like the coins themselves, offering an illusion of infallibility and security. Žižek observes that even when participants in money exchange “no longer believe” in the “scandal” that is taking place, “the things themselves believe for them” (emphasis in original); that is to say, commodities “believe in their place” in social relations (Žižek 1989, 32). Nevertheless, the coin reference book, like money itself, remains subordinate to the social–relational dynamic as Donny admits—“Look, we’re human beings. We can talk, we can negotiate” (Mamet 1975, 49). Indeed, the term “negotiate” alludes not only to haggling over an elusive price but also to the participants’ intricate emotive and intuitive maneuverings during the transaction. These negotiations through the human psyche, especially involving repressed traumatic memories, link The Price to the postmodern drama of Sam Shepard.

The Price and Shepard’s The Late Henry Moss: Sons Struggling with Trauma Miller has remarked that “The Price grew out of a need to reconfirm the power of the past” (Miller 2016, 293); indeed, “the rich heaviness” and “weight of time” (Miller 1968, 187) described in Miller’s opening stage directions are applicable not only to the furniture onstage but to innumerable unresolved issues between father and sons, brother and brother. Any hope of remediating these issues is fraught with obstacles. Susan Abbotson observes that Miller “simultaneously hated and admired his father; he was annoyed at Isidore’s incapacity to fully recuperate, economically and emotionally, from the Depression, yet he was able to recognize the man’s inner goodness … as he watched his father become increasingly useless as a provider” (Abbotson 2007, 3). In plays such as No Villain, Honors at

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Dawn, The Man Who Had All the Luck, All My Sons, and of course Death of a Salesman, Miller depicts various conflicts between a father and sons. Likewise, Sam Shepard’s relationship with his own father was ambivalent at best, and although he changed his name from Sam Shepard Rogers in an attempt to escape the curse of his father’s hard-drinking, violent legacy (a common theme in Shepard’s work), his plays inevitably depict paternal figures who resemble Shepard’s own father. The power of the past is ubiquitous throughout Shepard’s work, and one might conclude after reading some of his most important plays—among them Buried Child, True West, Fool for Love, and Curse of the Starving Class —that Shepard’s dramatic formula is to conjure a haunting memory of an inadequate father, add an angst-ridden son, or two brothers embroiled in a state of perpetual conflict, mix in liberal doses of alcohol, and see what unfolds. More often than not in Shepard’s plays, past events are misremembered or repudiated, though the truth eventually and inexorably claws its way to the surface in wrenching and often violent epiphanies. The Late Henry Moss is perhaps the quintessential Shepard family drama in this regard. Within the confines of their dead father’s trailer in the New Mexico desert, brothers Earl and Ray Moss lurch erratically through bouts of violence and mutual accusation as they struggle to cope with a traumatic event from the past precipitated by their father’s abuse. Based on the Moss brothers’ memory of that fateful, violent night thirty years earlier, Earl would seem to be in his forties, and Ray in his late thirties. Both brothers are loners, neither having married nor fathered children. They are determined to learn all they can about Henry’s death, not from filial affection but because they feel cheated that their father died before they could demand a reckoning for his past abuse. Younger son Ray, in particular, seems slighted and angry that he was not present when Henry died, and his obsession with clearing his conscience concerning his father parallels younger son Victor Franz in Miller’s play. Though the Franz brothers remain sober and abstain from violence, they share with the Moss brothers the difficulty of accurately remembering the past and fairly assessing their father’s legacy. In both plays, paternal decisions have led to disaster, resulting in the sons’ suffering a traumatic experience which “shatters or disables the individual’s cognitive and perceptual capacities so that the experience never becomes part of the ordinary memory system” (Leys 2000, 298). In The Price, the traumatic experience and subsequent repressed memory concern their formerly successful father losing the family fortune. Whether

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this disaster resulted from reckless financial speculation or was the hapless result of forces beyond the father’s control, we never can be certain. At any rate, Mr. Franz shouldered the blame and the shame for the family’s financial collapse, leading to Victor’s decision to offer financial support for their father in his later years. In The Late Henry Moss , the titular father’s failures are much more chronic, intentional, and sinister, including battering his wife and terrorizing his children during drunken rages. In both plays, the brothers’ memories of their respective fathers and of past family traumas differ significantly. Walter Franz’s memories seem more vivid and complete than Victor’s. “How do you remember all this stuff?” Victor asks Walter. In response, Walter expresses surprise that Victor has so effectively repressed these memories: “Why not? Don’t you?” (Miller 1968, 237). Perhaps Walter’s decision to flee the home twentyeight years earlier allowed freedom for his memories to coalesce while Victor remains conflicted about his own decision to stay by their father. Walter recalls their father’s “selfishness – which was perfectly normal – was always obvious to me, but you never seemed to notice it” (Miller 1968, 251). Walter’s observation is an indictment—however subtle—of Victor’s naiveté regarding their father. Victor remembers their father more sympathetically as “a beaten dog, ashamed to walk in the street” (Miller 1968, 258). Following Isidore Miller’s similar financial ruin, the playwright remembered how his older brother Kermit was “busy mobilizing himself [in order] to save our father, whom he had romanticized into a fallen giant,” with Kermit assuming the role of dutiful son similar to Victor Franz (Miller 1987, 116). In the midst of his spirited defense of his father’s memory, Victor soon discovers he is pitted not only against his brother but against his wife, Esther, as well. When Walter insists that their father was “a calculating liar” who “exploited” Victor’s filial sympathy, Esther affirms this view by labeling her father-in-law a “miserable cheap manipulator” whose missteps contributed in no small way to her own financial mediocrity (Miller 1968, 258–59). Esther’s self-awareness—“I want money”—demands a reckoning with some culpable external cause, leading her to excoriate her father-in-law. In the face of this dual opposition, Victor’s tone shifts from combative to confessional as he allows himself to remember a particularly painful moment with his father: his father’s laughter when Victor asked him for money for college. Victor admits, “I don’t think a week has gone by that I haven’t seen that laugh” (Miller 1968, 259). Victor’s use of “seen”

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rather than “heard” when describing his father’s laughter implies an image seared into his psyche, rather than a derisive echo reverberating perpetually in memory. Victor’s imagistic language points to his father’s vivid renunciation of his willingness to help his younger son at this critical juncture. Victor’s “seeing” his father’s laughter continually may illuminate the significance of the moment near the beginning of the play when Victor selects the laughing record from his father’s collection and listens to it in a type of subconscious pantomime of that fateful moment with his father. Cathy Caruth observes, “because the individual cannot [accurately] recall the original traumatic event, [s]he is fated to act it out or in other ways imitate it” (qtd. in Leys 2000, 298). As he listens to the record, Victor is described in phrases that may be interpreted as depicting his abject powerlessness in the face of this overwhelming traumatic memory: “Now he bends over with laughter, taking an unsteady step as helplessness rises in him” (Miller 1968, 188). When viewed through the lens of trauma studies, the bent-over helplessness of this moment—suggesting an almost fetal posture—finds its origins in the traumatic moment precipitated by his father’s laughter. In addition, this posture of abjection parallels Victor’s succinct explanation to Solomon of his father’s dilemma following his financial failure, “Some men don’t bounce” (Miller 1968, 216). Ironically, Victor fails to recognize that he himself has also failed to “bounce” back from the traumatic experiences he has suffered, as evidenced by the memory of his father’s laughter, which continues to haunt—and taunt— him. Shepard’s The Late Henry Moss alludes to the intersection of trauma and memory in the play’s opening line as Earl Moss tells his younger brother, “Well, you know me, Ray—I was never one to live in the past,” a claim which soon proves to be specious. Ray’s response—“I remember you leaving. That’s all I remember” (Shepard 2002, 6–7)—criticizes Earl’s decision to abandon the family, similar to Victor Franz’s indictment of Walter’s departure. In Trauma and Recovery, Judith Herman describes how “people who have survived atrocities often tell their stories in a highly emotional, contradictory, and fragmented manner which undermines their credibility and thereby serves the twin imperatives of truthtelling and secrecy” (1). Ray employs precisely this type of fractured narrative when attempting to recall repressed memories of the “big blowout” which is “still very vivid with me. Like it happened yesterday,” but he can

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express himself only through staccato utterances—“Explosions. Screaming. Smoke. The telephone” (Shepard 2002, 8). Earl casually shrugs off these memories by telling Ray, “Things get embellished over the years” and “You shouldn’t let that stuff haunt you, Ray” (Shepard 2002, 8). Similarly, Walter Franz dismisses Victor’s version of the past: “It’s a fantasy, Victor. Your father was penniless and your brother a son of a bitch, and you play no part at all” (Miller 1968, 257). In The Price, the audience—as well as Victor himself—is left wondering whether Walter may be telling the truth. In The Late Henry Moss, however, Earl’s guilt is confirmed not only by Ray but by the ghost of their dead father. Miller has observed in his autobiography Timebends , “whenever the hand of the distant past reaches out of its grave, it is always somehow absurd as well as amazing” (Miller 1987, 134–35). The hand of the past manifests itself in Shepard’s play when Ray counters Earl with eyewitness testimony of the night decades earlier when he [Ray] last saw his brother and father: “I’m your witness. I’m your little brother. I saw you, Earl. I saw the whole thing! I saw you run! …” (Shepard 2002, 45). This memory, at least, has not been repressed; it is indelible: “Things like that you don’t forget. They mark time. For me they do” (Shepard 2002, 9). Then, in a more “amazing” and, perhaps, “absurd” development, their father Henry Moss revives momentarily from beneath the sheet where he has lain dead for most of the play in order to confront Earl: “You could have stopped me then but you didn’t” (Shepard 2002, 112). On the night in question, Henry nearly beat his wife to death and Earl, rather than protecting his mother, fled the home in fear, never to return. Earl initially denies his father’s accusations: “I don’t know what you’re talking about!”, but eventually he admits, “I was—just—too—scared” (Shepard 2002, 113). Henry is astounded at this revelation, and his final words are a question—“You were scared of a dead man?” (Shepard 2002, 113). Significantly, Henry’s resurrection allows him to speak only with his firstborn son, Earl, while Ray observes silently from the periphery. Under these circumstances, this scene may be construed as a facet of the brothers’ traumatized psyches and their need for closure after so many years. An integral part of the repressed trauma for both sets of brothers concerns memories of their respective mothers’ suffering because of the fathers’ choices. In The Price, when Esther tells Walter, “He [Victor] doesn’t remember your mother very well,” Victor qualifies this by admitting, “It’s just her face; somehow I can never see her” (Miller 1968, 237). In contrast to the mocking laughter of his father, which Victor claims to

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“see” continually, he is unable to visualize his mother clearly although—or perhaps because—he vividly recalls the pivotal moment when his mother learned of her husband’s financial ruin.2 Walter reveals that their parents’ marriage was loveless and dysfunctional: “There was no love in this house. There was no loyalty. There was nothing here but a straight financial arrangement. That’s what was unbearable” (Miller 1968, 261). The phrase “financial arrangement” suggests their mother sacrificed her own dreams in deference to her husband’s promise of financial security. Walter elaborates on the extent of the sacrifices his mother made: “They were never lovers—she said a hundred times how her marriage destroyed her musical career” (Miller 1968, 261). This dysfunctional marriage imploded on the night when their father revealed to the family that he had entirely lost the family fortune. This memory is narrated by Victor in halting, torturous phrases, which are characteristic of a repressed traumatic memory rising from the depths of the subconscious: It was right on this couch. She was all dressed up—for some affair, I think. Her hair was piled up, and long earrings? And he had his tuxedo on … and made us all sit down; and he told us it was all gone. And she vomited. All over his arms. His hands. Just kept on vomiting, like thirty-five years coming up. And he sat there. Stinking like a sewer. And a look came onto his face. (Miller 1968, 260)

Walter, a medical doctor, acknowledges his brother’s repression of this memory—“you proceeded to wipe out what you saw” (Miller 1968, 261). At the same time, Walter asserts his own ability to relinquish the past and move beyond it, “he [their father] doesn’t follow me any more with that vomit on his hands” (Miller 1968, 261). If trauma may be accurately described as a “shock that appears to work very much like a bodily threat but is in fact a break in the mind’s experience of time” (Caruth 1996, 61), then Victor continues to be haunted by this image imprinted on his psyche, whereas Walter claims he has managed either to overcome this memory or to reconcile it somehow. In fact, Walter’s reference to his business venture of investing in nursing homes—“Helpless, desperate children trying to dump their parents” (Miller 1968, 241)—may be read as a subconscious allusion to his repressed guilt over abandoning their father all those years ago. Moreover, despite Walter’s insistence that he has moved on from the past, in fact he later suffered a complete mental breakdown and needed three years to return to functionality: “there’s one

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virtue in going nuts … you get to see the terror … the slow, daily fear you call ambition” (Miller 1968, 242). This collapse, which in some ways mirrors his father’s fall from grace, perhaps allowed Walter to exorcize his father’s memory in a way that has eluded Victor up to this point. In The Late Henry Moss, the memory of their mother likewise serves as a catalyst for the sons’ convoluted feelings of bewilderment, guilt, and shame. Earl remembers his mother fondly as the ideal Cold War-era American housewife, yet we cannot help sensing his incredulity: “She was always faithful. No matter what. I remember her now. I remember her on her hands and knees” (Shepard 2002, 109). At this moment in the play, Henry Moss has been temporarily resurrected, allowing him to interject his own irascible opinions about his wife—“That little shit. Another traitor. Locked me out of my own house” (Shepard 2002, 109)—while failing to admit that she was merely trying to protect herself and her children from her husband’s violence. Earlier in the play, Earl and Ray recalled watching their father kick their mother while she was on the floor on her hands and knees, with her blood flying all over the kitchen floor. Now, Ray re-enacts this scene by kicking Earl repeatedly across the kitchen floor of their father’s trailer. In doing so, Ray releases years of repressed anger over his brother’s cowardly refusal to protect their mother: “I thought Earl’s gonna stand up for her… Earl’s gonna stop him somehow” (Shepard 2002, 99). Now that Ray has at last been afforded the opportunity to confront Earl about his cowardice, he utters the final line of the play by repeating nearly verbatim the opening line which had previously been spoken by Earl: “You know me, Earl—I was never one to live in the past. That never was my deal” (Shepard 2002, 113). The implication is that Ray may now finally be able to overcome childhood trauma and move forward.

Conclusion Arthur Miller has opined, “A character is defined by the kinds of challenges he cannot walk away from. And by those he has walked away from that cause him remorse” (Miller 1987, 367). Walter Franz walked away from a challenge twenty-eight years earlier, and despite his statements to the contrary, seems to have been driven by remorse to return to the apartment to face a reckoning with his younger brother. Similarly, Earl Moss faces a reckoning with his younger brother in the New Mexico desert to answer for running away thirty years earlier. Ultimately, Shepard’s ending

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is characteristically equivocal. In the final scene of his 1978 Pulitzer-Prize winning play Buried Child, a mysterious grandson sits on a sofa contemplating the dubious inheritance he has just received—is it a blessing or a curse? Is he finally home, or is he now trapped forever? Susan Abbotson has noted an “intrinsic optimism” in Miller’s oeuvre versus Shepard’s plays, which are “disturbing studies in entropy” (Abbotson 2002, 300). Nevertheless, Miller’s The Price, it seems to me, ends only slightly less ambiguously than The Late Henry Moss. Walter storms out with “a flicker of a humiliated smile” and wanting to “disappear into air”; Esther “walks out with her life,” whatever that is supposed to mean; and Victor exits after telling Solomon he plans to return for his foil, mask, and gauntlets— symbols of skirmishes yet to be fought, perhaps with Walter on another battleground (Miller 1968, 264–65). Only Solomon may be said to end the play better off than when he began, filled with a new sense of purpose and a zeal for life. He may even have begun to forgive himself for his daughter’s suicide, for as Esther Franz remarks, “It always seems to me that one little step more and some crazy kind of forgiveness will come and lift up everyone” (Miller 1968, 265).

Notes 1. Shepard was slated as one of many celebrity readers but was unable to attend, perhaps due to his suffering from ALS. Shepard died on July 27, 2017. 2. Miller’s mother Augusta died in 1961, seven years before The Price was produced, so one may speculate that Mrs. Franz in the play had preceded her husband in death. Describing his mother’s funeral in Timebends , Miller writes, “I wished I had felt freer to acknowledge my love for her … our relation was unfinished” (Miller 1987, 594).

Works Cited Abbotson, Susan C. W. 2002. Sam Shepard: A Bibliographic Essay and Production Overview, in Matthew Roudané, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Sam Shepard. New York: Cambridge UP. Abbotson, Susan C. W. 2007. Critical Companion to Arthur Miller: A Literary Reference to His Life and Work. Facts on File Library of American Literature. New York: Infobase Publishing. Bigsby, Christopher, ed. 2004. The Cambridge Companion to David Mamet. Cambridge UP. https://books.google.com/books?id=

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0cqqdoKwk_oC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Bigsby,+Christopher+ed.+2004. +The+Cambridge+Companion+to+David+Mamet&hl=en&sa=X&ved= 0ahUKEwiq3MGRqt7cAhUHGKwKHWzBBRMQ6AEIKTAA#v=onepage& q=Bigsby%2C%20Christopher%20ed.%202004.%20The%20Cambridge% 20Companion%20to%20David%20Mamet&f=false. Accessed 9 June 2018. Caruth, Cathy. 1996. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP. Herman, Judith Lewis. 1992. Trauma and Recovery. New York: Basic Books. Leys, Ruth. 2000. Trauma: A Genealogy. Chicago: U of Chicago P. Mamet, David. 1975. American Buffalo. New York: Samuel French. Mamet, David. 2005. Attention Must Be Paid. The New York Times, February 13: n.p. https://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/13/opinion/attention-mustbe-paid.html. Accessed 20 May 2018. Miller, Arthur. 1964. Incident at Vichy, in Tony Kushner, ed., Arthur Miller: Collected Plays 1964–1982. New York: Library of America, 2012. Miller, Arthur. 1968. The Price, in Tony Kushner, ed., Arthur Miller: Collected Plays 1964–1982. New York: Library of America, 2012. Miller, Arthur. 1987. Timebends: A Life. New York: Grove Press. Miller, Arthur. 2016. Collected Essays. New York: Penguin. https://books.google.com/books?id=SCfbCwAAQBAJ&printsec= frontcover&dq=arthur+miller+collected+essays&hl=en&sa=X&ved= 0ahUKEwj4vpf4qN7cAhUHXKwKH-JBc4Q6AEILjAB#v=onepage&q= need%20to%20reconfirm%20the%20power%20of%20the%20past&f=false. Accessed 5 May 2018. Nadal, Ira. 2008. David Mamet: A Life in the Theatre. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Shepard, Sam. 2002. The Late Henry Moss, Eyes for Consuela, When the World Was Green: Three Plays. New York: Vintage. Thaler, Richard H. 2015. Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics. New York: W. W. Norton. https://books.google.com/books?id= xQedBAAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=richard+thaler+misbehaving&hl= en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjhrcTJp97cAhUEOawKHYqOAlcQ6AEIKTAA# v=onepage&q=richard%20thaler%20misbehaving&f=false. Accessed 7 March 2018. Žižek, Slavoj. 1989. The Sublime Object of Ideology. New York: Verso. Žižek, Slavoj. 2016. Afterword: Objects, Objects Everywhere: Slavoj Žižek and Dialectical Materialism. Agon Hamsa and Frank Ruda, eds. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

PART II

Arthur Miller, the Writer

CHAPTER 9

Approaches to Teaching All My Sons: Making the Play Matter Across the Curriculum Jan Balakian

In teaching All My Sons as a play about social responsibility, I use an eclectic combination of approaches in order to allow the play to speak to students’ lives, to clarify the play’s historical context and its concerns with ethics and economic vulnerability, to explain Miller’s debts to the Greeks and Ibsen, to explore psychological issues such as denial, guilt, repression, fear, choice, and self-righteousness, to consider the play’s contemporary relevance, and to show its connection to Brecht’s Mother Courage and human rights violations. For pedagogical purposes, this multifaceted approach serves students much better than pouring the play through one theoretical mold or reducing it to one thesis, because it allows them to see the many layers of a literary work. Each approach is a tool for your toolbox, or prompts, to ignite your class discussion and in-class writing exercises. Altogether, these approaches—Reader Response, Marxist, Historical, Intertextual, Psychoanalytic, New Critical, New Historicist—open up the play’s complex moral vision and ask students to reflect on how they will act in the world (Fig. 9.1).

J. Balakian (B) Kean University, Union, NJ, USA © The Author(s) 2020 S. Marino and D. Palmer (eds.), Arthur Miller for the Twenty-First Century, American Literature Readings in the 21st Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37293-4_9

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Fig. 9.1 “A play is about a moment of illumination—the light.” Arthur Miller in conversation with Jan Balakian, Michigan Quarterly Review 1989 (Photograph by Jan Balakian of Douglas W. Schmidt’s set for the Roundabout Theatre Company’s production of Arthur Miller’s All My Sons, spring 2019)

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To show the relevance of All My Sons to students’ lives, I first ask them the following personal questions. 1. Survival: Have students, or someone they know, compromised their ethics in order to survive academically, professionally, or socially? Was the compromise the result of fear? Was the fear financial? What do they do when their needs conflict with other peoples’ needs? Next, ask students to define “perjury,” “misdemeanor,” and “felony,” to explain the distinction, and to decide which one applies to Joe Keller’s crime. 2. Denial: Have they, or someone they know, denied the truth because the truth was too painful to accept? Why do some people construct narratives about themselves or others? Why do some blame others for their own wrongdoing? Does everyone have a blind spot? What happens when we do not accept responsibility for our actions? What happens when we do? Can they point to any national fake news? 3. Guilt/Shame: How have they handled guilt? What do they think about the way Larry, Chris, and Joe Keller deal with guilt? What is the difference between guilt and shame? How have students expressed shame—either about themselves or a parent? Would they consider taking their lives as a result of shame? 4. Social Responsibility/Consequences: Ask students to write down a decision that has come back to sting them. If we have good intentions or goals, is it ok to achieve them in any way that we can: does the end justify the means? What should people do when idealism conflicts with pragmatism? Are there times when actions are understandable but unacceptable? Can students point to a breach of social responsibility, a case where an individual or corporation chose financial gain over the greater good of the community? If we buy goods from such corporations, or do not protest against them, are we complicit in their wrongdoing? Is it possible to separate the individual from the world? Once students have responded to the above questions in writing and class discussion, they have been introduced to the central issues of the play. All My Sons dramatizes the conflict between what Miller calls “a biological morality” and the need for social responsibility. While he observed that we do what we do in order to survive, growing up during the Great

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Depression and learning about the social protest plays of The Group Theater during the 1930s, Miller preferred life to be “a comradely embrace” (Miller 1987, 111) rather than a Darwinian race. Contemporary students do not realize how much the stock market crash of 1929 challenged America’s faith in capitalism, leading many people to turn toward socialism. Miller explained that we improvised our way through the Great Depression with FDR’s social programs (Balakian 1996). These ideas prepare students for consideration of Joe Keller and his business ethics. The tension between the society and the individual is central in All My Sons. During World War II, Joe Keller told his business partner over the phone to sell defective airplane parts in order to fulfill a sales order from the War Department and to provide for his family, only to realize that his decision killed twenty-one pilots and ultimately destroyed his family. Ask students how often their plans or decisions backfire in ways they could never have anticipated. Aristotle’s peripeteia or reversal: Why is it an essential ingredient of drama? Clarify the influence of the Greeks and Ibsen on Miller’s moral imagination. Both taught Miller about structuring the consequences of actions, linking character to fate. As he says in his memoir: My mind was taken over by the basic Greek structural concept of a past stretching so far back that its origins were lost in myth, surfacing in the present and donating a dilemma to the persons on the stage, who were astounded by the wonderful train of seeing accidents that unveiled their connections to that past. (Miller 1987, 250)

As in the Greeks’ and Ibsen’s plays, the past reaches into the present, usually destructively, but leaving some illumination behind (Balakian 1989). Miller adopted Ibsen’s retrospective technique: Keller had committed his crime of selling cracked cylinder heads to the Army Air Force three years before the play begins. By asking students to write the prequel and sequel to the play, as Jane Dominik does with her class, students better understand its action, character, theme, and structure. Have students read their scenes out loud and discuss their discoveries. Only the Edward G. Robinson film inserts a scene in which Chris visits Steve Deever in jail, with the shadows of the jail bars on Deever’s face, and as Deever tells the story, we see a flashback to the day Keller advised him to ship the faulty parts. The new line, “If you want to know, ask Joe,” highlights Joe as secretly omniscient.

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Explain that Ibsen’s The Wild Duck—about a businessman’s betrayal of his friend and about life-lies—also influenced the detective-like structure and content of All My Sons. Every scene moves toward making connections between three events: Keller’s crime and betrayal of his partner and friend, Larry’s death, and Chris Keller’s desire to marry Larry’s former fiancée. When reading act 1, many students are impatient with the slow pace, so it is important to clarify how the slowness facilitates the revelation of the crime—“a horror born of the contrast between the placidity” of an American suburb and “the threat to it that a rage of conscience could create” (Miller 1987, 130). In this way, All My Sons resembles Film Noir of the Forties, in which everyday people became murderers—too fearful to resist crime. As actor Robert Mitchum put it, “America was coming to terms with its dark side” (TCM, Noir Alley). Both Noir and Miller’s American tragedy dramatize the banality of evil. Ask students if they can separate a person’s decisions from their identity. An acting student, Connor McKenna, remarked, “Keller is not a bad person, he just made the wrong decision” (McKenna 2018). Moreover, both Noir and Miller were interested in the informer and the secret. The jingle, “If you want to know, ask Joe,” runs throughout Universal’s production of the Edward G. Robinson film. Joe hides a secret that lands his partner in jail. Connect the play’s structure to the set of the original production, which was organized around a hump in the backyard. The set designer, Mordecai Gorelik, said, “This is a graveyard play; the son is their buried conscience reaching up to them out of the earth” (Miller 1987, 234). At the begining of the 2019 Roundabout Theatre production in New York, an ominous thunder shakes the theater and lightning strikes, followed by bright sunlight—that’s the play in miniature. The opaque curtain suggested the need to break the membrane between family and world. The apple tree, planted by Kate Keller in memory of Larry, blown down by a storm, represents the son who committed suicide upon learning of his father’s immoral act. So, it also stands for the Biblical Fall, for Keller’s broken connection with his community. Moreover, stage directions read, “the outskirts of an American town…The stage is hedged on R. and L. by tall, closely panted poplars which lend the yard a secluded atmosphere…the poplars cut off view of its continuation downstage” (5). Also, students of architecture, set design, and cultural history can present information about the suburbanization of America in the postwar period, when

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ranches and colonials followed split-levels, and Levittown provided Americans with the privacy and separateness that the play registers. Kenneth Jackson documents: “Between 1946 and 1956, 97 percent of all new single family dwellings were completely detached, surrounded on every side by their own plots.” They also created economic and racial homogeneity (Jackson, 239–241). So, the Keller home is insolated in every way. In act 2, when Chris saws off the broken tree, there is more light and less illusion. ∗ ∗ ∗

A Marxist Play? Next, we discuss Miller’s concern with the way economics shapes and breaks the American psyche, so much so that he became a target for The House Un-American Activities Committee. When All My Sons was supposed to be presented to U.S. troops in Germany, The Catholic War Veterans protested that it was “Communist propaganda.” Yet, when the play was produced, “the Wright Aeronautical Corporation of Ohio had exchanged ‘condemned’ tags on defective engines for ‘passed,’ collaborated with bribed army inspectors, and shipped hundreds of failed machines to armed forces” (Miller 1987, 253). In fact, he told HUAC that, at times, he “believed with moral certainty that Marxism was the hope of mankind” (Miller 1987, 407). Given the exigencies of economics in All My Sons, the play works well to teach students how to apply a Marxist approach—even though Keller owns, rather than works for, his company. He really works for the military industrial complex, whose demands dictated his decision to ship defective parts. In a cultural sense, Miller explained: I’ve always felt there is a fundamental insecurity in Americans, the fear of falling out of the class they’re in. In later years we have seen a whole class of people thrown out into the street…who no longer have the means to rent space in the city. There’s a subliminal amount of that fear. In some people it makes them greedier”. (Balakian 1989, 45)

If not for the need to make a profit, Keller would not have shipped defective parts, lied about it, or allowed his business partner to go to jail. Ask students: Can you link Keller’s financial vulnerability to fear? Why

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do some people succumb to fear, while others are not shaken? Can fear be as internal as external? What would cause students to compromise their integrity? What if Keller embraced risk and changed careers? Left the business? What would cause students to leave their jobs? Is his fear connected to his working-class background, where there are no trust funds? Stage directions read, he is “uneducated,” has “peasant-like common sense” and feels college is elitist (6). Instead of reading the news—the superstructure—he reads “the Want Ads” and hears the voices beneath the power structure. Perhaps this is a play about what people should really want—a moral brotherhood. Simplify Marxist assumptions for students: social relationships emerge when workers produce goods that they cannot afford to buy, disconnecting them from the product they make. Similarly, shipping defective cylinder heads caused twenty-one planes to crash and their pilots to die. Students also need to understand “false consciousness.” Those with money and power create and impose values that do not serve their workers, yet the workers adopt them without understanding their exploitation. Some students link this idea to the 2016 election in which working people voted for President Trump. Some conclude that Joe Keller exemplifies false consciousness: “A hundred and twenty cracked, you’re out of business…. Half the Goddamn country’s gotta go if I go!” (58, 67). He belongs to a national war effort that places profit before people. Joe Keller’s explanation about the incident to his jailed partner’s son, George, rationalizes his own decision to cover the cracks for profit and lends itself to a Marxist reading: In that shop in the war…it was a madhouse. Every half hour the major callin’ for cylinder heads… The trucks were hauling them away hot, damn near. I mean just try to see it human, see it human. A batch comes out with a crack. …half a day’s production shot…. What’ll I say? Human…human. So, he takes out his tools and he …covers over the cracks…that’s bad, it’s wrong, but that’s what a little man does…. alone he was afraid. But I know he meant no harm. …That’s a mistake, but it ain’t murder…. (28)

Since his decision resulted in soldiers dying, does it matter that he “meant no harm?” For Keller, to be human means to meet the demands of the war by producing your product so that you can feed your family—at the expense of those who are sacrificing their lives to defeat Fascism. Does “little” mean “subordinate to the war,” or does it mean “too weak to do

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the right thing?” Or, does weakness come from subordination? Introduce students to Hannah Arendt’s term, “the banality of evil.” Can one do evil without being evil? Do ordinary people commit evil deeds simply to advance their careers? As David Palmer says, “the play is about basically ordinary decent people who get overwhelmed by an unexpected crisis and lose their way in life. Miller is asking us to “see it human,” to see the moral complexity of the situation and the ways in which it was so easy for Joe to get lost…. To take the play too much as a moral critique of Joe flattens it out” (Palmer). Ask students whether they read the play as a call for social responsibility that villainizes Joe and heroizes the sons, or whether All My Sons is a modern tragedy that explores deep internal moral conflict (Palmer). (See later section on Chris’ self-righteousness.) In either case, students conclude that morality is often only possible if you can afford it. As Jim Bayliss, the doctor who gave up research to make money practicing medicine, says, “I would love to help humanity on a Warner Brothers salary” (8). Without that kind of salary, Keller lies: “If I’d gone in that day, I’d a told him—junk’em. We can afford it.” Miller recalls, Psychologically situated as I was – a young, fit man barred from a war others were dying in, equipped with a lifelong anguish of self-blame that sometimes verged on a pathological sense of responsibility – it was probably inevitable that the selfishness, cheating, economic rapacity on the home front contrasted the soldiers’ sacrifices and the holiness of the Allied cause. I was a stretched string waiting to be plucked, waiting, as it turned out, for All My Sons. (Miller 1987, 223)

In that context, we examine Chris’s words to Annie, which convey some survivor guilt: They didn’t die; they killed themselves for each other…a little more selfish and they’d’ve been here today…Everything was being destroyed. See, but it seemed to me that one new thing was made. A kind of… responsibility…And then I came home. There was no meaning in it here; Because nobody was changed at all. It seemed to make suckers out of a lot of guys. I felt wrong to be alive, to open the bank-book, to drive the new car, to see the new refrigerator. I mean you can take those things out of war, but when you drive that car you’ve got to know it came out of the love a man can have for a man, …. Otherwise, what you have is loot, and there’s blood on it. I didn’t want to take any of it. (31)

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Did American boys die to make America safe for shopping? Chris finds what George, the son of the business partner, now a lawyer, finds; “outside there doesn’t seem to be much of a law” (44). Keller’s airplane parts supply the military–industrial complex that shapes our foreign policy. While he is not officially the proletariat, he pledges allegiance to the Air Force for whom he supplies P40s. The play exposes a flaw in postwar Capitalism in which “a man’s becoming a function of production or distribution to the point where his personality becomes divorced from the action it propels” (Miller 1979, 131). Do students feel Keller is a victim? Some blame him, while others blame the system. Explain that in theory, Miller opposes the determinism of nineteenth-century Naturalism, because he believes a play must embrace both the given and the willed (Miller 1979, 170). The fish is in the water, and the water is in the fish. Does the play match this idea? Students often wonder whether the play is “about Marxism” or the broken promise of capitalism. We agree with Christopher Bigsby that the play is not calling for a subversion of the American economic structure, but for ethical liberalism. When the Daily Worker said the play was a “specious apology for capitalism,” Miller responded that the play did not intend to prove a Marxist argument: “Chris Keller would not become a revolutionary in real life, and that’s not what the play was about. …The play would not have been written at all had I chosen to abide by the Party line, for during the war the Communists pounced on anything that would disturb national unity” (Miller 1987, 237–38). In a critical approaches to literature class, it is important to remind students that creative work cannot be reduced to a singular theory. Michael Moore’s Capitalism A Love Story about the 2008 foreclosures resulting from subprime mortgages personalizes capitalism’s exploitation for students whose parents have lost their homes. Our conversation about the unequal distribution of power and wealth leads students to ask whether shared prosperity is possible. I also read them Miller’s utopian revelation about Marxism during a 1930s Brooklyn handball game when he heard that “things would be produced for use rather than for someone’s personal profit, so there would be much more for everyone to share, and justice would reign everywhere” (Miller 1987, 111). Ask students to select lines from the play that reflect this worldview or its opposite. They find: “This is the land of the great big dogs, you don’t love a man here, you eat him! The world’s that way, how can I take it out of him” (100). How do students feel about taking a cut in their future income for a

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greater good—free college, health care or public parks? Do they want a share of the profits from the organization for which they work? Should actors and theater practitioners receive a share of the profits from the productions that they create? Next, ask students why Marx views family as part of capitalism’s problem. Joe Keller tells his son, “The whole shootin’ match is for you!” And, “there’s “nothin’ Chris could do I wouldn’t forgive. Because he’s my son. Because I’m his father and he’s my son” (96). By definition, family is a private enterprise, living on private property, needing resources that compete with others. Joe cannot see beyond it: “If there’s something bigger than family, I’ll put a bullet in my head” (120). In an American Drama survey course, students remember “abolish the family” from Odets’ Awake and Sing. They wonder uncomfortably whether family and a free market are un-American. Point them to Chris’ idealized view of family: “If I have to grub for money all day, at least at evening I want it beautiful. I want a family, to build something I can give myself to” (69). Clarify that in exposing corruption, the plays advocate a more humane system that includes family. In fact, Miller was not writing so much about an American problem, as the House Un-American Activities Committee claimed, but about a flawed humanity. Finally, in a play about fathers and sons, we must ask, if women were running businesses in 1947, would Kate’s decision have been any different than her husband’s? Is the play pointing to a patriarchal problem or to a flawed humanity? Pair with Brecht’s Mother Courage Family and war profiteering link the play well to Brecht’s Mother Courage, so I teach the two plays in sequence. Though All My Sons does not practice Brecht’s “Theory of Estrangement,” because it is a well-made play, observing Aristotelian unities of time, place and action, its goal is the same—to provoke the audience to humanize the world. Like Keller, in order to provide for her family, Mother Courage sacrifices her family to the war by trying to bargain the price of her goods: “I’ve haggled too long.” Although set during the Thirty Years war, Mother Courage was written in 1939—the year Hitler invaded Poland. So, in a cultural-poetic way, Brecht also writes with the blood of WWII on his pen. Do students think that Keller is pushed into an economic trap, or does he choose to walk into it? While Mother Courage foregrounds a rapacious society, All

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My Sons exposes both sides to the story—Joe chooses within an economic matrix. Use Tony Kushner’s documentary about making Mother Courage in Central Park with Meryl Streep and ask students to respond in class to the following questions: *What attracts you to what destroys you? *Does your job take your labor from you? *Are you shaped by ends that do not benefit you? *How does that situation affect you? How could you create your destiny? *Is being part of a collective a solution? *How does class form your personality? (Kushner, Walter)

Once students respond personally, they apply the same questions to Keller and other characters in the play. Engage students about the role of choice by asking them to respond in writing to the following philosophical ideas: In Being and Nothingness, Sartre says, “by choosing, an individual commits not only himself, but the whole of humanity” (Sartre, 553). The Dalai Lama notes “…so much of our stress depends on seeing ourselves as separate from others, which perhaps returns to the loss of our sense of communal connection” (Dalai Lama, 99). Theologian Paul Tillich reflects, “In collectivist societies the courage of the individual is the courage to be as a part…. Self-affirmation within a group includes the courage to accept guilt and its consequences as public guilt….” (Tillich, 92). In terms of history, locate Joe Keller as a product of the Depression, whose realization is New Deal liberalism, which, as Chris Bigsby says, “challenged essential American myths about self-sufficiency and individual acquisitiveness” (Bigsby, 82). In the 2015 Lee University production, available on You Tube, Joe and Kate Keller listen attentively to FDR’s address to the nation after the attack on Pearl Harbor with sounds of planes and machine-gun fire, a bomb detonating, followed by a radio announcement from 1945 celebrating V- Day (Lee). Finally, what do they believe is the best way to “Make America Great” today? Should we build walls or bridges? A Human Rights Play Because of its concern with a moral conscience, All My Sons fits well into a Human Rights curriculum. Use the vocabulary of Holocaust and

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Genocide Studies. Sociologist Helen Fein defines a “universe of obligation” as “the circle of individuals and groups toward whom obligations are owed, to whom rules apply, and whose injuries call for amends” (Facing History, vii). Guilt and responsibility are as integral to a discussion of genocide as they are to Joe Keller’s crime. While Keller’s crime is not based on the eradication of a particular group, and “his intent is not to destroy,” as Raphael Lemkin defined genocide in Article 2 of the 1948 United Nations (Facing History), both cause mental and physical harm. Moreover, similar vocabulary can be used to discuss Keller’s moral crime: collaborator, perpetrator, bystander, victim, universe of obligation, upstander—a person who takes a stand against injustice—and bystander— a person who looks on—resister, and rescuer—one who attempts to save victims of violence (Facing History). Joe would be a perpetrator, for allowing his business partner to take the blame for his orders over the phone. In his complicity with evil, is his deed like that of the concentration camp—“the final expression of human separateness?” (Miller 1979, 289). Kate would be a collaborator in sustaining the lie, and her guilt prevents her from sleeping. In the film, she takes sleeping pills. Not until act 2 does she tell her husband, “Make clear you realize what you did. Tell him you’d go to jail” (120). Chris would also be a collaborator, for suspecting his father but remaining silent, until he resists him verbally in the climax of act 2: Where do you live, where have you come from? Is that as far as your mind can see, 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?” Kids were hanging in the air by those heads! (115)

For Miller, this was the scene that would make or break the play (Miller 1987, 272), which echoes Odets’ “Life should not be printed on dollar bills.” Ask students when and how they challenge their parents’ values. Do some live out their parents’ stories? Actors from The Group Theater played in the original production of All My Sons, so it is helpful to show students a clip from the PBS documentary about The Group Theater. In concluding the Facing History element of the discussion, students identify Larry, the son who commits suicide from outrage toward his father, as a resister without being a rescuer. Ask whether Steve Deever is a victim, or a conformist by obeying his partner’s orders during “times of fear and crisis” (Facing History).

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New Historicism---Contemporary Business Crimes New Historicism is also helpful in understanding how All My Sons naturally explodes its 1947 setting and speaks to contemporary war profiteering. Introduce students to Stephen Greenblatt’s definition of New Historicism: “[challenge] the assumptions of a literary foreground and a political background, between artistic production and others kinds of social production that are made up and redrawn by artists, audiences, and readers” (7). Students are not aware of contemporary examples of war profiteering by Turkey ($118 million), Central Asia ($22 million), by Lockheed Martin, Boeing or by Dick Cheney’s company, Halliburton, which gained $39.5 billion in federal contracts from the Iraq war, while costing American and Iraqi lives (Chatterjee). How do we hold businesses accountable for crimes against humanity? Should there be incentives for businesses to protect human rights? Ask the students if they are familiar with “peace profiting”? Do students think the Trump family exploits the presidency to promote their business interests? (NY Times, July 22, 2018).

Guilt, Shame, and Denial Groups Since social transgression leads to guilt, you can assign small groups to discuss different kinds of guilt. One group presents Jung’s view of guilt: the unconscious suffers from repressed moral conflicts, without the person being aware of the way these conflicts generate guilt. A second group defines Martin Buber’s existential guilt based on actual harm done to others, while a third explains the Freudian notion of guilt based on internal conflicts. A fourth group looks up defenses against guilt: repression, blaming the victim, sharing guilt, and self-harm (Wiki, Guilt). Students often conclude that Keller and his family fit all criteria. He wants his partner to “move back on the block” (81), and he wants to offer him a job. They come to understand that Keller’s guilt is the backbone of the play and why he offers to help the partner he betrayed. Try to view the Elia Kazan production in which Kazan highlights the guilt by casting Ed Begley as Keller, a reformed alcoholic, who identified with Keller’s guilt. Then show students the London and, if possible, Israeli productions that emphasize Kate’s suppressed guilt (Miller 1987, 135). The Kellers, however, are not the only ones feeling guilty. Ann Deever discloses Larry’s letter about killing himself in response to the news of Joe’s crime because she feels

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guilty for being silent about both her father’s and Keller’s immoral actions and for not communicating with her father since his imprisonment. How does the Keller family deal with their guilt? Denial. When students look up denial, they realize that it not only means “the refusal to accept a past or present reality,” but that it is a defense against negative traits, memories of negative actions, and an avoidance of one’s guilt for past actions, thoughts or feelings in order to protect one’s emotional and psychological wellbeing (Wiki). Joe says, “I’ve gotta ignore what I gotta ignore” (82). The Keller’s live by alternative facts. Chris tells his father, “We’ve made a terrible mistake with mother. Being dishonest with her…It’s time she realized nobody believes Larry is alive. We’ve got to say it to her” (67). Kate Keller perpetuates the life-lie, and Jim Bayliss says, she has “a certain talent for lying.” As David Palmer notes, Kate has been played “quite like Lady Macbeth, a figure who was smarter in a pragmatic and self-serving sense than Joe and who dominated him” (Palmer 2018). New Critic Edward Murray judged that “Kate is static, while Chris grows, and Joe is made to grow” (Murray, 10). Yet, in act 3, Kate wants Keller to offer to go to prison, if Chris asks him (120), but Joe disapproves of that plan, since he made his decision for his family. Students confuse two facts about Kate: She knows that her husband is guilty, but she believes that her son is alive and therefore not affected by Joe’s unethical decision. Chris also lives in denial. After his father kills himself, Chris says, “Mother I didn’t mean to…” (69). Kate further undermines it. “Forget now. Live” (69). In denying her son’s death, she denies her husband’s responsibility. Her final words contradict the point to which the play builds: social responsibility. Do students agree with Bigsby that “the son who brings down the wrath of the moral god remains inside the system that has created this immorality”? (Bigsby, 171). Chris says, “…if I knew that night what I know now, he’d be in the D.A.’s office this time…. I could jail him, if I were human anymore, but I’m like everybody else now. I’m practical now” (66). Ask students: Why has Chris’ integrity disappeared? Why does he earn a living from a business that he knows is corrupt yet refuse to add his name to the family firm? When Chris leaves home the night he finds out that his father is responsible for shipping faulty parts, his neighbor, Dr. Bayliss, who gave up medical research because it was not as lucrative as practicing medicine, says, “[Chris’ll] come back. We all come back. These private little revolutions always die. The compromise is always made” (61). After his fight with

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George, Chris disappears into the night to watch “the star of his honesty” go out. Earlier, he tried to convince Bayliss to abandon his practice for research. Sue Bayliss, his wife says, “Chris makes [Dr. Bayliss] feel he’s compromising…as though Chris or anybody else isn’t compromising…I resent living next door to the Holy Family” (38). Chris’s idealism, like Greger’s “rectudinal fever” in Ibsen’s Wild Duck, is partly guilt (Bigsby 1984). How many students know someone who destructively imposes their values on others? Is the real moral force the son who never appears but kills himself in shame? Or is it Chris, who tells his father: You can be better! 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. (69)

Chris’ demand for a moral brotherhood is an occasion to introduce students to Facing History’s term, “a universe of obligation” and to the neuropsychiatric term, “moral injury”—an injury to an individual’s moral conscience resulting from an act of perceived moral transgression which produces profound emotional shame. Moral injury emphasizes the psychological, social, cultural, and spiritual aspects of trauma (Feinstein). Each character is morally injured, including Joe. At the same time, Chris is self-interested. Does he want his mother to acknowledge his brother’s death in order to marry his brother’s fiancée, or because he insists on truth? Is he a phony idealist or the real deal? After his argument with George, he wants to leave town because he cannot bear to be around his father now that he knows the truth. Miller was fascinated by the guilt of the idealist. Chris is ambiguous and not just a moral hero. George and Ann Deever also feel guilt and shame. When visiting his father in jail, George discovers that he and his sister wrongly shunned their father, and he is angry about Keller’s betrayal of his father: You’re not going to marry him, because his father destroyed your family…. Joe told him on the phone to weld, cover up the cracks…and ship them out. Joe promised to take responsibility. On the phone you can’t have responsibility! In court, you can always deny a phone call, and he did. (102)

Both Keller and his partner were arrested and convicted, but Keller won an appeal that overturned his conviction. He claimed that Steve did not

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call him when he “called in sick,” (108) that he was unaware of the shipment. Have students imagine, write, and then act out this critical scene that we do not see on stage. It helps them better understand exposition. Kate denies Joe’s complicity in his death by insisting that Larry could be alive. “Your brother’s alive, because if he’s dead, your father killed him” (114). The play’s original title was The Sign of the Archer, because Kate wants to know if “November 25 [the day Larry went missing in war] was a favorable day for Larry; if so, he’d be alive” (62). She places faith in the stars and in God, rather than in human will, even though she has always known Larry was dead. “Certain things have to be and certain things can never be…. That’s why there’s God” (78). As Miller continued to write, psychology overtook astrology (Miller 1987, 132). For Kate, late at night, Larry “is so real, I could reach out to touch him and could hear him like he was in the room” (74). She sustains the illusion by keeping Larry’s clothes and shining his shoes. In her book Trauma and Recovery, Judith Herman writes, “Secrecy and silence are the perpetrator’s first line of defense.” If that fails, “the perpetrator attacks the credibility of his victim. And if he cannot silence his victim, he tries to make sure no one listens by denying or rationalizing his crime.” Both Kate and Joe do not assume blame. Joe says he “thought they’d stop ‘em before anybody took off” (115) and defends his actions, using Steve’s name. The Lee University production made the house look like a prison of their lie, so the top of the house disintegrated into a prison cell, and the trees looked like prison bars. Faux paneled walls diminished into an open space of nothingness, suggesting the disintegration of the top of the Keller home—mirroring the collapse of the walls of deceit in which Keller had enclosed himself. In act 2, audiences heard birds chirping, cars passing, the sound of crickets (Lee, 165). The action moves from insular to inclusive. Do students think Larry’s death is also denial, as Steve Centola argues? By killing himself, instead of coming home to his father’s guilt, he escapes responsibility (Centola, 56). Is suicide weakness? Studies research moral injury and find that suicide can accompany it (Kelley/Bravo). If no one is in touch with the truth, then the play speaks well to our “Post-Truth” America in which fact checkers have never been busier. Michiko Kakutani’s The Death of Truth examines how Trump’s lies signify a drift toward authoritarianism. Truth becomes whatever you say or believe. The court gets the truth wrong when it imprisons Steve rather than Joe. How exactly did Joe get exonerated?

