CENTRE FOR RESEARCH - DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH
SRIMAD ANDAVAN ARTS AND SCIENCE COLLEGE (Autonomous)
(Affiliated to Bharathidasan University)
Re-accredited at ‘A’ Grade By NAAC
TIRUCHIRAPPALLI - 620 005, INDIA
AUGUST 2014
Dr. S. RAMAMURTHY
Dean of Academics & HOD of English,
Centre for Research,
Srimad Andavan Arts & Science College
(Autonomous)
Tiruchirapalli-620 005
[email protected]
+91-98947-77716
0431-2431528
CERTIFICATE
This is to certify that the thesis entitled “Conflict between the Individual
and the Society: A Study of the Select Plays of Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee
Williams and Arthur Miller” submitted by M. Jayachandran is a bona fide
record of research work done by his under my guidance in the Department of English,
Centre for Research at Srimad Andavan Arts & Science College (Autonomous),
Tiruchirapalli-620 005 and the thesis has not previously formed the basis for the
award of any degree, diploma, associateship, fellowship or any other similar titles.
The thesis represents the independent work on the part of the candidate.
Tiruchirappalli
August 2014
Signature
DECLARATION
I hereby declare that the thesis entitled “Conflict between the Individual
and the Society: A Study of the Select Plays of Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee
Williams and Arthur Miller” has been carried out by me under the guidance of
Dr. S. Ramamurthy, Dean of Academics & HOD of English, Centre for Research
Srimad Andavan Arts & Science College (Autonomous), Tiruchirappalli-620 005
and the work has not been submitted either in whole or in part for any other degree or
diploma at any University or Institute.
M. JAYACHANDRAN
Tiruchirappalli -5
August 2014
CONTENTS
Chapter
No.
Title
Page
No.
Preface
i
Abstract
iii
I
Introduction
1
II
Themes of the Select Plays of Eugene O’Neill,
Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller
34
III
Characterization
85
IV
Social Concerns of the Writers
148
V
Conclusion
179
Works Cited
204
Publications
i
Preface
The plays of Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller have a
permanent appeal for readers. O’Neill has a tragic vision of life and any study of the
plays of O’Neill cannot ignore the important aspect of his plays. Tennessee Williams’
use of expressionism and symbols in his plays has earned him a reputation as an
experimentalist in American drama. Arthur Miller’s social concern has given him a
status as an American writer with social consciousness. These three writers are united
by a common major theme, namely, the theme of conflict between the individual and
the society. An attempt is made in this dissertation to explore this theme with
reference to the select plays of these three writers.
I take this opportunity to express my gratitude to my mentor and Research
Advisor, Dr. S. Ramamurthy, Dean of Academics and HOD of English, Srimad
Andavan Arts and Science College (Autonomous), Tiruchirappalli for his invaluable
guidance in completing this thesis successfully. His lectures on American drama and
the useful discussion I had with him on this topic of the thesis are quite useful in
formulating my ideas. I must also thank him for his meticulous scrutiny of the
manuscripts of the thesis and making corrections wherever they were needed. He was
a constant source of inspiration during the course of my research. But for his help and
guidance this thesis would not have got its present shape.
I must also record my sincere thanks to the members of the Doctoral Committee
for their suggestions. It is my duty to thank Mr. N. Kasthurirangan, the Secretary and
Correspondent of Srimad Andavan Arts and Science College (Autonomous) and the
Principal for their constant encouragement in my research. I am very thankful to my
well wishers and friends for their moral support. I must thank my dear wife H. Radhika
ii
for helping me in all possible ways to complete the thesis. I am very much indebted to
my parents who have cherished ambition that I should obtain doctorate in literature.
Thanks are due to the librarians of National College, Srimad Andavan Arts and Science
College and Bharathidasan University for lending me books.
Finally, I offer my prayers to Lord Muruga seeking his benign blessings.
iii
Abstract
American drama has undergone tremendous changes all over the years.
Naturalism, symbolism and expressionism are some of the new traits of American
drama in the twentieth century. Eugene O’ Neill, Tennessee Williams and Arthur
Miller are the three major American playwrights of the twentieth century who have
shown their concern for the American society that has been ailing with its social,
economic and political problems. They present the dilemma of modern man in their
respective plays. (Chapter -I)
The themes of the select plays of Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams and
Arthur Miller are taken for an in depth study in the second chapter. Their themes can
be broadly classified as follows: the theme of alienation, theme of disillusionment,
theme of despair, theme of search for identity, theme of conflict between the
individual and the society, theme of complex human relationship, theme of
disintegration, theme of power and sex and the theme of familial values. (Chapter- II)
O’Neill has a tragic vision and his characters are isolated individuals, day
dreamers and victims by their own actions. Tennessee Williams’ characters are
alienated women in the society. Arthur Miller’s characters belong to different strata of
American society that shirk their social responsibility. Arthur Miller has social
consciousness and that is evident in his plays. (Chapter-III)
The two World wars, the Great Depression of 1930, the Wall Street Crash,
Salem Witch Trial and The Holocaust were a few happenings that affected the
American society.
The themes and characters of the writers reflect their world views on American
society. All the three writers are conscious of the ‘American dream’. (Chapter –IV)
iv
There is always a conflict between man and God in O’Neill’s plays, a conflict
between man and man in Tennessee Williams and a conflict between the individual
and the society in all the plays of the three writers. Their characters are individuals
that reflect the changing moods and tendencies in America. These writers adopt
different techniques in their respective plays and who have contributed to the
development of American drama. They emerge as representative writers of twentieth
century American society. (Chapter- V)
Chapter – I
Introduction
1
Chapter - I
Introduction
Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller are the renowned
American playwrights of the twentieth century. They have stirred the conscience of
modern America through their plays. Their plays have been much discussed in
academic circles for their contribution to American drama. A brief discussion on the
growth and development of American Drama is very much relevant here for
examining the plays of these three authors. The American drama has undergone
tremendous changes in all through the years. In the initial stages, American drama
imitated English and European theatre until well into the twentieth century. Often,
plays from England were translated from European languages. During the nineteenth
century, melodramas with exemplary democratic figures and clear contrasts between
good and evil were popular. Plays about social problems such as slavery also drew
large audiences; sometimes these plays were adaptations of novels like Uncle Tom's
Cabin. Not until the twentieth century would serious plays attempt aesthetic
innovation. Minstrel shows, based on African-American music and folkways -performed by white characters using "blackface" makeup -- also developed original
forms and expressions. The large cultural wave of Modernism, which gradually
emerged in Europe and the United States in the early years of the 20th century,
expressed a sense of modern life through art as a sharp break from the past, as well as
from Western civilization's classical traditions.
Most American plays of the 18th and 19th centuries strongly reflected British
influence. In fact, no New York City theatre season presented more American plays
2
than British plays until 1910. Although the British repertory dominated the American
stage for so long, American drama had begun to diverge from British drama by the
time of Andrew Jackson s presidency, from 1828 to 1836. British plays,
which typically reflected the attitudes and manners of the upper classes, were by then
in conflict with more egalitarian American values. Despite this growing divergence,
British actors, theater managers, and plays continued to cross the Atlantic Ocean with
regularity, and most American plays copied British models until the early 20th
century. By the end of the 19th 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 20th century in both comedies
and tragedies. American drama achieved international recognition with the
psychological realism of plays by Eugene O Neill and their searing investigation of
characters inner lives. As the century advanced, the number of topics considered
suitable for drama broadened to encompass race, gender, sexuality, and death. (The
massive social change that went on during the Great Depression also had an effect on
theatre in the United States. Plays took on social roles, identifying with immigrants
and the unemployed.)
The Federal Theatre Project, a New Deal program set up by Franklin
D. Roosevelt, helped to promote theatre and provide jobs for actors. The program
staged many elaborate and controversial plays such as It Can’t Happen Here by
Sinclair Lewis and The Cradle Will Rock by Marc Blitzstein. By contrast, the
legendary producer Brock Pemberton was among those who felt that it was more than
ever a time for comic entertainment, in order to provide an escape from the prevailing
harsh social conditions: typical of his productions was Lawrence Riley’s comedy
3
Personal Appearance (1934), whose success on Broadway (501 performances)
vindicated Pemberton. The years between the World Wars were years of extremes.
Eugene O’Neill’s plays were the high point for serious dramatic plays leading up to
the outbreak of war in Europe. Beyond the Horizon (1920), for which he won his first
Pulitzer Prize; he later won Pulitzers for Anna Christie (1922) and Strange Interlude
(1928) as well as the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1940 proved to be a pivotal year for
African-American theatre. Frederick O’Neal and Abram Hill founded ANT, or the
American Negro Theatre, the most renowned African-American theatre group of the
1940s. Their stage was small and located in the basement of a library in Harlem, and
most of the shows were attended and written by African-Americans. Some shows
include Theodore Browne's Natural Man (1941), Abram Hill's Walk Hard (1944), and
Owen Dodson’s Garden of Time (1945). At ANT, many famous actors received their
training there, including Harry Belafonte, Sidney Poitier, Alice and Alvin Childress,
Osceola Archer, Ruby Dee, Earle Hyman, Hilda Simms, among many others. (World
Encyclopedia 403)
After World War II, American theatre came into its own. Arthur Miller and
Tennessee Williams had already established themselves as playwrights. In the 1950s
and 1960s, experimentation in the Arts spread into theatre as well, with plays such as
Hair including nudity and drug culture references. Musicals remained popular as well,
and musicals such as West Side Story and A Chorus Line broke previous records. At
the same time, shows like Stephen Sondheim’s Company began to deconstruct the
musical form as it has been practiced through the mid-century, moving away from
traditional plot and realistic external settings to explore the central character's inner
state; his Follies relied on pastiches of the Ziegfeld Follies-styled variety show; his
4
Pacific Overtures used Japanese Kabuki theatrical practices; and Merrily We Roll
Along told its story backwards. Similarly, Bob Fosse’s production of Chicago
returned the musical to its vaudeville origins.
In the late 1990s and 2000s, American theatre began to borrow from cinematic
and operatic roots. For instance, Julie Taymor, director of The Lion King directed Die
Zauberflote at the Metropolitan Opera. Also, Broadway musicals were developed
around Disney's Mary Poppins, Tarzan, The Little Mermaid, and the one that started it
all, Beauty and the Beast, which may have contributed to Times Square’s
revitalization in the 1990s. Also, Mel Brook’s The Producers and Young Frankenstein
are based on his hit films. During the period between the World Wars, American
drama came to maturity, thanks in large part to the works of Eugene O’Neill and of
the Provincetown. O'Neill's experiments with theatrical form and his combination of
Naturalist and Expressionist techniques inspired other playwrights to use greater
freedom in their works, whether expanding the techniques of Realism, as in Susan
Glaspell’s Trifles, or borrowing more heavily from German Expressionism, Other
distinct movements during this period include folk-drama/regionalism (Paul Green’s
Pulitzer-winning In Abraham’s Bosom), "pageant" drama (Green’s The Lost Colony
about the mysterious Roanoke Colony), and even a return to poetic drama (Maxwell
Anderson’s Winterset). At the same time, the economic crisis of the Great Depression
led to the growth of protest drama, as seen in the Federal Theatre Project’s Living
Newspaper productions and in the works of Clifford Odets (e.g., Waiting for Lefty)
and of moralist drama, as in Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes and The Children’s
Hour. Other popular playwrights of this century include George S. Kaufman, George
Kelly, and a set of playwrights who followed O'Neill's path of philosophical
5
searching, Philip Barry, Thornton Wilder (Our Town)) and William Sarovan (The
Time of Your Life). Theatre criticism kept pace with the drama, such as in the work of
George Jean Nathan and in the numerous books and journals on American theater that
were published during this time. (Meserve, Walter J. An Outline History of American
Drama 46)
The stature that American drama had achieved between the Wars was
cemented during the post-World War II generation, with the final works of O'Neill
and his generation being joined by such towering figures as Tennessee Williams and
Arthur Miller, as well as by the maturation of the musical theatre form. Other key
dramatists include William Inge, Arthur Laurents and Paddy Chayefsky in the 50s, the
avant garde movement of Jack Richardson, Arthur Kopit, Jack Gelber and Edward
Albee the 60s, and the maturation of black drama through Lorraine Hansberry, James
Baldwin and Amiri Baraka. In the musical theatre, important figures include Rodgers
and Hammerstein, Lerner and Loewe, Betty Comden and Adolph Green, Richard
Adler and Jerry Ross, Frank Loesser, Jule Styne, Jerry Bock, Meredith Wilson and
Stephen Sondheim. The period beginning in the mid-1960s, with the passing of Civil
Rights legislation and its repercussions, came the rise of an "agenda" theatre
comparable to that of the 1930s. Many of the major playwrights from the mid-century
continued to produce new works, but were joined by names like Sam Shepard, Neil
Simon, Romulus Linney, and John Guare. Many important dramatists were women,
including Beth Henley, Marsha Norman, Wendy Wasserstein, Megan Terry, Paula
Vogel and Maria Irene Fornes. The growth of ethnic pride movements led to more
success by dramatists from racial minorities, such as black playwrights Douglas
Turner Ward, Adrienne Kennedy, Ed Bullins, who created a dramatic history of
6
United States with their cycle of plays, The Pittsburgh Cycle, one for each decade of
the 20th century. Asian American theatre is represented in the early 70s by Frank
Chin and achieved international success with David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly.
Latino theatre grew from the local activist performances of Luis Valdez's Chicanofocused Teatro Campesino to his more formal plays, such as Zoot Suit, and later to the
award winning work of Cuban Americans Fornés (multiple Obies) and her student
Nilo Cruz (Pulitzer), to Puerto Rican playwrights Jose Rivera and Miguel Pinero, and
to the Tony Award winning musical about Dominicans in New York City, In the
Heights. Finally, the rise of the gay rights movement and of the AIDS crisis led to a
number of important gay and lesbian dramatists, including Christopher Durang, Holly
Hughes, Karen Malpede, Terrence McNally, Larry Kramer, Tony Kushner, whose
Angels in America won the Tony Award two years in a row, and composer-playwright
Jonathan Larson, whose musical Rent ran for over twelve years. (Meserve, Walter J.
An Outline History of American Drama)
Throughout the century realism, naturalism, and symbolism continued to
inform the plays. An important movement in early twentieth century drama
was expressionism. Expressionist playwrights tried to convey the dehumanizing
aspects of twentieth century technological society through such devices as minimal
scenery, telegraphic dialogue, talking machines, and characters portrayed as types
rather than individuals. Eugene O'Neill wrote expressionist dramas. The Twentieth
century also saw the attempted revival of drama in verse, but although such writers as
William Butler Yeats, W.H. Auden, T.S. Eliot, Christopher Fry, and Maxwell
Anderson produced effective results, verse drama was no longer an important form in
English. Three major figures of twentieth century drama are the American Eugene
7
O'Neill, the German Bertolt Brecht, and the Italian Luigi Pirandello. O'Neill's body of
plays in many forms—naturalistic, expressionist, symbolic, psychological—won him
the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1936 and indicated the coming-of-age of American
drama. Brecht wrote dramas of ideas, usually promulgating socialist or Marxist
theory. World War II and its attendant horrors produced a widespread sense of the
utter meaninglessness of human existence. This sense is brilliantly expressed in the
body of plays that have come to be known collectively as the theater of the absurd. By
abandoning traditional devices of the drama, including logical plot development,
meaningful dialogue, and intelligible characters, absurdist playwrights sought to
convey modern humanity's feelings of bewilderment, alienation, and despair—the
sense that reality is itself unreal. In their plays human beings often portrayed as dupes,
clowns who, although not without dignity, are at the mercy of forces that are
inscrutable. Probably the most famous plays of the theater of the absurd are Eugene
Ionesco’s Bald Soprano (1950) and Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1953). The
sources of the theater of the absurd are diverse; they can be found in the tenets of
Surrealism, Dadaism and Existentialism; the traditions of the music hall, Vaudeville,
and Burlesque and in the films of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. Playwrights
who belong to the theater of the absurd are Jean Genet (French), Max Frisch and
Friedrich Durrenmatt (Swiss), Fernando Arrabal (Spanish), and the early plays of
Edward Albee (American). The pessimism and despair of the twentieth century are
also found expression in the existentialist dramas of Jean-Paul Sartre, in the realistic
and symbolic dramas of Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, and Jean Anouilh, and
the surrealist plays of Jean Cocteau. Elements of the theatre of cruelty can be found in
the brilliantly abusive language of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger (1956) and
8
Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962), in the ritualistic aspects of
some of Genet's plays, in the masked utterances and enigmatic silences of Harold
Pinter’s "comedies of menace," and in the orgiastic abandon of Julian Beck’s Paradise
Now! (1968); it was fully expressed in Peter Brooks's production of Peter Weiss’s
Marat/Sade (1964). During the last third of the twentieth century a few continental
European dramatists, such as Dario Fo in Italy and Heiner Müller in Germany, stand
out in the theatre world. However, for the most part, the countries of the continent saw
an emphasis on creative trends in directing rather than a flowering of new plays.
(Jacob, John. History of American Literature.)
The late decades of the twentieth century were also a time of considerable
experiment and iconoclasm. Experimental dramas of the 1960s and 70s by such
groups as Beck's Living Theatre and Jerzy Grotowski’s Polish Laboratory Theatres
were followed by a mixing and merging of various kinds of media with aspects
of postmodernism, improvisational techniques, performance art, and other kinds of
avant-garde theater. Thematically, the social upheavals of the 1960s, 70s, and 80s—
particularly the civil rights and women's movements, gay liberation, and the AIDS
crisis—provided impetus for new plays that explored the lives of minorities and
women. Beginning with Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun (1959), drama by
and about African Americans emerged as a significant theatrical trend. In the 1960s
plays such as James Baldwin’s Blues for Mr. Charley (1964), Amiri Baraka’s
searing Dutchman (1964), and Charles Gordone's No Place to Be Somebody (1967)
explored black American life; writers including Ed Bullins (e.g., The Taking of Miss
Janie, 1975), Ntozake Shange (e.g., For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide
When the Rainbow is Enuf, 1976) and Charles Fuller (e.g., A Soldier's Play, 1981)
9
carried these themes into later decades. One of the most distinctive and prolific of the
century's African-American playwrights, August Wilson, debuted on Broadway in
1984 with Ma Rainey's Black Bottom and continued to define the black American
experience in his ongoing dramatic cycle into the next century.
The plays of Arthur Miller, Eugene O’Neill, and Tennessee Williams deal
with the important aspect of the twentieth century, namely the “lost” protagonist
confronting apparitions from the past, the isolated individual seeking connection in a
godless “wasteland” of modern technocracy, or the “Walter Mitty” dreamer following
elusive and non-existent rainbows. (Meserve, Walter J. An Outline History of
American Drama) The dramas of Miller, O’Neill, and Tennessee Williams portray the
tendencies and crisis of the post World War II. The recurrent “American” themes
were: the dissolution of the American family, the failure of the American Dream, and
the collapse of capitalism in American economics. The contemporary drama is post
“9/11” in character and reflects relevant, twenty-first century premises: society as
violence-riddled, the lurking threat of terrorism and serial crime, the loss of faith in
any deity or value-system, and the concept of totalitarianism masquerading as
democracy. American drama between the two world wars deals, in a significant
manner, with the enigma of the emerging American family, its vacillations and
institutions, and its eventual collapse.
Miller takes up the void that develops between father and son, between
husband and wife, and between two brothers in Death of a Salesman, The Crucible,
and The Price.But O’Neill is consistently obsessed in his plays with the
destructiveness inherent in the Irish-American pseudo-aristocratic family, especially
in Long Day’s Journey Into Night and Strange Interlude. Tennessee Williams
10
emphasizes the disintegration of the American South by depicting characters like
Amanda Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie and Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar
Named Desire, women who attempt to arrange the particulars of harsh modern reality
by retreating into a distant past of dead chivalry and non-existent “gentlemen callers.”
Each of these factors—the disintegration of family and the failure of the past—
materializes in the plays by Auburn, Lavery, Shanley, and McDonagh, but the
approach in the contemporary works utilizes twenty-first century tactics and
methodologies to address those issues. (Hart, James David: The Oxford Companion to
American Literature)
Just as the modern dramatic presentation of familial issues has evolved
considerably in contemporary drama, the presence of violence in human experience
has shifted, from the modern to the contemporary play, from allusion and distant
incidence to inescapable and stark pervasiveness and to visible acts of brutality on the
stage. For O’Neill, “sin,” in a post-Puritanical sense, necessitates certain Old
Testament consequences; desolation, recrimination, and punishment follow the
“sinful” act in his plays. The societal construct that progresses routinely while
violence and familial isolation persist is the subject of both modern and contemporary
plays; in the modern work, the social composition in which the characters wrestle
often materializes as a product of economic, post-war, and ethnic causes.
The social structure present in a contemporary play frequently defies
categorization or definition. In The Crucible, the Puritanical organization that
permeates Salem operates by specific imperatives, and John Proctor (as well as
Abigail) outwardly rejects those regulations throughout the play, even until his final
grasping of his “name” as he walks to the gallows in the final scene. The Price
11
depicts two brothers whose lives have been altered inexorably by the social and
economic constraints of the Depression. Williams’ Blanche Du Bois and Amanda
Wingfield are haunted by their fidelity to a fading Southern chivalry, indistinct but
still ostensibly present in their behaviour. Even O’Neill’s Ephraim and Eben Cabot in
Desire Under the Elms pay homage to the rock-surrounded farm that prevails as
metaphor for a construct of Old Testament justice.
Modern drama developed from a series of sociological and cultural events
whose presence is discernible in some form within the confines of the play; the
contemporary play’s sources are not so simply traceable, possibly a symptom of the
accumulation of varying and contradictory elements that comprise post September 11
civilization. Nina Leeds’ twenty-five year “interlude” originates in the death of
Gordon Shaw in World War I. Willy Loman’s destructive behavior emanates from
the particulars of the shortcomings of capitalism. Amanda Wingfield and Blanche
DuBois are trapped in a failed and deteriorating Southern regime whose walls are as
flimsy as the veil that a Southern belle uses to cover her face. C.W.E. Bigsby in his
book A Critical Introduction Twentieth Century American Drama declares that
Blanche
is self consciously her own playwright….The dramas which she
enacts—southern belle, sensitive virgin, sensuous temptress, martyred
daughter, wronged wife—are all carefully presented performances
embedded in their own narrative contexts (24).
Repeatedly, the character in a contemporary play is floating in a context that is
derived from insubstantial and indefinite sources. In other words, the modern play’s
character may often be traced or defined within a discernible social construct while
12
the contemporary play’s character operates within parameters that resist simplistic
categorization. Arthur Miller, in the canon of his several modern plays that followed
the Second World War, recognized that American drama needed to address specific
issues; he asserts thus:
Since the war began our most brilliant statesmen and writers have been
trying…to frame a statement, a ‘name’ for this war. They have not
found it, and they will not find it, because they are looking for something
new (Echoes 35).
The attempt to demonstrate how the motivations of specific characters are
derived from certain social events emerges consistently in the works of Miller,
O’Neill, and Tennessee Williams. However, drama lagged behind other branches of
literature, particularly poetry and novel in the United States of America and it took a
longer time to mature into a full-fledged literary genre, appealing to popular taste. By
the end of the nineteenth century, the Puritan prejudice against plays had completely
disappeared. This led to a mushroom like spate in the number of plays produced, the
quality of these plays being no better than mediocre. The standard of drama had fallen
to a considerable extent. Vaudeville was common in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth century, and is notable for heavily influencing early film, radio, and
television productions in the United States of America. George Burns was a very
long-lived American comedian who started out in the Vaudeville community, but
went on to enjoy a career running until the 1990s. Some Vaudeville theatres built
between about 1900 and 1920 managed to survive as well, though many went through
periods of alternate use, most often as movie theatres until the second half of the
century saw many urban populations decline and multiplexes built in the suburbs. By
13
the beginning of the twentieth century, nearly 1752 theatres had become decidedly
more sophisticated in the country, as it had in Europe. Ethel Barrymore and John
Drew were the stars of this era. This apart, the advance of the motion pictures also led
to many changes in theatre. (Jacob, John. History of American Literature) The
popularity of musical may have been due in part of the fact that the early films had no
sound, and could thus not compete, until The Jazz Singer of 1927, which combined
both talking and music in a moving picture. More complex and sophisticated dramas
bloomed in this time period, and acting styles became more subdued. Even by 1915,
actors were being lured away from theatre and to the silver screen, and Vaudeville
was beginning to face stiff competition. While revues consisting of mostly
unconnected songs, sketches, comedy routines, and scantily-clad dancing girls
dominated for the first twenty years of twentieth century, musical theatre would
eventually develop beyond this. By the beginning of the century, a strong sense of
nationalism in the arts was becoming evident throughout the Western world.
American artists were consciously striving to develop a national style. American
literature continued to follow realistic trends set by writers at the turn of the century.
Twentieth century authors have been disillusioned by social and economic injustices,
and by the effects of World war and economic depression. The dominant literary
figures of this century have focused upon tragic themes which reveal their
dissatisfaction with the romantic ideals of the past. A young group of writers
emerged after World War I to establish new styles in American fiction. They became
known as the Lost Generation, because they rebelled against traditional standards of
morality and taste, because they seemed to live their lives without moral purpose.
Reacting against the conventional standard imposed upon them by society, they
14
sought personal expression in tense emotional experiences and extravagant forms of
play. Their rebellion against traditional standards led them to seek new values and
new techniques to express more realistically the conflicts which they experienced.
They gave birth to a new cycle of American literature which, in creativity and
productivity, compares favourably with the Romantic period of the 19th century.
The golden decades of American theatre’s second phase were 1946 - 1966 in
which Eugene O’ Neill, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller and Edward Albee
excelled in producing society related plays. Of these playwrights, Tennessee Williams
proved the most durable for seeking out the most interesting themes about American
life and for finding the best dramatic means of presenting them. The next period of
American drama was in the 1970’s dominated by Sam Shepard and, later, David
Mamet whose writings break with the mainstream realism of American drama
maintained ever since the realism of O’Neill’s late plays.Mamet and Shepard have
created highly stylized, distinct forms of drama which, in one sense, reduce the range
of the realistic mimesis of the drama. Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman was hailed
as a classic almost when it first came out. Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, The
Crucible and A View from the Bridge are almost certain to remain in the American
repertory along with the best plays of O’Neill, Williams and Albee. Arthur Miller is
concerned to relate his drama to specific contemporary social contexts. The Crucible's
main relevance is to the goings on of HUAC in the twentieth century. Both Death of A
Salesman and A View From The Bridge are located in specific social situations: that of
a Salesman and his family in their New York home and the Italian American family
of Eddie Carbone in New York visited by illegal Sicilian immigrants. Arthur Miller’s
realism creates tight-knit family structures directly affected by their social
15
circumstances. It was Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire that appears to
have spurred Arthur Miller to make his own breakthrough in drama.
The writers of the twentieth century have been disillusioned by social and
economic injustices, and by the effects of World war and economic depression. The
dominant literary figures of this century have focused upon tragic themes which
reveal their dissatisfaction with the romantic ideals of the past. The renewed vitality in
the theatre came a few years later than that in poetry, but when it did come it came
with decided vigor. The works of Ibsen, G. B. Shaw and other great European
playwrights had overshadowed anything happening in the American theatres up to the
advent of Eugene O’ Neill. The way was prepared for O’Neill through the interest
shown in drama by two amateur groups in New York, the Washington Square Players
and the Provincetown theatre. It was the latter group with which the early work of
O’Neill is associated. There is a host of writers who have scaled great heights and
have brought the American drama to an equal status with the British drama. Clyde
Fitch and Langdon Mitchel, famous playwrights whose plays exhibited some increase
in literary sophistication, and also more serious writers notably Edward Sheldon,
William Vaughan Moody and Augustus Thomas who made serious attempt to
entertain themes had some relation to contemporary life. But none of these men were
permanently important, and the works of none achieved conspicuous excellence when
judged in accordance with the standards set by the contemporary efforts of novelist
and essayists, philosophers and historians. They consented to work within the very
narrow theatrical tradition, and that tradition tolerated no bold departure from longestablished stereo-types both artistic and moral.
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The stature that American drama had achieved between the Wars was
cemented during the post-World War II generation, with the final works of O'Neill
and his generation being joined by such towering figures as Tennessee Williams and
Arthur Miller. These writers took the responsibility of producing serious American
dramas that mirrored the contemporary American society with its problems and social
turmoil. Eugene O’Neill was a major literary figure, held by critics in American
literature, and it is unquestionable that he was the first American prolific writer. He
introduced classicism in drama at a time when it was enmeshed in sentimentalism. His
view of man in his plays is essentially tragic. Though his plays are modern, he strove
to bring into his an effect in harmony with traditional tragedy. He drew from Greek
drama such conventions as the chorus and the asides which suited his purpose of
exploring the vast, frightening terrain of human thought. He is, therefore, the
inevitable central figure in any literary discussion. He was not interested in the
relationship between man and man. He was mainly interested in the relationship
between Man and God. Thus, “man’s destiny, and man’s judgment under God is ever
present to O’Neill’s concern with dramatic involvement and character. He had written
thirty seven plays like William Shakespeare and all of them could be classified under
Tragedies. O’Neill tenaciously explored the darker aspects of the human condition,
embedding his plays with wide-ranging themes such as alcoholism, depression,
prostitution and race relations. In fact, nearly all of O’Neill’s plays are distillations of
personal tragedy, each tinged with the darkest shadings of melancholy and sorrow
drawn heavily from his experiences.
His remarkable plays are Beyond the Horizon(1918), The Emperor
Jones(1920), The Hairy Ape(1921), All God’s Chillun Got Wings(1923), Desire
17
Under the Elms(1924), The Great God Brown(1925), Strange Interlude(1927),
Mourning Becomes Electra(1931), The Iceman Cometh(1939), and Long Day’s
Journey into Night(1941). A brief note is given below on his plays:
Beyond the Horizon unfolds the tragedy of a young, farm-born dreamer,
whose romantic mind and frail body yearn for the open sea, the beckoning world
beyond the lines of hills which enclose his native town. The Emperor Jones is a
powerful dramatization of psychological obsession- fear. The Hairy Ape depicts a
rejected ship labourer who feels he belongs nowhere until he confronts an ape in a
zoo. All God's Chillun Got Wings is about miscegenation. Desire Under the Elms is
based on Euripides‘s Hippolytus and the boy Abbie in the play is competing with his
father for his mother’s love and masculine dominance. The play The Great God
Brown shows how man’s persistent efforts to conquer Nature are thwarted by
materialism, Christian asceticism and socially caused conflicts in the psyche.
Mourning Becomes Electra is a story retelling of the Oresteia by Aeschylus and the
play features murder, adultery, incestuous love and revenge, and even a group of
townspeople who function as a kind of Greek chorus. The plot of Strange Interlude
centers on Nina Leeds, the daughter of an Ivy League professor, who is devastated
when her adored fiancé is killed in World War I, before they have a chance to
consummate their passion. The Iceman Cometh is a parable of the destiny of man with
a religious significance. Long Day’s Journey into Night deals with the inter-family
isolation and shows how an outwardly prosperous and happy family suffers from
isolation. Anna Christi ends with an unnatural note of reconciliation. In treating
frustration in a naturalistic a way O’Neill used the themes of alienation from the land,
and the lure and the hostility of the sea. The play is conventional in structure and it is
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melodramatic in content. Lazarus Laughed does not deal with the happy man’s
laughter. Lazarus becomes a symbol of death-defeated. If death holds no powers,
Caesar too is powerless. As the choruses chant in rhythms of laughter, Lazarus grows
younger and more beautiful. Ah! Wilderness is a sentimental comedy of adolescent
youth. In the play Dynamo the main character thinks that he has found God in force,
and force is symbolized by the electric generator. An attempt to see the peace in the
Catholic Church appears in Days without End which shows John Struggling towards a
spiritual peace. A Moon for the Misbegotten again deals with characters trying to
conceal their true selves from the others. O’ Neill reveals that emotion is an ultimate
force, though it is largely negative and sterile. He wants to preserve the will to
believe, but finds that there is no place for will or belief.
Bound East for Cardiff, In the Zone, The Long Voyage Home, and The Moon
of the Caribbeans are the three short plays of O’Neill. O'Neill's plays were written
from an intensely personal point of view, deriving directly from the scarring effects of
his family's tragic relationships--his mother and father, who loved and torme nted
each other; his older brother, who loved and corrupted him and died of alcoholism in
middle age; and O'Neill himself, caught and torn between love for and rage at all
three. Among his most-celebrated long plays is Anna Christie, perhaps the classic
American example of the ancient "harlot with a heart of gold" theme; it became an
instant popular success. O'Neill's serious, almost solemn treatment of the struggle of a
poor Swedish-American girl to live down her early, enforced life of prostitution and
to find happiness with a likable but unimaginative young sailor is his leastcomplicated tragedy. Following a long succession of tragic visions, O'Neill's only
comedy, Ah, Wilderness! appeared on Broadway in 1933. Written in a lighthearted,
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nostalgic mood, the work was inspired in part by the playwright's mischievous desire
to demonstrate that he could portray the comic as well as the tragic side of life.
Dealing with the growing pains of a sensitive, adolescent boy, Ah, Wilderness! was
characterized by O'Neill as "the other side of the coin," meaning that it represented his
fantasy of what his own youth might have been, rather than what he believed it to
have been as dramatized later in Long Day's Journey into Night.
O'Neill's tragic view of life was perpetuated in his relationships with the three
women he married--two of whom he divorced--and with his three children. His elder
son, Eugene O'Neill, Jr. (by his first wife, Kathleen Jenkins), committed suicide at 40,
while his younger son, Shane (by his second wife, Agnes Boulton), drifted into a life
of emotional instability. His daughter, Oona (also by Agnes Boulton), was cut out of
his life when, at 18, she infuriated him by marrying Charlie Chaplin, who was
O'Neill's age. Until some years after his death in 1953, O'Neill, although respected in
the United States, was more highly regarded abroad. Sweden, in particular, always
held him in high esteem, partly because of his publicly acknowledged debt to the
influence of the Swedish playwright August Strindberg, whose tragic themes often
echo in O'Neill's plays. In 1936 the Swedish Academy gave O'Neill the Nobel Prize
for Literature, the first time the award had been conferred on an American playwright.
O'Neill's final years were spent in grim frustration. Unable to work, he longed for his
death and sat waiting for it in a Boston hotel, seeing no one except his doctor, a nurse,
and his third wife, Carlotta Monterey. O'Neill died as broken and tragic a figure as
any he had created for the stage. Raymond Williams quotes of O’Neill in his book
Modern Tragedy as follows:
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The tragedy of man is perhaps the only significant thing about him.
What I am after is to get an audience leaving the theatre with an
exultant feeling from seeing somebody on stage facing life, fighting
against the eternal odds, not conquering, but perhaps inevitably being
conquered. The individual life is made significant just by the struggle.
(Raymond Williams 116)
Like Eliot, he turned to the Greeks and shared the Greek view of the human
being as the helpless and tortured victim of the formidable forces of Fate. The modern
dramatist’s duty, according to O’Neill, is “to dig at the root of the sickness of today,”
the sickness being diagnosed by him as the consequence of “the death of the old God
and the failure of science and materialism to give a satisfactory new one.” (Quoted by
Joseph Wood Krutch in “Introduction to Eugene O’Neill’s Nine Plays (xvii)) Out of
the tragic predicament of man, he strove to create a sense of dignity of the human
being and an awareness of the meaning of life. It is a classic attempt on O’Neill’s part
to give a twofold justification of the ways of God or fate to man: “first, that suffering
and the very need to explain and symbolize it are the fountainhead of human action
and creativity: and second, that fated though he may be, man is ultimately a free and
responsible agent who brings most of his grief upon himself through pride.” (Monika
Gupta. The Plays of Eugene O’Neill 66) O’Neill, who started his dramatic career after
the World War I, has directed his attention to investigate the nature of a strictly
American brand of illusion and its clash with social reality. He has a tragic view of
“illusion” which cause suffering and shock to its victim.
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O’ Neill handled stylistic experiment with a sometimes disconcerting
lack of self-awareness, was prone to linguistic bathos, and often used
theatrical sledgehammers where nutcrackers were called for; but his
figure continues to dominate the American theatre, to which for the
first time he gave entirely distinctive shape. (Trussler, Simon.
Twentieth Century Drama 5)
O’Neill’s plays are replete with the theme of isolation and loneliness
permeating family and social relationships. The concept of isolation and loneliness is
vividly illustrated by the title of David Riesman’s sociological treatise, The Lonely
Crowd, and is comprehensively analyzed in Jung’s Modern Man in Search of a Soul.
Riesman demonstrates that in a lonely crowd the individuals are estranged from one
another, and communication and mutual understanding are replaced by estrangement
and hostility. Jung advances the thesis that science, knowledge, reason, civilization
and material progress only do violence to the natural forces which in turn seek
revenge, causing crisis and upheavals. Paul Tillich writes: “Mankind is in the state of
universal existential estrangement.” (Paul Tillich, Existential Analysis and Religious
Symbols 285) The situation is one of all-encompassing isolation and loneliness of
mankind. The existentalist movement actually arose in revolution against the
corruption of values in capitalist. Its basic conviction is that the evils are rooted in the
very concept and existence of society. It rejects the view of human being as a social
animal growing, enriching himself and realizing his freedom in his social relation
with other. O’Neill’s plays attempt to explain human sufferings and the way to justify
it. In a letter to George Jean Nathan O’Neill states:
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The playwright must dig at the roots of sickness of today as he feels it
the death of the old God and the failure of science and materialism to
give any satisfying new one for the surviving primitive religious
instinct to find a meaning for life in. (Quoted by Joseph Wood Krutch
in “Introduction to Eugene O’Neill’s Nine Plays (xvii).
