Chapter 1

General Introduction

1.1 Miller and Modern American Drama

American drama has established its unique identity in world literature today.

Of course, Arthur Miller's contribution for the international recognition of American

drama is considerable. It is true that Eugene O'Neill and Tennessee Williams have

influenced the American theatrical landscape in the former half of the twentieth

century and Edward Albee, Sam Shepard and among others, Wendy Wasserstein

enhance the later portions of the century. But only Arthur Miller's influence on

American Drama is clearly visible in the entire twentieth century.

It is pertinent here to take a glance at the growth of American drama.

American drama begins in the American colonies in the seventeenth century and

continues to the present. In the American colonies settlement was sparse and living

conditions were arduous, and therefore, little theatrical activity took place before the

mid-eighteenth century. Most American plays copied British models until the early

twentieth century. By the end of the nineteenth century, American drama was moving

steadily toward realism, illuminating the rough or seamy side of life and creating

more believable characters. Realism remained the dominant trend of the twentieth

century in both comedies and tragedies. The most prolific of prewar playwrights with

a social agenda was Rachel Crothers, who addressed such issues as society's double

standards for men and women in A Man's World (1909). The New York Idea

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(1906), a social satire by Langdon Mitchell managed to entertain while commenting

meaningfully on divorce. The American family and its development and

disintegration was a recurring theme of playwrights at this time and it would dominate

much of American playwriting for the rest of the twentieth century. Social tensions in

the United States began to preoccupy dramatists in the years leading up to World War

I (1914-1918).

In the wake of World War I, European developments in modern drama arrived

on the American stage. A host of American playwrights were intent on experimenting

with dramatic style and form, while also writing serious sociopolitical commentary.

From this time onwards Britain's influence, although never absent, became much less

important to American drama. One of the first groups to promote the new American

drama was the Provincetown Players, founded in 1915 in Provincetown,

Massachusetts.

The most prominent dramatists of the canon were Eugene O'Neill and Susan

Glaspell. The drama that they produced prominently featured oppositional political

content and social commentary. O'Neill introduced Expressionism in America, which

emphasized subjective feelings and emotions rather than a detailed or objective

depiction of reality. During the 1920s and early 1930s, American audiences saw

incisive and exciting American drama satirizing the often romanticized vision of

warfare. Also, in the 1920s and early 1930s, comedies of manners made a comeback

through delightfully glib, light satirical plays such as Phillip Barry's Holiday. The

economic collapse of the Great Depression of the 1930s closed many theatres

permanently. The austerity of the 1930s inspired a new way of hard edged drama that

tackled economic suffering, left-wing political ideologies, fascism and the fear of

another World War. The well-known playwright of this time was Clifford Odets. The

plays of Lillian Hellman also display a social conscience. During the Second World

War (1939-45), little drama of note appeared. It was neither escapist nor wartime

propaganda. However, two playwrights who dominated dramatic activity for the next

fifty years were Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams. Tennessee Williams, one of

America's most lyrical dramatists, wrote many plays dealing with social misfits and

outsiders. Arthur Miller combined realistic characters and social agenda.

Arthur Miller's reputation and stature as a writer of unusual talent and insight,

has increased steadily with the appearance of each of his plays and books. Over the

past few decades, Arthur Miller has become a well-known American playwright. He

has won numerous awards and is credited for doing amazing work. He is highly

regarded for his intellectual and political contributions to Modern America and the

rest of the world. According to James Houghton, "[h]e is one of the finest writers of

the twentieth century." `. . . . What he did with his plays was really bold. He was

breaking new ground all the time. His work was hailed as a watershed, bringing a

stinging humanist realism to the American stage." 2 In his plays, Miller attempts to

extend the limits of conventional realism. He has been studied from different

perspectives, however, there are no book-length studies dealing with the landscape of

realism in his plays. Here is an attempt to trace the two dominant strains of realism -

social realism and psychological realism in his selected plays.

1.2 Life and Works

Arthur Miller was born in Manhattan, on seventeenth October 1915 in a

Jewish immigrant family. His parents belonged to the middle class community in the

industrial area of the sprawingly metropolis. He was the son of a coat manufacturer

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who suffered financial ruin in the Great Depression. Arthur, a thin boy, was hardly

studious but rather athletically inclined. As a child he was an avid baseball fan, and by

the time he reached high school - a tall, rangy teenager - he became a football star. He

saw the societal and economic decay caused by the Depression, as well as his father's

desperation due to business failures, which had an enormous effect on him. Until the

Depression of the 1930s, the Millers were a moderately well-to-do family. He worked

as a loader and shipping clerk in an automobile warehouse in Manhattan. Miller

worked on a number of jobs, and saved up money for college. 3

He often went to the library during his lunch hour. He was a voracious reader.

Like most New Yorkers, he had always enjoyed the theatre, going to Broadway

shows. But now he felt an urgent desire to write plays. Arthur Miller plunged into

playwriting as if he had been born to the task. He rapidly gained a thorough

knowledge of the theatre. The Lydia Mendelssohn Repertory Theatre had opened in

1929. It offered workshops for new as well as seasoned productions. He attended

rehearsals, performance sessions in lighting and set designing. Ideas came to him and

words, dialogue flowed from him. When he went to Chicago during a vacation, he

saw a performance of Clifford Octets' Awake and Sing and the core message was

"life should have some dignity." It made a deep and lasting impression on him. He

thought a great deal about the change the Depression had wrought in his family as in

so many others. He contemplated on the values that had caused so many Wall Street

suicides when men were forced to face financial failure. He was forming the concept

of moral responsibility within the family, which was to furnish the central theme of

his plays, particularly the relationship between father and son. He placed the

responsibility for the general welfare of the masses on individuals. It was, therefore,

immoral for one man to amass great wealth at the expense of the many. This in turn

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led him to an appraisal of the injustices and the sins committed in the name of 'free

enterprise.' The tendency was to condone any means to achieve success. In his plays,

Miller questioned and sat in judgment on the false values of the past and present. In

1934, he enrolled at the University of Michigan and spent much of the four years

learning to write and working on a number of well-received plays. Miller's life

embodies a penchant for justice that animates his plays. For one thing, he has

travelled widely in order to observe foreign systems of government and report upon

them. He has also engaged in political activities - for example, as a delegate to and a

critic of the Democratic National activist associations of poets, playwrights, essayists

and novelists (1965-1969). In 1956, Miller was summoned by the House Un-

American Activities Committee when he applied for a routine renewal of his passport.

He acquitted himself with honour during his interrogation, testifying that he had allied

himself with liberal causes for many years. Miller's belief that "you change society

because you sharpen its consciousness" never wavered. 4

Miller married Mary Slattery in 1940. In 1956 they had a bitter separation.