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Playwriting/Criminal Justice Exercise Since Joe clearly framed Steve Deever, yet was exonerated himself, how did Joe, or his defense, convince the jury of his innocence, while Steve landed in jail? Having students imagine the unseen testimony is more interesting than Joe and Chris’ already articulated conflicting values. Kean student-teacher, Shontisha Haynes, suggests having students write the trial that we never see by formulating questions and answers (Haynes). Divide the class in three: one third formulates Keller’s testimony, another writes Deever’s testimony, while the final group weighs the evidence and arrives at a verdict. If we evaluate facts carefully, why do juries sometimes imprison the wrong person if both sides have equal access to the evidence? How do words manipulate facts and persuade an audience, causing the difference between freedom and jail? For Miller, a play is a piece of jurisprudence. This exercise especially interests students of Criminal Justice. Have the class write Steve Deever’s monologue in jail—first spoken to the cold steel of prison bars—and then to his children who visit. Is there a difference between what we say in solitude and what we tell our families? Divide the Class in Five Since truth is subjective, divide the class into five groups, each assigned to a character from the play. According to student Victoria Matthies, each group reads or interprets the play from the perspective of their character by writing down why that character believes what they do. Then they exchange their reasons with every other group. Viewing the same situation from five perspectives, students learn to see human behavior in the context of other peoples’ situations and backgrounds. In effect, they put each character on Freud’s couch.

Conclusion All My Sons transcends 1947 and any one critical approach because it is about how to live in the world. As Miller says, “There could be no aesthetic form without a moral world, only notes without a staff…” (Miller 1987, 160). Impress upon students that with choice comes responsibility for the survival of the human race. Read them this statement by Miller:

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I have wondered if the real issue is the return of the repressed… Whenever the hand of the distant past reaches out of its grave, …we tend to resist belief in it, for it seems rather magically to reveal some unreadable hidden order behind the amoral chaos of events…But that emergence is the point of All My Sons – that there are times when things do indeed cohere. (Miller 1987, 134–35)

The play reminds us to serve something bigger than ourselves, to rebel against injustice, to find a career to which we give our talents without losing them, to think about our connection to each other when making decisions. The final Reader-Response writing assignment comes from Miller’s “The Family in Modern Drama,” which I ask students to apply to themselves: “All great plays are about how to make of the outside world a home. How must we struggle, what must we strive to change and overcome within ourselves and outside ourselves if we are to find safety, love, ease of soul, identity, or honor?” (Miller 1979). With Keller’s bad choice on their minds, students write about how they will make the world a home professionally and personally. In keeping with the definition of drama, they write about an internal and external conflict and how they will deal with it most ethically. When placed under pressure, will they allow their panic buttons to be pushed, or will they do the right thing? Will they speak truth to power? This final writing instills in students the importance of thinking more carefully about their choices before covering up the cracks in the world.

Work cited All My Sons. 1948. YouTube. December 22, 2016, Edward G. Robinson, Burt Lancaster, Louisa Horton, Mady Christians. Balakian, Jan. 1989. Conversation with Arthur Miller. Michigan Quarterly Review 29:2. Balakian, Jan. 1996. Speaking on Stage, Interviews with Contemporary American Playwrights. Ed. Philip Kolin and Colby Kullman. Tuscaloosa: Alabama UP. Biglan, A. 2015. The Nurture Effect: How the Science of Human Behavior Can Improve Our Lives and Our World. Oakland, CA: New Harbinger. Bigsby, Chris. 1984. A Critical Introduction to Twentieth Century American Drama. Vol. 2. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Bigsby, Chris. 1994. Modern American Drama, 1945–1990. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.

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Brecht, Bertolt. 2012. Mother Courage and Her Children. London: Bloomsbury Methuen. Bressler, Charles. 2011. Literary Criticism. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Longman. Brucher, Richard. 2017. All My Sons Performance Review. The Arthur Miller Journal 12:1, 78–83. Buber, Martin. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/ entries/buber/. Centola, Steven R. 2010. All My Sons. The Cambridge Companion to Arthur Miller, 2nd Edition. Ed. Christopher Bigsby. New York: Cambridge UP, 56– 62. Chatterjee, Pratap. 2012. Halliburton Makes a Killing on Iraq War: Cheney’s Former Company Profits from Supporting Troops. Accessed March 2, 2012. https://corpwatch.org/article/halliburton-makes-killing-iraq-war. Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu, and Douglas Abrams. 2016. The Book of Joy. New York: Avery. De Tocqueville, Alexis. 2000. Democracy in America. New York: Bantam. “Denial.” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial. Dominik, Jane. 2019. Conversation. Facing History and Ourselves. 2017. Holocaust and Human Behavior. Brookline, MA. Feinstein, Anthony. 2019. Shooting War. Glitterati Incorporated. Group Theatre | About the Group Theatre | American Masters | PBS. 1997. www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/group-theatre-about-the-grouptheatre/622/. Haynes, Shontisha. 2018, Fall. Modern Drama Seminar. Kean University. Herman, Judith. 2015. Trauma and Recovery. New York: Basic Books. Ibsen, Henrik. 1982. The Wild Duck, in Eva Le Gallienne, ed. and trans., Eight Plays by Henrik Ibsen. New York: Modern Library. Jackson, Kenneth T. 1985. Crabgrass Frontier the Suburbanization of the United States. New York: Oxford UP. Jung, Carl. 1981. The Archetype and the Collective Unconscious. Princeton: Princeton UP. Kakutani, Michiko. 2018. The Death of Truth. New York: Tim Duggan. Kelly, Michael, J. Chemical Corporation Complicity in the Kurdish Genocide. https://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1442& context=bjil. Kelley, Michelle L., Adrian J. Bravo, Rachel L. Davies, Hannah C. Hamrick, Christine Vinci, and Jason C. Redman. Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy Moral Injury and Suicidality Among CombatWounded Veterans: The Moderating Effects of Social Connectedness and SelfCompassion. Online First Publication, March 21, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/ 10.1037/tra0000447. Kushner, Tony, and John Walter. 2008. Theater. https://vimeo.com›BASEBALZA›Videos.

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Gilman, Richard. 2000. The Making of Modern Drama. New Haven: Yale UP. Greenblatt, Stephen. 1998. The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Contexts, 2nd Edition. Ed. David H. Richter. Boston: Bedford. Lee, Andrew. 2015. “Performance Reviews”, “All My Sons,” Lee University. The Arthur Miller Journal 10:2, Autumn. McKenna, Connor. Modern Drama Seminar, Kean University, December 2018. Miller, Arthur. 1957. The Collected Plays of Arthur Miller. Vol. 1. New York: Viking. Miller, Arthur. 1979. The Collected Essays of Arthur Miller. Ed. Robert Martin. London: Penguin. Miller, Arthur. 1987. Timebends: A Life. New York: Grove. Miller, Arthur. 2000. All My Sons. Ed. Christopher Bigsby. London: Penguin. Moore, Michael. 2009. Capitalism: A Love Story. Overture Films. Moral Injury. Wikipedia. Murray, Edward. 1967. Arthur Miller, Dramatist. New York: Ungar. New York Times. “Room for Debate.” May 12, 2015. Odets, Clifford. 1935. Waiting for Lefty and Other Plays. Palmer, David. 2018. Conversation. Sartre, Jean Paul. 1993. Being and Nothingness. New York: Washington Square Press. Stel, Nora, and Wim Naude. Business in Genocide: Understanding and Avoiding Complicity. IZA Discussion Paper No. 9743. Available at https://ssrn.com/ abstract=2742531. Stossel, Scott. 2015. My Age of Anxiety. New York: Vintage. Szalai, Jennifer. Why Cloudy Untruths Eclipse Facts’ Sunshine. New York Times, January 10, 2019. Tillich, Paul. 1952. The Courage to Be. New Haven: Yale UP. Turner Classic Movies. 2019. Noir Alley. https://www.kpbs.org/news/2015/ jun/05/tcm-offers-free-online-film-noir-class/. Williams, Raymond, ed. Harold Bloom. 1959. Arthur Miller, an Overview. New York: Chelsea.

CHAPTER 10

Irish Immigrant Rebellion in O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape and Miller’s A Memory of Two Mondays Joshua E. Polster

Though they never met in person, Eugene O’Neill and Arthur Miller— two of the most significant U.S. playwrights in the twentieth century— corresponded in writing. In 1947, O’Neill sent a telegram to Miller, congratulating him on winning the New York Critics Circle Award for All My Sons . Two years later, Miller, in turn, wrote to O’Neill, inviting him to see his new play Death of a Salesman (1949) and to convey his respect for the elder playwright’s work: “I have held your work,” Miller wrote, “in such high esteem since my first consciousness of the theatre” (Isaac, Appendix). Miller, in fact, had more of a slow-growing admiration for O’Neill’s work. As Miller admitted in his autobiography, Timebends , in the spiraling economic climate of the mid 1930s, when the young Miller was acutely awakened to leftist politics and socially conscious theater, O’Neill’s work,

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to him, seemed “archaic,” as opposed to the overtly topical and politically agitating plays by Group Theatre prodigy Clifford Odets, the selfproclaimed “stormbird of the working class.” For the politically engaged Miller, O’Neill—who, in the 1930s, wrote Mourning Becomes Electra, Ah, Wilderness! and Days without End—seemed “the playwright of the mystical rich, of high society and the Theatre Guild and escapist ‘culture’” (Miller 1987, 228). It was not until the premiere of The Iceman Cometh that Miller reassessed his opinion of O’Neill’s work. He wrote of how “struck” he was by O’Neill’s “radical hostility to bourgeois civilization,” a hostility, in comparison, that was “far greater than anything Odets had expressed.” Miller also observed how “Odets’s characters were alienated because – when you came down to it – they couldn’t get into the system, O’Neill’s because they so desperately needed to get out of it, to junk it with all its boastful self-congratulation, its pious pretension to spiritual values when in fact it produced emptied and visionless men choking with unnameable despair” (Miller 1987, 228). It was perhaps for this reason that Miller reached out to O’Neill in his letter—at last seeing him more as a kindred artistic spirit. According to theater scholar Christopher Bigsby, Miller better understood that “O’Neill had worked against the American grain. Like Miller himself, he had been concerned to dramatize a tragic sense of life, at odds in some respects with American melioristic philosophy and now with mid-century boosterism” (491). In Miller’s letter to O’Neill, he, in addition to inviting him to attend Salesman, asked if they could meet: “I have long wished to speak with you and take this occasion to ask whether we might get together for an afternoon or an evening. Will you let me know if and when you could see the play and whether a meeting is possible at this time?” (Isaac, Appendix). The meeting, unfortunately, never occurred. O’Neill was already suffering from a neurological disease that left him with a severe case of tremors, impairing his ability to write and travel. It is tempting to imagine this situation differently with these two great playwrights getting together to discuss the situation of theater and their work. This, of course, can no longer happen after O’Neill’s death in 1953 and Miller’s in 2005. Instead, the types of extant communications are these correspondences and, quite possibly, their plays as a means for them to speak to each other. Miller’s expressionist play A Memory of Two Mondays —produced in 1955, only two years after O’Neill’s death—speaks to

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O’Neill’s work like none other, specifically to The Hairy Ape, which premiered thirty-three years earlier as one of the founding expressionist plays in the United States. It is fitting to see A Memory of Two Mondays as homage to O’Neill and his great body of work, in particular, The Hairy Ape.1 There indeed are considerable similarities between these two plays, especially in their dramatic styles and themes. This study, though, positions the two plays together primarily to focus on how O’Neill and Miller comparably used Irish immigrant characters in industrial settings as powerful vehicles of reflection and rebellion and how these similarities relate to their own immigrant family histories. As theater scholarship moves further into the twenty-first century, it is important to better understand the commonalities between these two playwrights, as well as the significant influence O’Neill had on the younger writer’s work. An immediate distinction between the playwrights, of course, is that O’Neill descended from Irish Catholics while Miller came from Polish Jews.2 Despite this difference, it is important to note that O’Neill and Miller, both second-generation Americans, had immigrant fathers; their mothers were born in the United States. O’Neill’s father, James, was born in Kilkenny, Ireland, and emigrated in 1850 at the age of four as part of the great famine diaspora. Miller’s father, Isidore, left Poland in 1891 at the age of six as part of the massive exodus of Jews fleeing destitution, discrimination, and the immense violence of pogroms. Many of the Irish and Jews who emigrated from the harsh conditions of their homelands were disappointed to find new racial and economic discriminations awaiting them on U.S. shores. Both playwrights’ fathers came to the United States during a period of fierce anti-immigrant sentiment and discrimination. Xenophobia was rampant in both law and industry. This was seen clearly in the numerous immigration acts of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that gave the government greater authority to restrict immigration and naturalization, as well as in the ruthless labor practices of the day. Poor work conditions and exploitation of immigrant workers in the United States were widespread throughout the early industrial years of the twentieth century. These were the times before child labor laws, minimum wage, and worker’s compensation. Men along with women and children worked seventy to eighty hours per week in dangerous work environments that entrapped and exploited destitute Americans, in particular, immigrants.

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James O’Neill, the playwright’s father, no doubt experienced such hardship. After a few years in Buffalo, New York, James’ father returned to Ireland, abandoning his family to abject straits. James suffered the shame of numerous evictions and was forced to work in a sweatshop for pennies a day. In O’Neill’s extensively autobiographical play Long Day’s Journey Into Night (posthumously published in 1956), James Tyrone, the character based on O’Neill’s father, recounts the adversity to his son: There was no damned romance in our poverty […] I worked twelve hours a day in a machine shop, learning to make files. A dirty barn of a place where rain dripped through the roof, where you roasted in summer, and there was no stove in winter, and your hands got numb with cold, where the only light came through two small filthy windows … And what do you think I got for it? Fifty cents a week! (147–48)

Arthur Miller’s father, Isidore, also plainly understood indigence and great hardship. To help support his impoverished family, Isidore started work at the young age of twelve in a sewing machine company, working seven days a week from sunrise to sunset. In Miller’s later years, the image of his father bent over a sewing machine in the gloom of the sweatshop continuously haunted him, “stirring a retrospective anger at the treatment of those, like his own family, forced to spend years struggling to escape a kind of servitude” (Bigsby, 12–13). Each playwright’s father managed to rise from poverty to success and wealth in his career: Isidore as an owner of a prosperous women’s clothing manufacturing business and James as a popular and well-paid actor. The years of destitution they and their families endured, though, were never forgotten, even when they were financially secure, and resulted in a severe drive and desire for money, as well as a constant fear of being without. Isidore, like many ill-fated U.S. citizens in the 1920s, overinvested in the stock market, in constant pursuit of the American Dream, and lost his fortune during the Great Depression, which forever destabilized and damaged the Miller family. Isidore was driven, it seemed to his son Arthur, by “a desire to make his mark, to claim his place in a world that once he could have felt he had no right to access” (Bigsby, 28). In other words, wealth, for Isidore, became an unstated requirement for U.S. citizenship: proof that you had the right to belong. This can be seen, as well, with James O’Neill. Early in his acting career, James was compared favorably to the great Shakespearean actor Edwin

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Booth, but he sacrificed his talent for financial security and easy notoriety by continuously playing in the highly popular The Count of Monte Cristo: more than 6000 performances over nearly forty years. O’Neill recalled: My father was really a remarkable actor, but the enormous success of Monte Cristo kept him from doing other things. He could go out year after year and clear fifty thousand in a season. He thought that he simply couldn’t afford to do anything else. But in his later years, he was full of bitter regrets. He felt Monte Cristo had ruined his career as an artist. (Workers, 110)

O’Neill’s father, like many immigrants, desired establishment not just in his profession but also in his new nation, and wealth, again, became a verification of belonging. This, assuredly, impacted James’ desire to solidify and secure his fortune. He was a notorious miser, as was Isidore, crippled by the fear of poverty. As James Tyrone recalled in Long Day’s Journey Into Night : It was at home I first learned the value of a dollar and the fear of the poorhouse. I’ve never been able to believe in my luck since. I’ve always feared it would change and everything I had would be taken away […] It was in those days I learned to be a miser … And once you’ve learned a lesson, it’s hard to unlearn it. (148)

In a recent speech to the Eugene O’Neill International Society, Michael D. Higgins, President of Ireland and an admirer of the playwright, spoke of the great expectations placed on immigrant fathers and how these expectations impacted family dynamics, in particular, the father–son relationships: “In the Irish migratory experience, it has a particular meaning in terms of a response to dispossession. The devalued father of the dispossessed is the father who has not been able to redress a great wrong or achieve excellence in the new conditions, the new destinations, to which the family of the dispossessed has fled or migrated” (Higgins 2017). Enormous tensions were placed on such new immigrants struggling with how to continuously survive the hazardous economic and social climate and belong in their adopted country. To best succeed, many immigrants chose strategies either of cultural isolation or assimilation. Miller’s father, for instance, opted for the path of cultural isolation. In an act of protective insularity, the majority of immigrant Jews who settled in New

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York, Isidore included, lived and worked in the Lower East Side to form their own ethnic community. James O’Neill took more of the approach of assimilation. In addition to abandoning his artistic ambitions and embracing the American Dream, he rid himself of all vestiges of brogue as he performed throughout the nation to succeed in his career and, in extension, in the United States. The ways Isidore and James dealt with their fears of poverty, belonging, and succeeding did not just greatly impact their careers but also their spouses. Both Ella O’Neill and Augusta Miller—again, first-generation Americans—were brought up in a different world with greater wealth, and thus they understood less about the transient and transitionary struggles of their husbands. Ella grew up in a comfortable home in Cleveland, Ohio, where her entrepreneurial father—who had prevailed over the Irish famine, the fearful journey to the new world, and discrimination toward Irish immigrants—prospered as a local businessman and real estate investor. He was able to provide Ella with a strong education at Catholic schools, where she also studied piano and voice. This put her on the path, she believed, toward a life of devotion and music. Her life, though, went in a different direction when her father died, and shortly after, she married James. Instead of following her faith, Ella followed James when on theatrical tours, pursuing his unquenchable quest for fame and fortune. On one such occasion, her seven-year-old son, Jamie, who had been left behind under the care of Ella’s mother while she was away, contracted measles and infected her infant son, Edmund. Edmund died before Ella was able to return, leaving her forever guilt-ridden and bitter toward her husband: “I should have insisted on staying with [..the baby] and not have let you persuade me to join you,” accuses Mary Tyrone, the character based on Ella, in Long Day’s Journey Into Night (88). Ella’s grief was compounded three years later when her third son, Eugene, was born, and she became addicted to morphine when it was prescribed to her for comfort after a difficult birth. According to Eugene O’Neill, his father was partly to blame due to his renowned stinginess, which led him to put his ailing wife under the care of a “quack” doctor. In Long Day’s Journey into Night, the son accuses the father of such an atrocity: It never should have gotten a hold on her! I know damned well she’s not to blame! And I know who is! You are! Your damned stinginess! If you’d spent money for a decent doctor when she was so sick after I was

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born, she’d never have known morphine existed! Instead you put her in the hands of a hotel quack who wouldn’t admit his ignorance and took the easiest way out, not giving a damn what happened to her afterwards! All because his fee was cheap! Another one of your bargains! (140)

Augusta Miller also had a more prosperous childhood than her immigrant parents. She grew up in New York, where her father overcame the initial hardships of settling into the new world to succeed as a clothing manufacturer. Like Ella O’Neill, she grew up with culture and education. Her marriage to Isidore was more of convenience than love, an arranged union by the couple’s fathers to help consolidate the clothing manufacturing businesses. In Miller’s autobiographical play After the Fall , the character called Mother laments, “I’ll never forget it, valedictorian of the class with a scholarship to Hunter [College] in my hand…. A blackness flows into her soul. And I came home, and Grandpa says, “You’re getting married!” (Miller 1981, 489). Augusta’s grief worsened when, shortly into their marriage, she discovered that her husband, who lacked formal education, was illiterate and profoundly uncultured. As Bigsby observed: Augusta’s sense of dismay was certainly real enough, the feeling on her part that she had surrendered her own future to a man whose charm and business acumen left her entertained and apparently secure but in some fundamental sense frustrated and eventually contemptuous of his incapacities. (19)

That sense of security, though, quickly dissipated in October 1929 when she learned that her husband had borrowed great sums of money to invest in the stock market and find his fortune. The family lost most of what they owned after the Great Crash, including their eleven-room Harlem apartment that overlooked Central Park. The Millers were forced to move to Brooklyn where they lived in a small utilitarian apartment with Arthur’s grandfather and a lodger. Like Ella, Augusta never forgave her husband. The remainder of their marriage was filled with bitterness and regret. Both playwrights had uneasy relationships with their fathers as well, and part of this unease was directly attributed to the choices their fathers made as they struggled with poverty, immigration, and resettlement into an industrial society ripe with economic and racial discriminations.3 These tensions can be traced not just in the family dynamics of O’Neill and

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Miller but also in their dramatic work. As previously mentioned, O’Neill directly addressed that experience in his late masterpiece Long Day’s Journey Into Night , but it impacted many of his previous plays as well. As noted by Hilton Als in the New Yorker, much of O’Neill’s work was on narratives of the outsider. President Higgins also observed in “play after play […]the voices of the excluded are heard.”4 Edward Shaughnessy’s critical study on O’Neill emphasized, as well, the significance of O’Neill’s family history with immigration and poverty: “To think that this history did not touch O’Neill would be naïve. The playwright’s roots are to be found in the poverty, sorrow, and wrenching extirpations caused by the Great Famine of the late 1840s.” James O’Neill, Shaughnessy asserted, was a “product” of that history (3). Both O’Neill and Miller used their artistic work to better understand their fathers, their fathers’ choices, and the immigrant and industrial worlds that helped to shape them. The first half of The Hairy Ape and the entirety of Two Mondays are set in an industrial locale depleted of spirituality and significance to make way for capital and commerce. The settings of these plays are similar, as well, to the confining and unsanitary settings of the sweatshops where the playwrights’ fathers worked in their youth. In The Hairy Ape, it is in the fireman’s forecastle of an ocean liner that recently departed from New York. The forecastle is described as a “crowded” and “cramped space in the bowels of a ship, imprisoned by white steel,” with all of the grime associated with shoveling coal (1). In Two Mondays, it is in the shipping room of a large auto parts distribution warehouse in an industrial section of Manhattan. The business is described as “dirty,” “unmanageably chaotic,” and claustrophobic. Instead of windows that look out to the world, for instance, the glass is “encrusted with the hard dirt of years” (3). Both of these dark and dingy worlds—like the sweatshops where the playwrights’ fathers once worked—are inhabited by a menagerie of marginalized workers who are a mix of immigrants and multi-generational Americans—similar to the playwrights’ families. In the stage directions of The Hairy Ape, for instance, O’Neill describes the workers in the forecastle as being comprised of “all the civilized white races” (2). The specific accents (Irish brogue) and word uses (“Gesundheit”) of the firemen, as well as their derogatory terms for each other (“Dutchman,” “Froggy,” and “Wop”) identify them as a mix of immigrant Irishmen, Germans, Frenchmen, and Italians, along with multi-generational Americans, like the leading stoker Yank, who ran away from his New York home when he

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was a child (2–3). The same can be seen in Two Mondays. For instance, the packing boss Gus, a naturalized U.S. citizen who was born in Eastern Europe, speaks with a “gruff” Slavic accent; coworker Kenneth, a recent immigrant from Ireland, talks with a thick brogue; and the new hire Bert is a second or third generation U.S. citizen, as are several other workers in the warehouse. The Brooklyn based, machine-idolatrizing protagonists in each play are both presented as ruthlessly uncivilized and comparable to apes. In O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape, Yank, who zealously compares himself to steel, is likened to a “hairy ape” (41). In Miller’s Two Mondays, Gus, who literally embraces auto parts more than his deathly ill wife, is compared to “King Kong” (1981, 7). Despite the primitive references, these two characters who acquiesce to their occupations are both severely removed from nature and their natural selves by the repetitive toil of industrial labor. This leads Yank and Gus to existential crises and to catastrophic acts of suicide, which in the end leave their bodies physically entrapped in the metallic industry to which they devoted and sacrificed their lives—Yank in a steel cage and Gus in an automobile. In both plays, the protagonist is a clear symbol of the laborer’s inner and external disharmony within an industrial society that creates demeaning, debilitating, servile jobs for people such as Yank and Gus. It also serves as a stark warning to those, like the playwrights’ fathers, who devotedly serve and crave to belong to the ruinous system of American capitalism. To better illuminate this separation between self and nature, in each play, in addition to an “ape,” there is an Irishman who functions as a foil to the protagonist: Paddy in Hairy Ape and Kenneth in Two Mondays. These Irish characters resist the protagonists’ narratives that initially accept an industrial existence and instead counter with poetic nostalgia for a more human existence, one more in harmony with nature prior to the onslaught of industrialization. For O’Neill, the Irish, especially those more connected to their homeland, represented a prideful and rebellious spirit: “There is,” he said, “among Irish still close to, or born in Ireland, a strange mixture of fight and hate and forgive, a clannish pride before the world, that is particularly our own” (Dowling 2016, 476). In The Hairy Ape, the other firemen are described as “bewildered, furious” and having a “baffled defiance.” Paddy, though, who is “wizened” and has eyes that contain sadness and “patient pathos,” is not baffled. Despite his similar “monkey-like” appearance from years of industrial labor, Paddy clearly understands what dehumanizes and

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cages him, and has pity for those who live among him confused and confined (1, 4). The overworked characters—in particular, the immigrants—are presented as debased species in such an industrial context. They are, as O’Neill put it, like “beasts in a cage” (1922, 1). Gina Rossetti observed in her scholarship how the workers in The Hairy Ape are pejoratively marked immigrants who are encoded with an “evolutionary retrogression.” As she put it, there is a “clear link between the immigrant characters and their primitivism” (91). To be clear, O’Neill, a son of an immigrant and sweatshop laborer, is not presenting a racist or xenophobic lens of immigrants but attempting to show how the industrial and capitalist system entraps, exploits, and diminishes the humanity of immigrant workers. The Hairy Ape—as well as Two Mondays —explicitly shows the menace and toll of industrial labor. The setting and characters symbolically portray the monotony of cyclical work, a violent detesting attitude toward industrial labor, and the deadly physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual toll of the work itself on a person, such as the playwrights’ fathers. In The Hairy Ape, Paddy’s fellow stokers unknowingly yearn for a different lot, and it is this desire that most likely makes them reach out to the Irishman and request a chanty, a song from his youthful days as a sailor aboard a clipper ship, when workers were more meaningfully connected to nature and more natural labor. Yank, though, refuses to listen to such songs and sees them as dead lyrics from a dead world. Paddy, who partly functions as the historicizing character archetype, provides the crucial link between the old and new world—a reminder of what has been lost and, perhaps, what still can be recovered. Yank, though, foolishly wishes to belong only to his present workplace. Paddy warns Yank of such belonging: “We belong to this, you’re saying? […] Almighty God have pity on us!” Paddy may serve the transatlantic liner in body but definitely not in spirit. He resists Yank’s ruthless diatribes and attempts to silence him by rebelliously crying out “in a voice full of old sorrow” memories of the “fine beautiful ships” and “fine strong men in them” who were “free men.” Unlike Yank, Paddy refuses to belong to his workplace, and, with great passion and defiance, reminds the other firemen of another way of being: “You worked under the sky … ‘Twas them days men belonged to ships, not now. ‘Twas them days a ship was part of the sea, and a man was part of a ship, and the sea joined all together and made it one” (9–11). Paddy attempts to rally the workers—bent from the cramped spaces, blackened by the coal, and cowered by the monotonous Tayloristic

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work—with stories of the “brave” “bold” men of his youth who were “free” with “clean skins,” “clear eyes,” and “straight backs” from their “work wid skill and daring to it.” He then scornfully turns on Yank: “Is it one wid this you’d be, Yank […] feeding the bloody furnace—feeding our lives along wid the coal, I’m thinking—caged in by steel from a sight of the sky like bloody apes in the Zoo!” (9–11). Yank, who listens with a “contemptuous sneer,” loses patience with Paddy. He calls him a “crazy Mick” and then “springs to his feet and advances on Paddy threateningly.” Yank manages to physically restrain himself, but then verbally barrages his opponent. Like the numerous xenophobic Yankees that condemned the arrival of Irish immigrants and attempted to define who and what was American, this Yank derides the “Old Harp” and his old world. The leading stoker repeatedly “barks out” his violent mantra, “Yuh don’t belong!” (11–12). With this, Yank dramatizes the ethnic pecking order and clearly portrays Paddy—in addition to his unwelcomed ideas—as an unwelcomed outsider. Paddy almost cowers before the Yankee and retreats into an indifferent alcoholic stupor, but then the Irishman “throws his head back with a mocking burst of laughter” (14). Paddy, who never physically could overpower the “broader, fiercer, more truculent” fireman, instead dissents with mocking laughter and verbal assault. With “jovial defiance,” he cries out: “I’m no slave the like of you. I’ll be sittin’ here at me ease, and drinking, and thinking, and dreaming dreams” (14–15).5 And with that, Paddy does not return to work but rebelliously returns to his thoughts of better days, quietly humming to himself.6 In A Memory of Two Mondays , the rebellious Irishman is Kenneth. Oddly, there is no apparent Jewish or Polish person in Two Mondays. Miller, in his early plays, had the tendency to remove the Jewishness of his characters, largely in response to the rampant anti-Semitism of the time. In Two Mondays, the Irish become the stand-in for the oppressed ethnic outsider, who is described by other members of the warehouse as subhuman.7 This is seen most clearly in several coworkers who repeatedly mock Kenneth’s ethnicity, as did the coworkers of Paddy, calling him a long-faced “donkey’’ and ridiculing his accent. Kenneth’s characteristics and situation are similar to Paddy’s. Like Paddy, Kenneth is Irish and will become a worn-out cog in the industrial machine, ethnically marked and assaulted, continuously berated by a leading and acquiescent coworker. Kenneth also is defiant in nature and sympathetic toward his fellow workers. He frequently confronts Gus about

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his ruthless treatment of coworkers and mocks Gus about his thinking, similar to the way Paddy chides Yank about his thinking in The Hairy Ape. Moreover, Kenneth, in the same way as Paddy, attempts to escape the harshness of the industrial workplace by fixing his mind on nature and resisting those who oppose him. At the beginning of the play, Kenneth, who likes to sing and recite poetry, has just arrived in the United States and has brought with him the hope of a better life. Kenneth, though, is the most hard-pressed of the workers. He suffers at home as well as at work; his shoes are full of holes, and he lives in a run-down boarding house with a landlady who neglects to provide proper heating or food. Despite his poverty, Kenneth has confidence and is the one figure capable of standing up to the belligerent Gus and to the intolerable labor conditions that the older worker does not challenge. Kenneth, for example, confronts Gus about “the dust constantly fallin’ through the air” of the workplace, and solicits Bert to help him clean up the workplace (11). Kenneth refuses to let the harshness of the industrial environment get to him by frequently remembering nature and imagining how “spectacular it must be out in the country […with its] green countryside” (Miller 2010, 13). Remembering nature, as in The Hairy Ape, is an important act of resistance in the industrial world. Two Mondays, though, traces Kenneth’s deterioration. He initially seeks to change the decrepit conditions of the warehouse, but ultimately the warehouse changes him, robbing him of his spirit and his poetry. Towards the end of the play, he is a despairing alcoholic, forgetful of his poetry and acquiescent to his monotonous life in the warehouse. Like many immigrants who expected prosperity in their new country, Kenneth has tailored the American Dream of success to fit his reality. He compromises his ambitions and starts to accept an impoverished lot in life. Like Paddy, who almost succumbs to drink, the incessant racial slurs of coworkers, and hard industrial labor, Kenneth almost capitulates but then resists. Later in the play, for instance, Kenneth stands up to a coworker who racially insults him. Instead of joking it off, as he has done previously, Kenneth grabs him roughly with a clenched fist, refusing to be demeaned. Most importantly, Kenneth tells Bert that, while at a tavern, he became disgusted with his constant inebriation and decrepit life, and knocked over a bar, breaking all the glasses and piping, which caused the beer to pour out all over the floor. For this outburst, Kenneth lost six weeks of pay, but he gained the knowledge that he was near his end and to survive he had to

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break free of his wretched manner of existence. As a result, Kenneth tells Bert he is bound for the Civil Service, working as a guard in a mental institution, where he can straighten himself out and, most importantly, get away from the ruinous atmosphere of the warehouse. He refuses to accept his situation and remain stagnant. The play ends with Kenneth returning to song, as did Paddy. He triumphantly remembers his poetry and sings the lyrics to “Minstrel Boy,” about a “warrior bard” who is off to battle, armed with his “father’s sword” and “wild harp” (xlii–xliii). The minstrel boy, most likely Kenneth, is now ready to fight against the economic and racial discriminations that attempt to break him. There are, indeed, many notable commonalities between the playwrights’ fathers and immigrant histories, and how these similarities and ways of attempting to understand their fathers manifest in these two plays. Of course, clear distinctions also exist in the dramas of Miller and O’Neill. Both playwrights saw—particularly in industrial and capitalistic contexts— the economic and sociopolitical forces that rupture humanity, as well as the life-lies we tell ourselves—such as the American Dream—in order to avoid the truth about ourselves and society. In Miller’s work, however, there is more optimism that we can break destructive cycles, discover new paths forward, and cultivate our humanity. In Two Mondays, for instance, Gus does die, but the new hire Bert manages to escape the destitution of the warehouse for the promise of a better life in college. He later gains a better understanding of and sympathy toward the shared plight of his coworkers. Kenneth no longer accepts a life of drinking or demeaning work and is bound for Civil Service employment where he will “get back to regular” (58). Hope is present in the play, perhaps, due to the promise of Miller’s father, who, though never again wealthy and always miserly, managed to recover some of his money after the Great Crash in a new hat-manufacturing business. In O’Neill’s work, though, the modern human is inescapably alone, forever searching but never able to fully belong in the material world, like the character Yank who is banished from several sectors of society and ultimately dies miserable and alone. Paddy does resist but will ultimately return to his work in the forecastle, ending his days shoveling coal with his confused and confined firemen. In The Hairy Ape, no one truly escapes or belongs, perhaps only in death (as the ending stage directions postulate). This play, like many of O’Neill’s works, philosophically succumbs to a more Nietzschean coldness. Perhaps this is due to how James O’Neill ended—a bitter man, incessantly penny-pinching and deeply regretful of the true ruinous cost of fame and fortune on his self, art, and family.

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Notes 1. O’Neill was on Miller’s mind at the time of Memory. In the article “Concerning the Boom” for International Theatre Annual, Miller considered the most significant dramatic event for the 1955–1956 season not his own play but the publication of O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night. 2. Miller, however, did have some connections to Irish ancestry. His second wife, Marilyn Monroe, was Irish through her maternal grandmother, Della Mae Hogan Monroe (1876–1927), who could trace her lineage back to Dublin. 3. The tensions between first- and second-generation Americans also can be traced in the difficult relationships O’Neill and Miller had with their mothers. This study, though, focuses more on how the immigrant histories of the fathers impacted the playwrights. 4. O’Neill, in fact, never visited the native land of his father, though he understood himself as being “all Irish” (Merrill). In his youth, O’Neill called himself “The Irish Luck Kid,” and later in life reaffirmed his heritage to his son: “The one thing that explains more than anything else about me is the fact that I’m Irish. And, strangely enough, it is something that all the writers who have attempted to explain me and my work have overlooked” (Gelb, 118). This has been largely corrected since then with important scholarship, such as Edward Shaughnessy’s Eugene O’Neill in Ireland, but omissions still occur. For instance, the 2006 American Experience documentary on the playwright, written by esteemed O’Neill biographers Arthur and Barbara Gelb, gave little attention to O’Neill’s Irish background and its impact on his work. Ireland’s President Michael D. Higgins, though, understood the importance of O’Neill’s Irishness: “O’Neill’s themes are reflective of the great themes of both Irish and American theatre: migration and the use and abuse of memory. O’Neill belongs to both the literary canons of America and Ireland.” O’Neill biographer Robert Dowling also recognized the impact of Ireland on the playwright: “O’Neill’s dogged testimonials about his Irish heritage—in his diaries and letters, public proclamations and idle chatter—together lay bare the weight his Irishness had on his dramas, and thus on American theatre” (Dowling “The Fact”). Indeed, this can be seen readily in what has been considered his more Irish plays, like A Touch of the Poet (1942), but it is also apparent in The Hairy Ape. 5. Later in the play, Paddy gets his revenge on Yank by being one of the main catalysts of the events that lead to Yank’s death. Paddy turns him into a laughingstock in front of his coworkers when he taunts Yank with how Mildred, the daughter of a steel tycoon, was repulsed by Yank’s appearance when she came down to visit the forecastle. She looked at Yank, as Paddy put it, like a “hairy ape.” Despite Paddy’s warning that it is foolish to give any attention to “the skinny sow,” Paddy does say he wished

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Yank “brained” her and ultimately provokes Yank into seeking revenge, thus sending him spiraling toward his eventual demise (41–42, 45). 6. Several O’Neill scholars have noted how the playwright surrendered to stereotype when he created the character of Paddy. Edward Shaughnessy, for instance, wrote: “In his early depictions of Irish-Americans, [he] worked too often from a paint-by-the-numbers kit. As he gained confidence, however, he created more convincing characters; eventually, his men and women became fully three-dimensional.” It is true that O’Neill’s Irish creation in The Hairy Ape—seen also in his early plays The Moon of the Caribbees and Bound East for Cardiff —is a hard-drinking Irish-type sailor who speaks with a pronounced brogue and has little regard for his work. Some critics found O’Neill’s depiction of the Irishman a demonstration of his disdain for the Irish, but in truth, O’Neill simply refused to sentimentalize the Irish and instead chose to present them more accurately with all the darkness and light he saw in them as well as in himself. “O’Neill,” further explained Shaughnessy, “knew first-hand the dark and brooding melancholy and the Irishman’s debilitating habit of self-medication via alcohol and he responded to the mysteries of fatalism and mysticism that stalk the Irish soul.” William V. Shannon agreed: “Those who thought him anti-Irish did not comprehend that for an artist telling the truth is the highest act of love” (see Shaughnessy, 154). In A Memory of Two Mondays , Kenneth is a much more fully developed character but does harbor several ethnic stereotypes, such as succumbing to drink. 7. Arthur Miller showed a keen interest in Ireland and its theater. In his autobiography Timebends , he discussed at length how much the artistic power, politics, and beauty of the 1930s Group Theatre inspired his dramaturgy. Only one other company, Miller recalled, was comparable: “When I recall [the Group Theatre], time is stopped. They seem never to have been tempted to make an insignificant gesture. The closest to these productions that I ever saw was [at] the Abbey Theatre” (230). Miller, in fact, had a consistent appreciation for Irish theater and its practitioners. After visiting the Galway-based Druid Theatre in 1997, he solicited its director Garry Hynes to direct the off-Broadway debut of his play Mr. Peters’ Connections . In 2000, the playwright claimed that “the best work being done for the stage today is being produced by the young Irish playwrights.” Matthew Martin has observed how much “the Irish dramatic tradition influenc[ed] [Miller’s] dramatic practice.” The influence of both O’Neill and the Irish dramatic tradition are seen clearly in A Memory of Two Mondays.

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Works Cited Als, Hilton. 2017. Eugene O’Neill’s Vexing Outsiders. The New Yorker, April 10. Bigsby, Christopher. 2009. Arthur Miller. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP. Dowling, Robert M. 2014. Eugene O’Neill: A Life in Four Acts. New Haven: Yale UP. Dowling, Robert M. 2016. ‘The Fact That I’m Irish’: Eugene O’Neill, US Playwright and Irish Revolutionary. Irish Times, April 27. Gelb, Arthur, and Barbara. 2000. O’Neill: Life with Monte Cristo. New York: Applause Books. Higgins, Michael. 2017. Reflections on the Irishness of Eugene O’Neill. Keynote Address. Eugene O’Neill Society Gala Dinner, International Eugene O’Neill Conference, National University of Galway, July 21. Isaac, Dan. 1993. Founding Father: O’Neill’s Correspondence with Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams. The Eugene O’Neill Review. 17:1 and 2. Martin, Matthew. 2007. Arthur Miller’s Dialogue with Ireland, in Enoch Brater, ed., Arthur Miller’s Global Theatre. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P. Merrill, Charles. 1993. Eugene O’Neill, World-Famous Dramatist, and Family Live in Abandoned Coast Guard Station on Cape Cod, in Mark W. Estrin, ed., Conversations with Eugene O’Neill. Jackson, MS: U of Mississippi P. Miller, Arthur. 1956. Concerning the Boom. International Theatre Annual 1, 85–88. Miller, Arthur. 1981. Eight Plays. New York: Garden City, NY: Nelson Doubleday. Miller, Arthur. 1987. Timebends. New York: Grove P. Miller, Arthur. 2010. A Memory of Two Mondays. London: Methuen Drama. O’Neill, Eugene. 1922. The Hairy Ape, Anna Christie, The First Man. New York: Boni and Liveright. O’Neill, Eugene. 1966. Long Day’s Journey Into Night. New Haven: Yale UP. O’Neill, Eugene. 1988. Selected Letters of Eugene O’Neill. Ed. Travis Bogard and Jackson Bryer. New Haven: Yale UP. Rossetti, Gina. 2006. Imagining the Primitive in Naturalist and Modernist Literature. Columbia, MO: U of Missouri P. Shaughnessy, Edward. 1988. Eugene O’Neill in Ireland. New York: Greenwood P. Shaughnessy, Edward. 2000. O’Neill’s African and Irish-Americans: Stereotypes or Faithful Realism, in Michael Manheim, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Eugene O’Neill. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Workers of the Writers’ Program. 1942. Theatre Research Series: James O’Neill. Vol. XX. Northern California: WPA.

CHAPTER 11

Before the Empty Bench: The Equivocal Motif of “Trial” in Arthur Miller’s Works Rupendra Guha Majumdar

Introduction In the drama of Arthur Miller, following close upon the turbulence of the last bombings of World War II, the seminal concept of a “trial” of the hero, in retrospect or as the immediate instance of urban tension, attains a parturient form on the American stage. This is especially so in the contexts of the far-reaching, anti-Semitic echoes of the Holocaust. In the foreground of the 1950s, the anxieties of Senator Joseph McCarthy about subversive political activities on home soil summoned Miller and his peers into the nets of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), which saw them as anathema, if not dangerous, for the nation. The trying experiments with the freedom of speech for the individual under duress in an ostensibly egalitarian society provides the setting for Miller to lay the foundations of his dramatic contestation. He places his belief succinctly before all: “A great drama is a great jurisprudence. Balance is all…” because, in the end “…justice and necessity are utterly face

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to face” (Miller 1996, 194); the dramatic form and essence of a proverbial trial, critically engaged to the present, becomes necessarily realized on the modern stage. Robert A. Ferguson in The Trial in American Life observes that legal trials in courts “formalize” or provide a characteristic form to conflicts that feature pertinently in a society’s imagination and demand an expedient verdict. He sees the paradox of “those who conduct a trial [being] always on trial themselves” (Ferguson 2007, xii). This implies the often ironic progress of crime and punishment and the necessity of polemical truths or confessions to “compete with rival narratives for the same discursive space,” a scenario that a play or courtroom session could well manifest. Trials can also constitute vital, interwoven narratives “for what is not said in them” (13), as in detracting subterfuges, till the moment when the objective truth is drawn out before the court. Our discussion of Miller will incorporate some of these facets. Many of the early twentiethcentury polemical discourses and trials in America, including those of antiSemitism and the Black Freedom movement, acquire a powerful intertextual form and significance in modernism. They find a common voice in writers like Hannah Arendt, Franz Kafka, Jean Paul Sartre, and Arthur Miller—thinkers who effectively address contemporary concerns in a new language of critical enquiry. They hope to resolve the impasse of modern plots of the alienation of heroes who are poised between the two extreme verdicts of “guilty” or “not guilty,” or curious variations inbetween. Miller’s ongoing working texts of the trial motif attains a significant place in this vista of pan-Atlantic self-reliance in the terms of modern intertextual narratives. In his adaptation of Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People (1950), for instance, Miller registers the existential significance of the “trial” paradigm as a cleansing exercise that constitutes both a paradoxical measure of despair as well as the regeneration of identity. This paper examines Miller’s involvement, at objective and subjective levels, with the concept of the trial as a trope in American life and drama at a critical turning point in the history of modern western drama. Miller’s Autobiography, Essays, and the Trial Motif In Timebends: A Life, Miller recounts the contrary influences he imbibed from an articulate mother and a word-depleted but worthy father (“I so wished to be like him”) in his career as a radical American writer, paradoxically combining in himself and his fictional protagonists both streams of

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failure and strength, confidence and confusion, while facing the unforeseen trials of his milieu. It becomes apparent that those uncharted journeys before “fate’s capriciousness” (19) proved more relevant for survival than the immediate taste of success even when mythic heroes like Uncle Ben and Dave Singleman are eulogized as paradigms. Miller attributes his inner strength and resourcefulness of negotiating trials in his adult life to his austere upbringing in Brooklyn and Harlem. He recounts without bitterness the experience of witnessing his father’s conscious swerving away from proffered affluence in an albeit risky business deal with a big cinema company before the Depression: “Had he taken the risk, I would have been raised in Los Angles, never learned what I did in Central Park and the streets of Harlem and Brooklyn, been spared the coming Depression, and arrived no doubt at a different personality” (20). Similarly, his grandfather’s timely despair before quitting their motherland, Poland, ensured Miller’s fortuitous survival as a playwright to a ripe age, the former having bypassed the gas chambers of Auschwitz and Treblinka on his way to Ellis Island. It was the fate of facing the trials of dispossession and insecurity through two generations that made Miller the formidable thinker and playwright he was. Likewise, in Timebends, he speaks of the valuable lesson of “how not to belong” (42), considering several times a month, to run away from an oppressive civilization, like the juvenile but daring orphans of Twain and Dickens. It was a form of “suicide,” he admits, “designed to punish everybody with an idea I had picked up from Oliver Twist” (47), and “the truculent desire for freedom of Huck Finn seemed not a fantastic and literary creation but a realistic version of my own state of mind” (48). In his decision to quit from society or life itself, the hero exercises his freedom of choice to accept or reject the laws of the land and thereby the awkward questioning of his acts of omission or commission that legal or existential trials may force him to be answerable to. To reject the authority of a “court” to judge one can be an act of freedom however transient, as apparent in the case of John Proctor. Willy Loman’s sons discuss their father’s apparently botched attempts at suicide without any idea about the roots of that impulse. Miller admits in the mythic vein of the Wandering Jew the shared telos that “one was really an orphan.” But he refutes the idea that “dispossession” was a classic, Jewish prerogative only: “Escape and denial are hardly the monopoly of the Jews” (63). The lessons of such trials were surely universal.