Unlike a philosopher O’Neill chose literature as the vehicle for his views on
matters of fundamental importance. Sartre, Camus, Dostoevsky and many other
thinkers had found that philosophy was not always the right medium for expressing
deep thoughts about so illusive a thing as human soul. That is why they chose the
medium of fiction to express their ideas indirectly. No wonder Unamuno insists that a
philosopher is to be a poet as well, and this is the reason why the American
playwrights—O’Neill, Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams chose dramas to
express their attitude towards contemporary man and his crisis. (Monika, Gupta. The
Plays of Eugene O’Neill 75)
Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller are the two American major
playwrights after O’Neill. They are interpreters of American ethos and their work
shows the difference of their own personalities and their artistic approach. Tennessee
Williams is the poet who delights in language and symbolism and exotic imagery;
Arthur Miller is the prose writer in the tradition of Ibsen, the psychological playwright
with a strong moral commitment. From the beginning Tennessee Williams probed the
dark side of human nature, the vulnerability of human beings with all their
sensitivities and illusions. He points out the viciousness of human beings when they
sense a difference or alienation in another. Tennessee Williams was born on March
26, 1911 and he suffered through a difficult and troubling childhood. His father,
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Cornelius Williams, was a shoe salesman and an emotionally absent parent. Williams
was sickly as a child, and his mother was a loving but smothering woman. In 1918 the
family moved from Mississippi to St. Louis, and the change from a small provincial
town to a big city was very difficult for Tennessee Williams' mother. The young
Tennessee Williams was also influenced by his older sister Rose's emotional and
mental imbalance during their childhood. In 1929, Tennessee Williams enrolled in the
University of Missouri. After two years his father withdrew him for flunking ROTC,
and he took a job at his father's shoe company. He despised the job but worked at the
warehouse by day and wrote late into the night.
Tennessee Williams went back to school and graduated from the University of
Iowa in 1938. He then moved to New Orleans, where he began going by the name
Tennessee, a nickname he'd been given in college thanks to his southern drawl. After
struggling with his sexuality through his youth, he finally entered a new life as a gay
man, with a new name, a new home, and a promising new career. In the early 40s,
Tennessee Williams moved between several cities for different jobs and playwriting
classes, also working at MGM as a scriptwriter.
Tennessee Williams shows the irony in how all men and women want
desperately to communicate in a society, even when its taboos ensure a destructive
battle of domination. In his plays, madness and sometimes death is often the lot of the
loser. He was a ruthless analyst of the American psyche and an exorcist of illusions.
He was frequently criticized for how he used violence, especially in his treatment of
sexual themes, but the violence is essential to his message, and at his best, his
statements about the human condition ring true. Plays like A Streetcar Named Desire,
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and Night of the Iguana resonate beyond the confines of the
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period that produced them.Tennessee Williams deals with social problems and
contemporary issues such as the place of women in society, homosexuality, and its
social acceptance, and the plight of battered wives in his plays. Dr. Egbert S. Oliver
in his book American Literature 1890-1965 – An Anthology remarks thus:
Tennessee Williams has been persistently occupied with the pathos of
human failure. He has centered his attention upon the inner life, the
psychology of adjustment necessitated by the impingement of harsher
reality upon a tender inner vision of glory. (237)
Tennessee Williams was one of the first American dramatists to stir the
conscience of the nation. In fact, the philosophical and even mystical nature of
Tennessee Williams’ work can be even more frightening than its social content.
Tennessee Williams spoke not only just for society’s unfortunate misfits but also for
conformists. He speaks about the inherent loneliness of modern life, the tendency of
individuals to approach damaging or fatal alienation, the withdrawal from ultimate
questions, the attraction of ill-considered ideals. The fragility of Tennessee Williams’
dramatic world is hidden by its outward brutality. Like other perceptive writers who
took the South as their theme, Tennessee Williams realized something universal: that
the brutal and unfeeling surfaces of people’s lives mirrors a pathetic and often
hopeless striving – a desire that lacks direction and a fascination with escape and rest
through madness, sexual intercourse, and the grave. His plays A Streetcar Named
Desire, The Glass Menagerie and Cat on A Hot Tin Roof are considered among the
finest of the American stage. At their best, his twenty-five full-length plays combined
lyrical intensity, haunting loneliness, and hypnotic violence. He is widely considered
the greatest Southern playwright and one of the greatest playwrights in the history of
American drama.
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In 1944 came the great turning point in his career: The Glass Menagerie. First
produced in Chicago to great success, the play transferred to Broadway in 1945 and
won the NY Critics Circle Award. While success freed Tennessee Williams
financially, it also made it difficult for him to write. He went to Mexico to work on a
play originally titled The Poker Night. The play A Streetcar Named Desiret won
Tennessee Williams a second NY Critics' Circle Award and a Pulitzer Prize in 1947,
enabling him to travel and buy a home in Key West as an escape for both relaxation
and writing. The year 1951 brought The Rose Tattoo and Tennessee Williams' first
Tony award, as well as the successful film adaptation of A Streetcar Named Desire,
starring Vivian Leigh. Around this time, Tennessee Williams met Frank Merlo. The
two fell in love, and the young man became Tennessee Williams' romantic partner
until Merlo's untimely death in 1961. He was a steadying influence on Tennessee
Williams, who suffered from depression and lived in fear that he, like his sister Rose,
would go insane. The following years were some of Williams' most productive.
His plays were a great success in the United States and abroad, and he was
able to write works that were well-received by critics and popular with audiences,
including The Rose Tattoo (1950),Cat on a Hot Tin (1955), Night of the Iguana
(1961), and many others. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof won Tennessee Williams his second
Pulitzer Prize, and was his last truly great artistic and commercial success. He gave
American theatre goers unforgettable characters, an incredible vision of life in the
South, and a series of powerful portraits of the human condition. He was deeply
interested in "poetic realism," namely the use of everyday objects which, seen
repeatedly and in the right contexts, become imbued with symbolic meaning. His
plays also seemed preoccupied with the extremes of human brutality and sexual
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behavior: madness, rape, incest, nymphomania, as well as violent and fantastic deaths.
Tennessee Williams himself often commented on the violence in his own work, which
to him seemed part of the human condition; he was conscious, also, of the violence in
his plays being expressed in a particularly American setting. In Tennessee Williams'
plays the themes of desire and isolation reveal, among other things, the influence of
having grown up gay in a homophobic world. Tennessee Williams had become
dependent on drugs, and the problem only grew worse after the death of Frank Merlo
in 1961. Merlo's death from lung cancer sent Tennessee Williams into a deep
depression that lasted ten years. Williams was also insecure about his work, which
was sometimes of inconsistent quality, and he was violently jealous of younger
playwrights. Overwork and drug use continued to take their toll on him, and on
February 23, 1983, Williams choked to death on the lid of one of his pill bottles. He
left behind an impressive body of work, including plays that continue to be performed
the world over.
Tennessee Williams was one of the more complex individuals on the
American literary scene of the Mid-twentieth century. His work focused on disturbed
emotions within families – most of them Southern. He was known for incantatory
repetitions, a poetic Southern diction, weird Gothic settings, and Freudian exploration
of human emotion. One of the first American writers to live openly as a homosexual,
Williams explained that the longings of his tormented characters expressed their
loneliness. His characters suffer intensely in their lives. He has written seventy four
plays. The Glass Menagerie(1945), A Streetcar Named Desire(1947), Summer and
Smoke(1948), The Rose Tattoo(1950), Camino Real(1953), A Cat on A Hot Tin
Roof(1955), Orpheus Descending(1957), Sweet Bird of a Youth(1959), In the Bar a of
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Tokyo Hotel(1969) and Vieux Carr’e (1977) are a few well-known plays of Tennessee
Williams. He derives his themes from psychoanalysis, conferred upon American
drama by the influence of Freud's theories given in the books Suppressed
Desires and Interpretation of Dreams. His most memorable characters are women,
faded belles such as Amanda Wingfield, Alma Winemiller, and Blanche Du Bois,
whose old-fashioned manners and charm suggest a vistful recollection of privileged
antebellum life. The Glass Menagerie is a four-character memory play that has strong
autobiographical elements, featuring characters based on Tennessee Williams himself,
his histrionic mother, and his mentally fragile sister Laura. Blanche Du Bois in
A Streetcar Named Desire is a fading, though still attractive Southern belle who clings
to high-toned Southern customs of decorum. The conflict between Blanche and
Stanley is a conflict between complex, introspective idealism and open sexuality. His
play, Summer and Smoke is set in Glorious Hill, Mississippi, from the "turn of the
century through 1916", and centers on a highly-strung, unmarried minister's daughter,
Alma Winemiller and the spiritual/sexual romance that nearly blossoms between her
and the wild, undisciplined young doctor who grew up next door, John Buchanan, Jr.
The Rose Tattoo is a play that tells the story of an Italian - American widow in
Louisiana who has allowed her to withdraw from the world after her husband's death,
and expects her daughter to do the same. Camino Real is a play that takes its title from
its setting, alluded to El Camino Real, a dead-end place in a Spanish-speaking town
surrounded by desert with sporadic transportation to the outside world. The play Cat
on a Hot Tin Roof examines the relationships among members of Big Daddy's family,
primarily between his son Brick and Maggie the "Cat", Brick's wife. The play features
several recurring motifs, such as social mores, greed, superficiality, mendacity, decay,
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sexual desire, repression, and death. Orpheus Descending is a modern retelling of the
ancient Greek Orpheus legend and deals, in the most elemental fashion, with the
power of passion, art, and imagination to redeem and revitalize life, giving it new
meaning. The story is set in a dry goods store in a small southern town marked, in the
play, by conformity, sexual frustration, narrowness, and racism. Sweet Bird of Youth
is a play which tells the story of a Gigolo and drifter, Chance Wayne, who returns to
his home town as the companion of a faded movie star, Alexandra Del Lago
(travelling incognito as Princess Kosmonopolis), whom he hopes to use to help him
break into the movies." In the Bar of Tokyo Hotel is a lacerating study of a painter’s
life. Vieux Carr’e is a play that focuses on a nameless, newly transplanted, innocent,
aspiring St. Louis writer who is struggling with his literary career, poverty, loneliness,
homosexuality, and a cataract.
Arthur Miller, a playwright after Tennessee Williams occupies a significant
place in the tradition of American drama. He is a writer with social consciousness
who has grown during the Great Depression in the United States of America which
determined his work. The Depression gave him his compassionate understanding of
the insecurity of man in modern industrial civilization, his deep-rooted belief in social
responsibility, and the moral earnestness that has occasioned unsympathetic – and
often unjust – criticism of the age of the Affluent Society. Throughout his career,
Arthur Miller has continually addressed several distinct but related issues in both his
dramatic and expository writings. At the heart of Miller’s work, partly concealed and
only inadequately expressed in the early plays but fully articulated in the later ones, is
a concern with guilt that is directly related to his experience as a Jew who had
survived the Holocaust, and as an individual who had discovered his own potential for
29
betrayal. The apparent clarity of the clash between the free individual and a politically
malevolent system had merely served to conceal the subtlety of a problem which had
become increasingly central to his work, and which he perceived as having
metaphysical rather than social origins. In his early plays and in a series of essays
published in the 1940s and 50s, Miller first outlined a form of tragedy applicable to
modern times and contemporary characters, challenging traditional notions suggesting
that only kings, queens, princes, and other members of the nobility can be suitable
subjects for tragedy.
Arthur Miller’s notable works are: A Man Who Had all the Luck(1944), All My
Sons(1947), Death of Salesman(1949), An Enemy of the People(1950), The
Crucible(1953), A View from the Bridge(1955), Incident at Vichy(1964), After the
Fall(1964), The Price(1968), The Ride Down Mt. Morgan(1991) and Broken
Glass(1994). The Man Who Had All the Luck is a play that depicts a young man,
David Beeves, who has a hard time dealing with his good luck, especially when he
sees his no less deserving brother have no luck at all. In All My Sons, Joe Keller, is an
apparently successful businessman who made his fortune by selling airplane parts to
the army during World War II. The play is centered on the conflict between his
conscience and business motive. Death of a Salesman tells the story of Willy Loman,
a down-on-his-luck traveling salesman. In order to cope with his failures in life, he
retreats to the past in his mind and seems to be losing touch with reality. An Enemy of
the People, an adaptation of Henrik Ibsen's play of the same title, Miller's version
remains very faithful to the original as he worked from a literal translation of the
original Norwegian. The play depicts a respected, resort-town doctor who finds
himself shunned by his community. The Crucible is an allegorical re-telling of the
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McCarthy era red scare that occurred in the United States after World War II. Based
on historical accounts, the play is set during the 1692 Salem Witchcraft Trials when
several young girls accuse innocent town members of witchcraft to avoid getting into
trouble for entertaining ideas of witchery themselves. The play A View from the
Bridge deals with the life of Eddie Carbone, a head-strong longshoreman who has
helped raise his wife's niece, Catherine, but has developed an unwitting sexual
attraction towards her. The play Incident at Vichy is set in Vichy France during the
German occupation in 1942 and the action focuses on a group of detainees
representing all walks of life-from a beggar to a prince-who wait to be interrogated by
the Nazis who are searching for Jews to send to the death camps. After the Fall is a
play centered on Miller's failed marriage to Marilyn Monroe. The play The Price tells
us the story of two brothers who meet after the death their father in order to go
through the belongings. The action of The Ride down Mt. Morgan takes place in the
hospital room of bed-ridden Lyman Felt who is recovering from a bad car accident.
Lyman, we soon discover, is a bigamist, and both of his wives, Theo and Leah, turn
up, each unaware, until now, that the other existed. Refusing to accept that he has
done anything really wrong, Lyman tries to salvage the situation and keep both of his
wives happy. In Broken Glass, Miller tells the story of Sylvia and Phillip Gellburg,
who after years of marriage come to realize that they hardly know each other at all.
No Villain, They Too Arise, Honors at Dawn, The Golden Years, That They May
Win are some the plays of Arthur Miller. Based on Miller's own experiences, the play
A Memory of Two Mondays focuses on a group of desperate workers earning their
livings in a Brooklyn automobile parts warehouse during the Great Depression in the
1930s. Concentrating more on character than plot, it explores the dreams of a young
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man yearning for a college education in the midst of people stumbling through the
workday in a haze of hopelessness and despondency. In the 1980s, Arthur Miller
produced a number of short pieces. The American Clock is based on Studs Terkel's
Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression, and is structured as a series of
vignettes that chronicle the hardship and suffering that occurred during that period.
Elegy for a Lady and Some Kind of Love Story are two one-act plays that were staged
together in 1982. Similarly, Danger, Memory!(1986) is comprised of the short pieces
I Can't Remember Anything and Clara. Reviewers have generally regarded these later
plays as minor works, inferior to Arthur Miller's early masterpieces. His work, The
Creation of the World and other Business is a series of comic sketches based on the
Biblical Book of Genesis. All of Miller's subsequent works premiered outside of New
York. Miller staged the musical Up from Paradise (1974), an adaptation of Creation
of the World (1972), at his alma mater, the University of Michigan. The Archbishop's
Ceiling was presented in 1977 at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.
Many critical works have been published separately on Eugene O’Neill,
Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller discussing their themes and art. Notable
among them are: The Haunted Heroes of Eugene O’Neill by Edwin Engel, Critical
Essays on Eugene O’Neill by James Martin, Critical Approaches to O’Neill by John
Stroupe, O’Neill’s Nine Plays by Joseph Wood Krutch and ‘A Kind of Alaska’
Women in the Plays of O’Neill by C. Ann Hall The Unknown Tennessee Williams by
Tom Lyle Leverich, Entering “ The Glass Menagerie” The Cambridge Companion to
Tennessee Williams by C.W. Bigsby and The Theatre of Williams Vol.3 by New
Directions Book, The Kindness of Strangers: The Life of Tennessee Williams by
Spoto, Donald. Arthur Miller and His Plays- A Critical Study by Pramila Singh,
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Arthur Miller: A Critical Study and Remembering Arthur Miller by Christopher
Bigsby, Critical Companion to Arthur Miller: A Literary Reference to His Life and
Work by Susan C. W. Abbotson, Arthur Miller: Biography of an American
Playwright by Wade Bradford, Arthur Miller (Bloom’s Modern Critical Views) by
Harold Bloom, Miller: The Playwright.2d ed,. Modern Theatre Profiles by Dennis
Well and Arthur Miller: A Dramatist and His Universe by Aysha Viswamohan. All
these critical texts deal only with their themes and techniques separately. But no
serious attempt has been made to compare these playwrights discussing their common
major theme namely the conflict between the individual and the society that is
prominent in their plays. Any study on these writers cannot ignore this important
aspect of their writings. Therefore, an attempt is made in this dissertation to discuss
the theme of conflict between the individual and the society in their plays. Further,
there seems to be a common ground for comparison among these American
playwrights in their choice of themes, characterization and their attitude to society.
There are interesting similarities and striking differences in their treatment of themes,
characterization, dramatic technique and worldviews. They are representative writers
and critics of the twentieth century American society who try to deal with American
life effectively in their plays bringing out the lurking conflict between the individual
and the society.
An attempt is made in this dissertation to discuss select plays of these three
playwrights focusing on this unified theme. The formal, psychoanalytical and
sociological approaches are followed in smaller measures in discussing their themes,
characterization, technique and world views. Accordingly, the dissertation has been
devised to discuss the select plays of these writers in five chapters. While the first
33
chapter is an introduction that traces briefly the history of American drama and a brief
note on the plays of each playwright, the second chapter is an in-depth study of the
themes of their plays. The third chapter is exclusively devoted to the study of
characters in their plays and the fourth chapter deals with the social concerns of the
playwrights. The fifth Chapter is the conclusion in which the findings of the
arguments are recorded.
Chapter – II
Themes of the Select Plays
of Eugene O’Neill,
Tennessee Williams and
Arthur Miller
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Chapter - II
Themes of the Select Plays of Eugene O’Neill,
Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller
Eugene O’ Neill, Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller are playwrights by
virtue of their remarkable social consciousness. They have paved the way for an
understanding of the human predicament by presenting the basic concepts of life
through a picture of the American society. Their themes can be broadly classified as
follows: theme of alienation, theme of disillusionment, theme of despair, theme of
search for identity, theme of conflict between the individual and the society, theme of
complex human relationship, theme of disintegration, theme of power and sex and the
theme of familial values. Most often these themes are inter related. Their themes are
concretized through their characters that belong to the American society. O’ Neill’s
plays are mostly tragedies, but they are tragedies which strike at the very roots of the
sickness of the present day American society. They attempt to explain human
sufferings and the way to justify them. His plays portray man in relation to his social
environment, and in one play after another he criticizes the whole structure of the
American society. It is not man as an individual alone that concerns O’ Neill; it is
man in a social order, tortured, starved, disillusion, and driven to disaster by the forces
of a system which cares nothing for the general welfare of the society. His characters
are mostly from different walks of life, such as farmers, stokers, business men and
day dreamers. O’Neill has made a consistent and impassioned attempt to dramatize
subconscious emotions. Life is his theme and life is often violent, mean, squalid,
spiteful, confusing, maddening; but there is beauty too and love and peace though
only fitfully.
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Loss of belongingness and sense of isolation are the major themes of O’
Neill’s Beyond the Horizon. They are projected through the tragic character Robert
Mayo, a young farm-born dreamer, who yearns for open sea, the swarming ports of
the mysterious East, the beckoning world beyond the lines of hills which enclose his
native town. By all that is in him, he is destained for an adventurous life, but cruel fate
has confined him to this little hill enclosed farm. Robert and his brother Andrew are in
love with the same girl, Ruth. However, Robert marries Ruth and stays in the farm
itself. He is no longer in harmony with his work. Owing to this loss of harmony, he is
unable to belong to his circumstances, and so suffers from a sense of isolation
throughout his life. Robert is proved as a misfit to the environment. Still he manages
the farm life for the sake of his child and wife. But Ruth becomes peevish and is
indifferent towards Robert. She even tells him that she did not love him:
What do you think--- living with a man like you-having to suffer all
the time because you ‘ve never been man enough to work and do
things like other people….I hate the sight of you! (97-98)
Hearing this, all the remaining hopes of Robert Mayo are shattered. His loss of
belongingness and the conflict between his dream and desire compel him to live
between hope’s eternal optimism and the inevitability of despair. Ultimately, he
remains an alienated person till the end of his life.
O’Neill portrays how an individual mind is brought out by the modern concept
of psychoanalysis through his play The Emperor Jones. Edwin Engel in his book The
Haunted Heroes of Eugene O’Neill maintains thus:
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The Emperor Jones…is a simple representation of psychological
naturalism for its own sake, ingeniously contrived to a point where one
must recognize that performance as a tour de force. (49)
There is an eternal conflict with those powers which are beyond man’s
control. Man is represented in relation with God. Jones, an ex-pullman porter,
through deception and corruption, becomes the emperor of an island in the West
Indies. After achieving this, his life style and his ways of thinking begin to change. He
tries to ignore the reality and his own past. He is involved in clash with one of his
friends while playing the games of dice, which results in his murdering of his friend.
This sends him to prison. But in the prison he also kills the guards and again becomes
a convict. In order to save himself, he flees away and reaches an island. Because he is
a tricky fellow, he impresses the innocent natives of that island and becomes the
emperor of that region. He is incompatible with Negroes and so exercises pressure
over them. He imposes extra-taxes and other duties which are unendurable for the
people. He earns a lot of money and deposits it in a foreign bank as well as keeps it
secretly under the white rocks in the jungle. He does so because he always suffers
from a sense of insecurity. His life is restless, and he cannot share his feelings with
the Negro people, who belong to his own class. Obviously, Jones is isolated from that
class of people to which he himself belongs. Outwardly, he is very ambitious and
determined. But inwardly, he is always haunted by a sense of unknown fear and loss
of security, to save himself from the fury of his people, he also beguiles them saying
that he can only be killed by a silver bullet, spreading superstition among them. His
brutish activities make the people conscious of their own sufferings and make them
rebel against him. Jones, in order to save himself, again decides to take flight and
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starts off philosophically the lonely march that takes him to Martinique, the world
where, he thinks, wealth and freedom await him. He has hidden food in the forest and
his revolver is loaded with five lead bullets meant for his enemies, and a silver bullet
for himself in case he is ever really cornered. But in the forest he does not find his
secretly kept belongings. Like a mad person, he removes the white rocks in the forest,
but is unable to locate the place. He shows vain courage, hope and smartness. His
body cannot keep balance with his mind. However, night falls, and to the incessant
accompaniment of pounding drums he conforms to the dark faces of his own mind
and the history of his own race. In a terrifying series of short episodes, he is assailed
by the phantoms of his victims and his past life, journeying back through auction
block and slave ship to his primer origins in the Congo. Out of fear, he has fired all
the bullets of his pistol at the images which pass before his sight. At dawn, the
natives, led by Lem, start their search and find Jones laying very near the place where
he had entered the forest. They fire a silver bullet into his body, believing it the only
means to end his life as he had told them. From the outset, Jones leads a different life.
He becomes an entirely isolated person. He had neither any family nor any children.
He has no interest in to run his life in a joint way. All these facts about his past life are
revealed from his conversation with the cockney trader, Henry Smithers, his partner
through whom he has earned a lot of money. His discussion with Smithers shows that
he is aware of the consequences of his deeds. That is why he has deposited all his
money in a foreign bank. He starts his life in a negative way, involves in gambling,
killing and all sorts of anti-social activities. After killing the prison guards in the
United States, he comes to this island. By nature he is shrewd and suspicious, and this
keeps him away from his surroundings. It is exceedingly easy to see this play as one
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which shows that Jones's thin veneer of civilized intelligence is quickly stripped away
to reveal the true nature of the man, a creature of superstition and instinct rather than
reason. Yet it is also a parable of a different nature, because Jones as a character has
shown also the falseness of modern civilization. From the "white quality" he met on
the Pullmans, then a high-status unionized job for blacks, he has learned how to
survive in modern society, by crime and by exploiting others lower than himself. He
has adopted the "new" God of Christianity, whom he will quickly put aside when He
becomes inconvenient. However, Jones is not a complete member of modern society,
as the garish furnishings of his throne room and the faintly ridiculous nature of his
uniform indicate. In the play he is taken back to his very roots, and the Witch-Doctor
leads him toward a submission to the dark gods of his racial unconscious. But unlike
Yank in The Hairy Ape, Jones does not choose to "belong" in this environment and
calls upon his new God for aid. But the crocodile god will nonetheless be revenged;
the forces of darkness will not be denied. Hence it is fitting that Jones also dies by a
silver bullet.
Alienation and search for identity are the basic themes of The Hairy Ape. In
the opening scene, Yank, the protagonist is quite confident and proud of his superior
strength. He exercises great authority over his fellow-stokers, who respect his superior
physical capacity and obey him and are afraid of him. But Yank’s sense of security,
his sense of belongingness is soon shattered as he is confronted with Mildred Douglas
who looks at him as if he were an ‘hairy ape’ and who calls him a filthy beast. It is
now that Yank becomes aware of the fact that he does not “belong”. The one thing
which made his life endurable was that he felt that he “belonged”, that was a
necessary, vital and human part of a social order. But now he realizes that he counts
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for nothing as an individual. Yank begins as an embodiment of power and strength.
He belongs- so he thinks. He is of the modern machine-driven power age. But his
faith is shaken. He finds ambivalence in man’s nature. “I was born” he says. That is
the charge, the crime, the root of the human problem. Born as a mixture of ape and
angel, where does he belong? (Oliver, Egbert S. American Literature 1890-1965: An
Anthology 172)
Patrick Roberts in his book The Psychology of Tragic Drama remarks:
O’Neill finds that rational factors do not reveal the depth of any
incident or situation. He frequently presents in articulate characters
who “belong” to something beyond themselves which drives or lures
them. The obsence of “belonging” is the great loss. (170)
The first scene presents Yank, as having a great faith in himself; and as having
equally great sense of belonging to the stokehole and the engine. He identifies himself
with the steam and smoke and steel:
“I’m smoke and express trains and steamers and factory whistles;…
And I’ m what makes iron into steel; Steel dat stands for the whole
thing! And I’m Steel – steel – steel! I’ m de muscles in steel, de punch
behind it!” (Scene I, 180)
In other words, Yank readily accepts man’s new situation in the industrial
world. However, he completely fails to realize that this great material progress has
been achieved at the cost of spiritual values; thereby sending man back to his
primitive cave days, reducing him, in the process, to a hairy ape. V. Doris Falk in his
book Eugene O’Neill and the Tragic Tension remarks,
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O’Neill wishes to claim that “ man is …free from all outside authority
in the determination of his fate..he has nothing on which to learn for
support but himself…to seek asylum from this responsibility for his
own destiny by accepting by some established institution.. is to escape
from the self and from fears of its inadequacy. All men can really hope
to belong to is himself (35).
All God’s Chillun Got Wings deals with the problem of belongingness. Both
Jim and Ella fail to belong to anyone and anywhere. They cannot even belong to each
other. Though the title of the play conveys the message of man’s professed faith that
All God’s Chillun Got Wings, there are several barriers that separate God’s one child
from another. Jim might have got ‘wings’; he has the new hope with him but his hope,
entirely based on illusion, remains an illusion. Travis Bogard in his book Contour in
Time: The Plays of O’Neill remarks, “the play deals with the tragic story of a married
couple who are deeply committed to each other, and yet are divided by a profound
sense of isolation and loneliness which is the basic cause of their tragedy” (191).
O’Neill’s play Desire under the Elms depicts Man’s inner conflict and his
suffering in utter loneliness. The title of the play symbolizes that the persons who
seek shelter under the ‘Elms’ have several desires within. Ephraim Cabot, the father
character who worships a hard God, always sticks to his possession. Simeon and
Peter, the two elder sons roam about the gold-field of California, and Eben, the third
one desires the possession of the entire farm from his greedy father. Even the new
member of the family, Abbie, steps under the Elms with her desire of possession to
get a secure place, to get a new identity of her own. They all try their best to fulfill
their ambitions in their own way. All the three brothers are leading isolated lives. The
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first two are cut-off from all the warm sides of life, and the third one confines himself
to the kitchen which is haunted by the spirit of his mother. There is no cordial
relationship between Eben and the elder brothers. Their sense of possessiveness keeps
them mentally apart from one another when Simeon and peter are planning for their
monetary condition:
Eben: (decisively). But t’ aint that. Ye won’t never go because ye’ll
wait here fur yer share o’ the farm, thinkin’ allus he’ll die soon.
Simeon: (after a pause): we’ve a right.
Peter: two-thirds belongs t’ us (142).
Though the play seems to deal with the story of two young lovers, yet actually
the real spirit behind the play is Ephraim Cabot who dominates the action from the
beginning to the end by his indomitable will-power and stone-like strength.
Throughout his life he works hard, but suffers in loneliness in search of human
understanding. He fails to establish any harmonious relationship with others except
the rocks and stones of his farm. No one but he himself is responsible for the barrier
created by him on account of his possessiveness, ownership and his believe in hard
god. There is hardly any cordial relationship between the father and the sons. The
desire to possess grows out of the feeling of insecurity, helplessness or instability.
Therefore, O’Neill’s vision of life is without foundation, without beliefs or creeds,
struggling for a symbol of security in a stony land of a new England farmstead, where
Abbie, the young wife, desires a home for security, Simeon and peter, Eben desires to
possess the farm of his mother, and old Ephraim, disappointed by his wives and sons,
desires to escape from his tragic sense of aloneness by possessing the farm he has
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made out of rocky land. Thus, there ensues a war of possession in which all the
members of the family are defeated by the sense of isolation.
In the play The Great God Brown, the device of wearing mask is central to the
action. Providing mask, the dramatist exposes the hidden motives of the characters
and their dual nature owing to which they are separated from one another. The play
shows how man’s persistent efforts to belong to nature are thwarted by materialism,
Christian asceticism, and socially caused conflicts in the psyche. Dion Anthony wears
mask except when in the presence of Cybel, the earth-mother figure: when he tries the
experiment of turning his true face on the girl he loves, she responds only with
bewilderment and fear. The use of mask in this play is an integral part of the theme.
When Dion Anthony is dead, Brown assumes his mask and is accepted as Dion by
Dion’s wife. The growing materialism in the modern world and the lack of
communication with others, force a man to wear a mask in order to get security. In a
world where illusions appear to be realities, masks are worshipped as real faces, while
the real faces cry for recognition. The theme of alienation is also projected through
the character of William Brown in the play. O’Neill describes Brown as follows:
Brown is the visionless demigod of our new materialistic myth – a
success building his life of exterior things, inwardly empty and
resourceless, and uncreative creature of superficial preordained social
groves, a by-product forces aside into slack waters by the deep main
current of life-desire. (The Great God Brown 5)
Brown represents the materialistic modern man for whom human relationships
have no meaning. He symbolizes the anguish of the uncreative man, the despair of the
person who cannot dream. In this regard, he reminds us of Andrew Mayo of Beyond
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the Horizon. Like him, Brown is an ‘anti-poet’ by nature. He says: “I never could
memorize poetry with a darn” (The Great God Brown 15). Due to lack of this artistic
sensibility he is rejected by Margaret and cheated by Cybel. His possessiveness and
envious nature separate him from Dion and force him to wear the mask of Pan to
‘possess’: he madly accepts the mask of Dion Margaret as his wife and Cybel as his
mistress. This is quite ironical that the person, who has forced Dion to wear the mask
of falsity himself, seeks shelter under the same mask. O’Neill explains this turn in the
play:
Brown has always envied the creative life-force in Dion-what he
himself lacks. When he steals Dion’s mask of Mephistopheles he
thinks he is gaining the power to life creatively, whereas in reality he is
stealing that creative power made self-destructive by complete
frustration. (The Great God Brown and Lazarus Laughed 11)
The real tragedy with him is that he cannot create as he is the man without
vision, without any artistic capability.
Strange interlude is a powerful presentation of man’s search for identity,
belief and belonging. It focuses on Nina Leeds, a young lady of twenty-two who lives
with her father, Prof. Leeds. Nina inherits the passionate, selfish hunger for love from
her father who determines her fate. Prof. Leeds has persuaded his daughter’s lover,
Gordon Shaw not to marry Nina until he returns from the war. But Gordon is killed in
the World War I, and Nina is left alone. She insists neither upon marriage, nor
surrendering herself physically in the arms of her sweet-heart before he left. After the
death of her lover, she hates her father and grows neurotic. She joins as a nurse in a
soldier’s hospital and offers herself to wounded war veterans in the name of sacrifice
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of her dead lover. She is intensely admired by the ineffectual novelist Charles
Marsden and the brilliant young physician, Dr. Ned Darrell. But neither of them is
willing to marry her. Prof. Leeds forces her to marry Sam Evans, a dull simpleton.
The tragic reversal occurs when Nina learns from her mother-in-law that, unknown to
Sam, his family has a long history of hereditary insanity, and that is why, Nina should
not bear his child. She deliberately aborts the child. But, for Sam’s sake as well as for
her own security, she decides to have a baby from some man other than her husband.
She shares her bed with Dr. Darrell and gives birth to a boy child. But before their son
is born, Darrell and Nina have fallen in love. Her possessive nature wants her lover
and child all to herself. She plans to leave Sam, but Darrell refuses to be party to that
crime and leaves on a long journey for years. Now her love turns toward her son,
Gordon. But misfortune comes in her way; the child loves Sam Evans very much.
Sam, believing the child to be his, is inspired by his supposed fatherhood to have
confidence in his business career. Thus she loses both Darrell and her son. Sam dies,
the affair with Darrell is over and Gordon, her son, flies away after marrying
Madeline. Now, she is too old and tired to batter any longer at the wall of self in order
to find love from some other person. Finally, she desperately surrenders herself to her
silent lover, Marsden, thinking to be the last chance for her feelings of belongingness.
Prof. Leeds’ possessiveness is also a theme of Strange Interlude. This
possessiveness makes Nina revolt against him. In this context, he can be compared
with the old Cabot of the Desire under the Elms. Like Abbie and Eben, Nina rebels
against her repressive Puritanic father, who denies her all possible opportunities for
the fulfillment of her desires. As a result, the possessive father has to spend the last
years of life as an orphan. In sheer despair, he is bewildered: “...she still must
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hate?...oh, god i feel cold...alone! this home is abandoned! The house is empty and
full of death!” (301-02). Professor Leeds remains isolated from others throughout his
life and the playwright brings out man’s failure to ‘belong’ or to finds roots anywhere
in this hostile world. (Monika Gupta. The Plays of Eugene O’Neill 46) Living in the
shadow of these illusory ideals, he keeps himself and his daughter cut-off from the
world of reality. He thinks that by keeping Nina away from the reality he would be
able to keep her love for himself. This sense of possessiveness led him to prevent his
daughter’s marriage because he wanted to keep her with him like an old collection for
his study. His sense of fear and egoism that arises from insecurity, stood like a barrier
between her and him. From the beginning of his life, Professor Leeds has spent a
different life, completely severed from the general social trend. After the death of his
wife, he becomes more insecure. He tells Marsden: “...but it’s terrible to be so alone
in this...if Nina’s mother had lived...my wife...dead.” (Strange Interlude 290)
Therefore, in order to mitigate the pain of solitude, he tries his best to reserve the love
of Nina for himself. But the love of Gordon makes a wall of hatred between them.
Prof. Leeds admits to Nina:
It is also true i was jealous of Gordon. I was alone and i wanted to keep
your love...i did my best to prevent your marriage. I was glad when he
died...i wanted to live comforted by your love until the end (Strange
Interlude 300).
Through these characters O’Neill successfully represents the predicament of a
generation and the causes of the sickness of the modern times. Strange Interlude deals
with very problem of existence in the face of annihilating forces of a dark tradition
that offers only an escape from reality and the a dead past that spreads its sinister
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shadows into the presents and chokes all the life out of it. It also reveals the tragic
consequences of the suppression of the basic urge of life through the characters of
Prof. Leeds , Nina, Marsden, Darrell , Sam, Mrs Evans and Gordon, as “All of them
live in a world of masks of the self and others” The root-cause of their romantic
imagination, a disease owing to which they suffer from estrangement and become
alienated from one another.
The title of the play, Strange Interlude, also evokes the theme of alienation.
On the first occasion, Nina sees the barrenness of the present moment that a strange
becomes the cause of her isolation. On the second occasion, at the whole of life like
that—a mere interval between an unknowable past and future in which she and her
dreams have no existence. As far the dramatic technique is concerned, O’Neill use of
monologue serves the function of mask in as much as it show the gulf between a
character’s thought and his open words. Inner thoughts reveal the real feelings of a
character—love, hatred or disgust. This device allows the playwright a freer hand to
plump into the continuous fluctuations going on in the minds of his character. In this
sense, ‘asides are modified ‘monologues’. The characters in the play reveal their true
self with the help of ‘monologues’.
Mourning Becomes Electra, one of the tragedies of the twentieth century,
depicts the story of man’s unending suffering for the sake of search for identity. It
proves O’Neill’s artistic craftsmanship as a playwright, and his power to tell a story
superbly. When the play opens the American civil war has ended and general Ezra
Mannon is about to return home to his wife, Christine, and daughter, Lavinia. Lavinia
adores him, and is jealous of his affection for her mother. When she discovers the
illicit affair between Adam Brant and her mother, she seeks to avenge her father by
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turning the family against her mother. When Ezra comes home, Christine, who has
never loved him, poisons him, hoping to escape from the Mannon family with her
lover caption Brant. Orin, Lavinia’s brother, who has been considered as mama’s boy
returns just after death of his father. Lavinia tells him of Christine’s unfaithfulness
and of the suspected murder of general Mannon, who is suspected to have died of a
heart-attack. In a fit of jealousy, Orin kills Brant in his ship, and his mother shoots
herself. Orin then realizes that he has irrevocably lost his mother’s love and,
consumed by guilt, edges close to madness. In order to get rid of the gloomy
surroundings of Mannon’s castle, Lavinia and Orin go for a long sea-voyage, Lavinia
has the emotionally twisted Orin under her control. He, in turn, is insanely jealous and
possessive of his sister. When Lavinia tries to involve with Peter, he threatens to
expose their past, and commits suicide. Peter deserts Lavinia, who is left alone to let
the past haunt her until the Mannon-curse is over. The problem of isolation is closely
related to the loss of security and quest for one’s happiness. Praising the play, B.H.
Clark observes: “O’Neill’s trilogy is a tearless tragedy, remote, detached, angst,
artfully shaped, cunningly devised, skillfully related and magnificently conceived.”
(Eugene O’Neill: The Man and His Plays 170) Through this trilogy, the playwright
expresses his concern not only for the evils of Puritanism but also for the evils of war,
man’s quest for beauty, and his wish to belong. It also shows how man fails to achieve
these ends; he finds himself in a miserable condition to justify his existence, and is
compelled to remain as an alienated person. The Greek concept of fate has been
translated in terms of modern experience, where fate means man’s personal, familiar
and racial past and the forces of heredity and environment. In spite of its similarity
with the Greek tragedy, it remains a modern play, treating the fundamental problems
of the time in terms of modern values.