Later, he married Marilyn Monroe. The marriage was brief and far from idyllic and

Miller was to examine it (exploit it, some have said) in his most important

contributions to the cinema, the screen play for John Huston's The Misfits, which

was Monroe's last completed film. He followed this with his play After the Fall

which appeared two years after her death. His third and happy marriage to Austrian

photographer, Inge Morath, lasted until her death in 2002.

Miller's amazing literary career spans more than six decades. He wrote his

first play No Villain in 1936 and followed it with a series of plays in which he tested

his skills and explored his response to private and public issues. A year later, it won

the Theatre Guild's award for best work by an unknown playwright. Arthur Miller's

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recognition as a professional playwright came with the production of The Man Who

Had All the Luck (1944). It introduced the major themes of Miller's later work. It

was a contrived tale of a man, whose constant source of good luck causes him great

misery until he suffers a setback which makes him aware, he could go ahead on his

own volition. In 1945, he wrote a novel Focus and two years later he came out with

All My Sons.

All My Sons (1947) is Miller's Ibsenite melodrama written during the Second

World War. It appealed to a nation having recently gone through a war and a

depression. It dealt with the basic concept of moral responsibility in the family,

linking it to the inner struggle of men in authority during the war. His major

achievement, Death of a Salesman (1949) deals with the themes of needs, desires

and responsibilities of the American family and even more specifically the American

male. His achievement rests in successfully bridging the gulf between a social

situation and human drama. The two elements are well fused. An Enemy of the

People (1950) depicts a respected resort-town doctor, who finds himself shunned by

his community. It was Miller's version of Ibsen's An Enemy of the People.

He wrote The Crucible in 1953. It dealt with the Salem witchcraft trials. It

was actually aimed at the then wide spread Congressional investigation of subversive

activities in the United States. It depicts a broader social engagement between

personal integrity and bureaucratic injustice. Miller achieves a fine balance between

private guilt and public conscience. It is an allegorical re-telling of the McCarthy era

red scare that occurred in the United States after the Second World War.

A Memory of Two Mondays (1955) is a one-act play which glances back

upon the Depression. It is an exploration of a mood, the mood of the thirties. It is

based largely upon his experience in an automobile parts warehouse in Brooklyn,

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where he worked to save money for college. The play takes a look at his co-workers

and the various people he met who stumbled through life in a haze of hopelessness

and despondency.

In A View from the Bridge (1956) Miller retained the basic theme of a

flawed protagonist. Eddie Carbone's problem is his guilt of incest. The hero of the

play is an illiterate longshoreman. His inexorable progress towards self-discovery stirs

the emotions with the same painful intensity, as the play jolts the intellect. In his later

plays Miller turns away from the primary unit of the family as a direct cause of the

protagonists' predicament. The father-son relationship is played down and never

shown in direct conflict.

In After the Fall (1964) 'the fall' is from a state of economic security as well

as from childhood innocence. The play uses the Holocaust as an important symbol.

For Miller, the Holocaust is one of the most central events of the twentieth century,

and one from which everyone can learn much about human nature. It is Miller's

expressionistic and philosophical drama.

Two one-act plays — Incident at Vichy (1964) and The Price (1968) — deal

with the universality of human responsibility and the guilt that often accompanies

survival and success. Incident at Vichy explores the theme of self-sacrifice and

honour. He depicts the individual struggling with forces greater than him, and

powerfully condemns the restriction of any man's freedom through tyranny. The

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

histories. One of his later dramatic works, The Creation of the World and Other

Business (1972) seemed too openly didactic for both critics and audience. In The

Creation of the World and Other Business (1972) Miller follows the early events of

the Bible only with a comic twist beginning with the creation, the story of Adam and

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Eve and their temptation and culminating with the slaying of Abel by his brother

Cain. The Archbishop's Ceiling (1977) studies the erosion of personal integrity in

East and West. It also examines the psychological and social coercions of a

totalitarian state and extends its concerns to question the nature of the reality we

imagine ourselves to serve.

Miller wrote Playing for Time (1980) based on the autobiography of Fania

Fenelon, a Holocaust survivor. It narrates Fania's experiences at Auschwitz during the

Second World War. The American Clock (1980) focuses on the family in crisis

trapped in moments of stress and conflict resulting from present and past actions that

threatened to destroy its members individually or collectively. It studies the effects of

the Great Depression on American society and the values which helped it to survive.

The play involves fifty two characters.

Two-Way Mirror (1982-1984) consists of two plays Elegy for a Lady and

Some Kind of Love Story. Another title Danger: Memory (1987) consists of two

other plays I Can't remember Anything and Clara. I Can't Remember Anything

is centered on the theme of connecting in an Isolated Age. It is stamped with Miller's

usual touches of disillusion with the world. Miller's career began to see resurgence

with the production of his The Last Yankee and The Ride Down Mt. Morgan. The

Last Yankee (1991-1993) stems from the inability of the partners in two marriages to

reconcile their dissimilar emotional and worldly needs. The Ride Down Mt. Morgan

(1991) depicts what motivates a man who constructs an elaborate network of lies in an

attempt to keep two wives. He revisits the themes he dealt in Death of a Salesman,

fifty years later through the social climate of the 1990 in Ride Down Mt. Morgan. It

also explores aspects of Nixon and Reagan's America. The play, like so many of his

late works, is a mixture of the personal and the public, the realistic and the fantastic.

In Broken Glass (1994) Miller repeats the dramaturgical strategy of After

the Fall after a gap of thirty years and attempts to mould the horrors of Kristallnacht

with the breakdown of a marriage. Mr. Peters' Connections (1998) is an

expressionistic drama which laments the loss of youth. It is about a man who has lost

his sense of roots and his connections. Resurrection Blues (2002) is a satiric piece in

which the local dictator on a fictional island plans to televise the crucifixion of a local

rebel whom people believe to be Jesus. Even the mainland television crew became

antagonistic to such brutality, and the play culminates in an uncertain apotheosis of

the figure in question.

Miller's writings outside the theatre have been prolific and varied. His novel

Focus (1945) is an ironic tale of anti-Semitism. The screenplay for the Misfits (1961)

is only one of the several he has written. He wrote In Russia in 1964 which is a travel

piece with illustrations by his wife, the photographer Inge Morath. Chinese

Encounters (1947) is another traveller's tale, while Salesman in Beijing (1948) is an

account of the production of his play in Chinese. The Theater Essays of Arthur

Miller is a collection of essays published in 1978. In 1987, Miller published

Timebends: A life which is his autobiography. It is a work of genuine literary

craftsmanship and social explorations. The book was translated into fifteen languages.

The book's dominant themes are the origins of creativity, the dangers of fame, the

temptations of the flesh, the corruption of Hollywood, the commercialization of

Broadway and the betrayal of American idealism. Arthur Miller was pleased with its

reception.