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Beyond Timebends , Miller constantly has meditated on the trial motif in his collected essays on theater and culture, his film scripts (The Misfits, Everybody Wins ) and his fiction (Focus ), keeping the polemical themes of anti-Semitism on one side and McCarthyism, the Depression, and post-World War II issues on the other. The range of the motif becomes consistently evident in the wake of Miller’s involvement not only with contemporary Broadway, Hollywood, and political activism, but also in his influence on later American dramatists, such as August Wilson, Sam Shepard, and Tony Kushner, and actor-directors in China, like Ying Ruocheng, who put on the first Chinese production of Death of a Salesman in Beijing in 1983. Miller observes in “The Nazi Trials and the German Heart” (1964) a characteristic invisibility of profile: “As in all murder trials, the accused were becoming more and more abstract” (62). It was the question of the perpetrator of a world mass crime scenario like the Holocaust, vanishing into the jungle of the modern city in order to escape the consequences of his evil doing. There was the need to break this nefarious camouflage. Miller locates very clearly a “free floating violence” (62) in Nazi eyes, as a residue of past inhumanity. Thus, their mythic violence and desecration become abstracted from the framework of the trial for murder that would establish their guilt in a new world order. Miller, somewhat like Arendt, splits the image of the Nazi fugitive from the underground into two: the one who cannot be easily identified in his true colors of evil, even in the net of law and the other who also cannot prevail as the demonic executioner of Hitler’s Final Solution. These two seemingly different images of the Nazi, the invidious and the innocuous, complement the ambivalent existence of the culpable American protagonist, like Joe Keller or Willy Loman, who alternate between the masks of sinner and savior in their uncharted trials. The accountability of a Nazi fugitive like Eichmann is induced by the relentless pursuit of the Zionist vigilante, not complemented by the absconder’s own conscience to surrender. Such resistance to punishment is also complicated, as Miller observes in the context of the Nuremberg Nazi trials. One side of the German national psyche condones the acts of genocide: “the human mind does in fact accept one kind of murder” during a great war when the nation empathizes with the killers rather than the victims and refrains from condemnation of the murderers “lest they have to condemn themselves” (2000, 67). Miller sees this as a “complicity” with murder universally, beyond the trial, even though

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every man does not use his own hands in the act, he has nonetheless profited simply “by having survived” the Holocaust or the war with only the finger of conscience pointing sharply to him, as in the case of Joe Keller. Miller estimates the value of such guilt transforming into responsibility in his essay “Guilt and Incident at Vichy” and in doing so, opening “the way to a vision that leaped the pit of remorse and helplessness” (2000, 73). Miller, like Arendt, complicates the issue of the expiation of guilt. Quentin the lawyer speaks his existential monologue: “Underlying it all, I see now, there was a presumption. That I was moving on an upward path toward some elevation, where – God knows what – I would be justified, or even condemned – a verdict anyway” (After the Fall , 3). Arthur Miller, Hannah Arendt, and the Trial Motif Fugitives of European totalitarianism, like Hannah Arendt, who were witnesses of global crimes, could retrospectively testify to the violence they survived, and record their trial-narratives in a language of attrition through multiple genres. Intertextually, these cogent reflections form the context of a discourse that Miller often took recourse to and dramatized, holding bourgeois protagonists to account for their unwarranted actions. To Miller, as a second-generation Polish-American Jew and president of International P.E.N. in the 1960s, issues of universal justice drew his attention consistently throughout his entire life. His speculations correspond with contemporary trial-reports on the themes of power and evil, the best known of which is Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963). In fact, in 1964, Miller himself covered the Frankfurt hearing of the Auschwitz trials for the New York Herald Tribune and his one-act play, Incident at Vichy, was written three weeks after his return from Europe the same year. Maxim Shrayer has observed that this play not only is “discussed in the context of Miller’s response to the Eichmann trial and its coverage by Hannah Arendt in Jerusalem,” but that it goes deeper into a position of social responsibility to “dramatically complicate Arendt’s thesis” (Shrayer). Miller’s protagonists, when trapped at urban crossroads, seem to subscribe to a similar “banality of evil” in their quest for identity, as Arendt signifies in her attempts to relate opposed realities. Prince Von Berg early in the play can be said to epitomize the very concept, as he believes he has never condoned the Nazi agenda in his life

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so far. But at the conclusion of the play he comes to realize that his failure to effectively confront Nazi determinism has unduly led to his supporting their evil. It is a tragic realization that eventually prompts him to make his final sacrifice by offering his own exit-pass to Leduc, the Jew on death row. Joe Keller in All My Sons, justifies his passing of defective airplane parts in his factory during the war for the love of his son Chris’s future even though it meant the death of other sons of the soil. The vision of such an inadvertent progression of evil, mutually nurtured in the midst of a conscious society, is shared by both Miller and Arendt. Miller’s “Holocaust” plays—Vichy and Fall —reflect Arendt’s view of promises made and the act of forgiveness of past lapses, ideas that Quentin, Von Berg and Leduc are compelled to confront in their individual crises and trials. Miller shares with Arendt not only a common Semitic background but also the intellectual attitude to reinterpret that ethnic predicament through contemporary, universal tropes and the semantics of forgiveness. Arendt’s meditations on the discourse of anti-Semitism and the sensational judicial trials of Alfred Dreyfus, Adolf Eichmann and Julius Rosenberg all have a bearing upon the “loss of authority” (Arendt 1968, 95) that both Arendt and Miller address in their works. With the rise of the Protestant Reformation, the universal values and judgments of the Catholic Church, subject to constant and extensive questioning, resulted in a severe loss of authority, a loss that is exemplified in the problematic disjunction of fathers and sons in Miller’s Death of a Salesman and All My Sons, as well as in his autobiography, Timebends: A Life. The anxiety about the missing patriarch in one’s existence acquires an acute relevance during the Depression years when, as Miller observes, “it was a bad time for fathers,” who were “no longer leaders” and “at a loss what to do with themselves” (2000, 127). Willy Loman’s job of a traveling salesman, along with his peripatetic inclinations, distance him from his sons when they need him most, and subsequently, he cannot make up for those lost years. His “loss of authority” is pronounced in Biff’s poignant accusation, “You fake! You phony little fake!” (95) and in his own realization that “nothing’s planted” (96) in the soil of his familial garden. John Proctor in The Crucible, as head of his household and a respectable citizen-farmer of Salem, forfeits his authority before tragically coming to terms with its significance in the course of his life’s trial. With the loss of authority and of tradition, Arendt laments in Between Past and Future (1968), that “we have lost the thread which safely guided us through the vast realm of the past.” Ironically, this “thread” which

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connected identities, was also the “chain” that fettered “each successive generation to a predetermined condition” of the past (94). We discover this paradoxical significance of the “chain” also in Miller, whose protagonists are often caught between endorsing the Adamic frontier tradition of unhampered progress as well as the need to be liberated from its severe romanticism. Willy’s persistent attempts to retrieve that melodious legacy of his father’s flute prove painfully futile. Arendt underscores the fact that “depth cannot be reached by man except through remembrance” (94). It implies a focusing, affected by the hero’s self-righteous egotism, as in Willy, and ironically confirms his culpability in the trial he seeks to endure. The “Trial” Motif in Miller’s Plays All My Sons (1947) The dramatic objective of Miller’s All My Sons, set in the wake of World War II, “to bring a man into the direct path of the consequences he has wrought,” according to Christopher Bigsby (Introduction, All My Sons, 2000, x), is synonymous with the theme of a judicial trial—a father’s misdirected love for his son elicits the evil outcome that the former is made to pay for through an extended enquiry and final judgment of a deathsentence pronounced by his own conscience. Miller shares Arendt’s perspective of the “banality of evil” in portraying protagonists like Joe Keller, who is not basically “aberrant” or anti-social and whose lapse is only a projection of the solipsistic opportunism of his peers in American culture. As Bigsby observes, Keller “represents a pragmatism that coexisted with the language and fact of idealism in wartime America” (Introduction, xii). Miller too sees the play as “an unveiling of what I believed everybody knew but nobody publicly said” during the war (1996, 134). This cryptic attitude underscores a subversion of the Kierkegaardian notion of the teleological suspension of the ethical when Kate tells her son Chris about the crime of filicide: “God does not let a son be killed by his father” (68). Here the idea of Abraham’s trial of will to slay his son and his triumph of faith, in Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, is given an ironic twist because here the mother’s faith in her son’s return to life by the mercy of God after the trial is undermined by the extended fact that he has already been sacrificed at the hands of the father and any further expectation of divine mercy is merely wishful thinking that cannot yield any fruit.

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A second trial is therefore imperative in the court of nature’s theater. Ironically it is the evidence of the dead Larry’s erstwhile letter, addressed to Ann, that drives home Joe’s culpability. In an Ibsen-like vein, Miller dismantles the dubious “pragmatism” (Introduction, xii) that Keller and his wife adopt socially to continue life with a masquerade of innocence. Bigsby sees each character confronting within himself or herself “a debate about contending values, of competing versions of the moral world and reality” (Introduction, xxi). For Miller, it is the resolution of these individual debates, or “rival narratives” (Ferguson 13) of an isolated trial, that from the beginning of their family crisis have contended for a dominant position. The alienated sons and father in the play do not reach the kind of reconciliation that Willy Loman and his son Biff do in Salesman at the penultimate hour, but in both cases of a trial of values, the final act of judgment and punishment is through the hero himself, brought to the critical point of a verdict of “guilty,” the point where he cannot walk away from the center anymore. The forgotten case of the dead pilots is exhumed unofficially with the return of Ann and her lawyer-brother, George, who is keen to prove the innocence of his father. But Keller not only flaunts his legal pardon, he recreates its erstwhile narrative as a theatrical charade: “Kid, walkin’ down the street that day I was guilty as hell. Except I wasn’t and there was a court paper in my pocket to prove I wasn’t!” (30). Thus, a “beast” was absolved at the expense of innocence. Keller’s anomalous, Janus headed identity, both “guilty” and “not guilty,” simultaneously draws him into the domain of existential self-questioning (or the absurd) of the kind that the protagonists of Kierkegaard, Sartre and Kafka elicit. In the World War II setting, Keller’s duality reflects that of an indigenous Adolf Eichmann’s as a post-Nazi fugitive under wraps who metamorphoses into a benevolent, old, citizen in Argentina. Miller functions intertextually in his engagement of the trope of the trial from a sociological and legal significance toward an existential one. Accordingly, Keller voices a language of solipsism with a holier-than-thou graciousness; Sue resents “living next door to the Holy Family” (45). Keller patronizes the fallen Deever in the latter’s ignominy of public “excommunication,” commiserating with Ann’s alienated notion of the father she’s been made to despise: “Well, he ain’t my sweetheart, but you gotta forgive” (31). Kate adds to the deluded subtext of their lives, clinging to a fantasy about her

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martyred son Larry—“He’s not dead, so there’s no argument!” (32)— and thus refusing to release her son Chris to marry Ann, believing that that truism would carry the Keller family beyond the sins of filicide in the likelihood of a Christian trial. For Kate Keller, Anne’s new liaison with Chris is untenable if Larry is to be kept alive in the former’s imagination, a wishful thinking she clings to in order to absolve Joe from the grievous sin of filicide. But in this extended trial that features the living and the dead, Nature prompts the hero to pass judgment on his own realized wrongdoing. Death of a Salesman (1949) In Death of a Salesman, the precarious and guilt-ridden status of Willy as father reaches a climax at the end of Act 2, which witnesses simultaneously the total loss of his paternal authority and the critical point of apparent, existential selfhood: “I am Willy Loman and you are Biff Loman” (105). Willy, far from successfully duplicating in his sons the grand formulaic pattern of success of a Ben or a Bernard or a Dave Singleman, inversely induces Biff to break out of a constantly imposed ideal. The capitulation of their venture into an unknown frontier, ironically liberates both of them by default! The outcome implies a demystification of a borrowed American Dream through a “consistency of arguing and reasoning, of the process of argumentation in its sheer formality” as trial (Arendt 1968, 96). This could be Biff’s answer to the unpardonable anomaly in America pointed out by Hannah Arendt in a letter to her mentor Karl Jaspers in January 1946: “the fundamental contradiction of this country is the coexistence of political freedom and social servitude” (quoted in Research on Phenomenology 1996, 3). Biff breaks out more confidently than Uncle Ben did on his venture to darkest Africa: “Why am I trying to become what I don’t want to be? … making a contemptuous, begging fool of myself, when all I want is out there, waiting for me the minute I say I know who I am!” (105). Paradoxically, at the very moment Biff asks his father to let go of the hegemony of his “phony dream” (106), their reunion becomes possible. Hope arrives at the end of a trial conducted with the protagonist on the dock. As in Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night , the play shows the need to account for the consequences of choices and to accept personal guilt. Willy guiltily inquires about Biff: “Why did he return home? I would like to know.” Linda has no answer (5). Biff confides in Happy:

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“Everything I say there’s a twist of mockery on his face” (10). Linda asks Biff: “Why are you so hateful to each other?” (38). The critical impasse rooted in the past disables the duo from advancing, yet serves as the necessary cause of the ensuing drama. Father and son become both accuser and accused in a trial of attrition. The intense tension that persists between them when together is a mystery to Linda since she has no clue about Willy’s freewheeling concupiscence, but that double-edged animosity has its roots in the breach of faith and embarrassing exposure that took place once in a Boston hotel, the guilt of which can be expiated only through a trial-oriented confession and possible forgiveness. The very presence of Biff before Willy constitutes, metaphorically, a finger of accusation about a mythic betrayal: “Why do you always insult me?” (45) Willy expostulates, though Biff has not uttered a single word of affront. In the self-assessment of guilt brought up before the virtual court of the play, Willy selectively and unconsciously assembles the chronology of events that feature in his subversion of Biff’s faith, calling up unbiased witnesses like Bernard from the past to record what he has to say to the “court.” Willy demands to know the “secret” behind Biff’s flunking math just before graduation and refusing to make up for it later when it would have been easy enough to do. “Why? Why! Bernard, that question has been trailing me like a ghost for the last fifteen years. He flunked the subject, and laid down and died like a hammer hit him!” (71). Willy’s rhetorical questions primed in guilt, ring out with the intense passion of a Dostoevsky protagonist set in the framework of a modern-day murder mystery. The trial concerning Willy’s guilt and alienation reaches a denouement in the restaurant scene when he is invited to dinner by his two sons to celebrate a new chapter in their lives. The subtext, however, points to a very different agenda than feasting. Instead of turning a new page of hope and joy, the protagonist’s contrite memory reaches its most critical and shameful moment of exposure: young Biff’s chance discovery of his father’s tryst with a merry coquette in his hotel room in Boston during one of the latter’s business rounds. Miller brilliantly juxtaposes two simultaneous betrayals within a single expressionistic frame—Willy’s hedonistic interlude and his two sons’ vile neglect of him in the restaurant—and thereby clinches the much-delayed judgment of Willy’s guilt in the trial he had initiated in his mind. Both betrayals involve soliciting the sirens of the city, easy, laughter-wielding women who are propitiated to counter

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loneliness and foster a travesty of love. Willy’s guilt is symbolically exorcized through the unseemly, disrespectful “celebration” in the restaurant on whose toilet floor he is finally discovered, crouching on his knees, babbling, his sons having “left with the chippies” (95). He epitomizes the image of schande or disgrace that German, non-heroic tragedy of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries related to bourgeois protagonists like that in Georg Buchner’s Woyzeck. Biff also admits to Linda that he himself is “the scum of the earth” (99). Both father and son hit an existential rock bottom before they awake from their respective delusions of righteousness. Willy Loman’s flashback in time is a psychic, volitional trial to unearth the significance of his original sin. He eventually realizes he is neither a super-salesman like Dave Singleman, nor is he the impecunious “dime a dozen” that Biff claims to be in self-abnegation. Willy becomes the impassioned but contrite hero stripped of his redundant baggage of heroic myths. A trial reconfigures memory towards a point of painful selfawareness: “I’m just what I am, that’s all” (106), as Biff says of himself. Willy concedes to that existential verdict of his son as his own. Arendt observes that since the Enlightenment the engendering of faith through the skepticism of both believers and nonbelievers of religious truth— “Since Kierkegaard doubt has been carried into belief” (Arendt 1968, 94)—has been an essential fact of modernity, and this is especially true for both Christianity and Judaism. Miller, like Arendt, examines the lapses of authority in line with fundamental human relationships and the notion of universal responsibility over the question of a possible renewal of lost faith. Unlike in Joe Keller’s trial, Willy’s self-examination moves beyond the nihilism of guilt and concludes tragically in a miraculous renewal of trust when he realizes that Biff, his son, despite his failures, really loves him. It is an awareness, he believes, that is worth dying for at the dawn of a new cycle of life. The Crucible (1953) Miller’s The Crucible, more than any of his other plays, is built critically around the trope of a trial, allegorically and autobiographically relating two parallel historical moments of religious and political “witch-hunting” in American civilization—seventeenth-century Puritan Salem and twentieth-century, post-World War II Washington, DC. In Timebends : A Life, Miller observes the “profoundly... ritualistic” (331)

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nature of the HUAC hearings in Washington to which he had been summoned in order to reveal, as expected, names of comrades in the Communist Party of America. As in seventeenth-century Salem, the main point of the hearings in Washington was that the accused make a public confession of his unholy alliance and a condemnation of his confederates in the same breath. But both Miller and the semi-fictional Proctor refuse to oblige the expectations of their respective antagonists in the trials concerned. The link between the two far-flung dimensions was the resultant guilt and shame in believing in a system of governance, infernal or Russian, that orthodox Christianity or Capitalism did not sanction at that point. Attitudes that were merely anti-establishment earlier are seen as treasonous in the current regime. Moreover, in the isolated but self-assured, Puritan farmer John Proctor, Miller discovers the tragic hero he had been “searching for for a long time” (342), someone whose assertion of will in an arbitrary charade of a theological trial could be seen as a universal affirmation of human values. From the beginning of the play, Miller indicates the incongruous composition of the “court” in Salem, where the likes of a gullible Mary Warren and a scheming Abigail, past and present housemaids of the Proctor household, have gone to feature formally in the cause of Puritan justice. Abigail’s biased expulsion from their service in the past motivates her to take revenge through that very court where she has in fact gained her wicked “authority.” Elizabeth prompts her husband to visit that court to expose the corrupt charges made on innocent village neighbors, not realizing that thereby John and she herself would be drawn into the vortex of tragic accountability. Ironically, within their household the Proctor’s marriage is on an unsteady footing, with memories of John’s past liaison with Abigail rising to the surface of their domestic life, and therein hangs the reality of their own implicit trial. Proctor finds his wife’s continuing suspicions unwarranted and refuses to be put on the dock: “Spare me … I cannot speak but I am doubted, every moment judged for lies as though I come into a court when I come into this house” (55). In his desire to negotiate an unsavory, disturbing past, Proctor—like Quentin in After the Fall —employs the imagery of a trial in a court he wishes to be liberated from: “You will not judge me more, Elizabeth” (54). Indeed, his selfrighteousness is unexpectedly compromised in a real conjugal trial that holds their future happiness at stake.

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Several of Miller’s heroes live double lives in transit, as did Adolf Eichmann in Argentina. Like Procter, the protagonists Joe Keller, Willy Loman, Lyman Felt (of The Ride Down Mt. Morgan), et al., consciously or unconsciously, cover the tracks of their past indulgences, lapses, violations, till they are caught up in a larger, macrocosmic self-questioning by Nature. They justify their duplicity in several ways, but Proctor, for one, does not offer any excuse. He tries in vain to bury his past in his and his wife’s mind and finally damns himself in court for his conscious lechery with the “whore” who had tempted him, in order to counter her—and the court’s—larger, evil machinations. But Elizabeth, much more than the other wives of Miller’s heroes— for example, Linda Loman and Kate Keller—is involved in the course and outcome of her husband’s trial before man and God, yet she assures John that she will not “judge” (55) him because she believes that the only living person that can do so in his existential predicament is he himself: “the magistrate sits in your heart that judges you” (55). However, her intuitive anticipation regarding the retribution of a larger evil for the entire clan is almost choric: “Oh, the noose, the noose is up!” Her love for John and tolerance for his lapses does not preclude the conditions of penitence and forgiveness that he must undergo, following upon his necessary, public condemnation of Abigail in her true identity, “a whore.” But before that he must snuff out all expectations of hedonistic love the latter has of him based on their past unholy tryst: “She has an arrow in you yet, John Proctor, and you know it well” (62). Thus John Proctor’s trial of conscience at home becomes vitally linked with the larger trial of dealing with the party of the Devil in Salem within a tragic framework that is augmented by Miller’s own life experience of political abuse. Ironically, it is Elizabeth’s predicament of being falsely implicated as a witch by Abigail that triggers John’s reaction to the true significance of his own limitations and choices of freedom. In the conclusion of Act 3, Abigail’s convincingly orchestrated charade of an omniscient Satanic presence in the court manifested through herself and her gang of fickle village girls, including Mary Warren, makes a travesty of the sovereignty of the court and the trial concerning religious integrity it has presumed to conduct. Falling for her consummate act, Mary is terrified to the extent that she charges Proctor for conspiring with her to “overthrow the court.” Judge Danforth’s following implication of Proctor being “combined with anti-Christ” pricks the latter enough to echo the apparent profanity of Nietzsche’s proclamation, “God is dead” (119); and charges the court as sanctioning the

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raising of “a whore” at the expense of “Heaven” (120). Reverend John Hale at this stage openly sides with Proctor in his trial, unequivocally disowning his own role in the current trial of moral values in Salem: “I denounce these proceedings, I quit the court” (120). Proctor chooses to take the difficult path, tearing his previously signed confession after acknowledging his sin. He thus passes judgment on himself and on those who would judge him in his final trial, by ringing the doom of his “good name” (111) and cheating the Puritan court of an exemplary exhibit of their triumphant and invidious power. Incident at Vichy (1964) Miller in Incident at Vichy reveals a contrary side to the ideas of collective guilt and complicity in evil, following the Holocaust and later the nefarious hearings of the McCarthy inquiry committee. The play shows the case of the Austrian nobleman, Prince Von Berg, sharing the same space with Jews gathered at random for an impromptu Nazi trial leading to deportation to a concentration camp if the Semitic ethnic identity is proved. At his own cost, he saves the life of the Jew, Leduc, placed on death row. Miller observes that he realized that the true story behind the play was “a counterpoint to many happenings” (2000, 70) around him in the past decade. Thus, a trial would be geared to provide the ground for metamorphosis but paradoxically had possibilities of both duplicity and transcendence to exist. The “innocent” share the common guilt of the German nation, a guilt that needs to be exorcized ritualistically at a primal level. But for Miller the dramatic resource of a trial provides the means of rejuvenation. In “Guilt and The Incident at Vichy” (1965), Miller recalls the true story of sacrifice that a Gentile underwent for a Jew, exchanging life for death in a Nazi stronghold engaged in operation of the “Final Solution.” This World War II incident was the inspiration behind his own play about sacrifice. The lifesaving “pass” in Miller’s imagination acquires the symbolic significance of a unique favor and the debt of gratitude that goes with it. Miller, in the above essay, elicits an allegory of necessary compensation from the narrative told him in 1942: “… death when it takes those we have loved, always hands us a pass”, a permit that conditionally sanctions our existence at someone else’s expense. He qualifies this idea of debt the living owe to the dispossessed, the dead and “the wronged” (2000, 73).

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Reacting to the skepticism of the contemporary audience regarding the trials of the bourgeois hero and the genre of tragedy, Miller in “Tragedy and the Common Man” asserts that “the common man is as apt a subject for tragedy in its highest sense as kings were” (5) and the basis of tragedy, ancient or modern, was that of an uphill, often self-annihilating trial: “tragedy is the consequence of a man’s total compulsion to evaluate himself justly” (5). Intuitively anticipating the dialectical theater of Bertolt Brecht1 on the modern European stage, Miller expresses his fascination for dialectic: “the beauty in the tension of opposites” which he saw everywhere after the death of fascism, sensing the arrival of a “new form.” He becomes familiar, as he observes in Timebends , with the works of Albert Camus (156, 502), Jean Paul Sartre (156), and Giradoux (179), and meets Theodor Adorno in Frankfurt (160)—writers who address the acute trial of the Outsider facing his existential struggle. Existential Antecedents to Miller’s “Trials”: Sartre and Kafka Indeed, Miller’s lifelong engagement with the theatrical motif of the trial in his works follows a trajectory that crosses beyond the literal and legal connotations of the word toward the expressionistic, the existential, and at times, the absurd within a modernist milieu. Thereby we discover his intertextual affinities with a wide range of existential and modernist thinkers—Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Kafka, Sartre, and Camus, among others whose related concerns this limited essay does not have the scope to address. In the context of modern existentialism, Jean Paul Sartre’s anxieties regarding freedom and justice in society find intertextual links with Arthur Miller’s development of the motif of trial in his drama. In the former’s play, The Condemned of Altona (1959) and in his essay, Anti-Semite and Jew (1944), Sartre shares with Miller and Kafka an existentialist perspective regarding the ubiquitous Jew’s contemporary predicament, which is rationalized in terms of the familiar destiny of Joseph K., of Kafka’s The Trial: “Like the hero of that novel,” Sartre observes, “the Jew is engaged in a long trial. He does not know his judge, scarcely even his lawyers; he does not know what he is charged with, yet he knows he is considered guilty” (63), and all his efforts to alleviate his condition in the “interminable” trial prove futile. The protagonists of The Condemned of Altona similarly admit the responsibility of their fate in an abstract court of law where the judge is the past and the verdict is without mercy.

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In Miller’s self-appointed “psychological role of mediator between the Jews and America” (Miller [1987]1993, 82), he realizes the existential implication of the heady responsibility, besides his alignment with other marginalized groups, like Blacks and left-wing artists. He measures his own dilemmas at times through a sense of the absurd like that of Quentin—“the pointless litigation of existence before an empty bench” with “no judge in sight.” (After the Fall, 1964, 3) Miller questions himself in Timebends : “I have often asked myself is any of this absurdity not only in my life but in anyone else’s?” (11) Miller’s concern about the easy unaccountability of crimes against humanity and his question, “How was it possible in a civilized society?” (1964c, 66) posed in the terms of a trial gone awry endorses the existential idiom of the Kafkaesque. Orson Welles’s Hollywood film adaptation of Kafka’s, The Trial (1962) in the Film Noir genre, along with Hannah Arendt’s report, Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) and her essay, “Franz Kafka: A Revaluation” (1944), establish an intertextual context for Miller’s Holocaust plays of 1964 After the Fall and Incident at Vichy and much later, Broken Glass (1994). Welles’s magnum opus about the curious fate of Kafka’s Joseph K., provides a corollary perspective to his close identification with the reaction against anti-Semitism that Miller had initiated with his novel Focus. Interestingly, Welles had seriously campaigned in 1945 for the book’s dissemination, attaching single copies of it with his letters about anti-Semitism to thirty Congressmen who, in turn, appreciated his efforts to “alleviate the prejudice and hate in our country”2 for both Jews and Blacks. When Miller visited Prague in 1968, he viewed the city not only as the birthplace of Kafka but also that of “the absurd in its subtlest expression”— namely the Russian Occupation of Czechoslovakia, which to him seemed like “some sort of gas which makes one both laugh and cry” (2000, 171). In Kafka’s oeuvre, the existential perspective of a trial is further supplemented in his unfinished, posthumously published novel, Amerika (1924), especially its concluding chapter, “The Nature Theatre of Oklahoma,” where its Jewish hero, Karl Rossman, strangely enough, chooses to write his name as “Negro” (244) in an application form for a new job in the United States. In absurd terms, this anomaly compounds the existential debate about the marginalized Jew and Black sharing the same fate in America in the twentieth century. The ideal solution to Miller appears in the form of the faceless stranger behind the true story that inspired him to write Incident at Vichy: the character of Von Berg, a gentile, who could consider exchanging his life for that of a Jew on a Nazi death row;

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that blank face appears “amid the jumble of emotions,” observes Miller, “surrounding the Negro in this country and the whole unsettled moral problem of the destruction of the Jews in Europe” (2000, 70). Kafka’s own skeptical reaction to the Austro-Hungarian bureaucracy prior to World War I, manifested in The Trial, finds correspondence with Miller’s critique of McCarthyism thirty years later. Miller parodies the totalitarian issue in two satirical prose pieces (both published in Echoes Down the Corridor, 2000) endorsing the absurd. The first, “A Modest Proposal for the Pacification of the Public Temper” (1954), is obviously in reaction to the Communist witch hunts of the 1950s. In it, he satirizes the expediency of branding the state’s “Conceptual Traitors” (CT) in the Puritan style of Hawthorne’s heroine, Hester Prynne, in The Scarlet Letter, wearing her alphabet A prominently on her chest to leave no public doubt about her profane social status. Such branding, Miller sardonically suggests, is for all those who “have been summoned to testify in a trial before any Committee of Congress and have failed to testify to the expected satisfaction” (41). The printed emblem “WECT” (“We Employ a Conceptual Traitor”), thus displayed clearly, provides the necessary proof of guilt at the trial to everyone concerned. The second piece, “Get it Right: Private Executions” (1992) is poised between Arendt’s antipathy to capital punishment and Kafka’s macabre short story, “In the Penal Colony” (1914), which like his novel The Trial was supposedly inspired by the polemical, anti-Semitic, Dreyfus Trial in France in the years 1894–1906. Here, Miller refracts the black humor of Kafka’s grim story and envisions public executions as ‘profitable’ entertainment with ringside seats at $300; sopranos inaugurating the event with the American national anthem; and the condemned, in the electric chair, proudly believing such a spectacle an achievement worth dying for! Miller’s recourse to the absurdist, carnivalesque, and existential idiom of conceptualizing future trials in America, achieves a Kafkaesque or Orwellian levity of imagination that he hardly used on the stage, but which someone like Erwin Piscator, also a victim of the HUAC in 1951, may have inducted into his political, epic theater if their paths ever had crossed.

Conclusion Miller’s lifelong engagement with the metaphor of the trial in his works finds a metaphorical embodiment at the end of The Misfits (1961) in the

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furious epic battle between Gay, a modern cowboy hero, and the wild stallion he is bent on mastering barehanded as a final proof of his classic, masculine power. The scene revives memories of Hemingway’s novella The Old Man and the Sea, the story of the old fisherman Santiago’s unworldly encounter with the giant marlin that he finally captures, single handed, and then forfeits to sharks on his return home. In Gay’s case, he advances to an existential frontier of being, partly through Roslyn’s chastisement of his conscience and the barbaric fighter in him: “You’re only living when you can watch something die!” (118). After capturing the mustang, to the others’ amazement he cuts the rope and frees him. His ego gives way to a higher ethical ideal of responsibility. As with Willy Loman, John Proctor, and Quentin in different degrees, Gay pronounces judgment upon himself in this epiphanic trial of conscience: “They smeared it all over with blood, turned it into shit and money like everything else. You know that. I know that … Find some other way to know you’re alive…” (129), unconsciously condoning Roslyn’s charge and echoing Chris Keller’s similar feelings about the bloody “loot” of the ill-gained profits of war in All My Sons. Roslyn acknowledges Gay’s metamorphosis, attributing her newfound strength to his love for her, proven in the paradoxical freeing of the prize stallion he had subdued. Roslyn exclaims: “Gay – for a minute you made me not afraid … For the first time” (131). The almost ritualistic and powerful drama of fighting, subduing, and releasing the wild stallion symbolizes a cathartic trial of liberation to ensure a new leap of faith, as Kierkegaard may have visualized for a meaningful Christian existence. Gay frees himself by freeing the horse and reaches his peace from his knowledge of Roslyn as the woman she really is: “it feels like I have touched the whole world” (132). We are once more reminded of Hemingway’s intrepid Santiago who had also acknowledged the cycle of heroically capturing the fugitive marlin against all conceivable odds and then honorably forfeiting its flesh to the hostile elements at the climax of his triumph. In the end of his oeuvre, Miller makes an open, existential proposition about the trials of life. They constitute a comprehensive mix of images of judge, prosecutor, defense lawyer, and client inside the head of an ubiquitous hero reflecting the view of Elizabeth Procter, who tells her husband John in The Crucible, “The magistrate sits in your heart that judges you” (55). We find in Miller’s Everybody Wins (1984)—his only original screenplay since The Misfits—an entire New England town, Highbury, enmeshed in a dubious trial which threatens to “bring the whole thing crashing down,” (102) public, police, judiciary. Yet finally, no one is held guilty; everybody wins! Euphemistically, the idea of individuated guilt of clan

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or hero disappears in a flash of wishful thinking. But power and equality are strange bedfellows. In Miller’s last play, Finishing the Picture (2004), he relives the misalliance that The Misfits had projected at both autobiographical and artistic levels four decades earlier. Miller had once corrected the thematic interpretation of Incident at Vichy from the idea, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” to “Am I my own keeper?” (2000, 75). His conclusive insight into life is not so much that everybody wins, as much as the birth of every man, Gentile or Jew or Negro constitutes “the rebirth of a claim to justice” (2000, 70). It is a realization that demands, as Miller puts it in the same essay on Vichy, neither drama nor proof to make it known to us, reviving the tenuous image of a protagonist standing anxiously before an empty bench with no judge in sight.

Notes 1. In Timebends, he declares that he “knew nothing of Brecht or of any other theory of theatrical distancing” during that time (194). 2. Orson Welles stated in a letter to Congressman J. W. Tremble, dated April 1, 1946: “A young American boy, Arthur Miller, has recently written a wonderful novel about the cancer of race hate …” Tremble’s letter to Welles is one of thirty similar letters from U.S. Congressmen located in the “Orson Welles MSS Correspondences” in the Lilly Library of Indiana University and dated from April 1 to April 24, 1946. This information is cited by James N. Gilmore and Sidney Gotlieb in their edited book, Orson Welles on Focus: Texts and Contexts (Bloomington: Indian University Press, 2018).

Works Cited Arendt, Hannah. 1944. Franz Kafka: A Revaluation. Partisan Review XI:4, 412– 22. Arendt, Hannah. 1968. Between Past and Future. New York: Viking Press. Arendt, Hannah. 2006. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Penguin. Balakian, Janet. 1997. The Holocaust, the Depression and McCarthyism: Miller in the Sixties, in Christopher Bigsby, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Arthur Miller. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 115–38. Bernasconi, Robert. 1996. The Double Face of the Political and the Social: Hannah Arendt and America’s Racial Divisions. Research in Phenomenology 26, 3–24. Bigsby, Christopher. 1997. The Cambridge Companion to Arthur Miller. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1–9. Broch, Hermann. 1945/1972. The Death of Virgil. New York: Penguin.

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Camus, Albert. 1979. Absurdity and Suicide, in The Myth of Sisyphus. New York: Penguin, 11–51. Cargill, Howard. 2011. The Fate of the Pariah: Arendt and Kafka’s “Nature Theatre of Oklahoma”. College Literature 38:1, 1–14. Contat, Michel, and John Shepley. 1999. The Intellectual as Jew: Sartre Against McCarthyism: An Unfinished Play. October 87, 47–62. Ferguson, Robert A. 2007. The Trial in American Life. Chicago and London: University of Chicago P. Kafka, Franz. 1999. Amerika. New York: Vintage P. Kafka, Franz. 2007. The Penal Colony. Reprinted in Kafka: Selected Stories, 35– 58. New York: W. W. Norton. Miller, Arthur. 1947. All My Sons. Introduction by Christopher Bigsby. New York: Penguin, 2000. Miller, Arthur. 1949a. Death of a Salesman. Introduction by Christopher Bigsby. New York: Penguin. Miller, Arthur. 1949b. Tragedy and the Common Man. Reprinted in Theater Essays, 3–7. Miller, Arthur. 1954. A Modest Proposal for the Pacification of the Public Temper. Reprinted in Echoes, 38–46. Miller, Arthur. 1961. The Misfits. New York: Viking P. Miller, Arthur. 1964a. After the Fall. New York: Penguin. Miller, Arthur. 1964b. Incident at Vichy. New York: Penguin. Miller, Arthur. 1964c. The Nazi Trials and the German Heart. Reprinted in Echoes, 62–68. Miller, Arthur. 1965. Guilt and Incident at Vichy. Reprinted in Echoes, 69–75. Miller, Arthur. 1973. Miracles. Reprinted in Echoes, 126–38. Miller, Arthur. 1978. The Sin of Power. Reprinted in Echoes, 170–74. Miller, Arthur. 1987/1993. Timebends: A Life. London: Minerva Books. Miller, Arthur. 1990. Everybody Wins: A Screenplay. New York: Grove Weidenfeld. Miller, Arthur. 1992. Get It Right: Private Executions. Reprinted in Echoes, 237– 39. Miller, Arthur. 1996. The Theater Essays of Arthur Miller. Ed. Robert A. Martin and Steven Centola. New York: DeCapo Press. Miller, Arthur. 2000. Echoes Down the Corridor: Critical Essays: 1944–2000. Ed. Steven Centola. New York: Penguin. Sartre, Jean Paul. 1944. Anti-Semite and Jew. Trans. George J. Becker. New York: Schocken. Shrayer, Maxim. 2015. https://www.tablemagcom/jewel-arts-and-culture/ theater-and-dance/191217/arthur-miller-forgotten-masterpiece.

CHAPTER 12

Reaganism in The Ride Down Mt. Morgan Thiago Russo

To look at the 1980s is to look at a decade that is fundamental in understanding not only what neoliberalism has accomplished in the economic and social sphere, but how it has profoundly altered the structure of thought and the character (Sennett 2011) of individuals. The 1970s marked the beginning of a historical era in which the discourse on democracy, public values, and the common good came crashing to the ground. First, Margaret Thatcher in Great Britain, and then Ronald Reagan in the United States—both hardline advocates of market fundamentalism—announced that there was no such thing as society and that government was the problem, not the solution. The neoliberal policies implemented by Ronald Reagan in the 1980s defended laissez-faire capitalism almost theologically and were responsible for cuts in social programs, defense of the business class, deregulation of the financial sector, and a government reduced domestically but aggressive in external policies—measures that became known as “Reaganomics” (Klein 2007). Social conservatism, backed at the time by the Republican Party and its neoliberal policies, used individualism and materialism, this time injected

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with extreme optimism and idyllic rhetoric. While Jimmy Carter recognized the disappointment of his fellow countrymen and tried to revive the communal essence of America with his Malaise/Crisis of Confidence Speech (1979), Reagan, instead of lamenting self-centeredness of Americans, celebrated it as a virtue. However, the discrepancy between the mythological rhetoric of Reagan and the real situation was flagrant. Purdy, commenting on the social conservatism of the Reagan administration, argues that Former Hollywood actor Ronald Reagan took advantage of the ‘American Freedom’ speech to criticize social and economic programs that were targeted for workers and poor citizens, arguing that a country’s prosperity depended on corporate health […]. Successive cuts in social programs aimed at a needy population walked alongside internationally negotiated free trade agreements to abolish restrictions on the expansion of international markets. (58)

The so-called “trickle-down economics” imposed by Reagan propelled the transaction to “hypercapitalism” (Kleinknecht, xi), a period in which self-interest and profit-seeking excused a strong undermining of human values. The sense of community, in which collective issues had been central, gave way to an era of empowered corporations that took their mission to the political stage and virtually disenfranchised people and their participation in the public life. The American theater did not go unscathed in this process since Reaganism spread in several areas of life. The commercial theater largely reflected the optimism and prosperity voiced by the Great Communicator, Ronald Reagan, in his speeches about the economic and social situation of the country. On the stages were spectacles that favored superstructure productions involving special effects, big settings, songs, and dances.1 Such spectacles and the underlying culture from which they arose tended to exclude from public debate important social issues like poverty, whether on or off stage (Woods 1993). However, looking at the historiography of the American theater, especially when “brushing history against the grain,” using Walter Benjamin’s aphorism, is a revealing exercise. There were playwrights who sought to expose the dynamics behind the optimistic veil of Reagan’s speech. Arthur Miller, David Mamet, Paula Vogel, and Tony Kushner2 remained attentive to the farcical condition of that decade and to the impacts later felt.

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In order to make a critique of what was on and off the stages, Arthur Miller, always attuned to the issues of his time, resorted to a familiar theme: the American Dream. Faith in individualism and in materialism emerged again as a fierce primary social force in the Reagan era, filled with a rhetoric of boundless dreams. “Make America Great Again,” the actorturned-politician’s slogan recently reused by President Donald Trump, showed optimism and confidence in the possibility of slipping free from limitations altogether. This was, after all, a time in which the political orthodoxy absolved individuals of responsibility to and for society. In the words of political theorist Sheldon Wolin (217), the Reagan era was marked by “a political culture in which lying was merely one component in a larger pattern wherein untruthfulness, make-believe, and actuality were seamlessly woven.” This is exactly what fuels the plot of The Ride Down Mt. Morgan, where Miller masterfully entwines this content with a fascinating formal structure. Miller described Mt. Morgan as “a fluid play which moves in and out of the character’s memory, a bit like ‘Salesman’. It’s very idiotic, almost farcical at times, but it is riding over a tragic tide” (Bigsby, 368). Initially rejected by the Manhattan Theatre Club and by the Seattle Repertory Theatre, Mt. Morgan—on which Miller worked for more than a decade—premiered in 1991 in London. Its U.S. premiere occurred at Williamstown in 1996 and Miller revised it for Broadway in 1998. This essay will analyze how Reaganism is present in the play and how Miller’s critique is articulated in both form and content, pointing out some differences between the two versions, but it is with the revised version—which Miller called definitive—that the analysis is made. The play is a farcical tragedy in which Miller depicts the Reagan era’s imperial self in 1980s conservative America as a perversion of the American Dream, where delusions of self-importance, personal prosperity, and an excessive optimism blurred perceptions of reality. The play is, in every sense, a diagnosis and a prognosis of the political culture not only of the Reagan years but also of what that culture later would become. Structurally speaking, the play follows Lyman Felt’s mind through scenes in real time as well as in memory and dream. At times the play harkens to the past through flashbacks (the memories invade the present in order to explain it, as in After the Fall ) while Lyman’s dreams/fantasies, attempts to escape the present, end up revealing the psychic structure of the Reagan era. Such formal elements are in direct connection with Miller’s content: the difficulty of the neoliberal individual in distinguishing reality

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from fantasy. This was also a feature of Reagan himself, as Miller once explained: For years now commentators have had lots of fun with Reagan’s inability to distinguish movies he had seen from actual events in which he had participated, but in this as in so much else he was representative of a common perplexity when so much of a person’s experience comes at him through the acting art. (2001, 3)

Miller’s critique of the acting art in politics—the idea of the politician as a mere performer—has been remarkable. In his 2001 Jefferson Lecture, On Politics and the Art of Acting , delivered before an audience of 2500 people, including many members of the political elite, Miller ridiculed politicians but more specifically Ronald Reagan, Al Gore, and George W. Bush, seeing them as actors, desperate to present themselves differently from who they were. Some days before the lecture, the playwright said “Reagan perfected the Stanislavsky method by making a complete fusion of his performance with his personality. He didn’t even know he was acting” (Gussow, 19). A notorious fact observed by Jackie Calmes, a journalist from The New York Times , is that no president made as much use of prime-time as Reagan: Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy interrupted prime-time shows to tell Americans from the Oval Office why they had ordered troops to desegregate schools. Bill Clinton broke into programming from behind the presidential desk three times in a month to explain military actions in Haiti and Iraq. Ronald Reagan, the telegenic former actor, set the record for evening addresses from the Oval Office desk: 29 over two terms. Even the untelegenic Richard M. Nixon spoke 22 times from the Oval Office in just five years, the last time to resign in disgrace. (July 10, 2013)

Reagan made television a strong tool for the propagation of his government and its neoliberal ideology. Dutch, as the former White House actor was nicknamed, knew how to make use of television for his own benefit, including lying in a nationwide broadcast on the Iran–Contra affair.3 Miller understood well the farcical and tragic nature of such an act and transformed his perception into a dramaturgic critique.

