CHAPTER – I

INTRODUCTION

The Twentieth century American Drama

American Drama took a long time to be born and a longer time to come of age. It

was only during the last eighty years that American drama gained acceptance along with

the modern dramatic heritage of the west. The American theatre in the last century

produced a number of excellent plays, with a distinction of reflecting the self - conscious

American society that nurtures absolute freedom of thought and expression as means of

expressing its identity and destiny. Modernism in American Drama stems from this shift

in values, which regards drama more as a self-analytical and a serious preoccupation than

as a mere, momentary entertainment.

Modernism arrived in America in the nineteenth century with the adoption of

secularism and scientific approach to life. Scientific inventions and discoveries

strengthened the nation to face the new challenges of modernism. The impact of

Darwinism on American Drama was significant, and Eugene O‘Neil was a product of this

socio-cultural atmosphere. As a founder father of the American Drama, he gave stronger

push to it with the support of other practitioners. The influence of Europe on this genre

was not only enlightening, but also enriching.

American drama is primarily a product of the twentieth century and a brief survey

of the same will reveal the exact location which will be contextually relevant to sketch a

brief historical survey of Arthur Miller in it.

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The early modernist influence of Europe and Britain can be felt in the American

Drama during the second decade of the twentieth century. Boris Ford makes the

following observation about the tendency:

The modernist movement in American Drama began in the second decade of the

twentieth century in small enterprises such as the Washington Square Players, the

Province Town Theatre, and the Neighbourhood Playhouse. These groups

produced Ibsen and Shaw as well as original plays that reflected their influence,

combined with a new conception of individual and family conflict based on

popular versions of Psychoanalytic theory. Eugene O‘Neill (1888-1953), the

greatest playwright emerged by adapting expressionist techniques. Tennessee

Williams and Arthur Miller are rooted in the tradition of realism like O‘Neill ,

which they modify with expressionist techniques, but these writers each made of

this blend a style uniquely their own (337-339).

The plays that were staged in America in the nineteenth century were written

mostly by the British writers but by the end of 1920 New York City achieved a complete

monopoly of the American theatre. Arthur Miller arrived on the scene in the 1940s and

in two decades gained a solid reputation as a successful playwright. American drama is a

product of twentieth century and many playwrights have imprinted their footprints during

this period. In this century, the genre of drama finds its roots in the native soil and its

voice in the local idiom. The realistic contemporary middle-class domestic melodrama is

the main technique of representing the richness of the American experience by the

playwrights to their urban middle-class audiences. If the 1920s were dominated by

Eugene O‘Neill and his experimental plays, the 30s belonged to Clifford Odets and his
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realism. The mid-century American Drama was given shape and direction by two other

dramatists of great talent and commitment- Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams. Both

the artists express the contemporary issues and ethical concerns through their different

plays and techniques. In fact, Eugene O‘Neill, Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams

clearly dominated the 20th century American Drama. Literary historian, Gerald M.

Berkowitz observes that the genre of drama emerged in America quite late, but its

evolution has been too fast:

Initially, plays were written and performed on the American continent and by the

nineteenth-century American theatre was quite popular. Yet in America as in

Europe, a change in the kind of literature being written for the theatre began to

become apparent in the last years of the nineteenth-century. As with many

historical and artistic developments in American culture, this was much less a

matter of an organized movement than of trial and error and accidents of

personality; an individual writer might not be consciously innovative, but

something in his work might attract audiences or inspire other writers, so that the

art form lurched forward a step…. This was very much a rebirth of an art form;

with little in the recent history of the genre to build on, the first generations of

twentieth century American Dramatists had to discover for themselves what shape

the twentieth century American Drama would take (1).

Arthur Miller as a dramatist

Miller has now universally been acknowledged as an eminent dramatist, and his

plays resonate with innovations. They bridge the European dramatic conventions of the

nineteenth century with the modern dramatists of the present century .His popularity is
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attested by strong impressions that his plays were received in Europe, Asia and across

the east of the Atlantic. The width of his popularity on the stage is well-matched with the

plethora of critical reactions and assessments right from the staging of his first successful

play.

Among the earliest critics of Miller, Dennis Welland is one who in his book,

entitled Arthur Miller, argues that Miller was constantly preoccupied with people who are

denied a sense of community. The American Depression gave him understanding of

man‘s insecurities in the modern industrial civilisation. Welland‘s Chief thrust is Miller‘s

sense of social commitment of the individual in the large macro-cosmic context.

Miller‘s concept of play is influenced by the Greek concept of play which

advocates that a play should include everything which makes man‘s life beautiful as well

as sensuous. Miller, in his plays, never tries to disguise the deficiencies of the individual

and society. His plays are a trajectory of the diverse human emotions, feelings and

situations. The questions related to individual and family, individual and society, good

and evil, appearance and reality, past and present, capitalism and Marxism, individual

liberty and state power, determinism and freewill haunt Miller‘s literary output. The plays

are deeply affected by the devastating impact of the Great Depression of 1929 which

turned the whole economic system of the U.S. upside down. It is this great event in the

history of the U.S. which disturbed not only economic system but also human relations.

Family as a unit is considered the most powerful factor in the American society. But as a

result of the Depression, disintegration in the family and as a result of it alienation of the

individual from society was but natural. As a result of Depression, American Myth of

success of an individual was shattered to pieces. Miller tells in an interview, ―They

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couldn‘t cope with the impact because it was incalculable. These people were profound

believers in the American dream. The day the money stopped their identity was gone…. I

don‘t think America ever got over the depression‖ ( Bigsby 1).

Depression had caused problems for survival for writers, actors, producers,

directors and all sorts of people related with the theatre. The Man who Had All the Luck

(1944) was Miller‘s first play which was unsuccessful. It made him try his hand in

novels, where he focused on anti-semitism with great success. His play All My Sons was

staged in the year 1947 and it attained a remarkable success. Death of a Salesman was

staged at the time of economic boom and the play depicts a strong urge for success, urge

for money, urge for name and fame. Miller‘s future plays were on the concepts of moral

responsibility and closed economy towards society.

Anti-communist hysteria bred by McCarthyism in America was instrumental in

setting up HUAC (House Un-American Activities Committee). It was a committee of the

House of Representatives which started witch-hunt of the present and former communists

and their fellow workers. In order to expose the evil of Fascist trend in the contemporary

American society in the form of HUAC he went back to the Salem witch-hunt and Salem

witch trials of 1692 America in The Crucible and thus reminded the American people in

particular and the world in general of the evil designs and evil consequences of the

contemporary McCarthyism and Witch-hunt. Towards the end of 1950s, he wrote A View

from the Bridge which highlights betrayal at personal and social level.

Towards the end of seventies, Miller wrote The Archbishop‟s Ceiling which

depicts his experiences in 1970s in Czechoslovakia where the room of his hotel was

bugged with microphones by government spies. This play raised a very pertinent issue
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relating to reality. In 1984 he told the audience of National Theatre in London: ―What

I‘ve become more and more fascinated by is the question of reality and what it is and

whether there is any and how one invites it into oneself, that‘s a moral issue‖ (Bigsby 8).

Miller‘s obsession with the past is a conscious one that bridges different eras and in a

way denounces the tendency of the Americans to deny history. In works like Death of a

Salesman, After the Fall and Timebends, Miller deals with the past which is already a part

of us. It reflects the image of morality to the present generation.

Unlike the earlier plays, Miller‘s, later plays like The Crucible, The Archbishop‟s

Ceiling, The Ride Down Mount Morgan lay emphasis on human fallibility. If public

behaviour is corrupt, it is projection of private flaws. Thus Miller pays greater attention to

individual and private relationships, and the moral flaws found in individual and human

relations get prominence in his plays.