In 2000, Echoes Down the Corridor was published (collected essays from

1944-2000). Finishing the Picture (2004) drew on his brief marriage to Marilyn

Monroe. These are the essays of a lifetime from America's greatest playwright. This

is also a record of Arthur Miller, the private man as well as the playwright, who has

created some of the most abiding dramatic and literary masterpieces in English

language.

Apart from being a playwright, Miller was involved in public affairs. He

lectured widely, wrote articles on the theatre and its relation to world affairs, and

participated in political movements of the day. In 1956, when he appeared before the

House Un-American Activities Committee, he refused to name people who had

attended a meeting to which he had been invited as a guest. It was believed that some

of whom he had met were members of the Communist Party. On this account, he was

convicted of contempt of Congress in 1957, a conviction which was reversed by the

Supreme Court in 1958. In 1965, Miller was elected international president of P.E.N,

the worldwide society of poets, playwrights, essayists, editors, novelists and

nonfiction writers. His presidency was so successful in the causes of international

understanding through literature and of freedom for writers everywhere that he was

unanimously elected to a second term. He died on eleventh February 2005. Many

critics have described his death as a great loss for World literature.

Death of a Salesman received Pulitzer Prize and numerous other awards in

1949. In 1959, Arthur Miller was awarded Gold Medal for drama by National

Institute for Arts and Letters. He also won the 1984 Kennedy Center Honors and the

1991 Mellon Bank Award, both for lifetime achievement. In 1995, he received the

Edward Albee Last Frontier Playwright Award. In 2001, Miller was awarded a NEH

Fellowship and the John H. Finley Award for exemplary service to New York City.

He has also received three Tony Awards, a George Foster Peabody Award, the

National Institute of Arts and Letter's Gold Medal for drama, the New York Public

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Library's Literary Lion Award and the Pell Award for excellence. He holds honorary

doctorates from Harvard and Oxford Universities.

1.3 Literary influences on Arthur. Miller

Critics have considered a great variety of possible influences on Miller's

plays, from Shakespeare through Russian writer Anton Chekhov to American novelist

Sinclair Lewis. The clearest influences, however, are those whom Miller himself has

acknowledged: classical Greek playwrights, nineteenth century Norwegian

playwright, Henrik Ibsen, nineteenth century Russian novelists, Leo Tolstoy and

Fyodor Dostoyevsky and, contemporary American playwrights Tennessee Williams

and Clifford Odets.

While studying at the University of Michigan Miller was attracted to the sense

of form and symmetry of events in classical Greek plays. Although he did not always

understand what the plays were about, they made him feel aware of the nature and

function of drama itself. "I had no background at that time to know really what was

involved in those plays, but the architecture was clear. One looks at some building of

the past whose use one is ignorant of, and yet it has modernity. It had its own specific

gravity. That form has never left me; I suppose it just got burned in." s

There are a number of critical studies over the years which show that Ibsen's

influence was pervasive in Miller's early career. Critics have recognized from the

beginning the traces of Ibsen's Pillars of Society in All My Sons

and others have pointed out that the story of Joe Keller and Steve Deever in that play,

is derived from that of Hakon Werle and Old Ekdal in The Wild Duck. 6 These

studies only begin to indicate the extent to which Ibsen's ideas and images permeated

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Miller's creative imagination at the beginning of his career. In an interview with

Gerald Weales, Miller once observed: "I not only read Ibsen in Joseph Wood Krutch's

drama class at Columbia but I squeezed into cheap balcony seats at the International

Theatre to see Eva Le Gallienne's production of John Gabriel Borkman." 7 Ibsen was

not a big box office success on Broadway. After the success of All My Sons and

Death of a Salesman, Miller was hoping to introduce Ibsen to that wide, welcoming

Broadway audience.

While Miller was a student at the University of Michigan, he discovered Ibsen

and the classical Greek playwrights at the same time. He explains the connection

between these two to Christopher Bigsby: "I assumed then that everyone was aware

that [Ibsen] was carrying the Greeks into nineteenth century Europe, principally

because they were both obsessed with the birds coming home to roost..... there's

something in me that understood that very well." 8 Miller has also written several

times about Ibsen most significantly in the "Introduction to his Collected Plays"

(1975) and in a New York Times article entitled, "Ibsen's Message for Today's

world." Miller carefully laid out elements of Ibsen's dramatic technique, which he

thought had influenced him in his writing of All My Sons (1947), his most

consciously Ibsenesque play. They include what is commonly referred to as the "late

point of attack," or what Miller calls "bringing the past into the present." 9 Miller sets

up an existential alternative to the tragic universe that Ibsen represents.

Miller rejects Ibsen's belief in supernatural forces represented by trolls and

devils as well as his belief in a just universe. He also rejects the view of some of his

contemporaries that lack of a demonstrable divine justice implied a futility of human

action and an absence of human responsibility for one's actions. In the face of a

universe, where luck is a matter of random chance, Miller placed his faith in the

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efficacy of praxis-willed action. He rejected what he saw as an increasing retreat into

a romantic preoccupation with the self in Ibsen's later work.

According to Miller, Ibsen's significant statements were mainly found in his

social plays like The Pillars of. Society, Ghosts and An Enemy of the People. Ibsen

articulated in his social plays the conflict between individual desire and social

responsibility that has been at the center of Miller's own work throughout his career. 1°

Miller acknowledges his debt to Ibsen in All My Sons. He admires Ibsen's

ability to forge a play upon factual bedrock. Miller observes thai: "situation in his

[Ibsen's] plays is never stated but revealed in terms of hard actions, irrevocable deeds,

and sentiment is never confused with the action it conceals." 11 He also appreciates

Ibsen's solution to the "biggest single dramatic problem, namely, how to dramatize

what has gone before," or to achieve "a viable unveiling of the contrast between past

and present, an awareness of the process by which the present has become what it is . .

. What is precious in the Ibsen method is its insistence upon valid causation." 12

Miller also acknowledges the influence of Clifford Odets — the radical

American dramatist of the depressed thirties. Odets understood the people he wrote

about "from the inside out" and consequently created characters exhibiting an

intensity of life that "lift[ed] them into another realm" and endowed them with an

"extraordinary freshness." 13 In "About Theater Language," Miller observes that: "For

younger writers such as myself, Odets for a couple of years was the trailblazer . . . he

had dared to invent an often wildly stylized stage speech. . . It was as though Odets

was trying to turn dialogue into jazz . . . It was an invented diction of a kind never

heard before on stage — or off." 14

Miller once confessed: "Idea is very important to me as a dramatist." He

believed that playwrights need not have invented new or original ideas, "which are