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This story of isolation and separation is rooted in Mannon’s family much
before the beginning of the play. David Mannon, the uncle of Ezra, loved Marie
Brantome, a girl below their rank. When she was pregnant, Abe Mannon brother of
David, forced him to marry the girl and drove them out of the house. Abe grew rich
Ezra inherited his property; the poor Marie resolved to wreak vengeance upon Ezra.
Ezra has had a glorious career, he joined army, gave it up, established a shipping firm,
studied law, became a judge, joined politics and was elected mayor, and when the
American civil broke out, he again joined army. The theme of isolation is aptly
projected through the character of Lavinia Mannon, the modern Electra whose action
dominates the play from the beginning to the end. Torn between the Puritanic father
and the sensuous mother, she is haunted by a sense of loneliness throughout her life.
She desperately wants to merge with the identity of her father, but finds her mother as
a rival. She is the product of a disgusted romance of her parents. She feels:
Her alien childhood is the result of her mother’s negation and her
father – orientation. She is not only cut-off from her mother, but also
separated from her brother. As Orin says: “he (father) always sided
with you against mother and me” (Mourning Becomes Electra 97). In
spite of her difference with her mother, she unconsciously feels that
vacuum. She says “oh mother” why have you done this to me? “what
harm have i done you?” (Mourning Becomes Electra 57). On account
of this atmosphere of hatred Lavinia has lost all the warm feelings of
life. She becomes ruthless “cold and calm as an icicle” (Mourning
Becomes Electra 98).
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Deprived of mother’s love, she is deeply attached with her father and is in
search of security which begins to crumble by the interference of Adam Brant. With
all her efforts, she tries to keep her mother away from Brant for the reputation of her
father. This makes the relations between the daughter and the mother bitter. Each tries
to find some lame excuse to humiliate the other. Finally, the long-drawn was of
possession for Ezra Mannon between Lavinia and Cristine ends with the death of
Ezra. The death of her father is a terrible blow to her conception of security and
belongingness for which she has been longing since her childhood. She is now
haunted by same sense of loneliness again, and becomes more possessive. Her plan to
snatch Orin for herself from her mother is the result of her insecurity, a common
characteristic of Mannons. To get security and to keep Orin in her possession, Lavinia
drives her brother first to kill Brant and then to drive Christine to commit suicide. But
the death of Christine caused a new threat to her possession because Orin slowly drifts
towards insanity. Both Lavinia and Orin are haunted by the sense of guilt. In order to
be free from the haunted surroundings of the home, she plans for a sea-voyage. But
her futile search for happiness again results in bitterness. They are constantly chased
by the ghostly memory which compels them to return. Their own guilt divides them.
Consequently both of them turn alien to each other in the haunted atmosphere of the
house. She asks Orin: “but now you’ve suddenly become stranger again. You frighten
me” (41) After returning from the voyage, Lavinia finds herself in a terrible state of
solitude. She turns colourless and looks like the ghost of her head mother. Her
possessiveness forces her to act like mother for Orin; and she tries to make him
forgetful of his loss. She pleads to him to forget the past and to develop a more
meaningful relationship with the immediate present. Even she hopes to mitigate the
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pain of isolation by marrying peter. But she fails miserably in her attempt. She
realizes that playing with human lives and human emotions is not a mechanical game
with foreseeable results. Comparing Lavinia with Nina of Strange Interlude, Harry
Slochower states:
In Nina and Lavinia, O’Neill presents the ultimate in self and social
alienation. Both are the masochistic products of modern rationalistic
probing. Both attempt to wield and possess people’s lives, as if they
were “god and had created them.” Nina renounces at the end. Lavinia
remains defiant even in her acceptance of suffering. (Mourning
Becomes Electra 18)
O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh projects man’s need to hide his consciousness
of failure underneath a veil of protective illusion. The self images projected by the
characters keep them alive; and when they are known to be unreal, death becomes
inevitable. Most of the characters of the play are hopeless individuals who find life in
liquor, generously furnished to them by the easy-going proprietor, an escape from the
realities of a world in which they no longer have a place. Here are the damaged souls
who in their day have sought success, honour and glory- a Boer War general, a British
Captain, a disillusioned anarchist, a Harvard Law school graduate, a Negro gambler, a
circus man, barkeepers, streetwalkers, a youth who has betrayed his and the political
cause that was her life. Each one tries in his lucid moments to explain himself, to
account for his failure, or deny it, and each is driven ultimately to forget or ignore it.
Each, too, manages to sustain himself by creating some kind of illusion, some brand
of pipe-dreams. As the play opens, all are awaiting the arrival of Hickey, former
friend and companion. Of them a salesman turns up periodically to give them a party.
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But this time he does not give them party. Instead, he begins to give lecture on the
evils of pipe-dreaming. But each in turn comes back to the saloon, miserable,
disillusioned, facing an intolerable reality. Hickey’s solution does not work, for
instead of bringing peace and happiness it plunges each of its victims still deeper into
his well of misery. He also tries to convince them by telling about his wife and family.
“He who had found happiness in the love of his wife, has killed her in order to save
her from himself. But there is no way out. ‘who the hell cares?’ asks Hope, his friend
and as Hickey is taken off by the police. Now Hope is hopefully attempts to reform
them, took shape in the mind of a lunatic”. (Monika Gupta. The Plays of Eugene
O’Neill: A Critical Study)
The drinking companions in Harry Hope’s saloon and hotel get from one day
to the next on pipe dreams about returning to the world to achieve respectability and
purpose. Day after day, year after year, they delude themselves with a belief that one
day they will do what is necessary to rise from their nether world of booze and lice
and demons from the past. However, they continually postpone acting on their
dreams. After Hickey coaxes them to at least try to remake their lives, many of them
dress up and go out to offer themselves to employers—only to fail miserably. They
return in deep despair. When Hickey tells them he murdered his wife, they pronounce
him insane.
Long Day’s Journey into Night deals with the inter-family isolation and shows
how an outwardly prosperous and happy family suffers from isolation. O’Neill has
turned autobiography into a play with sufficient objectivity. The play opens in
Tyrones’ fogbound summer house which keeps them apart from the outer world and
the present reality of life. It depicts the story of four Tyrones, the money-loving
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father, James Tyrone, his wife, Mary, their elder son, Jamie, and the younger son,
Edmund. As the play proceeds, it reveals the inner story of the family and the
suffering of its members from isolation and separation. Mary, who has just returned
from a mental hospital, makes clear by her attitude that she is not cured. She
nostalgically revives her past dreams of becoming a nurse or a pianist, and appears to
be an innocent girl once again. She also reveals that her addiction began when her
miserly husband chose a quack-doctor who treated her after her sickness in giving
birth to Edmund with morphine. Like her mother, Edmund wants to move away from
reality, and prefers to stay alone. Like her, he, too, shows both love and hate for his
family as he confronts his limited future as a consumptive, realizing that since he is
expected to die, his father will send him to the cheapest state sanatorium. A similar
ambivalence is exhibited by the debauched Jamie, who drunkenly tells Edmund how
much he loves him and yet how much he hates him as he (Edmund) is responsible for
their mother’s addiction. Both Edmund and Jamie accuse their father of the
destruction of the family. In defence, James Tyrone tells the story of his tragic
childhood that taught him the value of money. Each member of the family confronts
his own failure and guilt, which end in frustration and futility. Again, the theme of
isolation and loneliness is projected through all the major characters in the play. All of
them are suffering from a deep sense of isolation. James Tyrone leads an estranged
life owing to his materialistic attitude and his profession. In his search for monetary
security, he is hated by his wife and sons. The tragic irony of his life is that he
remains a stranger to his family for which he has sacrificed his life. By choosing the
profession of an actor, he has spent most of his time in cheap hotels and bars, and has
never provided a comfortable life to his wife and children. His indifferent attitude
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proves too much to his family and separates him from his wife. Out of disgust, his
wife remarks:
Oh, I’m so sick and tired of pretending this is a home! You wan’t help
me... you don’t know how to act in home! You don’t really want
one!... never since the day we were married! You should have
remained a bachelor and lived in second-rate hotels and entertained
your friends in bar-rooms! (19)
The theme of alienation is also projected through the title of the play. For her,
it is sad journey into the fog of dope and dream which clearly separates her from
reality. For Jamie, it is a hopeless journey into the night of cynicism and frustration.
For him, it begins and ends in darkness, offering him nothing to soothe his agitated
mind. For James, it is a tragic journey down the wrong road, away from his earlier
commercial triumph. And for Edmund, it is a journey beyond night in a hopeful state
of unreality. The symbols are also suggestive and add much more to expose the
theme. “home” is the most important symbol that creates the deep sense of isolation in
its inhabitants. Home is normally a place for man’s physical and spiritual shelter, but
in this play it ironically suggests loneliness and alienation. It is a home, but everyone
feels homeless here. Although it is ironically called the “summer house,” there is no
sign of summer or sunshine in it. Mary never finds herself belonging to it. The symbol
‘wedding gown’ signifies her search for happiness that she has lost since her
marriage. The symbols of ‘fog’ and ‘foghorn’ also convey the same meaning of
isolation and separation. ‘fog’ symbolizes the world of unreality that separates man
from reality and makes him a stranger in the eyes of others. It is a potential symbol of
man’s ignorance about himself and his failure to understand others in this fog-ridden
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world. It also stands for oblivion and self-deception. The constant use of fog signifies
the characters’ escapes from a world of reality to a world of unreality.
The play Long Day’s Journey into Night is a woeful tale of isolation and
loneliness. In it O’Neill has painted the most tragic picture of the shattered dreams in
an autobiographical manner. All the four haunted Tyrones torment themselves and
one another, gradually stripping away every protective illusion until each one faces
himself and others without hope. The driving force among them forces each of the
members into his own disintegration, and causes him to take others with him.
The Iceman Cometh shows how man’s inability to cope with life can create a
feeling of isolation and loneliness in his life, forcing him to alienation and sufferings
of the inhabitants of Harry Hope’s saloon who have long broken their links with
outside world and are living in a world of their own making. The Great God Brown
shows how a man’s persistent efforts to belong to nature are thwarted by materialism,
Christian asceticism, and socially-caused conflict in psyche. In Mourning Becomes
Electra, the effect of the sense of isolation and loneliness is actually felt by all the
members of the Mannon’s family, and they are forced to bear its brunt. Mechanization
of modern life is also one of the important factors responsible to generate the sense of
isolation, loneliness, estrangement and insecurity in the life of an individual. It has destabilized human life. The Hairy Ape shows how yank is brutalized by an impersonal
mechanical social order. Yank, in this play, is one who challenges the supremacy of
the machine-age and sacrifices his life to move the workers by making them realize
the necessity of revolt against their powerful masters. Besides the impersonal and
mechanical social order, another factor responsible for the feeling of isolation and
loneliness in O’Neill’s characters is their failure to discriminate between the world of
dream and that of reality.
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(All the references on O’Neill have been taken from Plays of Eugene O’NeillA Critical Study by Monika Gupta)
The playwright Tennessee Williams presents before us the dark world of onedimensional society of the modern civilization that survives in the midst of
exploitation, violation of moral code of conduct, corruption and dehumanized
passions of power and intimate relationships. He makes us realize such worldly
circumstances of the tainted world drives the misfits, the rebels, the artist figures or
the fugitive kinds to lead lives of depression, alienation. It happens due to their failure
of adjustment with the worldly norms and they construct make-believe worlds around
them through fabricated illusions in order to feel a sense of untrammeled freedom.
Tennessee Williams derives his themes from psychoanalysis, conferred upon
American drama by the influence of Freud's theories given in the books namely
Suppressed Desires and Interpretation of Dreams. Abandonment and Escape are the
major themes of Tennessee Williams in the play The Glass Menagerie. Tom, the key
character of the play wants to escape from the real life that tortures him. His mother
Amanda and sister Laura are living in a world of illusion. Tom escapes, but he
remains haunted by the memory, a bent nail forever poking at his conscience. Laura
and Amanda, on the other hand, have no possibility of escape both are trapped by
financial insecurity and lack of social opportunity, but Amanda feels it most acutely
because it is she who has known and can imagine the outside world. Ultimately, Tom
realizes that escape cannot come without an internal price - that there is no such thing
as freedom without a terrible cost. Each member of the Wingfield family has
experienced abandonment. As a unit, they were all abandoned by Mr. Wingfield when
he left the family, but this especially applies to Amanda – for her, being abandoned by
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her husband meant being abandoned by her childhood understanding of men and the
world. Laura has been abandoned by the world at large, falling into her own quiet
little rhythm outside the perimeter of everyday society. Jim, her one entrance into the
real world, also deserts her, pushing her farther back into a hermetic existence.
Finally, Tom fears being abandoned by his dreams and goals, and chooses instead to
abandon his family the way his father did – becoming another looming absence in the
Wingfield family, tantamount to the man whose portrait hovers over the sitting room.
For Tennessee Williams, the dominating promise has been the need for
understanding and tenderness and fortitude among individuals trapped by
circumstance. Therefore, his plays are concerned with little people the delicate and
unconventional characters; the southern gentle-women like Laura Wingfield who fails
to adjust to contemporary society: or others like a Blanche Du Bois (A Streetcar
Named Desire) or an Alma Winemiller (The Rose Tatoo), torn between natural
instincts and ideals imposed by a puritan culture; or derelicts helpless in a ruthless,
business society. None of them is mature enough for survival in a highly competitive
world. These sensitive, sentimental people refuse to face the truth about them and fail
to make reasonable adjustments. The trapped individual and his helplessness is also a
major theme of Tennessee Williams. Solitariness of the modern man is another major
theme. In his plays, the playwright contrasts the poet and the ordinary man: and to the
poet he gives nobler sense of values and intense compassion for humanity. The poet is
always the romantic who rebels against conventions and who demands for himself a
freedom which is incompatible with an urban society. Tennessee William’s poet is a
lonely individual.
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The Glass Menagerie is Tennesse Williams’ best expressionistic play. Like
Brecht, the playwright employs a screen as the symbol of consciousness. Awareness
of the past is always an element in Tennessee Williams’ plays. His characters live
beyond the fleeting moments of the play– back into a glowing past and shrinking from
a terrifying future. For both Amanda of The Glass Menagerie and Blanche of
Streetcar Named Desire, the south forms an image of youth, love, purity and all the
ideals that have crumbled along with the mansions and the family fortunes. The
atmosphere in the opening of the play is anti-realistic. The sky that shows around the
dim white building is a peculiarly tender blue, almost turquoise, which invests the
scene with a kind of lyricism and gracefully attenuates the atmosphere of decay. One
can almost feel the warm breath of the brown river beyond the river warehouse with
their faint redolence of ‘bananas and coffee. A corresponding air is evoked by the
music of negro entertainers at practically always just round the corner or a few doors
down the street, from a tiny piano, being played with the infatuated fluency of brown
fingers. This ‘blue piano’ expresses the spirit of the life which goes on here.” (A
Streetcar Named Desire 75) This speaks of the poetic and symbolic aspects of the
play. Tennessee Williams adds: “above the music of the ‘blue piano’ the voices of
people on the street can be heard overlapping”. Here the blue piano is the symbol of
the spirit of the life and the voices of the people are symbolic of illusions, around life.
They also symbolize the supernatural elements. Blanche, symbolizing beauty, is
riding on the car named desire, going to paradise. But she is misled by illusion and is
lost in the maya of this world. Once in the trap of this-worldliness, she is not able to
come out easily. Desire leads her nowhere but to further corruption and loss. Stella
stands for star. Blanche was once on the verge of lunacy. The music is in her mind:
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she drinks to escape it and the sense of disaster closes on her. Her past is mixed with
the present. It is her past that controls her present. What happens inside her is
poetically expressed. Her emotional states and strains are brought to light. In the
following lines it is her, mental state that is brought out:
a cultivated woman, a woman of intelligence and breeding, can enrich
a man’s life immeasurably: I have these things to offer and time
doesn’t take them away. Physical beauty is passing. A transitory
possession. But beauty of the mind and richness of the spirit and
tenderness of the heart-and I have all those things-aren’t taken away,
but grow: increase with the years, how strange that I should be called a
destitute woman. (A Streetcar Named Desire 87)
In the case of Stanley also it is the stream of consciousness that is given more
importance than the external qualities of his character. Tennessee Williams makes a
remark thus:
he is of medium height, about five feet eight or nine, and strongly, compactly,
built. Animal joy in his being is implicit in all his movement and attitudes.
Since earliest times the center of his life has been pleasure with women, the
giving and taking of it, not with weak indulgence dependently, but with the
power and pride of richly feathered male bird among hens branching out from
this complete and satisfying center are all the auxiliary channels of his life,
such as his heartiness with men, his appreciation of rough humour, his love of
good drink and food and games, his car, his radio everything that is his, that
bears his emblem of the gaudy seed – bearer. He sizes women up at a glance
with sexual classifications, crude images flashing into his mind and
determining the way he smiles at them. (A Streetcar Named Desire 5)
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In Summer and Smoke Tennessee Williams seems to return to the theme of
The Glass Menagerie, the longing of a young woman to lead a normal life, and this
time, a normal sex life. The play reveals the failure of Alma to find satisfaction of
both sex and spiritual values in the man she loves. Her lover is as frightened of her
soul as she is of his body; he could not feel’decent enough’ to touch her. Since she
cannot find true love, she destroys her spiritual quest and gives herself to the first
travelling salesman she meets. Sexual repression is the most prominent theme of “The
Rose Tattoo” in which Small-town gossip is rampant, and even with people streaming
in and out of the nearby hotels in New Orleans, little things still get picked up and
tossed about to demean others. The Strega, always listening in on Serafina, is a major
agent of this gossip and acts as her main tormentor. Since Serafina had been alone
ever since Alvaro’s death, but acted so strangely, she became a central target for
gossips, a sort of “holy grail” for whomever could actually detect the suspected
impropriety in this shuttered house. But while gossip played a role, one of the biggest
problems with Serafina’s love life is the slow deterioration of her worship of Rosario
as a god. Because she had been so happy with him (not knowing what he was doing
behind her back), Serafina got so attached that when Rosario was suddenly gone from
her life, it became very hard for her to open up to anyone. Here Tennessee Williams
explores the popular emotional hang-up people feel about commitment when they
have experienced loss. As the image of Rosario becomes worse as Serafina begins to
suspect that the rumor may be true, this actually compounds the problem rather than
helps it, because in addition to losing the man himself, she also lost the happy
memory of him. Her fear of romantic relationships also manifests itself in her
relationship with Rosa after she realizes that she has become interested in Jack. While
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it would be normal for a fifteen-year-old girl to be married in a 1950’s Sicilian family,
as Serafina had been, they still had to deal with the universal problem of most parents’
inability to cope with their children reaching sexual maturity. This causes minor
setbacks in most families, but in a situation where the parent has a past trauma
associated with romantic commitment, the problem goes from neurosis to psychosis.
It is important to point out that Serafina does not accept Rosa’s womanhood until she
herself has learned to appreciate the company of a man again.
In Tennessee Williams The Rose Tattoo, the rose tattoo is a symbol of love,
sex and procreation. Rosario was commended by Serafina for embodying all of these
qualities in her life, and she places a great deal of importance on his namesake tattooincluding the name of their first child. It is also of note that without knowledge of
Serafina’s story of the rose, Jack calls Rosa a rose, using the same symbol
coincidentally, showing the universality of the symbol. Tennessee Williams’s Camino
Real’s plea for compassion was a message for the contemporary American society.
The message was either misunderstood or rejected; the play received vitriolic reviews,
was derided for its symbolism, language and one-dimensional characters. Regardless
of its aesthetic properties, the play might be looked upon as a metaphor for the United
States or for any consumer society at large. There are allusions to consumerism, mass
media and bureaucracy shown in the sad context of deep existential despair. It is quite
ironic that the hard sell advertisement belongs to the gypsy who was offering her
daughter to strangers. The satiric tone of the passage is reinforced later on as Kilroy
finds out he is swindled by the fortune-teller:
Kilroy :
How about my change, Mamacita?
Gypsy :
What change are you talking about?
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Kilroy :
Are you boxed out of your mind? The change from that ten spot you
trotted over to Walgreen's?
Gypsy [counting on her fingers]: Five for the works, one dollar luxury tax, two for the
house percentage and two more pour la service! - makes ten! Didn't I tell you?
Kilroy :
What kind of a deal is that?
Gypsy [whipping out a revolver]: A rugged one, Baby! (Camino Real 23)
The idea of success, or rather its detrimental effect on a human being, is deeply
encoded in most of Tennessee Williams's plays. As the Camino protagonist is buried,
he is encouraged to be thought of as he was before his luck failed him, during the time
of his greatness, when he was not faded, not frightened. Sex and sexuality plays a big
role in the play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, as Brick, the principal character struggles with
both his own possible homosexuality and his real homophobia, believing that
accusations of homosexuality tainted the purity of his friendship with Skipper. Brick’s
alcoholism arises from an inner struggle with his own sexual feelings for Skipper,
guilt at his role in Skipper’s death by ignoring Skipper’s feelings for him, or both, but
Williams allows this to remain ambiguous. In any case, it’s clear that Brick’s views
reflect those of a homophobic culture and that he can’t stomach homosexual feelings
in either himself or his best friend Skipper, calling it an "inadmissible thing". Big
Daddy also discusses sex in the play, saying that what he most wants to do is
experience "pleasure with women". He doesn't want love, doesn't even seem to
believe in love. He wants only pleasure. Finally, Margaret, the play’s self-proclaimed
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, desires Brick and grows desperate for his attention, which
turns her catty and aggressive. Despite this aggression, her sheer desperation and will
to achieve what she wants make her an alluring yet heartbreaking protagonist of the
play, as she finally stoops to threatening Brick and bartering alcohol for sex.
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Orpheus Descending is a modern retelling of the ancient Greek Orpheus
legend deals, in the most elemental fashion, with the power of passion, art, and
imagination to redeem and revitalize life, giving it new meaning. The story is set in a
dry goods store in a small southern town marked, in the play, by conformity, sexual
frustration, narrowness, and racism. Val, The protagonist of the play is a young man
with a guitar, a snakeskin jacket, a questionable past, and undeniable animal-erotic
energy and appeal. He gets a job in the dry goods store run by a middle-aged woman
named Lady, whose elderly husband is dying. Lady has a past and passions of her
own. She finds herself attracted to Val and to the possibility of new life he seems to
offer. It is a tempting antidote to her loveless marriage and boring, small-town life.
The play describes the awakening of passion, love, and life – as well as its tragic
consequences for Val and Lady. On another level, it is also about trying to live
bravely and honestly in a fallen world. The play is replete with lush, poetic dialogue
and imagery. On the stage, the opening sections seem somewhat lacking in dramatic
movement, but the play picks up power as the characters are developed and it moves
to its Climax. Val, representing Orpheus, represents the forces of energy and Eros,
which, buried as they are in compromise and everyday mundane, have the tragic
power to create life anew. Sweet Bird of a Youth tells us the story of Chance Wayne
and Finley. Chance Wayne is a Self-professed young man who comes from the
‘wrong side of the tracks’ of St. Cloud, Florida, loves Heavenly Finley. She is the
daughter of wealthy 'Boss' Thomas J. Finley, a corrupt and ruthless politician and
businessman who has a strong belief in chastity and parades his daughter around in a
white dress showcasing her as the perfect virgin. Finley doesn't like bastards, or any
one he considers less than well bred, around his "puppet" Heavenly. Chance first
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meets Heavenly at the Finley's country club, where he was a waiter. Chance
approaches Boss Finley, seeking permission to see Heavenly formally, en route to a
future proposal of marriage. Finley will of course never allow this. So, he entices
Chance with the American Dream of fame and fortune in Hollywood to get Chance to
just leave town, and he sends his daughter away on a long tour of Europe to get her
away from Chance as well. Years later, Chance returns to St. Cloud with temperamental
and drunken movie star Alexandra Del Lago. She intends to retire because she is
embarrassed about her last movie role. Chance hopes to blackmail Del Lago with a
surreptitious tape recording in order to get a part in a film. However, Chance is
distracted by Heavenly and stops pursuing Del Lago. Heavenly still loves Chance and
wants to escape her dictating father. Boss Finley wants to run Chance out of town
again, but it will be a little more difficult this time if only because of the notoriety of
Miss Del Lago. (Kolin, Phillip; TheTennessee Williams Encyclopedia 262-263)
The play In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel deals with the theme of desire that brings
disaster in a family. Mark is an alcoholic painter on the verge of a nervous
breakdown who is trying to boost his sagging career by developing a new style in his
Tokyo hotel room. Instead, he has convinced himself he is the first artist to discover
color, and it appears he has drifted into psychosis as he spreads canvases on the floor,
sprays paint at them with a spray gun, and rolls around on them in the nude.
Meanwhile, his promiscuous wife Miriam, a typical ugly American, is loudly and
crudely trying to seduce the bartender in the hotel lounge. Anxious to be free of her
husband without losing his financial support, she has contacted his Manhattan art
dealer and close friend Leonard and asked him to join them in Japan. When he
arrives, she tries to persuade him to take her husband back to New York, but Mark
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dies. Feeling lost and without direction, she laments, "I have no plans. I have nowhere
to go" as the curtain falls.(In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel 1) The play is really an
extended monologue for Miriam who plays a familiar Williams type. The big
difference between her and characters like Blanche Dubois or Hanna Jelkes is that she
is hard to like. Her relentless harassment of the Bar-Man creates an oppressive
atmosphere. She is obnoxious and, in today's world, would be arrested as a sex
offender. By the second act, she is calling herself four-letter words and the audience
must finally admit that she is little more than what she says. Her insistence on going
to Kyoto without her neurotic and by now sick husband (Niall O'Hegarty) has none of
the metaphorical resonance associated with Chekhov's Moscow. After seeing Miriam
give the Bar-Man a working over, we understand what poor Mark has been through in
fourteen years of marriage. The Bar-Man is the only character who doesn't get on one's
nerves, although he's virtually silent in the second act. However, the by-play with
Miriam's mirror, the Bar-Man's over the shoulder cocktail shaking, the off-stage party
of diplomats which all create a nice physicality, largely disappears in the second act.
Tennessee Williams’ Vieux Carr’e deals with the theme of affliction of
loneliness. The play bears out that self-assessment, presenting a portrait of frustrated
individuals all condemned to solitary confinement in their own skins and struggle to
forge connections. It also focuses on a nameless, newly transplanted, innocent,
aspiring St. Louis writer who is struggling with his literary career, poverty, loneliness,
homosexuality, and a cataract. He gradually becomes involved with the other
residents, including Mrs. Wire, his demented, manipulative landlady; Nightingale, an
older, predatory, tubercular artist who refuses to accept his condition; Jane, a New
Rochelle society girl dying of leukemia; her sexually ambiguous, drug-addicted lover
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Tye, who works as a bouncer in a strip club; Mary Maud and Miss Carrie, two
eccentric elderly women who are literally starving to death; and a gay photographer
with a passion for orgies.
Arthur Miller like his counterpart portrays the American society brilliantly.
Insisting that the individual is doomed to frustration when once he gains a
consciousness of his own identity, Miller synthesizes elements from social and
psychological realism to depict the individual's search for identity within a society
that inhibits such endeavours. Critics praise his effective use of vernacular, his moral
insight, and his strong sense of social responsibility. June Schlueter commented:
"When the twentieth century is history and American drama viewed in perspective,
the plays of Arthur Miller will undoubtedly be preserved in the annals of dramatic
literature" (Modern American Drama:The Female Canon 25). Arthur Miller seems to
have been in search of a dramatic means to inter-relate “social and psychological
mechanisms. Arthur Miller in his long introduction to the collected plays indicates his
involvement with three stylistic modes prevalent in modern drama, which may be
called the realistic, the expressionistic, and the rhetorical. “I have stood squarely in
conventional realism,” he declares and an acknowledgement of a major debt to Ibsen
supports the statement. A situation in his plays is never stated but revealed in terms of
“hard action, irrevocable deeds”. Ibsen helped Arthur Miller answer the “biggest
single (expository) problem, namely, how to dramatize what has gone before.” “what
I was after,” Miller recalls, was the wonder in the fact that nonsequences of actions
are as real as the actions themselves. While Miller embraced words, gestures, and
shapes of the familiar world he “tried do expand (realism) with an imposition of
various forms in order to speak more directly of what has moved me behind the
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visible facades of life. He expanded in two directions. From the start of his career, he
wished to enrich the realistic style with an” evaluation of life a conscious articulation
of ethical judgment.
After Death of a Salesman, a “preference for plays which seek causation not
only in psychology but in society” compelled Miller to curtail his exploration of
subjective processes and to return to a more objective frame of reference. In writing
The Crucible, he was still bemused by” a kind of interior mechanism” but he hoped to
“lift” his study “out of the morass of subjectivism” with historical data and with
evaluative declamation.” “it seemed to me then,” he writes in a 1960 introduction to A
View from the Bridge,” that the theatre was retreating into an area of psycho-sexual
romanticism and this at the very moment when great events both at home and abroad
cried out for recognition in any analytic inspection.” In his essay, “on social plays,”
miller states that by the time he wrote a view from the bridge he had abandoned his
theory of “interior” causation in favour of “bare” facts and rational commentary.
Arthur Miller’s experimentation with expressionistic, realistic, and rhetorical styles
has been conditioned by his over-riding desire to declare objective truths about man in
society: “standard of right and wrong, good taste and bad, must in some way come
into either conflict of agreement with social standards.” Miller’s aim as a craftsman
has been to “make real on state as in life, that part of man which, through passion,
seeks awareness. There is no contradiction between the two.” (Sharma, Rani.
The Plays of Arthur Miller)
The Crucible is set in a theocratic society, in which the church and the state
are one, and the religion is a strict, austere form of Protestantism known as
Puritanism. Because of the theocratic nature of the society, moral laws and state laws
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are one and the same: sin and the status of an individual’s soul are matters of public
concern. There is no room for deviation from social norms, since any individual
whose private life doesn’t conform to the established moral laws represents a threat
not only to the public good but also to the rule of God and true religion. In Salem,
everything and everyone belongs to either God or the devil; dissent is not merely
unlawful, it is associated with satanic activity. This dichotomy functions as the
underlying logic behind the witch trials. As Danforth says in Act III, “a person is
either with this court or he must be counted against it.” (The Crucible 25) The witch
trials are the ultimate expression of intolerance (and hanging witches is the ultimate
means of restoring the community’s purity); the trials brand all social deviants with
the taint of devil-worship and thus necessitate their elimination from the community.
Another critical theme in The Crucible is the role that hysteria can play in tearing
apart a community. Hysteria supplants logic and enables people to believe that their
neighbors, whom they have always considered upstanding people, are committing
absurd and unbelievable crimes—communing with the devil, killing babies, and so
on. In The Crucible, the townsfolk accept and become active in the hysterical climate
not only out of genuine religious piety but also because it gives them a chance to
express repressed sentiments and to act on long-held grudges. The most obvious case
is Abigail, who uses the situation to accuse Elizabeth Proctor of witchcraft and have
her sent to jail. But others thrive on the hysteria as well: Reverend Parris strengthens
his position within the village, albeit temporarily, by making scapegoats of people like
Proctor who question his authority. In the end, hysteria can thrive only because people
benefit from it. It suspends the rules of daily life and allows the acting out of every
dark desire and hateful urge under the cover of righteousness. Reputation is very
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essential in theocratic Salem, where public and private moralities are one and the
same. In an environment where reputation plays such an important role, the fear of
guilt by association becomes particularly pernicious. Focused on maintaining public
reputation, the townsfolk of Salem must fear that the sins of their friends and
associates will taint their names. Various characters base their actions on the desire to
protect their respective reputations. As the play begins, Parris fears that Abigail’s
increasingly questionable actions and the hints of witchcraft surrounding his
daughter’s coma, will threaten his reputation and force him from the pulpit.
Meanwhile, the protagonist, John Proctor, also seeks to keep his good name from
being tarnished. Early in the play, he has a chance to put a stop to the girls’
accusations, but his desire to preserve his reputation keeps him from testifying against
Abigail. At the end of the play, however, Proctor’s desire to keep his good name leads
him to make the heroic choice not to make a false confession and to go to his death
without signing his name to an untrue statement. “I have given you my soul; leave me
my name!” he cries to Danforth in Act IV. By refusing to relinquish his name, he
redeems himself for his earlier failure and dies with integrity.
The cruel actions in The Crucible were justifiable in the name of
righteousness, so the reputations and names of the characters, and the town of Salem
were not looked down upon. Through Arthur Miller's play The Crucible he shows
cruelness through characters, and characters that represent the town. This is first
shown through the married couple John and Elizabeth Proctor. They are both equally
cruel to each other due to the great tension that lies between them due to John's affair
with Abigail. Abigail on the other hand is also a very cruel character, due to her great
pride and dream of getting with John. She accuses Elizabeth of being with so she can
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fulfill this dream. The final cruelness is shown through the people that represent the
town, like Reverend Parris, The girls and, all the people that wanted the accused
witches hung. Characters in the play used these cruel actions with the intention of
bettering themselves. Arthur Miller's first instances of justifiable cruelness were
shown through John and Elizabeth Proctor. First Elizabeth had disobeyed proctor by
letting Mary Warren go to the courts. While talking about going to Salem John gets
angry because Elizabeth let Mary Warren go, and feels he disobeyed her: "Why'd you
let her? You heard me forbid her go to Salem anymore!(The Crucible 52). When John
says "Why'd you let her"" he is questioning why Elizabeth allowed something to
happen that he did not want. This is not fair to John but Elizabeth turns things on him
to take the heat off her and starts bringing up Johns affair with Abigail. Elizabeth is
shocked to learn something that she never knew after they begin to talk about the
affair: "I am only wondering...She told it to me in a room alone..." (The Crucible 53).
When John said "she told it to me in a room alone" he did really not mean to say it to
be cruel, but he knew that it would hurt Elizabeth. He was telling her this to show her
that he could not prove anything she had said to him. Elizabeth got really offended but
John claimed that nothing happened, justifying his cruel actions. This still does not
make him a very nice person in Elizabeth's eyes. John feels that she will never forgive
him for what he has done and he is sorry for this. John gets angry at her and is out
right mean at her again. After they got into the fight about Abigail, Johns wishes that
Elizabeth would forgive him and realize that he is trying to become better: "Spare me!
You forget nothin' and forgive nothin'. Learn Charity, woman" (54). When Johns says
"Spare me!" he is begging that Elizabeth will just give up on Johns one sin, but it is
mean of John to call her out like this and also accuse her of forgiving nothing. This is
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justifiable for him though because he does not want to be looked down upon just
because he had an affair. So he tries to apologize, and get Elizabeth to forgive him.
The cruelest action that happened in Salem was the hanging of all the accused
witches. The person most involved with this was Abigail. She accused many people
that the girls and she disliked, including Elizabeth Proctor. When Mary Warren came
home from court she mentioned that Elizabeth had been spoken of in court: "Pointing
at Elizabeth: I saved her life today!" (The Crucible 59).When Mary Warren says "I
saved her life today!" it is because someone accused her in court and Mary Warren
claimed that she has never noticed any witchcraft coming from goody Proctor. This is
very mean for Abigail to do to accuse Elizabeth just to be with John, but she does it so
that she will never be accused in the affair and so she can live with John happily like
she wishes. Abigail is also rude and cruel when she claims in court that Mary had sent
her spirit out on her. "Oh Mary this is a black art to change your shape. No, I cannot, I
cannot, stop my mouth; its gods work I do" (The Crucible 115). This cruel action that
Abigail is performing could have and would have got Mary Warren hung if he kept
pursuing it. Abigail was self justified for these actions because she only did them to
save herself. If she had not made these scenes in court the judge may have thought she
was lying and then started questioning her heavily. Abigail is cruel often times just
because she has great pride in herself. In the beginning of act one after Parris
mentions dancing in the woods to Abigail she tells all the other girls what to say when
they are asked about the dancing, so that none of them would be accused of witchcraft
and they would not be questioned or thought to be witches: "No, he'll be coming up.
Listen, now; if they be questioning us, tell them we dance-I told him as much
already." (18). Miller cautions the audience of all of Abigail's lies cruelness especially
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towards Elizabeth through John and the affair. This shows the audience that Abigail
has a reason to be mean, and that reason is because she wants to be John's wife.
Cruelness was also seen through the entire town of Salem in many different
ways. The community as a whole was very cruel due to the fact that they hung all
accused witches, unless they confessed which many did not do. When Parris begs
Danforth not to be cruel and to let Proctor live yet another day Danforth claims: "You
misunderstand, sir; I cannot pardon these when twelve are already hanged for the
same crime. It is not just." This shows that these people that were hanged already
were shown no sympathy and were just hung in front of the entire town. In one case
during court all of the girls mock Mary Warren and pretend that her spirits are
attacking her. These girls are all towns' members performing this cruel act even
though they are doing it for Abigail, the girl that is leading them. While acting out this
cruel scene in court the girls directly accuse Mary Warren of sending out her spirits,
Susanna Walcott screams: "Her claws, she's stretching her claws!" (The Crucible115).
When Walcott says "She's stretching her claws!" she is claiming that Mary's spirit is
directly attacking her in the middle of court. This is very cruel for her to do because
Mary is not really attacking her through spirits. Walcott assumes that this is okay
because all of the other town girls are doing it with her and if she doesn't do it then
she too will be accused of witchcraft and sentenced to hang, thus she does this to
better herself. One of the final cruel actions that represented the town was through
Reverend Parris. To make himself look good in court he lies about the dancing of the
girls in the woods, because he was being irrational and using cruelness to save
himself: "I do not, sir, but I never saw them naked." (The Crucible 105). When
Proctor says "no sir I never saw them naked." He is clearly lying because in the
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beginning of the play he asks Abigail why the girls were naked. This is cruelness on
behalf of the town because Parris is supposed to be an honest godly man due to the
fact that he is the minister in Salem. Once again this is justifiable because Parris does
not want to be seen as a bad person by his town so he lies about knowing what
happened so no one will accuse him and he will still be liked.
All of these examples of cruelness in Millers' The Crucible are proven to be
justifiable by the character to make them self look better. John and Elizabeth were
mean to each other due to the tensions between them but they always had a reason for
their out bursts of meanness. Abigail was in particularly cruel to Elizabeth Proctor.
She was like this because she wanted to be married to John and have Elizabeth hung.
Finally, the people that represented the town of Salem like the minister, town girls,
and the people that wanted the accused hung were cruel because they also were cruel.
