Modern Drama

l          

Drama and theater became distinctly 'modern' during the last quarter of the 19^th  c. Modernity can be equated with the rise of realistic drama and stage production under the leadership of Ibsen, Zola, Shaw, Antoine and Stanislavsky.

l           The appearance of realistic technique and style was the first phase of modernism in drama.

l           Realism by itself does not define dramatic modernism, because a second aspect, one of nonrealistic stylization, has been important in the modern theater almost as long as realism has.

l           Dramatic modernism consists of a succession and an interweaving of strands that may be called Ibsenism and Wagnerianism, realism and symbolism, objective naturalism and both subjective and objective antinaturalism.

l           Subjective antinaturalism was manifested in expressionism; objective antinaturalism in epic theater as formulated by Erwin Piscator, Bertolt Brecht, and those who created 'living newspapers' during the climactic years of the New Deal in the 1930's). Even romanticism has been woven into the fabric of modernism.

l           Romantic drama came to be considered 'modern' again after Rostand wrote Cyrano de Bergerac in 1897.

l           Maxwell Anderson, whose popular historical plays recall both Shakespeare and Schiller, as well as Yeats and Paul Claudel, who combine romanticism with symbolism, also belong to the modern theater. (John Gassner. Directions in Modern Theatre and Drama. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1956, 3-6)

l           The decline of the theatre in the 19^th c., says C. W. E. Bigsby[1], was not an especially American phenomenon. It was a century of mass art. It was a century in which the novel predominated. This was the social art of the new bourgeoisie celebrating its own literacy and leisure. Shelley saw in the decline of drama a kind of social entropy: "the corruption or extinction of drama in a nation where it had once flourished, is a mark of a corruption of manners, and an extinction of the energies which sustain the soul of social life."

l           It was not that the theatre was unpopular but rather that it lacked subtlety. In 19^th c. America, with its public myths of upward mobility, of the self as a plastic form easily mouldable into the contours of successful businessman, rising politician and hero, the actor was in a sense a model of the age. He was everything the public could aspire to be: a Protean figure. The theatre provided both distraction and a displaced sense of potential.

l           The American theatre was not quite the total wasteland it was taken to be, but serious drama was almost invariably touched with melodrama. James O'Neill's version of The Count of Monte Cristo was not without a certain wit and verve. But its real claim to seriousness lay in its concern with locating the individual in a social context, with examining moral and social problems against a background which in part explained those problems.

l           Most plays were melodramas with a host of stock characters and contrived events. Bronson Howard observed that America needed plays which lauded virtue and attacked vice. His belief that "the wife who has once taken the step from purity to impurity can never reinstate herself in the world of arts on this side of the grave," suggests the limitations that he willingly embraced.

l           In James A. Hearne's Margaret Fleming (1890) we have the first Ibsenesque heroine who challenges convention and asserts her autonomy within marriage. The play is concerned with the infidelity of a successful businessman. A young woman does bearing his illegitimate son and when his wife discovers the truth she insists on taking the child into her own home, though the shock exacerbates an eye condition and makes her blind. Her husband is suitably cowed and the play ends on a note of snug contentment all round.

l           The age was that of naturalism at its best. In 1873 Emile Zola announced that "there should no longer be any school, no more formulas, no standards of any sort; there is only life itself, an immense field where each may study and create as he likes." The need, he insisted, was to "look to the future." And the future would "have to do with human problems studied in the framework of reality."

l           The naturalistic convictions of the novelist applied equally to the stage, where the mise-en-scene becomes the equivalent of the detailed description offered by the novel. As Andre Antoine had explained of his own innovations at the Theatre Libre, "it is the environment that determines the movement of the characters, not the movements of the characters that determine the environment."

l           In America the chief exponent of naturalistic st 626h719g age setting was David Belasco, who arrived in New York in 1882 and quickly made himself the dominant figure. Stanislavsky made him an honorary member of the Moscow Art Theatre many years later, following that theatre's visit to America in 1923. He declared his faith in realism and took advantage of the new system of electric stage lighting to produce naturalistic effects and insisted on realistic stage sets. "I will allow nothing to be built out of canvas stretched on frames. Everything must be real. I have seen plays in which thrones creaked on which monarchs sat, and palace walls flapped when persons touched them. Nothing so destructive to illusion or so ludicrous can happen on my stage," he wrote in The Theatre Through Its Stage Door (1919). Once he went to the meanest theatrical lodging-house and bought the entire interior of one of its delapidated rooms - patched furniture, threadbare carpet, tarnished and broken gas fixtures, dingy doors and even the faded paper on the walls.

l           The experimental theatre movement, which had produced the Theatre Libre in Paris in 1887, the Freie Buhne in Berlin in 1889, the Moscow Art Theatre in 1898 and the Abbey Theatre in 1904, was a considerable time in reaching America. The cultural lag in theatre was greater than in the novel, perhaps because the theatre is a collaborative exercise that requires a concerted decision as to the acceptability of the new.

[1] A Critical Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Drama, Vol. 1, Cambridge UP, 1982, p. 1.

l           American drama, says Barnard Hewitt[1], did not become completely 'American' until in the 1920s, when it attained full maturity in the plays of Eugene O'Neill, Robert Sherwood and Elmer Rice. Although strongly influenced by European models, particularly British ones, it reflected native American manners and customs, ideals, issues and conflicts. Most of the early plays have not stood the test of time well enough to warrant revival.

l           Of all the literary genres, the American drama has the shortest and most spare tradition. Neither the Puritan inheritance nor the harsh quality of frontier life was likely to contribute to the development of a native theater. It is true that in 1965 the American theater celebrated its three hundredth anniversary since the performance of Ye Beare and Ye Cubbe by farmers of Accomack County, Virginia, on 27 August 1665. But virtually everybody agrees that, before the 1920's, the American drama was a wasteland. Plays were manufactured almost as fast as sausages.

l           It was not until the early part of the 20^th c. that an original drama came into being, as an emulation of the European experimental theater. The dominant figure of that movement in America was Eugene O'Neill.