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already in the air, for which there has already been a preparation . . . Which is to say

that once an idea is 'in the air,' it is no longer an idea but a feeling, a sensation, an

emotion, and with these the drama can deal."" As noted by Alice Griffin: "When

Miller began his career he found in Eugene O'Neill a writer who, like himself, was

unafraid of expressing his ideas." 16

Among his contemporaries, he expresses his greatest debt to Tennessee

Williams. As he once put it, viewing a preview performance of A Street Car Named

Desire, "opened one specific door for me. Not the story or characters of the direction,

but the words and their liberation, the joy of the writer in writing that, the radiant

eloquence of its composition moved me more than all its pathos." "I did learn things

from Tennessee, although I'm not sure if he learned anything from me. His early

plays, especially, Streetcar, were truly unique. Before Williams, the full throated

voice of the author was muted on the American stage. The author of a play in

America was supposed to be practically non-existent as far as the language was

concerned. American play with the exception of O'Neill's is always an attempt to

imitate street speech, that is, ordinary daylight speech. Tennessee infused his plays

with his own poetry, and he did it blatantly.' ' 17 Miller continues:

People never really spoke the way they did in Tennessee's plays, but it

didn't matter, because the intentions, meanings, and emotional lives in

those plays were obviously widespread among the audience, and he

gave it his own twist. The only other writer - one of a quite different

temperament - to attempt a similar thing was Clifford Odets. Odets

wrote a dialogue that never existed on heaven or earth. His characters

were supposed to be Bronx Jews . . . . I felt the impact. 18

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1.4 Art and Dramatic Theory

Arthur Miller's extensive articles, essays, speeches and introductions provide

a key to understanding his aims and appreciating his art. From the fifty-two page

"Introduction to his Collected Plays," which appeared in 1957, to the 1993 essay

"About Theater Language," Miller's theatre essays are considered major contribution

to modern dramatic theory. 19 These are some of the major documents of American

theatre. They reveal an eminent playwright having struggled to understand and perfect

his craft. They show him eager to use the theatre to express his evolving ideas. Miller

discusses not only the aesthetic of his plays, but also what was 'in the air,'

surrounding and prompting their composition, the artistic, commercial, political, and

social climate of the times.

Miller chose theatre because he believed that "it was the cockpit of literary

activity and you could talk directly to an audience and radicalize the people.' 2° Miller

states: "I suppose that to me a play is the way I sum up where I am at any particular

moment in my life. I'm not conscious of that when I'm working, but when I look back

at what I've written, its quite clear to me that's what I'm doing is to find what I really

think about life." 21 This indicates that he has interwoven the events from his life into

the fabric of his plays. So he wrote, "[t]he plays are my autobiography." 22

There was something real about theatre which appealed to a man like Miller,

who beyond anything, liked to make things. From the age of six, he had worked with

wood. He has continued to do so, building the shed in which he wrote Death of a

Salesman and subsequently, he also built a bed, a dinner table, and an array of chairs

and cabinets. Miller believes that writing a play resembles making furniture: "It has

an architectural structure. You could walk around in it. I like to make things, mostly

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furniture, and create as I go along. I improvise designs. I never make a drawing. I just

get a couple of pieces of wood and start to fiddle around until something happens. A

play is a real thing." 23

He felt that in order to be the part of the main stream of drama, one had to be a

follower of Aeschylus. In 1966, when asked, which playwrights he admired most,

Miller replied: "first the Greeks, for their magnificent form, the symmetry . . . . I had

no background at the time to know really what was involved in these plays, but the

architecture was clear . . . That form has never left me; I suppose it just got burned

in."24 Over the years, Miller had come to see that it was not only form that he learnt

from the classical Greeks, but a sense of the nature and function of drama itself.

When Miller started his career, American theatre was pre-occupied with the

individual, and with psychological analysis divorced from the social context beyond

the domestic confines of the family. In a theatre, where the works of Tennessee

Williams and William Inge held sway, Miller was trying to define a tradition that

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

drama. As he explained: "The Greek dramatists had more than a passing interest in

psychology and character on the stage but for him these were means to a larger end,

and the end was what we isolate today as social. That is, the relations of man as a

social animal, rather than his definition as a separated entity was the dramatic goal." 25

The dialectic of personal self-actualization in conflict with social

responsibility informs Miller's works from beginning to end. A View from the

Bridge was written keeping in mind the classical Greek drama. This shows that Miller

had a clear sense of the dramatic agenda from the Greek tradition.

Miller remains committed to theatre because he sincerely believes that it can

change people for the better, and he feels that, it is his responsibility as an artist to

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encourage such change. Miller views society as a complicated network of individuals

who need to balance their needs and desires against those of the wider social group in

order to live fulfilled and contented lives. His plays reveal that American society has

been misled by myths of success which advocate rampant materialism, social

irresponsibility and self-negating guilt. Through his plays Miller expects us to

examine ourselves and reassess our true responsibilities to both self and the other.

Arthur Miller's plays reveal that he sees dramatic art "not as poetry of escape

from process and determinism, but as a timeless form in its ability to bind isolated

human beings together into their essential corporateness." His plays emphasize the

idea that he puts forth elsewhere, that "we are made and yet are more than what made

us." The most salient feature of his plays is his efforts to bring "back into the theatre

in an important way, the drama of social questions." "Great drama," Miller declares,

"is great questions or it is nothing but technique." 26 It is this notion of "great

questions" that Miller has been most interested to explore throughout his work.

His questioning is not merely reformist but possesses deep insights into the

Metaphysical dimensions of the existential problems related to life relationships and

meaningful existence. According to Harold Clurman a well-known critic, this

resistance to our 'souls' sloth dramatized by Miller defines "his single contribution to

American theatre of our day." 27

Miller discusses the form of his major plays and generalizes on the subject.

Form is literally the body that holds the soul of the play. He considers his "most

completely achieved form" is that of Death of a Salesman because it accommodates

`the full flow of inner and outer forces that are sucking the man.' The melting together

of social time, personal time and psychic time in Death of a Salesman is its unique

power.

17

In response to an audience question and answer session, Miller said, "[a]rt is

an imitation of life, and the whole writer is involved in whatever he is doing. In his

case, some of the inspiration came from simply imitating a character or maybe,

exploring a feeling that I have about the times we are living in. But, generally, it's all

method into one confusing mush, and to give it form and make it understandable to

other people is the art of writing. Where that comes from, God only knows." 28

His writing despite its aggressive intentions, does not attempt to startle society

with new ideas. Indeed, he does not believe that the theatre can promulgate entirely

new ideas, because it must gather the assent of its audience as it moves along, and this

is impossible with the radically new. The theatre should enunciate "not-yet-popular

ideas which are already in the air, ideas for which there has already been a preparation

by non-dramatic media." It follows that the theatre binds isolated human beings into

their essential corporateness: "I regard theatre as a serious business, one that makes or

should make man more human, which is to say less alone." 29 Miller has spoken of his

concerns to penetrate his own feelings about himself and the times in which he lived.