Though human fallibility is the main aspect of the above-mentioned plays,

―Holocaust‖ is also a passive subject matter in the plays like The Crucible , After

the Fall, Incident at Vichy, and Broken Glass. It is because of ―his commitment to

reinventing the moral world whose historical irrelevance was declared so

peremptorily merely sixty years ago. The lessons which he learned from

Depression, as the familiar world dissolved leaving only the necessities of

survival were projected to some ultimate point in Nazi Germany‖ (Bigsby 8).

In the early eighties, Miller‘s work titled Playing for Time depicts the

autobiography of a real personality Fania Fenelon. Fania‘s experiences at Auschwitz

during the Second World War two; and her survival in the harsh anti-semitic world forms

a part of the play. His work The American Clock brings out the story of America in the
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1930s. Towards the middle of 1980s, Miller wrote Two-way Mirror and Danger:

Memory! consists of I can‘t remember anything and Clara, discuss how a man face some

home truths about his relationship and realizes a greater responsibility for his life.

His creativity continued in 1990s with plays like The Ride Down Mount Morgan,

The Last Yankee, and Broken Glass. These plays were termed as revival plays in

England. These plays dealt with the mental problems of women due to marital issues.

Towards the end of 1990s and the beginning of 2000s, Miller wrote Mr. Peter

Connection, Resurrection Blues, and his final play Finishing the Picture dealt with the

making of a film The Misfits (1961).

Thus, the reassessment of Miller‘s plays in the US, the UK and Europe testifies to

the fact that his moral, social, economic and political concerns were of immense value for

the welfare of the individual and the society. Throughout his life, he remained active in

exposing the hypocrisy of American dream and moral corruption inherent in social-

economic and political sphere of American society. Akin to Shakespeare, Arthur Miller

is a man of theatre with a great knowledge about human beings and the coexistence of

good and evil in them.

Major Dramatists – Contemporaries of Arthur Miller

The twentieth century American Drama will be void without writers like Arthur

Miller (1915-2005), Eugene O‘Neill (1888 – 1953), Thornton Wilder (1877-1975),

Clifford Odets (1906-1963), Elmer Rice, Tennessee Williams (1911-1983), and Edward

Albee (1928). These playwrights liberated the American Drama from shackles of

traditional treatment and superimposed themes.

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The earlier playwrights were not able to create a lasting impression due to their

blind adherence to the traditional dramatic techniques. It was with Eugene O‘Neill that

drama earned the status of a respectable genre in American literature. O‘Neill‘s works

influenced and shaped the American theatre to a great extent. Like his predecessors,

O‘Neill was also influenced by Strindberg, Ibsen and Chekhov. However, unlike earlier

dramatists, O‘Neill‘s works were largely original in theme and universal in their artistic

appeal. He explored alternatives to realism in the 1920s most actively and successfully to

express his profound thoughtsout insights and philosophies. His attempt was to make

drama philosophical, metaphysical and psychological weight for his plays. He introduced

realism, expressionism, fantasy and dream sequences, Greek tragedy, masked spoken

thoughts, symbolic sets or lighting in American theatre. The Emperor Jones, The Hairy

Ape, The Fountain, Mourning Becomes Electra are marked by nihilistic and Freudian

ideologies. He dramatized the conflict between these two forces repeatedly in his plays

either as a struggle between characters, or between individuals and social forces.

All subsequent dramatists after O‘Neill employed this mode of dramatic realism

to explain the fast-changing world. Miller and Williams continued to delineate their age

in their own waysMiller via social realism and Williams through psychological realism.

The popular playwrights responded in their own way to the concept of the American

dream. The 1930s belonged to Clifford Odets who wrote about major political and social

issues of the day through the typical American middle-class setting. In a way, these

writers were preparing for the emergence of the American realism as a powerful impulse

in the American drama. The American tradition of dramatic realism gained new impetus

intensity with Clifford Odets who mixes doctrinaire socialism with ethnic realism. His
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plays Awake and Sing and Paradise Lost depict twin convictions of economic

determination of the human predicament and pre-eminence of family in society. Elmer

Rice wrote plays like The Adding Machine and The Street Scene that manifested

impressionism and expressionism as a new feature in American theatres. He gave his

social protest a more realistic form.

Miller and Williams are the major voices of American drama. Both the dramatists

described the mid-century American society in their own idiosyncratic manner. Williams

explored the psychology of the misfits, who could not lead ordinary lives. He is more

concerned with the psychological realism than the social realism. Williams‘ characters

are misfits who are unable to cope with the pressures of everyday life. He is a keen

observer of the human psyche and explores the emotional burden of his characters in a

very convincing manner. Some of his best plays are The Glass Menagerie (1947), A Cat

on Hot Tin Roof (1955), A Street Car Named Desire (1947) and The Orpheus

Descending (1957). His plays constantly questioned the concept of American dream and

utilitarianism.

Thornton Wilder, Edward Albee, Sam Shepard and Marsha Norman are the other

important playwrights of the twentieth century American drama. Sam Shepard used the

freedom to explore themes and styles in his own way. He reached his full powers as a

dramatist by the 1970s and 1980s. Some of his plays for example like The Holy Ghostly

are so highly personal and have biographical resonance. One repeated theme in his plays

is the need of the individual to create himself in a world that gives him no particular

identity to start with. Shepard‘s plays usually deal with the fantasies replacing reality.

Thornton Wilder is another writer of importance. He wrote in the early decades of the
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century. For him a play should neither be set too firmly in a specific time and place nor

should a play emphasize the reality of its setting, otherwise the play loses its sense of

magic and mystery. After Wilder comes Edward Albee. His plays like The Zoo Story and

Who‟s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ? depict alienation and impossibility of communication in

a hostile world. Albee‘s themes represent cultural decay, passionate psychological

realism, meaninglessness of life, irrationality and absurdity in general.

The numbers of plays written by women were at its peak in the 1970s and 1980s.

Marsha Norman is a notable woman dramatist, whose early plays show little people

taking little steps in their search for happiness, offering a great deal of promise and hope.

Her popular plays like Getting Out and Mother are the samples of assertion of the

individual‘s rights. Apart from these writers, there were some black dramatists like Ed

Bullins, Le Rol Jones, and Douglas Turner Ward whose focus was on the racial hatred

and harmony. Thus the American drama has cemented a fixed place in the world‘s

literature.

Social Drama – Psychology as Main Thrust

Miller, throughout his life, remained influenced by the Greek tradition of Social

Drama. He felt that the relationship between man and society is the primary concern of

man as far as human life in general and family life in particular is concerned. Like the

Greek dramatists, Miller tried to highlight the importance of ―whole man‖ ( On Social

Plays 54) which is the ideal model for human civilisation. According to Miller:

The social drama as I see is the main stream and the anti-social drama a bypass. I

can no longer take with ultimate seriousness a drama of individual psychology

written for its own sake, however full it may be of insight and precise observation.
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Time is moving; there is a world to make, a civilisation to create that will move

toward the only goal the humanistic democratic mind can ever accept with

honour. 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 ( On Social Plays 51).

In 1955, Miller wrote a lengthy essay titled On Social Plays when Tennessee

Williams and William Inge were at their peak. Their plays dealt with the individual and

psychological analysis without social orientation in their plays. These plays were

divorced from the social context. Brenda Murphy rightly remarks, ―In a theatre where the

works of Tennessee Williams and William Inge held sway, Miller was trying to define a

tradition that would encompass both the psychological and the social. He found this in

the classical Greek drama‖ (11). Arthur Miller himself says, ―Drama gains its weight as

it deals with more and more of the whole man, not either his subjective or social life

alone, and the Greek was unable to conceive of man for anything else except as a whole‖

(On Social Plays 54).