The girls and Reverend Parris lied in court to make themselves look good, and the
town's people were happy that the innocent were but accused witches were hung so
the town would be better, making them all cruel just to better themselves, and the
community.
All My Sons is a play of social criticism. The major theme of the play is Arthur
Miller’s belief that people have a wider responsibility to the society in which they
live, and this is something that Chris, Joe's son, is aware of and believes in. Unlike his
father, Chris feels society and other people play a main part in a person's
responsibility, as when he finds the truth out about his father’s actions; he is horrified
- "What the hell are you? You’re not even an animal, no animal kills his own, what
are you? What must I do to you? I ought to tear the tongue out of your mouth, what
must I do?"(All My Sons 34). Keller seems to still not understand his sons anguish, as
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his responses are "Chris...my Chris..."(45) Not until Larry's letter is revealed to him,
does Keller finally see the point of view of the next generation. Only after hearing
Larry's letter does he reply to Chris' question "Do you get it now!?" with "Yes...I think
I do" and then lead into where the play's title comes from when Joe Keller eventually
realizes that "they were all my sons" in one sense. Keller kills himself in the final few
pages of the play, leaving Kate on her own, the one thing she has always been said to
fear, but the truth seems to give her a sort of strength in itself, as she tells her
hysterical son Chris in the last line of the play, to "live...forget now...live" - finally
freeing him of the obligation of living with any feeling of responsibility for Keller's
suicide.
The play is also a criticism of the American dream. Joe Keller, a representative
type who would be considered an ordinary American, has lived through the Depression
and despite a lack of education he has been able to own a factory, which he hopes his
son will inherit. However, Keller’s quest for money leads to his responsibility for the
deaths of twenty one American pilots. Keller has apparently achieved the 'American
Dream' - he lives in a comfortable house despite being an uneducated man. Arthur
Miller is emphasizing the hollowness of the American Dream and that one should
'think about the consequences of our actions.' However, this material comfort which
Keller has worked to provide his family with the very best is of little consequence.
His strong family unit is an illusion - his wife is ill, Chris is discontent and Larry has
committed suicide as a result of his father's narrow-minded and reprehensible
decision. It is through the letter from Larry that Keller realizes that he has not only
killed one son but all of his sons, a theme which is reiterated by the title of the play.
At the end of the play, the American Dream has become more like an American
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Nightmare. Chris shows moral responsibility while his father Joe shows intense
family responsibility. The play focuses on Joe Keller’s conflict of responsibilities, his
responsibility to his family and that to wider society. He originally believes that he is
justified in sending cracked cylinder heads and causing the deaths of twenty one
pilots, as this allowed his family to make money and allowed his son Chris to inherit
the family business. Keller justifies his actions as he thinks he has a higher obligation
to his family over society, to Keller there is nothing greater than the family - "I'm his
father and he's my son, and if there's anything bigger than that I'll put a bullet in my
head”. Arthur Miller makes this clear in his introduction to The Collected Plays,
where he writes: Joe Keller’s trouble, in a word, is not that he cannot tell right from
wrong, but that his cast of mind cannot admit that he personally has viable connection
with his world, his universe, or his society (19). Gerald Weales accepts this belief that
“the best of drama has always dealt with man in both personal and social contexts… a
playwright should be concerned with both psychological man and social man”
(Arthur, Miller, Man And His Image, American Drama Since World War II 5)
The falsity of the American Dream is the dominant theme of Death of a
Salesman Willy Loman represents the primary target of this dream. Like most middleclass working men, he struggles to provide financial security for his family and
dreams about making himself a huge financial success. After years of working as a
traveling salesman, Willy Loman has only an old car, an empty house, and a defeated
spirit. Miller chose the job of salesman carefully for his American Dreamer. A
salesman does not make his/her own product, has not mastered a particular skill or a
body of knowledge, and works on the empty substance of dreams and promises.
Additionally, a salesman must sell his/her personality as much as his/her product.
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Willy Loman falsely believes he needs nothing more than to be well liked to make it
big. The tragedy of the dysfunctional family, which helps to keep the American
Dream alive, is a second important theme of Miller's play. Linda and Happy
especially work very hard to keep the fantasy of the dream of success alive. In the
dysfunctional Loman family, the wife is restricted to the role of housekeeping and
bolstering her husband's sense of self-importance and purpose. A contradictory role
given to her is that of the family's financial manager. In effect, Linda juggles the
difficult realities of a working class family while making her husband believe that his
income is better than adequate. Willy attempts to provide financial security and to
guide his sons' future, neither of which he does very well. Unlike the myth of
economic mobility in America, the vast majority of people in the working class stay
in the working class generation after generation. However, the myth is what Willy
Loman lives on. Unfortunately, his illusions do not fit his reality. Finally, the only
solution to providing for his family is to kill himself so that they can collect on his life
insurance. The American Dream that identifies hard work without complaint as the
key to success. Willy’s interpretation of likeability is superficial—he childishly
dislikes Bernard because he considers Bernard a nerd. Willy’s blind faith in his
stunted version of the American Dream leads to his rapid psychological decline when
he is unable to accept the disparity between the Dream and his own life. Willy’s life
charts a course from one abandonment to the next, leaving him in greater despair each
time. Willy’s father leaves him and Ben when Willy is very young, leaving Willy
neither a tangible (money) nor an intangible (history) legacy. Ben eventually departs
for Alaska, leaving Willy to lose himself in a warped vision of the American Dream.
Likely a result of these early experiences, Willy develops a fear of abandonment,
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which makes him want his family to conform to the American Dream. His efforts to
raise perfect sons, however, reflect his inability to understand reality. The young Biff,
whom Willy considers the embodiment of promise, drops Willy when he finds out
about Willy’s adultery. Biff’s ongoing inability to succeed in business furthers his
estrangement from Willy. When, at Frank’s Chop House, Willy finally believes that
Biff is on the cusp of greatness, Biff shatters Willy’s illusions and, along with Happy,
abandons the deluded, babbling Willy in the washroom. Willy’s primary obsession
throughout the play is what he considers to be Biff’s betrayal of his ambitions for him.
Willy believes that he has every right to expect Biff to fulfill the promise inherent in
him. When Biff walks out on Willy’s ambitions for him, Willy takes this rejection as
a personal affront (he associates it with “insult” and “spite”). Willy Loman, after all,
is a salesman, and Biff’s ego-crushing rebuff ultimately reflects Willy’s inability to
sell him on the American Dream—the product in which Willy himself believes most
faithfully. Willy assumes that Biff’s betrayal stems from Biff’s discovery of Willy’s
affair with The Woman—a betrayal of Linda’s love. Whereas Willy feels that Biff has
betrayed him, Biff feels that Willy, a “phony little fake,” has betrayed him with his
unending stream of ego-stroking lies.
Incident at Vichy focuses on the subjects of human nature, guilt, fear, and
complicity and examines how the Nazis were able to perpetrate the Holocaust with so
little resistance. The play revolves around the characters' struggle to accept why they
are there. All of the detainees except the gypsy and Von Berg are Jewish, and most
have fled to Vichy from the German-occupied northern half of France. Nevertheless,
they persist in allowing themselves a state of denial about the motivations for their
arrests and the fate that awaits them. Lebeau, Monceau, and Marchand all grasp for
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explanations: "It must be a routine document check." Bayard, who may or may not be
Jewish, is an outspoken Communist who warns the detainees about trains going to
Nazi concentration camps in Germany and Poland and reports of mass killings. He
enjoins the detainees to develop political consciousness so as to make an intellectual,
albeit private, stand against the pressure of detention. "My faith is in the future; and
the future is Socialist. ... They can't win. Impossible." (Incident at Vichy 24)
The play also shows the various characters' reaction to their situation: Leduc, a
psychoanalyst who is also a French veteran of the 1940 fighting against Germany,
tries to rally the prisoners to attempt an escape. However, the other able-bodied
prisoners prefer to hope for the best, rejecting Bayard's warnings. In this way, the
play's central lesson is how the Nazis were able to perpetrate the Holocaust, how they
were able to get away with it for so long. The café proprietor Ferrand notably does
nothing to intervene on behalf of his friend the Waiter with the interrogators. The
main confrontation is between Leduc and the Major, a disabled veteran of the German
Army, as Leduc tries to persuade the Major to let them go free. The Major resents his
assignment, thinking it beneath the dignity of a regular Army officer, but ultimately
resigns himself to it, feeling himself entrapped within the chain of command.
Furthermore, he feels that whether or not he helps the detainees to escape is
irrelevant: "There are no persons anymore" (Incident at Vichy 24). The future which
the Major sees is an authoritarian mass society where human beings are insignificant.
In the 1964 version, there is no real attempt at escape on the part of the prisoners as a
whole. At the end, Von Berg secures a free pass from the guards, but then attempts to
give it to Leduc, volunteering his life to help Leduc escape. In the 1966 version there
is a major escape attempt in the middle of the play, but it is thwarted by the
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unexpected appearance of the Major. Since the objective of the piece is to show how
the Nazis managed to make the Holocaust happen, this escape attempt may be viewed
as seriously undermining the play's theme.
Arthur Miller’s After the Fall deals with the death of love. The playwright, in
contrast to earlier plays where he stressed communal responsibility here moves to the
existential theme of moral separateness. Quentin’s trial is a device to establish to the
jury his innocence, yet this would-be exercise in self-justification leads him ultimately
to acknowledge his complicity in the suffering of those whom he has loved. The play
demonstrates a man’s struggle to survive in a fallen world. The fall from Eden is a
recurrent theme in American literature, after all, was established as a kind of New
World Garden, a bountiful paradise that would yield endless riches. It would bring
forth an ideal community in which all individuals could live together in harmony and
prosperity. The possibility of a fallen Eden, however, always lurked in the Puritan
commitment to the individual’s natural propensity for evil. Nathaniel Hawthorne,
Herman Melville, Henry James, and William Faulkner are some the great authors who
have treated the theme of the fall. In After the Fall, Arthur Miller explores theme of
fall in the light of the modern world. Quentin, the main character, who feels that there
is no God to judge his actions, is an alienated man. He tries to plead his case to a
sympathetic listener who is neither seen nor heard. The setting of the play is meant to
remind the audience of the hollow, cavernous condition of humankind. In Act I,
Miller tries to suggest, through the scenery and the archaeologist Holga, man’s
responsibility for the Holocaust, but unlike Holga, Quentin has no feeling for the
event or the people destroyed in it. He processes his client Felice’s divorce, but he
returns none of her exuberance or desire to become close. He is not sure, after two
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broken marriages, whether he can relate as a lover to Holga. Act I sets up the more
focused Act II, which goes back in time to detail the gradual destruction of the love
between Maggie and Quentin. As thoroughly innocent as she is physically beautiful,
Maggie gives herself to Quentin unconditionally. If she is the apple of his eye,
however, she is also the fruit of his fall. The more he tries to protect her, the more she
becomes angry and joyless qualities of an isolated person, doomed mentally and
physically to death. This part of the play moves gradually toward ultimate isolation as
Quentin pleads with the Listener for the right to his separate moral identity. In the
end, the characters who participated in his tragedy (destruction or holocaust of wives)
pass in review as though in judgment on him. He observes: “I loved them all, all! And
gave them willing to failure and to death that I might live, as they gave me and gave
each other, with a word, a look, a trick, a truth, a lie—and all in love!” (After the
Fall). The play ends on a positive note when Quentin, neither good nor innocent,
apparently accepts his past as Holga accepts her people’s Holocaust, for he leaves
with her. In a kind of existential choice, he, like her, forgives himself and moves
toward a new love relationship. The Price deals with the lives of two brothers.
Sacrifice ambitions and desires for a loved one, the two sides of dilemma are
projected through the characters. Victor chooses the first route and Walter’s the
second. Victor sacrificed his ambition, his desire to become a scientist, in order to
help his father, and the result is that he is trapped in a job he despises and he feels
lost, unable to make a decision about retirement and a new career. Walter, who fled
his responsibility to a father crushed by the stock market crash of 1929, pursued a
successful career as a doctor but is now tormented by guilt, so much so that he
attempts to bribe Victor to alleviate it. At the end of the play, when Walter comments
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that he will not allow Victor to make him feel guilty again, it is clear that Walter
actually has been tormenting himself. Each brother envies the other. Victor envies
Walter’s successful career, while Walter envies Victor’s generous spirit. Neither man,
however, can return to his original choice and undo it. Victor understands this finality
by the end of the play, while Walter is still trying to erase the years, his responsibility
to his father, and his guilt. Gregory Solomon, a wily Russian-Jewish antique dealer
whose wisdom lives up to his name, understands the problem with time and the
irrevocability of past choices.
The theme of The Ride Down Mt. Morgan is the dilemma of a bigamist. The
central character is Lyman Felt, an insurance agent and bigamist who maintains
families in New York City and Elmira in upstate New York. When he is hospitalized
following a nearly fatal car crash on an icy mountain road, both wives, Prim and
proper Theo, to whom he's been wed for more than thirty years, and the younger,
more assertive Leah, whom he married nine years earlier—show up at his bedside.
When confronted with his duplicity, Felt states that the two options in life are to be
true to others (and to what he deems a hypocritical society) or to himself, and that he
has chosen the latter. He justifies his actions to both shocked women by explaining he
has given them good lives, has supported them financially and emotionally, and has
been a good father. He goes on to say that the two women have been happier with this
arrangement than they would have been if they had been the only wife. As reasons for
this he cites domestic boredom, routine, and the angst of being trapped in the same
relationship forever. The play uses flashbacks to take us to previous situations both
families have lived. Doubts linger about the crash having been an accident, and some
characters start suspecting it was an attempted suicide, maybe motivated by Felt's
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growing discomfort about his unusual family arrangement. The flip side of the wives'
ostensible faultless lifestyle is also presented, when it is suggested that Leah has been
involved in another relationship, and Theo admits to having experienced long spells
of being cold and sexless. Every character starts having to deal with their own
hypocrisy, even Felt's outraged business partners who are later discovered to keep
lovers. Through Felt, Arthur Miller presents the supposition that monogamy is an
unnatural and unattainable state imposed on men by rigid but unnecessary social
convention.
There is great conflict between community and American law in the play A
View from the Bridge. The community abides by Sicilian-American customs protects
illegal immigrants within their homes, values respect and family, is hard working and
know the shipping culture, has strong associations with names, believes in trust and
wants revenge when a member has been wronged. Some of these values, however,
come in conflict with those of the American system of justice. Eddie Carbone chooses
to turn against his community and abide by the state laws. He loses the respect of his
community and friends—the name and personal identity he treasures. Eddie Carbone,
with a stronger allegiance to the community, reverts back to another custom of
Sicilian-Americans: revenge. Not only is Eddie pulled back to the values of his
community, but the final victor of the play is symbolic of community values—the
Italian, Marco. Thus, the small community is stronger than American law.
Arthur Miller’s The Crucible was the response to what he saw as the collapse
of individual integrity and life under the assaults of the social system; it was assertion
of the need to play socially responsible role deals with two important things.The play
also is about the individual and society. John Proctor is the individual who takes on
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total responsibility for himself and for his world.There are twenty-one characters in
all, not to mention the people referred to in the course of the play. A whole town is
involved, not simply one family whose drama might be representative of the plight of
the community. The twofold nature of the drama is stressed right from the beginning
by Miller himself in his authorial statements accompanying the first act. In a fairly
long disquisition sketching out the main features of Salem, Massachussets Bay in
1692, Arthur Miller is very careful to give his reader a few necessary facts concerning
the life of the community. Miller's commentary is a selection of facts chosen primarily
for their significance at the time of the crisis, not for their intrinsic importance. Miller
first lays stress on the importance of the sense of 'community'. The action takes place
in 1692 at a time when people were living in a very closely knit society, based on
Puritan principles, and, consequently, prone to a certain amount of intolerance
towards any form of opposition or dissent. Discipline and obedience were the primary
rules, for society was based on an implicit motto saying that '... in unity lay the best
promise of safety'. Such an adamantly rigid society of course implies that any form of
individuality will be considered subversive and dangerous. Thus, paradoxically, such
a society is likely to generate suspicion among its members, to develop, as Miller
points out in his essay Tragedy and the Common Man, '... a predilection for minding
other people's business'.
There is an essentially explosive situation where unity at once ensures and
endangers the individual's safety. It is precisely the potentially explosive situation
which triggers off the whole drama in The Crucible, where the general tragedy can be
seen as a magnification of petty, selfish quarrels occasioned because the individual's
desires are curbed by the authoritative state. Those squabbles gradually develop into a
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wider, extensive quarrel that soon gets out of hand both for the individuals and for the
society, and becomes impossible to control--the result being, of course, an intensification
of the already exaggerated authority. In other words, the play seems to portray some
sort of malignant process in which essentially personal grievances are inflated to
socially important hatreds. Broken Glass talks of the Nazis who in Berlin smash the
windows and destroy the contents of Jewish shops and synagogues. Old men in the
city are put to work cleaning the sidewalks with toothbrushes. At the same time in the
home of a Jewish couple in Brooklyn, New York city, a vivacious and caring woman,
a wife and mother, is suddenly unable to walk. Miller’s play examines how these two
situations mirror each other. Sylvia Gellburg, in her wheelchair, is an exact image of
the paralysis everyone, but in particular the American Jewish community, showed in
the face of Hitler. Phillip Gellburg, the husband, is a “miserable little pisser” and a
“dictator”, according to Margaret Hymen, the wife of Sylvia’s doctor. He is a
repressed and prickly character, a man who is both proud and ashamed of his heritage,
and who humiliates and represses his wife. Broken Glass is an interesting but
disappointing drama, like many of Miller’s later works. It does not have the stamp and
authority of his masterpieces but still manages to combine the power of realism with
the resonance of metaphor, for which the author was justly famous. We are shown
how fear can, literally, cripple a life. We are also reminded of the inevitable and
shocking consequences of public and private denial. This is a difficult play in many
ways, not least because the issues with which it deals have been aired many times
before. Miller gives us much to think about and the play is mostly engaging and
cleverly constructed, but there are holes in it, left uncorrected by an ageing dramatist.
Phillip’s heart-attack, for example, is so passé that it’s almost funny. And Broken
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Glass simply doesn’t need a shock ending. A younger and more self-confident Arthur
Miller would have known that. Arthur Miller’s concern with morality is based on the
individual's response to the manifold pressures exerted by the forces of family and
society. Recurring themes of his major works involve the overwhelming importance
of personal and social responsibility and the moral corruption that results from
betraying the dictates of conscience.
Chapter – III
Characterization
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Chapter - III
Characterization
Characterization is how characters are represented and the ways in which this
is accomplished, such as, how the writer limits one’s responses, questions or
observations, for instance. Any playwright may also describe a character through his
or her gestures or speeches. The writer chooses the themes and they are generally
concretized through characters in the plays. Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams and
Arthur Miller excel in their art of characterization. Their characters belong to all ranks
and files of American society. Each of their heroes is involved in a struggle which
results from either his acceptance or his rejection of an image of himself. This image
grows out of the values and the prejudices of the society. It is, therefore, natural that
the playwrights planted their characters firmly within a family structure which
reflected in turn the pressures of society at large.
Eugene O’Neill’s art of characterization is inseparable from his vision of life.
He wrote symbolic plays in which, instead of resorting to depicting a crowd, he began
to create representative individuals, concepts turned into characters. Characters, tragic
heroes especially, are symbols of dream and illusion, courage and fortitude, higher
ideals, poetic sensibility, rebellion, struggle against an alien world. Being dissatisfied
with the ordinariness of surfaces of the realistic method of character portrayal, he
experimented with expressionism. The Emperor Jones is his first expressionistic play
and Brutus Jones is his first expressionistic hero. The play, sometimes called
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“monodrama”, where the distinction is motivated by a character’s, state of mind and
where that character is still a human being. The, Hairy Ape apparently developed in
the direction of expressionism. Its position is somewhere between the expressionism
of The Emperor Jones and that of playwrights like Toiler or Kaiser; realistic and
stylized elements are mixed, and there is still quite a lot of emphasis on characterization
but also on social ingredients.
Freudian psychoanalysis developed O’Neill’s insight into the depth of human
psyche and he created characters representing psychological complexes in plays such
as The Strange Interlude and Mourning Becomes Electra. In the last phase of his
career, however, his art matured considerably and keeping in view the serious nature
of the plays he wrote, he created three-dimensional characters. The characteristic of
the dreamy eyes appears consistently throughout the plays. In Lazarus Laughed,
Miriam’s mask is described in these words: “The eyes of the mask are almost closed.
Their gaze turns within, oblivious to the life outside, as they dream down on the child
forever in memory at her breast.” (43). And in The Great God Brown Margaret is
described thus “She is almost seventeen, pretty and vivacious, blonde, with big
romantic eyes, her figure lithe and strong, her facial expression intelligent but
youthfully dreamy, especially now in the moonlight.” While Dion’s face is not
described by the word “dreamy”, a synonym serves to convey the same idea. “His
face is masked. The mask is a fixed forcing of his own face––dark, spiritual, poetic,
passionate) super-sensitive, helplessly unprotected in its childlike, religious faith in
life.” Robert, in Beyond the Horizon, “is a tall slender young man of twenty-three.
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Marsden in Strange Interlude is another member of the hapless company of
idealists who are incapable of accepting the reality of the world and are destroyed by
their own dreams of beauty. He is described : “His face is too long for its width, his
nose is high and narrow, his forehead broad, his mild blue eyes those of a dreamy
self-analyst, his thin lips ironical and a bit sad,. There is an indefinable feminine
quality about him, but it is nothing apparent in either appearance or act.” He is a man
fascinated by his own idealism and at the same time conscious of the limitations of his
ideal. Even old Ephraim Cabot in Desire Under the Elms is described in these words
“His eyes have taken on a strange, incongruous dreamy quality.”(24)
In all his plays, the individual is brought to a tragic end because he asks more
from life than life can offer him. He is incapable of reconciling himself to the
limitations of the world in which he lives. The narrow confines of his environment irk
him, and he dreams beyond the horizon into an imaginative world where all is
beautiful and good. Living in this divided world, the one of reality, the other of
imagination, the individual is continually tortured by the passionate longing of his
ambitions and the grim reality of his immediate environment. In fear of losing their
power, they are nervous, fretful, discontented. The efforts of O’Neill’s people are
concentrated on tiling to or holding on to their middle position.For instance, Brutus
Jones and Jim struggle against being driven back to their original colour lines. Yank
accepts the embrace of death rather than sink back to his pit of not “belonging”. In
Nina and Lavinia the will to power is to extreme and insistent as to reach near
hysteria. (Gupta, Monika. The Plays of Eugene O’Neill)
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But their rebellion, being incomplete or negative, proves in adequate to cope
with their situation. The result is that these characters are invaded by doubts which
split their personalities. It was O’Neill’s startling innovation to give theatrical form to
the dissociated personality through the visions in The Emperor Jones, the masks
in The Great God Brown, the “double talk” in Strange Interlude and the change of
personality in Mourning Becomes Electra. Brutus Jones repudiates and is repudiated
by both blacks and whites. What is here projected through the twilight consciousness
of one person is dramatized in the later plays, where O’Neill extends the technique of
dissociation to the point where it becomes a naturalistic form. In The Great God
Brown he would have us see the split in his characters by their use of masks;
in Strange Interlude he would have us hear the evidence of their duality.
In O’Neill’s two major plays, Strange Interlude and Mourning Becomes
Electra, the action pivots on a war scene which serves as the background for the inner
wars of the characters. Nina rebels against her father’s intervention which kept her
from consummating her love for Gordon; Lavinia and Orin trespass all natural
boundaries in defiance of their father’s strict morality. Deprived of love, Nina rejects
love itself, giving herself to men and marrying without love. Even her child is conceived in loveless “scientific” planning. Having freed herself from all outer
authority, Nina is trapped by the authority within herself. In Strange Interlude the
characters still manage to live and talk themselves out. In Mourning Becomes
Electra, all expression is turned inward. Here, love is for oneself, sinful and guilty
love of daughter for father, son for mother, brother for sister. The “rich exclusive
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Mannons” feel guilty in no longer being capable of productive love. They snatch at
love stealthily from those below, from Marie Brantome, the nurse girl with the joy of
life (reminiscent of Regina in Ibsen is Ghosts), and her son, Brant. Nina was still able
to produce “in secret”. The Mannons cannot do even that. The war has maimed them,
and after the public civil war is over they continue a private civil war within
themselves. Even as they succeed in keeping the murders from becoming public, the
acts carry on their secret “publicity” within the characters themselves. The result is
the secular tragedy in which suffering constantly mounts without alleviation. Lavinia,
the master will in all three murders, hopes, by her acts of “removal” to free her self
for simple love. But what Lavinia cannot control is the effect of the action on her self.
With each physical removal, she adds to her inner burden. The dead souls rule the
living ones. She retains her wilfulness to the very end, refusing to atone, but the,
confession and atonement take place nonetheless in the form of her self-rejection.
“There’s no one left to punish me. I’m the last Mannon. I’ve got to punish myself.”
With these words she enters her church of hell to practise love or hatred on herself.
In the play Mourning Becomes Electra through Nina and Lavinia, O’Neill
presents the ultimate in self and social alienation. Both are the masochistic products of
modern rationalistic probing. Both attempt to wield and possess people’s lives, as if
they were “god and had created them”. Nina renounces at the end. Lavinia remains
defiant even in her acceptance of suffering. Her very, self-surrender and self:
immolation have the character of challenge and insubordination. She remains in the
grip of the Furies. In the midst, of their sophisticated schemings, O’Neill’s characters
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yearn for the state in which there is no knowledge of sin, where man is not tormented
by “dreams of greed and power”. The business characters in O’Neill’s later plays,
unlike Marco Polo of the earlier one, become problematical in that-they question their
status. Brown doubts that he is “the great God Brown”; Sam Evans inherits Marco
Polo’s innocent acquisitiveness, but his success is illusory and planned for him by, the
sensitive and’ guilty characters, Nina and Darrell. He himself no longer enjoys the
robust health of Marco, and while the insane streak in his family passes him by, he
dies a sudden, “non-natural” death. What was an “instinct” of acquisitiveness with
Marco’ Polo becomes neurosis with Nina and Lavinia. What was simple reasoning
with him becomes tortured self-analysis. Marco Polo was intent on accumulating
information and goods. The modem characters having gathered them, question their
meaning, want to know what lies “behind” them.
O’ Neill’s Beyond the Horizon deals with the lives of two brothers, Robert and
Andrew. Both Robert and Andrew are brothers and are opposite to each other in
nature but fall in with the same girl, Ruth. Robert is a young farm born dreamer,
whose romantic mind and frail body yearn for the open sea. On the other hand,
Andrew has no interest in all sorts of romantic imagination. He is a real ‘Mayo,’ a true
son of the soil, born to do nothing but work in the fields. The play begins with the
incident that Robert is about to ship on a voyage with his uncle. His brother, who is
happy with the farm, is looking forward to his marriage with Ruth Atkins, his
childhood sweet-heart. When Robert tells Ruth that he loves her, her response causes
him to abandon his chance of escape and to marry Ruth, while Andrew replaces his
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brother on the sea voyage. Robert falls in despair and brings the farm to slow
disintegration and ruin. He realizes that his wife, who has become resentful and
morose, has always loved his brother. Anyhow, they have managed to pass their time
for the sake of their daughter and mother. But after the death of his mother and the
baby, Robert becomes more helpless and faces a lot of economic crisis. Then, Andrew
returns, successful and wealthy, and finds Robert surrounded by the ruins he has
created and dying of tuberculosis. On his death-bed, Robert still dreams of freedom
beyond the horizon and of reconciliation between Ruth and Andrew. At first we find
Robert sitting on the fence, reading a book in the beauteous atmosphere of the fading
sun. His appearance expresses his personality: “There is a touch of the poet about
him expressed in his high forehead and wide, dark eyes. His features are delicate and
refined leaning to weakness in the mouth and chin” (6) This individuality of his
character keeps him apart from the rest of the characters in the play. It seems that he is
haunted by a sense of isolation which ensues from his romantic nature ever in search
of beauty. On the other hand, Andrew is returning from his work in the field, “an
opposite type of Robert- husky, sunbronzed, handsome in large-featured, manly
fashion- a son of the soil, intelligent in a shrewd way, but with nothing of the
intellectual about him” (6). This shows his devotion towards work in contrast to
Robert’s worship of beauty. Both the brothers are sharply distinguished by their
thoughts. Being a farmer’s son, whose duty is to work in the field, Robert’s
expectation lies beyond the horizon. His high ambition is the cause of his loneliness,
which compels him to seek some peace in a lonely atmosphere, for which he is
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isolated from his family. Robert thinks that his search for identity may be fulfilled by
his urge for beauty. Robert’s longing for beauty is marred by the confession of Ruth.
On the eve of his departure, he comes to know that he is being loved by Ruth, who, he
thought, loved Andrew. At first, Robert insists Ruth to accompany him in his
voyage. But she refuses, citing the reason of her mother Mrs. Atkin’s illness and her
own outlook on life. She says to Robert:
I wouldn’t want to live in any of those outlandish places you were
going to. I couldn’t stand it there, I know I couldn’t – not knowing
anyone. It makes me afraid just to think of it. I’ve never been away
from here, hardly and – I’m just a home body. I’m afraid (30)
Her bent of mind is entirely practical, contrary to the poetical mind of Robert.
In fact, she is trapped in the cage of illusion- she hopes she will lead a life of
conciliation with Robert. But the nature of Robert is incompatible with hers. Robert
is a man living in the world of imagination such as poetry, and she, for this transitory
charm, wooes him. (Gupta, Monika. The Plays of Eugene O’Neill- A Critical Study)
Jones in The Emperor Jones is the major character whose manners and
appearance make him a different being and because of his own nature he is cut- off
from the society. Neither in the United States nor in the West Indian Island has he
established any social links with anybody which is natural instinct in every social
being. Identity is nothing but a farce for him. Being a convict, he becomes ruler at the
cost of his identity. But the identity which he assumes in the island becomes false
because he has again done the same mistake. It seems that treachery is part and parcel
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of his nature. He always faces the problem of identity. But whenever he gets identity
by his tricky efforts, he misuses it. He never considers himself a Negro; rather he
thinks that the black people of his race are inferior to him. It clearly shows that he has
no sense of fellow-feeling. Again and again, he calls “nigger,” “bloody nigger”, which
indicates that he has no sense of brotherhood and belongingness. Always he is
haunted by a sense of isolation; he belongs neither to himself nor to his own classes of
people. While Smithers warns him of the danger he has to face in wild forest, he calls
him: Look – a- heat white man; Does you think. I’su a natural bo-n-fool? (13). It
shows his false confidence and egoism which keep him isolated from the society. He
hates both the white and black people, and this ultimately separates him from the
society. His over smartness places him in a lonely state. He is confident that he can
make people fool in any circumstances at any time. Jones’s false pride and vain
courage always make a dividing line between him and society. None but he himself is
responsible for this conflict which keeps him aloof from the trend. Neither he
considers anybody’s suggestion nor understands the capacity of others.
In O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape Yank is the principal character whose sense of
belongingness is the main theme of the play. When this belongingness is shattered by
Mildred Douglas, he falls into despair. He is a stoker in a transatlantic liner and other
characters do not know about his whereabouts. Yank tells Long that on Saturday
nights his parent's fighting was so intense that his parents would break the furniture.
Ironically, his parents made him attend church every Sunday morning. After his
mother’s death, Yank ran away from home, tired of lickings and punishment. In the
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beginning of the play, Yank seems fairly content as, if not proud to be a fireman. He
defends the ship as his home and insists that the work he does is vital—it is the force
that makes the ship go twenty-five knots an hour. Mildred Douglas's reaction to Yank
is the catalyst which makes Yank come to class awareness. His attempt to get revenge
on Mildred Douglas widens to revenge on the steel industry and finally the entire
Bourgeois. Throughout this struggle Yank defines "belonging" as power. When he
thinks he "belongs" to something he gains strength, when Yank is rejected by a group,
he is terribly weak. However, Yank is rejected by all facets of society: his fellow
firemen, Mildred Douglas, people in Fifth Avenue, The I.W.W. (Industrial Workers
World) and finally the ape in the zoo. Yank symbolizes the struggle of modern man
within industrial society—he cannot break class or ideological barriers, nor create
new ones. Yank is the outsider and eventually just the freak at the zoo for people to
cage and point at.
In Desire Under the Elms Simeon and Peter, the two important characters are
disgusted with the life, provided to them by their father. They are aware of the
hardships they have met in cultivating the stony land of their father. They are so much
disgusted with him that they do not hesitate to wish him dead or mad. It clearly
indicated the Ephraim’s principle of worshipping the hard god is solely responsible
for the isolated lives of his sons. No one is free from the tyrannous eyes of Ephraim.
Eben accuses his brothers who did not stand beside their mother when she was
suffering and leading a lonely life. Eben believes that the spirit of his dead mother still
haunts the house. Eben’s desire to possess the farm is a type of unconscious revenge
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upon his father’s tyranny. When they assert their rights over the property, Eben
violently opposes: “ye’ve no right. She wa’n’t year maw; it was her farm. Didn’t he
steal it from her? She’s dead. It’s my farm” (Desire Under the Elms 148)
Eben sticks to his possession of the farm, and believes that the whole property
belongs to him. He gives the reason: “it’s maw’s farm agen! It’s my farm! Them’s my
cow! I’ll milk my durn fingers off fur cows o’ mine!” he is even ready to pay for the
share of his brothers (151). Simeon’s and Peter’s search of new life compels them to
be alienated from their own land, and so they sell their share to Eben for six hundred
dollars. In the meantime, Ephraim returns with his newly married wife, Abbie, whose
marriage to Ephraim is entirely based on her self-interest. It is for security that she
marries Ephraim. She narrates the insecure life of her by-gone years to Eben thus:
I’ve had a hard life, too – oceans o’ trouble an’ nuthin’ but wuk fur
reward, I was an orphan early an’ had t’ wuk fur others in other folks’
hums. Then I married an’ he turned out a drunken spreer an’ so he had
to wuk fur others an’ me to agen in other folks’ hums, an’ the baby
died, an’ my husband got sick an’ died too, an’ I was glad sayin’ now
I’m free fur was t’ wuk agen in other fulks’ hums’ doin’ others folks’
wuk till I’d most give up hope o’ever doing my own wuk in my own
hum, an’ them your paw come…( Desire Under the Elms 160).
After passing such an insecure phase, naturally aspires a secure life to which
she can belong. She keeps her eyes on Ephraim’s property which is the real security
for her. Abbie’s greed and possessiveness for the farm motivate all her actions in the
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beginning. As soon as she enters the house, she feels that the entire property belongs
to her. Her strong determination of possessiveness can be felt from her outward
appearance.Both Simeon and Peter have left the house, and therefore the only obstacle
in her way is young Eben, she thinks she can easily win him. In her encounter with
Eben, she tries to win his sympathy by telling him her story of loneliness and
hardship. But it seems too difficult on her part to mould him for her purpose owing to
his strict sense of possessiveness. The foremost reason behind Abbie’s desire of
possession is her sense of insecurity. She has suffered a lot in her past, and hence the
real cause of her possessiveness is her desire for security. She wants to belong. She
wants to identify herself with the farm of Cabot. This sense of belongingness leads
her to establish an illegal relationship with Eben. Gradually, Eben is trapped by her
sensuality. His longing for the lost mother’s urge finds a ray of hope in Abbie. His
search for a lost maternity compels him to be a victim of Abbie’s lust and purpose.
Eben’s “quest for the source of feminine power in the land sets him apart from his
brothers and brings him into fatal opposition with Ephraim and his hard god.” like
Simeon and Peter, at first, he seeks satisfaction in a dream of material possession; but
as the play proceeds, it becomes clear that his hatred for his father and his legalistic
claims of ownership are only signals of truer desire to rediscover the security through
an identification with the land. For Eben, the true, the consummate condition of
‘being’ is to belong to the land as an unborn child belongs to the womb. In reality,
Eben is opposite of his father and his brothers.
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The Great God Brown deals with the four helpless persons’ futile search for
happiness. They are: Dion Anthony, the torn and tortured artist; his wife Margaret, his
friend William (Billy) Brown; and Cybel the prostitute. They represent conflicting
selves as well as conflicting elements in the society. The play begins with a prologue
in which we find Dion and Billy, as boys are in love with Margaret. Their fathers are
partners in a construction firm. Billy is a simple boy who wears no mask, and
obediently promises his parents to study architecture. But Dion wears a mask of pan
to conceal his real poetic nature. He is too sensitive to stand in the misunderstanding
of the world. Margaret loves Dion’s mask, which protects his sensitive nature from
intrusion, and never comes to know his inner self. She, without ever understanding
him, marries him and bears him children. It is here that the play property opens in
their ugly home. The domestic life of the alien couple turns to be a miserable one.
Dion has spent his money, and the tenderly loving Margaret suggests him to work for
his friend, Billy, now the successful businessman William a. brown. Dion hesitatingly
sends her to get the job for him. After knowing the reality through Margaret about
Dion’s failure as an artist and a father, brown agrees to take him as the chief
draftsman in his firm. Instead of painting the nature, Dion becomes a building
designer. Being dissatisfied with life, Dion seeks consolation from Cybel who
embodies the honest qualities of earthly love. She accepts him without his mask. But
here Dion also finds brown to be his competitor as he was in the case of Margaret.
Brown is jealous of Dion’s creativity, though the latter has played a significant role to
promote his business. After long and bitter circumstances, Dion mockingly wills
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brown his mask, and the latter puts it on and tries to fulfil his desire of possessing
Margaret in the disguise of Dion. Replacing his own identity with Dion’s mask, he
manages for a time to alternate between the two selves, but is unable to continue to
play the double role : one as Dion, and the other as brown. He then assumes the
character of Dion for good, and is accused of murdering brown. In a confused chase
by the police who accuse him of murder, brown is shot. He dies in the arms of Cybel,
who affirms the existence of god and love. Disillusioned Margaret finds fulfilment in
a state of falsity with her sons and her time less love for the mask of Dion. Wearing a
mask is not a matter of choice. Man is trapped in the mask by circumstances, and by
his own fears and inhibitions. When he fails to find some communion with the world
beyond his cells, he separates himself from all other human beings. But his solitary
journey never ends until his doom. This happens in the life of Dion Anthony, the
distinguished character of the play.