So, he asserted that the job of the artist was to remind people of what they have

chosen to forget. In a series of essays during the fifties, Miller laid out his ideas on the

relationship between dramatic form and the conflict between what he called "private"

or familial and the "social" life of the individual. 3°

Miller thought the realism of the previous half century "could not, with ease

and beauty, bridge the widening gap between the private life and the social life" while

expressionism "evaded it by foregoing psychological realism altogether and leaping

over a portrayal of social forces alone." 31 He wrote in the "Introduction to his

Collected Plays," "realisms hold on our theatre," for what he considered the moral

18

vacuum in American plays. He believed that "Nealism as a style could seem to be a

defense against the assertion of meaning." 32

Miller considered one of the reasons for dramatic realism's failure to

encompass a wider and deeper segment of human life was the imposition of

naturalistic philosophical and sociological assumptions such as environmental and

biological determinism on realistic stage language: "The idea of realism has become

wedded to the idea that the man is, at best, the sum of forces working upon him and of

given psychological forces within him." 33 Miller, on the other hand, asserted that "an

innate value, an innate will does in fact posit itself as real not alone because it is

devoutly to be wished but because, however, closely (man) is measured and

systematically accounted for, he is more than the sum of his stimuli and is

unpredictable beyond a certain point." 34 A play that stopped at "the point of

conditioning" he asserted, "is not reflecting reality." 35 He was seeking a new dramatic

form in which "a new balance has been struck which embraces both determinism and

paradox". 36 He found the answer to the need for a theatrical idiom in expressionism,

in which one could address social and political concerns in the fifties. It was the most

immediately available theatrical language. He broadened its definitions to include

essentially all presentations and theatrical idioms as opposed to purely

representational realism. Despite his discovery of subjective realism and his belief

that expressionistic idioms were inherently linked to the dramatization of public

issues he continued to use realism as a way of representing the protagonist's social

responsibility as in The Crucible (1953).

Arthur Miller belongs to the mainstream of that segment of artistic community

which rejected "Art for Art sake" in favour of the more current "Drama is a weapon"

that rejected realistic representation in favour of more symbolic realism. Similar

19

tendencies are noted in the writings of Odets, Elmer Rice, William Saroyan and

Tennessee Williams. He, like Odets, succeeded in fusing the temporary with the

poetic, realistic dialogue with symbolic force, anger and despair with warmth,

tenderness and compassion, to forge a unique and dramatic idiom. 37

1.5 Views on Language

In "The Family in Modern Drama" Miller discusses the critical debate about

the early modern realistic drama whether dramatic prose is "less artistic" 38 than

dramatic poetic verse forms. The core of this essay consists of Miller's contention that

a poetic drama must be built upon a poetic idea. 39 Miller always had great concern for

the social implications of his plays and he believed that the great poetic plays must

connect to the outside world of the characters and the play must go beyond the family

circle that it originates in. Citing Streetcar, Hamlet, Oedipus, The Great God

Brown and The Hairy Ape as examples, Miller declares that when a play opens itself

up to the larger societal circle, the poetic becomes possible: 4°

When one is speaking to one's family, for example, one uses a certain

level of speech, a certain plain diction perhaps, a tone of voice, an

inflection suited to the intimacy of the occasion. But when one faces an

audience of strangers, as a politician does, for instance - and he is the

most social of men - it seems right and proper for him to reach for the

well-turned phrases, even the poetic word, the aphorism, and the

metaphor. And his gestures, his stance, his tone of his voice, all

become larger than life; moreover, his character is not what gives him

these prerogatives, but his role. In other words, a confrontation with

20

society permits us, or even enforces upon us, a certain reliance upon

ritual similarly with the play. The implications of this natural wedding

of form with inner relationships are many, and some of them are

complex. It is true to say, I think, that the language of the family is the

language of the private life — prose. The language of society, the

language of the public life, is verse. According to the degree to which

the play partakes of either relationship, it achieves the right to move

closer or further away from either pole. 41

Miller's 1993 essay "About Theatre Language" exhibits his sustained interest in the

style of language. In this essay, Miller has the elder statesman's advantage of

reflecting on both his career and the whole of twentieth century American drama. He

puts forth ideas similar to those he expressed in "The Family in Modern Drama,"

about meeting the demands of language in modern realistic drama:

It was inevitable that I had to confront the problem of dramatic

language . . . I gradually came to wonder if the essential pressure

toward poetic dramatic language — if not of stylization itself - came

from the inclusion of society as a major element in the play's story of

vision. Manifestly, prose realism was the language of the individual

and of private life, poetry the language of man in crowds, in society.

Put another way, prose is the language of family relations; it is the

inclusion of the larger world beyond that naturally opens a play to the

poetic . . . . How to find a style that at one and the same time deeply

engages an American audience, which insisted on recognizable reality

of characters, locales, and themes, while opening the stage to

21

considerations of public morality and the mythic social fares - in short

the invisible. 42

Miller's explanation in this essay gives insight into his use of poetic language and

shows how it goes far deeper than mere mechanics. Miller states that he came out of

the 1930s — the formative years of his career — "sure that a good play must move

forward in its depth as rapidly as on its surfaces; word-poetry wasn't enough if there

was a fractured poetry in the structure, the gradually revealed illuminating idea behind

the whole thing." 43 For Miller, the ideas behind his plays most often are his social

themes, which the figurative language consistently illustrates. Miller has himself

pointed to his criticism: "A drama ought not to be looked at first and foremost from

literary perspectives merely because it uses words, verbal rhythm, and poetic

images.""

Miller's awareness of the organic necessity of a text also points out exactly

what New Criticism ignored in his work. I. A. Richards in The Philosophy of

Rhetoric discussed the "organizing" activity of figurative language, pointing out that

a word maybe simultaneously literal and metaphorical in a text. In Miller's plays,

figurative language relies heavily on the tension between the literal and metaphorical,

between the abstract and the concrete, between the denotative and connotative

meaning of words. Miller often uses images, symbols, and metaphors as central or

unifying devices by employing repetition and recurrence.

Theatrical language is a tool for human contact and understanding. Miller

depicts the social fabric by which the individual is bound to the group and by which

society is created out of the weave of individual will. In Miller's plays the social

fabric is always a function of language. Miller's plays have become increasingly

oriented toward talk, acknowledging the centrality of language as a social index. He

22

argues that "drama . . . must represent a well defined expression of profound social

needs, needs which transcend any particular form of society or any particular historic

moment." 45 Since it is "an organism that expands one's awareness to life's continuity

and meaning for Miller, is a contentious issue." 46 Further, Miller astutely observes

that Odets' dialogue was not realistic but poetic. 47 Likewise, although Miller's

dialogue often has been praised for its realism, it is carefully crafted to fit his

characters. His best lines have become familiar and oft used quotations not because

they sound like everyday speech but because they are embedded in 'poetic realism.'

For example: "Attention must be paid." "He's liked, but he's not well liked" (Death

of a Salesman). "Is the accuser always holy now?" (The Crucible), "I never saw you

as a man. I saw you as my father" ( All My Sons), and "It's not your guilt I want, it's

your responsibility" ( Incident at Vichy) .