Regarding the concept of the ―Whole man‖ (Miller, On Social Plays 54). Brenda

Murphy rightly remarks, ―The concept of the drama of the ―Whole man‖- psyche and

citizen, individual subject and social actor has driven Miller‘s own playwriting from very

early on. The dialectic of personal self- actualization in conflict with social responsibility

informs his work from beginning to end‖ (12).

As a consequence of his faith in subjective and objective existence of man, Miller

deals with his characters at psychological and social levels. Characters are portrayed with

their image in society. Conflict between individual‘s interests and social values is the
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hallmark of Miller‘s plays. He does not allow an individual to remain isolated from

society.

Miller opines that integration of the psychological and the social concept was

Greek dramatists‘ marvellous contribution to the domain of drama. Miller argues that the

value of drama increases, ―as it deals with more and more of the whole man, not either

his subjective or his social life alone, and the Greek was unable to conceive of man or

anything else except as a whole‖ ( On Social Plays 54).

Miller seems to be of the view that social leanings play a dominant role in

deciding the fate of personal relationships. Pulls and pressures of a given social setup

remain beyond the control of the individual. It is the social order which affects the

personal relationships. Arthur Miller as a playwright is a social critic who portrays the

evil embedded in contemporary society in a convincing manner. In his plays, an

individual caught in the cross-currents of family, social, economic and political

relationships, struggles to find the meaning in life. Further, Miller‘s realistic portrayal of

relationships in society captivates our attention to ponder over the fate of the individual

in society.

In simpler words, his dramas deal with man‘s relationship with society and

family. He has brought back into the theatre of drama of social questions. Each of his

four chief plays is built on a family situation Sons and Salesman on the father-son

conflict. The Crucible and View on the triangle of sex. His plays can be treated as

domestic dramas. Crucible and View deal with marital problems caused by the attraction

of an older man to a younger woman and suggest that they stem from the fact that the

author could not get Miss Monroe out of his mind between his first meeting with her in
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1950 and his marriage with her in 1956. They are also psychological as the focus is more

on the psyche as well. Unconsciously his plays also reflect, reveal and comment

poignantly about the contemporary American society.

His plays are obviously family-centric. His protagonists are mostly presented as

failed husbands and fathers as they are portrayed on the image of the ancient family

plays. Each of his heroes is involved in a struggle that results from his acceptance or

rejection of an image that is the product of his society‘s values and prejudices. For

instance, Ben the hero of They Too Arise is in a dilemma to accept his father‘s diktat or

the comrade‘s injunctions. The hero of The Man who Had All the Luck (1944) accepts

the town‘s view of him as a man who has succeeded through luck not ability. In All My

Sons (1947) the hero, Joe Keller, fails to be a good man and the good citizen that his son

Chris demands. His fault, according to Miller and Christ, is that he does not recognize

any allegiance to society at large. Willy Loman of Salesman regularly confuses labels

with reality. This happens with Miller‘s other heroes too.

Miller‘s plays criticize the business-oriented society where corruption,

selfishness and indifference are deeply ingrained. But the playwright‘s main concern is

personal morality. The theme that recurs in all his plays is the relationship between a

man‘s identity and the image that society demands of him. Hence almost everyone

believes that Arthur Miller clearly deserves the title of Social dramatist; apparently the

only question is whether to call him a Marxist or a humanist. Indeed it would be going

beyond the evidence to suggest that he adheres to any ‗line‘ whether political or

ideological. Yet some critics call him a Marxist and believe that his work presents a

socialist commentary on the economic structure of the United States. Tom Driver
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declares ―nevertheless, he bears a quasi-Marxist stamp and most of his plays tend to

become mere partisan social critique‖ (48). William Weignand sees Miller as a borrower

of Odets who uses ―Marxist themes as a preacher who sermonizes on the pathetic

martyrdom of an oppressed middle class.‖ (85). Wiegnand‘s opinion of Miller as a social

preacher and reformer is supported by Eleanor Clark as well. He comments on the Death

of the Salesman in the following manner:

It is, of course, the capitalistic system that has done Willy in; the scene in which

he is brutally fired after some forty years with the firm comes straight from the

party line literature of the thirties, and the idea emerges lucidly enough through all

the confused motivations of the play that it is our particular form of money

economy that has bred the absurdly false ideals of both father and sons (633).

Miller may not be a social reformer in the real sense, but he is a social critic. He

does condemn faults of Capitalism and contemporary social values. But his purpose is not

a political one but a humane one. ―The merit in Miller‘s treatment of his material lies in

a certain clean, moralistic rationalism‖, writes Harold Paul Clurman, ―his talent is of a

kind of humanistic jurisprudence‖ (71). Paul West argues that Miller‘s warning against

dedication to material success supports ―Christian existentialism‖ (84). He does blame

the ‗system‘. Henry Popkin claims, though ―a liberal parable of hidden evil and social

responsibility‖ (59).

It is quite understandable that Miller should be regarded as a writer with a

message whether affirmative or negative, humane or socialistic. It is a known fact that he

has been accused for his early socialist associations. He has affirmed his belief that

tragedy brings us knowledge and pertaining to the right way of living in the world. His
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plays try to suggest to men to understand themselves and their limitations, not to be

over - ambitious and over-greedy, to achieve dignity, to develop their talents, and to

avoid self-defeat; individuals must acknowledge and adjust to their limitations rather than

obsessively pursue egoistic ambitions.

So the concept of the society should be broadened in Miller‘s case to term his

plays social dramas. Miller certainly does point an accusing finger at a culture that

encourages ―wrong‖ values; he campaigns against an uncharitable social order that

deprives honest workers of constructive labour. He discards those who are no longer

useful in his plays such as Focus, Death of a Salesman, A Memory of Two Mondays and

The Misfits. He also discards a social order that condones profit criminally gained as in

All My Sons. Miller fosters belief in the inferiority of minority races in Focus. In The

Crucible, he suppresses liberty in the name of a sacred cause.

Arthur Miller has often been regarded as a writer of social dramas, and sometimes

of socialistic dramas. He is deeply concerned with social realities. But he does not deal

with them in the fashion of a propagandist. Rather he studies their effects upon human

beings in their groping for a meaningful existence. In this way his plays provide an

implicit condemnation of those social institutions and forces that are antagonistic to

human dignity.

The theoretical, technological and social changes that affected the nineteenth

century theatre led to an unprecedented outpouring of dramatic creativity across the

continent of Europe. Henrik Ibsen, generally considered the first modern playwright,

wrote in Norwegian; August Strindberg, Ibsen‘s rival and contemporary wrote in

Swedish. Anton Chekhov perhaps the most influential of early modern playwrights,
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wrote in Russian. Despite the linguistic and cultural diversity of this disparate group of

writers, in the aggregate they forged a new theatrical world.

Ibsen is perhaps the best known for eight plays he wrote in Italy and Germany

between 1877 and 1890. By separating himself physically from his homeland, he gained

the freedom and perspective to criticize it. Dissatisfied with the heroic and mythic poetic

dramas he had been writing, Ibsen embarked on a series of realistic prose plays exposing

contemporary problems in modern Norwegian settings. Concentrating directly on

bourgeois Norwegian society, he nevertheless addressed universal concerns, for the social

problems that provide the context for these plays- among them the question of women‘s

rights in A Doll‟s House (1879), hereditary syphilis in Ghosts (1881), and municipal

corruption in An Enemy of the People (1882) were instantly recognizable to audience

throughout Western Europe and America.