The painful revelation of the early childhood possesses him entirely, and he
can not rest until the promise is somehow fulfilled. So, cut-off from his friend and
father, he desperately wants to communicate his real self. When he tries to show his
inner self, she recoils with horror. He realizes that there is no human being whom he
can comprehend or whose comprehension enables him to unmask himself, and thus
free himself from loneliness. After his marriage and the death of his parents, he
becomes more helpless and insecure. Gradually, he loses his interest in life and his
family. “his real face has aged greatly, grown more stained and tortured”, and his
mask becomes “more defiant and mocking, its sneer more forced and bitter, its pan
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quality becoming Mephistophelean” (25).He turns to be a split person, tortured by the
conflict between his inner-self and the mask. In search of happiness, he becomes
spend-thrift drunkard and visits low women. His relation with prostitute Cybel is the
result of his longing for his mother’s love. Perhaps her mother is the only person who
understood his artistic sensibility, and no wonder his father considers him identical to
his mother. For him, his mother is the symbol of all the warmth of life that he has lost
forever.
In search of understanding and love, he marries Margaret. But to his ill-luck,
instead of loving him, she loves his mask. He expresses the agony of his tragic
alienation when he says to his wife mockingly :“this domestic diplomacy! We
communicate in code – when neither has the other’s key!” (28). he becomes a stranger
to his wife and loses the feelings of a devoted husband. Pretending his failure as an
artist when Margaret approaches brown for a jub to him, he considers it her pride, and
not her loyalty. Similarly, when Cybel reminds him about his worried wife, he says:
She knows-but-she’ll never admit to herself that her husband ever entered your door.
(mocking) aren’t women loyal-to-their vanity and their other things! (51-52). Under
the stress of the conflicts between the outer mask and inner self, Dion shatters
mentally. His mask acquires a sinister reality and completely overshadows his inner
being. He realizes that it is really difficult to live in a world of strangers under the
falsity of the mask. His lonely suffering ends in his death. Before the end he decides
to bequeath the mask to William Brown.
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Nina Leeds is the main character of O’Neill’s Strange Interlude whose sense
of possessiveness is the striking feature of the play. She lives in a world of unreality,
since she does not find anything real to which she can belong. This sense of conflict
arises out of her possessiveness, her desire to keep all man she has wanted for herself.
An inescapable past becomes her whole life. When she realizes the illusory nature of
her quested values, she feels embittered and then moves in another direction in clutch
at a new illusion. But she fails to achieve her goal of possession, and remains an
alienated person throughout her life. The tragic story of her life begins with the death
of Gordon Shaw, her fiancee, who she cannot forget throughout her life. Her longing
for him and to be the mother of his baby leave her in a state of isolation. Life becomes
meaningless for her: “Gordon is dead! What use is my life to me or anyone?” (298).
she accuses her father of preventing their marriage. She wanted to be in the
possession for her security. But not she considers herself as a barren woman, who
stands lonely in the wasteland of life. She miserably confesses: “and now i am lonely
and not pregnant with anything at all but – but loathing!” (229). she considers herself
a coward on account of her failure to make love with him. She says: “i must pay for
my cowardly treachery to Gordon!” (299). her payment for her guilt becomes horrible
for her. From this point, she is separated from her father and this separation leads her
to leave him and the home and accept a promiscuous life.
Nina has lost her mental peace owing to the insecurity which arises after the
death of Gordon. Her act of promiscuity does not fill the vacuum created within her.
After the death of her father, she says to Marsden: “you know-grief, sorrow, love,
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father – those sounds our lips make and our hands write” (315). The sense of security
that she has lost never returns to her. Her first attempt as a nurse proves to be a futile
search, but her search for belonging never ends. To satisfy her longing, she decides to
marry Sam Evans on the advice of Darrell and Marsden. Gordon is not only a man for
her, but is the symbol of her security, her identity. However, her aspired security, for
which she longs, is shattered to pieces when Sam’s mother reveals the family-curse of
insanity. Evan forces her for an abortion and suggests her to get a baby by somebody,
instead of Sam. The story of insanity creates a gap between the wife and the husband.
She loses her interest in him. She thinks : “i only married him because he needed me –
and i needed children!” (334). Both Nina and Sam are separated mentally. This
separation and the memory of Gordon increase her agony. She begins to forget her
duty as a wife. The reason of her dissatisfaction with Sam after the abortion is nothing
but the memory of Gordon. She confesses: “...i loved it; so it seemed at times that
Gordon must be its real father, that Gordon must have come to me in a dream while i
was lying asleep besides Sam!” (351). But her dream shatters with the operation, and
a sense of insecurity. To satisfy her urge for the security, she choose Dr. Darrell for
the father of her baby, violating all the code and conducts of a loyal wife. At first
Darrell refuses; but owing to his pressing desire for her, he is mesmerized to prescribe
himself scientifically for the act. On the other hand, she considers her illicit affair as a
sacrifice like her previous attempt as a nurse. For the sake of her happiness, she wants
to desolate Sam in favour of Darrell. Sexual relation seems to be the principle reason
behind her fiance, she has a conflict with her father and becomes an alien daughter.
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Now, for the sake of Darrell, she wants to throw Sam. But when Darrell rejects her
proposal of marriage and decides to leave, she wants to avenge him. Instead of
breaking down, she thinks to use Sam as an instrument for her revenge. The
selfishness and passion for possession keep her apart from her family member and
friends. She realizes that no single man can provide her a sense of fulfillment. So, she
tries to get all the men she knows into her trap, and to some extent, she gets the taste
of success. As she says triumphantly:
My three men i feel their desires converge in me...to from one
complete beautiful male desire which I absorb....and am whole....they
dissolve in me, their life.. I am pregnant with the three....!(395)
It is an illusion which marred by her cruel and capricious wilfulness and a
power to hurt not only herself but all men whom she knows. Disillusion by the men,
she places all her hopes in Gorden as the last resort of her belonging. She says:
These men make me sick.. I hate all three of them! They disgust me..
the wife and mistress in me has been killed by them! Thank God, i am
only man......! (406).
Nina has always dreamt of love and happiness. But how does her dream shape
into reality? The death of her real lover, her betrayal by her father, her horrible
experience as a nurse, her tragic with Sam, her physical and emotional involvement
with Darrell, and her failure to keep the love for her son Gorden—all her encounters
with reality break her till she becomes the ghost of her former self. Finally, she
decides to marry Charles Marsden, her silent lover, to end her long journey of
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insecurity. She considers life as “merely strange dark interlude in the electrical
display of God the father!” (449). Another significant character of the play, who
suffers a lot through isolation, is Dr. Edmund Ned Darrell. He seems to be the most
wanted person in Nina’s list of men. Professionally, he is a physician; emotionally, an
ardent lover; and from human point of view, a weak person. He is a rootless person
having no familiar attachment likes Sam Evans or Charles Marsden. He enters the
story as a sympathizer to Nina, but turns to be an isolated one due to his deep
attachment with her. His hypocritical attitude is the root of his disillusionment
because of which he suffers from a deep sense of anguish throughout his life.
In the search of happiness, he returns to Nina after spending a long period of
frustration and separation. He confesses before Nina:
I wasn’t all noble, I’ll confess! Thought of myself and my career!
Damn my career! A lot of god that sis it! Study! I didn’t live! I longed
for you—and suffered. I paid in full, believe me, Nina! But I know
better now! I’ve come back. The time for lying is past! You’ve got to
come away with me! (391).
But the destiny has played its part. It has left Darrell in a state where he finds
himself alone, and helpless before the force of circumstance. He has lost his beloved
and his son. Charles Marsden is another victim of the disease of romantic
imagination. He is the only male figure who came in contact with Nina much earlier
than others. For a long times, he loves Nina but cannot express his feelings to her. The
cause behind his silence is his conception of love and his deep attachment with his
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mother. His indifferent attitude towards sex and his hidden love affairs keep him apart
from others.
The other two characters who suffer isolation are Mrs. Evans, the mother of
Sam, and Gorden Evans, the authorised son from the family curse. In the case of
Gorden Jr., the isolation is of a different type. He remains unknown to his real
identity. His real paternity acquires a mystery when w realize that “biologically” he is
the son of Darrell, “spiritually” he is the son of Gorden Shaw, and “morally” he is the
son of Sam Evans. Above all, Sam Evans, who has enjoyed a normal life, does not
know the falsity of his life that he is an alien son to his mother, alien husband to his
wife, and alien for the to his son.
All the major characters in the play Mourning Becomes Electra suffer from the
sense of insecurity, though they belong to a single family. It seems that all of them are
living a life without any sense of relatedness with others. Ezra Mannon, the senior
member of the family, is haunted by the same sense of isolation. Like all the
Mannons, he has a mask-like look which symbolizes split of his life. Outwardly, he is
a successful man in every respect, but inwardly he is a helpless personal entirely cutoff from the marital bliss. He is hated by his wife owing to his puritanic attitude: a
common characteristic of his wife. In search of belongingness when he returns home
after the end of war, he finds himself in the same state of loneliness. He says: “i can’t
get used to home yet. It is so lonely.” he admits to his wife that “there’d always been
some barrier between us – a wall hiding us from each other i would try to make up my
mind exactly what that wall was but i never could discover” (Mourning Becomes
Electra 54). It clearly shows that he is an alien husband to his wife.
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After his marriage, he is haunted by a sense of nothingness that makes him a
different man. He says: “...something keeps me sitting numb in my own heart – like a
statue of a dead man in a town square” (Mourning Becomes Electra 55). Being
dissatisfied with his wife, he turns to his daughter in search of peace which creates
another barrier between the mother and the daughter. His joining of Mexican was
after his marriage and his engagement in business is the result of his wife’s negation.
Mocking at his achievement in life, he admits that the real reason behind his success
in business is not this capability but his desire to be free from the isolated atmosphere
of his home. To bridge the gap, finally, he wants to surrender himself to the arms of
his wife, but, to his ill-luck, he fails to find any thread of belongingness. Realizing the
reality of their relation, he says to his wife in a bitter tone:
Is that your notion of love? Do you think i married a body?... you were
lying to me tonight as you’ve always lied you were only pretending
love you made me appear a lustful beast in my own eyes as you’ve
always done since our first marriage night i would feel cleaner now if i
had gone to a brothel! I would feel more hone between myself and life!
(Mourning Becomes Electra 60).
But this is not the final realization; to his great amazement and horror,
Christine tells him, before giving him the poison, instead of medicine, that she loves
Adam Brant. Thus, a brave warrior like him dies a treacherous death plotted by his
own wife. The suffering of Christine Mannon is something different from that of her
husband. She suffers not for the puritanic attitude but for her sensuality and
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possessiveness. Rather, she is a rebel against the Puritanism of Mannons. In search of
security, she marries Ezra. But, instead of getting a loving husband, she finds a
co-hearted person in him. She feels that her marriage with him quite unfortunate. Her
longing for a happy life stops its breath under the puritanic atmosphere of Mannon.
Neglected by her husband, she gradually turns towards her son, Orin, to fill the
vaccum. but she again finds herself in the Same state of loneliness after his joining the
army. She has lost her motherly affections towards her daughter and considers her as
a competitor in the war of possession. She accuses Lavinia: “you’ve tried to become
the wife of your father and the mother of Orin! You’ve always schemed to steal my
place” (33) This hostility reaches the climax when Lavinia discovers her mother’s
illicit relation with Adam Brant. Christine’s with Brant is the result of her loneliness
that arises due to the absence of Orin. She confesses: “i never would have fallen in
love with Adam if i’d had Orin with me” (32). She wants to go away from the house
of Mannon through Brant, leaving all the sufferings behind. In search of happiness
and ‘belonging’, she kills her husband and betrays her son, but finally fails to attain
that. After the murder to Adam by Orin, she loses both her lover and her son. Her
dream of a happy life and her desire of possession are shattered by the well-managed
plan of Lavinia. She commits suicide to end her lonely life. Orin’s mother-fixation is
the root cause of his disillusionment. His strong attachment with his mother
symbolises his longing for peace and security. Out of jealousy he shoots Adam Brant
on account of which Christine commits suicide. From this point onwards Orin leads a
life of suffering and disillusionment. The memory of his dead mother haunts him. He
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feels himself guilty of the suicide of his mother. Being trapped by Lavinia’s
possessiveness, he tries to fulfill his desire for the mother and is ready to share the
burden of guilt. He feels that neither he nor Lavinia have a right to love. He realizes:
The only love i can know now is the love of guilt for guilt which
breeds more guilt – until you get so deep at the bottom of hell there is
no lower you can sink and you rest there in peace (Mourning Becomes
Electra 160).
Gradually, he reaches a state of insanity that arises from his sense of guilt. He
accuses Lavinia of being responsible for the mother’s suicide, and suggests that they
should confess and atone to the full extent of law: “that’s the only way to wash the
guilt of our mother’s blood from our souls” (152). Orin’s deep attachment with
Lavinia is nothing but the same quality of love and loathing for oneself that has
always dominated Mannon-relationships. Orin hates Lavinia as much as he likes her.
He does not like that she should marry peter and threatens her to disclose the crime
committed by them. Realizing the reality of Lavinia, he tells her: “there are times now
when you don’t seem to be my sister, nor mother, but some stranger” (165). Finally,
his guilt compels him to commit suicide like his mother, so that he may be able to
regain his ‘lost-island.’ James Tyrone fails to prove himself a worthy husband to his
wife. His incapability of providing a real home makes him a stranger. Her sense of
isolation and loneliness increase when she finds that she cannot communicate with the
outer world. She expresses her belief to her husband: “in a real home one is never
lonely. You forget know from my experience what a home is like. I gave up one to
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marry you – my father’s home” (Mourning Becomes Electra 62). Her longing for a
real home is marred by the materialistic attitude of her husband, and has compelled
her to lead a solitary life.
Being dissatisfied with the present, she moves towards the past in search of
peace and security. She blames herself for causing the death of Edmund due to her
sheer negligence and indifference. She realizes that she has been a liar throughout her
life, and has been false not only to others but also to herself. Thus, she remains
isolated from the present. Mary is constantly haunted by a sense of guilt. She does not
consider herself a worthy mother, and for this she blames her husband. Through the
character of Mary, O’Neill expresses his firm conviction that we are what life has
made us, and that we are able to know its foul game only when it is too late to do
anything about it. In her words:
None of us can help the things life has done to us. They’re done before
you realize it, and once they’re done they make you do other things
until at last everything comes between you and what you’d like to be,
and you’ve lost you true self forever (Mourning Becomes Electra 53).
Haunted by an utter sense of loneliness and insecurity, she takes more and
more of the drugs so that she may live in the past which is the only reality to her. She
loves the fog since it hides her from the world of reality; but she hates the foghorn
which reminds her of the harsh and nagging realities. At the end of the play, her
appearance in the wedding gown is a symbol of her quest for hope and her longing for
happiness which are never fulfilled.
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Jamie, like the other members of his family, suffers from a sense of isolation
and separation. He leads a meaningless life without any goal. He has the potentiality
of becoming a mongering and he blots out the possibility of becoming some
prominent person in life. He becomes a wastrel and a cynic, sneering at everything but
himself. He is a nagging son to his parents. He has a hostile relation with his father,
for whom he is no more than a vagabond who does not know the value of money. His
father’s stinginess, his mother’s love-hate attitude, his brother’s envious nature and,
above all, his poetic nature are the combined forces behind his lonely suffering.
Edmund blames his father, recalling the case of his mother. As he is more attached to
his mother, he feels the load of his mother’s dope-addiction, weighing heavy on his
heart. Like his mother, he avoids reality and seeks an escape into the fog of unreality:
The fog was where i wanted to be... everything looked and sounded
unreal... i wanted-to be alone with myself in another world where truth
is untrue and life can hide from itself... i even lost the feeling of being
on land... as if i was a ghost belonging to the fog, and the fog was the
ghost of the sea. It felt damned peaceful to be nothing more than a
ghost within a ghost (Mourning Becomes Electra 113).
Like Mary, he never finds peace in the summer-house and remains a stranger
to his family. Actually, the poet within him keeps him apart from others. He does not
identify himself with them and loses his sense of belongingness. Therefore, he
searches an identity of his own in a world beyond human reach. In this regard
Edmund Tyrone can be compared with Robert Mayo of Beyond the Horizon. Both the
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men are seekers of beauty; both are dissatisfied with the life provided to them and
suffer from a sense of isolation. Unable to find any solution, Edmund hopes to find
the lost sense of belonging in a state of unreality like Robert’s quest of hope – what
lies beyond the horizon. Edmund hopes to find it in his mystic oneness with the sea:
I dissolved in the sea, became white sails and flying spray, became
beauty and rhythm, became moonlight and the ship and the high dimstarred sky! I belonged, without past or future, within peace and unity
and a wild joy, within something greater than my own life, or the life
of man, to life itself. To god, if you want to put it that way (Mourning
Becomes Electra 134).
Doris v. Falk rightly opines:
All the Tyrones are doomed to destroy and be destroyed, to be
victimized not only by each other but by the dead, for the dead have
willed them a heritage of disease, alcoholism and drug addiction, and
have cursed them with the deeper ills of alienation, conflict, and selfdestructiveness. (Eugene O’Neill and the Tragic Tension 182)
All the characters of O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh are guilt-ridden due to
their ruined lives, and all cling to pipe-dreams about their condition and the future.
They are waiting for the entertaining and generous Hickey, a salesman, who spends
money for them lavishly. When Hickey arrives in time for his friend Harry’s birth
day, they are shocked to find him greatly changed. He announces that he has finally
had the courage to face himself and to lay his pipe-dreams to rest. Further, he intends
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to help others do the same for their own happiness. But to his anticipation, he finds
that his gospel of disillusionment does not work. Often he is haunted by his dead wife
Evelyn. The idea of Hickey is insane gradually develops as a new pipe-dream, allowing
others to resume their old relationships and illusions. The description of Harry Hope’s
saloon at the opening scene of the play reveals of alienated life of its occupants. It is
the saloon which separates them from society, severes them their deadly past, and
forces them to lead a life of alienation. But in a state of illusion, they consider the
place as the safest one where they can dream their golden tomorrow. Harry narrates
the story of his lonely life. It begins with the death of his wife. He recalls:
Twenty years, and I’ve never set foot out of this house since the day I
buried her. Didn’t have the heart. Once she’d gone, I didn’t give a
damn for anything. I lost all my ambition, Without her, nothing
seemed worth the trouble (The Iceman Cometh 645)
Hickey becomes the victim of isolation due to his fickle nature and his falsity.
Since his childhood he has been restless and reckless, desiring change. His home and
his school appear to him like jail. The profession chosen by Hickey causes his
separation from his wife and is also responsible for his solitary life. The love-hate
relationship between husband and wife make Hickey a split personality, an isolated
figure. He expresses his tragic suffering in these words:
I loved her so, but I began to hate that pipe dream! I began to be afraid
I was going …forgive her for forgiving me… and it made me hate
myself all the more.. I’d get so damned lonely…(The Iceman Cometh 716).
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Larry Slade is also a victim of isolation. Throughout the drama he pretends
complete detachment and disinterestedness, but his unable to forget his past.
Analyzing the play, Rosamond Gilder opines:
The Iceman Cometh is made of good theatre substance –meaty material
for actors, racy dialogue, variety of character, suspense and passion --all within the straight jacket of a rigid pattern. It is also primarily an
allegory of man’s pitiful estate , a parable of his search for
redemption.(The Iceman Cometh, O’Neill and His Plays 203)
There is a similarity between the tragic plays of O’Neill and the plays of
Tennessee Williams. Like the plays of O’Neill, Tennessee Williams’ playss are also
psychological tragedies – “plays in the tragic tradition”. The playwright has a tragic
vision and is faithful to the modern spirit of unrelieved failure of disaster. In his play
A Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Williams portrays his principal characters
Blanche and Stanley who have a sense of sexual and emotional craving, that is, a deep
and uncontrollable desire to find belonging in the arms of another person. As Stella
defends her sister, Blanche, against Stanley’s harsh accusations, she describes this
element of longing in Blanche’s character:
When she was young, very young, she married a boy who wrote poetry
. . . He was extremely good-looking. I think Blanche didn’t just love
him but worshipped the ground he walked on! Adored him and thought
him almost too fine to be human!” (Williams, Tennessee.Collected
Plays 2229).
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Blanche is characterized by both sensual and romantic fantasies. As her
obsession with her husband causes her emotional destruction upon his death, thus
ushering her into a life of prostitution and irresponsibility, it is apparent that her
fantasies have facilitated her moral and societal decline. In this way, Tennessee
Williams depicts how desire is the main influence over her actions, or how the
eponymous “streetcar” has carried her into her current conditions. Stanley is defined
by a similar sense of desire; although his yearning is more masculine, more brutally
unrefined and sexual. As he is about to rape Blanche, and annihilate what is left of her
mental stability, he says to her “Come to think of it — maybe you wouldn’t be bad to
— interfere with,’ and Williams provides the stage notes ‘He takes a step forward her,
biting his tongue which protrudes between his lips‘ (Williams, Tennessee.Collected
Plays 2242). His characters represent the decadence of southern aristocracy and typify
the clash of values between the north and the south. The people of the south were
against the materialistic values of the north, they wanted to retain their spiritualism
and their traditions. This conflict is one of the themes of Williams.
The Lauras, Amandas, Blanches and Kilroys possess the values which
Tennessee Williams feels endow life with whatever meaning and definition it has. But
they lack vitality, the strength and the force to preserve these values against a hostile
universe. Their pathetic defiance is their gallantry; but their ineffectuality will never
allow them to triumph. TennesseeWilliams has always placed his protagonist, a
sensitive and lonely individual of either sex, in an unfriendly world. The poet-itinerant
outsider- the male who is often closely identified with his creator – seeks to avoid the
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full responsibilities of a job and family life. Among the most prominent and urgent
themes of The Glass Menagerie is the difficulty the characters have in accepting and
relating to reality. Each member of the Wingfield family is unable to overcome this
difficulty, and each, as a result, withdraws into a private world of illusion where he or
she finds the comfort and meaning that the real world does not seem to offer. Of the
three Wingfields, reality has by far the weakest grasp on Laura. The private world in
which she lives is populated by glass animals—objects that, like Laura’s inner life,
are incredibly fanciful and dangerously delicate. Unlike his sister, Tom is capable of
functioning in the real world, as we see in his holding down a job and talking to
strangers. But, in the end, he has no more motivation than Laura does to pursue
professional success, romantic relationships, or even ordinary friendships, and he
prefers to retreat into the fantasies provided by literature and movies and the stupor
provided by drunkenness. Amanda’s relationship to reality is the most complicated in
the play. Unlike her children, she is partial to real-world values and longs for social
and financial success. Yet her attachment to these values is exactly what prevents her
from perceiving a number of truths about her life. She cannot accept that she is or
should be anything other than the pampered belle she was brought up to be, that Laura
is peculiar, that Tom is not a budding businessman, and that she herself might be in
some ways responsible for the sorrows and flaws of her children. Amanda’s retreat
into illusion is in many ways more pathetic than her children’s, because it is not a
willful imaginative construction but a wistful distortion of reality. Although the
Wingfields are distinguished and bound together by the weak relationships they
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maintain with reality, the illusions to which they succumb are not merely familial
quirks. The outside world is just as susceptible to illusion as the Wingfields. The
young people at the Paradise Dance Hall waltz under the short-lived illusion created
by a glass ball—another version of Laura’s glass animals. Tom opines to Jim that the
other viewers at the movies he attends are substituting on-screen adventure for reallife adventure, finding fulfillment in illusion rather than real life. Even Jim, who
represents the “world of reality,” is banking his future on public speaking and the
television and radio industries—all of which are means for the creation of illusions
and the persuasion of others that these illusions are true. The Glass
Menagerie identifies the conquest of reality by illusion as a huge and growing aspect
of the human condition in its time. Tom’s double role in The Glass Menagerie
underlines the play’s tension between objectively presented dramatic truth and
memory’s distortion of truth. If there is a signature character type that marks
Tennessee Williams’ dramatic work it is undeniably that of the faded Southern belle.
Amanda is a clear representative of this type. In general, a Tennessee Williams faded
belle is from a prominent Southern family, has received a traditional upbringing, and
has suffered a reversal of economic and social fortune at some point in her life. Like
Amanda, these women all have a hard time coming to terms with their new status in
society—and indeed, with modern society in general, which disregards the social
distinctions that they were taught to value. Their relationships with men and their
families are turbulent, and they staunchly defend the values of their past. As with
Amanda, their maintenance of genteel manners in very ungenteel surroundings can
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appear tragic, comic, or downright grotesque. Amanda is the play’s most extroverted
and theatrical character. The physically and emotionally crippled Laura is the only
character in the play who never does anything to hurt anyone else. Despite the weight
of her own problems, she displays a pure compassion—as with the tears she sheds
over Tom’s unhappiness, described by Amanda in Scene Four—that stands in stark
contrast to the selfishness and grudging sacrifices that characterize the Wingfield
household. Laura also has the fewest lines in the play, which contributes to her aura of
selflessness. Yet she is the axis around which the plot turns, and the most prominent
symbols—blue roses, the glass unicorn, the entire glass menagerie—all in some sense
represent her. Laura is as rare and peculiar as a blue rose or a unicorn, and she is as
delicate as a glass figurine. The idea of characterization and how one character’s
actions may enlighten audiences to issues surrounding another character is brilliantly
illustrated by Williams in his play. Tennessee Williams writes in his production notes
that this is a “memory play” (1041
). What is interesting about The Glass
Menagerie is the point of whose memory the audience is exposed to. Tom acts as the
protagonist because it is his memory that audiences must trust, as the narrator in
addition to being the man of the house in the absence of his father. Upon further
assessment of Amanda’s character audiences may concede to the fact that she is these
things while acknowledging a more admirable facet to her character. The Glass
Menagerie is reflected through the eyes of the son Tom who himself seems to be
dealing with hurt and resentment which would cloud his view of his mother as a
genuine person. Perhaps if the story was told from the point of view of Laura a
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different image would emerge. This idea is evidenced in the relationship between
Laura and her mother. Amanda seems to nag much less when dealing with Laura but
tries to help advance her in this world. She does get upset when Laura drops out of
business school but is understanding. Amanda is in addition very concerned for Laura
and her future. She employs Tom to find Laura a gentleman caller in an effort to
secure a comfortable future. She is even more overly concerned because of Laura’s
disability. It is interesting how the story is in fact told from Tom’s point of view.
Through the character of Tom, in the play, audiences are also made aware of
how Laura is very much so left out of the picture by and large. Whenever Tom and
Amanda’s conversations concern Laura she is never present. This represents her
character as weak. This is an example of how Williams silences Laura as a way of
rejecting her as a character, thus making her unimportant. Jim, it can be argued, is
brought in to further exclude Laura as a valid character in an effort to reflect how she
views herself in the world around her. He, through his actions, takes her to the brink
of love (not in the true sense of the word but those feelings associated with such) only
to reveal that he is already spoken for. Conversely, it can be argued that Williams uses
Jim’s character as a way of validating Laura, a character who could not validate
herself. She had always been so critical of herself and her disability; it is Jim who
assures her that the loud clonking she heard all those years was none existent. Even
though in the end they are not able to maintain a relationship that one night made
Laura feel like a woman, and that is a feeling that neither Tom nor Amanda could
offer.
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Blanche DuBois is the main character in Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar
Named Desire who is a fallen woman in society’s eyes. Her family fortune and estate
are gone, she lost her young husband to suicide years earlier, and she is a social pariah
due to her indiscrete sexual behavior. She also has a bad drinking problem, which she
covers up poorly. Behind her veneer of social snobbery and sexual propriety, Blanche
is an insecure, dislocated individual. She is an aging Southern belle who lives in a
state of perpetual panic about her fading beauty. Her manner is dainty and frail, and
she sports a wardrobe of showy but cheap evening clothes. Stanley quickly sees
through Blanche’s act and seeks out information about her past. In the Kowalski
household, Blanche pretends to be a woman who has never known indignity. Her
false propriety is not simply snobbery, however; it constitutes a calculated attempt to
make herself appear attractive to new male suitors. Blanche depends on male sexual
admiration for her sense of self-esteem, which means that she has often succumbed to
passion. By marrying, Blanche hopes to escape poverty and the bad reputation that
haunts her. But because the chivalric Southern gentleman savior and caretaker she
hopes will rescue her is extinct, Blanche is left with no realistic possibility of future
happiness. As Blanche sees it, Mitch is her only chance for contentment, even though
he is far from her ideal. Stanley’s relentless persecution of Blanche foils her pursuit of
Mitch as well as her attempts to shield herself from the harsh truth of her situation.
The play chronicles the subsequent crumbling of Blanche’s self-image and sanity.
Stanley himself takes the final stabs at Blanche, destroying the remainder of her
sexual and mental esteem by raping her and then committing her to an insane asylum.
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In the end, Blanche blindly allows herself to be led away by a kind doctor, ignoring
her sister’s cries. This final image is the sad culmination of Blanche’s vanity and total
dependence upon men for happiness. Stanley is remembered next to Blanche DuBois
in Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire. He is an egalitarian hero at the
play’s start. He is loyal to his friends and passionate to his wife. Stanley possesses an
animalistic physical vigor that is evident in his love of work, of fighting, and of sex.
His family is from Poland, and several times he expresses his outrage at being called
“Polack” and other derogatory names. Stanley represents the new, heterogeneous
America to which Blanche doesn’t belong, because she is a relic from a defunct social
hierarchy. He sees himself as a social leveler, as he tells Stella in Scene Eight.
Stanley’s intense hatred of Blanche is motivated in part by the aristocratic past
Blanche represents. He also sees her as untrustworthy and does not appreciate the way
she attempts to fool him and his friends into thinking she is better than they are.
Stanley’s animosity toward Blanche manifests itself in all of his actions toward her—
his investigations of her past, his birthday gift to her, his sabotage of her relationship
with Mitch. In the end, Stanley’s down-to-earth character proves harmfully crude and
brutish. His chief amusements are gambling, bowling, sex, and drinking, and he lacks
ideals and imagination. His disturbing, degenerate nature, first hinted at when he beats
his wife, is fully evident after he rapes his sister-in-law. Stanley shows no remorse for
his brutal actions. The play ends with an image of Stanley as the ideal family man,
comforting his wife as she holds their newborn child. The wrongfulness of this
representation, given what we have learned about him in the play, ironically calls into
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question society’s decision to ostracize Blanche. Mitch appears to be a kind, decent
human being who hopes to marry so that he will have a woman to bring home to his
dying mother. Mitch doesn’t fit the bill of the chivalric hero of whom Blanche
dreams. He is clumsy, sweaty, and has unrefined interests like muscle building.
Though sensitive, he lacks Blanche’s romantic perspective and spirituality, as well as
her understanding of poetry and literature. She toys with his lack of intelligence—for
example, when she teases him in French because she knows he won’t understand—
duping him into playing along with her self-flattering charades. Though they come
from completely different worlds, Mitch and Blanche are drawn together by their
mutual need of companionship and support, and they therefore believe themselves
right for one another. They also discover that they have both experienced the death of
a loved one. The snare in their relationship is sexual. As part of her prim-and-proper
act, Blanche repeatedly rejects Mitch’s physical affections, refusing to sleep with him.
Once he discovers the truth about Blanche’s sordid sexual past, Mitch is both angry
and embarrassed about the way Blanche has treated him. When he arrives to chastise
her, he states that he feels he deserves to have sex with her, even though he no longer
respects her enough to think her fit to be his wife. The difference in Stanley’s and
Mitch’s treatment of Blanche at the play’s end underscores Mitch’s fundamental
gentlemanliness. Though he desires and makes clear that he wants to sleep with
Blanche, Mitch does not rape her and leaves when she cries out. Also, the tears Mitch
sheds after Blanche struggles to escape the fate Stanley has arranged for her show that
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he genuinely cares for her. In fact, Mitch is the only person other than Stella who
seems to understand the tragedy of Blanche’s madness.
The unreciprocated love in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof centers on the male
characters, especially Brick and Big Daddy. Brick is the object of unrequited love for
his wife Margaret, his friend Skipper, and his parents Big Daddy and Big Mama.
Their energies—sometimes sexual, sometimes protective—propel most of the
confrontations in the play, as they bounce off the cold, distant character of Brick.
There are other instances of unrequited love as well, such as Big Mama’s love for Big
Daddy, and the tension between Mae and Gooper, which hints at possible marital
strife beneath their façade. This is summed up in the repeated line at the end of the
play, the parallel between Big Daddy and Brick when their women—cats on a hot tin
roof, desperate to be understood and to have their love returned—tell Big Daddy and
Brick that they love them. Both men, untouchable, respond under their breath to
themselves, say, “Wouldn’t it be funny if that were true?” (24) Neither of them men
can conceive of their wives loving them.
As a dramatist Tennessee Williams makes use of expressionistic techniques to
depict inner reality. The action moves backward and forward freely in space and time
in harmony with the thought processes of the character concerned. There is a deeper
and deeper probing of the subconscious, action is increasingly internationalized, and
what goes on within the soul becomes more important than the external action.
Tennessee Williams uses expressionistic techniques in a masterly manner. He
recognizes that for the expressionist the everyday appearance of a thing or a person is
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a mask to be torn effects, music, telephone, and symbol on the stage are a part of his
expressionistic technique. Lighting is used to express the mood of nostalgia,
decadence or illusion. It the Glass Menagerie the stage was often dim with shafts of
light focused on selected areas or actors. The light upon Laura was supposed to have a
pristine clarity similar to that used in religious portraits of female saints. In A Streetcar
Named Desire shaded lighting and the use of a peculiarly tender blue color of the sky,
helped to invest the scene from the very outset with a kind of lyricism which in
Williams’ view would attenuate the atmosphere of decay in which the play developed.
Blanche Du Bois in a Streetcar Named Desire has a mania for covering electric bulbs
with coloured lampshades. Blanche explains her own attitude in these words:
“I bought this adorable little coloured lantern in a Chinese shop on
Bourbon. Put it over the light bulb…I can’t stand a naked bulb any
more than I can stand a rude remark or a vulgar action.”(A Streetcar
Named Desire 24)
Rose is a symbol in the Tattoo of earthly love: a box of sleeping pills is a
symbol of escape in Summer and Smoke. In Orpheus Descending the snake-skin
jacket worn by Val represents his wild and independent nature. Then we have insane
character. But such characters are not fully insa ne. They are generally sick. A more
genteel word for them is disturbed. Among this category may be placed Blanche
(Streetcar), Catharine (Suddenly Last Summer), Lady (Orpheus Descending). Through
these characters William creates a world of men who cannot catch their breath in a
world that is smothering them. Similarly, there are sexual specialists and foreigners.
As a whole Williams characters are life-like and real: they are fully of vitality.
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Summer and Smoke illustrates the transformation of the human mind and body
through eloquent symbolic subtleties that are present throughout the play. The set is a
powerful tool in the hands of its designer. The feel of a set to the audience and the
characters is an important facet of making a production successful. The choice of
furniture style and décor can help the audience get a feel for the characters that are
portrayed as using this furniture. In the production, the choice of furniture styles and
décor in Alma's house and John's house indicate that these two characters are on
opposite sides of the spectrum. Alma's furnishings consist of velvet cloth furniture,
which is a soft, nurturing material that symbolizes her child like naivete and her
family's good heartedness. On the other hand, the doctor's furniture in the first half of
the play, is pale yellow wood furniture. This choice seems to scream at me that the
characters that are being portrayed with this particular set are inanimate and cold just
like the wood. The pale yellow color in the furniture hints at the fact that a particular
character is suffering from some form of an illness. In John Jr.'s case, this represents
his disbelief in a spiritual side to the human being. This scene changes dramatically in
the second half of the play. The doctor's office, which was formerly yellow wood,
turns into a white set, which seems to cheer up the scene and portrays John's recovery
from his illness. The characters themselves also play a major role in the ongoing
symbolic transformations in the production. A character's demeanor, his speech and
his mannerisms are all important forms of symbolic subtleties to Tenessee Williams.
One of the first noticeable symbolic sayings in the production occurs between John
and Alma. In the beginning, Alma is complaining to John that she is feeling weak and
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faint at heart. John then quickly retorts and says that she has a doppelganger. Not
knowing what a doppelganger is, Alma brushes it off and pays no attention. Later,
Alma then finds out that the term doppelganger means that she has a person inside of
her. The doppelganger that John refers to symbolizes an alternate behavior, or to be
more specific an alternate personality inside of Alma, which she does not yet exhibit.
This facet of her personality is her wild side, the person that never says No. This
behavior manifests itself later in the production. The second and more inconspicuous
symbolism is found in the title of the production. The smoke in Summer and Smoke
represents two different things. As Alma was talking to John in the second to the last
scene of the play, she states, smoke comes, from my burning inside. This statement
from Alma points to the fact that she is hurting from her undying love for John, to
which he is not willing to reply, and seeks to give to Nellie. The second possible
meaning for smoke is also shown in the second to the last scene where John points at
the anatomy chart and tries to explain to Alma that he has come around to her way of
thinking, that there is a soul in the human body. He states the soul is as thin as smoke,
but nevertheless it is there. Adding yet another dimension to the play are the
costumes. The costumes can enlighten the audience with regard to the characters.
They can aid the audience in deciphering which characters' personalities match and
which individuals are truly incompatible. In the production, it was obvious that
Dr. John Sr. and Alma dressed in the same light color palates. This gives the audience
the impression that these characters complement each other. This is the case because;
they both trusted each other enough to share Alma's most intimate secrets. On the
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contrary, Rosa Gonzales wore a provocative red dress, which beautifully contrasted
Alma's more conservative white dress. During the play, it was obvious that the two of
them never saw eye to eye. Both Alma and John change into different style and color
of clothes in the ending scene. This change in attire symbolizes to the audience their
evolved personalities. In the ending scene Alma's dress becomes a shade of brown,
which is a darker more engaging color. The style of this particular dress was much
more flamboyant. Her hair, along with her inner wild side was also let loose. All these
changes intend to show us that she has lost all hope and gone to a more defiant and
less respectable route. John, On the other hand, is now sporting a black, more
conservatively cut suite. It is also painstakingly obvious that he has abandoned his
renegade ways, and has now become a more responsible and respectable man.
Character transformation is evident in the Guthrie Theater's production of Summer
and Smoke.