"My own tendency," writes Miller, "has been to shift styles, according to, the

nature of my subject . . . . In order to find speech that springs naturally out of the

characters and their backgrounds rather than imposing general style." 48 Miller points

out that New Englander in The Last Yankee does not speak like the working men

and women in A Memory of Two Mondays or even like Eddie Carborne and his

fellow Longshoremen in A View from the Bridge. For The Crucible he invented a

language that began with the syntax and idiom of the verbatim court records of the

period and proceeded to take on poetic flavour of its own which is stark, strong and

earthy, like the people who spoke it.

23

1.6 Background

To gain an insight in the plays of Arthur Miller, it is necessary to know the

background of the socio-economic and political issues of his time. Arthur Miller is a

man who saw the Depression, World War II, the Holocaust, the Cold War and the fall

of Communism. All these events were grist for his mill. More importantly, he always

wrote about these things with a moral sense. He lived the way he wrote. Many

American novelists, poets and dramatists have made use of the American Dream

symbolically. Arthur Miller is not an exception because the American Dream is very

much present in plays like Death of a Salesman. Arthur Miller was personally

affected by McCarthyism, and he has made use of it in his play The Crucible. The

Great Depression also provides a backdrop to his plays. He has examined the ethical

ramifications of the Holocaust in four plays, one screenplay, one novel, and has

addressed the issue in his autobiography.

American Dream

The American Dream is the concept widely held in the United States of

America which believes that through hard work, tenacity and determination one can

achieve prosperity. These were the values of the original pioneers who crossed the

American plains when Europeans first came to America. What the American Dream

has become is a question under constant scrutiny. The American Dream is a

constantly fluctuating set of ideals, reflecting the ideas of an era. America is seen as

the land of promise and the American Dream is commonly associated with the

freedom and opportunity of gaining wealth, fame, power, glory and happiness. On the

24

surface, this dream seems almost enchanted, offering people the unprecedented

prospect of achieving success regardless of one's race, religion or family history. The

American Dream is interwoven and deeply embedded in every fabric of American

life. It has become the major focal point of many works of American literature. For

instance, in F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel The Great Gatsby the pursuit of the

American Dream is shown through the lives of the protagonists

The American Dream in the twentieth century

In the twentieth century, the Americans were challenged by a few critical

moments. For instance, the Great Depression caused widespread hardship during the

twenties and thirties, and was almost a reverse of the dream for those directly

affected. Racial discrimination did not disappear and in some parts of the country,

racial violence was almost commonplace. There was concern about the undemocratic

campaign carried on against suspected Communists. Young American families have

sought to live in relative bourgeois comfort in the suburbs that they built up since the

end of the Second World War. The possibility of great wealth has remained more of a

distant dream in the recent century, while the widely held goal of home ownership,

financial security and civil and international stability have come to take the place of

the common American Dream in modern times.

Great Depression

The Great Depression was the global economic slump that began in the United

States following the Wall Street panic of October 1929. On twenty-ninth October

1929 share prices on Wall Street collapsed catastrophically, setting off a chain of

25

bankruptcies and defaults that quickly spread overseas. The events in the United

States triggered a worldwide depression, which put hundreds of millions out of work

across the capitalist world throughout the 1930s. On the global scale, the market crash

in the U.S. was a final straw in an already shaky global economic situation. Germany

was suffering from hyperinflation, and many of the Allied victors of World War I

were having serious problems paying off huge war debts. In the late 1920s, the U.S.

economy at first seemed immune to the mounting troubles, but with the start of the

1930s it crashed with startling rapidity.

McCarthyism

McCarthyism, named after Joseph McCarthy, was a period of intense anti-

communism, also known as the Red Scare, which occurred in the United States from

1948 to 1956 when the government of the United States actively persecuted the

Communist Party USA, its leadership and others suspected of being Communists.

The word "McCarthyism" now carries connotations of false, even hysterical

accusation, and of government attacks on the political minority. From the viewpoint

of the great majority of American citizens in the then fairly conservative political

climate, the suppression of radicalism and radical organizations in the United States

was a struggle against a dangerous subversive element controlled by a foreign power

that posed a real danger to the security of the country, thus justifying extreme, even

extra-legal measures. From the radical viewpoint it was seen as class warfare,

particularly by those Communists actually targeted. From the viewpoint of people

who were caught up in the conflict without having done anything objectionable, it was

a massive violation of civil and constitutional rights. Another major element of

26

McCarthyism was the internal screening program on federal government employees,

conducted by the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover. This comprehensive program vetted all

federal government employees for Communist connections and employed evidence

provided by anonymous sources that the subjects of investigation were not allowed to

challenge or identify. From 1951, the programs required level of proof for dismissing

a federal employee was for "reasonable doubt" to exist over their loyalty; previously,

it had required "reasonable grounds" for believing them to be disloyal. The hearings

conducted by Senator Joseph McCarthy gave the Red Scare the name which is in

common usage, but the "Red Scare" predated McCarthy's meteoric rise to

prominence in 1950s and continued after he was discredited by a Senate censure in

1954, following his disastrous investigation into the U.S. Army which started on

twenty-second April of that year. McCarthy's name became associated with the

phenomenon mainly through his prominence in the media; his outspoken and

unpredictable nature made him ideal as the figurehead of anti-communism, although

he was probably not its most important practitioner.

McCarthyism as a general concept

The term McCarthyism has entered the American vernacular as a general term

for the phenomenon of mass pressure, harassment, or blacklisting used to instill

conformity with prevailing political beliefs. The act of making insufficiently

supported accusations or engaging in unfair investigatory methods against a person as

a purported attempt to unfairly silence or discredit them is often referred to as

McCarthyism. Miller's play, The Crucible, written during the McCarthy era, used the

Salem witch trials as a metaphor for the McCarthyism of the 1950s, suggesting that

27

the process of McCarthyism-style persecution can occur at any time and place.

Holocaust

Holocaust is defined in the Hyper dictionary as "an act of great destruction

and loss of life" and also "as the Nazi program of exterminating Jews under Hitler." 49

The Holocaust (also called Shoah in Hebrew) refers to the period from thirtieth

January, 1933, when Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, to eighth May,

1945, when the war in Europe ended. During this time, Jews in Europe were subjected

to progressively harsh persecution that ultimately led to the murder of several Jews.

The Nazi Party conducted a vicious propaganda campaign against its political

opponents — the weak Weimar government and the Jews whom the Nazis blamed for

Germany's ills. Hitler began to restrict the Jews with legislation and terror, which

entailed burning books written by Jews, removing Jews from their professions and

public schools, confiscating their businesses and property and excluding them from

public events, and were arrested and sent to concentration camps.