The early modern dramatists including Strindberg, Chekhov and George Bernard

Shaw knew Ibsen‘s work intimately and acknowledged its significance in their own

development. One of the great practitioners of psychological realism the American-born

novelist Henry James commented on the first London production of Hedda Gabler in

1891, scarcely one year after its original Norwegian production. James explains the

power of Ibsen‘s theatrical realism by pointing out that ―the ugly interior on which his

curtain inexorably rises‖ provides a visual equivalent of ―the pervasive air of small

interests and standards, the signs of limited local life‖(On the Occasion of Hedda Gabler

249).

In Ibsen‘s realistic drama, detailed and specific props and scenery were not

devices to sweep the audience away to exotic foreign locations or distant historical eras;
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instead, they encouraged viewers to contemplate the pretty possessions, the furniture and

bric-a-brac which an acquisitive middle class accumulated in order to stake its claim in

the modern world.

The great plays often tend towards generalized settings, although the

psychological implications of place were not unimportant. In a Shakespearean play for

instance, a change in scene often reflects a change in mood, the forest typically creates a

special mental freedom that is not available in the court. But Ibsen and his colleagues

rarely set their characters free in any undefined territory. On the contrary, their modern

insight told them that human beings were never free. Indeed, it is significant that most

early modern drama is played out in domestic sets. The smaller size to which the modern

world seems to reduce its inhabitants dictates that crucial action occurs in enclosed

architectural limits. In Strindberg‘s Preface to Miss Julie, written in 1888, he complained

of flimsy old-fashioned canvas-painted sets still in use that prevented audience

involvement. A one-act play of searing intensity, daringly staged not in the drawing room

but in the kitchen of an aristocratic home, Miss Julie demanded authentic production.

Strindberg insisted that ―there is nothing so hard to find on the stage as an interior set that

comes close to looking as a room should look. There are so many other conventions on

the stage that strain our imagination; certainly we might be freed from overexerting

ourselves in an effort to believe that pots and pans painted on the scenery are real‖

(Strindberg 73).

Yet modern dramatists know that realism in the theatre transcends set design and

involves more than real pots and pans. Ibsen‘s mid-career decision is to abandon poetry

for prose signals his conviction that the key to characterization lay in authentic speech.
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By replacing brilliant soliloquies with the conversational rhythms of everyday expression

Ibsen began to write in a way that audiences accepted as ―true to life‖. Although dramatic

dialogue is always artificial, every important playwright must find a strategy for tailoring

that artifice to seem as real as possible. Early modern drama, it should be remembered,

was written while Sigmund Freud was developing a psychoanalytic treatment that asked

patients to speak in their own everyday voices until unwittingly they revealed their

unconscious feelings. Ibsen and his contemporaries exploited a similar insight. They

created dramatic characters whose routine-sounding dialogue divulged the truth about

themselves as surely as and more ―realistically‖ than an explicitly self-revealing

soliloquy. Every hesitation, every slip of the tongue, every euphemism of Ibsen and of

Chekhov, as for Freud, has profound meaning. Thus ordinary speech and mundane

settings originally manipulated by the likes of Scribe and Sardou to serve to facile

melodrama provided realistic instruments to probe psychological and social truths in the

work of the early modern dramatists.

Shaw, Strindberg and Chekhov, the three eminent successors of Ibsen discovered

different dramatic models in the realistic mode evolved by Ibsen and of the three; the

Irish-born George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) openly acknowledged his debt to Ibsen.

The author of one of the earliest appreciations of Ibsen entitled The Quintessence of Ibsen

(1891). Shaw believed that Ibsen had fundamentally transformed the theatrical formula

drawn from the French Boulevard plays by incorporating a new intellectual vigour in

them. For August Strindberg (1849-1912), the social questions raised in plays like A

Doll‟s House were only of superficial interest. A neurotic and troubled person, Strindberg

responded more to the emotional tangles in which Ibsen‘s characters struggled. In his
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own drama Strindberg probed the disfigurations of family life even more scathingly than

did the man he regarded as his rival. In his domestic plots, a category that includes Miss

Julie and The Dance of Death (1901) the thrice-married Strindberg, son of a debased

aristocrat and a servant woman showed men and women trapped in cruel and all-

consuming sexual relationships. These plays, more naturalistic than realistic in their

depiction of the unrelenting pressure of heredity and physical impulse, leave little room

for the possibility of remaking the self to which Ibsen‘s characters at least could aspire. In

other works like A Dream Play (1902) and The Road To Damascus (1898, 1904)

Strindberg experimented with a phantasmagoric style that may have influenced Ibsen in

his final, less realistic plays, a style that pointed to the theatrical expressionism that the

next generation of modern dramatists was to explore.

Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) left a major body of short stories and plays and in

both forms continued to examine the minutiae of everyday experience. Less schooled

than Ibsen in the conventions of nineteenth century French theatre and less morbid than

Strindberg, Chekhov used realism more delicately than they did. The characters in his

four great plays-The Seagull (1896), Uncle Vanya (1897), The Three Sisters (1900) and

The Cherry Orchard (1904) rarely experience definitive revelations of truth. However

dreadful the events encompassed in his plays, like lovers separated and families

dispossessed, and death by duel and by Shaw‘s own witty plays explore the possibilities

of discussion which refers to intellectual discourse.

In a way, Chekhov‘s achievement brought the early modern drama to an impasse.

Like Ibsen, Shaw and Strindberg he had identified a series of social and personal

problems that defined a seemingly worldwide collapse of central authority as the

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twentieth century evolved. His work, however, proposes neither a rationale nor a

resolution for that collapse. In fact, the short stories and plays of Chekhov convince us

that no matter how intimately we may probe character, the human condition remains

mysterious.

As with every art form, once the theatrical realism totally fulfilled its mission, the

genre began to seem obsolete and gradually gave way to a new phase of modern theatre.

A second type of modern drama soon developed that both reflected the unstable world of

the twentieth century and broke the impasse of realism created by Ibsen, Shaw and

Chekhov. Those playwrights, still living in a relatively rational world, had been able to

create rational play of discussion and ideas. In the manner of all conventional dramatists,

they took a situation, showed the inherent conflict, and then sought to resolve that

conflict. Such plays were possible because their creators believed in logical discourse, a

common reality and stability of character. But somewhere around the turn of the

twentieth century these beliefs, along with a general faith in traditional authority

vanished. The prevailing attitude was that the modern world was irrational and

incoherent. Consequently, the conventional play that purported to imitate reality was no

longer relevant, for ―reality‖ became increasingly problematic. A new kind of theatre was

needed.

Pirandello is one of those playwrights who problematised reality. Pirandello‘s

modernist belief is that there is no universal fixed reality; there is only every person‘s

individual perception of what is real. In his play Six Characters in Search of an Author

written in 1921, Pirandello does exactly with the result that the line between illusion and
 21

reality breaks completely. In Pirandellian situation illusion cannot be distinguished from

reality.

Bertolt Brecht, the German playwright, director and theorist, is known for his

unique style and a distinctive outlook towards the world with a special method of

staging plays. To understand what made Brecht ―Brechtian‖ it is necessary to see his

dramatic style both as the product of his personal and historical experience and as a

culmination of a century of stylistic experimentation in the German theatre.

Brecht is hailed as the founder of Epic theatre. Epic theatre followed the

inglorious Bolshevik Revolution, with progressive Europeans like Piscator and Brecht

gravitating towards Communism hoping the emancipation of the labour classes and

unchaining the oppressed people. Structurally, epic theatre combines the narrative and

dramatic elements, with alternate flow of action interspersed with live performances and

musical commentary with propagandistic tinge. Thematically Brechtian theatre concerns

the grotesque social imbalances fostered by capitalism in the years following World War

I. Nevertheless, the Communist Party always had difficulty with Brecht whose plays

never conformed to the requirement of socialist realism.