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Mt. Morgan opens with Lyman in the hospital in a state of semiconsciousness after his accident, and Reaganism is present from the play’s opening line, which shows important clues about the 1980s’ male essence: […] We have a lot of … not material … yes, material … to cover this afternoon, so please take your seats and cross your legs. No-no … (Laughs weakly) … Not cross your legs, just take your seats. (1)

The word material can be understood not only as subjects to be covered but as an ironic reference to materialism (highly praised during the Reagan era) as well as the celebration of masculinity4 when he asks women not to cross their legs. Lyman’s second line is this: I want you to look at the whole economic system as one enormous tit. […] So the job of the individual is to get a good place in line for a suck. […] Which gives us the word ‘suckcess’. Or… or not. (1)

Besides its explicit masculinity, this line is also a powerful metaphor that condenses the motto of the conservatism endorsed by the actor who was in the White House from 1981 to 1989: the condemnation of people using the State as a safety net. Lyman’s profoundly anti-Roosevelt rhetoric is also the ultimate neoliberal ideology espoused by Reagan, and Miller presents it by using humor with the word “tit ” in reference to people who like to suck things out of the State, therefore having their “suckcess.”5 Lyman finds out his nurse, Logan, is black, and he tells her “I’ve got the biggest training program of any company for you guys. And the first one that ever put them in sales” (2). This not only states that the insertion of black people into higher levels of the labor force is made by Lyman’s company but asserts that it is up to the businessman (one of Reagan’s most privileged figures) and not to the State to play this role. This ironic line finds a wider explanation in Purdy’s words that between the 1980s and 1990s, one-third of the black population was below the poverty line, with no resources available for education and other public services, professional assistance, training, and opportunity (2011, 265).6 Lyman’s two wives, Theo and Leah meet, as well his daughter Bessie from his first marriage to Theo. The three women demand an explanation regarding Lyman’s double life, which is presented through flashbacks.

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Lyman continuously exposes the quintessence of the 1980s man by effusively expressing his engagement with feelings: Feeling is all I believe in, Leah (…) any decent thing I’ve ever done was out of feeling, and every lousy thing I’m ashamed of came from careful thinking […] I’m going to wrestle down one fear at a time till I’ve dumped them all and I am a free man. (20–21)

The latter line goes beyond an assertion of his masculinity or the motivational cliché of a superhero, and his fearlessness means having no limits. The following speech could have been Lyman’s, but it was uttered by Reagan in his 1987 State of the Union Address: The calendar can’t measure America because we were meant to be an endless experiment in freedom, with no limit to our reaches, no boundaries to what we can do, no end point to our hopes. (Qtd. in Conley, 359)

This almost megalomaniacal statement reflects the ideology at the core of neoliberalism (unfettered capitalism) and indeed seems to have been spoken by Miller’s protagonist. When Lyman is unmasked regarding his two marriages, he tries to justify his own actions as Joe Keller, from All My Sons , did. He knows about the social contract but does not see his culpability in actions that could harm other people. Lyman states Boredom is a form of deception, isn’t it. And deception has become like my Nazi, my worst horror—I want nothing now but to wear my own face on my face every day till the day I die. (24)

Engaging with his own desires and privileging the ethics of freedom over that of responsibility, Lyman is, after all, a symptomatic result of neoliberalism (unfettered capitalism), whose faith in the philosophy of the laissez-faire had him focusing on personal gain even at the cost of cheating. He acts pretty much like Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, an emperor of himself, and also resembles Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby and his own self-creation. Lyman’s father, a character present on stage in the first version, but only mentioned in the revised version, is another Reaganesque element in the play. In the first version, he carries around a black cloth, symbolizing death, and pretty much resembles Ben from Salesman (1949), who was always highlighting the importance and advantage of personal success within the system. In both versions of Mt. Morgan, Lyman’s father

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is evoked as a way to reinforce the importance of work and optimism: “I keep thinking of my father – how connected he was to life; couldn’t wait to open the store every morning and happily count the pickles, rearrange the olive barrels” (26). Lyman’s line displays a nostalgic optimist (which was also the basis of the Reagan conservative rhetoric of “Make America Great Again,”) encompassing what Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman named Retrotopia. Lyman’s trajectory is also symbolic of what success meant in the Reagan era and in current neoliberal times: Lyman was a poet who became a businessman; Reagan, who had once been an actor and President of the Screen Actors Guild, became the spokesperson of businessmen and GE, besides being an informer for the FBI.7 Miller’s use of irony throughout the play is also an element of critique of Reaganism. In a flashback (scene two, act one), Leah expresses her desire to end her pregnancy, and Lyman opposes it by saying that Benjamin, a name chosen by him in honor of his family, “has a horoscope, stars and planets; he has a future!” (29). The idea of a horoscope inserted by Miller reminds us that Reagan himself consulted a Californian astrologer regarding key White House decisions, though the actor denied it had any influence on his policies (Roberts). Another ironic reference to Reaganism and conservatism is made through Miller’s reference to the theme of abortion, a big issue for conservatives still today, and with an explicit reference to Reagan in the first version. Lyman tries to convince his second wife, Leah, to keep the baby and she says, “Don’t, Lyme, it’s impossible. (Obviously changing the subject – with pain.) Listen, up here they’re all saying Reagan’s just about won it.” Lyman replies, “Well, he’ll probably be good for business. The knuckleheads usually are.—You know if you do this it’s going to change between us” (220). Another very subtle and apparently trivial dialogue between Lyman and Leah also refers to one of the biggest issues of the 1980s Reagan era, deeply explored by Tony Kushner in Angels in America.8 After making love for the first time with Lyman, Leah asks, “You are really healthy, aren’t you?” and Lyman replies, “You mean for my age? Yes.” Leah, in turn, says “I did not mean that!” (p. 41). Although Miller does not state what the subject is, it is a reference to the anxieties of AIDS, which had in the 1980s a boom as never before. The question whether people were “healthy” or “clean” (a term commonly used in the gay jargon) was and still is common whenever someone wants to know about a person’s HIV status.

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In another key flashback in act one, Lyman and Leah are talking about Lyman’s work, and their conversation reveals another fundamental aspect of the Reagan era that finds connection with Salesman. Lyman says: Well, insurance is basically comical, isn’t it? – at least pathetic. […] You’re buying immortality, aren’t you? – reaching out of your grave to pay the bills and remind people of your life? It’s poetry. The soul was once immortal, now we’ve got an insurance policy. (42–43)

Lyman’s insight reflects the commodification of life itself and reminds us of Willy Loman, the salesman who had to kill himself to secure the future of his family, leaving his life insurance money for them. Willy’s life was guided by the pursuit of money and by his attempt to remain a salesman despite his age, which ironically had turned him into a disposable material in the very system he had defended all his life. There are critics who compare Willy Loman and Lyman Felt in two respects: first, looking at associations that can be made from their names—Loman is an inferior man, small, disposable, a low man and Lyman is a cheating man, who lies, a lie man; second, Lyman is a Willy Loman who managed to achieve the American Dream of economic success but remained hollow as a person. Both characters are self-made men; however, the difference between them can be found in the words of Christopher Lasch: In earlier times the self-made man took pride in his judgement of character and probity; today he scans the faces of his fellows not so as to evaluate their credit but in order to gauge their susceptibility to his own blandishments. He practices the classic arts of seduction with the same indifference to moral niceties, hoping to win your heart while picking your pocket. (53)

Lyman has indeed used his seduction skills not only through his manliness but also through his money. The common point between Lyman and Loman is that the success and happiness promised by the dream, in the end, are shown to be problematic, since both characters have a tragic fall at the end of the plays. In the opposite direction of Beckett’s iconic characters Vladimir and Estragon from Waiting for Godot, Lyman does not wait. Moved by selfcentered desire and materialism, propagandized as virtues by the neoliberalism, he also is moved by anguish in search of something that promises

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to fulfill him, which does not happen. His endless appetite for consuming desires, promoted by the American Dream, made Lyman a slave of his own wishes. Lyman, in his imperialistic urge, has it all: money, cars, a company, children, and two wives (commodities). Yet, despite his illusion of fulfillment, he has to confront himself and his actions and painfully realize that his idyllic situation, to which his pursuit of the American Dream apparently has brought him, presents itself more like a nightmare. Even though he is dealing with this contradiction, Lyman does not realize that the anguish that surrounds him arises because he is engrossed in and defends a culture that intends to be “an endless experiment in freedom” (as President Reagan called it in his 1987 State of the Union Address, see Conley) and which has become a love affair with consumerism. From a historical standpoint, Chris Hedges revealed how the United States systematically began shifting in the second half of the 1970s from a production empire to a consumer empire, which explains not only the decline of the American empire but also the illusion of freedom through slavery—or rather, voluntary servitude, in the terms of Étienne de La Boétie—to consumerism. In this sense, it is time to invoke one of Zygmunt Bauman’s most frighteningly provocative questions: Does ethics have a chance in a world of consumerism? (2009). Responsibility and the sense of guilt become difficult in a society that has individualism and victory at its core. The sense of guilt, one of Miller’s central themes in many of his plays, appears in connection to Reaganism, too. In a remarkable moment (act 2, scene 2), Lyman faces the lion on a safari and defeats him by saying that he is a happy man and that “I don’t sacrifice one day to things I don’t believe in—including monogamy [...] Maybe lions don’t eat happy people” (85). Despite the comic effect of Lyman’s pathetically trying to convince the lion of his bravery, masculinity, and polygamy through optimism, Miller actually is exposing the absurd logic behind Lyman’s words; he is a man who believes himself invincible. In another meaningful scene, trying again to justify his actions as expressions of his feelings, Lyman tells his second wife, Leah, about a day he took her to see his former wife, Theo, whom he claimed he had divorced: I was dancing the high wire on the edge of the world … finally risking everything to find myself! Strolling with you past my house, the autumn breeze, the lingerie in the Madison Avenue shop windows, the swish of

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… wasn’t it a taffeta skirt you wore? … and my new baby coiled in your belly?—I’d beaten guilt forever! (93)

Lyman transforms his act of deceit into a poetic image in which he celebrates the autumn breeze, the shop windows of Madison Avenue (one of the most expensive streets in New York with designer stores and advertising agencies), and his masculinity with his baby, not theirs, as if Leah were only an incubator. Lyman’s speech, in addition to presenting a strong symbol of the Reagan era cultural philosophy that “Greed is Good,” also invokes the idyllic and poetic image of the “autumn breeze,” which resembles Reagan’s equally idyllic and poetic rhetoric of “It’s morning again in America”.9 Lyman feels he has beaten guilt not only because of his engagement with his desires but also through the rationalization of betrayal as something natural that justifies deceit. Lyman says: A man can be faithful to himself or to other people – but not to both. At least not happily. We all know this, but it’s immoral to admit that the first law of life is betrayal; why else did those rabbis pick Cain and Abel to open the Bible? (66)

Lyman’s deliberate exclusion of the social contract is again a symptom of the neoliberal ideology. He feels pride and a certain heroism, but in his mind, it does not stem only from his manly skills toward females. He became business partners with Leah by colonizing her even regarding commercial issues. He claims to have saved her from “all those lonely postcoital showerbaths, and the pointless pillow talk and the boxes of heartless condoms” (108). Simultaneously, he also accuses Theo of benefitting from his love: You tolerated me because you loved me, dear, but wasn’t it also the good life I gave you? – Well, what’s wrong with that? Aren’t women people? Don’t people love comfort and power? I don’t understand the disgrace here! (109)

For Lyman, relationship is an extension of capitalism; it functions as a kind of commercial transaction, a relation of mutual exploitation, by the ethics of pleasure and profit, in which happiness is the demigod that rules. The argument reaches exhaustion when the optimistic rhetoric no longer can be sustained. All strategies collapse, and the sadness that invades the characters comes from the fact that everyone had to “ride

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down Mt. Morgan.” The descent, absolutely rugged, forced everyone to analyze not only what each one is (or believes himself or herself to be) individually but their relationship with one another. It is in this sense that Miller, with his Humanistic Judaism, reveals his deeper Levinasian side, which is summed up in the axiom that the “ethics of responsibility must precede that of freedom.” Reaganism inaugurated an era that ran in the opposite direction of what Miller stands for. Reagan defended little or no regulatory interference in the domestic life of the country but also sought to expand America’s dominance abroad fighting communism. Similarly, and symbolically speaking, Lyman also defended no regulation in his private life (living a life of endless freedom) and expanded his dominance on the outside, by choosing to have two wives who ultimately became his commodities. The play ends with Lyman questioning the nurse, Logan, about what she and her family talk about when they are fishing, and she says they talk about shoes. Lyman gets emotional and starts crying. The play ends with a slight difference between the two versions. In the first Lyman begins to cry but holds the cry and faces the suffering that awaits him: “He begins to weep, but quickly catches himself and with a contained suffering stares ahead” (278). In the second version, the mood is of optimism: “He begins to weep, but quickly catches himself. Now learn loneliness. But cheerfully. Because you earned it, Kid, all by yourself. Yes. You have found Lyman at last! So … cheer up!” (116). His assertion to cheer up reveals once again the attempt to deny the consequences of his act. Reflecting about Lyman, Miller in an interview with Christopher Bigsby said: I have to consent to him […] and condemn him. He is telling a truth. There is a reptillian mind in us that predates all morality. It is the force of nature … And that is immune to education. It’s what we rely on for a creative act but which has to be disciplined or we will destroy each other. (379)

Lyman’s individual acts, as in all Miller plays, have a deep impact in the collective sphere, and cause-and-effect unravel, in ways similar to those in the plays of his model, Henrik Ibsen. Using Lyman Felt’s self-serving delusions to depict the irresponsible folly of American culture in the last decades of the twentieth century, Miller shows us how memory and fantasy are interwoven with denials of

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the past and delusions about the future. Such behavior, which is tragic but at the same time farcical, reminds us of one of Marx’s most famous aphorisms, that history repeats itself, “first as tragedy, and then as farce.” This, by the way, was also a path Miller took by writing first tragedies and in later plays something close to farce. Mt. Morgan is Miller’s portrayal of the absurdity and moral emptiness of America’s love of individualism, and its lethal effects on the collective sphere. The play resonates even more strongly today in an era in which neoliberalism has reemerged triumphant as yet again a model of tough-minded, pragmatic values and rational action in a world bequeathed to us by the actor who occupied the White House in the 1980s.

Notes 1. When Ronald Reagan was elected in 1981, he immediately ordered that the NEA (National Endowment for the Arts ) grants to small—read leftist—theaters be abolished. Reagan’s antidemocratic measure was only the beginning of a series of backlashes against progressive and leftist ideas. 2. The playwrights mentioned fiercely critiqued the Reagan era with SpeedThe-Plow (1988), by Mamet; The Oldest Profession (2004), by Vogel; and Angels in America (1991), by Kushner. 3. Reagan’s administration proceeded to violate the law by covertly supplying weapons to Iran and, in further violation, diverted some of the profits derived from the arms sale to the Nicaraguan “Contras,” despite a congressional restriction on such assistance (Wolin, 271). 4. The Reagan era rekindled the status of superheroes and they embodied some of the precepts of Reaganism—through virility, bravery and masculinity—all of them transformed into several movie productions such as Rambo, Terminator, Die Hard and RoboCop. Hollywood was another big propagator of Reaganism through movies. 5. Reagan frequently mentioned a minor case of welfare fraud to criticize the efficiency of the government by citing the “Welfare Queen”. The woman named Linda Taylor, according to him, used 80 names, 30 addresses and 15 telephone numbers to collect food stamps. Four decades later, however, it was discovered that Reagan’s shameless racial demagoguery was actually a minor case of fraud, which he used to demonize government efficiency and to highlight how the private sector would take better care of things. 6. The original passage is in Portuguese and has been translated by me. (…) um terço da população negra ficou abaixo da linha da pobreza, sem recursos suficientes para educação e outros serviços públicos, carente de emprego, treinamento e oportunidade (Purdy, 265).

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7. Ironically, in an early draft, Miller intended Lyman to be a character who had informed on his business partner, as Joe Keller in All My Sons (1947) did, but he decided not to add this feature in any of the versions of the play. 8. Tony Kushner. Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes. Part one: “Millennium Approaches”. New York: Theatre Communication Group, 1994. 9. Morning in America was a 1984 political campaign television commercial that became famous for its opening line, “It’s Morning Again in America”. The commercial featured common people going to work happily, getting married, and it also stated that they were going to buy new homes and that prosperity had finally come to the country.

References Bauman, Zygmunt. 2009. Does Ethics Have a Chance in a World of Consumers? Cambridge: Harvard UP. Bauman, Zygmunt. 2017. Retrotopia. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. Bigsby, Christopher. 2005. Arthur Miller: A Critical Study. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Calmes, Jackie. 2013. In Live From the Oval Office: A Backdrop of History Fades From TV. The New York Times, July 10. http://www.nytimes. com/2013/07/10/us/politics/the-fading-of-a-cultural-touchstone-the-ovaloffice-address.html. Accessed April 21, 2018. Conley, Richard. 2017. Historical Dictionary of the Reagan-Bush Era. 2nd Edition. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. De La Boétie, Étienne. 2008. The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude. Createspace Independent Pub. Gussow, Mel. 2002. Conversations with Miller. New York: Applause. Hedges, Chris. 2009. Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle. New York: Nation Books. Horowitz, Daniel, ed. 2005. Jimmy Carter and the Energy Crisis of the 1970s: The “Crisis of Confidence”. Speech of July 15, 1979: A Brief History with Documents. Boston: Bedford and St. Martin’s. Klein, Naomi. 2007. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. New York: Henry Holt & Company. Kleinknecht, William. 2009. The Man Who Sold the World: Ronald Reagan and the Betrayal of Main Street America. New York: Public Affairs. Lasch, Christopher. 1991. The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations. New York: W. W. Norton. Lévinas, Emmanuel. 1996. Basic Philosophical Writings. Adriaan Peperzak, ed. Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP.

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Marx, Karl, and Daniel De Leon. 1898. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. New York: International Pub. Co. Miller, Arthur. 1991a. The Ride Down Mt. Morgan. Reprinted in Arthur Miller: Collected Plays, 1987–2004: With Stage and Radio Plays of the 1930s & 40s, Tony Kushner, ed., New York: Library of America, 2015. [First Version]. Miller, Arthur. 1991b. The Ride Down Mt. Morgan. Revised edition. New York: Penguin Books, 1999. Centennial Edition, 2015. [Second Version]. Miller, Arthur. 2001. On Politics and the Art of Acting (The Jefferson Lecture). New York: Viking. Purdy, Sean. 2011. O Século Americano, in Leandro Karnal, ed., História dos Estados Unidos: Das Origens ao Século XXI. 3ª edição. São Paulo: Contexto. Roberts, Steven. 1988. White House Confirms Reagans Follow Astrology, Up to a Point. The New York Times, May 4. https://www.nytimes.com/1988/05/ 04/us/white-house-confirms-reagans-follow-astrology-up-to-a-point.html. Accessed June 16, 2018. Sennett, Richard. 2011. The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism. W. W. Norton. Wilentz, Sean. 2009. The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974–2008. New York: Harper Perennial. Wolin, Sheldon. 2008. Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP. Woods, Alan. 1993. Consuming the Past: Commercial American Theatre in the Reagan Era, in Ron Engle and Tice L. Miller, eds., The American Stage: Social and Economic Issues from the Colonial Period to the Present. New York: Cambridge UP, 252–66.

CHAPTER 13

Arthur Miller, Essayist Matthew Roudané

Arthur Miller remains one of the greatest playwrights of the contemporary stage. Indeed, from All My Sons (1947), Death of a Salesman (1949), and The Crucible (1953) through Broken Glass (1994), Resurrection Blues (2002), and the last play of an illustrious career, Finishing the Picture (2004), Miller’s plays spotlight selected public issues of a nation as reflected through the private anxieties of the individual. This public/private dialectic informs his entire oeuvre. His work continues to attract global audiences, for his plays have been staged throughout the world: United States, Canada, Great Britain, Spain, France, Italy, the former Soviet Union, India, Germany, Greece, Japan, Chile, China, Israel, and, among many others, South Korea. In honor of the 2015 Miller centennial, there was a year-long celebration of his work—in Costa Rica. Death of a Salesman, alone, “has been produced on six continents, in every country that has a Western theatrical tradition, and in some that have not” (Murphy, 106). Plays first staged decades ago remain as fresh today as when Death of a Salesman made its epochal debut on February 10, 1949, at the Morosco Theatre in New York City. And ten years after his death, in April 2015, The Library of America published Arthur

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Miller: Collected Plays, a three-volume collection containing what its editor, Tony Kushner, calls the “Early Plays” and “Radio Plays” from the 1930s and 1940s that had been previously unpublished. An indefatigable artist, Miller wrote dozens of plays, radio plays, screenplays, works of fiction, an autobiography, and nonfiction. Miller also wrote nearly 90 essays totaling nearly 900 pages. These essays, a significant number of which may be found in Robert A. Martin and Steven R. Centola’s The Theater Essays of Arthur Miller (1996), Centola’s Echoes Down the Corridor: Collected Essays, 1944–2000 (2000), Susan C. W. Abbotson’s Arthur Miller: Collected Essays (2016), and my own The Collected Essays of Arthur Miller (2015, 2017), reveal much about the playwright’s dramatic theory and practice, his political stance, and his moral optimism. Like his plays, these essays provide a clear idea of Miller’s worldview. In a sense, these essays give readers a portrait of two Arthur Millers: Arthur Miller as a playwright of genuine originality and immense theatrical power and Arthur Miller as an engaged and engaging public intellectual. Miller is nowhere better seen as that public intellectual than in his remarkable essays spanning nearly seven decades. As Robert A. Martin writes in his introduction to the original edition of The Theater Essays of Arthur Miller, it is through his essays that Miller speaks most directly of his social and dramatic convictions, and of his craftsmanship as a playwright; they comprise a body of critical commentary that is both distinguished and significant in the history of American drama and culture. Collectively, Arthur Miller’s essays on drama and the theater may well represent the single most important statement of critical principles to appear in England and America by a major playwright since the Prefaces of George Bernard Shaw. (Martin and Centola, xx)

Although Martin registered these observations in 1977, such remarks remain accurate today. Impressive as the sheer quantity of all this work may be, however, the quality of thought and vigorous yet clear style within Miller’s reflections stand out. His essays reveal his passionate commitment to social justice and human rights, his lifelong civic engagement with national and international politics, and his unwavering commitment to the various ways in which his theater and essays capture something of the sweep and play of a nation thinking, or not thinking, in front of itself. His essays cover a

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wide range of subjects, often defending people he felt were being treated unjustly: a famous dissident writer from abroad, a local teenager falsely accused of murder, even a president of the United States. As Tony Kushner remarked at Miller’s memorial service held at the Majestic Theater on May 9, 2005, in New York City: If Arthur’s Emersonian temperament saved him from the terrible mistakes of the doctrinaire left of his time, if his habits of scrupulousness and independence carried him into a healthy, immensely vital skepticism, if he refused partisanship, he also never ceased in reminding us of his indebtedness to, indeed affinity with, the left, with progressive thought. He never became a cynic, or a nihilist, or an ego-anarchist, or a despoiler of humanist utopian dreams, or a neocon. His great personal courage and his graceful confidence in his stature and talents made it unnecessary for him to cuddle up to power elites, allowed him to retain his sympathy, his affinity for the disinherited, the marginal and the powerless. He never wanted us to forget that without economic justice, the concept of social justice is an absurdity and, worse, a lie. (Kushner 2005)

Miller began writing journalistic essays while a student at the University of Michigan in the 1930s. However, it was his “Tragedy and the Common Man” (1949) article in The New York Times that signaled the beginning the playwright’s commitment to composing essays about the theater, politics, world affairs, and what it means to be a citizen in a postWorld War II cosmos. The moral seriousness embedded throughout his plays, we see, reveals itself in this early essay: Now, if it is true that tragedy is the consequence of a man’s total compulsion to evaluate himself justly, his destruction in the attempt posits a wrong or an evil in his environment. And this is precisely the morality of tragedy and its lesson. The discovery of the moral law, which is what the enlightenment of tragedy consists of, is not the discovery of some abstract or metaphysical quantity. (Martin and Centola, 5)

This from a 34-year-old whose Willy Loman first graced the stage but 17 days earlier. Miller would continue to write passionately about the theater and world affairs into the twenty-first century, with one of his last essays, “Subsidized Theatre” (2000), appearing when the playwright was the same age as Dave Singleman from Death of a Salesman—84 years old.

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An essayist of great range, Miller sometimes writes deeply personal works, such as “A Boy Grew in Brooklyn,” (1955) and “Thoughts on a Burned House” (1984). “Burned House,” for instance, provides readers with a better sense of the man behind the art, as when his daughter called Miller and Inge Morath in China with the shocking news that their home partially had gone up in flames. At other times he becomes a literary critic of sorts, as in “Tennessee Williams’s Legacy: An Eloquence and Amplitude of Feeling” (1984), “On Mark Twain’s Chapters from My Autobiography” (1996), and “Notes on Realism” (1999), an essay in which Miller is comfortably conversant with the theory and practice of realism in the context of his own dramaturgy and the works of other writers he discusses, including Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, Eugene O’Neill, J. M. Synge, T. S. Eliot, August Strindberg, Clifford Odets, Tennessee Williams, Anton Chekhov, Sean O’Casey, and a dramatist who had significant influence on him as a beginning playwright, Henrik Ibsen. Miller displays an impressive command of his fellow literary artists and the modernist temper in a prose style that is most accessible. A versatile writer, he sometimes displays humor, wit, and satire, as in “A Modest Proposal for the Pacification of the Public Temper” (1954), “Get It Right: Privatize Executions” (1992), and “Let’s Privatize Congress” (1995). As Susan C. W. Abbotson suggests, “Whether he is winking at us in playful humor or seriously addressing a concern in measured prose, Miller is always, as fellow playwright Edward Albee observed at Miller’s memorial service in 2005, ‘a writer who mattered. A lot’” (Abbotson, xxviii. See also Zinoman). His sense of the comedic informs these particular essays, even as he tackles serious subjects. At other times Miller emerges as an insightful political observer, as is evident in “The Battle of Chicago: From the Delegates’ Side” (1968), “The Limited Hang-Out: The Dialogues of Richard Nixon as a Drama of the Antihero” (1974), and “Clinton in Salem” (1998). These overtly political essays show a writer committed to democratic principles and ideals in a world fraught with opportunistic partisanship. As Steven R. Centola notes: Nothing escapes Miller’s piercing scrutiny as he discusses such subjects as the Holocaust, the Nazi War Crimes Trials, the Great Depression, the Cold War, McCarthyism, the Vietnam War, anti-Semitism, censorship, juvenile delinquency, the Watergate scandal, capital punishment, and the oppression of dissident writers in foreign countries, in an effort to understand the sources of human misery and conflict in the twentieth century. In

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one memorable essay after another, he captures the frenzied spirit of a schizophrenic age and records poignant observations on the political unrest and moral decline rampant in this century. (xiii–xiv)

Indeed, reading Miller as an essayist is, in a sense, reading an ongoing narrative history of modern America and, indeed, the modern world. This was a person who, after all, was born in 1915 during World War I, as a teenager watched as his parents—and the vast majority of Americans— lost most of their savings during the 1929 stock market crash, endured as a young man the Great Depression in the 1930s, and lived through the unprecedented horrors of the Holocaust and the advent of the nuclear age in the 1940s. A writer who eschewed the lure of Hollywood in the 1950s, he found himself at the very epicenter of that glamorous world when he married Marilyn Monroe in 1956, the very year he was brought before the House Un-American Activities Committee, refused to name names, and was convicted of contempt of Congress and sentenced to a one-month suspended jail time and fined $500. By the time Miller returned to Broadway with After the Fall , in 1964, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and Bob Dylan mesmerized Great Britain and the United States. Four years later, in 1968, he campaigned for Democratic presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy and, as a delegate from Roxbury, Connecticut, traveled to Chicago to witness the Democratic Party convention. He also visited the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia that year while his play The Price, which had premiered on Broadway in February, opened in Tel Aviv, Israel. Miller lived through, and protested against, the Vietnam War, lived through the Watergate scandal and watched a president resign in August of 1974. In the 1980s he directed Death of a Salesman in Beijing, China, and in the 1990s, while staging several new plays, he read and wrote about the Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky scandal. A major voice in contemporary theater and politics, he remained a significant force well into the early twentyfirst century. We can only imagine what Miller might say in a new essay today in the New York Times in the era of Trump. During the last decades of his long life, he emerged as the elder statesman of the American stage, and by the time he died on February 10, 2005, in Roxbury, Connecticut, Arthur Miller was rightfully regarded as one of America’s and, indeed, the world’s most inventive and exemplary literary figures. Many of the essays, multifoliate in their rich detail, dovetail with key themes long associated with the plays. The playwright seems entranced by

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the primal family unit and its combative yet loving members. In his exploration of the family, Miller dramatizes questions of heredity and genetics, biology and spirituality, social responsibility and individual duty—and the various ways in which family members psychologically spar with love and each other. This also allows Miller, as seen in “On Social Plays,” to explore the tragic: “It is a world in which the human being can live as a naturally political, naturally private, naturally engaged person, a world in which once again a true tragic victory may be scored” (Martin and Centola, 57–58). Miller consistently explores such subjects, although, as in his play After the Fall , for instance, they often take shape in the more personal quests on which his protagonists embark. Debates between the Self and the Other, often set in a social world of diminished possibilities, animate the stage. “For Arthur Miller,” as Abbotson observes: theater was ever a serious business, and his essays exhibit the strong social and theatrical commitment and conviction that fed his drama, guided his life, and allowed him to be a perceptive commentator on the twentieth century through which he lived for all but fifteen years, as well as a prescient voice for the century to come. To read his essays is not only to learn more about the plays and the playwright, but to also learn much about the societies in which we live, and the core of human nature itself. (xiii)

The myth of the American Dream, too, emerges as a central force in his work. This myth is implicit in his “Introduction to the Collected Plays” essay and in all of his plays. As Miller once explained to me: The American Dream is the largely unacknowledged screen in front of which all American writing plays itself out—the screen of the perfectibility of man. Whoever is writing in the United States is using the American Dream as an ironical pole of his story. Early on we all drink up certain claims to self-perfection that are absent in a large part of the world. People elsewhere tend to accept, to a far greater degree anyway, that the conditions of life are hostile to man’s pretensions. The American idea is different in the sense that we think that if we could only touch it, and live by it, there’s a natural order in favor of us; and that the object of a good life is to get connected with that live and abundant order. And this forms a context of irony for the kinds of stories we generally tell each other. After all, the stories of most significant literary works are of one or another kind of failure. And it’s a failure in relation to that screen, that backdrop. I think it pervades American writing, including my own. It’s there in The Crucible,

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in All My Sons , in After the Fall —an aspiration to an innocence that when defeated or frustrated can turn quite murderous, and we don’t know what to do with this perversity; it never seems to “fit” us. (Roudané, 361–62)

Beyond the myth of the America Dream are many other issues, such as free will, the truth, choice, betrayal, illusions, tragedy, and ethical accountability that come into play as his characters’ decisions affect both the public and private worlds they inhabit. Again, such issues often reveal themselves in Miller’s theater essays and prefaces as well. In both the plays and in essays, questions of justice—social, economic, legal, moral— underpin his works. In nearly all of the essays addressing his plays directly, Miller raises these issues, as in “Guilt and Incident at Vichy,” to cite but one example. Christopher Bigsby rightly suggests “that he has charted so accurately the shifting mood of his time has, indeed, made him a kind of moral historian to whom we can look for understanding of the chaos that so often seems to confront us” (xxxiv). In reading his theater essays, prefaces, and interviews, then, we get a revealing sense of the man and his theatrical and political ideals. For decades, Miller’s nonfiction contributions outlined many of the public issues of a nation as reflected through the private anxieties of the individual. The essays, in retrospect, stand as historical markers of a nation that prides itself on its exceptionalism while often overlooking its tragic flaws. The essays—vigorous in their plain style and perspicuity—are statements of Miller’s fundamental belief that the theater may promote social change within the polis and may promote a newfound self-awareness that so often eludes his fated heroes. And it is evident that Miller relished, above all, the civic dimension of the theater. As Miller once told me when I first met him in 1983: Another element in a great theater is that it tried to place aesthetics at the service of its civic function. See how the plays that we call great have made us somehow more civilized. The great Greek plays taught the western mind the law. They taught the western mind how to settle tribal conflicts without murdering each other. The great Shakespearean plays set up structures of order which became parts of our mental equipment. In the immense love stories, the wonderful comedies, there’s all sorts of color. But back of these great plays is a civic function. The author was really a poet-philosopher. A forty dollar [1983 price of a Broadway theater ticket] ticket brooks no philosophy, tends toward triviality. I believe that if we had some means

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of expanding our audience it would take awhile but playwrights would respond to that challenge. They’d smell blood out there! (Roudané, 374)

While Miller refers to many writers from the distant past as poetphilosophers, it is not too fanciful to suggest that he himself was one of the most influential poet-philosophers whose essays speak directly and gracefully to readers around the world. Acknowledgements An earlier version of this essay first appeared in Matthew Roudané, “Introduction,” in The Collected Essays of Arthur Miller (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), pp. xiii–xviii. I am grateful to the editors at Methuen Drama, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc., for permission to reprint this essay in a slightly updated and revised version here.

Works Cited Abbotson, Susan C. W., ed. 2016. Arthur Miller: Collected Essays. New York: Penguin Books. Bigsby, Christopher. 1995. Introduction to the Revised Edition, in Christopher Bigsby, ed., The Portable Arthur Miller. New York: Penguin Books. Centola, Steven R. 2000. A Note on the Selection, in Steven R. Centola, ed., Arthur Miller: Echoes Down the Corridor, Collected Essays 1944–2000. New York: Viking. Kushner, Tony. 2005. Arthur Miller: 1915–2005. The Politics of a Progressive Playwright. The Nation, May 26. Printed in the June 13 issue. https://www. thenation.com/article/kushner-miller/. Accessed November 15, 2018. Martin, Robert A., and Steven R. Centola, eds. 1996. The Theater Essays of Arthur Miller. New York: Da Capo Press. Murphy, Brenda. 1995. Miller: Death of a Salesman. Plays in Production Series. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Roudané, Matthew. 1987. An Interview with Arthur Miller, in Matthew Roudané, ed., Conversations with Arthur Miller. Jackson, MS, and London: U of Mississippi P. Zinoman, Jason. 2005. Remembering Arthur Miller, a Playwright of Conviction. The New York Times, May 10. https://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/10/ arts/remembering-arthur-miller-a-playwright-of-conviction.html. Accessed November 15, 2018.

CHAPTER 14

Viewing the Playwright Through a Different Lens: Miller’s Fiction and How It Connects to His Life and Drama Susan C. W. Abbotson

Although best known as a dramatist, Arthur Miller was also a skilled writer of fiction with a successful novel and three published volumes of stories. This is an aspect of his writing we hear too little about. There have been several studies that usefully consider the relationship between the fiction of Tennessee Williams and his drama, but little has been done with Miller’s prose. When the playwright published his first short story compendium in 1967, I Don’t Need You Anymore, he wrote an introduction in which he expressed surprise that the included stories seemed to fit together so well. Given they all came from the mind of the same writer, this is unsurprising. The entire body of Miller’s work throughout his 73year career from 1932 to 2005 express his central concerns about identity and commitment, guilt and responsibility, hope, and individual potential. Miller’s humanism is forefront in his prose, as it is in his drama, but he conveys this in different ways than in his plays, exploring alternate avenues and formulas. The fiction introduces us to characters who offer intriguing

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reflections on several of those dramatic creations we thought we knew so well. Paying closer attention to his fictional output suggests new ways of looking at and understanding Miller’s career as a whole. Miller began experimenting with short fiction as a teenager. Around age seventeen he created his first vision of a down-on-his-luck salesman in Alfred Schoenzeit in the story “In Memoriam.” The young, first-person narrator recalls being asked to carry samples for Schoenzeit on a sales round. Schoenzeit is doing so badly he has to ask his companion for their train fare. Treated disrespectfully by the buyers and selling nothing, Schoenzeit nonetheless becomes upbeat and chatty on their return home. When the narrator later hears that Schoenzeit is dead, his response is a “glowing smile within my soul” (Miller 1995, 111), suggesting a positive message in the man’s death. Little more than a character sketch, this story has echoes in both Death of a Salesman with its central protagonist, Willy Loman, and The American Clock, in which Miller has an embarrassed Moe Baum ask his son for train fare. Like Willy, Schoenzeit is an indifferent salesman crippled by uncertainty and the sense his profession does not really suit his nature. Schoenzeit masks his dejection with surface joviality but apparently chooses to end his life rather than continue such humiliation. The story itself does not suggest suicide, but a note on Miller’s manuscript says, “The real Schoenzeit of the story threw himself in front of an El train the day following the incident” (Miller 1995, 110). This is the first glimmer of Miller’s understanding of the tragedy of the common man: a thankfulness for the man’s release from a painful existence but also admiration for his struggle against defeat. The character’s name ironically means “beautiful time,” and Miller’s memory here is bitter-sweet and tinged with approbation. Miller’s first published story, “Ditchy,” came out in 1944 in Mayfair Magazine and offers another of Miller’s life-long themes: using empathy to guide one’s embrace of social responsibility. It tells the tale of a young man revisiting where he grew up near Central Park and going to the spot where he had been mugged for his roller skates at the age of seven. As he recalls this, he is confronted by a similar trio of thugs. Being older and wiser, he responds unexpectedly, befriending one of them, who calls himself Ditchy. In an empathetic leap, the narrator sees that Ditchy’s aggression is a symptom of a harsh upbringing and the unrelenting pain he gets from his mouth full of rotten teeth. Offering compassion rather

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than anger, the man takes Ditchy to a dentist, who pulls his teeth. The man then treats Ditchy to ice cream. We can see parallels between this story and Miller’s play of the same year, The Man Who Had All the Luck. Both utilize the format of an allegorical fable and deal with similar issues of fairness and compassion. Everything goes right for David Beeves, but he cannot accept his good fortune and nearly drives away his wife and child, while his gentle brother Amos, simply cannot catch a break. Miller asks us to empathize with both characters. He refuses to accept any simple notion of fate, always holding people responsible for how they engage with what they receive. In his portrait of the young thug, Ditchy, Miller shows his early interest in how people evolve and what motivates their choices, constantly realizing that individuals need to be treated with sympathy. Early on, Miller was aware that people left in isolation never do as well as those surrounded by a caring community. All of us need to find this balance between serving ourselves and others to live fully human lives. Disappointed by the failure of The Man Who Had All the Luck— Miller felt the production had not captured his intended fabulist tone— he turned again to fiction and penned his first and only full-length novel. Originally titled Some Shall Not Sleep, he eventually settled on the more succinct title, Focus , since the way in which people perceive others is essential to his narrative. Miller’s subject was a topic about which many people in the 1940s were strangely silent: the casual racism and antiSemitism running throughout American society. He depicts it as backed by mainstream religion, fueled by ignorant, disgruntled people seeking scapegoats for their own frustration, and permitted by the moral inertia of the masses, who want a quiet life. Its central character, the ambiguously named Lawrence Newman, is one such person, who during the novel is forced to confront his own racism and apathy and finally take a stand, allying himself with Finkelstein, the Jewish underdog of the neighborhood. Newman, like most of those around him, tends to stereotype those whom he sees as Other. His desire for the safety of a tightly ordered life makes him categorize everyone he meets to keep them safely in their place. He plays “trying to spot the Jew” on the train going to work, a skill on which his livelihood depends as a personnel officer in a deliberately bigoted corporation that does not hire Jews. He must weed out any employment candidates who might try to hide this detail. Despite his attraction to Gertrude Hart when she applies for a secretarial position,

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he refuses to employ her, suspecting she is Jewish from the shape of her nose. His suspicion turns out to be false. Newman makes judgments solely on appearance, so Miller turns the tables on him, having others judge him in the same way when he is forced to wear glasses that make him look Jewish. The subsequent disdain with which he begins to be treated, including a demotion at work, eventually brings home to Newman the injustice with which he has treated others. He quits his workplace and after meeting Gertrude once again, marries her. In a further ironic twist, we discover his new wife is more virulently anti-Semitic than he ever was, especially as he begins to discover the falseness of the stereotypes he had unquestioningly accepted as he and Finkelstein become friends. Stereotypes collapse when confronted by real individuals: “He could not break his gaze away and kept staring into Finkelstein’s eyes. It was like seeing Gertrude all new over Ardell’s desk that time, seeing her changed, human” (210). By the close, Newman has found an inner calm in his recognition of the perversity of racism. No longer feeling conflicted, he now allows himself to be seen as a Jew in solidarity with a neighbor he knows suffers from bigoted injustice. The theme of focusing and clear vision plays though the novel at many levels. Politically, Miller focuses his reader’s attention on a dark aspect of American culture, as he will continue to do in his dramas, challenging America to become a better place. More literally, the focus of Newman’s vision changes once he puts on his new glasses, which brings about a change in his life. Gertrude constantly changes in his vision: at first, he thinks she is Jewish, then an attractive Gentile, and finally an unpleasant and narrow-minded bigot. Her reaction to being refused a room at the hotel they go to on their honeymoon exposes the widening difference in their visions of the world: she sees nothing wrong in restricting clientele and just wants people to know she is not Jewish; Newman, however, is indeed becoming a “new man” who is morally outraged by such restrictive treatment. Ultimately, he and Finkelstein survive by joining forces and taking the social action Finkelstein has recommended all along to save America from a bigoted minority. The novel ends not in despair but in hope for the power of courage and solidarity against injustice. Newman’s recurring dream of the carousel and its underground machinery becomes a metaphor for the underground way in which prejudice is manufactured in America. Finkelstein explains how these feelings are being exacerbated by a small “gang of devils” who influence the

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masses (183). If not stopped, they will destroy American ideals. Finkelstein does not spend his time focusing on people like Fred (Newman’s racist neighbor) or Gertrude. His greater concern, like Miller’s, is with the morally deficient bystanders who are the majority and allow themselves to be sullied by their acceptance of a bigotry they know is morally wrong. Miller’s next play, All My Sons (1947) also deals with issues of complacency and myopic perspective, showing that the community’s embrace of successful businessman Joe Keller and his individualistic ideals cannot justify his self-serving actions in shipping faulty airplane parts, gambling with people’s lives, and ultimately causing the deaths of 21 pilots (as well as his own son Larry). Keller’s moral hypocrisy, like Newman’s, will be exposed as the play unfolds. While Focus is Miller’s only novel, there followed a steady stream of short fiction in which the playwright evidently was trying out ideas that surface later in his drama. In 1946 he published “The Plaster Masks,” in which he explores the impact of war injuries on veterans, based on his experiences visiting military hospitals during World War II. This theme also surfaces in the play he was writing at that time, All My Sons , as the veteran son Chris tries to come to terms with American apathy toward his war experience and talks of the awful casualties of armed conflict. In “The Plaster Masks” a writer comes to the hospital to ask if he can interview badly injured soldiers for a radio broadcast. As he observes surgeons’ consultations with patients for reconstructive surgery, he finds it hard not to be repulsed. The men have severe injuries that include missing limbs and sections of their heads, but they are mostly spirited and comradely. The writer struggles to understand their lack of bitterness and how those around them, including spouses and young helpers at the hospital, respond with such kind sensitivity. After meeting with a sculptor, who makes plaster masks of the men’s faces before and after surgery to help the surgeons envision their work, the writer comes to understand how these people have chosen to embrace a future rather than wallow in the unpleasant past. In the same way, Miller will have Chris in All My Sons (who is based partly on Miller’s brother Kermit, who suffered from PTSD after World War II) resolve to leave behind the horrors of war and start a new life with Ann. Near the close of “The Plaster Masks,” the writer spots a post-surgery mask that looks like his own face. After trying on the initial mask that reflects the soldier’s injuries, he is able to put himself in this man’s place and understand the uselessness of pity or regret.

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“The Plaster Masks” bluntly exposes what war does to people, and in All My Sons Miller develops a more complex response, extending his analysis beyond the battlefield. For Miller, who was forced to stay home from the war due to an old football injury, those who served are not to be pitied but admired for their spirit and sense of purpose. But Miller also realizes that they are able to cope only through a surrounding network of those who care. Someone like Joe Keller, who cares so little for others that he risks pilots’ lives just to stay in business, will not be allowed to continue without facing his moral irresponsibility, despite what the law allows. This sense of justice also permeates the more comical story “It Takes a Thief,” which Miller published less than two weeks after All My Sons opened in January 1947. Like the Kellers, the Sheltons are presented as an upper-middle-class couple. Shelton, like Joe Keller, developed a profitable business during the war. Where Keller sold aircraft parts, and then kitchen appliances and washing machines after the war, Shelton sold used cars to the war plants and then new cars in the growing postwar economy. Like the Kellers, the Sheltons are friendly, engaging people. We initially sympathize with them when they discover they have been robbed. But when Shelton telephones the police, our suspicions are aroused as his wife stops him before he gives his name and address. It recalls Kate Keller telling her husband “Be smart now, Joe” (Miller 2015, 114). We discover that Shelton has been skimming money from his business to avoid taxes, and $91,000 in cash has been stolen along with jewelry, silver, and a fur coat. When the police trace his call and come to find out what has happened, Shelton must avoid mentioning the theft since the money was acquired illegally. Eight days later when the police catch the thief, Shelton goes to the station to reclaim the jewelry but is afraid to claim the money. Asking the detective what will happen to it, he is told it will be held while the police complete their investigation. The Sheltons are haunted the rest of their lives, caught in a self-imposed limbo and rarely leaving their house, waiting for the police to arrest them. The story’s title becomes true: the thief who burgled their home exposed the bigger theft by this supposedly respectable couple. As in All My Sons, Miller again espouses a Greek- or Shakespearean-like belief that ultimately justice prevails, and the universe is righted.