The Rose Tattoo tells the story of Serafina, an Italian-American widow in
Louisiana who attempts to remain true to the memory of her dead husband by abstaining
from further sexual relationships. She worships his memory and preserves his ashes in
an urn. To her, married sex is the ultimate experience and she is proud of her
adherence to its values: faithfulness and purity. But her husband Rosario is a contrast
to her. He is not faithful, and there is no indication that he even loved his wife. After
his death, Serafina continues to exalt his memories and maintains her idealization of
their relationship. She quits taking care of herself, lives in the past, and talks to the
ashes. The moment she comes to know that her dead husband had an illegal affair
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with a woman; she breaks the urn and comes out of her illusion. She is freed from her
illusion by Alvaro to whom she turns in a relationship so practical that it cannot be
idealized.
The main characters of Orpheus Descending are Val, Lady, and Carol who are
lonely, isolated figures. They do not fit into the environment in which they find
themselves, are unable to communicate their deepest feelings and passions to others,
or feel cut off. Val sums up this theme when he says to Lady, "Nobody ever gets to
know no body! (28) We're all of us sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own
skins, for life!" Val himself is a free, unconventional, artistic spirit who is bound to be
misunderstood and isolated wherever he goes in a narrow, repressive society. Lady is
trapped in a loveless marriage, in which her passionate nature has no opportunity to
express itself, except through hate and resentment over the past. The protagonist of
the play Sweet Bird of Youth is a blond gigglo called Chance Wayne. He returns to a
small town in the Deep South where as a youth he had had a sweetheart called
Heavenly, daughter of the political boss Finley who had chased him out. He hopes he
is returning in different circumstances, under the wing of an ageing beauty queen who
is approaching middle ages with the help of hashish and other drugs. Chance sees in
her merely a hope of gaining a foot hold in the movies- she has just made a film
which proves to be the means of her come-back at the end of the play – and
possibility of pursing the stage career of a Don Juan. His return is rather different
from what he had imagined, for as a result of his infecting her with veneral disease
Heavenly has had her sexual organs removed. Chance falls into the hands of Finley’s
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henchmen and takes his punishment of castration. The fall of a sensitive creature and
the rise of his tougher counterpart is the action in common between Kingdom of Earth
and In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel, a mid-length play talks of a couple, Miriam and
Mark. The sickly Lot Ravenstock corresponds to the psychotic Mark Conley, a painter
whose inability to control his new technique has driven him into a state of infantile
dependency.
Arthur Miller’s protagonists belong to a strange breed and they fervently
defend egocentric attitudes, and the futility evokes a genuine sense of terror and
pathos that indirectly but powerfully reinforces his thesis on the necessity for
“meaningful” accommodation in society. Arthur Miller finds apt metaphors to signify
the implications of a gap between the private life and the social life. Most of his
symbolic images are drawn along simple lines a carousal that conceals hatred
(Focus); a fruitful tree destroyed in its prime (All My Sons): “green leaves” blotted out
by the hard outlines of apartment buildings, a flute song displaced by childish
nonsense from a wire recorder, a wife’s praise creased by a whore’s laugh (Death of
Salesman); a dingy warehouse, harbouring hopeless inmates(A Memory of two
Mondays); a herd of mustangs moving towards extinction (the misfits); a ruined tower
that memorializes horrors committed memorializes horrors committed by “ordinary”
men (after the fall); feature and a broken pot guarded as if they were life itself
(Incident at Vichy). Miller incorporated the accusation-defence rythm of a trial into
the structure of his major plays. Despite his wide ranging experiment with form, the
narrative schemes of All My Sons, Death of a Salesman, The Crucible, A view from
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the Bridge and after referred to covertly, then bared in a climate revelation—a scheme
based upon Ibsen’s exhibitions of the inescapable casual movement from past action
to represent reaction.
Each of Arthur Miller’s protagonists in his major plays is involved in struggle
which results from his acceptance or his rejection of an image of himself- an image
that grows out the values and the prejudices of his society. Arthur Miller’s vision is
existential, which takes note of the sense of anguish and alienation which common
man is subject to. It probes still deeper into the mystery of life and asks questions
about life, love, death and God. But even amidst despair and annihilation it perceives
a moral order that exists in spite of all mullity and waste. Arthur Miller, like
Tennessee Williams, each one of his plays also embodies his particular individual
inimitable vision of reality and his ultimate aim is to mirror the truth as far as he
understands it (Singh, Pramila. Arthur Miller and His Plays – A Critical Study53)
Miller’s principal characters are motivated by an obsession to justify
themselves: they fix their identities through radical acts of ego-assertion. High rank or
noble status does not distinguish them. Miller says in his essay Tragedy and the
Common man: “the commonest of men may take on stature to the extent of his
willingness to throw all he has into the contest.” Tragic antagonism arises because the
“unchangeable (social) environment” often “suppresses man, perverts the flowing out
of his love and creative instinct”. (25)
Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman and Joe Keller in All My Sons adopt
popular standards but become estranged from both family and society because of their
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uncompromising self-will. In work after work, from All My Sons and The Crucible to
Incident at Vichy, Arthur Miller has presented dilemmas in which a character's sense
of personal integrity or self-interest conflicts with his or her responsibility to society
or its representatives. Finally, Miller has repeatedly returned to the theme of family
relations, particularly interactions between fathers and sons. The families depicted in
Miller's plays often serve as vehicles for the author's analyses of the broader relations
between individuals and society. (Sharma, Rani. The Plays of Arthur Miller 55) The
play Death of a Salesman represents his most powerful dramatization of the clash
between the individual and materialistic American society, chronicles the downfall of
Willy Loman, a salesman whose misguided notions of success result in
disillusionment and, ultimately, his death. Throughout his life, Willy has not only
blindly pursued society's version of success, he has based his own identity and selfworth on social acceptance on how "well-liked" he is. At the play's end, he commits
suicide, convinced that the settlement on his life insurance policy will provide his son
Biff the wealth that had eluded Willy himself; however, Biff's ideals have already
been tarnished by the same forces that destroyed his father.
The play The Crucible is based upon the witch trials held in 1692 in Salem,
Massachusetts, addresses the complex moral dilemmas of John Proctor, a man wrongly
accused of practicing witchcraft. Through his depiction of the mass frenzy of the witch
hunt, Miller examines the social and psychological aspects of group pressure and its
effect on individual ethics, dignity, and beliefs. Many of the figures in the play are
poorly developed and merely serve as mouthpieces for Miller's social commentary,
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they claimed. The relationship between the historical events depicted in the play and
the events of the 1950s has continued to be the subject of much debate among
subsequent critics of The Crucible. Masood Ali Khan in his book Modern American
Drama remarks thus:
The message of the play, a timely reminder of the historical facts of the
Salem witch trials, carried out with so much bigotry and zealous
intolerance and blindness comes across without turning the stage into a
pulpit, for the historical facts themselves have dramatic unity. (200-01)
Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman is a story of an average salesman with a
dream of being rich and well-liked. Miller’s character Willy Loman is a reflection of
modern tragic hero therefore “Aristotelian concepts weigh heavily on an altered
world” (American Plays and Playwrights of the Contemporary Theatre 47). But
Arthur Miller redefines the classical concepts of tragedy and tragic hero, derived from
Aristotle, in his play Death of a Salesman, and the product of this redefinition is the
protagonist Willy Loman. Willy Loman is not a classical tragic character, but as a
pathetic modern tragic hero of 1940s American bourgeois tragedy of an ordinary man.
He is not of “noble birth”, quite the contrary he is a common man, though certainly
has Hamartia, a tragic flaw or error in judgment, his downfall is that of an ordinary
man (a “low man”). Loman’s flaw comes down to a lack of self-knowledge like
Sophocles’s Oedipus in Oedipus the King. However, Loman’s downfall threatens not
a city unlike Oedipus, but only a single family, the Lomans. In the light of this
perspective, Loman may not be considered as a tragic hero in terms of classical
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definition. Still, Arthur Miller places his protagonist as a tragic hero: not a classical
but a modern tragic hero. Linda, Willy Loman’s wife tries to protect her husband
from the negative effects of the system of Capitalism that enslaves and exploits him.
As Willy is the victim of the system, Linda expresses her humanity protesting its
outcome on the lives and psychology of ordinary people. Still, Willy runs after his
ideals for reaching his goal as Uncle Ben, who is a representative of his ideals and
fantasy, and who realized the American Dream. Willy Loman tries to be like Uncle
Ben who is successful in realizing the American Dream. He wants to get rid of his
position as a “common man” and be rich. As Beşe emphasizes, Arthur Miller raises
issues as the “impacts of environmental forces on the individual and his family and
the responsibilities or irresponsibility of family and society in relation to each other”
(Beşe 3). He accepted vulgar, debased, and false systems of values”. (Krutch 238) As
Lewis observes, “. . . the behavior of an individual in love, sex, or parental relations is
evidence of the choices imposed by social necessity”. (American Plays and
Playwrights of the Contemporary Theatre 46) Accordingly, Miller placed this
personal drama as a tragedy of modern American family of post- WWII era. Although
Willy Loman does not fall from a great height, his pride destroys him by placing him
as a modern tragic figure.
Willy Loman consistently keeps his American dream without ever bothering
himself about the consequences of his illicit affair. Willy dies for the cause of his socalled “American ideal”. In this sense, as Leech argues that Willie’s concern is
sociological rather than universal: “he is the victim of the American dream rather than
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of the human condition” (Leech 38). Happy, who is not as realistic as his brother Biff,
draws attention to Willy’s dreams that never came true: “. . . I’m gonna show you and
everybody else that Willy Loman did not die in vain. He had a good dream. It’s only
dream you can have – to come out number-one man. He fought it out here, and this is
where I’m gonna win it for him.” (Miller 111)
Willy Loman is not a tragic hero in classical tragedy, but as a modern day
tragic hero and a pathetic tragic hero in 1940’s America who quests for self identity
because of the harsh outcome of the commercialized world. Miller creates a hero of
modernism with an influence from the social movements in his era. Thus, he revises
both the classical tragedy and tragic hero to create his favorite subject of the modernday tragedy.
Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge is significant in that it exhibits many
similarities to classical Greek tragedy. Eddie Carbone, the play's central character,
unconsciously harbors an incestuous love for his niece, Catherine. Jealous of her
attraction to an illegal alien the Carbones are hiding, Eddie exposes the man to
immigration authorities and becomes involved in a fatal confrontation with the man's
brother. Critics have often noted that, like such Greek dramatic heroes as Oedipus,
Eddie brings about his own downfall through his ignorance and inability to see the
consequences of his actions. After the Fall is considered Miller's most experimental
and, perhaps, most pessimistic piece. This play takes place, as Miller has stated, "in
the mind, thought, and memory of Quentin," a guilt-ridden man who tries to come to
terms with his past through conversations with an imaginary listener. In the course of
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Quentin's examination of the ruins of two failed marriages, the individual, the family,
and society are all subjected to harsh criticism. Nearly every character in the play
betrays love for the sake of his or her own survival. In Incident at Vichy, Miller
continued his exploration of the conflicts between individual and societal
responsibility. Set in occupied France during World War II, this play features seven
men who, awaiting interrogation by their Nazi captors, discuss their fate and the
importance of social commitment to maintaining group freedom. The drama suggests
that those who fail to resist oppression are as guilty as the Nazis of crimes against
humanity.
Arthur Miller’s The Price deals with the lives of the two brothers, Victor and
Walter Frank, who are brought together after many years by the death of their father.
Like the characters in All My Sons and Death of a Salesman, these two men recall the
past, trying to come to an understanding of their lives and the choices they have made.
The play A Man Who Had All the Luck tells the story of a young man named David
Beeves who has the unlucky fortune of getting everything his heart desires.
Everything always goes his way, while the fortunes of his friends and family rise and
fall like those of normal people. The pressure of wondering when he too might fall
pushes him to the edge of sanity as he struggles with his fate. In All My Sons, set
during World War II, the truth about Joe Keller's past is gradually revealed. Keller has
sold defective parts to the United States Air Force, resulting in the death of several
American pilots. When his sons learn of this, one, a pilot himself, commits suicide by
crashing his plane; the other demands that Keller take responsibility for his actions.
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As the play closes, Keller accepts his obligation to society, recognizing that all the
lost pilots were, in effect, his "sons." He then takes his own life to atone for his crime.
Joe Keller is the main character whose sense of guilt and sense of isolation are the
major themes of Arthur Miller’s All My Sons. The playwright gives a good bit of
space to the description of Joe Keller in the opening stage directions:
A heavy man of stolid mind and build, a business man these many
years, but with the imprint of the machine-shop worker and boss still
upon him. When he reads, when he speaks, when he listens, it is with
the terrible concentration of the uneducated man for whom there is still
wonder in many commonly known things, a man whose judgments
must be dredged out of experience and a peasant-like common sense, a
man among men. (All My Sons 1)
The description of Joe Keller as a simpleton comes up again and again in this
play. Chris teasingly calls him an "elephant" (35) and Kate calls him a "bull" (36).
After George's ominous phone call, Kate warns her husband to "be smart now, Joe.
The boy is coming... Be smart" (36) Arthur Miller emphasizes Joe's lack of education
as one justification for his criminal actions. A reader does not think Joe approved
those cracked cylinder heads because he's stupid. He approved them because, as an
uneducated man, he needs all the more desperately to protect his way of making a
living. Joe has always been concerned with money. With the Great Depression fresh
in his memory – and personal poverty even older than that – economic security is his
greatest concern. Joe is outraged when Kate and Chris attack him for saving his
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business. "I spoiled both of you," he says. "I should've put him out when I was ten
like I was put out, and make him earn his keep. Then he'd know how a buck is made
in this world" (63). Joe's narration of his triumph over the criminal justice system
concludes with the boast that "fourteen months later I had one of the best shops in the
state again, a respected man again; bigger than ever" (46). Until he finally understands
the cause of Larry's death, his primary value is the success of his business and his
ability to make money. Miller doesn't totally demonize Joe, however. It's not just for
his own comfort that Joe makes money; it's for his family. "Nothin' is bigger" than
family to Joe (67). Though they don't like to admit it, Kate and Chris reap the benefits
of Joe's single-mindedness. Kate has a nice house and garden. She can look forward
to steak and champagne by the sea. Chris stands to inherit a lucrative business that
will similarly support a cozy family life with Ann. We believe Joe when he tells his
son, "I did it for you, it was a chance and I took it for you […] for you, a business for
you" (45). Joe is not evil, just has a tragic lack of vision. Joe in All My Sons presents
himself as a man who deeply loves his family, but also has great pride in his business.
Joe Keller has been running a successful factory for decades. During World War II,
his business partner and neighbor, Steve Deever noticed the faulty parts first. Joe
decided to send the parts through because he was afraid that admitting the company's
mistake would destroy his business and his family's financial stability. By the play's
end, the audience discovers the dark secret he has been concealing: Joe allowed the
sale of faulty airplane parts to be shipped to the frontline, resulting in the death of
twenty-one pilots. After the cause of the deaths was discovered, both Steve and Joe
were arrested. Claiming his innocence, Joe was exonerated and released and the entire
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blame shifts to Steve who remains in jail. Like many other characters within the play,
Joe is capable of living in denial. It is not until the play's conclusion that he ultimately
faces his own guilty conscience - and then he chooses to destroy himself rather than
deal with the consequences of his actions.
Arthur Miller’s An Enemy of the People is an adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s
modern drama An Enemy of the People, in which the audience is presented an array of
characters with differing ideals, who in responding to a common truth, enter into
conflict. It also addresses the irrational tendencies of the masses, and the hypocritical
and corrupt nature of the political system that they support. The play also concerned
with the inviolability of objective truth. The battle between self-interest and public
good, between painful truths and public lies, is waged unambiguously. Pramila Singh
in her book Arthur Miller and His Plays- A Critical Study opines:
An Enemy of the People suggests the answer that when the times are
out of joint; the individual must be true to himself. Stockman clings to
the truth and suffers the social consequence (42-43).
Dr. Stockmann, the protagonist of the play An Enemy of the People holds
those ideals that are central to modern democracy; that is, he has a strong belief in the
truth, a commitment to free speech, and a sense of individual responsibility. The truth
– that “the springs are poisoned” (An Enemy of the People 14) – though inconvenient,
is propagated by Dr. Stockmann in the hopes of bettering his society. Though he
himself profits greatly from the springs, he feels a sense of responsibility towards
those who would be poisoned by its waters, which motivates him to spread the truth
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to the townspeople. Later, he is surprised to learn that his community wants nothing
to do with this truth. In fact, one of the central ironies in the work is that this doctor,
whose ideals are the pillars on which democracy is founded, is silenced by majority
vote. Uncompromising and having strong convictions, the doctor does not allow his
voice to be silenced via majority tyranny, deciding to attempt to pass his ideals on to
the next generation via education. On the opposite end of the spectrum lies Peter
Stockmann, to whom power and wealth are the ideals. He holds those ideals that are
central to an authoritarian regime: a belief that the individual should subordinate
himself to the powers in charge and a belief that the ideal society is one in which
everyone thinks the same way. As a result of holding these ideals, Peter Stockmann
responds to the truth offered by his brother with hostility. In particular, he sees Dr.
Stockmann’s relentless pursuit of truth as a gesture of defiance, and manifesting as his
belief that the doctor is working behind [his] back. The truth about the springs, if
publicized, would drive away business and Peter Stockmann is unwilling to sacrifice
the springs as a source of revenue. Thus, in accordance with his ideals, he not only
rejects the truth, but manipulates the townspeople and persecutes his brother to do so.
In particular, Dr. Stockmann uses the truth to attempt to make positive changes - those
changes in line with his ideals – in his society, while Peter Stockmann uses his
authority and influence to do the same. The people are then presented with two
options: to accept an inconvenient truth and to lose a source of potential wealth, or to
reject the truth and become wealthy. In the end, these people, whose only solid ideals
are selfish ones, reject not only the doctor’s truth, but even democracy itself, as they
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deny the doctor the right to speak. The result is an all-too-convenient victory of power
over truth.
In An Enemy of the People, Arthur Miller invites his audience to reflect upon
their own ideals in the context of the modern democratic society. Miller suggests that
“the majority is never right”; rather, that the individual should arrive at a decision
based on their own ideals rather than those of the majority. John Proctor is the main
character of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible who is honest, upright, and blunt-spoken.
He is a good man, but one with a secret, fatal flaw. His lust for Abigail Williams led
to their affair (which occurs before the play begins), and created Abigail’s jealousy of
his wife, Elizabeth, which sets the entire witch hysteria in motion. Once the trials
begin, Proctor realizes that he can stop Abigail’s rampage through Salem but only if
he confesses to his adultery. Such an admission would ruin his good name, and
Proctor is, above all, a proud man who places great emphasis on his reputation. He
eventually makes an attempt, through Mary Warren’s testimony, to name Abigail as a
fraud without revealing the crucial information. When this attempt fails, he finally
bursts out with a confession, calling Abigail a “whore” and proclaiming his guilt
publicly. Only then does he realize that it is too late, that matters have gone too far,
and that not even the truth can break the powerful frenzy that he has allowed Abigail
to whip up. Proctor’s confession succeeds only in leading to his arrest and conviction
as a witch, and though he lambastes the court and its proceedings, he is also aware of
his terrible role in allowing this fervor to grow unchecked. Proctor redeems himself
and provides a final denunciation of the witch trials in his final act. Proctor’s refusal
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to provide a false confession is a true religious and personal stand. Such a confession
would dishonor his fellow prisoners, who are brave enough to die as testimony to the
truth. Perhaps more relevantly, a false admission would also dishonor him, staining
not just his public reputation, but also his soul. By refusing to give up his personal
integrity Proctor implicitly proclaims his conviction that such integrity will bring him
to heaven. He goes to the gallows redeemed for his earlier sins. As Elizabeth says to
end the play, responding to Hale’s plea that she convince Proctor to publicly confess:
“He have his goodness now. God forbid I take it from him!”(35)
Eddie Carbone is the tragic protagonist of The View from the Bridge who is
constantly self-interested, wanting to promote and protect his innocence. Eddie
creates a fictional fantasy world where his absurd decisions make sense—where
calling the Immigration Bureau in the middle of an Italian community that prides
itself on protecting illegal immigrants has no repercussions. In Eddie's world, he
imagines protecting Catherine from marriage or any male relationship and wants her
for himself. While Eddie wavers and switches between communal and state laws and
cultures, his motivations do not change. Eddie constantly looks out for himself at the
expense of others and is ruled by personal love and guilt. There are several moments
in the text where the audience is given clues that Eddie's love for Catherine may not
be normal. For example, when Catherine lights Eddie's cigar in the living room, it is
an event that gives Eddie unusual pleasure. This possibly warm and affectionate act
between niece and uncle has phallic suggestions. Depending on interpretation by the
actors, this moment many have more or less sexual undertones. Eddie's great attention
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to his attractive niece and impotence in his own marital relationship immediately
makes this meaning clear. Although Eddie seems unable to understand his feelings for
his niece until the end of the play, other characters are aware. Beatrice is the first to
express this possibility in her conversation with Catherine. Alfieri also realizes
Eddie's feelings during his first conversation with Eddie. Eddie does not comprehend
his feelings until Beatrice clearly articulates his desires in the conclusion of the play,
"You want somethin' else, Eddie, and you can never have her!" (The View from the
Bridge. 43) Eddie does not realize his feeling for Catherine because he has
constructed an imagined world where he can suppress his urges. This suppression is
what devastates Eddie. Because he has no outlet for his feelings—even in his own
conscious mind—Eddie transfers his energy to a hatred of Marco and Rodolpho and
causes him to act completely irrationally. Eddie's final need to secure or retrieve his
good name from Marco is a result of Eddie's failure to protect Catherine from Marco.
Eddie fails in his life, but seeks redemption and victory in death.Alfieri is the
symbolic bridge between American law and tribal laws. Alfieri, an Italian-American,
is true to his ethnic identity. He is a well-educated man who studies and respects
American law, but is still loyal to Italian customs. The play told from the viewpoint of
Alfieri, the view from the bridge between American and Italian cultures who attempts
to objectively give a picture of Eddie Carbone and the 1950s Red Hook, Brooklyn
community. Alfieri represents the difficult stretch, embodied in the Brooklyn Bridge,
from small ethnic communities filled with dock laborers to the disparate cosmopolitan
wealth and intellectualism of Manhattan. The old and new worlds are codified in the
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immigrant-son Alfieri. From his vantage point, Alfieri attempts to present an unbiased and reasonable view of the events of the play and make clear the greater social
and moral implications in the work.
The character of David becomes quickly obsessed with the idea that his good
fortune in life is merely a product of his miraculous long-time luck. He has not only
married the woman of his dreams and inherited her father's farmhouse after a
strangely fortunate incident; he has also become quite successful in auto repair and
mink farming. David watches on and those he loves falter and fail time and time
again; his older brother, Amos, battles with the drive to become a profession baseball
player but is often rebuked, his father lives vicariously through his burned-out onetrack son with no hopes of his own, his business partner faces unfortunate
circumstances as his product dies, and his foreign friend struggles to make ends meet
despite his expert craft. However, David is unable to enjoy his good fortune; he
becomes consumed with the idea that he has not truly earned all that he has, and that
others who work harder than he fail time and again. While the other characters flail
and rely on only one prospect in life, David accounts for all, and his outcome - while
perhaps padded by good fortune - is his to deserve.
In Arthur Miller’s Incident at Vichy, he focuses upon the subjects of human
nature, guilt, fear, and complicity using Vichy France for the setting. The characters
of the play argue and cajole each other to act in the face of the unknown. Each man
has been pulled off the street, not sure why he has been targeted. The businessman is
convinced of the routine nature of the inspection, certain of the rationality of the law.
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The poet is hysterical and afraid his Jewish identity will indict him. The socialist and
the psychologist realise their fate and courageously argue for resistance. The aristocrat
speaks mournfully of the vulgarity of the Nazis and the possibility of human nobility
in the face of self-interest. Each character hopes to convince the others, aware that
they can only act to survive together. Arthur Miller makes the choice facing the
characters highly absorbing. The characters have something to lose if they attempt an
escape and straightforward acquiescence at least offers some hope of release.
Monceau, the Jewish actor, refuses to fight the guards and make an escape because he
cannot conceive of the Germans' cruelty and the irrationality of their imprisonment.
The Nazis also become more terrifying in the play as their own lack of agency is
revealed. The Major is nervous, and guilty about the nature of the inspections but
when pushed by a prisoner, becomes excessively defensive. The aristocrat observes of
the Germans, 'the less you exist, the more you have to make an impression'. (34) It is
the insecurity of Nazism that gives rise to violence and vulgarity. Both victims and
persecutors are trapped in a system where they find little room for resistance. Being a
memory play the main character in Arthur Miller’s After the Fall, Quentin begins
speaking to someone offstage. Perhaps he speaks to the audience, perhaps to an
invisible friend or therapist. What becomes clear is this: everything that happens
onstage is in Quentin's mind; one can see the other characters from his point of view.
Something has happened to this man to force him into a reflective state of being. He
is a lawyer whose primary client is himself. Quentin investigates how things have
turned out the way they have from his own perception of truth. People from his past--
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wives, lovers, clients, and friends--appear and fade away as Quentin remembers past
encounters. He wanted to do good in life, to love and be loved. But his first two
marriages ended in divorce and he betrayed a friend. As the play moves forward and
backward in time, Quentin acknowledges his own capacity for cruelty and murder-not the physical taking of another life but the murder of love, his own as well as the
love of others. Quentin learns about denial from considering the impact of the
Holocaust. This brings him to the realization that he must face the many ways he has
justified or ignored his complicity in the failure of his marriage to Louise and the
death of Maggie. He does not want to look at the truth and yet once he begins, he
sees the layers of denial and is compelled to dig deeper. Stephen Barker remarks that
After the Fall intimates that the original fall from Eden is recapitulated by each
individual through the Fall into consciousness and thus into choice (Cambridge 237).
Arthur Miller’s The Price involves two brothers, Victor and Walter, and focuses on
the distribution of their dead parents’ belongings, all housed in a ten-room
brownstone. The secondhand furniture broker, Solomon, has offered a thousand
dollars for these belongings, and Victor has reached a tentative agreement with him,
although his wife and brother both urge him to hold out for three times the amount
offered. The play involves family secrets and duplicity. The brothers’ father, who had
been reasonably prosperous, suffered the fate of many during the Great Depression of
the 1930’s and was reduced to living at a bare subsistence level. He made his sons
realize that he did not have the wherewithal to send them to college. Victor accepted
his fathers’ penury at face value, but Walter, who suspected that his father had
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squirreled away some money to increase his own sense of security, struggled to
continue his education, eventually becoming a surgeon. Victor, meanwhile, became a
police officer and, during the action of the play, has served on the police force for
twenty-eight years. As Walter’s fortunes increased, Victor at one point approached his
brother, requesting a five-hundred-dollar loan so that he could continue his education.
Walter, however, although he was easily able to spare the money, would not make the
loan because of his suspicion, which proved to be quite accurate, that their father was
hiding money from his sons.
Lyman Felt is a major character in Arthur Miller’s The Ride down Mount
Morgan. He is an insurance agent and a bigamist who maintains families in New
York City and Elmira in upstate New York. When he is hospitalized following a
nearly fatal car crash on an icy mountain road, both wives—the Prim and proper
Theo, to whom he's been wed for more than thirty years, and the younger, more
assertive Leah, whom he married nine years earlier—show up at his bedside. When
confronted with his duplicity, Felt states that the two options in life are to be true to
others (and to what he deems a hypocritical society) or to himself, and that he has
chosen the latter. He justifies his actions to both shocked women by explaining he has
given them good lives, has supported them financially and emotionally, and has been
a good father. He goes on to say that the two women have been happier with this
arrangement than they would have been if they had been the only wife. As reasons for
this he cites domestic boredom, routine, and the angst of being trapped in the same
relationship forever. The play uses flashbacks to take us to previous situations both
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families have lived. Doubts linger about the crash having been an accident, and some
characters start suspecting it was an attempted suicide, maybe motivated by Felt's
growing discomfort about his unusual family arrangement. The flip side of the wives'
ostensible faultless lifestyle is also presented, when it is suggested that Leah has been
involved in another relationship, and Theo admits to having experienced long spells
of being cold and sexless. Every character starts having to deal with their own
hypocrisy, even Felt's outraged business partners who are later discovered to keep
lovers. Through Felt, Miller presents the supposition that monogamy is an unnatural
and unattainable state imposed on men by rigid but unnecessary social convention.
The major characters of Miller’s The Broken Glass are Phillip and Sylvia
Gellburg who are a Jewish married couple living in New York. Phillip works at a
Wall Street bank, where he works on foreclosing. Sylvia suddenly becomes partially
paralysed from the waist down after reading about the events of Kristallnacht in the
newspaper. Kristallnacht (translated as The Night of Broken Glass) was the
coordinated Nazi attack on Jewish people and their property which led to 91 Jews
being murdered, 25,000 to 30,000 arrests, 267 synagogues being destroyed, and
thousands of homes and businesses being ransacked by the Hitler Youth, the Gestapo
and the SS on 9th and 10th November that year. Dr. Harry Hyman is contacted by
Phillip to try and help Sylvia recover. Dr. Hyman believes that Sylvia's paralysis is
psychosomatic, and though he is not a psychiatrist, he begins to treat her according to
his diagnosis. Throughout the play, Dr. Hyman learns more about the problems that
Sylvia is having in her personal life, particularly in her marriage. After an argument
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with his boss, Philip suffers a heart attack and is dying at his home. Phillip and Sylvia
confront each other about their feelings. Before Phillip dies, his final words are
"Sylvia, forgive me!"(Broken Glass 45) Upon his death, Sylvia's paralysis is cured.
O’ Neill has experimented in expressionistic drama that explores the
unconscious life of men through a technique of distorting the elements of the realistic
theatre. Brutus Jones, a self-styed emperor of West-Indian Island was killed by a
silver bullet. In The Hairy Ape, Yank is insulted by the wealthy Mildred. In Mourning
Becomes Electra, he reconstructs the Greek legend of Orestes in the American context
of the Mannon family. He has a tragic vision and his drama ranges from the realistic
to the symbolic theatre and he expresses, the predicament of the twentieth century
man portraying his anguish and tension. John Gassner is of the view that O’Neill’s
search for expressive form led him to undertake numerous experiments with symbolic
figures, masks, interior monologues, split personalities, choruses, Scenic effects,
rhythms and schematization (The Readers’s Encylopedia of World Drama. 616).
Hailing from the rural South the state of Mississipi, Tennessee Williams explores in
his plays mostly the unconscious of the human mind. His characters withdraw
themselves into a world of their own, a world of fantasy and illusion. Though they are
left in a helpless and pitiable state, they have tragic dignity. Most of his characters are
alienated and isolated in the society. Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman presents a
criticism of the American dream of success, of how the drama of hard work and
millions of Dollars can be frustrating. His play All My Sons deals with the social
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responsibility of men in the society. In The Crucible, Miller presents the theme of
personal integrity in the character of John Proctor, a social victim who turns into a
romantic hero. He rejects society’s demand for ritual confession and regains his
personal identity and dies in an act of defiance.
Chapter – IV
Social Concerns
of the Writers
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Chapter - IV
Social Concerns of the Writers
One of the more significant literary movements in the twentieth century has
been nourished by racial conflicts and social unrest in the United States in America’s
South. In the works of Faulkner, Caldwell, Tennessee Williams and Robert Pen
Warren, the history of slavery and segregation in the country has been made to seem
even more troublesome to the conscience of the nation than the injustices of modern
capitalism. These writers have been witnesses of the degeneration of the South’s old,
white aristocracy after the Civil war. Twentieth century witnessed global level
upheavals, such as World Wars, the spread of Communism and the rise and fall of
Fascism, and such America’s national events as the Great Dust Bowl disaster to MidWest- Agriculture, the Great Depression of the thirties, and the prohibition
experiment of the twenties. The increasing Urbanization and the concentration of
population in suburban areas, the advent of automobile, the radio, theatres and the
electrification of rural America have been factors modifying the social, cultural and
literary life of the country. This scene at the turn of the twentieth century is one of
great complexity and diversity. This complexity and diversity is fully mirrored in the
literature of the age, more so as it is the era of the common man and the aspirations of
the masses find increasing expression in literature. With the passing of time this
complexity and intricacy continues to increase owing to various causes, which include
influences from the other side of the Atlantic, chief of such influences being the of the
new psychology of Sigmund Freud, Jung and Bergson and teaching of Karl Marx and
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his followers. Rapid industrialization and urbanization bring with them their own
problems and difficulties which colour the literature of the new century. The anxiety,
ennui, boredom, the sense of loneliness and neurosis, caused by these developments
find their own place in literature. (Johnston, Brian. Courses in Dramatic Literature
from Ancient to Modern Drama)
Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller are popular American
playwrights who address the anxieties of their age. They have been concerned with
the state of their society and examining the fate of fundamental American myths
having to do with liberal individualism, a sense of community and a utopian vision.
What they chiefly seem to regret is the decay of a metaphor- the metaphor which one
linked history with the notion of growth and located the individual in a natural cycle
which pulled him or her into harmony with the world he or she inhabited and with
those who shared that fate. They lament the decline of the morality band the slow
fading of a vision but in doing so they implicitly make a case for the possibility of
change and indeed see in the theatre itself a chief agent of transformation and a
paradigm of the social, moral and spiritual community whose decline they regret. A
careful reading of their plays reveals their social concerns and world views.
O’Neill’s tremendous success as a dramatist depends to a great extent upon the
fact that he has had something to say about the modern social order that has been
worth saying. His technique has been admirable vehicle for an interpretation of the
conflict which arises out of the circumstances of the society in which he lived. It is
not man, as an individual alone that concerns O’Neill: it is man in a social order,
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tortured, starved, disillusioned, thwarted and driven to, disaster by the forces of a
system which cares nothing for the general welfare of society. Man moves across the
stage of an O’Neill play not as a free and detached individual, not merely as
an individual in relation to a few characters who are associated with him in the
immediate drama which makes the play, but he treats man against a rich background
of social forces. It is the social implication that makes his play have a life in the mind
of the audience after it has left the theatre and scattered to the quiet of
individual thought. That O’Neill is concerned with the problem of man in relation to
the present social order is apparent in all of his plays. The social implication of the
greed for empire is boldly set forth in The Emperor Jones. When Brutes Jones lost his
nerve in the forest, the grim shadows of his past came to haunt him. Jones escapes the
direct punishment, but he could not escape the deep scars left by a vicious system. In
the pantomime of the prison scene and at the auction mart our social order as well as
the character of Jones is clearly revealed. O’Neill presents man’s desire for psychic
wholeness urges him to turn the negative experiences of isolation and difference into
a positive one through involvement in the task of relieving human beings of misery
and sufferings. Richard Gray remarks,
The fundamental problem O’Neill dramatizes and develops in all his
works is that of the relation of the human being to something,
anything, outside himself; something to which he can belong,
something in which he can ground his life so that it can have more
shape, a sense of purpose, somewhat saves him from feeling lonely,
lost an existential exile. (History of American Literature 459)
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The Hairy Ape is a significant play of social criticism. It presents a negative
view of the state, of mechanized America, where the worker best adjusted to the
system is a ‘hairy ape’, and where the “Capitalist class” is even more terribly
dehumanized, for it has lost all connection with life, is simply ‘a procession of gaudy
marionettes’. According to this play, both government and religion are devices for
maintaining the status quo. The Church substitute political conservatism for
Christianity substitute bazaars, methods of making money, for a concern with the
meaning of life and death. The Government is equally at the service of the
marionettes. On the legislative side, it is exemplified by the windy oratory of Senator
Queen, glorifying the status quo and denouncing with ignorant terror any threat to it
like the I.W.W (Industrial Workers World). On the enforcement side, it is
exemplified by police who function to keep the workers from disturbing the wealthy.
On the whole, the state, as pictured in The Hairy Ape is a device for dehumanizing its
citizens, and for preventing change. The sickness of the machine age is not wholly a
problem of relating production and consumption. It goes much deeper than that. The
whole concept of life, of man’s relation to the world, of his place in it is involved.
Yank in Hairy Ape was not concerned about distribution––vitally important as that is–
–he wanted to be a creative part of the social structure, and no man working in the
stoke-hole of a liner or making the two hundred and fifty-sixth part of a shoe in
regulation eight-hour shifts can ever ‘belong’ in the, same sense that man belonged as
a creative worker in the eighteenth century. Yank is a protest against the mordant
success of the machine age.
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In O’Neill’s opinion, man finds himself totally isolated in a spiritually sterile
universe and, therefore, cannot have a sense of harmony in it. In his search for
identity, and also his need to belong, he feels his losing more intensely. It is evident
from his plays that a man has to face tough times in a world without god, love and
faith in life, and that he may belong, but it is possible only after sacrificing his life. It
happens in the case of yank, Robert Mayo and Orin Mannon. The importance of
O’Neill as a social critic lies in the fact that he emphasizes the psychological aspect of
the modern social order.
He is critical about America’s acquisitive society. He does not merely stress
the fact that workers are exploited to create wealth fort the few, but shows how in our
modern machine-made world they are deprived of the sense of harmony and mental
well-being that comes from doing something that seems important and necessary.
Man’s work is a necessary part of his personality; it is an extension of his ego; it
makes him feel that he is a necessary part of the life of the world in which he lives.
Modern industry tends to destroy this psychological counterpart of work, and in so far
as it does, it leaves the worker a nervous, irritable and dissatisfied misfit. Yank was
such a worker, and at the same time, conscious of the thing he had lost. He didn’t
want a job simply because it would be a means to earning a living; he wanted a job in
which he could live. (Monika, Gupta. The Plays of Eugene O’Neill – Critical Study 56)
The play All God’s Chillun Got Wings deals with the problems of social
inequality in modern America. The American Negro is technically free, but
psychologically he is still in bondage. The social pressure of a society that cannot
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overcome its race prejudice makes its individual a failure and depressed. Jim failed
because the social system denied him something that he wanted more than wages and
votes, it denied him the right to belong. Here O’Neill has selected the material out of
which the modern Negro’s tragedy is perpetuated beyond the termination of his
physical slavery. He has arraigned the deep and powerful prejudices of American
civilization before the bar of true justice. O’Neill has stressed in his plays the personal
weakness of those who strive for wealth. Billy Brown is helpless without the creative
strength of Dion Anthony. Marco Polo becomes despondent when lack of external
activity forces him to think. Sam Evans, the successful businessman of Strange
Interlude, is totally without inner resources. “How weak he is!” his wife thinks early
in the play. When he gains power, it is purely external: “What a fount of meaningless
energy he’s tapped !...always on the go ..., typical, terrible child of the age.”