Aspects of Miller’s Theatre

Many of Arthur Miller‘s plays undoubtedly provide a critical perspective on the

American society and its values. This applies to the work of 1950s when he was involved

in several confrontations with the authorities, the most well-known of which is his

appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1956. Despite

references to his Marxist sympathies during the thirties and early forties, the main thrust

of Miller‘s criticism is essentially moral as mentioned in his autobiography. His

 22

condemnation of the excesses of capitalism or materialism was due to his being in

morality rather than communism. In his autobiography Timebends, he says, ―History

bends; the ease with which I could in the sixties, understand the fear and frustration of the

dissident in the Sovietized world was the result, in some great part, of my experience

before the Un-American Activities Committee in the fifties‖ ( 408).

It is probably Miller‘s sense of moral outrage which leads him to focus more on

the victims of injustice, rather than on the way the system allows injustice to flourish. He

says about reasons for stopping writing drama in the pandering,

From where I stood, the country was going exactly one hundred and eighty

degrees in the opposite direction. I didn‘t feel I had anything to say to these

people. I really felt that I might as well be living in Zambia. I had absolutely no

connection with these people anymore (Bigsby 207).

Even his view about the Second World War is seen through the prison of the society. He

commented ironically that the War solved the ―unemployment-consumption problem‖

(Miller, Timebends 588) caused by the 1929 Great Depression.

Miller’s Theatre as a Man’s World

Having noted Miller‘s clear-sighted view of his country and fellow Americans,

the contemporary spectator or reader may seek Miller‘s perspective on other issues. What

was his position on civil rights or the place of women in society, for example? This

question is legitimate since the period in which Miller denounces intolerance and

materialism also saw the beginnings of the civil rights movement and the reassessment of

women‘s place in the society. The civil rights question require discussion of Miller‘s

status as the son of a Jewish immigrant (his father emigrated from Poland at the end of
 23

the nineteenth century) and can be more effectively considered by studying some of the

later plays. Miller‘s attitude to women is more easily accessible in the early plays through

the playwright‘s focus on the family, but this attitude is not unequivocal. But still

Miller‘s dramatic world depended on the world of men.

Arthur Miller‘s recognition as a professional playwright came with the

production of The Man Who Had the Luck. It introduced the major themes of Miller‘s

later work. It was a contrived tale of a man, whose constant source of good luck caused

him great misery until he suffered a setback which made him aware that he could go

ahead on his volition. All My Sons is Miller‘s Ibsenite melodrama. It dealt with the basic

concept of moral responsibility in the family, linking it to the inner struggle of men in

authority during the war.

In the play Death of a Salesman five of the fourteen characters are women, out of

which three of them appear only briefly and have little to say. Both Linda Loman,

Willy‘s wife, and the Woman, Willy‘s former mistress play a vital role. Willy Loman, his

elder son Biff, his younger son Happy, his brother Ben, Charley his friend and neighbour,

Bernard his neighbour‘s son, his boss Howard are all male characters from which it can

be noticed that only two of the minor male characters are not linked to Willy‘s personal

or professional life.

Throughout the play, Willy and the other characters insist on the father-son

relationship. Although he is allowed to express doubts (to Ben) about the type of

education he is giving, it is never suggested that Linda could also have a role. Nor is

Willy the only character to believe that it is the father who prepares his son‘s future.

Willy is surrounded by fathers who have successfully brought up their sons or at least
 24

have set them good examples, beginning with his own brother Ben, who followed their

father to Alaska. Charley‘s son, Bernard, despised by the Loman men for his lack of

athletic ability, becomes a successful lawyer. Howard, Willy‘s boss, has taken over from

his father at the head of the company. No mothers are ever mentioned or seen.

On connecting the emphasis of fatherhood with the frontier myth, the process of

distortion becomes clear. During the pioneer era, women had an important role to play as

Betty Friedan and others have argued (The Feminine Mystique). However, the frontier

myth developed through cultural representations of the period which gradually excluded

women. In his book Love and Death in the American Novel, Lesile Fielder describes

how, as the frontier disappeared, it came to stand for freedom and adventure, a place for

men, opposed to the constraints of the town and civilisation associated with women.

Speaking of Fenimore Cooper, Fielder speaks of ―a place where mothers do not come‖

(182). What we can see in Salesman is also perhaps another distortion of this myth.

The point of the frontier, of course, is not just to experience freedom and

adventure but also to succeed. Willy, Charley and Howard‘s father have all been living

their lives according to the principles of the American Dream, which demands of fathers

that they help their sons along the road to success. In the modern world, success can be

achieved in different ways, but should bring both material advantage and social

recognition. In its frontier form, success required both physical and mental skills. Ben

combines the physical strength of the pioneer with the ruthless determination of the

businessman. Charley, Bernard and Howard achieve success on the basis of their mental

skills. Both Willy and Biff are more gifted physically than intellectually. Willy fails to

exploit his gifts by pursuing a career for which his abilities did not really suit him. Biff,
 25

on the verge of a sports career which could have allowed him to use his physical prowess

to achieve success, fails because of his flawed relationship with his father and then heads

out west, exchanging one failure for another.

In a recent study James Robinson has argued that the focus on father-son

relationships in Miller‘s plays can be explained by examining the conflict within Willy-

between ‗his Jewish and American heritages‘. While much of the study is actually

devoted to The Price his insistence on Miller‘s view that the father figure in his plays

―incorporated both power and some kind of moral law which he had either broken or had

fallen prey to‖ (124) is of interest to our study. Robinson explains that The Price can be

read as a struggle between the Jewish patriarchal tradition, represented by one brother

(Victor) and the pursuit of the material values of modern American values, represented

by the other brother (Walter). In the case of Salesman, the character of Willy, who

actually tries to reconcile both positions. In fact, Willy uses his paternal authority to try to

back up his case for pursuing a particular line of conduct. (Charley provides a counter-

example in the play). The events of the play highlight the difficulty of defending values

and maintaining authority at the same time. Once Willy loses his image of paternal

infallibity, in Biff‘s eyes, his ideology also becomes suspect to his son. Women do not

really have a major role to play within this tradition, as can be seen in many plays by

playwrights from very different backgrounds, such as Sam Shepard or August Wilson.

Unlike Salesman, The Crucible offers a wide selection of women‘s roles. Of the

twenty characters who appear in the play, ten are women and these include two of the

play‘s most important roles: Abigail Williams and Elizabeth Proctor. In fact, the

organization of the characters in this play is very different, since they are grouped
 26

according to their dramatic function, which itself is linked to gender almost

systematically. Each group contains both important and secondary characters. The first

group is a group of girls who instigate the action. Abigail Williams and Mary Warren are

the leading characters in this group of five. This group stands in contrast with the group

of five older women who are accused by the former of witchcraft. There are important

differences between these two groups of women characters which explain why they are in

conflict. Two women in this group receive more attention than the others: Elizabeth

Proctor and Rebecca Nurse. The last group of local characters is formed by the women‘s

husbands. This group is led by John Proctor, husband of Elizabeth, lover of Abigail,

which in itself creates a link between the three groups.

It is not surprising that the fourth group is composed of male characters to make

the play symmetrical. It is this group that needs instant attention in order to assert the fact

that Arthur Miller is essentially concerned with man‘s world. Unlike the other groups

which remain fairly small, this group actually gains elements as the play progresses, since

there are defections from other groups as well as new arrivals. The dramatic function of

this group is also enhanced by the fact that it contains both locals and outsiders. This is

the group that includes the most powerful figures in the play who represents authority. It

is through study of this group that makes the readers understand fluctuations in the

balance of power between men and women, locals and outsiders and the law and the

individual.