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In his next plays of the late 1940s and early 50s—Death of a Salesman, The Crucible, and A View from the Bridge, as well as his adaptation of Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People—Miller continues his exploration of morality, self-definition, and the distorting limits of the American Dream. It is not surprising, therefore, that his 1951 story “Monte Sant’ Angelo” also concerns issues of identity and connection. The idea came from Miller’s experiences during a brief trip to Italy in 1948, the year before Salesman appeared, and it relates how Bernstein, an American Jew, accompanies his friend Vincenzo “Vinny” Appello on a search for Vinny’s Italian relatives, and through this rediscovers himself. Though similar in appearance, Bernstein is presented as a total opposite to the ebullient Vinny. Initially uncertain of his identity—significantly, we never learn his first name—Bernstein hides behind an aloofness that also masks a jealousy of his friend’s opportunity to make family connections. Regardless of the paucity of Vinny’s success with these family reunions, Vinny remains upbeat, which encourages Bernstein to reconsider his own sense of connection. Bernstein discovers Mauro di Benedetto, an Italian who follows Shabbat routines while having no knowledge of Judaism; he is merely following old family customs. Despite, or perhaps because of, this man’s lack of self-awareness, this testament to the Judaic emphasis on community and tradition leads Bernstein to feel less alone in the world. Knowing his Austrian relatives and millions of Jews had been lost in the Holocaust, Bernstein had felt that the past also had been erased, but now he feels a renewed sense of connection, as Irving Jacobson suggests (507), not only to his Jewish roots and identity but also to the larger world: he now somehow is “at home in this place” (Miller 2016b, 62). Bernstein’s new-found confidence leads him to encourage Vinny to find the graves of the ancestors they had previously failed to uncover, which takes their friendship to a new, more emotionally engaged level. In his 1956 essay “The Family in Modern Drama” Miller asserts that all great plays explore the question: “How may a man make of the outside world a home?” (Miller 2016a, 87–88), and this theme also pervades his stories. Miller had married Mary Slattery, a Midwestern Catholic, in 1940, but after the success of Death of a Salesman in 1949, he was feeling increasingly estranged from his family. Miller’s 1950s plays all deal with issues of belonging to a community and personal identity. In The Crucible, John Proctor nearly loses himself but in the end embraces the cause of his putupon neighbors and dies a hero. Eddie Carbone, on the other hand, in A View from the Bridge, rejects the values of his community when he breaks

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one of their cardinal rules and so dies shunned and virtually alone. Aside from young Bert, who knows where he is heading and what he wants to be, the characters in A Memory of Two Mondays drift aimlessly with little true satisfaction despite their connections to one another. To know oneself is a key to contentment, and at this point Miller knew his relationship with Mary was doomed. In 1956 Miller divorced Mary to marry a very different type of woman, Marilyn Monroe, who would convert to Judaism to be with him. While briefly residing in Nevada to obtain this divorce, he produced his first version of the story “The Misfits,” published in 1957. It relates the simple lives of local cowboys Miller had met while living in Nevada. Called “misfits” as they feel left behind by the current society that no longer values their way of life, they feel most alive when close to nature, rounding up mustangs for a living. The sad fact is that this endeavor has become both cruel and pointless: the mustangs are as much misfits as they, no longer wanted as mounts and fated to end up as dogfood. There is a strong sense of wasted beauty and potential in the final image of the defeated mustangs waiting tired and thirsty in the desert for their inevitable destruction. It is a destruction wrought upon them by the ceaseless capitalism of the larger world. As Malcolm Bradbury suggests, the story depicts “waste, mechanized futility, and the corruption of the natural” (224), and the meager profit the men make from their round-up only reinforces these negative aspects of their trip. There are mirrored similarities between Miller and Gay Langland, the story’s central character. Miller was an adulterer with Monroe. Langland left his wife six years earlier, for her adultery, but also because he felt she no longer needed him, which was perhaps more to the heart of Miller’s marriage breakdown. Langland left behind two children, feeling they would be better raised by their mother, just as Miller left Jane and Robert with Mary. Langland, trying to move on with his life, is dating Roslyn, a character who will be expanded later into a part for Monroe to play in the 1961 film version, though also changed from being a teacher to an exotic dancer. What is most notable in this original prose version is that the central story is about Langland and Perce Howland, a young cowboy. The close of the tale has them driving off together. Though they have only known each other for five weeks, Langland is more concerned with maintaining his friendship with this younger man than with Roslyn to whom he feels too beholden. Both men have the same outlook on life, spurning wages

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and wanting to rule their own lives, and in this Guido, their pilot friend, is little different as we learn he turned down an airline job to keep his freedom. It is hard not to sympathize with these men however brutal their exploits, for there is a bond and caring camaraderie between them that has value. Expanding Roslyn into a disruptive sexual presence, whom all the men desire, the later screenplay developed from this tale offers a very different dynamic in which a demanding female presence upends the male bonds, and Langland rejects his former life. As if trying to write his own marriage a happy ending, Miller has the film end with Langland riding to town with Roslyn. However, Miller would leave the film set without Monroe, and they shortly would be divorced. Abigail (The Crucible), Catherine (A View from the Bridge) and Patricia (A Memory of Two Mondays ) all suggest tantalizing, seductive versions of Monroe, and her ghost haunted many of Miller’s writings for the rest of his career. While with Monroe, Miller published three more short stories: “I Don’t Need You Any More” (1959), “Please Don’t Kill Anything” (1960), and “The Prophecy” (1961), all of which were included in Miller’s first story collection I Don’t Need You Any More (1967). The selection of this as the collection’s overall title reflects a theme that often recurs in Miller’s work: the difficult need for balance between individual independence and authentic connections to other people, an issue in Miller’s own connections to his parents and siblings and in his marriages. It is seen clearly in his two plays written in this period of the early 1960s, directly after his divorce from Monroe: After the Fall and Incident at Vichy. Indeed, there are similarities between the child at the center of this title story and Quentin in After the Fall: both flip back and forth between feelings of martyrdom and inadequacy. Miller’s acknowledgment and essential celebration of his Judaic roots in “I Don’t Need You Any More” with its High Holidays setting and overtly Jewish family is unsurprising after “Monte Sant’ Angelo,” but it is the story’s five-year-old protagonist Martin’s feeling of restriction by women that makes this story most intriguing as he discovers the essential separateness of people. Martin initially is suspicious toward women, especially his mother’s tendency to be overprotective, which is at odds with his nascent desire to become part of the bigger world. Torn between wanting to be fully accepted by his family and needing independence, he equates women with darkness and men with light as he thinks it is they who best navigate the world. He admires what his father and older brother are

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doing and feels left out of the male activities as they observe the rituals of Yom Kippur—a period of atonement during which adults fast, attend synagogue, and significantly renew themselves for another year. Forbidden to go swimming on his first trip to the ocean, Martin imagines the stormy waves full of strangely bearded and threatening sins. He contains his impulse to run home to tell his mother, feeling uncomfortable that this child’s world of fantasy is at odds with reality. He recalls a time his mother met the local dentist and confessed to him that she nearly had married this man, which horrifies him as it is evidence of a life she has led separate from the family. Coupled with his unacknowledged realization that she is having another child, which soon will change his position in the household, Martin tries to set himself apart from his mother before she can reject him, and does so quite viciously, striking her and screaming the line in the story’s title. Christopher Bigsby suggests that the boy’s cry of “I don’t need you any more,” at this point is “less an expression of independence than a confession of bewilderment” (449). Martin is not ready to be alone but is trying to better understand his place in the world. Later while eating back at home and trying to act grownup, Martin spills his soup and reverts to being a child. He calls for his mother, but she refuses him help as family allegiances shift to and fro. He apologizes to his mother, but things escalate into another row until finally his family gives him the attention he needs to authenticate himself: “three congealments of warmth embracing him” (Miller 2016b, 40). But when his father accuses his mother of spoiling him and he sees his brother’s tears over Martin’s treatment of their mother, Martin begins to understand that each member of his family is a separate person, each with a different responsibility to the others, including him. His growth has been less from child to adult than from innocence to awareness. Martin’s discovery of the essential separateness of people, kept in balance with their need for connection will be expanded into the adult world in 1964 in After the Fall and Incident at Vichy. We see it in After the Fall in the complex relationships between Quentin and his friends and family, and in Incident at Vichy within a wider social milieu as a disparate group of men navigate their potential responsibility to one another as they are being threatened by the Nazis. The central female in “Please Don’t Kill Anything” (1960) foreshadows the revised version of Roslyn for the screenplay of The Misfits and is based on an event that occurred when Miller was walking the beach with

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Monroe. Here, the wife’s identification with the unwanted and suffering fish the fishermen have cast aside on the shore, speaks volumes regarding her psychological fragility. She persuades her reluctant husband, Sam, to throw the fish back into the sea. While he dutifully saves them all, even battling against local dogs who play with the fish, there remains an undercurrent that they are fighting a losing battle. In The Misfits Miller has Roslyn persuade Langland not to kill the rabbits that are eating their garden and again not to kill the mustangs. Twice the killing is deferred, but even Monroe felt the closing scene of Langland and Roslyn going off together was unrealistic. As Miller had written with prescience in the earlier story version of The Misfits, “The victims make other victims” (Miller 2016b, 68). Bradbury suggests that in “The Prophecy” Miller captures “the sensation of life, its moments of senselessness, its challenge, and its metaphysical difficulties” (226). Written at a time when Miller was himself uncertain about his marriage to Monroe, it depicts the underlying problematic relationships of several couples at a party hosted by Cleota and attended by a seer, Madamme Lhevine. All the characters struggle; not knowing what the future will bring, they are guarded, victims of their own delusions, and unable fully to commit. None are truly content or in touch with what Lhevine calls their “inner voice” (Miller 2016b, 126). As a result, they damage themselves and others. Taking risks and facing life honestly, Miller appears to be saying, are necessary to give life deeper meaning. This is a theme Miller also is exploring in the plays he wrote in the early 1960s. Prince Von Berg demonstrates it in Incident at Vichy, and Quentin comes finally to accept it through his relationship with Holga, who is based on his wife Inge Morath, by the end of After the Fall . The same theme of personal hollowness is taken up in Miller’s 1962 story “Glimpse at a Jockey.” This monologue of an unnamed jockey speaking to a stranger at a bar, is a motif Miller will echo in After the Fall as Quentin confesses to an unnamed listener, but the outcome in the story is less positive. The drive to win at all costs has ruined the jockey’s enjoyment of horse-racing (a metaphor for any life passion), and while he has had great success, he reveals that after a bad fall most people abandoned him. He declares love for his wife and children, but also states that “you draw a line somewhere, someplace” (Miller 2016b, 103), suggesting his inability to fully commit, and he closes by declaring his intent to pick up a woman in the bar. There is a depressive undertone to his speech, and when he reveals how his father deserted the family, we recall

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Willy Loman’s sense of inadequacy in not knowing who he is because of a similar abandonment. Like Cleota, the jockey is a person who cannot be alone, and yet by his inability to be fully honest or commit he drives himself toward that fate. The story in fact offers a warning as Christopher Bigsby suggests: “The man who tries so hard to conceal himself, in fact slowly reveals the drama of his life which has been the slow loss of meaning, the sacrifice of value to ambition, of love to obsession” (451). After his father’s death in 1966, Miller wrote three short stories that can be connected to his 1968 play, The Price. The first, “A Search for a Future,” is about a middle-aged Jewish actor, Harry, who learns from his elderly father how to appreciate life by being genuinely involved with definite goals rather than hiding in empty roles and pretending things don’t matter. To have a future, one must commit to the present as an honest and realistic path to getting there. Having placed his father in a nursing home, primarily because he does not want the burden of caring for him himself, Harry also admires his father’s courage in attempting to leave the place and re-engage with his old life. Characters’ confrontations with their own cowardice are depicted often in Miller’s plays, perhaps most pointedly in Victor Franz in The Price, which Miller was working on during this same period. Victor, unlike Harry, cared for his father at home, but has made similar self-limiting choices. He, too, is led to reassess his life after being forced to take a more honest look at the past. Like The Price, the story also can be read as a critique of America’s blindness in the Vietnam War, here made explicit in the repeated image of a young man who has had his eyes shot out on a Vietnam battlefield. The next story offers a potential aspect of the other brother in The Price, Walter, the successful surgeon who has come to see the emptiness of his achievements and wishes to live more honestly. Originally published under the title “Recognitions,” Miller retitled this short fable “Fame” when he included it in the I Don’t Need You Any More collection. Even while he enjoys his popularity, successful Jewish playwright Meyer Berkowitz has become sick of what he feels is the insincere adulation of people who do not really know him. Wanting to be admired and fearing anonymity, he is surprised by an encounter with an old schoolmate, Bernie Gelfand, who does not know about his success and embarrasses himself by boasting of his own mediocre achievements. Berkowitz knows the revelation of his own success will embarrass Gelfand, but gets a perverse pleasure from doing it, nonetheless, and comes to see that it is he who has created this false public image of himself about which he initially

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complained. The story exposes Miller’s uneasy recognition that fame and wealth distort how others see you and can interfere with relationships. Success offers a sense of achievement and a boost to the ego, but it also can isolate and lead to guilt, as it does in Walter Franz. The third story Miller produced at this time, “Fitter’s Night,” is a meditation on marriage and career choices that also will be explored in The Price. Miller introduces us to shipfitter, Tony Calabrese, who works at the Brooklyn Navy Shipyard during World War II. Having been tricked into a marriage by the promise of cash that turned out to be worthless, Tony avoids what he has come to see as a meaningless existence through defensive cynicism. Tony and his friends tend not to push themselves, but this evening he gets called to a difficult repair job. Although he goes to this reluctantly, having completed the dangerous repair, he feels good about his success, wins real respect from the ship’s Captain and crew, and is rewarded with a new sense of purpose and connection in his life. It is another tale about the benefits of true commitment. After The Price, Miller’s next play is the comedic retelling of Genesis in The Creation of the World and Other Business (1972), which is followed by the brief 1976 story, “Ham Sandwich.” Both reflect Miller’s engagement with more whimsical presentation and interest in scenes of closure and renewal. An impressionistic sketch of less than 500 words, this story encapsulates that moment when old friends reunited at a small dinner party after five years apart discover they no longer have anything in common despite joyful memories of their shared past. Their friendship now is awkward and cannot be revived, just as Adam and Eve no longer can return to Eden, and nor should they. It is a condensed parable of how to best embrace changing life and testament to the great changes in Miller’s own life during this period. First produced in 1977, The Archbishop’s Ceiling is an overtly political play that reflects not only Miller’s growing experience abroad but also his continuing interest in his roots and human nature in general. The following year he published “The 1928 Buick,” a story recalling defining incidents from his past, and “White Puppies” a dark and unusual tale about the potential destructiveness of people, themes he revisits in two plays from 1980: The American Clock a semi-autobiographical tale of the Great Depression and Playing for Time, set at Auschwitz. “The 1928 Buick” reveals the clannish isolation of people in Miller’s old neighborhood and the empty repetition of their lives. When young, Miller had much admired Max Scions, who was planning to marry Miller’s

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cousin, Virginia, and drove the title car, often taking her to the beach. After a gap of seven years, having since been to college, Miller discovers the now-married couple is miserable and the car has sadly deteriorated. Max has a new car, which he drives to the beach alone, where he weeps and then dies of a heart attack. A doctor who witnesses this brings his body home but is cruelly shunned by Max’s mother and wife as if he were partly to blame. Virginia spends the rest of her life in a kind of daze, sheltering in her home. It is precisely this kind of narrow existence and wasted potential that so appalled Miller and provoked him to leave behind his old life. In “White Puppies” Karl and Caroline Gruhn seem to have perfect lives but are revealed to be full of resentments and regrets in a desperately dissatisfying marriage. We learn that in the future one of their children, Joseph, will commit suicide, and Karl will physically attack his wife. This playing with time and perspective is something Miller will develop further in his one-act plays of the 1980s that were produced as Danger Memory! and Two-Way Mirror. Both Gruhns drink heavily and despite their complacent appearance are filled with contained rage and negativity that bursts through in Karl’s virtual rape of his wife and Caroline’s eventual drowning of the title puppies. Their fraught relationships with everyone, from parents to children to each other, are fed by their own insecurities and inability to connect. When their dog, Sally, gives birth to five puppies, three are the wrong color, and even though they appear more virile than their siblings, it is decided they must be drowned to preserve the pedigree. Karl insists his wife deal with this, a callous decision intended to illustrate the complacent carelessness toward life of people like the Gruhns. We are encouraged to equate their son Joseph to those wasted puppies as he drowns himself in suicide. Miller’s quirkiness continues into his next story, “Bees,” published in 1990, based on his attempt to exterminate a colony of bees he found in his original Roxbury farmhouse. Almost disappointed by what he assumed was his success, he returns several years later after the house has been sold to discover the bees are back, and he feels an admiration for their persistence. Might the bees represent the persistence of memories and/or his own imaginative thought? The concepts of memory and imagination are integral to his earlier one-act pieces and continue into his plays of the 1990s: The Ride Down Mt. Morgan, The Last Yankee, Broken Glass and Mr. Peters’ Connections . Miller clearly is concerned with past behaviors

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and their impact on the present, which are also key aspects of his 1990s dramatic output. In 1991 Miller produced The Ride Down Mt. Morgan, which comedically explores the self-destructive, bifurcated desires of the egotistical bigamist Lyman Felt. The Last Yankee, meantime, offers some simple truths about survival through judicious compromise. In 1992 he published the novella Homely Girl , a Life, which recounts the life of Janice Sessions from youth into her sixties and has a connection to both these plays. Janice has had two very different husbands, albeit not simultaneously: Sam, a confident but arrogant bookdealer and committed socialist activist, whom she found sexually unfulfilling; and the more charming Charles, a blind pianist, who makes her feel like an equal. Each reflects different aspects of her nature to which she is drawn. She also has a family, like Patricia Hamilton in The Last Yankee, who have unrealistic expectations and have made her self-conscious, unconfident, and far too concerned with what others think. After Sam confesses to raping a German farmwoman while serving abroad, Janice has the excuse she needs to leave him and his outmoded politics. After two abusive affairs, she meets Charles with whom she is very happy and sexually satisfied. She acts on her attraction to him, feeling freed by his inability to see what she believes to be her plainness, and so the blind man ironically teaches her to see herself in a more positive light. After his death, she returns to where they first met and feels content to move forward on her own, filled “with wonder at her fortune at having lived into beauty” (Miller 2016b, 253). Her change of heart and new understanding are reminiscent of Patricia Hamilton in The Last Yankee, who feels encouraged by her husband’s love and respect to reembrace the wonder of life. The need for understanding and mutual support between couples also lies at the heart of Miller’s next play, Broken Glass (1994), in which he returns to Jewish themes and once again revisits the family culture of his childhood. It also is the theme of the 2001 story “Bulldog,” another highly symbolic tale of maturation and growing independence such as “I Don’t Need You Any More,” but with the unnamed protagonist now thirteen. Wanting a dog, the boy answers an advertisement and gets seduced by the lady selling the puppies, who gives him a puppy for free. Having been sexually awakened the boy now feels embarrassed with his mother as the pair ineptly try to discover how to care for a dog, which soon takes the opportunity to eat an unguarded chocolate cake and dies as a result.

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The boy considers returning to the lady, about whom he frequently has fantasies, but turns to playing the piano. Just as Martin in “I Don’t Need You Any More” had discovered a new sense of himself on the beach, the boy here feels he is changed as a person: he now has secrets and a separate life from his family. At the story’s end, he plays the piano in a new way that amazes even his mother. Moving into the twenty-first century there is a definite change of tone in both Miller’s prose and drama. The year 2002 marked the death of his wife of 40 years, Inge Morath, and Miller’s new works are clearly darker and closer to absurdism. Hope, however, still lingers in the margins. The play Resurrection Blues explores the complications of blind acceptance in a satire of overblown capitalism as the dictator of a third-world country is willing to perform a live crucifixion for American television. The stories “The Performance” and “The Bare Manuscript” connect to this theme in a variety of ways. “The Performance” is a similarly quirky tale that riffs off a famous American dancer who, keeping his Jewish identity a secret, is invited to perform for Hitler. Harold May’s performance is a huge hit, and Hitler offers him a position running a tap-dancing school for the German people. Seduced by Hitler’s sense of power, May initially agrees but soon realizes it would be untenable and leaves. His experience has left him confused and burdened: he cannot connect these dance enthusiasts, whose attention he found flattering, to the men who will kill so many Jews. His momentary desire to ignore corruption in naïve self-service is reminiscent of the behavior of Henri Schultz in Resurrection Blues , who made a fortune off the misfortune of others by turning a blind eye. “The Bare Manuscript” features Clement Zorn, a writer who has lost his way both in his writing and his relationship with his wife, Lena. He regains impetus toward both through writing about his courtship of his wife on the naked flesh of another woman. Like the dictator Felix Barriaux in Resurrection Blues, Clement begins fairly lost, but is able to regain his passion through the assistance of a willing woman. This way of producing new work allows Clement to “bare” his soul, reexamine his past, and rediscover direction in his art and life. The story portrays Clement’s recognition that the power that breathes life into his work is love, rather like the message of love asserted by the Christ figure in Resurrection Blues. Miller’s final works are interesting in their insistence on the redemptive power of love and refusal to give up hope. It is hard not to view his own unexpected relationship with the much younger Agnes Barley in his

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final years as providing inspiration. “The Presence,” a story published in 2003, relates how an older, unnamed male protagonist leaves his sleeping wife to go for a walk and witnesses a young couple making love in the dunes. He later encounters the woman in the sea, who had sensed his “presence;” they kiss and embrace, and he then falls asleep. When he awakes he is unsure if it was a dream, but the experience revivifies his sense of life, and despite the darkness and sense of loss, “a tremendous joy was flowing into him that was no longer connected to anything” (Miller 2016b, 371). Miller’s final play, Finishing the Picture, while returning to the issue of how Monroe had been abused, closes with a cleansing fire and the hopeful romance of Ochsner and Edna, who unexpectedly find something in each other they had been missing. The year of Miller’s death, 2005, saw two more published pieces of fiction: “The Turpentine Still” and “Beavers.” In “The Turpentine Still” we meet another former leftist, Mark Levin, who has lost his passion for the cause and needs to be taught how to re-engage. His lesson is achieved through two separate visits to Haiti taken thirty-three years apart. On the first visit he meets Douglas, an American who has moved with his family to the island and is determined to distil turpentine there, a decision everyone else views as crazy. Returning to the still on the second trip, Levin learns that it has fallen into disarray but in fact had been built, which he takes as evidence that passionate involvement, however apparently absurd, is its own reward, and that a life without such passion is not worth living. A kind of companion piece to “The Bees,” “Beavers” is also about unwanted wildlife that is reluctantly destroyed on Miller’s property and teaches the author a lesson. Miller fears the beavers will kill his trees and pollute his pond, so he has a neighbor kill them. The male beaver’s earlier blockage of a pipe coming into the pond seems senseless: the pond was already sufficiently deep for their lodge. Bothered by this, Miller decides the construction must have been done as an act of love for the beaver’s partner. The lesson is that much in life is unknowable, including love, but it is a worthwhile pursuit in and of itself. A positive note on which to end a life.

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Works Cited Bigsby, Christopher. 2005. Fiction, in his Arthur Miller: A Critical Study. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 444–72. Bradbury, Malcolm. 1997. Arthur Miller’s Fiction, in Christopher Bigsby, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Arthur Miller. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 211–29. Jacobson, Irving. 1976. The Vestal Jews on “Monte Sant’ Angelo.” Studies in Short Fiction 13, 507–12. Miller, Arthur. 1944. Ditchy. Mayfair Magazine, October: 37–39, 42, 44–45. Miller, Arthur. 1946. The Plaster Masks. Encore: A Continuing Anthology 9, April: 424–32. Miller, Arthur. 1947. It Takes a Thief. Collier’s Weekly, February 8: 23, 75–76. Miller, Arthur. 1976. Ham Sandwich. Boston University Quarterly 24:2, 5–6. Miller, Arthur. 1978a. The 1928 Buick. The Atlantic, October: 49–51, 54–56. Miller, Arthur. 1978b. White Puppies. Esquire, July: 32–36. Miller, Arthur. 1990. Bees. Michigan Quarterly Review 29:2, 152–57. Miller, Arthur. 1995. In Memoriam. The New Yorker, December 25: 110–111. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1995/12/25/in-memoriam-12. Miller, Arthur. 2001. Focus. Reissued edition. New York: Penguin Books. Miller, Arthur. 2015. Collected Plays. Forward by Lynn Nottage. New York: Penguin Books. Miller, Arthur. 2016a. Collected Essays. Ed. Susan C. W. Abbotson. New York: Penguin Books. Miller, Arthur. 2016b. Presence: Collected Stories. New York: Penguin Books.

CHAPTER 15

Miller in China Claire Conceison

During the 2015 centennial year of Arthur Miller’s birth, his plays were produced at theaters around the world, his books were published in new editions, and his life and literature were discussed at university symposia. It was a heady time for Miller enthusiasts, who came together to share their zeal for reading his work and staging his plays. It was also a time when Miller’s impact within China was acknowledged through revivals of past productions of his plays, new stagings, and theater projects beyond China’s borders that reexamined his experience and influence there. My path to scholarship on Miller began in the 1990s while living in the Chinese theater community where I learned about the 1983 staging of Death of a Salesman in Beijing and Miller’s impact on Chinese theater artists both before and after that watershed production. Understanding “Miller in China” requires examination of three discrete but interrelated phenomena: dissemination of his plays as texts and in productions by professional theater companies in Chinese cities; Miller’s residence in Beijing in 1983 when he collaborated with Ying Ruocheng to direct Death of a Salesman; and the impact and legacy of these events domestically and transnationally. Some of the material in this essay is drawn from my introduction to

C. Conceison (B) Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA © The Author(s) 2020 S. Marino and D. Palmer (eds.), Arthur Miller for the Twenty-First Century, American Literature Readings in the 21st Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37293-4_15

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the 2015 centennial edition of Miller’s 1984 book Salesman in Beijing (retitled Death of a Salesman in Beijing ), which resulted from conducting interviews with actors, directors, designers and others in Beijing and Shanghai who had worked with Miller directly in the 1980s and who have staged his plays in China since, as well as reviewing archival material from those productions. Thirty years passed between China’s first encounter with Miller’s published plays in English just before the establishment of the People’s Republic in 1949 and circulation of his works in Chinese translation after the end of the Cultural Revolution. In between, the new communist government kept most western literature, culture, and people out of China, with rare exceptions such as Soviet experts who disseminated Stanislavski’s theories at places like the Beijing People’s Art Theatre. During the subsequent thirty years, artists in Shanghai and Beijing staged Miller’s top plays, the most significant of these productions being Death of a Salesman at the Beijing People’s Art Theatre in 1983 directed by the playwright himself. In the wake of Miller’s death in 2005 and the global revisiting of his works in 2015 during the centennial of his birth, Miller’s dramas were revived on Chinese stages for a new generation of audiences. Concurrent to this was a post-centennial emergence of new, cross-cultural collaborative works outside of China about Miller’s impact there, focusing on his partnership with Ying Ruocheng in 1983. The tale of Ying and Miller’s Sino-American Salesman project became an object of fascination for likeminded theater artists in the United States and Canada and led to the staging of Miller, his wife, and their Chinese colleagues from 25 years ago as characters onstage in two bilingual theater works created for twentyfirst century international audiences. Intended to familiarize diverse communities with this historical event and pose questions about the challenges of collaborating across cultures, these projects in New York and Vancouver reconstructed and reframed the events they recalled, reproducing the 1983 Beijing production and its contingent processes on stage for twentyfirst century audiences in North America and Asia.

Miller Is Encountered and Adopted (1949--1980) To situate Miller in China, it is helpful to understand the eastward journey of Western theater long before his arrival there. The origins of Chinese huaju (spoken drama) are traced to a stage adaptation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin performed by overseas Chinese students in Tokyo in 1907.1

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Shortly thereafter, spoken drama troupes were formed in Shanghai and Beijing, and plays by dramatists such as Ibsen, Chekhov, and Shaw were staged alongside plays in the new Western form written by their Chinese counterparts like Tian Han and Cao Yu. This “westward gaze” in the theater began as part of a larger cultural shift toward the vernacular in literature and toward adopting foreign models to address China’s social issues. Western-style drama was deliberately imported to China by pioneering Chinese intellectuals and not disseminated by foreign colonizers; thus, Chinese spoken drama has a long history as a Sinicized cultural form used for domestic purposes. It also has a long history of adapting new trends via the temporary visits of foreigners who come to China as collaborators or performers. Arthur Miller became part of this tradition in 1983 when he traveled to Beijing to direct Death of a Salesman. Since that landmark production, Miller has been securely positioned in the top trio of American playwrights in China, alongside Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams. Their plays are staged frequently in China, assigned to students in universities and theater academies, and are the subject of dozens of Chinese books, doctoral dissertations, and journal articles. While research on O’Neill and Williams encompasses the full range of their respective works and careers, the focus of Miller scholarship and productions tends to be more on The Crucible and Death of a Salesman than his other plays, essays, and other writings. When Miller first visited China in 1978 with his wife Inge Morath, he was relatively unknown, whereas O’Neill and Williams were already firmly established in the Western dramatic canon of literary and art circles in Shanghai and Beijing.2 Miller’s plays had not yet been translated into Chinese. An article with a summary of six of his plays had been authored by Mei Shaowu (son of Beijing opera actor Mei Lanfang) in 1962 but had not circulated widely. Even the worldly Huang Zuolin—a leading director and scholar who had studied at Oxford and helped disseminate the theories of both Stanislavski and Brecht in China—was not familiar with Miller or his plays before his 1978 visit. But three years later, Huang would be the first Chinese director to stage one when he directed The Crucible in Shanghai. China was closed to most foreign influences during the chaotic and devastating decade of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976); exposure to arts and education was minimal, and students and intellectuals were “sent down” to the countryside to live and labor alongside peasants. The academic and artistic reopening of China came on the heels of Miller and Morath’s visit: Mei Shaowu published more articles about

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Miller’s plays in 1979, and Chen Liangting’s translations of All My Sons and Death of a Salesman were published in 1979–1980. Every year since then has seen at least one publication of an article, play translation, or book by or about Arthur Miller (Wu et al. 2015, 3–4). It is unclear whether Cao Yu, China’s foremost playwright of the twentieth century, had heard of Miller when he met him in 1978—Ying Ruocheng contends that he had, but other accounts report that Cao Yu acknowledged right in front of Miller that he had no idea who he was (Ying and Conceison, 158; Wang, 17–18). Cao Yu, fluent in English, along with fellow Chinese playwright and novelist Lao She, had spent a year touring the United States after the end of World War II, with Lao She remaining in New York for an additional three years. Miller’s first significant stage success, All My Sons , did not come until 1947, making it possible that Cao Yu returned to China before Lao She learned of this play or of Death of a Salesman.3 Nonetheless, by 1978 Ying Ruocheng, Cao Yu’s close friend and colleague, had already been a fan of Miller’s work for three decades. Miller’s early plays in their original English versions became available at elite institutions like Beijing’s Tsinghua University in its American literature collection at the same time they became available in the United States. It was at Tsinghua—a college with both Chinese and foreign faculty offering instruction in both Chinese and English—that Ying, an undergraduate student from a prominent Manchu family, first read Death of a Salesman at a librarian’s recommendation in December 1949.4 This was less than a year after the play had premiered on Broadway and only a few months after the founding of the People’s Republic of China by the Chinese Communist Party. Ying’s first encounter with this new playwright and play was transformative: I took it away and started reading. I finished it that same night. I was so drawn to the play, but immediately thought it would be impossible to produce at that moment in China … But it left a very deep impression on me … While I was still a student at Tsinghua, I imagined what it would be like if only we could stage [it] … by my senior year, I had my mind set on three plays [to stage]. One was Death of a Salesman. (122–23)

Ying Ruocheng would graduate from Tsinghua a year later, and he immediately became a founding member of the Beijing People’s Art Theatre, China’s premiere theater company. He would not fulfill his dream

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of staging Salesman until 30 years later. O’Neill and Williams never collaborated with artists in China on productions of their own plays, so this aspect of Miller scholarship in China—the groundbreaking cross-cultural event of Miller directing Death of a Salesman in Beijing in 1983—is one that understandably receives a great deal of attention. In addition to discussions of the project in published sources by Chinese and Western journalists and scholars, the first-hand record of that encounter from Miller’s perspective lives on in his published diary, Death of a Salesman in Beijing, and from Ying’s perspective endures in his autobiography Voices Carry: Behind Bars and Backstage During China’s Revolution and Reform.5 Ying’s narrative also details his extraordinary life as an artist and pubic intellectual, eventually rising to a government appointment as Vice Minister of Culture from 1986 to 1990: the perilous events in Tiananmen Square in 1989 shook his previously steadfast faith in the Chinese Communist Party and he managed to extricate himself from his post. As well known in China as Miller was and is in the United States, Ying Ruocheng was a famous stage actor, revered translator, and pioneering director, bringing plays like Major Barbara and Amadeus to the Chinese stage. He was also a renowned film actor, both in Chinese cinema and television, and in international film, playing Kublai Khan in the international miniseries Marco Polo and featured roles in Bernardo Bertolucci’s films The Last Emperor and Little Buddha. In addition to collaborating with Miller, Ying brought other foreign artists to China, including Charlton Heston to direct Caine Mutiny Court Martial at Beijing People’s Art Theatre in 1989. When Miller received the prestigious Kennedy Center Honor in 1984 from President Ronald Reagan—alongside Lena Horne, Isaac Stern, Gian Carlo Menotti, and Danny Kaye—it was Ying Ruocheng who introduced him at the event that was broadcast to homes throughout America.

Miller Is Staged and Restaged (1981--2012) After meeting Miller in 1978 and discussing his plays with him, Huang Zuolin decided to stage The Crucible at Miller’s recommendation, and he commissioned Mei Shaowu to translate the script. Miller suggested his 1953 hit play because during that initial visit to China, Ying Ruocheng and Cao Yu had introduced him to writers and artists, and he had learned of their sufferings during the previous decade of political turmoil. He felt

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the play’s depiction of the historical Salem witch hunt of 1692 (standing in for the purges of McCarthyism in the 1950s) provided an ideal metaphor for the targeting of Chinese intellectuals who endured endless campaigns during the Cultural Revolution. Not surprisingly, Huang Zuolin’s version, with a new title The Witches of Salem, included deliberate allusions to the Cultural Revolution that echoed the “Scar Literature” discourse of the day. Critically well-received, it ran for fifty-two performances.6 Huang’s 1981 production juxtaposed a symbolist set design featuring a large cross with a Stanislavski-based realist acting approach. The cast learned about the history of witches in seventeenth-century European Puritan society and considered the inner psychology of their characters, though the play’s sociopolitical metaphor was clearly about China’s Cultural Revolution. In 2006, the Shanghai Dramatic Arts Centre restaged The Witches of Salem to commemorate the centennial of Huang Zuolin’s birth, inviting his grandson Zheng Dasheng to direct the new production. Zheng used a very different style than his grandfather, creating a play-within-a-play aesthetic in which actors (including star couple Lü Liang and Song Yining and veteran actor Xu Chengxian, who had appeared in the 1981 version) wore contemporary clothing and remained on the periphery watching the action during scenes in which they did not appear. One critic referred to the production as a refreshing take on a classic play in an era of “cultural fast food” (Han, 75). In addition to these two professional stagings of The Crucible in Shanghai, director Wang Xiaoying mounted an award-winning production of the play in Beijing in 2002. Retaining the title Witches of Salem, Wang created an expressionist aesthetic that featured set pieces such as towering abstract wooden forms and huge white masks, and oversized rope nooses that suddenly flew down to hang above the audience at a climactic moment. Wang explained that he wanted to apply a “small theater concept” to a large proscenium space, and so he deliberately constructed an oppressive atmosphere coming at the audience from all directions, surrounding them on four sides and even from above. Wang adopted the Chinese convention of “realistic make-up,” which included darkening the skin of the actress playing Tituba, and putting wigs in various lengths (long and short), textures (curly, wavy, and straight), and hues (white, red, brown, black) on both male and female actors. The acting style Wang developed was in scale with the visual elements—grand and emotional, at times histrionic. These melodramatic impulses, while in direct contrast to

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the aesthetic Miller carefully crafted for his 1983 production of Salesman at Beijing People’s Art Theatre, continue to appeal to mainstream Chinese audiences today. The 2002 Witches of Salem production won numerous accolades, including three Plum Blossom Awards for its leading actors. Death of a Salesman was chosen for the Miller collaboration at Beijing People’s Art Theatre in 1983, two years after Huang first introduced Miller’s work on the Chinese stage in Shanghai. Though some expressed concern that the plot and theme of Salesman—the demise of a traveling salesman and the myth of the American Dream—were too unfamiliar to audiences in post-Cultural Revolution Beijing, Salesman was chosen over both The Crucible and All My Sons because it introduced newer and more challenging aspects of modern theater to Chinese artists and audiences who had been deprived of such fresh forms during the previous decade of chaos. The structuring of time in the play, the development of character, the tension between inner psychology and outward action, between fantasy and memory, and the formal blending of realism and expressionism—all of these were breakthroughs on the Chinese stage for which Miller and his play are credited. As Ying Ruocheng elaborates: [Miller] was rather keen on trying out new forms. For instance, the walls didn’t exist for the people in the play anymore … Willy could walk through any wall. He could communicate with whoever he was in the mood to. And Arthur created the necessary ambience for such things to be believable, to be credible. People were shocked—especially Chinese audiences, who were not accustomed to this kind of surrealistic style… (160–61)

Scholars and journalists who have written about the project discuss timing, political atmosphere, the play’s ambiguity, and its themes of capitalism and the American Dream as all being both challenges and key contributors to the production’s success. Opinions in 1983 were divided on whether China’s lack of American-style salesmen or life insurance would be a barrier to Beijing audiences, and whether they could sympathize with an ambiguous protagonist who did not possess the moral attributes of a hero (Wang; Miller; Ying; Houghton; Ou and Zhaoming; Wu et al.).7 In interviews with press and in his own diary, Miller stressed the goal of “show[ing] that there is only one humanity” and Ying Ruocheng emphasized the universality of the relationships in the story, both of which helped avoid the divisions mentioned above and evade political interpretations, such as the demonization of individualism or capitalism.8 It was a

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particularly sensitive time for Sino-American relations, as 19-year-old tennis player Hu Na had just defected while playing in the Federation Cup tournament in California and been granted political asylum in the United States, putting a halt to all government-sponsored Sino-American cultural exchanges for 1983, including in sports and the arts. Because the Salesman project was not funded by the government, it continued, observed with great interest from both sides. As a visiting artist in China, Arthur Miller was a distinguished ambassador of the American theater, and he was fortunate to have skilled partners who helped him in the enterprise of bringing Death of a Salesman to the Beijing stage. These included his wife, Inge Morath, whose study of Chinese language and passion for Chinese culture he credits with inspiring the couple’s visit in 1978, and Ying Ruocheng, who was already a leading figure in Chinese theater and cultural circles as an actor and translator. Fluent in English, widely read in Western literature, and married to Wu Shiliang, a gifted actor and translator in her own right, Ying Ruocheng was that rare citizen with the capacity to translate not only language, but also cultural difference. Ying’s participation and interventions were a key factor that made the Beijing production the lauded success it became and the landmark it remains (Ou and Zhaoming, 61–64, 67–69). It was Miller who insisted that Ying both play the role of Willy Loman and craft a new translation of the play. Ying Ruocheng’s script became a renowned case study in Chinese-English drama translation (Deng, 149– 51). Completing the task in only six weeks in preparation for Miller’s arrival, Ying’s 1983 version differed from Chen’s previous translation because Ying maintained Miller’s linguistic style, but infused the dialogue with colloquial Beijing speech and local flavor, one of the hallmarks of the Beijing People’s Art Theatre repertoire. While the language spoken by the Lomans emerged from the hutongs (lanes) of Beijing, their utterances were still situated in a Brooklyn, New York context. This cultural hybridity would become an important aspect of the play in its rehearsal process, audience reception, and enduring critical legacy. As Miller discusses in his diary and Brenda Murphy analyzes in her survey of international stagings of Death of a Salesman, a central question of the Beijing production was defining the location of the action and the nationality and ethnicity of the Lomans. In employing Beijing dialect and slang in his approximation of Miller’s colloquial New York English, Ying Ruocheng attempted to replicate “language that would have been spoken in a crowded Chinese city at the end of the 1940s,” while preserving

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references to places like Yonkers and Brooklyn. Ying asserts that “the best result is when the play is performed and, after five minutes, the audience forgets about the actors’ appearance and ethnicity and buys into the belief that they’re watching Americans” (162–63). According to Ying, as Miller journeyed through the rehearsal process, he began to see the cast as a second-generation Chinese family in Brooklyn. Mi Tiezeng, the actor who played Happy in the Beijing production, recalls that Miller continuously encouraged him not to imitate a foreigner, but told him to “act yourself” (Mi). Playing an American onstage for the first time, Li Shilong as Biff wanted to please the distinguished guest director, though he had never heard of him before and had never read his plays. Li’s strongest memory—one shared by every member of the cast I have interviewed—is of Miller timing every scene of each rehearsal with a stopwatch. Miller insisted that the pace of the play be precisely the same as the Broadway production of his original English version. Li admits that at first he found this bizarre, but gradually he came to realize that this constraint placed on the actors prompted a transformation that shifted from external to internal: when actors had to speed up their lines, it resulted in less overacting and more “natural” delivery of dialogue with clearer motivations. Miller explained to the actors that the play was written for everyone, not just Americans, and that parents, children, and siblings are similar all over the world: “He told us to act like a Chinese mother, father and son,” Li recalls (Li). Miller describes the result of this process as “creating something not quite American or Chinese, but a pure style springing from the heart of the play itself—the play as a non-national event, that is, a human circumstance” and concludes that the actors became “Lomans-asChinese-looking-people [placing] them in some country of the mind, I suppose, certainly not in any earthly geography” (131, 145). Introducing a new stage aesthetic to China, just as it had in the United States when it premiered in 1949, the 1983 production of Salesman in Beijing challenged (and ultimately rejected) the conventional practice of using what Chinese theater artists call “realistic makeup” (xianshi huazhuang ) in the form of facial pigment, wigs, and nose and chin prosthetics for Chinese actors playing foreign roles. Intended to approximate racial verisimilitude on stage from the Chinese audience’s vantage point, “realistic makeup” appears to the occasional foreign audience member who attends Chinese plays (including Miller in 1983 and myself in the 1990s) to be a form of ethnic drag or even to “turn [the actors] into

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Halloween spooks” (Miller, 5; Wang, 70). One of the most frequently discussed legacies of Miller’s direction of Salesman in Beijing is his departure from this conventional practice of using costumes, makeup and mannerisms to convey a “real” foreigner. This “real” is, of course, highly imagined, resulting in an effect similar to the “yellowface” adopted in American films of an earlier era, such as The Good Earth (1937), in which Western actors portray Chinese characters to the satisfaction of viewers of their own race. Miller was resistant to adopting the entrenched Chinese tradition of realistic makeup onstage because of the semiotic distancing between his self-perception and the visual construction of Caucasian identity presented to him in Chinese bodies and faces, which triggered American political associations with racist representations in earlier performance forms such as blackface minstrelsy. In reimagining the Loman family as a Chinese American family living in Brooklyn, whether or not that was a reality local audiences could grasp, the production evoked culturally integrated reception: the unfamiliar story of the plight of a New York salesman, set in a particularly American domestic and national idiom, portrayed through the bodies, faces, and linguistic expression of Chinese actors who remained, for the most part, “Chinese.” The “wig incident” (jiafa shijian), as it has come to be known, is one of the most frequently cited events of the mounting of Death of a Salesman at the Beijing People’s Art Theatre in 1983 and its legacy. Miller describes the event in great detail in his account and Ying notes its significance, as do all cast members I have interviewed, as well as published scholarship about the production in both Chinese and English. In his diary entries from April 25–29, Miller recounts his struggle to convince the costume, makeup, and wig staff at the theater—appealing to Ying Ruocheng as the linguistic and cultural bridge between them—to abandon their plans to wig and make up the entire cast to look like foreigners. This caused not only a substantial loss of face for the hardworking staff, but also left them and some of the actors bewildered. As Brenda Murphy points out, “Chinese actors felt naked on stage without heavy makeup and wigs” (122). While Miller was sensitive to these ramifications, he stood his ground, identifying the central conflict as the actors “want[ing] to imitate Americans, to play-act people they are not, when what I want is exactly who and what they really are” (155). This telling moment strikes at the heart of fundamental questions of both artistic practice in the theater (playing “the Other” on stage) and of cross-cultural perceptions off stage. While for Miller, the actors donning

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wigs in rehearsal conjured blackface minstrelsy and Hollywood excess, and made them “weirdly unidentifiable, not only as individuals, but as humans” (155), for the cast members themselves it was a tool long used in their acting training to play foreign roles. The earliest modern Western dramas in China at the dawn of the twentieth century employed a more presentational style of acting, but as scholar Wu Ge illuminates, once Stanislavski’s techniques were introduced in China via Soviet experts in the 1950s, the relationship between actor and character shifted from “I play” to “I am,” making actors more—not less—dependent on makeup and wigs to achieve this transformation (52–55). In short, while Miller regarded actors approximating the physical appearance of foreigners as off-putting and alienating due to his own aesthetic training and sociopolitical circumstances, Chinese actors found the absence of these markers off-putting and alienating on the same basis: Chinese actors feel more like foreigners when they do not look physically Chinese. Miller’s authority as the director, as the author of the play, and as a real foreigner trumped the comfort and conventions of the cast and artistic staff of the theater, with Ying Ruocheng as the conduit for each side to comprehend the perspective of the other. As Wu Ge and other scholars have pointed out, Miller’s resistance to embrace Chinese modern drama staging conventions, while sensible and even crucial from his cultural, aesthetic, and moral perspective, revealed a lack of familiarity and deep understanding of the history and effects of these practices in China (54, see also Sun). A compelling question remains whether this lasting legacy of how foreigners have been portrayed at the Beijing People’s Art Theatre from 1983 up to the present reflects the liberation of isolated Chinese artists, as Miller interpreted it, or the vestiges of neo-imperialism that shape Chinese practices according to Western models. Participants, audiences, and scholars of the production debate the ultimate cultural meaning of this shift, but all acknowledge that the practice of Chinese actors playing foreigners on stage was changed by Miller’s visit to China.9 Arthur Miller’s influence in China emanating from Death of a Salesman in 1983 goes far beyond removing wigs and makeup, however. In the wake of the production, new Chinese plays that adopted some of its hybrid realist-expressionist techniques found their way to the stage, most notably Jin Yun’s Uncle Doggie’s Nirvana (1986), which imitated elements of Salesman’s structure, character and even plot: the main character is a peasant struggling to keep his land who throws himself in front

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of a fire at the end of the play, hinting at suicide.10 In terms of the longterm influence of the actual collaboration with Miller on his actors and the impact of the live performance on audiences, cast members fondly recall the director’s supportive, caring manner toward actors, and they speak of working with Miller as one of the most enriching and satisfying experiences of their careers. They also describe the deep impression that seeing the production left on individual audience members, including a Peking University professor who was so moved by the play that he walked all the way back to the campus reflecting on it afterwards—a distance of 11 miles (Li). In her survey of international productions of Salesman beginning with the first European production in Vienna in 1950, Murphy notes that the “universal indicator of a successful production” of the play is an opening night audience with tears in their eyes sitting frozen in “awed silence” for a prolonged period and then erupting in a crescendo of applause (107). This was indeed the reaction in Beijing in 1983, according to Ying Ruocheng’s account: As the curtain came down, there was absolute silence for what seemed to us [actors in the wings] like a long time. […] And then, all of a sudden, I don’t know who started it, but it came like an avalanche: the applause came forth and it didn’t end. Everyone was cheering. I was relieved and excited—all of that effort had not been in vain … the audience rushed forward to the edge of the stage, shouting and pointing. (167)

Miller’s recollection in his final diary entry on May 7 has a similar description to that of Ying, along with an interpretation of what the passionate clapping and cheering were communicating: At the end they would never stop applauding. Nobody left …The gamble had paid off, the Chinese audience had understood Salesman and was showing its pride in the company. The row of Americans were cheering, […] eyes were red and wet, Ambassador Hummel was pounding his palms together, and I thought Chinese and Americans alike were trying to assure each other of the durability of both countries’ affection. (251–52)

The landmark cross-cultural collaboration established a deep bond between the two men, as detailed in Miller’s diary. Miller mentions Ying Ruocheng on the first page of the original edition of his book, the last page of his book, and almost every page in between, and Ying’s image

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is included on the cover of every version of the book that has been published, and in most of Morath’s photographs inside. Death of a Salesman was performed in Beijing more than fifty times after Miller returned to the United States, and then toured to Hong Kong and Singapore. This original Beijing version was the only production of the play in China for nearly thirty years, until another director at Beijing People’s Art Theatre, Li Liuyi, mounted a new and very different version in 2012 for the sixtieth anniversary of the theater company. He localized and contemporized the story without changing the script, steering the actors’ interpretations toward evoking a trendy current-day Chinese vibe rather than a 1950s foreign feel. Ironically, in creating this hypermodern sensibility, Li and the actors drew on traditional xiqu (Chinese opera) elements, by staging the play in the vast space of the Capital Theatre using only minimal physical elements, most notably invoking the xiqu convention of “one table and two chairs.” As both director and set designer, Li Liuyi employed minimalism, using only a few chairs, a table, a bench, a Juliette balcony protruding from an enormous back wall, a cluster of tree branches, the iconic refrigerator, and numerous white spheres of varying sizes scattered across the enormous stage. Lighting effects cast looming shadows to create an expressionist, nearly futuristic environment with a universal feel. The production was highly regarded by critics and moderately appealing to mainstream audiences, running for a respectable 22 performances in Beijing People’s Art Theatre’s largest proscenium venue, where Miller’s production had been performed three decades prior. Shanghai also staged Miller in 2012, but rather than returning to the tried and true Crucible or Salesman, Beijing’s southern theater rival cohosted a foreign collaboration of All My Sons , featuring two women at the helm. It was the first Sino-American cross-cultural production of an Arthur Miller play since his Salesman project in 1983, with the paradigm reversed when director Lei Guohua from the Shanghai Dramatic Arts Centre (SDAC) journeyed to University of Kansas as a visiting artist. Having led workshops in 2009–2010, she returned to the KU campus the following year to direct All My Sons with a cast of students. She linked her choice of the play directly to Miller’s lasting legacy among theater artists in China, revealing that SDAC had harbored hopes he would return to China for an encore project: In 1983, Miller traveled to China to direct Death of a Salesman at the Beijing People’s Art Theatre in Beijing. The play was a smashing success and

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deeply touched the Chinese people. In 2004, my theatre and I planned to invite Miller to return to China for a production of All My Sons . Unfortunately, he left the world forever before this was possible, but his work and soul have never left us. (Lei)

Employing a Brechtian style, Lei added a narrator who directly addressed the audience, and she incorporated film projections to highlight the lead character’s mental state. She also drew parallels between the story of lives sacrificed for the sake of business in Miller’s play to recent events in China, such as the 2008 tainted milk scandal.11 Under the co-direction of Lei and University of Kansas University Theatre Artistic Director Mechele Leon, the cast and crew subsequently traveled to China where the production was remounted as part of the 2012 Shanghai Contemporary Theatre Festival. Thus the production is unique on many fronts: a professional Chinese director worked with American college students to perform an American play in English; a college production developed in the United States traveled to China for an encore performance in a vastly different cultural context; and Miller’s play All My Sons premiered in China more than thirty years after it was initially considered for production in Beijing.