Holocaust literature generally falls into one of two ideologically oriented

interpretative categories. The first position is the particularistic stance. This point of

view, championed by writers such as Elie Wiesel and Cynthia Ozick, maintains that

the Holocaust is qualitatively and quantitatively a unique event without precedent or

parallel. Adherents of the particularistic perspective question the propriety of most

artistic representations. Lawrence Langer, Alvin Rosenfeld, Sidra Ezrahi, and Nora

Levin have argued that such efforts tend to simplify and reduce the magnitude of the

occurrence. They are particularly distressed by artists who deny the specificity of

Jewish suffering, treat the Holocaust as a symbolic metaphor for Western society and

28

who, in the words of Nora Levin, "pander to the craving for the sadistic, the

pornographic, sentimental, grotesque, even the comic, in the abuse of . . . history."

The second interpretative stance regarding the Holocaust is the universalistic

position. Such a view has been delineated by Hannah Arendt, Bruno Bettelheim and

George Steiner. It is also projected into the dramatic works of C.P. Taylor, Peter

Barnes, George Tabori and Martin Sherman. Proponents of the universalistic

perspective assert that the Holocaust was indeed a horrific historical catastrophe but it

nevertheless remains within the continuum of the Western tradition. Therefore, it is

not only appropriate, but also necessary to seek analogies, utilize metaphors, and

derive symbolism, in order to understand and transmit the universal qualities of the

event. 50

Arthur Miller is perhaps the foremost spokesman for a universalistic and

humanistic interpretation of the Holocaust. He places the event within the cultural and

historical continuum of Western history by utilizing conventional dramaturgical

models. Miller embraces both an existential and teleological view of the world. He

believes that the Holocaust has both historical importance and contemporary

relevance.

1.7 Critical Studies on Arthur Miller

Miller scholarship is very extensive. Arthur Miller by Dennis Welland in

1961 marks the beginning of book-length studies of Miller's work and establishes the

format that was to become the standard in Miller scholarship. Welland revised and

updated his examination of Miller's plays in Miller: The Playwright in 1983. Sheila

Huftel, in Arthur Miller: The Burning Glass (1965) focuses on the character's quest

29

for self knowledge in plays like Incident at Vichy. Edward Murray's Arthur Miller

Dramatist (1967) adds a few new insights. Arthur Miller (1967) by Leonard Moss

on the other hand, focuses on the psychological dimensions of Miller's work. Ronald

Hayman's Arthur Miller (1972, reprinted 1983) concludes with a chapter on Miller

within the context of Modern European and American drama where he emphasizes

Miller as a social dramatist. Neil Carson in Arthur Miller (1952) presents Miller's

contribution and his vision as both a social and religious writer.

Christopher Bigsby's The Cambridge Companion to Arthur Miller

provides an introduction to this influential dramatist. In addition to analyses of

Miller's plays, fiction and contributions to film, the book places his work within the

context of the social and political climate of the times. Arthur Miller by Glassman

Bruce discusses the life of the main American Playwright and examines the common

themes in his works. Arthur Miller (1987) by Schlueter and Flanagan offers

insightful analyses of the plays like Dangers! Memory and examines his social

commitment, dramatic innovations and the interplay between his personal experience

and his dramatic works.

A large number of collections of critical essays has been published over the

last five decades. Miller's plays began to attract the attention of theatre critics with the

production of Death of a Salesman. Arthur Miller by Harold Bloom is a

comprehensive biography of the playwright. It contains extracts from important

critical essays that examine important aspects of each work. The Temptations of

Innocence in the Dramas of Arthur Miller by Terry Otten examines all of his plays

from his unpublished undergraduate dramas written at the University of Michigan to

Mr. Peter's Connections. It is comprehensive in its survey and incorporates

scholarly and critical commentary.

30

While Miller is most often compared with Williams, themes that appear in his

work have often been examined in relation to other writers as well. The Crucible is

often studied with The Scarlet Letter notably by David Bergeron. Thomas Adler

examines him in relation to Pinter. Leslie Kames examines his plays in relation to

Sam Shepherd in Dreamers and Drunks: Moral and Social Conscispitsness in

Arthur Miller and Sam Shepherd.

Much of the scholarship on Miller has focused on questions of genre,

particularly, on the concept of tragedy which Miller himself initiated in his essays like

"Tragedy and the Common Man" and "Arthur Miller on The Nature of Tragedy,"

both originally published in 1949 and reprinted in Robert A. Martin (ed), The

Theater Essays of Arthur Miller (1978). Robert Hogan's monograph entitled

Arthur Miller (1964) argues that the significance of Miller's work is in the tragic

spirit that the plays embody. Much of the criticism of Death of a Salesman focuses

on a definition of tragedy and how this play achieves or fails to achieve the tragic

form.

A recent critical approach offering new insights into Miller's work is that of

gender studies. June Schlueter has edited two volumes exploring the plays from a

feminist perspective entitled Feminist Rereadings of Modern American Drama.

Iska Alter, Gayle Austin, Lillian Hellman, Centola, Nada Zeineddine and many others

have written from feminist perspectives. Critical attention has also focused on men's

issues. More sophisticated are the articles by David Savran and Steven .R. Centola.

There are a large number of scholars working on Miller investigation or at least upon

the social concerns raised in his plays. Death of a Salesman in particular has aroused

the curiosity of psychological critics. The Crucible has sparked studies examining the

31

historical precedents of the play. There are a few studies that have examined Miller's

works in relation to his Jewish heritage.

Miller's plays have been produced abroad. This has resulted in a new direction

in the scholarship on Miller. Prominent among these studies is C.W.E Bigsby's

examination of Miller's work from a British perspective. Several articles have been

written on Miller in Foreign Languages from the cross-cultural perspective.

1.8 Plan

The principal objective of the present study is to examine the divergent

themes as well as innovative forms of the selected plays of Arthur Miller in order to

trace the landscape of realism. It also aims at bringing out Arthur Miller's

dramatization of the conflictual and dialectical relationship between realism and

expressionism, subjective and the objective, public and the private, individual will and

familial responsibility.

The thesis is divided into five chapters. The first chapter entitled "General

Introduction" presents an overview of American Drama till the arrival of Miller on the

dramatic scene and thus contextualizes Miller. This section depicts Miller's childhood

through the Depression years and his theatrical apprenticeship leading to eventual

fame and critical acclaim for his plays. It describes his plays as well as non-fiction.

The chapter outlines Miller's literary and dramatic precursors and discusses their

influence on his works. For Miller, the theatre was at once a near-sacred place and an

arena for ideas. He had his views on Art and dramatic theory. He has contributed a lot

to modern dramatic theory. An attempt is made here to understand his theatrical art

and craft. Like Odets, Miller succeeded in fusing realistic dialogue with a symbolic

32

force to forge a unique dramatic idiom. His views on language are also examined in

this section.

To understand and appreciate Miller's plays it is necessary to get an insight

into social, political and economic condition of his times. Hence this section describes

in brief the Great Depression, the Holocaust, McCarthyism and the American Dream,

which have determined the thematic pattern in his plays. A brief survey of important

critical works is made in this section.