Both the removal of moral ambiguities and the focus on individuals rather than

the group serve Miller‘s purpose of showing the importance of individual resistance to

injustice. It is also theatrically effective to pit the ―ordinary‖ Proctor or the ―rebel‖ Hale
 27

against powerful figures of authority. These decisions are consistent with Miller‘s

preference for tragedy. Why, however, must he choose a tragic hero rather than heroine?

Ultimately, it is not the example of the saintly Rebecca Nurse which will carry weight in

Salem but that of John Proctor. Both Elizabeth and Rebecca Nurse refuse to hand over a

written confession and it is motivated by his sense of commitment to his community. He

refuses to betray his fellow citizens. In his words the idea that is central to Salesman gets

reflected. The idea is that the father, who by transmitting values to his sons, actually

shapes the community: ―I have three childrenhow may I teach them to walk like men in

the world, and I sold my friends?‖ (TC 124). Just as it was men who set up the system of

repression, it takes men to bring it down. Women in this play may make sacrifice for their

souls or for their families, but not for their community and this is why their influence is

limited. The influence of men, on the other hand, crosses over the boundary between

private and public life.

A View from the Bridge shares some of the features of the two previous plays.

Like Salesman, it explores the role of the husband and father in the family, like The

Crucible, it studies the responsibility of the individual to his community. An analysis of

these two roles would enable the readers to see if women have a bigger place in the play.

One of the most important differences between View and Salesman is that Eddie Carbone,

instead of having a son is given a daughter. Catherine is not his biological daughter, of

course, but he and Beatrice have brought her up (she is Beatrice‘s niece). The presence of

Catherine means that the family relationships are explored differently. It is the tension

within the Carbone family setting that is, particularly appropriate. Eddie‘s professional

life is not directly responsible for what happens.

 28

It is also possible to connect this statement to Willy Loman‘s ambitions for his

sons. Eddie, like Willy, has not achieved success himself, but places his hopes in the next

generation. Likewise, both fathers finally do more harm than good in their misguided

attempts to influence their children. The character of Rodolpho is obviously important for

the plot and his arrival coincides with Catherine‘s first real step into the adult world

In After the Fall, Miller uses the Holocaust as an important symbol of the

twentieth century and one from which everyone can learn much about men. Two one-act

playsIncident at Vichy and The Pricedeal with the universality of human responsibility

and the guilt that often accompanies survival and success. Incident of Vichy explores the

theme of self –sacrifice and individual struggling of man‘s freedom through tyranny. The

Price is a play about two brothers who are pinned in positions of flight from their

histories.

Miller‘s later plays like The Last Yankee and The Ride Down Mt.Morgan depict a

man to keep two wives and is a mixture of the personal and the public, the realistic and

the fantastic. In Broken Glass Miller depicts the breakdown of a marriage. Mr. Peters‟

Connection is about a man who has lost his sense of roots and his connections. In all the

plays that have been analysed, Miller is anxious to show how private behaviour and

public conduct interact. This explains why the home and family life are at the centre of

all plays. Although the wives and children are present and suffer as a direct consequence

of the heroes‘ actions, the plays do not really focus on them.

Although the men in Miller‘s plays are guilty at one level of betraying their wives

and children, to a certain extent they are redeemed by their determination not to be

destroyed by this guilt. They continue asserting their belief in certain values and die
 29

defending these values. Hence Willy dies to help Biff succeed in life, Proctor dies to

protect his good name and Eddie dies to avoid being labelled as an informer. Miller‘s

comment applies to The Crucible but it can also be extended to the other plays. Miller

says in Timebends ―There were moments when an individual conscience was all that

could keep a world from falling‖ (342). He then goes on to speak about the effects of

tragedy on the audience in the following manner: ―they must have had their therapeutic

effect by raising to conscious awareness the clan‘s capacity for brutal and unredeemed

violence so that it would be sublimated and contained by new institutions‖

(342). It is the male characters who are given the potential to affect the outside world by

their conduct, since it is through their failings that society‘s values can be tested. In other

words, there is a shift from private to public morality. The downfall of the all individuals

does not undermine society, it reinforces it. Their actions have a collective significance

for the community. This is of course in keeping with tragedy which ultimately serves to

make social bonds stronger. It is fitting that Miller, still under the influence of the role of

the artist as it was in the thirties, should choose this form. However, by choosing ordinary

men as his heroes, and linking their tragic flaws to sexual betrayal, Miller‘s plays also

tackle domestic issues. Whereas the plays allow the men characters to make the transition

from domestic drama to tragedy, the women characters are confined to their private

sphere. They are only seen reacting to matters that concern them to the immediate sphere

and they are almost cut off from the outside world.

To some extent, Miller reflects the American society as it was at the time with

most women assuming the traditional roles of wife and mother. In his autobiography,
 30

Timebends, Miller writes of his reactions to watching Robert Duvall in the role of Eddie

in 1965,

As I watched Duvall, the most unimaginable of incarnations came through to me

from his Eddie Carbone- I suddenly saw my father‘s adoration of my sister, and

through his emotion my own. When I wrote the play, I was moving through

psychological country strange to me, ugly and forbidding. Yet something in me

kept to the challenge to push on until a part of the truth of my nature unfolded

itself in a scene, a word, a thought dropping onto my paper (326).

Instead of describing Miller‘s theatre as a man‘s world, it would perhaps be

closer to the truth to describe it as a man‘s view of the world.

Looking at Miller from a gender perspective-An innovative attempt

For several decades now, feminist scholars have shown how genderthe cultural

prescriptions that each society attaches to one‘s biological sex at a particular time is a

central component of social and political life. Along with other factors such as race, class

and sexuality, gender is now understood as one of the essential aspects which shape one‘s

life, as one of the main mechanisms which determine the distribution of power in the

society.

Traditionally, gender studies have focused on women. However, masculinity

studies, especially in the last two decades have started to show how gender does not only

shape women but also men as well. Thus, men (especially white heterosexual males)

remained largely invisible or ―unmarked‖ in gender terms (Haraway 210). In Western

patriarchal discourse, the universal person and the masculine gender have traditionally
 31

been conflated. While women have usually been defined in terms of their sex, men have

often been seen as representatives of a universal and genderless personhood.

Arthur Miller‘s select plays, though written before the fashioning of the term

‗masculinity‘ in the present sense, have demonstrated such resultant tragedies of

masculinity victims. Hence, Miller‘s plays should be approached from a new critical

perspective in order to understand the protagonists‘ psychological crises.

The masculine – feminine interaction is an interesting aspect of masculinity

studies. In Miller‘s plays male characters often perceive the female ones as a threat to

their supremacy. This sort of focus is based on the gender perspective. Hence, in Miller,

the male protagonists‘ interaction with their women counterparts shall also be studied to

illustrate how masculinity perceives itself to be in a fix to consider femininity to be a

threat in asserting masculine identity as well as superiority. The threat of the female and

the influence of the feminine in a masculine domain as perceived by these masculine men

shall be analysed. This research is a new attempt and a small step in looking at Miller

from a gender perspective.

Shades of Masculinity

Masculinity and Femininity in the broadest sense are a set of attitudes, roles, and

norms of behaviours, hierarchy of values typical of male and female sex in each specific

society. A more detailed interpretation of masculinity and femininity can be given in

terms of the gender theory. For instance, R. Connell, an Australian sociologist, has

brought out various shades of masculinity that occur in real life.

 32

According to Connell, the hierarchies of Masculinities are of four different types.

They are: hegemonic, complicit, marginalized and subordinate masculinities, of which

certain types like hegemonic, are valued over others.