Miller Is Revived and Reconstructed (2015--Present) The first professional Chinese staging of All My Sons followed three years after Lei Guohua and Mechele Leon’s Kansas-Shanghai project, in a production directed by Luther Fung for the Hong Kong Federation of Drama Societies as part of the Miller centennial in 2015. Shanghai and Beijing likewise made plans to join the international theater community in commemorating the hundredth anniversary of the playwright’s birth. The Shanghai Dramatic Arts Centre (SDAC) intended to stage Death of a Salesman with experienced Miller director David Esbjornson invited from the United States, and featuring Lü Liang in the lead role, but it was changed to a production of Tennessee Williams’ Glass Menagerie when Lü became unavailable.12 The project was picked up again under Chinese director Lin Yi, and Lü Liang finally took the stage as Willy Loman in Shanghai’s first-ever production of the play in 2020. To mark the Miller centennial in Beijing, the National Theater of China (NTC) not only revived Wang Xiaoying’s 2002 production of The Witches of Salem (featuring the same cast that performed thirteen years earlier),

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but also staged China’s premiere of The Ride Down Mt. Morgan, directed by Zhao Yi, which opened in January 2016. Three years later, in March 2019, the Face Theater Group (Renmian jutuan) in Shanghai presented a reading of Mt. Morgan with scripts in hands, minimal costumes, and no lighting or set design, in a small, simple white room that evoked the feel of the play’s Chinese title Teshu bingfang, which translates as a special hospital ward or patient’s room. In addition to these live performances in recent years, the Royal National Theatre in London partnered with the National Theatre of China in 2015 to screen videotaped performances of British theater productions in cinemas and similar settings throughout China. Called NT Live and supported by the British Council, the screenings are distributed by ATW Culture Media Ltd. to more than 20 cities in mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, reaching hundreds of thousands of people.13 NT Live featured Ivo Van Hove’s production of Miller’s A View from the Bridge in 2018, and the 2019 International Theatre Live Festival opened with the Old Vic’s production of The Crucible.14 According to Li Congzhou, the CEO of ATW Culture Media, audiences for NT Live in China are mostly young (ages 20–35), highly educated female fans of British and American television and film (China Plus ). While British theaters staging Miller’s plays are broadcasting those performances to the Chinese public, continuing the flow of his work from West to East, theater-makers in North America are transferring the story of Miller’s Beijing adventure in 1983 and its resulting production from East to West. This transnational flow is a constellation of networks that intersect with the content and themes of Miller’s experience of staging Death of a Salesman in China: embodying the Other on stage, situating dramatic material in new national and cultural contexts, working in a bilingual environment through translation, navigating hierarchies of authority, and negotiating opportunities for inclusivity. Salesman in China, a Canadian collaboration, and Salesman 之死, an American collaboration, each feature a new Ying-Miller style duo that bears similarities and differences to their predecessors. Both projects were inspired by a past reading of Miller’s 1984 book about his experience in Beijing. In each case, the person inspired to create the piece (the “Ying” half of the duo) approached the other to be a collaborative partner and write or co-write the script (the “Miller” half of the duo), with the “Ying” figure being Western and “Miller” being ethnically Chinese. Without any awareness of each other, or any subsequent contact, both pairs began work on their

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projects at approximately the same time (2017) and with strikingly similar content, issues, and audiences in mind—but developed them with unique qualities that illuminate the broadly applicable facets of the “Salesman in Beijing” story. Though separated by many miles, both Michael Leibenluft and Leanna Brodie, upon first reading Miller’s 1984 book sometime around the start of the new millennium, immediately imagined it as a story to dramatize on stage.15 Like Ying after encountering Miller’s 1949 play, they kept the idea in the back of their minds for years and then picked it up at a future date. For American Leibenluft, the flame was reignited when he spent several years after college in Shanghai studying theater and directing plays, and then continued his practice in New York. For Brodie, it was when she moved to the community of Richmond, British Columbia (a satellite city of Vancouver) where half the population of roughly 200,000 identifies as Chinese and 60% of all residents were born outside of Canada, the highest immigrant population in the country (Sy).16 The multilingual, intercultural environments in the United States and Canada in which Leibenluft and Brodie each were creating theater became fertile ground for staging the events that took place in spring 1983 at the Beijing People’s Art Theatre in China. Brodie, an accomplished translator, and playwright/director Jovanni Sy developed their production concept and script for Salesman in China together by first traveling and interviewing people in the United States, Canada, and Beijing who had collaborated with Ying and Miller, and by researching in archives and museums, as well as reading closely Miller’s Salesman in Beijing, Ying’s Voices Carry, and academic articles and press materials related to the 1983 production. Between 2017 and 2020, a three-year residency with Playwrights Theatre Centre, along with script workshops at the Stratford Festival and Banff Playwrights Lab, facilitated collaborations with actors at various stages of the work. The first public event, entitled Unscripted: Salesman in China in February 2018 at Gateway Theatre, was advertised as “a border-crossing, time-travelling community event” and featured a scene from Miller’s Death of a Salesman performed in both Chinese and English, a presentation about Ying and Miller’s collaboration in 1983, a panel on play translation, and an extensive lobby display featuring timelines, video footage, an interactive “Memory Booth,” and Beijing-inspired snacks. The first time Brodie and Sy’s script-in-progress was presented in a reading was after the playwrights’ retreat at the Stratford Festival later that year. The ultimate goal is for

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a fully bilingual production of the play to be performed in both North America and China in partnership with a Chinese theater company, preferably the Beijing People’s Art Theatre. As articulated in their artistic statement, “it’s a great story” and has dramatic chops: “Ying and Miller had an audacious dream where the odds were stacked against them from the start. They avoided pitfalls and concocted ingenious solutions to triumph and leave an enduring legacy” (Brodie). Leibenluft’s experiment, Salesman 之死 (“zhisi” meaning “death of”), was jumpstarted with a fellowship in 2017 from LABA: A Laboratory of Jewish Culture at New York City’s 14th Street Y, where he gathered four bilingual actors of Chinese descent for a preliminary exploration that involved discussion of the 1983 production and exposure to the background history and archival material. He approached Jeremy Tiang (a Singaporean playwright, translator, and theater artist based in New York City) about collaborating first as dramaturg and then as playwright. Together with the performers, they developed a “collage piece that included short scenes from Salesman performed bilingually, intermixed with interviews amongst [them]selves about how they envisioned the characters and the play, as well as their own experiences being immigrant and Asian American artists in the US” (Leibenluft). Miller and Ying were not yet characters in the piece; rather, the actors related the people in Willy Loman’s world to their own personal experiences. This fluidity of characterization was expanded as the play took shape, with a cast of five performers eventually portraying more than fifteen identities: the actors from the 1983 Chinese cast as well as roles they played (Ying/Willy Loman, Zhu Lin/Linda, Li Shilong/Biff, Liu Jun/Woman from Boston), along with Miller and his wife Inge Morath, Ying and his wife Wu Shiliang, Miss Shen the interpreter, a production designer, and a few others. In addition to these roles—all of which appear in the Canadian project—Leibenluft and Tiang created five new characters in a structural element that connects the two narratives of the existing playwithin-a-play to a third narrative. This “contemporary coda” comprises the final section of the performance and “positions the 1983 collaboration in relation to our current geopolitical and cultural moment” (Leibenluft). The coda in the first workshop production in 2018 examined the isolation of and pressures on Chinese students at American universities, linked through the plot element of a student at Ohio State cramming for an exam on the play Death of a Salesman and the generation gap between her and her mother that echoes that between Biff and Willy in Miller’s

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play. In the revised script for the 2020 premiere in New York, the coda again explored tensions between a mother and daughter, but this time surrounding the timely issue of college entrance examination cheating scandals in the United States.17 The Leibenluft-Tiang play Salesman 之死 specifies a cast of all-female or nonbinary performers, thus exploring gender dynamics along with “investigat[ing] the dynamics of translating ideas across culture and language, the intrinsic power dynamics and misunderstanding and opportunity for empathy” intended by the project (Leibenluft). In terms of how their production depicts the partnership at the center of the story, Leibenluft and Tiang and their cast constructed “heightened versions” of Ying and Miller and “their personas in the public imagination” rather than “realistic portrayals” because both are public figures (Tiang). They envision it not set in the literal setting of the Beijing People’s Art Theatre of 1983, but “in more of an abstracted rehearsal room in today’s world” (LABA). At the center of the piece have always been its bilingualism and the desire that it be comprehensible and enjoyable to bicultural/bilingual and monolingual audiences alike. The Brodie–Sy play Salesman in China emerged from many similar goals of exploring cross-cultural encounters, power dynamics, female agency, and linguistic interplay, with some contrasting results. Its casting calls for a minimum of a dozen actors, with some doubling of parts, though for the most part according to conventional gender assignments. As a feminist, Brodie sought to de-marginalize the women in the “malecentered narrative” by foregrounding Morath and Wu Shiliang along with Zhu Lin, Liu Jun, and Miss Shen (interpreter) throughout the play. In Salesman 之死, Tiang addressed this dominance of male subjects in the events of 1983 by including a scene about halfway through the script that begins with a projected title reading “For once, Mrs. Ying and Mrs. Miller get a scene” and features Morath, Wu Shiliang, Zhu Lin, Liu Jun, and interpreter Shen, but no male characters—it is the only scene in Salesman 之死 in which none of the actresses plays a male role. Both plays stage the “wig incident” as a climactic turning point in the plot and substantial dramatic conflict that includes both humor and pathos. Salesman in China divides the embarrassed and affronted designers into three individuals—Mo the Wigmaker, Hui the Make-up Artist, and Gong the Props Guy—while Salesman 之死 combines them into one character named Designer Huang. Brodie and Sy’s version, while

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maintaining the core dramatis personae featured in Tiang’s script, populates the play with additional characters who were actual participants in the 1983 project: Zhu Xu (the actor who played Charley), Mi Tiezeng (Happy), Gladys and Xianyi Yang (friends of Ying who were English translators of Chinese literature), Sam Rosicky (US cultural attaché), and the aforementioned renowned playwright Cao Yu, who was President of the Beijing People’s Art Theatre and extended the formal invitation to Miller to direct his play in China. Another addition in Salesman in China is peripheral characters designated as being inside the heads of the two main characters. In much the same way Willy Loman interacted with his brother Ben from his past and imagination in Death of a Salesman, Miller converses with Elia Kazan and Howard Smith in Salesman in China, and Ying Ruocheng communicates with his father Ying Qianli.18 This echoes one of the stated goals of the play’s creators—“getting inside the heads of characters whose cultural background and experience of the world has been so different from [our] own”—as articulated by Brodie. Like Leibenluft and Tiang, Brodie and Sy seek to offer a theatrical experience that challenges Sino-American cultural perceptions and, while bilingual, is accessible to audiences whose language might be limited to either Chinese or English. Their characterization of Ying and Miller strives to stay more historically accurate by “trying to stay true to who we, and most of the general public, perceive Miller and Ying to be … [so] that even if we’re making up a scene and putting words in Miller and Ying’s mouths, the people who knew them best could … see [them] saying that” (Sy). When it comes to the rapport between the two men, both the American and Canadian project creators infused the pair with lively dialogue and witty banter that displays their dry wit, quick reflexes, and mutual respect and affection, though the two plays offer audiences Arthur Millers and Ying Ruochengs with distinctly different personalities. Indeed, one of the dilemmas of staging the story of the staging of Salesman, according to both duos (Leibenluft/Tiang and Brodie/Sy) is finding a balance between historical accuracy and compelling theater. They are aware that most audience members know little or nothing of the story of Miller and Ying in Beijing in 1983, and thus they face the challenge of presenting a narrative that reflects the story relayed in the two mens’ respective memoirs that inspired the project. At the same time, they speak of “finding theatrical truth…rather than being bound to biographical detail” (Brodie) and “allowing enough creative room to let the

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story breathe, not creat[e] a history biopic” (Leibenluft). Both productions interweave scenes of rehearsal and performance reconstruction— that suggest what it might have been like inside the process of staging Death of a Salesman at the Beijing People’s Art Theatre in 1983 China— with behind-the-scenes moments such as press conferences, private conversations, and personal ruminations. From Miller’s diary, his assessments of the actors and designers are brought to life on stage, while from Ying’s autobiography, their assessments of Miller are expressed just as strongly— some humorous, some thought-provoking, and all intended to invite the audience to critically reflect and consider the rehearsal and production process from multiple vantage points. By mining diverse source material and the creative talents of an ensemble of actors to stage a story previously known only from Miller’s point of view (via five editions of his book “Salesman” in Beijing between 1984 and 2015, and from newspapers, magazines, and television coverage of the event in 1983), Salesman in China and Salesman 之死 extend Miller’s influence in China beyond Chinese national borders to reach new global audiences. To fully understand “Miller in China,” then, one must first go to China, following in the path of his plays, productions, and his own artistic collaboration there, examine its legacy for the Chinese theater community ever since, and then travel back to North America to see Miller in China—as he was and is imagined to have been—performed on Canadian and American stages. Acknowledgements Thank you to Bloomsbury for its permission to draw material from my introduction to the 2015 centennial edition of Miller’s 1984 book Salesman in Beijing, retitled Death of a Salesman in Beijing, for use in this chapter.

Notes 1. The Chinese version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin performed in Tokyo in 1907 was adapted from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel (not George Aiken’s stage melodrama), with a few significant plot changes and theme emphases. China’s earliest Western-style stage dramas (later dubbed “huaju” or spoken drama) developed from wenmingxi (civilized drama) that were modeled on Japanese forms called shingeki and shinpa (for more, see Liu 2013). Many prominent Chinese intellectuals in the early twentieth century studied abroad at universities in Japan, England, France, and the United States.

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2. Miller and Morath visited China in 1978 as private citizens (not as foreign experts) under the auspices of the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries, with support from the newly established Center for US-China Arts Exchange. Miller had tried unsuccessfully to obtain a visa to visit China in 1973 and 1976 (for more details, see Wang 2017, 11–12). 3. All My Sons premiered in NY in 1947, winning the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award; Death of a Salesman premiered in 1949 and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award, and Antoinette Perry Award (among others) and ran for 742 performances. 4. Cao Yu also attended Tsinghua University, graduating in 1934, more than a decade before Ying attended. 5. Death of a Salesman in Beijing (2015) was originally published as Salesman in Beijing in 1984 with subsequent editions in 1991 and 2005. Voices Carry: Behind Bars and Backstage during China’s Revolution and Reform was published in 2009. Ying Ruocheng and Arthur Miller died within two years of each other (Ying in 2003 and Miller in 2005). 6. The Crucible is called “The Witches of Salem” or “The Salem Witches” in some other countries/languages as well, including French (Les Sorcières de Salem) and Spanish (Las Brujas de Salem). 7. For a particularly thorough examination of the trajectory of the YingMiller project in 1983, the cultural and political challenges and debates, and multifaceted impact and legacy, see especially Wang (2017) and Ou and Zhaoming (2013). 8. Miller, 6; see also Wang (2017) and Ou and Zhaoming (2013). 9. This does not mean that foreign characters in Chinese plays are no longer depicted using wigs, facial prosthetics, makeup—indeed often they still are—but Salesman introduced the option of actors playing foreigners without these markers of “foreignness” if desired. From 1983 on, this became a choice that directors and designers have made distinctly for each production. Wang Xiaoying’s 2002 production of The Witches of Salem—and its 2015 revival—are an example of post-1983 productions that retained the conventions of ‘realistic makeup,’ as discussed in this essay. 10. Uncle Doggie’s Nirvana (Gou’er ye niepan) is widely regarded as the most significant Chinese play of the 1980s. Directed by Lin Zhaohua, it won the National Best Play Award in 1986. Ying Ruocheng directed his own English translation of the play at Virginia Commonwealth University in 1993, the same year he directed Death of a Salesman at the College of William and Mary (about which he notes, “I must admit that when I was directing Salesman, it felt rather odd at times to be explaining to American actors how Americans behave” [184]).

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11. In July 2008, milk and baby formula containing the banned chemical melamine (added to boost protein content) caused the severe illness of hundreds of thousands of babies in China (including six fatalities). Public admission of the crisis by authorities was delayed until after the Beijing Olympic Games in August. Eventually, several individuals held responsible were prosecuted and imprisoned (two were executed). 12. The Esbjornson production of a classic American play was part of a series of annual Sino-Western collaborations hosted by SDAC—the previous two years had seen co-productions of Moliere’s School for Wives with a French director and Uncle Vanya with a Russian director. 13. Though intended to be broadcast live via video feed during actual performances in the UK, NT Live screenings are pre-recorded in China because of the six hour time difference (an evening performance in England begins at midnight in China) and because of strict censorship regulations in China that require advance access to the scripts and broadcasts by officials before they can reach the public. 14. For more on NT Live in China during this period, see the following links, https://www.britishcouncil.cn/en/shakespearelives/arts/ntlive; http:// www.chinadaily.com.cn/business/2017-06/01/content_29572058. htm; https://www.caixinglobal.com/2017-07-28/filmed-plays-bringbroadway-and-west-end-to-chinas-silver-screens-101123508.html. 15. Neither Brodie nor Leibenluft was able to pinpoint exactly when they read the book for the first time: Brodie recalls it was sometime between 1996 and 2007, and Leibenluft read the book as an undergraduate sometime between 2006 and 2010. 16. Vancouver is the third largest city in Canada with over 2,250,000 people, more than half of whom speak a mother tongue other than English. Its population is 28% Chinese. 17. The public workshop directed by Leibenluft was staged in Long Island City (NY) at the LaGuardia Performing Arts Center (LPAC) as part of its Rough Draft Festival in April 2018, featuring Julia Brothers, Vivian Chiu, Chun Cho, Julia Gu, and Jing Xu. The play’s 2020 premiere presented by Target Margin Theater was co-produced by Leibenluft’s company Gung Ho Projects and the Yangtze Repertory Theater, and adopted a new title: Salesman 之死: The (Almost!) True Story of the 1983 Production of Death of a Salesman at the Beijing People’s Art Theatre Directed by Mr. Arthur Miller Himself from a Script Translated by Mr. Ying Ruocheng Who Also Played Willy Loman. 18. Brodie and Sy dubbing these characters “The Inside of Their Heads” seems to be a nod to Miller’s original title for Death of a Salesman, which was The Inside of His Head. Elia Kazan was the director of the 1949 production (which previewed at the Colonial Theater in Boston before moving to Broadway), and Howard Smith was the actor who played Charley.

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Ying Ruocheng’s father, Ying Qianli, was a prominent intellectual in Beijing who fled to Taiwan in late 1948 when Ying Ruocheng was in college, and never saw his family again, dying in Taiwan 20 years later during mainland China’s Cultural Revolution (his family did not learn of his 1969 death until many years later).

Works Cited Brodie, Leanna. 2019. Email correspondence. August 3–6. Brodie, Leanna, and Jovanni Sy. 2018. Salesman in China. Unpublished partial draft. October. Conceison, Claire. 2015. Introduction, in Death of a Salesman in Beijing. Bloomsbury, viii–xxxii. Deng, Di. 2008. Ying Ruocheng’s Influence on the Chinese Drama Translation Theory. Hundred Schools in Art 2, 149–51. Han, Dexing. 2014. “Arthur Miller in China” (Ase Mile zai Zhongguo). Theatre Arts 2, 69–77. Houghton, Norris. 1984. “Understanding Willy” (Book review of Salesman in Beijing ). The New York Times, June 24. http://movies2.nytimes.com/books/ 00/11/12/specials/miller-beijing.html. Lei, Guohua. 2011. Press release. All My Sons. University Theatre, University of Kansas, November. Leibenluft, Michael. 2019. Email correspondence. August 3–5. Li, Liuyi. 2015. Interview with author. Beijing, January 3. Li, Shilong. 2015. Interview with author. Beijing, January 2. Liu, Siyuan. 2015. Performing Hybridity in Colonial-Modern China. Palgrave. Mi, Tiezeng. 2014. Interview with author. Beijing, July 3. “Michael Leibenluft discusses ‘Salesman 之死’.” May 4, 2017. LABA: A Laboratory for Jewish Culture. https://labajournal.com/2017/05/michaelleibenluft-discusses-salesman之死/. Miller, Arthur. 2015. Death of a Salesman in Beijing. Bloomsbury. Murphy, Brenda. 1995. Miller: Death of a Salesman. Cambridge University Press. Ou, Rong, and Qian Zhaoming. 2013. ‘Death of a Salesman’ in Beijing Revisited. The Arthur Miller Journal 8:2 (Fall), 57–76. Sun, Huizhu (William Hui-zhu Sun). 2005. “Arthur Miller: A Dramatist Full of Paradox” (Ase Mile: chongman beilun de xiju dashi). Culture Review 2. Sy, Jovanni. 2019. Email correspondence. August 3–6. “The Crucible opens this year’s International Theatre Live Festival.” 2019. China Plus, July 31. http://chinaplus.cri.cn/news/showbiz/14/20190731/ 323969.html. Tiang, Jeremy. 2019a. Salesman 之死. Unpublished script. June.

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Tiang, Jeremy. 2019b. Email correspondence. August 3–5. “Unscripted: Salesman in China.” 2018. Playwrights Theatre Centre. https:// www.playwrightstheatre.com/unscripted-salesman-china/. Wang, Qiuyu. 2017. Stones from Other Hills: The Impact of Death of a Salesman on the Revival of Chinese Theatre in the 1980s. Thesis for Master of Liberal Arts in Extension Studies, Harvard University, November. http://nrs.harvard. edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:37736770. Wren, Christopher. 1983. “Theater Opens Doors in China.” The New York Times, September 4. https://www.nytimes.com/1983/09/04/theater/ theater-in-china-opens-some-doors.html. Wu, Ge. 2006. “Ying Ruocheng, Arthur Miller—The Two ‘Salesmen’ of SinoAmerican Theatre Exchange” (Ying Ruocheng, Ase Mile—Zhongmei xiju jiaoliu de liang ge ‘tuixiaoyuan’ ). Chinese Theatre 7, 52–55. Wu, Wenquan, Chen Li, and Zhu Qinjuan. 2015. “Arthur Miller: Reception and Influence in China.” The Journal of American Drama and Theatre 27:3 (Fall). Ying, Ruocheng, and Claire Conceison. 2009. Voices Carry: Behind Bars and Backstage During China’s Revolution and Reform. Rowman & Littlefield.

PART III

Arthur Miller and Contemporary Issues

CHAPTER 16

Human Rights and the Freedom to Write Christopher Bigsby

The first subsection of Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights declares, “everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers.” Its second, subsection, however, offers not just one get-out clause but a host as those freedoms are trumped by national security, territorial integrity, public security, the prevention of disorder, the protection of morals, and the disclosure of confidential information. Writers have found their work banned for any combination of the above. Nadine Gordimer has insisted that a writer requires “freedom from the public conformity of political interpretation, morals and tastes” (Webb and Bell, 57). That freedom has not always been available, within Europe or outside it. The United States is not a signatory to the American Convention on Human Rights. It is one of only three countries not to have signed the Convention on the Rights of the Child (the others being South Sudan and Somalia). It has not signed the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, one of only six countries out of 193, or the Convention Against Enforced Disappearance, which

C. Bigsby (B) University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK © The Author(s) 2020 S. Marino and D. Palmer (eds.), Arthur Miller for the Twenty-First Century, American Literature Readings in the 21st Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37293-4_16

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prohibits the secret detention and abduction of people by the state, precisely the activity in which it would engage following 9/11. Ironically, it did ratify the Convention on Protection from Torture even as engaging in it under President George W. Bush. When Arthur Miller died, an Arthur Miller Freedom to Write Memorial Lecture was established. The first was delivered by the Turkish Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk who insisted when another writer in another house is not free, no writer is free. … Whatever the country, freedom of thought and expression are universal human rights. These freedoms, which modern people long for as much as bread and water, should never be limited by using nationalistic sentiment, moral sensitivities, or—worst of all—business or military interests. … Respect for the rights of religious or ethnic minorities should never be an excuse to violate freedom of speech. (New York Review of Books )

For Israeli writer David Grossman, who also delivered an Arthur Miller lecture, “As soon as we lay hands on the pen, we already cease to be a slave” (Nagy). “Literature,” he said, “is one of the few places where we can allow ourselves to explore tenderness or sympathy for the other” (Blackshaw). And that, of course, is one of the methods, functions, and perhaps justifications for literature. In literature, barriers of gender and race dissolve. Writers cross national boundaries, imaginatively and literally. Philosophically, writers do not have passports, though unfortunately there have been times when that was literally so as governments stripped writers of their passports, the very sign of citizenship. Miller, of course, was one of those. Salman Rushdie, who also delivered one of the Miller lectures, reminded his audience that Ovid was banned from Rome, Mandelstam died in a labor camp and Lorca was murdered in Spain. He might have added a whole litany of imprisoned writers, including Wole Soyinka in Nigeria and Joseph Brodsky in Russia. As it happens, both were released as a result of the efforts of Arthur Miller, who had himself faced the prospect of prison for holding opinions at odds with those of the state. In 2018, Hillary Clinton delivered the Miller lecture, listing those writers of all kinds who were persecuted, imprisoned, killed around the world, all too aware of attacks on the press in her own country, of the hostility of the President to whom she had lost in a deeply compromised election. In the World Press Freedom Index of 2018, the United States came 45th,

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four places below Burkino Faso but three above Botswana, the President having declared the press an enemy of the people. There is no federal “shield law” allowing reporters to protect their sources. During the Cold War, in eastern and central Europe, books were mimeographed and passed secretly from hand to hand at considerable risk. That alone suggested the subversive role of literature. When the Irish writer Anne Enright’s parents went to Lourdes, not for a cure but, strangely, on their honeymoon, on their way back they smuggled books on the banned list back into Catholic Ireland which sought to determine what could be read on the grounds of morality, religion trumping freedom of expression. Edna O’Brien’s first book was banned in Ireland as an offense to moral values, banned, that is, by a Church some of whose priests, at the time, were busy molesting children while seizing the children of unmarried mothers who had been told that contraception was wicked. The Catholic Church, of course, is not unique in believing that its dogmas alone justify suppressing freedom of thought and expression. The Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa once remarked that “the mere existence of literature is a subversive act” (Bigsby 2000, 371), perhaps not so surprising when you discover that his first novel was publicly burned by the military. His Mexican colleague Carlos Fuentes was banned from the United States for years, the FBI maintaining a 170-page dossier on him, though Miller secured his entry for a New York meeting of PEN International. The Colombian Nobel Prize winner Gabriel Garcia Marquez was banned from the United States for decades, a ban finally reversed by President Clinton, who had been caught reading One Hundred Years of Solitude in a class at Yale law school. Marquez responded by defending Clinton in the Monica Lewinsky affair. Tit for tat. In 1974, the Brazilian writer, and bestselling author, Paulo Coelho, was arrested and tortured by the military government for “subversive activities” because of lyrics he wrote for singers that struck that government as left-wing. Unsurprisingly, he is a supporter of Amnesty International. Why recall the past? Because Arthur Miller insisted that the past is “the seedbed of current reality, and the way to possibly reaffirm cause and effect in an insane world.” He was aware, though, that his own culture “had deemed amnesia as the ultimate mark of reality,” America preferring myth over history (Bigsby 2011, 156). The National Museum of African Americans was not established until 2003, the National Museum of the American Indian until 2004. Lynching was finally commemorated in 2018 with the opening, in Montgomery, Alabama, of the Legacy

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Museum and National Museum for Peace and Justice. To mark the occasion, the Montgomery Advertiser listed 360 African Americans killed in the state between 1877 and 1950. Its front page carried a banner declaring, “Time to Face the Past.” The National Museum of Latinos is no more than a proposal. Human rights perhaps begin with an acknowledgment of the past’s just demands on the present as well as its persistence into the present. To deny the link between past and present, between cause and effect, is not only to deny social responsibility, it was, for Miller, to deny the basis of morality. His own plays, he noted, “are refracting the past all the time, because I don’t really know how to understand anybody only from his present actions. We need the past to comprehend anything” (Biggs, 10). Human rights were a central concern of Arthur Miller. His theater was not polemical, except at the very beginning when, as a Marxist, he wrote plays for the trade union movement, but he was concerned with the private consequences of public actions and the public consequences of private actions. In that sense he was political almost from the beginning. He became a convert to Marxism at the University of Michigan and as a consequence found himself in opposition to American capitalism, even joining strikers picketing his own father’s company, which may explain something of the tension between fathers and sons in his work. The great external issue of his university days was the Spanish Civil War. Indeed, he wrote to the president of the United States to protest against America’s policy toward Spain, marking the beginning of what would become an extensive FBI file as he spoke out, sometimes for suspect causes, leading him eventually to appear before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee, an institution which he regarded as a sin against political liberty. Support for Republican Spain also earned FBI files for Pearl Buck, Edna Ferber, and William Faulkner, among others. One of his friends at the University of Michigan died in Spain, and he himself was tempted to go but stopped by his mother, which is what mothers are for. Well over half a century later, when he was awarded the Prince of Asturias Award in Oviedo, he took the opportunity to invoke that war in the presence of some of those who, from his point of view, had been on the wrong side. There is an argument for interring the past, laying ghosts to rest, but there is a stronger case for preserving it, a debate at the heart of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant. His first Broadway successes, All My Sons and Death of a Salesman, were not political interventions, though there were those on the Right

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and Left who saw both in those terms. The former was not the attack on capitalism the Right declared it to be, and which led to it being banned in areas of Europe then under American occupation. Paradoxically, it was also banned in the Soviet Union precisely because it was not such an attack. By the same token, Death of a Salesman is not an attack on the American dream but on Willy Loman’s version of it as he convinces himself that the meaning of his life lies in his role as a salesman rather than his relationship with those who care for him, though again this play was banned in allied occupied Europe. The real political intervention, of course, came with The Crucible. The House Un-American Activities Committee may have been the immediate occasion for Miller’s writing The Crucible, but it went on to be his most-produced play not because audiences around the world were interested in 1692 or 1950s’ America but because they saw its immediate relevance to themselves. The Chinese saw it as a comment on the Cultural Revolution, in which children took their revenge on adults. Miller himself saw its relevance to so-called recovered memories, in which, under therapy, people accused their parents of abuse, with no evidence. When the play was staged in New York, six months after 9/11 and five after the passage of the Patriot Act, Miller saw it as dealing with the disintegration of a society. It was a play about paranoia and hysteria. The Patriot Act authorized the indefinite detention of immigrants, the searching of property, telephone, email, and financial records without a court order and the seizing of library records so that it would be possible to see what American citizens were reading. To their credit, librarians resisted. Records could be seized without probable cause or judicial oversight and a gag order meant that those who received these demands could not disclose the fact, though this was later modified. Beyond that, though, The Crucible’s portrait of a man who stands up against the orthodoxy of the day and suffers accordingly has never lost its relevance. It is a play which dramatizes the ease with which we watch others persecuted and simply stand by as if it had no personal relevance until it reaches out to touch us. It stages the price that can be paid for resisting authority, for rejecting the narrative offered by those with the power to enforce it. It presents the uncomfortable truth that neighbor can turn against neighbor, as they did in the former Yugoslavia and Northern Ireland, as they are in Ukraine, Libya, Iraq, and Syria.

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He witnessed those close to him required to inform on their friends to save their own careers, asked to name those who had been fellow communists in the 1930s. Elia Kazan, director of Death of a Salesman, initially refused, but when it was made clear to him by a Hollywood executive that his career in movies would be over if he refused to cooperate, he asked for a supposedly secret hearing at which he gave up those names. The secret hearing turned out not to be secret, names quickly being divulged. It would be four years before Miller himself would be summoned by the Committee. Unlike Kazan, he refused to name those who had attended the few communist party meetings he had gone to. As a result, he was sentenced to a year in prison (reversed on appeal), a $500 fine, and loss of his passport. Ironically, attacked at the time for his earlier pro-Russian views, in later life, as president of International PEN, he would secure the release of writers imprisoned in the Soviet Union and elsewhere. This man who as a student had embraced communism ended by liberating some of its victims. When Vietnam became a central issue, he found himself in contention with a man, Richard Nixon, who had initially made his reputation on the House Un-American Activities Committee. It was President Harry Truman who remarked that he was a no-good, lying bastard who could lie out of both sides of his mouth at the same time. As Nixon was to say later of his involvement in the Watergate scandal, he was not lying but saying things which later seemed to be untrue. As Hamlet says, “seems. I know not seems.” Nixon, though, came into his own in the 1950s, a period it is sometimes hard to understand. When Miller’s third wife, Inge Morath, an Austrian, wanted to go to America, she was asked by an official why she was living with a woman (she had shared Mary McCarthy’s Paris apartment). Apparently, Europeans were liable to a supposed vice of whose existence Queen Victoria was apparently ignorant. She was also asked whether she had committed adultery, this evidently being a European vice which could corrupt America if such practices ever crossed the Atlantic. So confused did Inge become that, presented with a landing form when she arrived in America which asked her color, she wrote “pink.” On arrival in America, she was asked if she had been a communist but not if she had been a Nazi even though both her parents (for career rather than ideological reasons) had been members of the Nazi Party. But, then, America was busy smuggling former Nazis into the country, including Werner von Braun, not only a member of the Nazi Party but also a Sturmbanführer in the SS, whose rockets rained down on Britain, rockets

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built by slave labor, some of whom he had hand-picked from Buchenwald concentration camp. He surrendered to the Americans because, as he said, he could only surrender such a weapon to a people who were guided by the Bible, God apparently favoring those in pursuit of missile technology. The people of the Bible, who evidently didn’t read it too well, duly took him to America, forging documents to remove any reference to his Nazi past, a conspiracy against history of precisely the kind that Miller rejected. This was the man who in 1969 took America to the moon and was awarded the National Medal of Science. The human rights violations of those who had built his rockets were forgotten as Neil Armstrong took one small step for man (sic) and one giant leap for mankind. Those worked to death building the V2 rockets could often not even manage a single step while they hardly represented a giant leap for humanity. Arthur Miller’s friend, the peace campaigner William Sloane Coffin, supporter of the Civil Rights movement and fierce opponent of America’s involvement in the Vietnam War, once observed that, “I feel strongly that Oliver Wendell Holmes was right. Not to share in the activity and passion of your time is to count as not having lived” but added, “St Augustine said … ‘Never fight evil as if it were something that arose totally outside yourself’” (McGrath, 10). It was a conviction shared by Miller, who often stood beside him in his battles for justice during the Vietnam war and who also rejected the notion that evil is wholly external to the self. As he has a character remark in After the Fall , to maintain our innocence, we kill most easily, that even the Jews have their Jews. America, perhaps more than most countries, has a predilection for feeling itself uniquely innocent. As Ronald Reagan remarked in his State of the Union Address in 1984, “how can we not believe in the goodness and greatness of Americans? How can we not do what is right and needed to preserve this last, best hope of man on earth?… We will carry on the traditions of a good and worthy people who have brought light where there was darkness” (Reagan). In 2001, George W. Bush declared, “I know how good we are,” (Bush) even as, through his policies, he tried his best to prove the opposite, declaring torture legally valid while covertly flying those seized from the streets of foreign countries and imprisoning them, without trial, in Cuba on land legally sovereign American territory and therefore subject to American laws, the laws thus abrogated. During the Vietnam war Miller both took to the public platform and wrote a film, The Reason Why (1969), in which two men sit and discuss the possibility of shooting a woodchuck. It is a film about an unnecessary

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act of violence. As he explained, “I still thought writing had to try to save America, and that meant grabbing people and shaking them by the back of the neck.” For Robert Ryan, who featured in the film version, along with Eli Wallach, “a scene of this nature can say more than all the speeches in the world” (Bigsby 2011, 194). In fact it did not, not least because it was seen by few people. Instead, Miller flew to Paris, where peace talks had stalled, to have discussions with the North Vietnamese, taking with him a naïve proposal that to stop the bombing two thousand mothers and children should travel to North Vietnam, and vice versa, until peace talks succeeded. Throughout his career, indeed, he fluctuated between playwriting, signing protests, writing caustic essays and appearing on public platforms. In 1984, under the auspices of PEN, he visited Turkey with Harold Pinter to investigate the persecution of writers. It was then that he met a young writer assigned to accompany him because he spoke English. The young man’s name was Orhan Pamuk. It was a meeting that would play a role in politicizing him. As he said subsequently, “before long I had taken on a political persona far more powerful than I had ever intended,” even as he was aware that, “someone who has been a victim of tyranny and oppression can suddenly become one of the oppressors” (Bigsby 2011, 349). Even the Jews have their Jews. Unsurprisingly, Pinter found himself in an argument with the American Ambassador who nonetheless raised a toast to Miller. In his reply, Miller compared the situation of writers in Turkey to that of the characters in The Crucible, imprisoned for what they were assumed to be thinking. When the Ambassador and Pinter subsequently got into an argument, Pinter and Miller were effectively thrown out of the Embassy, only to be swept up by the French Ambassador who took them to the French Embassy and gave them champagne, the French always being reliable, at least when it comes to a suspicion of America. Pinter subsequently wrote a play, Mountain Language, provoked by what he had learned of the treatment of the Kurds whose language had been banned. In 2018, three writers in Turkey were sentenced to life imprisonment. In April of that year, 150 journalists and writers were in prison. Percy Bysshe Shelley’s verse drama Hellas, the last poem published before his death, was written to raise money for the Greek War of Independence. In it he claimed that the love of literature, religion, and the arts all had their roots in Greece. He left out of his list democracy. And in 1967, so did Greece when, among much else, the military junta banned Aristophanes’ Lysistrata because of its anti-war message, the military not

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being known for their subtle readings of texts, but, then, it was the Greek Plato who famously sought to banish poets from his commonwealth as perverters of morality, along with music that was effeminate and debasing, the concept of effeminate music being an interesting, if somewhat baffling, one. In 1967, the Constitution was suspended, and Greece left the Council of Europe when complaints were made to its human rights commission. The junta was attacked, however, by Greece’s Nobel Prize winner Giorgos Seferis. At Seferis’s funeral, crowds sang Mikis Theodorakis’s setting of Seferis’s poem “Denial.” Theodorikis’s music was itself banned, as was Costa-Gavras’s film Z, while in 1973 the filmmaker Pantelis Voulgaris was exiled to the island of Gyaros, where he joined 7000 political prisoners. Poetry, music, and film challenged power in Greece, and the result was imprisonment. In time, the junta fell, but in April 2013 a poll found that 30% of Greeks yearned for the “better” days of the junta. In 2012 the fraudulent Protocols of the Elders of Zion were read out in parliament, in Athens, without complaint. Human rights, it seems, can be challenged even in the birthplace of democracy, the home of theater, which in ancient Greece was a place where the people went to see their myths and values dramatized and debated. Arthur Miller, who would later go to Epidaurus, had studied Greek theater while at university. He learned from it, as he did from Ibsen, that past acts have present consequences. He learned also that the private and the public are inseparable. He, who was what the French call an oppositionelle, refused to allow his plays to be published in Greece as long as the colonels were in charge, citing the imprisonment of sixteen Greek writers, as he refused to allow his plays to be performed before racially segregated audiences in apartheid South Africa. Arthur Miller was the president of International PEN from 1966– 1969. At the beginning of his term, in relation to the New York meeting of PEN, he wrote about writers imprisoned not only in the Soviet bloc but also those around the world, in Mexico, Nigeria, Brazil, and Spain. He once remarked: I am sometimes referred to as a moral playwright, and when I am, I tend to look over my shoulder to see who they are talking about. It makes me uneasy, as though my competence were being questioned. You make points in the theatre for all sorts of things but knowing right from wrong is distinctly not one of them. (Miller 1986)

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As President of International PEN, however, he was clear as to his role. Joseph Brodsky, whose release Miller facilitated, was sentenced for “social parasitism.” He subsequently became an American citizen and won the Nobel Prize for Literature. In his Nobel Prize speech, he asserted if art teaches anything (to the artist, in the first place), it is the privateness of the human condition … it fosters in a man, knowingly or unwittingly, a sense of his uniqueness, of individuality, of separateness—thus turning him from a social animal into an autonomous “I.” It is for this reason that art in general, literature especially, and poetry in particular, is not exactly favored by the champions of the common good, masters of the masses, heralds of historical necessity. (Brodsky)

Is literature, then, public or private? Brodsky seems to be making a case for the private but in doing so makes a political point. For Miller, the two were inseparable. For Sartre, man is condemned to be free, acknowledging that private decisions have public consequences. Thoreau wrote of the man who marches to a different drummer, refusing to pay his poll tax because he was at odds with his government’s policy. He went to jail for his beliefs, albeit briefly. So it was that this man who withdrew to Walden Pond was also the man who wrote an essay on civil disobedience that would inspire Gandhi to political action, while Gandhi would inspire Martin Luther King. So the circle closes. “Every man is the lord of a realm beside which the earthly empire of the Czar is but a petty state,” insisted Thoreau (2004, 321), adding that that government is best that governs not at all, what today we call Belgium. He also said, in “Slavery in Massachusetts,” that “the law will never make men free. It is men who have to make the law free.” When Massachusetts returned runaway slaves he said, “I had foolishly thought that I might manage to live here, minding my private affairs, and forget [the state and its government]. It has interrupted me and every man on his onward and upward path. … Who can be serene in a country where both the rulers and the ruled are without principle? The remembrance of my country spoils my walk” (1992, 45–46). This is a statement of the need to transcend the private, to venture beyond Walden Pond. Nonetheless, a public gesture begins with a private conviction. It is initially as individuals that we dissent. In 1967, Arthur Miller declared, “I am responsible for myself, and you are responsible

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for yourself, and no president can ever reduce that responsibility by one ounce.” Politics is seldom straight forward, especially in America, which offers itself to the world as a template for democracy while Illinois politicians are barely elected before they are processed into prison. In fact, the governors of nine states have been found guilty of federal offenses. In 2017 the United States was the 16th least corrupt country out of 176, not a boast you tend to hear much about in State of the Union addresses. Denmark and New Zealand are the least corrupt, but their economies are based on pigs and sheep. The comedian George Carlin remarked that honesty may be the best policy, but it is important to remember that, apparently, by elimination dishonesty is the second-best policy, a policy plainly adopted by another American president when he declared, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.” Everything, Arthur Miller once remarked, is ultimately political, having implications for how we govern ourselves. He insisted that his plays were concerned with locating individuals in terms of their society. It was Thomas Mann, in The Magic Mountain, who observed that “A man lives not only his personal life as an individual but also consciously or unconsciously the life of his epoch and his contemporaries” (Biggs, 8). If any American playwright, if any American writer, addressed the tensions of his time, and in a sense exemplified them, it was Arthur Miller. If any American playwright insisted, in his work, on the struggle to sustain a sense of personal integrity in a context in which compromise was offered as a rational and desirable alternative, it was Arthur Miller. If any writer saw the freedom of the writer, and through that the human rights of all, as central to his work, it was Arthur Miller. It is now over one hundred years since his birth and over a decade since his death. The words on his grave tell you all you need to know of him. It reads, “Arthur Miller. Writer.” Writing to Batuz, the artist, philosopher, and activist, inventor of the wonderfully named Société Imaginaire, in 1990, Arthur Miller insisted that at this stage of his life he could serve better by concentrating on his plays rather than trying to move the world through letters and speeches. It was an admission that, though for most people he was the author of a series of major plays that may have had their political implications, for much of his life he had been active in the political realm, signing protests, making political speeches, joining organizations, sponsoring events, fighting to release those imprisoned for challenging power. Many of the issues he engaged with over the years, in his public statements and essays,

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have seemingly, though, passed into history. Vietnam is behind us, the House Un-American Activities Committee concluded in 1975. But what lay behind these interventions was a commitment to human values and rights, those of the individual and society, whose relevance continues. He stepped forward to defend the rights of a local man falsely accused of murder with the same energy with which he challenged the imprisonment of writers, fought the death penalty at home, or campaigned against a war abroad. He spoke out against censorship not only in other countries but his own, it being “as old as America” (Centola, “Good Old American Apple Pie,” 244). In fact, and in imagination, he reached out beyond his own society, suspicious of a corrosive nationalism: “As for the very notion of patriotism, it falters before the perfectly obvious interdependence of the nations” (Centola, “The Sin of Power,” 173). Nor was this simply an acknowledgment of geopolitics, a resistance to national selfinterest elevated above shared experience. It was a justification for his own engagement, in person and through his plays, his sense that art itself transcends borders, that human needs, desires, and rights are shared, that the individual exists in a social context. Even as he stood up for those oppressed in other countries, he acknowledged “It need hardly be said that by no means everybody in the West is in favor of human rights,” adding “if one has learned anything at all in the past forty or so years, it is that to struggle for these rights (and without them the accretion of capital is simply the construction of a more modern prison) one has to struggle for them wherever the need arises” (Centola, “The Sin of Power,” 173). Commenting, in 1999, on the continuing relevance of The Crucible around the world, he declared “the Devil is known to lure people into forgetting precisely what it is vital for them to remember—how else could his endless reappearances always come with such marvelous surprise?” (Centola, “The Crucible in History,” 295). Why else did he turn to the Holocaust in Incident at Vichy and Playing for Time? Genocide did not end with Auschwitz-Birkenau. Why else did he write The Archbishop’s Ceiling , which concerns surveillance (there may or may not be microphones in the ceiling of the building where writers gather), the sense that speech may be monitored and coerced by those in power, than because such was not restricted to the Czechoslovakia where (he privately acknowledged) it was set. Why else did he adapt Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People than because he saw the right to free speech cede territory to political and financial necessities.