In an earlier play Lazarus Laughed, O’Neill showed that the craving for
political power is also a compensation for inward weakness, emptiness. The depraved,
power-mad Caligula is above all, weak, frightened, spiritually dead. After murdering
Tiberius, he cries savagely to the empty amphitheatre:
Kneel down ! Abase yourselves ! I am your Caesar and your God !”
But, a moment later, he becomes aware of his loneliness, and ends by
“groveling in a paroxysm of terror” (Gupta, Monika. The Plays of
Eugene O’Neill 45)
All those who seek wealth, power over others, in the plays of Eugene O’Neill,
do so out of personal weakness. When they do gain power, wealth, they are ‘poorer
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thereby’. This interpretation of financial, worldly success was behind O’Neill’s
declaration that the United States is “the greatest failure”. He explains : “We are the
greatest example of ‘For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world,
and lose his own soul?’ “O’Neill’s most bitter condemnation of the status quo is thus
based on his Nietzschean philosophy. Both O’Neill and Nietzsche believe that the
state produces soulless conformity, that those who seek worldly power and money, do
so out of inner weakness and sterility.
O’Neill believed that individuals must gain the “courage to possess their own
souls” before man can begin to think of establishing a just society. As Larry Slade
of The Iceman Cometh puts it, “The material the ideal free society must be
constructed from is men themselves and you can’t build a marble temple out of a
mixture of mud and manure. When man’s soul isn’t a sow’s ear, it will be time
enough to dream of silk purses.” (The Iceman Cometh 45) For O’Neill, then, it is not
a better state that makes better men, but better men who make a better state. The
world revealed by Eugene O’Neill is tragic because it is, without intelligent social
organization. Ignorance, brutality, selfishness, greed and hatred are the dominant
forces in this world of O’Neill. The multitude of men and women who pass by in the
imagination as one tries to envision the sum total of life that O’Neill has presented in
his plays is a sorry lot. Here by the roadside lies a young man coughing his lungs out
as he cries for the beauty which lies beyond the horizon ; here is a girl tortured into
committing a murder ; another passes with a fixed look of dry-eyed sorrow that, is just
breaking into insanity over her lover killed in war ; a handsome Negro passes with the
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sorrow of hopeless despair furrowing every line of his face ; in a narrow room another
breaks under the strain, of life as his fevered imagination turns gilded trinkets into
gold ; in, the cold seas of the north a woman goes mad from loneliness ; in a beautiful
New England home starved and misguided love brings endless tragedy ; and so one
could go on with the enumeration. O’Neill emphasizes the fact of a social system
which is destructive in itself, which thwarts every effort to achieve happiness, which
puts a value on misery and pain as a good in itself, and worst of all encourages and
rewards everything that is predatory and destructive, condemning beauty, well-being
and happiness as a sin.
Interestingly, both O’Neill and Tennessee Williams were influenced by
Sigmund Freud. Tennessee Williams was suffering from Oedipus complex because in
his earlier life he could not get attached to his father; he found convincing attraction
in his mother. While leading a Bohemian lifestyle in New Orleans, he became aware
that he had homosexual tendencies. His unconscious rationalization or repression
made him explore the world of gaiety and frivolity. Unconsciously it affected him and
it found expression in his writings, in the form of portraits- at times as that of his
sister and at others in his own.
In the play Orpheus Descending Mrs. Torrance and, in A Streetcar Named
Desire, Blanche Dubois symbolically refers to his mental state. In these plays sex,
which was considered a taboo, is treated by Williams in a shocking and revolutionary
manner. He generated the germ of the new spirit of freedom for woman to find sexual
fulfillment (symbolized by the West) and this idea is in conflict with the moral
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Puritanism of New England. Actually he tries to balance his mental delirium through
wish- fulfillment of his repressed desires which had been controlled by the Puritanical
code of conduct taught by his mother Edwina Williams. The extrasensory perception
and heightened emotionalism of Tennessee Williams' writings have inspired
numerous attempts at interpretations over the years. Even though the form of the plays
is deviated from conventional standards as well as their seemingly secret yearnings
shame the society and they are shunned from mainstream society, yet the plays are
still held to be more successful due to their inner probing of a lost person in the
corrupt and materialistic world of the twentieth century.
His two plays A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof analyze
the very important problem gender conflicts in the American society. The two dramas
represent not only very fruitful sources for gender conflicts, but also contrasting and
unanimous elements on the issues. The Glass Menagerie also discusses the gender
conflicts in Southern culture, but it was found not suitable in terms of sexuality and
especially homosexuality, as it entirely lacks elements of the latter, and
homosexuality is regarded as a very important and interesting factor in the analysis of
gender and its related conflicts. The proverbial conflict between males and females
has often been termed the "battle of the sexes." Sexual hostilities rage throughout the
play. According to Williams, the universe is fragmented and man born into it is born
into incompletion. Everything that governs human action emanates from this broken
condition which is the root condition of the universe. Man’s life is a constant attempt
to compensate for this lack of wholeness which he feels in himself. In the work of
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Tennessee Williams, human action is defined by universal incompletion. Not only can
the individual not appeal to forces beyond himself, but because his life is defined in
terms of his universe and is thus marked by guilt and atonement, he cannot rely even
upon personal responsibility. There is no sense of individual responsibility in this
deterministic view of existence.
Arthur Miller is linked with Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams, and is
one of the five major American dramatists of international repute, namely Eugene
O’Neill, Thornton Wilder, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller and Edward Albee.
During the last two decades a whole host of playwrights have had to face the oblivion
of anonymity while Miller’s plays continue to attract, arouse amuse and provoke the
readers and the audience alike. Marching ahead with greater determination, steadier
steps and increasing boldness, Miller has continued to maintain his pace in the
glorious high road of American drama. Miller has been able to maintain his faith in
values like courage, trust, responsibility, and faith.
The American liberal intelligentsia took a drastic turn for the worse in the
middle of the twentieth century, making a bargain with the most dastardly elements in
American society. The Wall Street Crash had a major impact on the U.S. and world
economy, and it has been the source of intense academic debate historical, economic,
and political—from its aftermath until the present day. Some people believed that
abuses by utility holding companies contributed to the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and
the Depression that followed. Many people blamed the crash on commercial banks
that were too eager to put deposits at risk on the stock market. Arthur Miller
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maintained a critical attitude toward American society until the end of his life. He
supported and participated in the civil rights struggle and opposed the Vietnam War.
Most recently, he criticized the US invasion of Iraq. Arthur Miller based his works on
American history, his own life, and his observations of the American scene. Though
uniquely American, they simultaneously were universal stories about an individual's
struggle with his society, his family, and especially, himself. He stood up to
McCarthyism in the Fifties as bravely as any American. In the mid-Sixties he stood
up to communism by helping Soviet bloc authors as president of PEN, the
international writers’ organization. Through the early Seventies he raised one of the
most urgent, resonant voices against the Vietnam War.” The New York Times has led
the way in this effort, publishing no less than six obituaries, op-ed pieces and assorted
articles on Miller in the first few days after his death, in addition to slide shows on its
web site. Arthur Miller utilizes the concept of the American family as an underlying
context in a number of his plays. The ideals that come with such a stigma vary, yet
some remain stark and vital in Miller's works, such as the notions of grasping
the American Dream at any cost, family dysfunction, success, failure, and hard work.
These concepts become prevalent in The Man Who Had All the Luck, Miller's earliest
play. Utilizing these ideals as driving forces for character development, the
protagonist David emerges, bringing the audience to its knees as he battles internal
and external demons for a chance at an honest, beautiful American life. Arthur Miller
was called to testify in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee to name
names of communist sympathizers in 1956, the height of the McCarthy Era. Miller
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refused to do so and was heralded by the arts community for his strength of
conviction and loyalty. In 1957, Miller was charged with contempt, a ruling later
reversed by the U.S. Court of Appeals. Miller, like Eddie Carbone, was faced with the
problem of choosing to be American or not, specifically by naming names of people
who were doing (what were considered then) unlawful acts. Miller's own struggle
with this issue is very present in A View from the Bridge. Unlike Eddie Carbone,
Miller chose to be loyal to his fellow artists, but like Carbone, Miller went against the
cultural consensus at the time. Miller, in the play, has reversed the scene—rather than
the mass culture supporting the extrication of possible communists, Miller chose to
script a community that accepted and protected unlawful people. The consequences
and eventual repercussions of naming names, for Eddie Carbone, are drastic. Miller
used this play to strongly condemn the McCarthy trials and those who named the
names of innocent artists. Eddie in A View from the Bridge loses control of his actions
in the play. Driven and possessed by incestuous love for his niece, Eddie resorts to
desperate measures to protect his identity and name in the community. Alfieri's
commentary often remarks on this theme. Alfieri seems constantly amazed by Eddie's
actions and his own reactions to the events of the play. Alfieri sees his own irrational
thinking, just as he recognizes Eddie's irrational behavior. Irrationality is also how
Alfieri defines acting wholly. The human animal becomes irrational when he acts
fully on his instincts—just as Eddie does in the play. Alfieri proposes that humans
must act as a half, or restrain some of our instinctual needs or wants for reason.
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Miller was not primarily a political activist. He determined at a relatively early
age on writing as a vocation. He studied plays and playwriting in university: Ibsen in
particular, but also Greek tragedy, the German expressionists, Brecht, Büchner, Frank
Wedekind. Eugene O’Neill, the dominant figure in the American theater in the 1920s
and 1930s, seemed too “cosmic” to Miller and unresponsive to social realities. He was
more sympathetic to the efforts of Clifford Odets, author of Waiting for Lefty and
other works, the leading left-wing playwright of the time. Shakespeare, oddly, is not
mentioned in Gottfried’s biography as a subject of study. The American theater, as a
serious institution, dates from the period around World War I, when groups such as
the Washington Square Players and the Provincetown Players established themselves.
O’Neill, associated with the latter group, poured forth a series of expressive, often
insufferable works (Desire Under the Elms, Strange Interlude and Mourning Becomes
Electra and many others), influenced by Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and Freud (and
Jung), which nonetheless transformed the American stage. The “left” theater, which
arose in the aftermath of the Crash of 1929, hardly offered an alluring alternative to
O’Neill’s cosmic and static fatalism. In the hands of Stalinist chief literary thug
Michael Gold, subtlety and nuance were reduced to naught. Upon graduating from the
University of Michigan in 1938, Miller returned to Brooklyn, working briefly for the
Federal Theater program. He married Mary Slattery, a Catholic from Ohio, in 1940. A
few months after the US entered World War II, in the spring of 1942, Miller went to
work at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. (Robert E. Spiller. Literary History of the United
States: History)
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His first produced play, The Man Who Had All the Luck, opened and closed
quickly in New York in 1944. All My Sons concerns two families in Ohio (the play
was inspired by an anecdote related by his mother-in-law), the Kellers and the
Deevers. More than its obvious social statement, about war profiteering and one’s
larger responsibility to society, the play’s enduring impact, such as it is, emerges from
the anger of the younger men against Keller and his generation. Something of Miller’s
own background and feelings makes itself felt in the seething fury of George Deever
in particular. Other than that, All My Sons is largely patriotic, pat and contrived.
Nonetheless, the drama clearly struck a chord with audiences still hopeful, like Miller
himself, that a more populist, vaguely anti-capitalist New Dealism would flourish in
postwar America. By the time Death of a Salesman opened in February 1949 that
particular illusion had surely been crushed, with the onset of the Cold War and the
anticommunist crusade, and Miller’s new play no doubt reflects that reality. The
political situation in the US had transformed itself within a matter of months in 194748. The prospects for third-party candidate and former vice president Henry Wallace,
who received the support of the American Stalinists, seemed relatively propitious
when he began considering running for president in 1947, his campaign had virtually
collapsed by the following summer. The American political and media
establishment’s anticommunist campaign had shifted into full gear. The House UnAmerican Activities Committee hearings into “Communist influence” in Hollywood
grabbed headlines day after day in the autumn of 1947; ultimately, the “Hollywood
Ten” were convicted and sentenced in April 1948. The Communist Party leadership in
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New York City faced prosecution under the Smith Act, which outlawed conspiring to
advocate forcible overthrow of the government; in August 1948 congressional
hearings (presided over by Richard Nixon) began into accusations that former State
Department official Alger Hiss had spied for the Soviet Union; the following summer,
indicating the general climate, a right-wing mob broke up a Paul Robeson concert in
Peekskill, New York. (Bigsby, C.W.E. The Cambridge Companion to Arthur Miller)
Even while drawing fairly sharp conclusions about Death of a Salesman’s
failings, one always has to bear in mind the conditions in the teeth of which Miller
wrote the play; the unfavorable atmosphere goes a considerable distance toward
explaining some of its more obvious weaknesses. The piece, Miller’s best-known
work, treats the final hours in the life of an aging salesman, Willy Loman. In the
course of one day Loman quarrels repeatedly with his older son, Biff, an idler, who
has returned home after spending time out West; gets fired by his firm after more than
30 years of backbreaking effort on its behalf; continues to borrow money from an old
friend to cover up the fact that he has not been earning anything from his sales work;
conjures up the presence of his dead brother and other memories of a happier past;
recalls as well the traumatic moment when Biff, a teenager, discovered him in a hotel
room with another woman; and, finally, because he is worth more dead than alive
(thanks to an insurance policy), kills himself at the wheel of his automobile. In an
epilogue, his neighbor defends Willy’s memory, “Nobody dast blame this man. A
salesman is got to dream, boy. It comes with the territory.” Death of a Salesman was
an instant success, provoking rapturous praise from the New York press, Brooks
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Atkinson of the New York Times being the most prominent at the time, and guaranteed
Miller’s stature as an important American writer. The play has achieved a reputation
as a critique of American capitalist society or at least its moral and social standards,
and audiences and readers have seen it in that light for decades. Despite the
undeniable moments of truth, at the center of Death of a Salesman is a profound
ambiguity, which must reflect, in the end, the playwright’s own ambiguous feelings
about American society and the American dream. The play refers to moods more
bound up with the Depression, or Miller’s conception of it. America was about to
“take off” in 1949, the American salesman was entering a golden age. Arthur Miller
criticized certain tendencies in American society such as selfishness, mediocrity,
cowardice, sometimes sharply; on the other, he offered “understanding” that
amounted, in the end, to a form of approval or at least acquiescence. One never
derives any sense of a necessary historical and social process from Miller’s plays.
Again, it is tempting to seek at least a partial explanation in his own experience in the
financial crash. Social events arrive in his plays inexplicably and rather arbitrarily.
The Crucible was intended at least in part as a response to the anticommunist witchhunting of the 1950s, and, in the mechanisms and mentality it exposes, it has a certain
value. One would find it nearly impossible to argue, however, that the piece
illuminates in any way the set of conditions in America that made the “red scare”
possible. The sanctimoniousness and self-aggrandizement of its central character,
John Proctor, stands in direct proportion to the play’s historical or social abstractness.
A View from the Bridge is a poor work from nearly any point of view. The story of a
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Brooklyn longshoreman, driven by jealousy and possible repressed homosexual
longing, to turn in a pair of illegal immigrants, is unconvincing as a picture of
working class life and unserious as a moral-social critique. The knowledge that this
misbegotten play was intended as a reply both to Kazan’s infamous act of “naming
names” and the latter’s defense of his informing in On the Waterfront merely reveals
how little Miller understood, or allowed himself to understand, of postwar American
society. While the height of the McCarthyite period had passed, Miller was still to
face threats and harassment from the red-baiters in Washington. In 1954 he was
refused a passport he needed to attend a performance of The Crucible in Belgium on
the grounds that his presence abroad “would not be in the national interest. The
playwright was summoned to appear before the House Un-American Activities
Committee (HUAC) in June 1956 on entirely spurious grounds, “The Unauthorized
Use of United States Passports.” Singer Paul Robeson was obliged to appear in the
same round of hearings. When asked whether he had suggested that black Americans
would never go to war against the Soviet Union, Robeson replied,
Listen to me, I said it was unthinkable that my people would take arms
in the name of an Eastland [the racist senator James O. Eastland of
Mississippi] to go against anybody, and gentlemen, I still say that.
(quoted from infoplease.com)
Miller was eventually convicted of contempt of Congress and the conviction
was overturned by the Supreme Court in 1956. A period of nine years separates A
View from the Bridge from the staging of After the Fall and Incident at Vichy in 1964.
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During that time, in addition to his difficulties with HUAC, Miller was divorced from
his first wife, married movie star Marilyn Monroe and then divorced her. Monroe
committed suicide one year later in 1962. Miller’s depiction of Monroe in After the
Fall, for the most part a travesty of a play, was poorly received by critics and the
public at large. Its unflattering portrait was viewed as uncharitable, an instance of
speaking ill of the dead. The play After the Fall takes place in the mind of Quentin, a
New York lawyer, who recalls various experiences with his three wives in particular.
Monroe appears as Maggie, a self-destructive and “ingenuous whore,” in Martin
Gottfried’s words. The play rejects the “fantasy of innocence.” Quentin feels like “an
accomplice” in the shadow of the concentration camp.
In 1947 Miller told an interviewer that his writing evolved from settings and
dramatic situations “which involve real questions of right and wrong.” He meant it
sincerely, but this type of conventional moralizing inevitably proves a very limited
and inadequate guide to the complexities of modern life. Miller’s failure to make any
serious analysis of social life and history brought him to this unattractive and
untenable position in After the Fall. Incident at Vichy raises similar concerns. One
confronts here the demoralization of the liberal intelligentsia, its “overwhelmedness,”
in the face of the traumas of the mid-twentieth century. After the Fall also suffers
from a type of false self-criticism that abounds in the modern theater. The problem
with Miller’s characterization of Monroe is not chiefly that he is unkind to her. He
had the right, after all, to portray her as he thought she was. But the “self-criticism”
Quentin/Miller offers—that he fooled himself into thinking he could be her savior
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(“this cheap benefactor”) and then abandoned her in the end—misses the point, at
least in relation to Miller’s own life and condition. The Miller-Monroe coupling, in
real life, was not a long-lived or happy affair, although it began idyllically enough.
Monroe, Miller discovered, was a deeply unhappy and insecure woman; in addition,
she was addicted to barbiturates. Her film roles, as a “dumb blonde,” a “joke,” in her
own words, deeply frustrated and depressed her. Miller’s last play to receive
significant attention, The Price, was staged in 1968. The drama centers on the
relationship of two brothers and resonates with the experience of Miller and his
brother Kermit and their father, who went into a deep depression after the collapse of
his enterprise. Miller’s later pieces, such as The American Clock, The Ride down Mt.
Morgan and Broken Glass reveal that the playwright maintained his limited artistic
virtues to the end of his life.
Arthur Miller has denounced writers who conform to commercial
specifications, businessmen and politicians who exploit other men’s insecurities,
informers who betray friends in order to preserve their own reputations, civilians who
passively tolerate wartime atrocities and veterans who quickly forget the comradeship
they knew during combat. Arthur Miller repeatedly stresses the idea that the proper
business of serious drama is to demonstrate the feasibility of such communication and
the disastrous results of its absence. Throughout his career, Arthur Miller has
continually addressed several distinct but related issues in both his dramatic and
expository writings. In his early plays and in a series of essays published in the 1940s
and 50s, Arthur Miller first outlined a form of tragedy applicable to modern times and
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contemporary characters, challenging traditional notions suggesting that only kings,
queens, princes, and other members of the nobility can be suitable subjects for
tragedy. In Tragedy and the Common Man, Miller asserts that the "underlying
struggle" of all such dramas "is that of the individual attempting to gain his `rightful'
position in society." Consequently, "the tragic feeling is evoked in us when we are in
the presence of a character who is ready to lay down his life, if need be, to secure one
thing his sense of personal dignity"(29) within a society that inhibits such endeavors.
According to this view, even an individual like Willy Loman, the protagonist of
Death of a Salesman can achieve truly tragic stature. It is this issue of the individual's
relationship to society, and its representation on stage, that forms the second of
Miller's abiding concerns. Throughout his work, Miller has sought to fuse the moral
and political messages of social plays with the realism and intensity of psychological
dramas that focus on the individual.
Arthur Miller has conveyed his conviction that the common man is as apt a
subject for tragedy as kings were. The tragic feeling does not anchor on the social
status of the protagonist. It is aroused in us when we are in the presence of a character
who is ready to lay down his life to secure his personal dignity. Arthur Miller feels
that tragedy is the consequence of man’s total compulsion to evaluate himself. Man
constantly fights back the hostile cosmos, tries to get the better of the strangling,
choking environment, and from this springs the terror and fear associated with
classical tragedy. Tragedy is “the consequence of a man’s total compulsion to
evaluate himself justly, his destruction in the attempt, posits a wrong or an evil in his
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environment”. And this is precisely the morality of tragedy and its lesson. An
otherwise ordinary and common protagonist may rise to the stature of a tragic hero
because of his extraordinarily intense zeal and fervour and the sincerity of
commitment to his goal—his eagerness to give up anything required in this battle of
achieving his proper place in this world.
The plays of Arthur Miller are never devoid of social context. Arthur Miller is
of the view that the protagonist of the drama must be a part of meaningful social
relationships. A lonely, isolated individual living in his own ivory tower or an
individual marooned on an island or sailing in the vast seas—any individual, so to say
bound by any type of physical or mental confines—is not suitable for a play. Normal
man lives in society and the play should depict the interaction between the individual
and society. Miller’s characters have served this purpose. His characters possess “the
worth, the innate dignity, of a whole people asking a basic question and demanding its
answer”. The playwright and the protagonist join hands and try to find an answer to
the question: how may man make for himself, a home in that vastness of strangers and
how may he transform that vastness into a home?” (Sharma, Rani. The Plays of
Arthur Miller 23)
The central issue of Miller’s plays is: “The struggle of the individual
attempting to gain his rightful position in his society and his family.” Miller, however,
does not make out society to be the sole villain. The society finds it easier for its
hostility to work because of the tragic flaw or the weaknesses of the characters. An
individual can maintain his own and society’s stability by resisting hatred and
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exclusiveness, or an individual may upset social equilibrium by enforcing the
exaggerated demands of an inflated ego. Though Joe Keller (All My Sons) and Willy
Loman (the Death of a Salesman) adopt popular norms, they get estranged from
themselves and their families because of their stubbornly uncompromising self-will.
Miller’s characters are life-like. Drawn from the contemporary American society, they
verge on the border of universality. They represent their counterpart, at least in their
own country by facing similar dilemmas, similar predicaments and similar options.
The protagonist does not and cannot function without entering into social
relationships. Miller’s plays are concerned with rebellious sons, betrayed fathers,
down-trodden workers, persecuted citizens and the like. Miller tries to achieve a
harmonious blend of ‘I’ and ‘We’. Miller is one who may be compared to his nearest
associate Eugene O’Neill. O’Neill fails to connect his characters with the social
environment, while Miller comes out triumphant.
Willy's quest to realize what he views as the American Dream—the "selfmade man" who rises out of poverty and becomes rich and famous— is a dominant
theme in Death of a Salesman. Willy believed wholeheartedly in this treasured
national myth, which began during colonial times, and which was further developed
during the 19th century by such industry tycoons as Andrew Carnegie and J.D.
Rockefeller. In the 1920s, the American Dream was represented by Henry Ford,
whose great success in the automotive industry was achieved when he developed the
assembly line. Also in the 1920s, a career in sales was being hailed as a way for a man
without training or education to achieve financial success. Pamphlets, lectures, and
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correspondence courses promoting strategies for improving the skills of salesmen
were widely distributed during this decade. These strategies focused on teaching
salesmen how to effectively manipulate their clients. Willy would have begun his
career as a salesman in the 1920s, when belief that salesmen adept at manipulation
and "people skills" were destined for wealth and fame was widespread. However, by
the late 1940s, when Death of a Salesman takes place, the job market and prevailing
belief has changed, and salesmen (and other workers) required specialized knowledge
and training in order to succeed. Because he lacks such knowledge or training, Willy
is destined to fail in a business world that demands the ability to play a specific part in
a large establishment. Willy, of course, does not realize how things have changed, and
he continues to try to strike it rich using his powers of persuasion. Willy's personal
representations of the American Dream are his brother Ben and the salesman Dave
Singleman, and he views the success of these two men as proof that he can indeed
attain the success he is so desperate to achieve. According to Willy's version of the
American Dream, he is a complete failure. (Sharma, Rani. The Plays of Arthur Miller 23
Selective realism in American drama was a mid-20th century movement in
writing for the stage, which began as a result of the post war mood of the country. The
pioneers and forerunners of the American realistic movement were Arthur Miller and
Tennessee Williams, two of America’s most celebrated playwrights today. They
brought realism to the American stage in post-WWII theatre. Throughout theatre
history, theatergoers would see plays to escape real life and get a taste of otherworldly
themes, through supernatural places and mythical figures. This principle carries its
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weight through Asian drama, ancient European, and modern European works. The
realist movement, however, presented real life just as real as ever: no subject matter
was left out, and audiences were shocked. In post-WWII American theatre, audiences
preferred more fantastic presentations, which is evident by their leanings towards
musical theatre, as well as the overarching popularity of absurdist movements and
surrealism in theatre. Nevertheless, this did not stop the American realistic
playwrights from writing some of the most celebrated and frequently produced shows
today, most notably Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman and Tennessee Williams’ A
Streetcar Named Desire and The Glass Menagerie.
The origins and primary influence of the American realistic movement can be
attributed to the early 19th century works of Henrik Ibsen, the founder of modern-day
realism. He wrote such in your face and true to life works as A Doll’s House, which
dealt with spousal neglect in the home. Also important is the overarching influences
on the general realistic movement of Eugène Scribe and Victorien Sardou, who wrote
the first ‘well-made’ plays. These plays implored a specific construction of events
unfolding which playwrights will still utilize today. Ibsen is arguably the primary
influence on the realistic writing styles of Miller and Williams and other American
20th Century realistic dramatists. In the 1930s the Great Depression, economics
dominated politics and the American Dream turned into a nightmare. What once was
the land of opportunity and hope became a land of desperation. In other words, the
land of hope, optimism, and the symbol of prosperity became the land of despair.
Many farmers migrated to the big cities in the hope of getting a job. Instead of
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advancement, survival became the major problem. By the emergence of the World
War II, the situation deteriorated, which inevitably influenced the lives of ordinary
American people in a negative way. Arthur Miller draws reader’s attention to the
devastating effects of the economics and politics of the era on a fictional character
that mostly represents a member of an ordinary American family with an American
Dream.
His play, Death of a Salesman, focused on the individual’s role in the family
and his struggles. This play presents in a realistic sense the father’s role in the family
and society, focusing on the themes of responsibility. In an interview with William
R. Ferri Miller remarks thus,
I suppose she was speaking about the care and support that his family
might give him, in that context. Of course, there is a larger context,
which is social and even political-that a lot of people give a lot of their
lives to a company or even the government, and when they are no
longer needed, when they are used up, they're tossed aside. I guess that
would encompass it. (Humanities magazine, NEH March-April 2001
issue)
The play An Enemy of the People is Miller’s remarkable creation of its time.
During the time when so many playwrights are dealing with modern man’s isolation
and loneliness, Miller, without denying either the loneliness or the isolation is
convinced that the world is moving toward a unity, a unity won not alone by the
necessities of the physical developments themselves, but by the painful and confused
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reassertion of man’s inherited will to survive. The play suggests the answer that when
the times are out of joint; the individual must be true to himself. Stockman clings to
the truth and suffers the social consequences. The play is story of a scientist who
discovers an evil and innocently believes that he has done a service to humanity. He
expects that he will be thanked by the people. However the town has vested interest in
the perpetuation of that evil, and his ‘truth’, when confronted with that interest, must
be made to conform. The scientist cannot change the truth for any reason
disconnected with the evil, and this brings sufferings for him. This theme is valid
today just as it will always be in Miller’s view.
Tennessee Williams’ plays, while different from Miller’s style of writing in
many ways, still retained the realistic style of the time. Tennessee Williams focused
on putting everyday characters, usually on the lower end of the socioeconomic food
chain, into heated environments (literally and figuratively in A Streetcar Named
Desire – the play is set in New Orleans). A great example is in The Glass Menagerie,
where Tom is trapped at home for financial reasons to take care of his family, who
based on their character flaws will never change. Many of Williams’ plays dealt with
characters that felt ‘trapped’ by society; this is probably reminiscent of Williams’ own
financial situations, which did not permit him finishing college until a much later age.
Also of note in Williams’ plays is his use of stage directions. He writes some of the
most descriptive stage directions of all time, painting a picture on stage (sometimes
literally) and taking away the job of blocking from the director. Both Arthur Miller
and Tennessee Williams incorporated large amounts of symbolism in their works, and
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this is a principle theme in 20th Century realism. Symbolism most commonly reflects
character’s personalities and flaws. For example, in A Streetcar Named Desire, our
first interaction with Stanley is when he comes home, yells “Stella!!! Meat.” and
throws up the meat he just bought from the butcher’s to Stella, which she catches.
This is a perfect symbol of Stanley’s masculinity, and the relationship between Stella
and Stanley.
Miller observes the process of materialism, capitalism, and false success
policies which bring disillusionment, isolation, and alienation. Post-war American
dramatists attempt to redefine domestic life that becomes a disappointing matter
because it mostly illustrates disintegration in the family life. As Bigsby suggests, the
central theme of the twentieth-century American drama is “alienation: man from God,
from his environment, from his fellow/man and from himself” (Bigsby 125). It is a
world in which the relationship between man and environment is destroyed. For the
writers of 1930s, alienation is seen as a sense of loss, bred by social injustice. In fact,
the effects of alienation could be seen in various stages of Eugene O’Neill, Clifford
Odet, Lillian Hellman, Edward Albee and Miller. Fromm describes the cause of this
alienation; not only economic, but also the personal relations between men have this
character of alienation. In fact, Willy is partly the victim of an unjust competitive
society: “Willy is a victim of society. But he is also a consenting victim, or a victim of
himself.
Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams, maintain similarities in styles of
writing, but differ on overarching sociopolitical themes in their plays. Arthur Miller
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focused more on the individual, whereas Williams’ plays were based upon characters’
interactions, and societal influences on households. Nevertheless, they remain two of
the most important American playwrights of the 20th century, pillars in theatre history.
They continuously influence playwrights today, in both dramatic, and comedic works.
Recently, playwright Christopher Durang wrote a parody of Tennessee Williams’ The
Glass Menagerie entitled For Whom the Southern Belle Tolls, poking fun at
TennesseeWilliams’ use of southern settings, and characters self-inflicted handicaps.
Instead of a menagerie, the play revolves around Lawrence and his collection of glass
cocktail stirrers. Durang also pokes fun at Williams’ own homosexuality and how it
reflects in his plays, switching the gentleman caller to a ‘feminine caller,’ and making
her a lesbian.
Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams were at the forefront of American
Realism movement, and despite the slight differences in their works, they produced
what is considered the best dramatic pieces of American realism, many of which are
celebrated and still produced today. Tennessee Williams’ plays represent the side of
American life, and they do not have happy endings. They plumb the depths of
problems such as homosexuality, symbolic cannibalism, alcoholism and lurid
behavior. Tennessee Williams’ general view of life is pessimistic, morbid tragic. In
his plays, he raises issues about the relationship of people to the organizational and
corporate world symbolically and indirectly.
Arthur Miller has denounced writers who conform to commercial specifications,
businessmen and politicians who exploit other men’s insecurities, informers who
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betray friends in order to preserve their own reputations, civilians who passively
tolerate wartime atrocities and veterans who quickly forget the comradeship they
knew during combat. He encountered the last while gathering material in American
army camps for a movie. Miller repeatedly stresses the idea that the proper business
of serious drama is to demonstrate the feasibility of such communication and the
disastrous results of its absence. The protagonist of this drama must enter into
meaningful social relationships, if only to challenge conventional norms. He should
possess “the worth, the innate dignity, of a whole people asking a basic question and
demanding its answer” (“on social plays”). The “identity” he moulds within the
intimate bounds of his family must be tried to in an inhospitable world society, as a
whole. Miller explains in The Family in Modern Drama (1956) family is “mutable,
accidental, and consequently of a profoundly arbitrary nature to us”, a limited theatre
will, therefore, restrict its scope to the family, which symbolizes what is “real” and
abiding in human affairs.
Much of Miller's work displays his deep and abiding concern with conscience
and morality, with one's dual and often conflicting responsibilities to oneself and to
one's fellow human beings. It is only through relationships with others, Miller's plays
suggest, that our humanity truly emerges. The Crucible is widely considered Miller's
most controversial and best-known work since his highly acclaimed Death of a
Salesman. Based upon the witch trials held in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692, The
Crucible uses characters based on historical personages to address the complex moral
dilemmas of John Proctor, a man wrongly accused of practicing witchcraft. Through
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his depiction of the mass hysteria that propelled the witch-hunts, Miller examines the
social and psychological aspects of group pressure and its effect on individual ethics,
dignity, and beliefs. The Crucible begins after the Reverend Parris discovers several
teenage girls dancing nude in a forest after dark. To escape punishment, the girls
accuse several townspeople of having possessed them and of initiating them into
witchcraft. Abigail Williams, one of the girls, claims that she was under the spell of
Elizabeth Proctor, who had employed her as a servant until she discovered that her
husband and Abigail were having an affair. Several members of the community are
subsequently accused, convicted of witchcraft, and threatened with a sentence of
death unless they confess their involvement in demonism and name their coconspirators. Because she is pregnant, Elizabeth Proctor is not sentenced to hang;
however, her husband's refusal to cooperate with the court and falsely confess his
participation in witchcraft ultimately leads to his destruction. When The Crucible was
first staged, a number of critics maintained that Miller had failed in his characteristic
attempt to merge the personal and the social. According to historical records Williams
was a victim herself, a young child who became infected by a hysteria already
rampant in her community. In The Crucible Abigail is depicted as a shrewd and
sinister teenager and thus a difficult character for an audience to view as a victim of a
corrupt society. Soon after the play's first production, critics noted similarities
between the events in The Crucible and the investigations headed by Senator Joseph
McCarthy and his House Committee on Un-American Activities into an
unsubstantiated communist conspiracy.
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What is interesting to observe in O’Neill, Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller
is they are the products of American culture and they criticize the American society in
their plays. They are critical of American society and share their concerns in their
plays.
Chapter- V
Conclusion
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Chapter - V
Conclusion
The modern American Drama arose from a time of change in American
culture and society. The American Drama Movement made people realize that the
world was not perfect and they were not alone with that reality. With the movement
from country life to city life, the large flow of immigration, and the trauma of war
many Americans were faced with situations that would challenge their traditional
views of life, religion, family and self. This change in American reality inspired
writers such as, Eugene O’Neill, Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams. Eugene
O’Neill’s works speak of inner strength and conquering obstacles that in life one may
face. His plays are about family and a common bond that connects people. The major
theme in Tennessee Williams’ plays is man’s alienation and isolation in a world
without beliefs. The study reveals that the playwright is interested in depicting valour
and endurance in human nature for the individuals trapped by circumstances. The
theatre of Arthur Miller relates to the public world; the relationship of man to other
man and the sphere of public morality.
Their characters in their plays were real people and their stories were about
struggle, doubt and at times, redemption. Many times the characters in their plays had
to face the fact that the ideal word they wanted to live in just didn’t exist. The study
reveals that O’Neill transformed the conflict between man and God or man and nature
dramatized in Greek tragedy into a struggle within the suffering individual. Only such
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a struggle could form the theme of great tragedy- tragedy in the classic sense of the
term. This is the recurring theme in his plays. O’Neill’s attempt was to deal with “the
relation between man and God”, the Greek Gods being substituted in the modern
context by the unconscious.
A careful study of the plays of Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams and
Arthur Miller reveals that the theme of isolation and loneliness is one of the recurring
themes in their plays. All these playwrights are engaged in some form or the other
with the theme of quest. In the plays of Eugene O’Neill, however, this theme has been
raised almost to a ‘cult’, a ‘force’ in human affairs that seems to dominate all the
other aspects of life. Almost every one of the major characters displays a dream or a
craving for the ideal that is outside his actual life. In most cases, the revealed situation
is ironical. Fate and circumstances always conspire against the dreamer that the dream
not only becomes impossible but also a source of suffering and tragedy. O'Neill freely
used experimental techniques to do so, but always in the service of a fundamental
realism. From the start, O'Neill was interested in the inner drama of his characters
more than their physical or social world, and he evoked psychological states through
powerful metaphorical settings. His innovations and revivals of ancient techniques
were legion: masks and other expressionist devices, great length, the casting of black
actors, taboo subject matter, extended asides with the action frozen, and serious
dramatic treatment of the poor and powerless.
A study of the select plays O’Neill plays reveals that O’Neill is mainly
concerned with the sociological, cultural and personal isolation of the individuals who
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are estranged from one another, and communication and mutual understanding in their
lives are replaced by estrangement and hostility. His plays reveal the social life where
one individual looks upon the other as a hostile force. There comes a state when he
becomes isolated and estranged not only from others but also from himself. O’Neill,
being an existentialist, deals with life in very realistic and authentic manner, and
presents a faithful dramatization of human situation. The most important issue of the
contemporary American society is man’s failure to “belong” or to find roots anywhere
in this hostile world. Man is isolated not only from himself but also from nature, culture,
society, religion and god. He is a lost and lonely soul, and suffers from a sense of
anguish as evinced through the alienation of Robert Mayo in Beyond the Horizon,
Jones in The Emperor Jones, Yank in The Hairy Ape, Jim Harris and Ella in All God’s
Chillum Got Wings as well as the protagonists in the other plays under this study. This
sense of isolation and loneliness of the characters in his plays arises out of the
American socio-cultural and spiritual milieu. Man’s desire to belong is shown in
Mourning Becomes Electra, and in it we find and utter lack of any sustaining faith in
the present time. The sense of isolation and loneliness in the plays of O’Neill causes
suffering to his characters, and their failure to control it in an effective manner brings
tragedy in their lives. This isolation and loneliness may originate from a painful sense
of separation from those with whom one has a striking intellectual or spiritual affinity.
It looks ironical when one feels a total stranger in the very place where he intensely
wants to live with a sense of belongingness. An isolated person in his plays is one
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whom circumstances have forced into a self-recognition of separateness, resulting in
his suffering.
A study of the men and women that move through the world of O’Neill’s
dramas reveals some significant characteristics that many of them have in common.