The second chapter entitled "Realism and the American Dramatic Tradition,"

introduces the concept of realism by focusing on the difficulties in defining the term.

It discusses some of the theories related to realism. It points out how the term realism

is one of the most frequently used but most problematic categories in the field of

literary discourse. It examines the relationship between 'realism' and reality in

literature. With a brief introduction to American realism it critically analyses the

various realisms in the American Dramatic Tradition. It analyses Ibsen's contribution

to realistic drama and also describes realism in modern theatre. In terms of the

contributions of Shaw, Strindberg and Chekhov, it briefly refers to Brecht and the

German dramatic tradition and then it discusses the American tradition. The last

section describes the various forms of realism - naturalism, photorealism, historical

realism, magic realism, social realism and psychological realism.

The third chapter entitled "Reality Without: Social Realism" examines

Miller's selected plays to trace social realism. At the outset it presents an overview of

his apprenticeship plays which also reveal his socio-political concerns in his master

works and later plays. The critical examination of the plays analyzed in this chapter

shows that Miller's plays are ineluctably social. He cannot conceive of the individual

outside of a social context. Art to Miller has to be responsible to social realities. The

33

chapter also points out that many of Miller's plays center on families and by

concentrating on their pleasures, problems and relationships Miller exposes in

microcosm society as a whole. In play after play, he emphasizes on the need of an

individual's sense of responsibility. The conflict between self-actualization and social

responsibility is deeply embedded in Miller's consciousness.

Psychological realism in the selected plays of Arthur Miller is dealt in the

fourth chapter entitled "Reality Within: Psychological Realism." Miller was

dissatisfied with the stage idiom of the theatre of the fifties. He was unable to find a

satisfactory theatrical idiom for the articulation of the public and the social. Through

the expressionistic devices he tried to combine two different representational modes

on the stage at once. The analysis of the selected plays will show that despite his

discovery of subjective realism and his belief that expressionistic idioms were

inherently linked to the dramatization of public issues, Miller continued to use realism

as a way of representing a protagonist's social responsibilities.

The fifth and the last chapter, apart from bringing the loose threads together,

also makes an attempt to analyze objectively Miller's place in modern realistic

dramatic tradition.

Chapter Notes

'James Houghton, "The Playwright: Living in the Present," www.yahoo.com .

<http://www.neh.gov/whoweare/miller/appreciation.html > 4/06/04.

2"Writers mourn Arthur Miller,"www._google.com <http://www.afp.com/english/afp >

03/05/04.

34

3 Arthur Miller, Timebends (New York: Grove, 1987) 248.

4"Arthur Miller," www. google. com

<www.college.hmco.com/history/readerscomp/rcah/html/ah_059800_millerarthur .

htm> 03/02/05.

5Carlisle Olga, and Rose Styron, "Arthur Miller: An Interview," The Theater Essays,

ed. Robert A. Martin (New York : Viking Press, 1978) 266.

6Brenda Murphy, "The tradition of social drama: Miller and his forebears," The

Cambridge Companion to Arthur Miller, ed. Christopher Bigsby (United

Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 1997)16.

7Gerald Weales, "Arthur Miller and the 1950s," Michigan Quarterly Review 37.4

(Fall 1998) 644.

8Steven R. Centola, "All My Sons," The Cambridge Companion to Arthur Miller,

49.

9Arthur Miller, "Introduction to the Collected Plays," The Theater Essays of Arthur

Miller, ed. Robert A. Martin (New York: Viking Press, 1978) 135.

' °Brenda Murphy, "The tradition of social drama: Miller and his forebears," 18.

"Arthur Miller, "Introduction to the Collected Plays," 131.

' 2lbid.,133.

' 3John .W Frick, "The 'Playwright of the Proletariat'," Realism and American

Dramatic Tradition, ed. William Demastes (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama

Press, 1996) 126.

'4Arthur Miller, "About Theater Language," The Last Yankee: With a New Essay

(New York : Penguin Books, 1993) 83-84.

15Arthur Miller, "Introduction to the Collected Plays," 119, 122.

35

I6Alice Griffin, "Understanding Arthur Miller," Understanding Arthur Miller

(South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press,1996)15.

17Arthur Miller, "Responses to An Audience Question and Answer Session,"

Michigan Quarterly Review 37.4 (1998): 826.

18.-. • •• ,826.

19Arthur Miller, Introduction, Arthur Miller's Collected Plays ( New York; Viking

press, 1957), 3-55; "About Theater Language," The Last Yankee ( New York:

Penguin Books, 1993), 75-98. The earlier major essays including the 1957

Introduction appear in Theater Essays.

20 Christopher Bigsby, Introduction, The Cambridge Companion to Arthur Miller,

2.

21 Arthur Miller, "The Good Old American Apple Pie," Censored Books: critical

Viewpoints, 1993.

22Christopher Bigsby, Introduction, 1.

23Ibid.,2.

24Olga Carlisle and Rose Styron, "Arthur Miller: Interview," 265-66.

25Arthur Miller, A View from the Bridge (New York: Viking Press, 1955) 1.

26Arthur Miller, Timebends, 80.

"Harold Clurman, "Arthur Miller," Later Plays, Arthur Miller; a Collection of

Critical Essays, ed. Robert Corrigan (Englewood Cliffs, N.J Prentice Hall Inc.,

1969) 151.

28Arthur Miller, "Responses to an Audience Question and Answer Session," 818.

29From Tulane Drama review 4, no 4 (may 1960).

30Brenda Murphy, "Arthur Miller: Revisioning Realism", Realism and the American

Dramatic Tradition, 194.

36

31 Arthur Miller, " Introduction to the Collected Plays," 82.

32Ibid.,160.

33Ibid.,170.

34Ibid., 170.

35Ibid.,170.

36Ibid.,170.

37John Frick, "The 'Playwright of the Proletariat'," 134.

38Arthur Miller, " The Family in Modern Drama," The Theater Essays of Arthur

Miller, ed. Robert Martin (New York : Viking Press, 1978) 70.

39Ibid.,72.

40 Stephen Marino, Introduction, Studies in American Literature 53 ( Edwin:

Mellen Press 2002) 6-7.

41Miller Arthur, " The Family in Modern Drama," 76.

42Arthur Miller, "About Theatre Language," 82.

43Ibid.,84-85.

44Ibid., 1 14.

45Arthur Miller, "Introduction to the Collected Plays," Arthur Miller's Collected

Plays ( New York: Viking Press, 1971) 3.

46Ibid.,16.

48Ibid.,9 1 -92.

49 "Holocaust," www.yahoo.com <http://www.hyperdictionary.com >05/06/05.

50"Arthur Miller and the Holocaust," www.google.com

<http://www.holycross.edu/departments/theatre/eisser/millerhtm > 04/05/04.

37