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At times he stared into the darkness of human nature, staged the plight of those crushed by power or absorbing values at odds with human necessities, in conflict with themselves as, at times, with a public world which could itself be coercive. Yet, troubled as they are, trying to make sense of their lives and their relationship with others as they do, his characters are not, as he claimed of Willy Loman, writing their names on a block of ice on a summer’s day not least because those names still echo in theaters, because John Proctor has his counterparts today, because certain struggles, with the self, with a sense of right action, are shared by those who, in different countries, different languages, watch as the action unfolds and a flash of recognition lights mind and imagination alike, the past summoned into the present, those remote in time and place suddenly familiar.

Works Cited Biggs, Murray. 2000. Arthur Miller in Conversation with Murray Biggs. Ninth Annual Maynard Mack Lecture. New Haven: The Elizabethan Club of Yale University. Bigsby, Christopher. 2000. Writers in Conversation with Christopher Bigsby. Vol. 1. Norwich: Pen & Inc Press. Bigsby, Christopher. 2011. Arthur Miller: 1962–2005. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Blackshaw, Anna. 2008. My Enemy, My Brother: David Grossman on the Conflict Between Israel and Palestine. The Sun. October. https://thesunmagazine. org/issues/394/my-enemy-my-brother. Brodsky, Joseph. 1987. Nobel Lecture in Literature. http://www.davar.net/ EXTRACTS/MISCL/BRODNOBL.HTM. Bush, George W. 2001. White House Press Conference, October 11. Centola, Steven R., ed. 2000. Arthur Miller: Echoes Down the Corridor, Collected Essays 1944–2000. New York: Viking. McGrath, Ben. 2003. The Light of Sunday. The New Yorker. December 1. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/12/01/the-light-of-sunday. Miller, Arthur. 1967. Broadside Records, BR 452. Folkway Records, FL 9752. Miller, Arthur. 1986. Speech at Union Theological Seminary. October 7. Nagy, Kimberley. n.d. The Power of Conversation: David Grossman and Nadine Gordimer—The Arthur Miller Freedom to Write Lecture. Wild River Review. https://www.wildriverreview.com/columns/pen-worldvoices/power-of-conversation/. New York Review of Books. 2006. May 25. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/ archives/2006/may/25/freedom-to-write/.

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Reagan, Ronald. 1984. State of the Union Address. https://www.presidency. ucsb.edu/documents/address-before-joint-session-the-congress-the-state-theunion-4. Thoreau, Henry David. 1992. Slavery in Massachusetts, in Richard Dillman, ed., The Major Essays of Henry David Thoreau. Albany, NY: Whitson. Thoreau, Henry David. 2004. Walden. Princeton: Princeton UP. Webb, W. L. and Rose Bell, eds. 1997. An Embarrassment of Tyrannies: 25 Years of “Index on Censorship”. London: Victor Gollancz. World Press Freedom Index. 2018. Reporters Without Borders for Freedom of Information. https://rsf.org/en/ranking.

CHAPTER 17

“What a Man”: Performing Masculinity in Arthur Miller’s and Tennessee Williams’ Plays Claire Gleitman

It is virtually impossible to imagine Willy Loman and Stanley Kowalski meeting one another in life. More than that, one senses they would not be able to conceive of the other man’s existence. Yet the plays that contain them share suggestive similarities. Written within two years of each other in the immediate postwar period, A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) and Death of a Salesman (1949) feature as their central male character a traveling salesman facing the potential collapse of his patriarchal status within his home. In each drama, females to some degree operate as an obstacle to the male’s quest to view himself as a successful, self-reliant male even as they operate as crucial ballasts for his self-esteem. Yet the plays end quite differently. Willy Loman is driven to suicide by his acute sense of masculine failure, while Stanley Kowalski triumphantly reestablishes his absolute dominance in his household and his community. The difference has much to do with each man’s relationship to ideals of masculinity that neither can

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fully embody but that Stanley is far more successful at performing. Stanley’s ferocious ability to compel others to affirm his performed selfhood is due in part to his brute strength. But he also has the good fortune to be surrounded by effective foils, who unwittingly reinforce Stanley’s claimed status as both hypermasculine and a member of the rising, white middle class. Willy Loman’s insecurities as a male, a spouse, and a provider are apparent from the start of the play. Early on, he admits that he has always felt “kind of temporary” about himself, a psychological condition that he links to his experience of paternal abandonment (Miller 1949, 51). Without a father, he cannot fully know himself. In another early conversation, he attributes his failures as a salesman to the fact that he is “fat,” “foolish to look at,” and overly garrulous; these shortcomings leave him fearing that he will not succeed in “making a living” for his wife and sons (37; 38). At least in his own self-assessment, Willy lacks the qualities of muscularity and taciturn reserve that are traditionally associated with virile manhood. For all of Willy’s persistent macho bluster (e.g., “A man who can’t handle tools is not a man” [44]), Miller repeatedly emphasizes Willy’s sensitive love for nature and his appreciation for beauty. He laments that it is no longer possible to see the stars in his increasingly boxed-in home (42), he wistfully recalls the “lilac and wisteria” that used to grow in his garden (17), and his last line in act 1 is: “Gee, look at the moon moving between the buildings!” (69). The sweet aesthetic delight Willy takes in nature is one of his most attractive qualities; it is also one that would fit uncomfortably in the code of masculinity to which he at other moments fiercely subscribes. His avid need to exhibit his fidelity to that code is strongly evident in the first past-tense scene in act 1. Willy brings home a punching bag after a trip on the road, laughs merrily at his son Biff’s brazen defiance of school rules, and brags hyperbolically about his professional feats in machismo terms: “Knocked ‘em cold in Providence, slaughtered ‘em in Boston” (33). Willy’s need to employ this pugilistic rhetoric exposes the self-doubt he spends much of the play seeking to keep at bay. In reality, Willy’s work has nothing to do with his muscles, and his recurrent memories of his brother Ben—who reputedly walked into the jungle at seventeen and walked out four years later “rich” (48)—are the clearest indications of Willy’s anxiety about a road not taken, one that might have granted him a greater sense of masculine fulfillment. That Miller wishes us to recognize that road as a fantasy is made clear by the absurd route

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Ben supposedly traveled to get to it: he explains that his intention was to find his father in Alaska, but he “had a very faulty view of geography” and so ended up in Africa by mistake (48). One wonders if somewhere en route from South Dakota to Africa Ben might have stopped to ask someone for a map. (Then again, as is well known, real men don’t ask for directions.) The point of Ben is his mythic status, his embodiment of a supreme masculinity defined by cold-hearted aggression and an incontestable virility (he has fathered seven sons) that Willy reveres without being able to achieve. This inability is in part the consequence of the time in which Willy lives; the unconquered territories from which Ben claims to have wrestled diamonds have largely vanished in the mid-twentieth century. Still, Ben taunts Willy, giving voice to Willy’s internal self-loathing: “I’ve bought timberland in Alaska and I need a man to look after things for me,” he says, the implicit challenge clearly implied (85). He goes on: “Get out of these cities, they’re full of talk and time payments and courts of law. Screw on your fists and you can fight for a fortune up there” (85). Yet even as Ben insists that Willy turn his back on what he suggests is effete work and fight with his fists, we should recognize his demand as unrealistic, a product of Willy’s muddled, romantic and ahistorical view of what is required to achieve manliness. As the form of Death of a Salesman makes abundantly clear, Willy is haunted by a past that he also mystifies, one in which the masculinity to which he aspires appeared possible. He mourns the loss of the father he never knew, who embodied a perfect conflation of the qualities that, for Willy, constitute the ideal man. As Ben explains: Father was a very great and a very wild-hearted man. We would start in Boston, and he’d toss the whole family into the wagon, and then he’d drive the team right across the country…And we’d stop in towns and sell the flutes that he’d made on the way. (49)

Willy’s father—at least as conjured by Ben conjured by Willy—was forever on the move across an as-yet untamed American frontier, and he lived off the product of his hands. It is a lovely touch that Willy’s father made flutes, suggesting both aesthetic beauty and the pastoral world for which Willy so longs. Willy too is adept at working with his own hands, specifically at carpentry. But, in an awkward effort to accommodate himself to a modernity he loathes, he has persuaded himself that this way of life is beneath him and demeans the father from whose loss he cannot recover

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when he says to Biff: “Even your grandfather was better than a carpenter” (61). Though Willy is baffled by modern technology—as evidenced by his horrified encounter with his boss’s new tape recorder (83)—he attempts to merge the middle-class, urban-based notions of capitalist success he has internalized with the heroic value system he reveres. He makes this clear when he pleads with the boss who is about to fire him by describing the way things used to be, in the business world, before that boss was born: “In those days there … was respect, and comradeship, and gratitude in it” (81). But surely there was never any such time. Comradeship is inimical to capitalism; it is also inimical to the ruthless self-reliance that Ben embodies and that ultimately Willy’s father did, too: for reasons unexplained, he abandoned his family when Willy was three and departed for Alaska, never to be seen again. It is inimical too to Dave Singleman, the eighty-four-year-old salesman who persuaded Willy that it was possible to imbue a white-collar lifestyle with the mélange of traits essential to his idea of what it means to be a man. Yet a defining feature of that whitecollar lifestyle is the white picket fence, securely enclosing the home and the family it shelters. Like all the men Willy lionizes, Singleman’s symbolically loaded name makes clear that nothing at all enclosed him; the ultimate single man, he was free to roam up and down the east coast because he was unencumbered by family ties. Although Willy rhapsodically reports that “hundreds of salesmen and buyers were at his funeral,” he says nothing about children or wives, presumably because Singleman had none (81). Indeed, it is Willy’s status as a family man that is the defining feature of his masculine selfhood and the greatest challenge to it. Ben is repeatedly invoked in such a way as to underscore the tension between manhood as Willy defines it and the familial path he has chosen. “What a man,” Willy intones breathlessly when he recalls the gift of “a watch fob with a diamond in it” that Ben brought him from the wilds of Africa. Yet Willy pawned that “beautiful” watch to pay for Biff to take a radio correspondence course, as his wife Linda reminds him (53). Though Linda tries her best to persuade Willy of the adequacy and even heroism of his choices (she calls his job “beautiful” [85]), she shows herself to be an advocate of compromise who cannot understand masculine longings. “You’re doing well enough, Willy!” she says, when Willy is tempted to follow Ben into the jungle, “… Why must everyone conquer the world?” (85). For all her kindness, Linda is an emblem of unromantic domesticity who, in the scenes from the past, is forever carrying a decidedly unsexy laundry basket.

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Still, she works hard to bolster her husband’s self-esteem, warmly reassuring him that he is “the handsomest man in the world” (18; 37). Nevertheless, and in spite of clearly loving her, Willy’s relationship to Linda chips away at his sense of masculine adequacy. As Elaine Tyler May has argued, an essential component of male achievement in the postwar period involved being a successful breadwinner who could support a family in an “affluent suburban [home]” (21). But here too Willy flails, and he knows that he does, in part because of Linda’s well-intentioned but persistent reminders. When he boasts about his successes on the road, Linda pulls out her pencil to calculate his earnings, forcing him to confess that he barely earned enough to cover household expenses. Willy’s fear of failure as a provider is directly linked to his extramarital affair, as he makes clear in a line already partially quoted: “I get so lonely,” he confides to Linda, “especially when business is bad and there’s nobody to talk to. I get the feeling that I’ll never sell anything again, that I won’t make a living for you, or a business, a business for the boys” (38). It is precisely at this moment that we first hear the laughter of the Woman, who is Linda’s direct antithesis. She alluringly wears stockings (in contrast to Linda, who mends them), she dresses in a black slip (again unlike Linda, whom Miller once remarked should look “as though she had lived in a house dress all her life” [Miller 1955, 46]), and she laughs seductively when Willy “slap[s] her bottom,” something he never does to his wife (39). The very name by which we chiefly know her—The Woman— underscores her status as a gendered body first and foremost. Yet if Willy’s goal in turning to the hyper-sexualized Woman is to prop up a masculinity weakened both by the nature of his job and his lack of success at it, this goal too is unrealized, for at least two reasons. The Woman is a receptionist, one who repeatedly promises to put Willy “right through to the buyers” in exchange for their sexual dalliances (39). The disempowering gender reversal this implies—as Willy prostitutes himself for professional success—is further reinforced when Biff, after catching Willy with the Woman, pronounces him a “phony little fake,” not commanding enough to have any impact on Biff’s school teacher, whom Biff earlier mocked. Despite the teacher’s “lithp,” Biff declares, “He wouldn’t listen to you” (120). Thus, two figures—the Woman and also what David Savran describes as “the feminine male” (41)—who were intended to secure Willy’s manly self-regard result instead in its utter unraveling. Most importantly, the affair destroys Willy’s relationship with the son on whose veneration he depends for self-respect.

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It is to win back that veneration that Willy commits suicide, as he makes clear in one of his last lines: “Ben, he’ll worship me for it!” (135). The need for filial worship is a recurring Miller theme; its importance arguably derives from the loss of any reliable foundation for masculine selfhood in a world in which the old binaries on which it depended— always tenuous and artificial—had become hopelessly blurred. Confined by day to office spaces and by night to suburban lifestyles, many men in the postwar period felt emasculated by the very roles meant to solidify their status as successful males.1 Demoralized by the menial professional life he has chosen, selling something so insignificant that Miller never tells us what it is, Willy strives to patch together a compensatory self that might allow him to measure up to the men who haunt his imagination, men who “knew what [they] wanted and went out and got it!” (41). But as Willy himself points out, “The world is an oyster, but you don’t crack it open on a mattress” (41). The domestic realm that Willy has embraced forbids him from achieving a version of masculinity that is rooted in a lost past and hostile to human relationships. Willy is too tender a man, too committed to the wife and sons he also mistreats to follow in the nomadic footsteps of his role models.2 Thus, he looks to the people in his life— dead and alive—to reflect back at him the man he wishes to be. Instead, they remind him of his limitations: his inability to pay for household items that are forever breaking down, his helplessness to get right through to the buyers without the assistance of a woman, the fact that he is not and never will be “a leader of men” (132). Alienated by a modernity that has consigned him to the status of “a hard-working drummer who landed in the ash can like all the rest of them,” and wedded to an aggressive view of masculinity that he was always too hapless and too kind to embody himself, Willy kills himself in the hopes that his favorite son can. “That boy is going to be magnificent,” he declares, convinced that his death will allow Biff to “make it,” though “making it” is a value Biff vehemently rejected in the previous scene (133; 135). In committing suicide, Willy can at once convince himself that he is helping his son and at last free himself from familial ties, following Ben into the jungle that is “dark…but full of diamonds” (135). Intriguingly, Tennessee Williams also employs the jungle metaphor, and it is at the point when Stanley is on the verge of his ultimate triumph: just prior to being raped by Stanley, Blanche hears sounds “like cries in a jungle” (159). This contrast between the two men—the jungle signifies death for Willy, conquest for Stanley—is not the only respect in

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which Stanley is the inverse of Willy. The home that Stanley provides for his wife, Stella, is far from sumptuous, as her sister is quick to point out, but there is no evidence Stanley aspires to the white-picket-fence suburban ideal that Willy has embraced. If Willy nostalgically recalls a time when wisteria grew in the back yard, Stanley revels in his urban environment and manifests no obvious insecurities about his masculinity (131). On the contrary, in contrast to Willy who “talk[s] too much,” Stanley is the essence of taciturnity; his first line is a monosyllabic grunt: “Meat” (4). He unselfconsciously strips to his undershirt in front of the sisterin-law he has just met; he is unabashedly and at least from Stella’s perspective electrifyingly sexual; and he is, again at least according to Stella, immensely successful at his job because of his unique “drive” (53). We know little about his past apart from the fact that he has Polish ancestry and was a Master Sergeant in the Engineers’ Corp during WWII. These details aside, Stanley inhabits the present, as underscored by his last line in the play, which is, “Now, honey. Now, love. Now, now, love …Now, now, love. Now, love” (179). In this regard, Willy has far more in common with Blanche, who longs for the return of a vanished world while also being tormented by the more troubling, sexual aspects of her past. Not only does Stanley show no interest in the past; insofar as Blanche’s arrival exhumes it, he would like to see it buried again and forgotten. Although these characteristics are surely crucial to Stanley’s success— he is in step with modernity and conforms to a traditional understanding of masculinity—Blanche nevertheless exposes anxieties that are profound enough to motivate him to destroy her, and she does so by arguing that he is in effect too basely male. The very qualities in Willy that prevent him from feeling fully masculine but which root him firmly in the American middle class—his suburbanized softness, his commitment (albeit wavering) to a bourgeois value system that requires a suppression of primal impulses in favor of the routinized rules of office work—are the qualities Blanche sees as lacking in Stanley. In her most impassioned denunciation of him in the play, which she delivers after Stanley has violently attacked Stella on his poker night, Blanche argues that he represents a catastrophic descent that Stella has the power to resist. Noting that Stanley is “common,” Blanche tries to reawaken memories of their genteel background: “You can’t have forgotten that much of our growing up…that you suppose that any part of a gentleman is in his nature!” She goes on to claim that Stanley is worse than merely ordinary:

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There’s something downright—bestial about him! … He acts like an animal, has an animal’s habits…There’s even something—sub-human… something—ape-like about him…Bearing the raw meat home from the kill in the jungle! … Maybe we are a long way from being made in God’s image, but Stella…there has been some progress since then! … In some kinds of people some tenderer feelings have had some little beginning! … In this dark march toward whatever it is we’re approaching … Don’t —don’t hang back with the brutes! (82–83)

Blanche’s argument has no impact on Stella, who hurls herself into Stanley’s arms immediately in the wake of it. But it does have an impact on Stanley, who feels the insult keenly. We know this because he repeats it three scenes later: “That girl calls me common!” (118). To understand why Blanche gets so deeply under Stanley’s skin, we should note that, despite the power Marlon Brando’s performance has had in shaping all future interpretations of the role, the character as written is not necessarily the incarnation of exquisite masculinity that was young Brando. In an early stage direction, Williams tells us that Stanley is “about five feet eight or nine,” which makes him of average height for his time period but not imposing—which may explain his obsession with the Napoleonic code (24). More tellingly, when Stanley first encounters Blanche, he justifies his impulse to remove his shirt by explaining, “you can catch cold sitting around in damp things, especially when you been exercising hard like bowling is” (26). In reality, Stanley’s main pastimes—bowling and poker—require skill but little brawn. Of relevance too is the fact that, though he pronounces himself “king” of his domain (131), Stanley is a marginalized figure in the larger society that surrounds Elysian Fields. Blanche makes this clear when she derides him as a “Polack” and hurls racialized insults at him: he is a beast, an ape, “a little bit on the primitive side” (39).3 In his opening stage direction, Williams describes New Orleans as “a cosmopolitan city where there is a relatively easy intermingling of races” (3); yet the play largely keeps blackness in the margins while insistently reminding us of its existence. A “Negro Woman” makes a brief appearance, we hear “the infatuated fluency of brown fingers” playing on a distant piano (3), a “Mexican Woman” arrives late in the play symbolizing death. One Latino man, Pablo, is a member of Stanley’s poker group. Apart from him, the play’s named characters are all white. Still, the encroaching if mostly absent presence of people of color underscores Stanley’s uneasy determination to establish his

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own whiteness—which was at best “probationary” in this time period, as Blanche’s remarks make clear and as Virginia H. Cope has pointed out (503)—his status as “one hundred percent American,” as well as his gendered supremacy (134). Blanche challenges all three as an embodiment of whiteness (due to her name, her clothing, and her association with the “great big place with white columns” [9]), as well as hyperfemininity and a firmly entrenched American identity. Speaking to Stanley’s poker buddy, Mitch, Blanche remarks that her “first American ancestors were French Huguenots,” which means they likely emigrated to the United States in the seventeenth century (59). In short, there is a strong undercurrent of anxiety in Stanley’s retaliation against Blanche, aroused by what he perceives as a threat to his status and selfhood. He counterattacks by methodically dismantling Blanche’s sense of self, which relies on external validation. The reasons for this are in part existential: Williams suggests, as does Miller, that selfhood is by its nature unstable and contingent on others’ affirmation. But this phenomenon is aggravated, in Blanche’s case, by the evaporation of the world she once knew, which bolstered her identity in crucial fashions. Late in the play, as she describes the ignominious collapse of Belle Reve, she quotes an exchange with her mother, who was demanding she tend to a dying relative: “‘Yes Mother,’” Blanche replied, “‘But couldn’t we get a colored girl to do it?’ No, we couldn’t of course” (148). A key signifier of the dissolution of Blanche’s status is the disappearance of servile black labor, which her family could no longer afford. Still, Blanche does her best to cling to her former sense of self, while also recognizing that it is sustainable only through others’ indulgence (136). She makes this clear in the song she sings as she bathes off-stage in the magnificently contrapuntal Scene 7. “Say, it’s only a paper moon, Sailing over a cardboard sea. But it wouldn’t be make-believe If you believed in me!” (120). Stanley’s onstage reply to this plaintive request is an emphatic no; “Sister Blanche is no lily!” he tells Stella (119). Stanley assiduously blackens Blanche not only in her sister’s eyes but in Mitch’s, whom Blanche has been attempting to woo. Once Mitch learns the unsavory facts that Stanley unearths about Blanche’s sexual past, Blanche transforms in his eyes from a prim virgin into a whore he pronounces, “not clean enough to bring in the house with my mother” (150). From the perspective of the perpetually bathing Blanche, there is no crueler insult. Equally noteworthy is that an off-stage woman, Mitch’s mother, becomes the alleged barometer that deems Blanche insufficiently clean.

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Indeed, whereas Willy tries and fails to use women as ballasts for his desired personae,4 in Streetcar women are successfully coopted within a frame of mind whose nature is captured by the play’s last line: “This game is seven-card stud” (179). To maintain his centrality in the domestic space and yet not suffer the emasculation that plagues Willy, Stanley effectively masculinizes it, so that Blanche’s critique of him is nullified along with her humanity. He accomplishes this in opposition to Blanche’s efforts to do the opposite. In her early scenes, she is making some headway in her effort to forge an alliance with Stella: she manages to redecorate the Kowalski home, filling it with her jasmine scents, her rhumba music, and her “adorable little colored paper lantern” (60). She also successfully elicits defiance in Stella, as indicated by the following exchange in Scene 2: Stanley: The Kowalskis and the DuBois have different notions. Stella: Indeed they have, thank heavens! — I’m going outside … You come out with me while Blanche is getting dressed. Stanley: Since when do you give me orders? (35)

By aligning herself with the DuBois and by asserting herself against Stanley, Stella challenges Stanley’s absolute sovereignty. So too do his male subordinates, who briefly take the women’s side when Stanley objects to their music; Mitch even allows himself to be drawn into Blanche’s orbit when he enters the female space and dances with Blanche, prompting Stanley’s violence at the end of the poker scene. Stanley’s counterattack, as already suggested, involves out-witting Blanche at her own game and declaring her repugnantly sexual. Though Blanche seeks to persuade Mitch that her tawdry past was rooted in her loneliness and fear, not lust—“intimacies with strangers was all I seemed able to fill my empty heart with”—Stanley is the better persuader. The reason, it seems clear, is Mitch’s own fragile masculinity. A sensitive man who lives with his mother, Mitch is mocked by Stanley, who in Scene 3 offers to fix him a “sugar-tit,” or baby pacifier (48). Mitch’s susceptibility to Blanche’s lies, brought to light by Stanley, further demoralizes him, prompting compensatory macho aggression—he demands that she grant him what “I been missing all summer”—and his rejection of her as marriageable. This behavior does little to reinstall Mitch’s sense of himself as sufficiently male, something he could really receive only from Blanche, who earlier called him her “Rosenkavalier” and “Samson” (99; 107). After all, Blanche needed Mitch to be romantically masculine in

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part to prop up her own preferred posture as desirably feminine; Stanley, by contrast, props up his masculinity at other men’s expense. In the play’s final scene, when Mitch tries to intervene as Blanche is about to be carted away to a mental institution, Stanley easily overcomes him. Mitch collapses and is sobbing when we last see him (177). If masculinity, as Norman Mailer famously remarked, is not something “given to you, but something you gain” (242), Streetcar suggests that this is accomplished not through “small battles with honor” but through a performative style that can be mastered only by some, and that their onlookers are coerced or brutalized into affirming. Blanche’s efforts to reinforce Mitch’s hypermasculine pose—when he brags that he has been working out, she agreeably pronounces him “awe-inspiring” (107)—are no match for Stanley’s utter obliteration of her fictive self, upon which her ability to affirm Mitch’s depends. Her painstaking effort to present herself as a virginal Southern belle, rather than the desperately wounded woman that she is, is brought definitively to an end when she and Stanley are alone while Stella is in the hospital giving birth. Stanley declares, “I’ve been on to you from the start! Not once did you pull any wool over this boy’s eyes” (158). The declaration is untrue; in the play’s early scenes, Stanley is quite taken in by Blanche’s performance, mistaking her fake furs and rhinestone jewelry for signs of wealth. Perhaps it is in part being for a time duped into belief that generates Stanley’s fury; Stanley must punish the seeming icon of white, aristocratic wealth for briefly intimidating and disempowering him. Stanley’s rape of Blanche is the final step in his effort to reduce her to the animal she once claimed he was: “Tiger—tiger! … We’ve had this date with each other from the beginning” (162). In effect declaring that he and Blanche have equivalent desires, Stanley “[pulls her] down off them columns” as he earlier proudly declared he did to Stella— and in both cases he does so with sex (137). Here too we may detect a revealing contrast with Willy. His relationship with Linda appears largely sexless, despite an intriguing declaration that, when he is on the road, he longs “to grab [her] sometimes and just kiss the life outa [her].” The slight edge of violence in the line becomes more notable when we recall that it is when Willy is on the road that he sees his mistress. If females inspire anger and frustration in Salesman’s males—Happy points out that “it gets like bowling or something. I just keep knockin’ them over and it doesn’t mean anything” (25)—in Streetcar the most hypermasculine of men can bend them completely to his will and thus become the man he wishes, and he accomplishes this in

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part through sexual power. When Blanche asks Stella whether she has any objections to the life in which she has landed, and the beatings that are a recurring feature, Stella replies with unmistakable clarity: “There are things that happen between a man and a woman in the dark—that sort of make everything else seem—unimportant” (81). It is the “seem” in the line that is arresting, in the context of an exploration of performance. If Blanche candidly declares, through song, her reliance on others’ belief to sustain what would otherwise reveal itself as make-believe, Stanley makes a very different declaration in the last scene of the play. At this point, Blanche has been fully broken and Stanley has regained his position as king in the eyes of his awestruck friends, who curse his “rutting luck” at poker. “Luck,” Stanley counters, “is believing you’re lucky…To hold front position in this rat-race you’ve got to believe you’re lucky” (163). Stanley in effect rewrites Blanche’s lyric: it wouldn’t be make-believe, he proclaims, if I believe in me. Through this declaration, Stanley pronounces himself fully self-reliant, Willy’s ideal male made flesh. Yet the play shows otherwise. Stanley’s self-perception is as dependent on external validation as is Blanche’s. We know this in part because of a telling remark from Stella, delivered when she is admitting that she allowed Blanche to be taken to a mental institution despite being informed by Blanche that Stanley raped her. As justification, Stella says, “I couldn’t believe her story and go on living with Stanley” (165). As the line reveals, Stella has chosen what and whom to believe. In so doing, she has chosen to believe what she half-admits to knowing is a lie, and she has done so to allow life to “go on,” for the Kowalskis, unaltered (166). It is more than ironic that an act of brutish violence allows Stanley to triumph over the woman who critiques him for being brutally violent. Stanley extinguishes Blanche through an assertion of a primal, violent virility that his wife finds thrilling but that the couple must half-deny in order to remain comfortably ensconced within the domestic realm they have crafted for themselves. The Kowalski marriage survives Stanley’s rape of Blanche because both tacitly agree to not believe that it occurred. Virility, Death of a Salesman suggests, has been suburbanized out of the Miller male, and Willy and his sons lament its absence; they are haunted by a sense that they are failed men, a condition that can be escaped only through suicide or a self-deluding flight from bourgeois society.5 Stanley, by contrast, labors at essentially the same job that disappointed Willy, in a similarly boxed-in urban environment; he is not especially athletic, adventurous, or wealthy, and yet he manages to persuade others

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and himself that he is Ben, the embodiment of self-reliant, hegemonic masculinity. He claims he is self-made, when his success hinges on the subordination or domination of others. He denounces as fiction anything that interferes with his preferred narrative. He demeans women and also relies on them for his grandiose view of himself. And his claim of “one hundred percent American” status is rendered trustworthy only when he has eliminated from the “rat-race” he inhabits any rivals for the “front position” he claims to have secured purely through the power of his own belief. In at least some of these respects, Stanley may remind us of the current inhabitant of the White House, though he lacks any iota of Donald Trump’s political and economic capital. Still, Williams clearly wanted us to view Stanley as a forecast of what was to come. In a letter responding to the Hollywood censors’ desire to eliminate the rape from the film version of the play, Williams argued for its necessity by noting that Streetcar is about “the ravishment of the tender, the sensitive, the delicate, by the savage and brutal forces of modern society.”6 Miller too saw tenderness as incompatible with a modern capitalist ethos, though he suggests that females are entwined with that ethos and that it leaves no space for a fully secure masculine sensibility. While Miller arguably offers a way out, depending on how one reads Biff’s flight west, Williams suggests that survival in modern society requires the performance of a noxious hypermasculinity that is hostile to otherness, brutally protective of its own centrality, and founded on self-inflating falsehoods. Stanley succeeds in bringing Blanche, Stella, Mitch, and the rest of his community to a state of “complete surrender” because he has a firm grasp, as Willy does not, on the rules of “seven card stud”—which is a “game” and not a reality, one that hinges on a man’s ability to bully others into accepting that he is “the king around here,” whether his kingdom is a grimy, two-room flat or the Oval Office (131).

Notes 1. See Steven M. Gelber, who points out that fathers in the postwar period were meant to both “[bring] home the paycheck” and “be warm and nurturing parents,” a role that both solidified a man’s status as a successful “suburban dad” and risked emasculating him (82). 2. Ben does not appear to have abandoned his wife; she knew of his death— which occurred shortly before the play begins—and informs Willy of it.

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But Ben makes no mention of her, and it is difficult to imagine that she accompanied him into the jungle. Notably, when Stella tells Blanche that Stanley is Polish, Blanche jokes: “Oh, yes. They’re something like Irish, aren’t they? … Only not so-highbrow?” (16). As is well known, both Irish and Polish immigrants were the victims of negative, racialized stereotyping in the early parts of the twentieth century and needed to establish their white identity—which they accomplished in part by bonding with white immigrant groups against African Americans and other dark-skinned immigrants. See Jacobson. This phenomenon continues to this day, as manifested by the current hostility to immigration (particularly from what Donald Trump once dubbed “shithole countries”) displayed by the descendants of immigrants. In addition to Willy, his son Happy is another example; he tells Biff that, despite having “plenty of women,” he remains lonely, and his perpetual dalliances with other men’s girlfriends do not alleviate his feelings of selfdisgust (23; 25). See Biff’s revealing line in act 1: “We don’t belong in this nuthouse of a city! We should be mixing cement on some open plain” (61). Cement is used, of course, to build cities. Quoted in Lahr, 227.

Works Cited Cope, Virginia H. 2014. A Multiethnic Streetcar Named Desire: We’ve Had This Date from the Beginning. Modern Drama 57:4 (Winter). Gelber, Steven M. 2000. Do-It-Yourself: Constructing, Repairing and Maintaining Domestic Masculinity, in Jennifer Scanlon, ed., The Gender and Consumer Culture Reader. New York: NYU P. Jacobson, Matthew. 1999. Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP. Lahr, John. 2014. Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh. New York: W. W. Norton. Mailer, Norman. 1966. Petty Notes on Some Sex in America, in his Cannibals and Christians. New York: Dial Press. May, Elaine Tyler. 2008. Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era. New York: Basic Books. Miller, Arthur. 1949. Death of a Salesman. New York: Penguin Books. Miller, Arthur. 1955. The American Theater. Reprinted in Robert A. Martin and Steven R. Centola, eds., The Theatre Essays of Arthur Miller. New York: Da Capo Press, 1996.

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Savran, David. 1992. Communists, Cowboys and Queers: The Politics of Masculinity in the Work of Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams. Minneapolis and London: U of Minnesota P. Williams, Tennessee. 2004. A Streetcar Named Desire. New York: New Directions.

CHAPTER 18

Devouring Mechanization: Arthur Miller and the Proto-Posthuman Peter Sloane

Writing during a century that ushered in (most notably in Bertolt Brecht’s vision for “epic theatre”) a conception of drama that was not simply sensitive to and reflective of the ideological struggles of the early to midtwentieth century but determined to enact radical change in and through the audience, Arthur Miller was a socially engaged, politically attuned playwright committed to his craft as a “serious business,” one “that places serious issues before the public.”1 Inspired by Henrik Ibsen, his “avowed master” according to David Bronsen (229), Miller used the stage to work through his own ideological and even existential differences with contemporary American society.2 Speaking with Steven R. Centola in 1982, Miller explicated a belief implicit in each of his works that “Society makes such a heavy demand upon the individual that he has to give up his individuality” (346). Society, as Bronsen remarks, is for Miller and his characters “the great antagonist against which the individual must rebel” (241). Indeed, Miller’s own life was touched, or more accurately brutalized, by

P. Sloane (B) University of Lincoln, Lincoln, UK © The Author(s) 2020 S. Marino and D. Palmer (eds.), Arthur Miller for the Twenty-First Century, American Literature Readings in the 21st Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37293-4_18

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financial hardship after the collapse of his father’s textile business during the Great Depression, an economic catastrophe alleviated only by the onset of World War II and the global market it created for American military machinery (the subject of All My Sons ). Industrial society for Miller was almost definitionally unconducive to individuality both in general terms and particularly to the “average man,” as he argues in “Tragedy and the Common Man” (1949: see Miller 1994). In this chapter, I explore the profound and unresolvable antagonism that Miller strives to understand and articulate between human beings and their changing environment, suggesting that in Miller’s works we see a nascent proto-posthumanism. Miller is interested in the collision of humankind with (literal and figurative) machinery, with the manner in which early- to mid-twentieth-century modernization and its reciprocal mechanization of both domestic and work space dramatically altered the nature of being human and the relationship between human beings and their denaturalized cybernetic ecosystems. More specifically, I want to tease out Miller’s subtle but peculiarly recurrent fascination with broken engines, as both a material reality and a deeply resonant and diversely valent metaphor for a spectrum of dis- and malfunctioning biological, familial, psychological, political, and social systems. That Miller lived in a period of American history that saw itself on the cusp of mass automation was remarked upon by his contemporary, Robert W. Corrigan, who draws an analogy between the swiftness of life and Miller’s rise to fame as a young playwright, commenting that “We live in an instant age. Everything from the most complex information to giant buildings, from vast networks of electric circuitry to blenderized gourmet meals, can be produced or made available in a flash. It should be of little wonder, then, that we also tend to create instant major figures in the arts” (141). Corrigan lights here upon precisely those concerns that pervade Miller’s writing, and it is these that explain Miller’s continued resonance for the postindustrial information era. In his introduction to The Collected Plays, Miller speculates about the enduring relevance of drama as a form of artistic expression that is peculiarly sensitive to and reflective of what might be considered pan-historical and even pan-human values: Almost alone among the arts the theater has managed to live despite the devouring mechanization of the age, and, in some places and instances,

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even to thrive and grow. Under these circumstances of a very long if frequently interrupted history, one may make the assumption that the drama and its production must represent a well-defined expression of profound social needs, needs which transcend any particular form of society or any particular historic moment. (3)

In a somewhat polemic panegyric that risks underplaying the fact that, as Jean-Paul Sartre remarked in 1961, “[t]he bourgeoisie has been in control of the theatre for about 150 years,”3 Miller suggests that drama is uniquely placed, as an art form, not simply to represent socio-historically specific issues, but to express something transcendent about the human condition (Sartre 1961, 3). Perhaps this is because theater, performance, in the immediacy of its relationship with and access to its audience, retains something of the power (of presence/proximity) lost in the (absent/distant) printed word. Theater’s capacity for enduring relevance pivots, at least for Miller, on its conduciveness to interrogating, giving voice to what he perceives as “social needs.” It is perhaps his ideological and artistic indebtedness to Ibsen’s use of the social play that inspires Miller’s own elevation of drama above other forms. That said, his comments here might be more accurate if we read “social theatre” for “theatre”: like his British contemporaries Joe Orton and John Osborne (Miller went to see Look Back in Anger and famously remarked that it was the only British play not “hermetically sealed off from life”), Miller was invested in rejuvenating the form to reflect contemporary concerns.4 As Paul Blumberg writes: To summarize Miller’s views, a social play, in contrast to a non-social or a psychological play, demonstrates the impact of social forces—the class structure, the economy, the system of norms and values, family patterns, etc.—on the raw psychology and lives of the characters […] and, finally, addresses itself to the question, as did classical Greek drama which Miller regards as the forerunner of all social plays, “how are we to live?” in a social and humanistic sense. (292–93)

Pessimistically, in Miller’s plays the answer may be that we are not to live at all, given the prevalence of suicide: consider Larry and subsequently Joe in All My Sons , Willy in Death of a Salesman, Gus in A Memory of Two Mondays , and David Beeves in The Man Who Had All the Luck who, though not going through with the act, certainly considers it.

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The key phrase, however, is “devouring mechanization.” It is crucial to understanding both Miller’s work and the significance of that work as a sociological commentary on the world’s most advanced nation undergoing an irreversible epochal transition. In part it is a comment on modernity in the broadest sense, on life after the factory, the Model T Ford, and the assembly line mode of production that it instigated (and which in turn instigated a second wave of industrialisation), but it also is literal— Miller was acutely, even painfully sensitive to the growing presence of mechanisms, machines, engines, and their parts in everyday domestic and professional life. Elsewhere, in his essay “On Social Plays”, he addresses directly the subordination of mankind to machine, complaining that The absolute value of the individual human being is believed in only as a secondary value; it stands well below the needs of efficient production. We have finally come to serve the machine. The machine must not be stopped, marred, left dirty, or outmoded. Only men can be left marred, stopped, dirty, and alone. (1994, 60)

“Stopped, dirty, and alone” is certainly an accurate description of some of Miller’s characters, but perhaps not so much the men as the women that they exhaust, devour, and almost without exception abandon in their despair: Kate Keller mourning first the disappearance and then suicide of her son, the suicide of her husband, and on the brink of abandonment by son Chris; and Linda Loman, widow of Willy, and emotionally abandoned by her two sons. Perhaps more, it is the anonymous and isolated single women that linger in the perpetual dusk of Miller’s backgrounds and offstages, the insinuated bars and grimy hotel rooms, such as A Memory of Two Mondays ’ Patricia, or Salesman’s eternally anonymous yet vital The Woman. Equally fascinating in this passage is the idea that the machine must not or cannot stop. Miller means the machinery of capitalism in the broadest figurative sense but also implicated in this are a variety of other machines, both synthetic and organic. Miller’s sentiment echoes the anxiety and fear that informs E. M. Forster’s rare science fiction story “The Machine Stops” (1909). As Forster’s Kuno passionately pleads: Cannot you see, cannot all you lecturers see, that it is we that are dying, and that down here the only thing that really lives is the Machine? We created the Machine, to do our will, but we cannot make it do our will

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now. It has robbed us of the sense of space and of the sense of touch, it has blurred every human relation and narrowed down love to a carnal act, it has paralysed our bodies and our wills, and now it compels us to worship it. The Machine develops—but not on our lines. The Machine proceeds—but not to our goal. We only exist as the blood corpuscles that course through its arteries, and if it could work without us, it would let us die. (110)

For both Miller and Forster, this injunction is directed toward the micro and the macro: machine as mechanism and machine as social systems. However, the key is the transposition in the economy of value; if machines were conceived (in both senses) to aid and support human life, the logic of industrial capitalism (one reason Marx is so often adduced in discussions of Miller) demands that the means of production be elevated above the operators. The “machine” in this sense necessarily evokes the economic substructure of industrial capital, by which “the common man” is enslaved, even literally devoured; as Willy Loman angrily tells Howard (in what might be an inspiration for Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange): “You can’t eat the orange and throw the peel away—a man is not a piece of fruit!” (Miller 2009, 181). Miller’s plays, however, seem to demonstrate that this is not only possible but inevitable in the period of industrial capital, efficiency, and cost-benefit analyses. Miller and Forster were not alone in foreseeing the potential for dehumanization produced by the rapid mechanization of Western society. In England, the birthplace of the industrial revolution, J. R. R. Tolkien was writing his anti-industrial saga The Lord of the Rings, preoccupied with what William Blake had earlier called the “dark satanic mills” decimating the rural landscape and dominating the expanding urban centers, a central concern also in the writing of working-class modernist D. H. Lawrence. George Orwell was writing too against mechanization, with great power: You have only to look about you at this moment to realize with what sinister speed the machine is getting us into its power […] Wherever you look you will see some slick machine-made article triumphing over the old-fashioned article that still tastes of something other than sawdust. And what applies to food applies also to furniture, houses, clothes, books, amusements, and everything else that makes up our environment […] In a healthy world there would be no demand for tinned foods, aspirins, gramophones, gaspipe chairs, machine guns, daily newspapers, telephones, motor-cars, etc., etc.; and on the other hand there would be a constant

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demand for the things the machine cannot produce. But meanwhile the machine is here, and its corrupting effects are almost irresistible. (189–90)

For Orwell, the revolution in mankind’s capacity to alter its environment leads equally to the gramophone and industrialized weapons of mass destruction. Crucially, a world in which machines are necessary is for Orwell unhealthy. What is it, one might wonder, that machines “cannot [re]produce”? For Forster, “the imponderable bloom of the grape was ignored by the manufacturers of artificial fruit. Something ‘good enough’ had long since been accepted by our race” (Forster 2001, “The Machine Stops”, 93). For Walter Benjamin, the “bloom” is the “aura” that results from the unique, the hand-crafted: “a general formula that the technology of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the sphere of tradition. By replicating the work many times over, it substitutes a mass existence for a unique existence” (22). Perhaps it is this aura of singularity that is invariably missing in Miller’s constitutionally dissatisfied characters struggling to assert their individuality in an age of anonymous homogeneity and machine replication. It is precisely these concerns that interest Miller. In Salesman, Willy Loman, crushed financially by machines and metaphorically by the capitalist machinery, is angered when his wife buys “American-type cheese,” “whipped,” and Willy asks, genuinely perplexed, “How can they whip cheese?”—an echo of Orwell’s profound disaffection with “factory-made, foil-wrapped cheese and ‘blended’ butter” (190). Cheese is perhaps the archetypal image of the “innocent” (prelapsarian) pastoral life that so many of Miller’s city-bound characters yearn for. Willy’s question has to do with both method and rationale: it is both a sincere technical query and an ethical question, gesturing toward some perceived but inarticulable transgression by the somewhat sinister “they.” Orwell recalls a conversation with hop-pickers, asking why they did not form a union he was told “‘they’ would never allow it. Who were ‘they’? I asked. Nobody seemed to know; but evidently ‘they’ were omnipotent” (44). Miller, Forster, and Orwell foresee/witness a radical and irreversible alteration of the nature of our environment, one that precipitates yet further, deeper change. Necessarily, as Darwin informed us, if the environment changes, so must the native organism; this is what leads to the failure of intergenerational communication we see in Miller’s works as the young adapt to an environment that has outmoded their fathers.