Hegemonic Masculinity is the dominant form of masculinity in our society. It is

culturally virile. Its qualities include heterosexuality, whiteness, physical strength, and

suppression of emotions. Hence masculinity studies look at the tense and complex

relationship between hegemonic masculinities (that is, the idea of a ―real man‖ in a given

time and place) as portrayed in Arthur Miller‘s Death of a Salesman and All My Sons.

Complicit Masculinity is a term for man who does not fit characteristics of

hegemonic masculinity but does not challenge it. It often admires the characteristics of

hegemonic masculinity. Marginalized Masculinity does not fit into the hegemonic

because of certain characteristics like race, gender etc. but it can still subscribe to norms

of hegemonic masculinity like physical strength and aggression. It distinguishes men of

colour or men with disability in Miller‘s plays The Crucible, Death of a Salesman, After

the Fall, Incident at Vichy, and most of his later plays fit into this category.

Subordinate Masculinity exhibits qualities that are the opposite to those values of

hegemonic masculinity. It may exhibit physical weakness or be very expressive with

emotions (masculinities that, in a given time and place, fall short of the ―real man‖ ideal).

For example, being involved in sports and being the examples of American hegemonic

masculinity. Usually, shunning sports and being a stay-at-lone‘ dad are examples of

subordinate masculinities while hegemonic masculinities have power and they meet

challenges with social approval while subordinate lack this quality. Throughout history,
 33

men have paid a heavy price for not adhering to, or consciously resisting, hegemonic

models.

Assessment of Miller’s female characters

The female characters in Miller‘s plays, however, often are shunted to the

margins, as many have noted. ―Miller‘s plays are essentially stories of men,‖ (413)

Martin Gottfried writes in his 2003 biography of Miller. British scholar Christopher

Bigsby maintains, ―Miller‘s women are usually shadowy characters, rarely as fully

realized as even some of the secondary men‖ (xxii).

A closer look at Miller‘s plays however reveals several multifaceted female

characters and one can make the case that he is perhaps the first great American

playwright to draw realistic portraits of the marital state in all its joy and more often,

anguish. His female characters are very intelligent and very complicated women who are

planets around the major sun, which is the male character.

Miller often writes about tragically flawed men surrounded by women who

represent reason and stability. His plays suggest that he had more respect for women than

for men. The men are always fogged by their ambition or their vanity and it is the women

who need to provide the clarity of vision.

In Miller‘s early plays, he creates a gallery of long suffering housewife mothers in

his plays. Linda Loman in Salesman, Kate Keller in All My Sons, Elizabeth in The

Crucible, Beatrice in a View From The Bridge, Maggie in After The Fall depict

sacrificing and nurturing housewife –mothers entrapped in patriarchal society. Unlike

most male writers, Miller does not depict housewife-mothers imprisoned in domestic

spheres as happy angels in the house and satisfied with their imposed roles.
 34

Instead, Miller is critical of male dominance and female predicament and accurately

portrays under-represented areas and perspectives of women‘s lives with a touch of

sympathy. He is concerned with women caught up in the familial, economic and moral

nets of their background into his early plays. Miller‘s later plays do tend to feature

women who are either struggling with mental illness (Patricia Hamilton in The Last

Yankee) or a combination of physical and mental ills (Sylvia Gellburg in Broken Glass).

But they retain insight even in the midst of their pain.

Women are the ―other‖ in Arthur Miller‘s theatrical world. They are powerless,

suppressed and subordinated by the patriarchal system that has got precedence over the

class structure in the advanced capitalist model called America, that very citadel of

democracy, equality and democratic rights. Women, however are the second sex, despite

the political rhetoric. Women and marginality go together in the artistic world of Arthur

Miller. The Universal myths of male-superiority, greater physical strength and

intellectual rationality, are posted against the conception of female inferiority, weakness

and irrationality (including hysteria and madness). The women have been excluded from

the circuits of decision- making, command and authority, in every sense. Be it Linda

Loman, or Elizabeth proctor or Kate Keller or Sylvia or Carbone or Patricia, these

mythical angle-like women are the classic cultural stereotypes of an ideal, selfless, caring

and domesticated home-makers who are devoted to their husbands and to their kids, as

dedicated and self-effacing mothers. They do not possess a nuanced sense of self-identity

or self-worth. Thus, it is concluded that the theatrical world of Arthur Miller singularly

fails to be emancipated though liberal in its outlook towards women.

 35

Link between Gender issues and Psychic Catastrophe

Gender is constructed from cultural and subjective meanings that constantly shift

and vary, depending on time and place (Kimmel 1995). Gender stereotypes are among

the meanings used by society in the construction of gender and are characteristics that are

generally believed to be typical either of women or of men. There is very high agreement

in our society about what are considered to be typically feminine and typically masculine

characteristics (Williams and Best 1990). This research indicates that men experience

comparatively greater social and psychological pressure than women to endorse gendered

societal prescriptions.

In western culture, stereotypically, men are aggressive, competitive and

instrumentally oriented while women are passive, cooperative and expressive. Early

thinking often assumed that this division was based on underlying innate differences in

traits, characteristics and temperaments of males and females. In this older context,

measures of femininity / masculinity were often used to diagnose what were understood

as problems of basic gender identification, for example, feminine males or masculine

females (Terman and Miles 1936).

Gender is very much associated with psychic disorders though the level varies

with the atmosphere in which the characters are located. In the case of Death of a

Salesman, it was written in the immediate aftermath of World War II, which almost

demolished the myth of masculinity. In a way World War II equalised the gender in such

a way that both were left weak and exhausted. Willy Loman, a masculine character

almost exhibits the traits of women in many occasions. His inability to showcase his

subconscious masculine traits pushes him into the deep recesses of neurotic failure.
 36

Likewise in the case of All My Sons, Joe Keller commits suicide at the end due to

suppression of facts. It does not disturb him till discovery, but when his children find out

the truth he loses his mental balance and dies. In the case of Crucible, Elizebath the chief

character comes to know about her husband‘s illicit relationship with her servant, but

suppresses the fact too long. Since women have mental buffers to withhold the shock, she

does not take any drastic step, but unfortunately it is her husband who commits suicide.

The above-mentioned facts about the play The Crucible will be incomplete without the

mention of Proctor, the protagonist of the play who faces a strange conflict with himself

in order to satiate the expectations of the society as he is a man who respects the society

and its goodwill. But later he decides to satisfy himself for personal and religious reasons

rather than public reasons. He goes to gallows to redeem himself and face the

consequences which in a way show his moral stand which reflects Freud‘s superego state.

In the play A View from the Bridge Catherine is a woman who suppresses her basic

desires for a long time due to psychological weakness but finally breaks out from Eddie‘s

hold and gets caught in Rodolpho‘sher lover hold. Thus her weakness of mind is all

pervasive as she represents the traditional feminine gender. In the play The Last Yankee,

gender has no role as both Hamilton and his wife Patricia along with Karen Frick fall

prey to mental illness. In Broken Glass, Philip and Sylvia lead a dull married life and

external events of Kristallnacht pushes her into paralysis which primarily is due to

psychosomatic. Thus both men and women are equally sensitive and neurosis is an

offshoot of some or other guilt.

According to psychoanalytic theory, one‘s gender identity develops through

identification with the same-sex parent. This identification merges out of the conflict
 37

inherent in the oedipal stage of psychosexual development. By about age three, a child

develops a strong sexual attachment to the opposite-sex parent. Simultaneously, negative

feelings emerge for the same-sex parent that is rooted in resentment and jealousy. By age

six, the child resolves the psychic conflict by relinquishing desires for the opposite-sex

parent and identifying with the same-sex parent. Thus boys come to learn masculinity

from their fathers and girls learn femininity from their mothers.