One is impressed by the courage and fortitude with which they face the unfavourable
situations of the society in which they live. They are determined to give life meaning
and value in defiance of a world that is unconcerned about the dreams of human
beings. His characters live in two worlds one the outward world of physical reality,
the other, a world of unfulfilled and passionate desire. This latter world is the one
which the dreamer wishes for with all the pent-up powers of his being. To this world
he will sacrifice all that life has given him, for there is nothing in life that for a
moment is comparable to the genuine reality of his dream. In the early plays of
O’Neill, isolation and loneliness are caused by the vague and romantic dreams of the
characters, who finally meet with the failure of non fulfillment of these dreams. In the
later plays, O’Neill deals with that aspect of the dream of his characters which, with
its rare flashes of revelation, keeps the dream alive and worth-pursuing. The character
experiences a submerging of self into the universal whole in a mystical fashion. The
character for moment has a saint’s vision of beatitude, as Edmund says in Long Day’s
Journey into Night: “for a second there is meaning! Then the hand lets the veil fall
and you are alone, lost in the fog again, and you stumble on towards nowhere.” (45)
This is the kind of ‘isolation’ we find in the later phase of O’Neill’s literary career.
The playwright shows that isolation and loneliness make man spiritually shattered,
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and not only physically as in the early plays. Here, man feels dejected because his life
is split between the dark reality and his sick existence on the one hand, and the eternal
beauty of a permanent dream of mystical kind on the other. The dream merges into a
mystical-spiritual experience and reveals the larger mystery of the universe itself.
O’Neil comes to the realization that the quest for illusion or dream is meaningless and
that only recognition of the eternal unity manifest in god can bring comfort to the
isolated, lonely and split soul of man. (Gupta, Monika. The Plays of Eugene O’Neill)
O’Neill’s characters are the willing victims of romantic dreams or illusions
they suffer and feel isolated because of their refusal to give up their dreams. In
Beyond the Horizon, Robert is pushed beyond his pragmatic bent of mind. The
Iceman Cometh also indicates how the destructive power of the romantic ideal stands
in the way of man’s forming a meaningful relationships with the real world, and how,
finally, it is the cause of isolation and loneliness in his life. The same is true of the life
of Dion Anthony of The Great God Brown and Simon Harford of A Touch of the Poet
having failed in their search for romantic ideal, both of them are isolated from reality.
In Long Day’s Journey into Night, Edmund Tyrone’s quest for beauty in a world of
dreams is the principal cause of his estranged life. Thus, in O’Neill’s plays man’s
over-reaching craving for possessiveness and material gains is one of the vital causes
of his isolation and loneliness. How the commercial civilization has made man
spiritually bankrupt is given its finest expression through the characters of Ephraim
Cabot suffers from a sense of isolation due to his excessive materialistic attitude. His
thirst for money keeps him apart and separated from his sons and wives. Similarly,
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Billy brown exemplifies the successful but empty life of the materialist. He is
inwardly empty and devoted only to the exterior things of life. The Great God Brown
shows that isolation deeply rooted in American culture. It exposes those who seek
money at the cost of truth and beauty, and remain severed from others and also from
themselves. O’Neill always considers the acquisitive man as the root-cause of all the
modern maladies. His is a voice against the craze of material success. To him, a
money-minded person is quite complacent and steeped only in material values which
cause his personal isolation and suffering. The isolation of James Tyrone and Phil
Hogan from their families in Long Day’s Journey into Night and in A Moon for the
Misbegotten, respectively, is the cause of their excessive materialistic attitude.
O’Neill’s characters suffer from isolation and loneliness also when they try to
possess any human being by playing nasty tricks. This kind of possessiveness arises
out of insecurity, and becomes the cause of their isolation. This makes Prof. Leeds of
Strange Interlude remain isolated from his daughter, Nina, when he tries to keep her
as a possession for his security. Lavinia Mannon of Mourning Becomes Electra faces
the same problem when she tries to possess her brother, Orin, for her security.
Another character who becomes a victim of loneliness and isolation owing to this
kind of possessiveness is Nina Leeds of Strange Interlude. She turns to be an
alienated figure when she tries to possess all her desired men. In the way of
possessing others, the possessor sometimes becomes a possession and remains
isolated forever. The case in point is the tragic suffering and isolation of Abbie in
Desire under the Elms who tries to trap and possess Eben for the sake of her
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materialistic fulfillment, but becomes herself a possession of Eben. The suffering of
Josie Hogan in A Moon for the Misbegotten is something parallel to that of Abbie.
She is trapped by Jamie’s selfless love when she tries to possess him, and finally
remains isolated from him. Similarly, in Strange Interlude, Ned Darrell is forced to
lead an isolated and lonely life of suffering when separated from his beloved and son
after being trapped by the power of love. Also, it happens in the case of Christine
Mannon and Adam Brant in Mourning Becomes Electra. Both the characters are
trapped in the course possessing others, and remain isolated and lonely to face their
doom. The possessiveness in Brant arises out of revenge, and Christine’s is the result
of her insecurity. But both are the victims of isolation and loneliness. He lives entirely
in his memories of earlier gallantry in love and war. He always considers himself as
the major ornelius melody. In his pretensions of aristocracy, he hates his low-born
wife and worships a high-bred mare, and thus remains lonely and isolated from the
realities of life. In Desire under the Elms, Ephraim’s egotistical nature stands on his
way, and his failure to adjust himself to new situations always plunges him into everincreasing loneliness. Another significant cause of man’s isolation and loneliness in
O’Neill’s plays is the search for the lost mother’s love. There is a profound love of a
man for the lost mother, and it is symbol of lost happiness. Having failed to attain it,
man remains isolated throughout his life. In The Great God Brown, Dion cries to be
buried with his mother; and in Desire under the Elms, Eben fails to forget his dead
mother, who has been haunting his subconscious mind since the day of her death. In
strange interlude, Charles Marsden suffers from isolation after the death of his
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mother. The suffering of Orin Mannon in Mourning Becomes Electra and Jamie in A
Moon for the Misbegotten is the result of the search for lost mother’s love. These
characters suffer from isolation and loneliness after losing the love of their mothers.
But in the case of Don Parrett of The Iceman Cometh, the search of something
different in it, O’Neill is preoccupied with the dual aspect of the ‘mother-archetype’ –
both the giver and the destroyer of life. Orin tries to regain it through Lavinia. Jamie
desperately wants to get in the arms of Josie, and Dion helplessly seeks it through
Cybel, but none of them are able to recover it completely. Thus, they are forced to
lead an estranged life, devoid of the love of a mother.
The sufferings of an individual in the plays of O’Neill are also found through
his isolation from self. The characters in his plays are isolated and feel lonely due to
their false pretensions and racial complex. Jones in The Emperor Jones is a victim of
self-alienation by hating the Negroes to whom he really belongs. The characters in
Long Day’s Journey into Night also suffer from self-alienation. Marry is isolated from
self and is engaged in her past. Jamie’s struggle is with himself. He has punished
himself by taking wine and indulging in sex. Edmund’s self-alienation is the result of
his romantic outlook, his desire to identify with nature. Isolation in the plays of
Eugene O’Neill is shown through the love-hate relationship among the characters.
This can be found in the case of Evelyn and hickey in the Iceman Cometh. In Long
Day’s Journey into Night James Tyrone’s love-hate relationship with his sons is the
cause of his estrangement.The same relationship exists between Mary and Jamie, and
between Edmund and Jamie. The tensions in O’Neill’s plays are nearly always
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connected with man’s struggle against isolation and loneliness. The secret of his
dramatic intensity is to be found not in his theatricality, but in his rebellion and anger,
and in his inability to resign himself to an arid view and way of life. He could not be
at ease in a world without god, love and trust in life. His plays make it certain that he
is the dramatist of failure, estrangement and isolation all through his illustrious
literary career.
Eugene O’Neill began the search for ‘epic’ American themes on the scale of
Greek drama, but about ‘non-elevated’ and non-heroic characters. This is an attempt
to assert tragic significance out of the material of everyday reality. The O’Neill
themes in his major plays are basically about ‘losers’ whose sufferings imply
something wrong with the ‘American experiment’ One of O’Neill’s major plays, The
Iceman Cometh recently revived in New York, is set in Harry Hopes’s Bar in the
Lower East Side of New York, where the denizens have all retreated into ‘pipe
dreams’ to reconcile themselves to the various forms of failure their lives represent.
When an old friend, a salesman, returns to the bar, it is to offer them an escape from
their pipe dreams as, he claims, he has managed to do. He convinces them that they
can realize their desires by giving up whiskeyand their pipe dreams and accepting
who they are. Their attempts to do this fail, however Hickey then reveals that he has
just murdered his wife and is waiting to be arrested. When he is led off by the police,
the bar customers return to their whiskey and pipe dreams. (The Iceman Cometh)
O’Neill’s play, Long Day's Journey into Night is an autobiographical account of the
failure of a whole family, the Tyrones. The father (the older O’Neill) is an actor who
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has wasted his talent on one profitable role in The Count of Monte Cristo when he had
the makings of a great Shakespearean actor. One of the sons is a drunkard who has
wasted his life; the other, Edmund, who wishes to be a poet, has tuberculosis; the
mother is a hopeless drug addict. The action of the play is one long day and night of
recriminations, reconciliations, confessions, ending in the despairing final entrance of
the mother, Mary, lost in her ‘fog’ of drug addiction. This play is probably the
definitive American family tragedy, where, as in The Iceman Cometh O’Neill no
longer tries to recreate Greek tragedy but instead to dramatize his own life experience.
Like Iceman the play ends in despair but the implication is that it is out of this despair
O’Neill (Edmund = Eugene) will create his dramas. It is evident that all the
protagonists of his plays feel isolated, alienated, and despaired for lack of the centre
of belonging. The tension in his plays is commonly related with the struggle against
isolation and loneliness.
A study of the men and women that move through the world of O’Neill’s
dramas reveals some significant characteristics that many of them have in common.
One is impressed by the courage and fortitude with which they face the unfavourable
situations of the society in which they live. They are determined to give life meaning
and value in defiance of a world that is unconcerned about the dreams of human
beings. The favourite character of an O’Neill play has dreamy eyes. His characters
live in two worlds one the outward world of physical reality, the other, a world of
unfulfilled and passionate desire. This latter world is the one which the dreamer
wishes for with all the pent-up powers of his being. To this world he will sacrifice all
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that life has given him, for there is nothing in life that for a moment is comparable to
the genuine reality of his dream.
O‘Neill’s last plays seem to overlap with the emerging new dramatists,
Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller. It is striking how much the later dramatists
follow the blueprint of O’Neill’s later plays of society's failures and damaged losers;
Willy Loman; Eddie Carbone, who never understand themselves: or the ‘fugitive
kind’ as Tennessee Williams called his drifters, loners and losers. They may have
deluded visions, like Willy or Blanche du Bois but they are not ‘visionaries’ nor are
they possessed of remarkable powers, either of intellect or spirit. Nor do they stand
for any firm principles or convictions. In most cases, the playwrights expect the
readers to understand and sympathize with these characters even in their banal
delusions. Willy and Blanche exit the stage accompanied by the audience’s sniffles of
grief. Indeed Linda Loman practically orders us to feel sympathy in her famous
“Attention, attention must be paid” speech. It is both the strength and weakness of
much American drama that it dwells on the value and suffering of the ordinary.
Tennessee Williams’ works often were based on depressed, lonely, and
unappreciated characters. The characters involved in his writings often mirrored his
own friends and family members. Additionally his sexuality played a significant role
in his writings, as he himself was a gay man in a time period that this was not
acceptable. Tennessee Williams has shown us in his plays that realism is not the key
to reality. He has explored unconventional techniques such as expression- ism or
impressionism. Tennessee Williams searches for truth and meaning within the
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moment of a poetic vision. The poetic vision is manifested not only by dialogue but
also by staging techniques. Tennessee Williams began his career with the pieties of
the age, believing that the world could be re-made by the moral sensibility and that
political change could shape an environment in which innocence could survive and
the spiritually delicate be protected. These convictions were short-lived, certainly not
surviving in the 1930s (Bigsby. Introduction to the Twentieth Century American
Drama 25)
Tennessee Williams' plays are rather based on incidents than on a plot. When
he is asked about a theme, he comments that it is a play about life and that is life in
America. He invites us to share his fragmental visions and to find truth or meaning in
the direct experiences of human beings. (Nelson, Benjamin. Tennessee Williams: The
Man and His Work) The image of his plays is intensively of the isolation of modern
men. His plays describe violence, rape, prostitution, murder, perversion, and
castration. In contrast with these, beauty, gentility, sensitivity, and warmth are
important elements of his plays. Another significant element is contrast between
present and past, in other words between reality and dream. The past is revealed as a
key to understanding his plays. In these elements Tennessee Williams' plays present
individuals' struggling for self-realization, the destruction of sensitivity and the
corruption of beauty by brute ugliness, and decaying aristocracy, and describe a man
as a victim of his own conflicting desires, the conflict between soul and body. He
considers those points as the causes of suffering in the modern world, but on the other
hand it is said that he has no world view and his world, lacks the stability of
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philosophy, government, or religion. Tennessee Williams gives us the question of
choice by presenting the ambiguity and ambivalence of men in reality, so that the
judgement rests with us. Nancy M. Tschler gives an interpretation as the following:
There are no absolutes for him, no system of values outside of man, no morality
outside of personal anguish. His ultimate ethic is sympathizing. (Tennessee Williams:
Rebellious Puritan)In a universe that rolls on its inevitable way, living in a society
that we cannot change, we are powerless to influence or even understand our fate. The
best we can do is to face our doom with fortitude and reach out hands in sympathy to
our doomed fellow beings. He writes of life and sees the basic problems of the world
as personal. Through personal problems in his plays, his ideas of reality in the modern
world of America can be sought out. Tennessee Williams' first successful play The
Glass Menagerie contains the themes and techniques that are repeated or expanded 'in
his following genres, though it lacks violence or brutality abounding in his other
plays. As well as the screen device, every item of the set ring is symbolic in this play.
The most prominent symbolic device is Laura's collection of tiny glass animals, which
symbolizes her isolated and beautiful but fragile world, and in which the unicorn,
being her own image and therefore different from the others, is her favourite. The
lyricism of the dialogue in this play describes each character's attitude to reality and
conflict between reality and illusion. The play The Glass Menagerie is filled with the
image of isolation in the family-which is intensified by the smiling photograph of the
father having deserted the family-and lack of communication among the characters,
and finally the disintegration of the family is hinted at by Tom's decision in leaving
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his mother and sister. These ideas, the conflict between illusion and reality, the
fragility of purity and sensitivity, and the isolation of human beings in the modern
America are repeated in A Streetcar Named Desire and Summer and Smoke in a
different way. The action of The Glass Menagerie thematically results in the tragedy
of Laura-a crippled and delicate girl and the most lost and lonely character, while the
other two plays are concerned with young women such as Blanche of A Streetcar
Named Desire and Alma of Summer and Smoke. Amanda is, however, a more
impressive figure in the play. The Southern aristocrat, Amanda considers her husband
the embodiment of romance and remembers her past as glorious memories, whereby
she tries to encourage herself to cope with the ugly present.. When she becomes aware
of Laura's inability ever to cope with marriage in spite of her mother's desperate
attempt to the contrary, we cannot help feeling more the tragedy of Amanda rather
than her daughter, and have similar sympathy for her to that for Blanche of Streetcar.
Nancy M. Tischler says: The audience, never seeing the gracious mansion that was
the scene of Amanda's girlhood, feels its remembered glory and its contrast to the
mean present. Awareness of the past is always an element in Williams' plays. His
characters live beyond the fleeting moments of the drama-back into a glowing past
and shrinking from a terrifying future. The memory of the past becomes a more
substantial element in the other two Tennessee Williams himself sees A Streetcar
Named Desire as his masterpiece and most critics agree that it should undoubtedly
stand as his finest work. Tischler speaks highly of the good construction of this play
and writes the following: Each scene is constructed like a one-act play, Williams'
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forte; yet together the scenes have an impressive accumulative effect. There is a
convincing balance of humor and pathos, of illusion and reality. Nowhere has
Tennessee Williams made better use of his abilities; his talent for picturing violence,
for accurate dialogue, for compassionate revelation, for understanding of basic human
problems. Streetcar is 1ess poetic as a whole than The Glass Menagerie, which is
more relevant and effective since the lyricism is limited to Blanche's over refined
speeches regarding her unrealistic world. The play is wholly concerned with
Blanche's private anguish and it is so well constructed that the action moves steadily
and persuasively to the conclusion of her destruction. To Blanche, the past seemingly
consists of beauty, gentility, intelligence, and boastfulness, but inside herself it is a
long, gradual, and inevitable corruption owing to the decline of the aristocracy
(Ishida, Mie. Modern America in Tennessee Williams). Her delicate soul is bruised in
having to face a series of deaths under her family and relatives, while her husband's
terrible suicide causes her sexual perversion. Her corruption originates in her own
natural sensitivity and because of the hidden nature of all human beings. The loss of
her parents, relatives, and lover, and the subsequent loss of the plantation, Belle Reve,
drives her into desperation and isolation. It appears to her that sexual consummation is
able to fill her empty heart and her love affair with a boy student causes her to lose
her teaching position. She becomes dependent upon the warmth of strangers as the
fear of death and isolation, and the aging of her body begins to prey upon her mind.
Eventually she is forced to get away from Laurel in the South owing to this dark drive
in her being which has distorted her outlook on life. As a victim of human nature,
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Blanche in utter despair goes to her sister, Stella, in the hope of at last finding some
protection. When Blanche meets Stella, they staring at each other for a moment,
Blanche runs to her with .Blanche is the victim of her own conflicting desires, the
conflict between her soul and her body, whose inner beauty is destroyed by the brute
ugliness of being misunderstood in the modern American society.
Summer and Smoke is a poetic and lyrical play. It deals with violence, murder,
insanity and prostitution all common elements in Tennessee Williams' plays, but the
poetic lyricism surpasses these as a more prominent element. The symbols and themes
are so clearly expressed in Summer and Smoke that some critics see this p}ay as
inferior to his others because it lacks usually so much a part of Tennessee Williams'
plays, the more usual shadowing depth and driving power. In the prologue, we are
acquainted with Alma and John's childhood, which, in the play, represents the beauty
of the past. The stone angel, a figure of `' Eternity," is a symbol of spirituality and the
anatomy chart is that of sexuality. The death of the old Alma indicates the
impossibility of the survival of sensitivity and gentility and the rebellion against the
oppression of Puritanism. Summer and Smoke is a different story, according to its
impact on the public, from The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire, and
its value varies with critics' appreciation. It is well controlled and beautifully constructured, and the theme-the conflict between the spirit and the flesh, and between
order and anarchy-has universality. There is considerable truth of life in the story that
a young man and woman search for perfect communication over a period of years, but
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their love results in fruitless one. Summer and Smoke, a beautifully symbolic play
about morality will remain one of Tennessee Williams' best plays. (Ishida, Mie.
Modern America in Tennessee Williams)
All the major characters in Tennessee Williams’ plays are women who have
outlived a tradition in which physical beauty was their greatest aspect; old people of
both sexes who had been warped by a life-denying southern Puritanism; men and
women of an old tradition of honour who found themselves competing with a cheap
culture; the lonely individual who found himself out of place in a vulgar materialistic
society; the vigilants who tortured and killed not only the negro but the foreigner.
However, these men and women are universals. They help the dramatist in developing
his themes. The plays The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire and Summer
and Smoke are all concerned with the corruption or dissolution of a sensitive woman
with a beautiful mind owing to her inability to adjust to the reality in the modern
world of America. These heroines' tragedies lay, not in the fact that they had resisted,
but in the fact that they had little to resist with, so that they were driven to live in their
inner world. These tragic plays about women contribute to our greater understanding
the American people, particularly of American women of today. The heroines who
appear in these three plays by Tennessee Williams are quite different from the image
we have of today's general American women. The young American women of today
are very active and aggressive in their approach to life and love. Esther M. Jackson
rightly says in The Broken World of Tennessee Williams:
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Williams thus examines a comprehensive theme of twentieth century
arts, the search for identity: the journey toward meaning. It is because
of his perception of a moral crisis that Williams has abondoned more
flattering images of man... He insists that the proper function of
modern drama is to expose man's hidden nature, to search out his
motives, to discover his limits, and ultimately, to help him to find a
mode of salvation... He is intensed as the object of pity and terror in
the modern world.
The plot of these three plays are primarily written around the heroines, but we
can still catch the common image of men struggling for self-identification in the
modern world of America, such as Tom of The Glass Menagerie, Stanley of A
Streetcar Named Desire, and John of Summer and Smoke. This image of struggling
men takes on more emphasis in his later plays and indicates a trend of contemporary
American literature: the lacking communication and the isolation of modern men, as
well as the individual conflict between idealism and reality in the modern world.
Jackson also says: As early as The Glass Menagerie, Tennessee Williams began to
create myth of modern life; that is, he began to weave the dark images of his personal
vision in a schematic explication of modern life. This activity, begun in his early
work, was accelerated in middle plays such as A Streetcar Named Desire, Summer
and Smoke, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Rose Tattoo, and Camino Real. (Ishida, Mie.
Modern America in Tennessee Williams) Gradually, in his later works, Tennessee
Williams has put together a kind of modern myth, a symbolic representation of the
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life of man in our time, The myth of Williams mirrors modern man's dilemma, his
need for a comprehensive system of interpretation, for a structure which can restore
meaning to life and which can reconcile the conflict within reality itself. (Ishida, Mie.
Modern America in Tennessee Williams)
Tennessee Williams has been indefatigably occupied with the pathos of human
failure. The study reveals that he has centered his attention upon the inner life, the
psychology of adjustment required by the impingement of harsher reality upon a
tender inner vision of glory. This irrational flight of character from the outward
pressures towards the myth nurtured in complacent seclusion, leads them to
frustration or insanity. It is sometimes said that Tennessee William’s view of life is
morbid and it does have a continuous preoccupation with psychological variation.
Though Tennessee Williams’ plays like those of Arthur Miller deal with frustration,
their frustration, unlike those of the Greek plays, is not universal. Their problems are
not universal. Their defeat is not ennobling. No great feeling of relief follows upon
Tom’s escape an impossible situation nor upon Blanche’s being led off to an insane
asylum. Like the plays of O’Neill, Tennessee Williams’ plays are psychological
tragedies; “plays in the tragic tradition” as he once called them. But his defeat and
frustrated characters lack the true dimension of tragic types, representing universal
happiness of defeat. Tennessee Williams does have a tragic vision and is faithful to
modern sprit of unrelieved failure or disaster. But he is not a modern exponent of
classical tragedy. Following statement of Tennessee Williams make his aims and
objectives quit clear: “A writer’s view of the world is always affected by his own state
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of being. I am an anxious troubled person. I cannot write about anything I don’t
feel…. I am a deeply disturbed person and I write about disturbed people”. “the
dominant them in most of any writings is that the most magnificent thing in human
nature is valour and endurance. “I believe that my dreams are basically more
concerned with morality than most plays”.
Tennessee Williams frequently touches upon religious themes. But he believes
that guilt and atonement do exist. It is in this sense that they form the theme or soul of
Tennessee Williams’ plays. The recurrence of the theme of loneliness suggests that
the writer is carried away by his own state of mind. It seems that all his plays sing the
same old refrain-“nobody knows how lone-some I am” – a song accompanied by
appropriate off-stage music. Tennessee Williams has created more lonely people than
any other dramatist up to date.
The characters in Tennessee Williams' plays attempt to create an aura of
illusions in order to either forget the unpleasant reality of human existence or to avoid
certain experiences of the past. Sometimes they are also fed up with this material life
and the worldly-wise people that inhabit it. Such illusions serve as an escape for them
and also enable them to remain disguised in a make-believe world. The Glass
Menagerie indicates Tennessee William’s interest in the plight of the ill-adjusted
women, often middle-aged, who remember a myth of gracious living but is defeated
by the impinging realities of the present. This play has strong autobiographical
overtones, too. The three characters of the family resemble Tennessee Williams, his
mother, and his sister. Tennessee Williams has called it a memory play and it is
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dominated by the background of decadent Southern culture helplessly beaten by the
crude indifference of the inhospitable surrounding. The characters unfold from within
a pathetic self-revelation as Tennessee Williams avoids the straight play. The title
The Glass Menagerie does present different ideas and themes such as, the idea of the
family being so fragile. The menagerie is beautiful on the outside but easily broken
much like the family that has hidden secrets and fears.
Another prominent theme in his plays is that of conflict between reality and
illusion. The dramatist often wonders which is real-the outward world of houses,
streets and refrigerators or the inner world of memories, hopes and fears. In The Glass
Menagerie, particularly, in A Streetcar Named Desire and in The Rose Tattoo readers
get characters that carry with his or her being an image of idealism, dreams and
illusions. He regards the delusions of his characters as pathetic defences against the
shipwreck of their lives. But he also realises that the illusion in which his hero or
heroine would prefer to live is often as corrupt as the real world in which they live.
Search for beauty is another of Tennessee Williams’ major themes. The playwright
searches for beauty in this ugly world with her glass menagerie; Laura searches for
beauty amidst the unhappiness and physical and mental squalor of her life. The
playwright never gets beyond these large and safe philosophic and rather meaningless
generalites of which characters tell as if they have discovered something really profound.
The study reveals that Arthur Miller has social awareness and his plays expose
the hardships faced by American’s during the depression in a very realistic fashion.
Instead of creating idealistic, heroic characters to build a story around, Arthur Miller
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creates a struggling hero. While facing the mistakes of his/her past, Miller’s
characters are also facing the tragedies of society and the struggles to create the life
they want. Arthur Miller produced plays that were not only entertaining but also
realistic and relevant to the time they were created in. At the same time, his characters
suffer from anxiety, depression, and guilt, and it was the genius of Miller to portray
their pain and sorrow realistically, creating works that were familiar, yet uncanny in
their power to move an audience. Arthur Miller's stature is based on his refusal to
avoid moral and social issues in his writing, even when the personal cost was terrible.
Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman and The Crucible are famous plays that portray
middle class American society. Death of a Salesman tribute to “Everyman” Willy
Loman, is something of a pseudo-tragedy that does not look terribly deeply at the
lower middle class dream of success or any other aspect of American life. Miller
perhaps should have resisted the urge, as tempting as it might have been, to create a
parallel between the Salem witch trials of 1692 and the anticommunist purges of the
early 1950s. Articulate and intelligent as it is, The Crucible does not offer much
insight into the source of McCarthyism or the state of American society as a whole.
Arthur Miller was a glorious example of what it meant to be a liberal when liberalism
was in its prime. Arthur Miller, like Eugene O’Neill, was impressed by Greek
Tragedy. It was his ambition to discover a tragic significance within the texture of
ordinary, everyday American life: to make tragedy democratic. O’Neill imported
Greek tragic myths into American subjects, in Desire under the Elms and
Mourning Becomes Electra (set in the time of the American Civil War).
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The characters of O’Neill are often day dreamers, haunted by memory and
desire. The protagonists of Tennessee Williams are estranged and alienated women.
On the other hand the characters of Arthur Miller are irresponsible, isolated and
helpless victims of the society. O’Neill was deeply interested in existential questions
and the main theme of his plays is man’s struggle to understand his place in the
universe. Yank from The Hairy Ape is in a broader sense a symbol of mankind itself.
Tied to his animal origin man still aspires towards a higher existence. His basic search
is for a realm to which he can “belong”. Yank, failing to find his home in the higher
regions attempts to descend into the animal world. The unthinking brutes, however,
destroy him as an interloper. Man is forever condemned to live an existence
midway between the animal and the divine and it is clearly shown in The Hairy Ape.
In Long Day’s Journey into Night, the playwright portrays troubled families, where
illusions, vulnerability and morality clash. Long Day's Journey into Night is not only
a journey forward in time, but also a journey back into the past lives of all the
characters, who continually dip back into their old lifestyles. The audience realizes
that the family is not making progress towards betterment, but rather continually
sliding into despair, as they remain bound to a past that they can neither forget nor
forgive. Among the most prominent and urgent themes of The Glass Menagerie is the
difficulty the characters have in accepting and relating to reality. Each member of the
Wingfield family is unable to overcome this difficulty, and each, as a result,
withdraws into a private world of illusion where he or she finds the comfort and
meaning that the real world does not seem to offer. Of the three Wingfields, reality
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has by far the weakest grasp on Laura. Laura, a young girl, being rejected by the
suitor her mother would have wanted, desperately turns to her collection of fragile
glass animals for comfort and companionship. The private world in which she lives is
populated by glass animal objects that, like Laura’s inner life are incredibly fanciful
and dangerously delicate.
Most of Arthur Miller’s characters are in search for their identity, suffering
rises of consciousness they are confronted with a situation that they are incapable of
meeting. The character Willy Lowman (Death of a Salesman) and Joe Keller (All My
Sons) like other characters end in death by their lack of self-understanding. All of
them are helpless victims. Miller, however, argues that the tragic feeling is invoked
whenever we are in the presence of a character, any character, who is ready to
sacrifice his life, if need be, to secure one thing—his sense of personal dignity. And
the "little" salesman was determined to do just that, no matter what the cost. Arthur
Miller presents the crisis as a conflict between the uncomprehending individual and
the social and economic structure in his plays displaying his social commitment.
Investigations of human nature and human plight, the attempt of defining
man’s identity in the universe are recurrent themes in American literature. The quest
for identity has been present in the drama of the American writers since the Eighteenth
century. The playwrights have characters that suffer crises of consciousness,
difficulties in accepting the reality and finding their place in the universe. (Mihalache,
Roxana. Quest for Identity in American Literature-Research Article) Though the
striking similarities are brought out in the preceding chapters, particularly in their
203
themes, there are differences in their character creation and the use of dramatic
techniques. Most of the plays of these playwrights were enacted and some of them
have been screened for movies. While O’Neill has an inclination towards the Greek
Tragedies and classical in style, Tennessee Williams’ style is poetic. Arthur Miller
uses simple prose style in his plays. Whatever be the differences they have a unity in
their choice of themes namely the conflict between the individual and the society to
present the plight, problems and aspirations of the American society in their plays.
They emerge as the representative writers of the twentieth century America and their
contribution to drama is admirable. It is hoped that this thesis will provoke further
discussion on these playwrights and discuss several features of their plays that have
not been discussed here. These playwrights can also be compared with dramatists of
other countries and researches be undertaken for mutual illumination.
Works Cited
204
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214
www.arthurmillersociety.org
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1936/oneill-autobio.html
http://www.eugeneoneillsociety.org/<span
http://www.answers.com/topic/eugene-o-neill-1?cat=entertainment<span
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Publications
M. Jayachandran, M.A., M.Phil.
Dr. R. Mahendran, M.A., M.Phil., Ph.D.
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Courtesy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_O'Neill
Introduction
in the history of American drama is well established. He is a
sincere and conscientious writer who gains popularity and fame as a serious playwright by virtue
of his remarkable social consciousness. He has paved the way for an understanding of the
predicament by presenting the basic concepts of life through a picture of the American society.
The more O'Neill's characters yearn for some higher ideal, for spiritual fulfillment or intellectual
or moral freedom, the more mired they become in doomed relationships, addiction, and squalor.
O'Neill was a finer thinker than has often been acknowledged, and not quite as solipsistic as his
plays can seem in isolation. He wrote not only out of his own suffering and damage, but also
rooting his sense of America's modern failures in a framework of classical tragedy.
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68
ision
Courtesy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mourning_Becomes_Electra.jpg
is a modern tragic artist who has a fine sense of dramatic values and a penetrating
insight into emotion. His imagination has a fiery heat which uplifts and ennobles everything it
touches, even the sordid and the mean. Masood Ali Khan maintains that,
dramatic in life and its realization in the theatre is ever present, and certainly nothing can cancel
out his innate ability to tell a story. (p. 124). His plays portray man in relation to his social
environment, and in one play after another he criticized the whole structure of contemporary
American society. That is why his plays are more than
It is not man
as an individual alone that concerns O Neill; it is man in a social order, tortured, starved,
disillusioned, thwarted and driven to disaster by the forces of a system which cares nothing for
the general welfare of society. Man moves across the stage of
plays not as a free and
undetached individual, not merely as an individual in relation to a few characters who are
associated with him in the immediate drama which makes the play, but he treats man against a
rich background of social forces. It is the social implication that makes his plays to have a life
in the minds of the audience after they have left the theatre and scattered the quiet of individual
thought.
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69
plays are mostly tragedies, but they are tragedies which strike at the very roots
of the sickness of today. They attempt to explain human sufferings and the way to justify it. In
a letter to George Jean Nath
The playwright must dig at the roots of sickness of today as he feels it the
death of the old God and the failure of science and materialism to give any
satisfying new one for the surviving primitive religious instinct to find a
meaning
.
Dramatizing Subconscious Emotions
Neill has made a consistent and impassioned attempt to dramatize subconscious
emotions.
Life is his theme and life is often violent, mean, squalid, spiteful, confusing,
maddening; but there is beauty too and love and peace though only fitfully. What God (or
nature) has made for man, and what man has made for man, and what man has made for himself
are the three tortuous streams that meet in the pool of human misery and tragedy. Raymond
Modern Tragedy as follows:
Wil
The tragedy of man is perhaps the only significant thing about him. What I am
after is to get an audience leaving the theatre with an exultant feeling from
seeing somebody on stage facing life, fighting against the eternal odds, not
conquering, but perhaps inevitably being conquered. The individual life is made
significant just by the struggle. (P.116)
Heart Rending
Beyond the Horizon, The Emperor Jones, The Hairy Ape, A
Got Wings, Desire Under the Elms, Mourning Becomes Electra and The Great God Brown are
heart rending plays and they are mostly concerned with men. His works reveal strong originality
and the effect of forces in the world outside himself which sometimes help mould and
sometimes distort the expression of his own talents. The life force in his plays is not a part of
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M. Jayachandran, M.A., M.Phil. and Dr. R.Mahendran, M.A., M.Phil., Ph.D.
70
plays show that the modern fate is b
consciousness and his will and his emotions are his worst enemies.
Beyond the Horizon and Other Plays
In his play Beyond the Horizon, we see the mental and physical degradation of a man
who cannot live without illusions. Each character in this play is obsessed by his desire for what
he can never have for what lives in beyond the horizon.
The Hairy Ape and The
Emperor Jones are fine examples. In both plays, the attention is focused on the central figure,
and the other characters are not individualized.
The Hairy Ape dramatizes the vision of the tragic and alienated condition of men in the
modern complex social system. The play symbolizes the struggle of modern men within
industrial society following an individual's (Yank) baffled search for identity to recover his
sense of belongingness. Yank is a representative of not only a representative of lower working
class but also of the modern man in general and his alienation from society is reflective of one
of the main challenges faced by all men of today.
We see the psychological terrors and obsessions of Brutus Jones in the play The Emperor
Jones.
is sharp and pertinent analysis of the intermarriage between
before attempted to be.
In The Great God Brown
le,
fy himself with nature. The
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M. Jayachandran, M.A., M.Phil. and Dr. R.Mahendran, M.A., M.Phil., Ph.D.
71
tragedy, but it wins.
Tragic Heroes
Neither Kings nor Princes
tragic heroes are neither kings nor princes, nor great military generals.
Aristotle had laid down that the tragic hero must be an exceptional individual so that his fall
from his former greatness may raise the tragic emotions of pity and fear. But
personages are all drawn from the humblest ranks of the society. They are all ordinary men and
women, suffering and downtrodden.
psychoanalysts, who stressed the importance of the subconscious in human motivation. He
wrote only for the stage unhampered by the conventions of the stage, and he wrote to explore
the unexplored regions of the human mind and not solely to entertain.
Freudian Concept and Mourning Becomes Electra
Mourning Becomes Electra is based on Freudian concept Electra Complex. Written in
Mourning Becomes
Electra sets the family tragedy of Aeschylus' Oresteia during the American Civil War. For the
psychological forces, in particular hidden incestuous desires.
Lavinia (parallel to Electra) loves her father with more than childlike affection. When he
dies mysteriously in the presence of her mother Christine, she suspects foul play. Christine
poisoned her husband because of her affair with a distant cousin, who resembles her son. When
Orin (Orestes) returns from the war, Lavinia informs him of recent events and, despite hints of
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72
days are haunted by guilt and their suppressed desire for each other. Only in the end do the
attempt
to substitute Freudian theories for the influence of fate and the gods appears forced and artificial
to many critics today, but few would fault his ambitious goal of following the Greek example.
New Gods
Heredity and Environment
l believes that heredity and environment are the new Gods governing the destiny of
men. Man may not be able to change his past or heredity, but he can certainly modify his social
environment or at least adjust himself to it, and in this way escape much sorrow and suffering.
As a social critic he stresses the evils of the present social structure, so that a way to the
betterment may be found.
s view about human life is remarkable. Human life has no intrinsic meaning or
order, no harmony like that of nature except that meaning than man projects upon it. He must
create his own values and impose upon universe whatever significance and whatever moral
order he except to adopt as a raison
or as a basic for an ethical code.
Conclusion
thought exulted in human potential, raising spiritual understanding of them above the pettiness of
everyday life. However, he acknowledged the challenge of writing tragedy today. Throughout
country, from farm and factory to the ivory tower. He is a uniquely American playwright. His
language is fascinating because it is so familiar an American diction while it probes so deep. He
digs into the well- springs of human emotions in the fashions of the American frontiersman
pushing into the wide openness of a new land.
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73
References
Ali Khan, Masood. Modern American Drama. New Delhi: Sublime Publication,2004.
Engel, Edwin. A.
. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1953.
Gray, Richard. A History of American Literature. Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2004.
Nathan, George Jean,
. New York: Modern Library, 1941.
Vol.1 New Delhi: Sublime Publication, 1989.
William, Raymond. Modern Tragedy. Standford: Standford University Press, 1966.
Journals:
Brown, John Mason.
The Ordeal o
The Saturday Review of Literature, Oct.19, 1946: 26-30.
, Time. 1946. Oct.21 71-78.
Online Sources:
http:// www.eoneill.com
http:// www.freelibrary.com
=====================================================================
M. Jayachandran, M.A., M.Phil.
[email protected]
Dr. R. Mahendran, M.A., M.Phil., Ph.D.
[email protected]
Assistant Professors in English
Srimad Andavan Arts and Science College
No. 7, Nelson Road
Tiruvanaikoil
Trichy - 620005
Tamilnadu
India
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