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However, if machines dehumanize, they also elevate and confer status, if the shift from the human to posthuman is accepted. In A Memory of Two Mondays , Larry, overburdened with care, slipping into middle age, decides to buy an Auburn, a stylish but impractical car that gives him a sense of freedom that he feels has been absent from a life devoted to family and vocation. Defending his choice to the more pragmatic Gus, who asks him when it comes time to sell who’s “gonna buy an Auburn,” Larry replies that he’s “sick of dreaming about things. They’ve got the most beautifully laid-out valves in the country on that car, and I want it, that’s all” (Miller 1958, 342). A connoisseur of engine parts, not simply the emergent entity itself but very specifically the “valves,” Larry chooses a car that does not retain its value, a willful if ultimately futile rebellion against the system of exchange. Larry’s decision, evidence of a mid-life crisis, is more than vanity; machines supplement, augment, enlarge ones being. To be at one with machines is also the epitome of success; when superannuated Willy Loman confronts and is fired by his young boss, Howard, the latter is preoccupied with a wire-recording machine, telling Willy that it is “the most terrific machine I ever saw in my life” (Miller 1958, 177). For the newly immigrated Rodolpho in A View From the Bridge, machines confer not simply social status but ontological validity; asked by Eddie why he needs a motorcycle and cannot rely on walking or public transport, he passionately argues that “the machine, the machine is necessary […] a man who rides up on a great machine, this man is responsible, this man exists” (Miller 1958, 394–95). For Rodolpho, escaping the poverty and stagnation of a postwar Europe bankrupted by both war and US loans, to exist is to embrace the mechanistic. Machines then paradoxically offer the possibility of self-transcendence, power, status, and also of mass dehumanization. Perhaps the most extreme contemporary interpretation of this posthuman hybridity between mankind and its machinery appears in Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus. It is here, in their groundbreaking study of capitalism and desire, drawing from the work of Foucault, Marx, Freud, Kant, Klein, and almost every significant figure from Western intellectual history, that they suggest that persons are “desiring machines,” complexly, inextricably, and literally “plugged in” to networks of energy and desire production. As they write: It is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at times, at other times in fits and starts. It breathes, it heats, it eats. It shits and fucks. What a

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mistake to have ever said the id. Everywhere it is machines—real ones, not figurative ones: machines driving other machines, machines being driven by other machines, with all the necessary couplings and connections. An organ-machine is plugged into an energy-source-machine: the one produces a flow that the other interrupts. The breast is a machine that produces milk, and the mouth a machine coupled to it. The mouth of the anorexic wavers between several functions: its possessor is uncertain as to whether it is an eating-machine, an anal machine, a talking-machine, or a breathing machine (asthma attacks). Hence, we are all handymen: each with his little machines. (1)

Very explicitly they argue that the human body is not simply a figurative machine but a literal one. One might suggest that there is little that is either controversial or innovative about this idea, one whose origins can be traced to Plato’s dualism, and subsequently Galen and Vesalius’ masterworks of early anatomy. However, clearly the possibility of conceiving of organic bodies in this linguistic paradigm of “machines” is both modified by and predicated on the conceptual and social fact of industrialization. Deleuze and Guattari mean that bodies are composites, entelechies of myriad complex functioning micro-machines, that these composites themselves interact with one another as machines interact, drawing power, yes, but also producing desire and its satisfaction. Troublingly, as Miller writes above, human value stands below that of the machine to such an extent that in order to theorize the organic former, we must take recourse to the synthetic latter. This may seem innocuous, but it speaks powerfully of metaphors of efficiency that are deeply personal for Miller. Their enigmatic notion that “we are all handymen” resonates with Miller’s own views on not simply the mechanization of urban space, but of the individual and his or her environment. In either understanding, mechanization and the growing dominance of and reliance upon machines, engines, inorganic systems both inside and outside the home radically altered the nature not simply of the environment but of the human beings striving simply “to be” within it. For Miller, this posed profound problems for his characters, striving already to accommodate themselves to an ideology of self-reliance in an economic and ideological machinery unsympathetic to what might be considered traditional social/community values, evident when Willy Loman appeals to Howard for a small regular wage and is reminded that affection and service have no place in the machinery of business. One might suggest that what is at stake in this period of transition is humanistic values, ones

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that seem, in the bourgeoning posthuman cities, to have been superseded by more pragmatic concerns. It is these deeply resonant possibilities that Miller interrogates in a series of plays, each of which is invested in the human condition in the age of industrial capitalism. It is in his first Broadway play, The Man Who Had All the Luck, that Miller first demonstrates his interest in engines and machinery, and as S. C. Gordon notes, “questions of luck, freedom and self-making” invested with an urgency in Depression-era America (511). One of his least successful works—in his own estimation “the play failed” (Centola, 349)—in its fascination with the intersections between fatalism and free will (clearly influenced by Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex) it is nevertheless important for Miller’s development as a major playwright. The play is about a man who “wants to know where he begins and the world begins; where he leaves off, the world begins” (Centola, 349). We might think of this either literally or metaphorically. For Rodolpho in A View from the Bridge, mankind is augmented by machine, and collapsing the boundaries between each and entering into a symbiotic (cybernetic) ontological partnership is desirable. This relationship also is central to The Man Who Had All the Luck: David Beeves is an untrained auto mechanic, and the play opens with “two car horns […] honking impatiently,” demanding his attention, service, and care (Miller 2009, 100). It is clear here and throughout that David exists to serve the machines that noisily, even threateningly, surround the imaginary off-stage. Troublingly, as we realize very soon, the sense of threat comes from the fact that Beeves is self-taught, inexperienced, and in his own estimation simply lucky. It is no exaggeration to say that all of the action in the play is facilitated by malfunctioning or broken cars. In this play we see the first of many road deaths in Miller’s works, when Dan Dibble accidentally runs down Andrew Falk, the father of David’s intended, while driving a car to David’s repair shop. Tellingly, this is a brutal and literal collision of the mechanical and the organic, one that pre-empts Miller’s more philosophical and figurative explorations of this theme both here and in his later works. Gordon dismisses this symbolically potent moment, commenting that “Suddenly, randomly, the father is killed in an off-stage car accident” (512). However, it is far from random. In the first case, Andrew aggressively opposed the marriage of David and Hester, and so it is only because of his death that the marriage can go ahead. More significantly, Andrew was pushing his broken car along the road as Dan drove his broken car along the same road.

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The second scene turns entirely on the dramatic suspense over whether David can repair the engine of Dibble’s Marmon. If successful, he is assured of a lucrative position servicing the tractors and other machinery on Dibble’s flourishing mink farm. Shortly after the death of her father, Hester finds David laboring under the engine. He tells her “I never heard an engine make that sound, I took the pan off, I took the head off, I looked at the valves; I just don’t know what it is, Hess! It’s turning off centre somewhere and I can’t find it, I can’t!” (Miller 2009, 125). Gus, an Austrian immigrant and experienced professional mechanic, happens to stroll past, and manages easily to fix the engine. David, although attempting to share credit with Gus, is rewarded with lucrative contracts. Feeling some shame at having benefited from Gus, he initially rejects the offer on the basis that he has not got “the machinery,” before being told “But you’ve got the machinery” as Dan agrees to furnish his garage (Miller 2009, 135–36). Gus, on the other hand, sees his own workshop close and is subsequently employed by a slightly guilty David. Crucially, there are two central plot points in the play, the “luck” in the story, and each has to do with a motor car, specifically a broken engine. In a world undergoing rapid mechanization, one that fuels and feeds a ravenous economy, David’s value is directly and proportionally correlated with his capacity to service engines. But, in Miller’s world cars and engines are narratologically operative; without them, the plot would stall. Miller returns to engines in A Memory of Two Mondays , a play that takes place entirely in an auto-parts warehouse which, as Kenneth quips, sends “grimy axles out into the green countryside” (Miller 1958, 340). If T. S. Eliot’s Prufrock has “measured out [his] life with coffee spoons,” Gus, a broken engine after the death of his wife, has performed the feat with automobiles. Recounting his life, he remarks: When there was Winton Six I was here. When was Minerva car I was here. When was Stanley Steamer I was here, and Stearns Knight, and Marmon was good car […] When was Locomobile, and Model K Ford and Model N – all them different Fords, and Franklin was good car, Jordan Car, Reo car, Pierce Arrow, Cleveland car – all them was good cars. All them times I was here. (Miller 1958, 370)

Gus refers to cars as though they were discrete eras, epochs, defining moments in his own life, but also the life of the nation. Indeed, finally he equates the cars with “them times.” His life has been spent in the service

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of machines in a literal sense but also figuratively. What is most apparent in this—and in the play that takes as its central metaphor the possibility of the substitution of malfunctioning or simply outworn elements—is that the warehousemen are replacements and replaceable parts subordinated to the engines and commercial machinery they maintain. This is made most evident in the character Tom Kelly, a drunk, apparently on the brink of being fired after receiving a final warning and still coming in inebriated on the day the owner is due to inspect the shop. At one point Larry, with a preternatural knowledge of engine parts and where they are stored, sends young Bert to the third floor to get an obscure shaft for a 1922 truck. Moments later as the owner enters, Agnes the office secretary asks Larry “why don’t you put him up on the third floor” (Miller 1958, 352). This is Miller’s most overt analogy for the aging and psychically exhausted person and machine parts. That persons are exhaustible, and eventually replaceable, is the subject of Miller’s most enduring work. Like many of Miller’s plays, Death of a Salesman begins and ends by wistfully evoking the lost bucolic, explicitly referring back to the ancient Greek literary tradition that Miller held in such esteem. The first stage direction is that “A melody is heard, played upon a flute. It is small and fine, telling of grass and trees and the horizon” (Miller 1958, 130): a subtle but no less powerful allusion that may have come from Virgil’s Eclogues or even Theocritus’ Idylls. Indeed, Willy Loman is drawn to nature and in the final scenes manically plants seeds despite the fact that “The grass don’t grow any more, you can’t raise a carrot in the back yard” (Miller 1958, 135). In a psychosocial reading, Mauricio Cortina & Barbara Lenkerd argue that Willy’s “conflict reflected the social shift from rural values to urban marketing values” (255). Importantly, cars once again play a significant role in the plot. The play opens with Willy telling Linda about his inability to drive to Boston, because, he says: I was driving along, you understand? And I was fine. I was even observing the scenery. You can imagine, me looking at scenery, on the road every week of my life. But it’s so beautiful up there, Linda, the trees are so thick, and the sun is warm. I opened the windshield and just let the warm air bathe over me. And then all of a sudden I’m goin’ off the road! I’m tellin’ ya, I absolutely forgot I was driving. If I’d’ve gone the other way over the white line I might’ve killed somebody. (Miller 1958, 132)

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In the most basic sense, we see here a state of mind: Willy Loman has forgotten how to sell, what it means to be a salesman, and has acknowledged his profound failure to become a “masterful man.” As Irving Jacobson writes, in Miller’s plays “The consequences of failing to attain prominence and to transform society into a home are loneliness, frustration, and ultimately despair” (252). Once again, the action of the play, the plot, depends upon the car. In this scene, Willy is subconsciously drawn to the nature that he finds so starkly absent in the cities—we see here a desire to be in the trees, exposed to the sun, to not reach the destination of yet another city but to enjoy the interstitial, arterial, but rural connective spaces between places. In an odd way, his is a desire to travel, but to not arrive, to be nowhere. If Miller speaks above about the way society has modified the economy of value away from humanity and toward the machine, Willy Loman is the example par excellence of this observation; as he himself perceives it, he works to maintain unreliable machines. Counting his weekly salary, his wife lists the expenses: Linda: Well, on the first there’s sixteen dollars on the refrigerator Willy: Why sixteen? Linda: Well, the fan belt broke, so it was a dollar eighty. Willy: But it’s brand new. Linda: Well, the man said that’s the way it is. Till they work themselves in, y’know. (They move through the wall-line into the kitchen.) Willy: I hope we didn’t get stuck on that machine. Linda: They got the biggest ads of any of them! Willy: I know, it’s a fine machine. What else? Linda: Well, there’s nine-sixty for the washing machine. And for the vacuum cleaner there’s three and a half due on the fifteenth. Then the roof, you got twenty-one dollars remaining. Willy: It don’t leak, does it? Linda: No, they did a wonderful job. Then you owe Frank for the carburetor. Willy: I’m not going to pay that man! That goddam Chevrolet, they ought to prohibit the manufacture of that car! (Miller 1958, 148)

Here is a clear example, as Miller said (1994, 60), that “we have finally come to serve the machine.” In one sense, perhaps unattuned to the importance of a growing dependence on machines, this is simply modern

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life. Things break, we must replace them. However, a reading more sensitive to the fact that these machines are new, alien, inhospitable, enables a more sinister sense that Willy Loman strives to support not his wife (endlessly darning stockings) but machines, so, to return to Forster, “that the Machine may progress, that the Machine may progress, that the Machine may progress eternally” (Forster 2001, 105). All My Sons is explicitly about a confrontation between primitivism and industrialization. The opening scene is, once more, neo-pastoral: a group of men sitting among a copse of poplars in an affluent unnamed American suburb. Attempting to determine whether Joe and Kate Keller’s son Larry might have succumbed to the literal and metaphoric machinery of modern warfare on November 25th, the Keller’s neighbor Frank is drawing a horoscope; if he finds that day to be “a favorable day for Larry,” then they might safely assume he is simply MIA. Very quickly, the fact of broken machines intrudes into this oddly premodern narrative when Frank’s wife, Lydia, enters and asks Frank to fix a toaster, although it transpires that she has plugged in the wrong machine, as Frank tells her, “If you want the toaster to work don’t plug in the malted mixer” (Miller 1958, 63). Again, one might read these moments as somehow unrelated both to the central concerns of the play and Miller’s broader social concerns. However, the occurrence of broken and malfunctioning machines, and their usurpation of idyllic spaces, is too frequent and well-placed to be random. Once again Miller draws our attention to perhaps the defining phenomenon of the transition between the human and the posthuman, a growing reliance on machinery in both domestic and work spaces. Crucially, this proto-posthumanism has important implications in terms of gender roles. Traditionally, certainly during the period in which Miller is writing, the kitchen was the jurisdiction of the housewife. However, here she too is alienated from domestic work and space by the encroaching machinery. At the play’s heart is a particularly significant malformed engine part: cracked cylinder heads that Joe Keller sold to the US military and then managed to lay the blame solely on his partner Steve. Joe defends his actions in a fashion similar to Howard’s when he fires Willy in Death of a Salesman: “business is business,” (Miller 1958, 180). Keller passionately pleads with his son Chris: 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

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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 out in five minutes, what could I do, let them take forty years, let them take my life away? (Miller 1958, 115)

Once again, we return to Orwell and to Miller’s “they,” the sinister pronoun for business, for government, for hostile society and the “mass man.” For Joe, his responsibility ends with his family and with his business. Part of the irony of course is that functioning fighter planes are designed to end life, to kill, but here the malfunction results in another irony, the unwilled kamikaze of one hundred and twenty US servicemen. The manufacturing process is crucial here because it requires the skilful utilization of a range of complex machines to produce machines and machine parts on which human life depends, and to which human life is secondary. A failure in manufacturing process results in failures of social and human responsibility, leading to an inevitable chain reaction of ultimately catastrophic mechanical failures. A metaphorical reading would have the engine as society, the cylinder as the individual, and the hairline crack as those members of society, the Steves and the Joes, whose sense of community is restricted to the idea that “the world had a forty foot front, it ended at the building line” (Miller 1958, 121). Miller then, through the use of machines, raises and interrogates profound questions about the nature of contemporary society, responsibility, and in the context of the war intergenerational culpability—as Joe says in a moment of realization that precedes and precipitates his suicide, to Larry, they were “all my sons” (an idea explored in Lucy Kirkwood’s 2016 play The Children). Gerald Weales suggests “Joe [is] a peculiarly American product. He is a self-made man, a successful businessman ‘with the imprint of the machine-shop worker and boss still upon him’” (168). Joe then is a product of a failed process, one might say, with a crack, possibly welded over, but inevitably destined to malfunction, and thereby disrupt the soft machinery of family and by extension the wider society. At the heart of Miller’s play is a paradox: he is concerned that individuality is at stake in a hostile mechanical world, but at the same time he expresses deep concerns about the individualism that is at the core of the American philosophy of “self-reliance.” For Miller there is an imperative

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for survival both to embrace and to be cautious of a potentially destructive self-concern. If we are “all handymen: each with his little machines,” the role we play in the wider machinery into which we are integrated gains significance. This role of handyperson has to do not simply with the body, of course, but with the machinery of society. America, for Miller, is, in David Beeves’ words, “turning off centre somewhere.” Perhaps the role of the socially aware playwright then is akin to that of a mechanic, a handyperson; if the machinery in the broadest ideological, political, and humanistic senses is turning off center, it is drama that not only gives voice to “well-defined expression of profound social needs,” but which offers some possibility for providing for those needs. Drama then is indeed a very “serious business.” And so, for Miller machines are in themselves significant and insidiously pervasive presences, definitional of a period of American and world history. His recurring fascination with machinery, and more particularly malfunctioning engines, is remarkable and repeatedly draws attention to the collision between the metallic, hard, unforgiving fact of industrial modernity and the soft fleshy machinery of the human being. But, for Deleuze and Guattari, industry mines, exploits, but ultimately reveals the natural essence of mankind; in their posthuman reading, mankind and machine are part of a single system, within which each finds its being: The human essence of nature and the natural essence of man become one within nature in the form of production or industry, just as they do within the life of man as a species. Industry is then no longer considered from the extrinsic point of view of utility, but rather from the point of view of its fundamental identity with nature as production of man and by man. (4)

This then is the posthuman, a space in which the synthetic and the natural combine in apparent symbiosis. What I have tried to show here is that Miller was a poet of the proto-posthuman, concerned with the developing subordination of mankind to the machinery that it had created in order, ostensibly, to improve life. Efficiency for Miller comes at a cost to self, to family, to society, and ultimately to the species. If this was the case for Miller, Forster, and Orwell, writing in the early and mid-twentieth century, then the case would be even stronger now, in the beginning of a new millennium that has witnessed and continues to see exponential progress in technology and machinery. One wonders what Miller would have written in the world of Twitter, smart phones, tablets, Wi-Fi, Ear

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Pods, I-Pads, augmented and virtual reality. Indeed, one might wonder what Miller would make of the fact that this chapter, this book, is a product of electronic messages, electronic files, user interfaces, digital printing, and often unreliable word-processing pro …

Notes 1. Robert A. Martin, “Editor’s Introduction,” The Theatre Essays of Arthur Miller (London: Methuen, 1994), xxvi. Both Brecht and Miller were brought before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Whether Miller was aware of Brecht during the early stages of his career is unclear. See Weisstein, 373–96; Kern, 157–65. 2. Jean-Paul Sartre wrote the screenplay for the French language film of The Crucible, and although denying direct influence, Miller says Sartre was “always attractive to me in a vague way.” See Centola, 347. 3. A fact Miller acknowledges in an essay “American Theater,” noting that the “bulk of [the audience] is middle class.” See Miller (1994, 32). 4. Quoted in Aleks Sierz and Dominic Cavendish, “The Theatre That Changed Drama,” The Telegraph, 11 January 2006.

Works Cited Benjamin, Walter. 2008. The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media. Eds. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP. Blumberg, Paul. 1969. Sociology and Social Literature: Work Alienation in the Plays of Arthur Miller. American Quarterly 21:2, Part 2: Summer Supplement, 291–310. Stable URL, https://www.jstor.org/stable/2711943. Bronsen, David. 1968. An Enemy of the People: A Key to Arthur Miller’s Art and Ethics. Comparative Drama 2:4, 229–47. Project MUSE, https://doi. org/10.1353/cdr.1968.0016. Centola, Steven R. 1984. The Will to Live: An Interview with Arthur Miller. Modern Drama 27:3, 345–60. Project MUSE, https://doi.org/10.1353/ mdr.1984.0017. Corrigan, Robert W. 1968. The Achievement of Arthur Miller. Comparative Drama 2:3, 141–60. Project MUSE, https://doi.org/10.1353/cdr.1968. 0011. Cortina, Mauricio, and Barbara Lenkerd. 2008. Willy Loman’s American Dreams. Contemporary Psychoanalysis 44:2, 247–265, https://doi.org/10. 1080/00107530.2008.10747150.

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Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. 2000. Anti-Oedipus. Minneapolis: U Minnesota P. Forster, E. M. 2001. Selected Stories. London: Penguin. Gordon, S. C. 2018. Luck Stories: Stress-Testing Contingency and Agency at the Margins of Post-war American Literature. Textual Practice 32:3, 509–27 (511), https://doi.org/10.1080/0950236x.2018.1442398. Jacobson, Irving. 1975. Family Dreams in Death of a Salesman. American Literature 47:2, 247–58. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2925484. Kern, Edith. 1958. Brecht’s Popular Theater and Its American Popularity. Modern Drama 1:3, 157–65. Project MUSE, https://doi.org/10.1353/mdr. 1958.0009. Martin, Robert A. 1994. Editor’s Introduction, in The Theatre Essays of Arthur Miller. London: Methuen. Miller, Arthur. 1958. The Collected Plays. London: Cresset. Miller, Arthur. 1994. The Theatre Essays of Arthur Miller. Ed. Robert A. Martin. London: Methuen. Miller, Arthur. 2009. Plays: Four. London: Methuen. Orwell, George. 1989. The Road to Wigan Pier. London: Penguin. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1961. Beyond the Bourgoise Theatre. The Tulane Drama Review 5:3 (March), 3–11. Weales, Gerald. 1962. Arthur Miller: Man and His Image. The Tulane Drama Review 7:1, 165–80. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1124636. Weisstein, Ulrich. 1963. Brecht in America: A Preliminary Survey. MLN 78:4, 373–96. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3042820.

Index

A Abbey Theatre, 175 Abbotson, Susan C.W., 130, 137, 212, 214, 216 abortion, 203 absurdism, 13, 15, 19, 234 absurdity, 208 Absurd, The, 70, 72 Adam and Eve, 61 Adorno, Theodor, 191 affinity with, the left, 213 African American, 99, 103–105, 112, 114, 115, 117, 118, 120 African American dramas, 7 After the Fall , 44, 45, 69, 167, 181, 188, 199, 215–217, 227–229, 269 agency, 102, 108 Ah, Wilderness!, 162 AIDS, 203 Albee, Edward, 2, 6, 7, 65, 66, 68–72, 214

All My Sons , 51, 52, 57, 66–69, 76, 105, 106, 108, 141, 161, 182, 202, 211, 217, 223, 224, 240, 243, 249, 250, 257, 266, 294, 295, 305 Als, Hilton, 168 American Buffalo, 124, 128 American Clock, The, 88, 220, 231 American Convention on Human Rights, 263 American culture, 65, 66, 68–71, 222 American Dream, 7, 8, 65, 66, 68, 70, 75, 93, 164, 166, 172, 173, 185, 199, 204, 205, 216, 217, 243, 267 American Dream, The, 66, 68–70 American Experience documentary, 174 America Play, The, 87 An Enemy of the People, 178, 225 Angels in America, 203, 208 Antigone, 22

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG, part of Springer Nature 2020 S. Marino and D. Palmer (eds.), Arthur Miller for the Twenty-First Century, American Literature Readings in the 21st Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37293-4

311

312

INDEX

anti-Semitism, 104, 112, 171, 221, 222 Archbishop’s Ceiling, The, 231, 274 Arena Stage, 89 Arendt, Hannah, 148, 178, 180, 181, 185, 192, 193 Aristophanes, 270 Aristotle, 19, 86, 144 Arthur Miller Freedom to Write Memorial Lecture, 264 Arthur Miller Journal , 5 ATW Culture Media, 251 Augustine, St, 269

B Balakian, Jan, 8, 142, 144, 146 Baker, Annie, 75, 93–95 Baraka, Amiri, 114 “Bare Manuscript, The”, 234 Battle of Angels , 51 Batuz, 273 Bauman, Zygmunt, 203, 205 “Beavers”, 235 Beckett, Samuel, 15, 19, 88, 204 “Bees, The”, 232, 235 Begley, Ed, 153 Beijing People’s Art Theatre, 238, 240, 241, 243, 244, 246, 247, 249, 252–256, 258 Benjamin, Walter, 198, 298 Benning, Annette, 3 Bienvenu, Germain, 113 Bigsby, Christopher, 2, 5, 9, 15, 16, 20–22, 96, 106, 108, 149, 151, 154, 155, 162, 167, 183, 207, 217, 228, 230 Blake, William, 297 Bloom, Harold, 15 Blumberg, Paul, 295 Booth, Edwin, 165 Booth, John Wilkes, 87, 88

born in 1915, 215 Bound East for Cardiff , 175 Bradbury, Malcolm, 226, 229 Brando, Marlon, 284 Brater, Enoch, 15 Brecht, Bertolt, 96, 150, 293, 308 British National Theatre, 88 Brodie, Leanna, 252–255, 258 Brodsky, Joseph, 264, 272 Broken Glass , 41, 42, 46, 104, 105, 112, 192, 232, 233 Bronsen, David, 293 Brooklyn, 167 brother(s), 52, 55, 124, 131 Buber, Martin, 153 Buchner, Georg, 187 Buck, Pearl, 266 “Bulldog”, 233 bullying, 101, 106 Burgess, Anthony, 297 Buried Child, 137 Bush, George W., 4, 264, 269 Businessman, 306

C Cain and Abel, 52, 55, 58, 59, 61–63 Calmes, Jackie, 200 Camus, Albert, 191 Cao Yu, 239–241, 255, 257 capitalism, 118, 149, 169, 197, 202, 206, 234, 266, 267, 280, 289, 296, 297, 299, 301 Carlin, George, 273 Cars, 297, 301–303 Carter, Jimmy, 198 Caruth, Cathy, 133 catharsis, 23 Catholic Church, 265 Cat on Hot Tin Roof , 53 Centola, Steven R., 58, 106, 156, 212, 214, 293, 301, 308

INDEX

Chekhov, Anton, 2, 239 Cheney, Dick, 153 Chen Liangting, 240 Chinese Cultural Revolution, 267 Chinese huaju (spoken drama), 238 chorus, 17 civil disobedience, 110 Clinton, Bill, 265, 273 Clinton, Hillary, 264 Coates, Ta-Nehisi, 101 Coelho, Paulo, 265 Coffin, William Sloane, 269 Coleman, Jenna, 3 commodity fetishism, 125 conservatism, 197, 199, 201, 203 consumerism, 205 Convention Against Enforced Disappearance, 263 Convention on Protection from Torture, 264 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, 263 Convention on the Rights of the Child, 263 Cope, Virginia H., 285 Corrigan, Robert W., 294 Cortina, Mauricio, 303 Council of Europe, 271 Count of Monte Cristo, The, 165 cowardice, 38, 39, 42, 47, 48 The Creation of the World and Other Business , 52, 61, 231 Crucible, The, 2–4, 6, 8, 13, 20–23, 41, 44, 46, 76, 77, 86, 87, 105, 108, 182, 194, 211, 216, 225, 227, 239, 241–243, 249, 251, 257, 267, 270, 274 Cultural Revolution (China), 238, 239, 242, 243, 259 Czechoslovakia, 192

313

D Daily Worker, 149 Dalai Lama, 151 Danger Memory!, 232 Darwin, Charles, 298 Days without End, 162 Death of a Salesman, 15, 19, 20, 23, 39, 40, 43, 51, 52, 58, 66–69, 76–79, 83, 84, 161, 180, 182, 185, 202, 204, 211, 213, 215, 220, 225, 237–241, 243, 244, 246, 247, 249–253, 255–258, 266–268, 277, 279, 288, 295–300, 303–305 debt, 190 Deleuze, Gilles, 299, 300, 307 Delicate Balance, A, 71 democratic principles, 214 Denial, 143, 153, 154 Depression, The Great, 60, 94, 144, 164 Desiring machines, 299 despair, 29, 32, 38, 40, 42, 43, 48 DeVito, Danny, 3 Dickens, Charles, 179 disgrace, 187 Ditchy, 220, 221 Dominik, Jane, 144 Donna Reed Show, 63 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 186, 191 Dowling, Robert, 174 Drama Desk Award, 87 Dramatists Guild of America, 83 Dreyfus, Alfred, 182, 193 Du Bois, W.E.B., 99, 103–106, 112, 119 E Eden, 66, 69, 70 Eichmann, Adolf, 180, 184, 189, 192 Elam, Harry, 113 Elam, Michele, 113

314

INDEX

elder statesman of the American stage, 215 election, US 2016, 147 Eliot, T.S., 302 Engine(s), 294, 296, 299–303, 305–307 Enright, Anne, 265 Esbjornson, David, 250, 258 European Convention on Human Rights, 263 Everybody Wins , 194

F Face Theater Group (Renmian jutuan), 251 Factory working conditions, 163, 170 “Fame”, 230 family, 65, 66, 70, 150 family dramas, 7 “Family in Modern Drama, The”, 158, 225 Fate, 19 father, 52, 124, 128, 131, 179, 183–187 Father Knows Best , 63 fathers and sons, 150, 182 father–son relationships, 165, 167 Faulkner, William, 266 FBI, 265, 266 feminine, 21, 22 feminine male, 281 Ferber, Edna, 266 Ferguson, Robert A., 178 fetishism, 130 Field, Sally, 3 Film Noir, 145 Final Solution, 190 Finishing the Picture, 195, 235 Fires in the Mirror, 87 “Fitter’s Night”, 231 Flick, The, 93–95

Focus , 104, 221 Foley, Helene, 17 Forster, E.M., 296–298, 305, 307 Frankfurt, Harry, 29 Frost, Robert, 27, 28, 31 Fuentes, Carlos, 265 Fung, Luther, 250 G Gassner, John, 51 Gavras, Costa, 271 Gelb, Arthur, 174 Gelb, Barbara, 174 Gelber, Steven M., 289 Generation Jones, 66 genocide, 152, 274 Glass Menagerie, The, 51, 52 global audiences, 211 Goat, The, 71, 72 Good Earth, The, 246 Gordimer, Nadine, 263 Gordon, S.C., 301 Gore, Al, 4 Gorelik, Mordecai, 145 Great Gatsby, The, 202 Greek drama, 6, 13, 217, 295, 303 Greek War of Independence, 270 Greenblatt, Stephen, 153 Grossman, David, 264 Group Theatre, 144, 152, 175 Guattari, Felix, 299, 300, 307 Guilt, 143, 152, 153, 205 H Hairy Ape, The, 163, 168–170, 172 Hamlet , 268 “Ham Sandwich”, 231 Hansberry, Lorraine, 75, 78, 82, 114 Haynes, Shontisha, 157 HBO, 5 Hecht, Jessica, 3

INDEX

Hedges, Chris, 205 Hegel, G.W.F., 14 Heilman, Robert, 19 Helburn, Theresa, 51 Heller, Agnes, 14, 15, 19 Hemingway, Ernest, 194 Henley, Beth, 83 Herman, Judith, 156 Higgins, Michael D., 165, 168, 174 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 269 Holocaust, 151, 177, 180, 181, 190, 192 Homely Girl , 233 Hong Kong Federation of Drama Societies, 250 Hopwood Award, 1 House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), 9, 86, 146, 266–268, 274 Hughes, Langston, 113, 115 Human rights, 9, 266 Hu Na, 244 husbands and wives, 76 hypercapitalism, 198

I Ibsen, Henrik, 2, 5, 6, 13, 106, 108, 144, 145, 155, 178, 184, 202, 207, 239, 274 Iceman Cometh, The, 28, 31, 32, 34, 39, 40, 42, 44, 46, 48, 162 Ideology, 293, 295, 300, 307 I Don’t Need You Any More, 227, 230, 233 immigrant families, 8 immigrants social assimilation, 165 Incident at Vichy, 44, 104, 125, 181, 190, 192, 195, 227–229, 274 indignation, 29, 32, 39, 40, 43, 48 individualism, 68–70, 197, 199, 205, 208, 306

315

Individuality, 272, 293, 294, 298, 306 Industrial society, 294 “In Memoriam”, 220 intertextuality, 178 Ionesco, Eugène, 88 Iran–Contra affair, 200 Irish characters, 8 Irish Famine of 1840s, 168 Irish immigrants, portrayal of, 169 Ishiguro, Kazuo, 266 “It’s morning again in America”, 206 “It Takes a Thief”, 224

J Jacobson, Irving, 225, 304 Jacobson, Matthew, 290 James, William, 29, 30 Jaspers, Karl, 185 Jefferson Lecture, 4, 200 Jewish heritage, 52 Jewish identity, 227, 269 Jin Yun, 247 Julius Caesar, 22

K Kafka, Franz, 178, 184, 191–193 Kakutani, Michiko, 156 Kavanaugh, Brett, 4 Kazan, Elia, 3, 86, 153, 258, 268 Kennedy, Adrienne, 7, 115 Kennedy Center, 241 Kennedy, John F., 68 key themes, 215 Kierkegaard, Søren, 36, 37, 109, 184, 191, 194 Kingdom of Earth, 53 Kirkwood, Lucy, 306 Kushner, Tony, 151, 180, 198, 203, 208, 212, 213

316

INDEX

L La Boétie, Etienne de, 205 Lahr, John, 290 Lao She, 240 Lasch, Christopher, 204 Last Yankee, The, 232, 233 Late Henry Moss, The, 124, 132 Lawrence, D.H., 297 Leave It to Beaver, 63 Lee University, 151, 156 leftists, 235 Legacy Museum and National Museum for Peace and Justice, 266 Leibenluft, Michael, 252–256, 258 Lei, Guohua, 249, 250 Lemkin, Raphael, 152 Lenkerd, Barbara, 303 Leon, Mechele, 250 Letts, Tracy, 3 Levinas, Emmanuel, 207 Lewinsky, Monica, 265 Li, Liuyi, 249 Lincoln, Abraham, 87, 88, 117, 183 Li, Shilong, 245, 253 Livesay, Lew, 16 Llosa, Mario Vargas, 265 Lombardo, Agostino, 20 Long Day’s Journey Into Night , 2, 40, 164–166, 168, 185 Lorca, Garcia, 264 Lower East Side, 166 Lü Liang, 242, 250 Lynching, 265 Lyric Stage Company, 41

M Macbeth, 31, 154 Mailer, Norman, 287 “Make America Great Again”, 199, 203

Mamet, David, 7, 8, 198, 208 Mandelstam, 264 Manhattan Theatre Club, 199 Mann, Thomas, 273 Man Who Had All the Luck, The, 40, 51, 52, 56, 221, 295, 301 marginalization, 101, 102 Marquez, Gabriel Garcia, 265 marriage, 135 Martin Beck Theater, 86 Martin, Robert A., 212 Marxism, 146, 147, 149 Marx, Karl, 14, 208, 297, 299 masculinity, 9, 22, 81, 201, 202, 205, 206, 208, 277–279, 281–284, 286, 287, 289 Mason, Jeffrey D., 72, 106 materialism, 197, 199, 201, 204 Matthies, Victoria, 157 May, Elaine Tyler, 281 Mayfair Magazine, 220 McCarthyism, 180, 193 McCarthy, Joseph, 86, 177, 190 McCarthy, Mary, 268 McKenna, Connor, 145 Mechanization, 294, 296, 297, 300, 302 Mei Lanfang, 239 Mei Shaowu, 239, 241 melodrama, 28 “Memoranda on Masks”, 28 memory, 27, 29, 30, 88, 126, 131, 134–136, 267 Memory of Two Mondays, A, 94, 162, 168, 171, 175, 226, 227, 295, 296, 299, 302 middle class, 278, 283 Miller, Arthur and Greece, 271 and Marxism, 266 as president of PEN International, 271

INDEX

Emersonian temperament, 213 on basis of morality, 266 opinion of Eugene O’Neill, 161, 162 youth, 220 Miller, Augusta, 166, 167 Miller, Isidore, 163, 164, 166 Miller, Kermit, 52, 223 Miller, Rebecca, 5 Miller Trust, 5 Misfits, The, 193, 194, 226 screenplay, 227, 228 Mitchum, Robert, 145 Mi, Tiezeng, 245, 255 modernism, 178 modernity, 14, 296, 307 “Modest Proposal for the Pacification of the Public Temper, A”, 193 Money, 124 Monroe, Marilyn, 44, 226, 227, 229, 235 “Monte Sant’ Angelo”, 225, 227 Moon of the Caribbees, The, 175 Moore, Michael, 149 Morath, Inge, 5, 234, 239, 244, 249, 253, 254, 257, 268 Morgan, Colin, 3 Morisseau, Dominique, 118 Morrison, Tony, 101 mother, 52 mothers and daughters, 83 Mountain Language, 270 Mourning Becomes Electra, 162 Mr. Peters’ Connections , 175, 232 Murphy, Brenda, 69, 244, 246, 248 Murray, Edward, 154

N National Medal of Science, 269 National Museum of African Americans, 265

317

National Museum of Latinos, 266 National Museum of the American Indian, 265 National Theatre of China, 251 “Nature of Tragedy, The”, 28 Nazi Party, 268 Nazi(s), 44, 45, 184, 190, 192 “Nazi Trials and the German Heart, The”, 180 neoliberalism, 197, 199–204, 206, 208 New Deal, 151 New Historicism, 153 New Orleans, 284 New School for Social Research, 51 New York Critics Circle Award, 161 New York Times, The, 39, 82, 86, 124, 200, 213, 215 ’night, Mother, 83, 85 "1928 Buick, The", 231 1980s, 197, 199, 201–203, 208 Nixon, Richard, 268 Norman, Marsha, 75, 83, 84 Nottage, Lynn, 75, 76, 89, 92, 99, 105, 106, 112, 113, 118, 119 No Villain, 1, 3 Nuremberg trials, 180

O O’Brien, Edna, 265 O’Casey, Sean, 28, 48, 96 Odets, Clifford, 150, 152, 162 Oedipus, 31 Old Vic, 3 One Hundred Years of Solitude, 265 O’Neill, Edmund, 166 O’Neill, Ella, 166 O’Neill, Eugene, 2, 6, 8, 70, 161, 185, 239, 241 on Irish national character, 169 O’Neill, James Sr., 163, 164, 166

318

INDEX

O’Neill, James Jr., 166 One Man’s Family, 63 On Politics and the Art of Acting , 4, 200 “On Social Plays”, 296 Oregon Shakespeare Festival, 89 Orton, Joe, 295 Orwell, George, 297, 298, 306, 307 Osborne, John, 295 Othello, 20 Otten, Terry, 17, 18 Our American Cousin, 88 Outer Critics Circle Award, 88 Ovid, 264

P Pamuk, Orhan, 264, 270 Parks, Suzan-Lori, 75, 87, 117 Past, importance of, 265 patriarchal, 277 Patriot Act, 267 patriotism, 274 PEN International, 9, 181, 265, 268, 270, 271 "Performance, The", 234 Pinter, Harold, 70, 93, 270 pipe dream(s), 28, 29, 32–35, 37, 38, 40, 42, 43, 48, 70 Piscator, Edwin, 193 “Plaster Masks, The”, 223, 224 Plato, 271, 300 Playing for Time, 104, 231, 274 “Please Don’t Kill Anything”, 227, 228 Plum, Paula, 41 poet-philosopher, 218 polygamy, 205 Posthuman, 305, 307 postmodern, 13, 14, 19, 24 post-World War II America, 78 prelapsarian, 68, 69

“Presence, The”, 235 presidential election, 4 Price, The, 42, 44, 46, 52, 59, 105, 110, 124, 215, 230 Prince of Asturias Award, 266 “Prophecy, The”, 227, 229 Protocols of the Elders of Zion, 271 public intellectual, 212 public issues, 211 Pulitzer Prize, 83, 88, 89 Pullman, Bill, 3 Purdy, Sean, 198, 201, 208

R racism, 7, 101, 103–105, 113, 115, 118 A Raisin in the Sun, 78, 82, 83 Ransom Center, 5 Ray, David, 27, 28, 31, 38 Reading, Pennsylvania, 89, 93 Reagan era, 8 Reaganism, 69, 197–199, 201, 203, 205, 207, 208 Reaganomics, 197 Reagan, Ronald, 197–208, 269 realistic makeup (xianshi huazhuang ), 245 The Reason Why, 269 rebellion, 29, 32, 39, 40, 99, 102, 105, 107, 108, 113, 115, 117–119 recognition, 102, 103, 105, 109, 113–115 Repression, 153 Republican Party, 197 respect, 77 Resurrection Blues , 72, 234 Ride Down Mt. Morgan, The, 8, 199, 201, 202, 207, 208, 232, 233, 251 Rosenberg, Julius, 182

INDEX

Rossetti, Gina, 170 Roudané, Matthew, 15 Roxbury, Connecticut, 5, 232 Royal National Theatre (London), 251 Royal Shakespeare Company, 3 Ruffalo, Mark, 3 Rushdie, Salman, 264 Ryan, Robert, 270

S Sartre, Jean Paul, 151, 178, 184, 191, 272, 295, 308 Savran, David, 281 Schechtman, Marya, 27–32, 36, 37, 39, 100 Schvey, Henry, 51 Screen Actors Guild, 203 "Search for the Future, A", 230 Seascape, 71 Seattle Repertory Theatre, 199 Seferis, Giorgos, 271 self, 27–48, 100–106, 108–115, 117–119 self-delusion, 31, 35 selfhood, 278, 280, 282, 285 self-narratives, 28–36, 40, 43, 48 self-reliance, 300, 306 self-righteousness, 106–108 Sell, Mike, 15 Shakespeare, William, 3, 13, 22, 217 Shaloub, Tony, 3 shame, 99–106, 108, 109, 112, 113, 115, 117, 118, 120, 143, 153 shaming, 7 Shandell, Jonathan, 113 Shanghai Contemporary Theatre Festival, 250 Shanghai Dramatic Arts Center (SDAC), 242, 249, 250 Shannon, Sandra, 104, 118

319

Shannon, William V., 175 Shaughnessy, Edward, 168, 174, 175 Shaw, George Bernard, 8, 212, 239 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 270 Shepard, Sam, 7, 8, 180 Shrayer, Maxim, 181 sister, 52 Slattery, Mary, 225 Smalley, Webster, 113 Smith, Anna Deavere, 75, 86, 87 social drama, 14 social play, The, 295 social responsibility, 8 Sophocles, 301 South Africa, 271 Soviet Union, 267 Soyinka, Wole, 264 Spanish Civil War, 266 State of the Union Address, 202, 205, 269 Steiner, George, 15, 19 Stock market crash of 1929, 167 Strawson, Galen, 28, 300 Streep, Meryl, 151 Streetcar Named Desire, A, 35, 51, 53, 277 14th Street Y (New York City), 253 Strindberg, August, 2 suicide, 78, 83, 106, 108, 169, 277, 282, 288, 295, 296, 306 Sweat , 89 Sy, Jovanni, 252, 254, 255, 258

T tainted milk scandal, 250 Taylor, Frederick W., 170 teleological suspension of the ethical, 36, 37, 109 televison, political use of, 200 Thacker, David, 3 Thaler, 127

320

INDEX

Thatcher, Margaret, 197 theatre and social change, 75, 76, 96, 295 Theatre Guild, 51, 162 Theocritus, 303 Theodorakis, Mikis, 271 Thomason, Krista K., 100–106, 108, 111–113, 117, 119 Thomas, Richard, 3 Thoreau, Henry David, 272 Tiang, Jeremy, 253–255 Tian Han, 239 Tillich, Paul, 151 Time, 15, 24 Timebends , 1, 5, 123, 134, 137, 161, 175, 180, 187, 191, 192, 195 Tolkien, J.R.R., 297 Tony Award, 86, 87 Topdog/Underdog , 87, 88 A Touch of the Poet , 174 tragedy, 6, 15, 18–21, 23, 27, 28, 31–33, 35, 37–41, 43, 44, 48, 66, 68, 69, 71, 72, 104–106, 109, 110, 112, 113, 117–119, 220 Greek, 71 "Tragedy and the Common Man", 6, 39, 83, 103, 104, 114, 191, 213, 294 tragic, 216 tragic mulatto, 113 tragicomic humanism, 70 trauma, 134 trauma studies, 124 trial, as metaphor, 8 trials, 178, 179, 188, 191, 193, 194 trickle-down economics, 198 Truman, Harry S., 67 Trump, Donald, 4, 5, 147, 153, 156, 199, 289, 290 Trumpism, 69 Tsinghua University, 240, 257

"Turpentine Still, The", 235 Twain, Mark, 179 twenty-somethings, 93 Twilight Los Angeles: 1992, 87 Two-Character Play, The, 53, 54 Two-Way Mirror, 232

U Uncle Doggie’s Nirvana, 247, 257 Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 238, 256 University of Michigan, 1, 52, 266

V Van Hove, Ivo, 3, 4 vaudeville, 87 Velleman, David, 29 Vesalius, Andreas, 300 Vietnam War, 9, 230, 268, 269 View from the Bridge, A, 13, 23, 44, 76, 77, 105, 109, 225, 227, 251, 299, 301 Violence, 102 Virgil, 303 Vogel, Paula, 198, 208 von Braun, Werner, 268 Voulgaris, Pantelis, 271

W Walden Pond, 272 Wallach, Eli, 270 Wang Xiaoying, 242, 250, 257 warrior, 103, 104 Washington, Denzel, 34, 35 Washington Times, The, 4 Wasserstein, Wendy, 83 Watergate, 268 Weales, Gerald, 306 Weber, Max, 14 Welles, Orson, 192, 195 White Puppies, 231, 232

INDEX

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, 2, 21, 66, 68–72 wig incident (jiafa shijian), 246 Williams, Tennessee, 2, 6, 7, 9, 51, 219, 239, 241, 250, 282 Willy Loman, 213 Wilson, August, 7, 103–105, 112, 114, 115, 118, 120, 180 Witches of Salem, 242, 250, 257 Wolfe, George C., 34, 35 Wolin, Sheldon, 199 Wollheim, Richard, 29 women, 150 women dramatists, 7 World Press Freedom Index, 264 Wright Aeronautical Corporation, 146 Wu Ge, 247 Wu Shiliang, 244, 253, 254

321

X xenophobia, 163, 171

Y Ying Ruocheng, 237, 238, 240, 241, 243, 244, 246–248, 255, 257–259 Young Vic, 3

Z Zhao Yi, 251 Zinman, Toby, 88 Žižek, Slavoj, 124–128 Zoo Story, The, 71, 72 Zuolin, Huang, 239, 241, 242