A more recent formulation of psychoanalytic theory suggests that mothers play an

important role in gender identity development. According to Chodorow, mothers are

more likely to relate to their sons as different and separate because they are not of the

same sex. At the same time, they experience a sense of oneness and continuity with their

daughters because they are of the same sex. As a consequence, mothers will bond with

their daughters thereby fostering femininity in girls. Simultaneously, mothers distance

themselves from their sons who respond by shifting their attention away from their

mother and towards their father. Through identification with their father boys learn

masculinity.

Miller‘s plays are adept in dealing with the relationship between gender and

psychic catastrophe. His works scanned through the psychic lens shows the different

ways and means used by the characters using the defence mechanisms of Freud to deal

with their conflict. Thus Miller‘s characters wrestle with gender identity and psychic

catastrophe to find out their position in the society.

Structure of the Thesis

The study is arranged in an organic manner with the introduction dealing

with the traces of the origin and development of the twentieth century American Drama
 38

highlighting its main characteristics, reassessment of Arthur Miller as a dramatist. It also

closely examines the major dramatists and contemporaries of Arthur Miller. It focuses on

the social drama and psychology as its main thrust. It also points out that Miller has

always been seen as a social dramatist and Miller‘s world has always been seen as a

Man‘s world. Hence, the chapter depicts Miller from a gender perspective - which is a

new attempt. Thus, this chapter also delineates various shades of Masculinity,

Assessments of Miller‘s female characters and link between gender issues and Psychic

Catastrophe.

As a necessary preamble to this study through the gendered lens, (Chapter II)

preceding the study of select plays, mentioned above, unfurls the theoretical framework

of Gender Studies, particularly highlighting Masculinity Theory which of late has

established that men too need to be seen as having gender, which can accompany

historical studies of men and masculinity. This chapter also discusses the femininity

myths that male writers exploit to drive home and uphold male authority and supremacy.

It is achieved through the mythical attributes of the institution of marriage and through

the cult of motherhood, which confine woman to the home, under the authority and

protection of her husband, the male, who has been defined by God supposedly through

scriptures as the worker and the breadwinner. As Poulain de la Barre has observed ―All

that has been written about women by men should be suspect, for the men are at once

judge and party to the lawsuit,‖ this study tends to re-reinterpret the rationale behind the

choice of the myth of ‗witch-hunt‘ and the heroine‘s ‗admonishing father figure‘ in two

of the select plays of Miller.

 39

Though Miller‘s world has of late been dubbed as ‗man‘s world,‘ this study

objectively looks at his representation of mental-illness in two of his later plays which

exhibit some gender-neutral outlook. The introduction details how Psychic catastrophe

(i.e. mental illness) is used as a literary device, by men for men and the same illness‘s

manifestation on women in order to explain its rationale by its representation as

expounded by feminist literary critics like Sandara Gilbert and Susan Gubar (through

their foundational text Mad Woman in the Attic) and as contested by the feminist

psychologists like Mary Freud, Karen Horney, Melanie Klein etc who have

counter -theorized women‘s psychology and women‘s mental illness as well.

Chapter III deals with the question of whether it is simply the Lomans and

Keller‘s chasing of American Dream and success myth that caused their tragedy

ultimately, or else whether it is basically their gendered mind, especially their masculinity

that made them chase these rather masculine ideologies; it suggests that the relationship

difficulties experienced by the Lomans stem from the norms of the traditional masculine

role. Their presumptuous adoption and lack of understanding of the dysfunctional

aspects of traditional masculinity for their complex contemporary historicity leads to their

afflicted psyche and the relationship stress they all experience; it is substantiated that the

Lomans and Kellers adoption of male gender role stems from masculinity types that

include Hegemonic, Subordinate, Complicit and Marginalised masculinity.

Chapter IV exemplifies how the assemblage of Miller women has been portrayed

in the following categories; mothers and wives and the seekers. An in – depth study of

Miller‘s mothers and wives, who are interrelated capacities affect not only family ties,

but also social relationships. In The Crucible Elizabeth tied by strong familial bonds is a
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symbol of love, devotion loyalty that supports her husband and is committed to a moral

order. But there is an exception that fall outside the purview of the homely group.

Beatrice from A View from the Bridge is a specimen of jealousy, selfishness and

desertion. Beatrice turns the offender and openly undermines her husband‘s self-respect.

She rejects the renunciatory status and passive role in marital like and uses the weapon of

rebelliousness. Her marital life, based on gender incompatibility, brings unhappiness and

ruin to her family ultimately resulting in Eddie‘s death.

Further the seekers – the off-shoot of the new women group, are one step ahead of

the traditional women as they grow out of family folds in quest of their personal destiny.

The two young women, Catherine and Abigail who march out into the wide world

seeking security, gentility and revenge are a case in point. Like the mothers and wives,

the seekers too fail. Their seeking to outgrow self-effacing at home results in

transgression of social, ethical and moral values. Abigail‘s motive of revenge, her sexual

transgression breaks the family accord and ruins society. In her negative seeking, she

identifies herself more as an agent of the devil than a woman fulfilled. Catherine‘s quest

for gentility and upper class values leads to Eddie‘s moral transgression of not only

community ethics but of all human values. Instead of achieving success and resolving any

crisis, the seekers get enmeshed as victims in the process of devastation, which they

initiate by searching for personal fulfillment. Often their innocent search for social status

disturbs the brittle order of home or society. Catherine and in a negative way Abigail,

crack the conservative moral structure of life by trying to seek a more liberal order of life.

The moral crack collapses the entire social structure and the blot is left on the conscience
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of these seekers. Abigail obliterates her own identity, while Catherine closely encounters

the gruesome death of the Eddie.

However, in the course of another forty years things changed a lot for Miller and

in the world around. Gender sensitivity established itself through socio-cultural critical

theorizing and Miller's later plays do tend to feature women with considerable

representative space and articulation in his plays. But he has not featured any

emancipating woman yet; however, he tends to give voice to women who experience the

career or identity crises (that affect men only earlier), or they are shown having trouble

relating to their parents or lovers. This has been explicated in Chapter V of this study.

Possibly as they have not been emancipated yet in reality, or as he does not want to be

modernistically definite anymore, he prefers showing them who are either struggling with

mental illness (as Patricia Hamilton in The Last Yankee, 1993) or a combination of

physical and mental ills (as Sylvia Gellburg in Broken Glass,1994); but they retain

insight even in the midst of their pain. The subservient shadows have become

introspecting survivors of their struggled existence. They are not either of the binary

opposites of too good ( like Linda, Beatrice, Catherine) or too bad (like Abigail) types.

Chapter VI (Conclusion) sums up how this revisiting in the light of gender

perspective highlights though Miller was not aware that his men suffer because they had

inculcated the long-held masculinity virtues which are obsolete and non-accommodative

in the cases of Miller‘s men, Miller was aware that they were trying to stick on to

something impracticable and life-costing. It is also clear from this study that Miller has

cast some of the women in these select plays as mythical-household-women, being

selfless, docile and passive, to either facilitate or complement these men‘s obsession with
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their masculinity and some others as petty, evil and whore-like who are destructive. It is

interesting to note here, that many male-viewpoint interpretations have appraised that

Miller portrays all his housewife-mothers as the stronger by endowing them with courage

and strength, though their seeming ‗strength‘ actually facilitates and reinforces the

pseudo-masculine values and the mythical qualities of the ‗feminine‘ women these men

wish to endorse in the ‗Other‘ of their household. Indeed, their protest in lieu of their

docile submission, if any, would have averted the tragedies of their men. The conclusion

also traces out the pattern of positive evolution of Miller‘s gendered outlook as one from

a ‗macho masculine one‘ to gender-inclusive outlook through the course of the select six

plays of this study.