[1] "The Americanism of American Theater," in The American Theater. Edited by Alan S. Downer. Forum Lectures, 1964, p. 3.

Eugene O'Neill

l           O'Neill was born into the theatre. His father, James O'Neill, was a famous actor who early in his career had been hailed as a potentially great tragedian but who had settled for the financial security that came with the rights to The Count of Monte Cristo, a play whose continuing success trapped him in the same role for two decades. This surrender of poetic self to prosaic materialism, says Bigsby (36), was one which haunted O'Neill's imagination in later years and became the basis for much of his work.

l           Eugene's home life was painful. His father was domineering, his mother a morphine addict, his brother an alcoholic. He spent a year at Princeton but never finished his course. Then, having made a young woman pregnant he secretly married her. But he immediately allowed his father to ship him off to South America, where, out of funds, he learned about the underside of life at close hand. On his return to America he made no attempt to see his wife and child, abandoning them and living in a bar-hotel in New York. Following a suicide attempt he was rescued by his father but a tubercular infection necessitated a stay in a sanatorium, where he began his first attempts at playwriting. The result was a series of brief plays.

l           O'Neill was a double inheritance. From his father's theatre, the theatre of 19^th c. melodrama, he derived the central significance of event, and from the naturalistic tradition of Crane, Zola and London the determining significance of environment, the tendency to see setting as a concrete image and central mechanism of fate. He did not have much respect for the theatre as he found it, and from the first he attempted to write dialogue which was authentic in language and tone. But his interest in examining human nature under pressure, in characters placed in extreme situations left him open to the charge of creating melodramas. His early works, later collected under the title The Lost Plays of Eugene O'Neill, are a catalogue of suicides, shipwrecks, abortions and moral ironies almost wholly lacking in subtlety.

l           Like Nietzsche, whose work he read avidly, he saw little evidence of ethical progress and his early plays tend to be accounts of the collapse of social and moral worlds. Class disintegrates under pressure (Recklessness, Abortion, 1914; Thirst, 1916; Fog, 1917). As Bigsby notes, self in these early plays is very much a product of arbitrary forces. Ships are constantly running into submerged wrecks, lives are destroyed by stray pregnancies and by tuberculosis, by sudden affliction or ill-considered marriages. His seas are scattered with icebergs, his society with the flotsam of social injustice. His romantic attachment to blighted lives, consumptive young women and a pervasive smell of death, allied with a fascination with the wealthy, is in some ways reminiscent of F. Scott Fitzgerald, who followed him at Princeton some years later. Sailors, down and outs, and prostitutes figure prominently in his early plays. It was not just romantic pose. These were the people he knew well.

l           It is difficult to classify Eugene O'Neill's plays since, on the one hand, he was always ready to experiment, and, on the other, he would return to themes, character types, and techniques he had used before. In general he was rooted in the realist and naturalist tradition; his early plays express in drama the American naturalism that runs through the work of Frank Norris, Stephen Crane and Theodore Dreiser. After his early dramas, notably those connected with the sea, he went through a long period of experimentalism, being influenced by European expressionism, the use of masks, and techniques which incorporated into theater modern patterns of thought, notably those of Nietzsche and Freud. In his later stage he returned to the tradition more familiar to him, a realism that revealed a new artistic mastery.

l           O'Neill's early realistic period is marked by his sea plays - one-act plays, The Moon of the Caribbees, In the Zone, Bound East for Cardiff, The Long Voyage Home, and the full-length play Anna Christie. Each play is a mood or note struck in the experience of a sailor's life, which is always subject to a fateful association with the sea. The effect is largely pessimistic (as in most naturalistic works), man being overpowered by 'compelling, inscrutable forces behind life.' Yet there is a sense of heroic human endurance, hope and resilience.

l           Beyond the Horizon (1920) is O'Neill's first full-length play and his first Pulitzer prizewinner. According to Martin S. Day, this play marks the beginning of the great age of American drama.

l           Robert Mayo, of poetic nature, dislikes work on his father's farm, and plans to seek adventure as a seaman. His brother Andrew , better adapted to farm life, has been his rival for the love of Ruth Atkins, but when she reveals that she loves Robert, Andrew goes to sea instead. In the next three years Ruth's passion fades, and Robert fails as a farmer. His only comfort is with his daughter and books. Ruth hopes that Andrew still loves her and will return. Back home for a day, Andrew reveals to her that his love for her has died. Disillusioned and poverty-stricken, the family passes another five years on the farm. Robert's daughter dies, his wife is apathetic, and Andrew returns only when Robert is dying of consumption. Rising from his bed he watches the sunrise from a hill: "It isn't the end. It's a free beginning... beyond the horizon!"

l           The American stage had previously produced pathos and melodrama, rhetoric and even lyric flights, but here for the first time it produced tragic intensity both powerfully realistic and powerfully symbolic.

l           The Emperor Jones (1920) is the play that made O'Neill famous. It is expressionist (stylized theatrical techniques), although O'Neill disclaimed the influence of German expressionism, saying that he saw Kaiser's From Morn to Midnight after he had written The Emperor Jones.

l           The giant black Brutus Jones, a former railroad porter and ex-convict, becomes in two years the feared, autocratic 'emperor' of a West Indian island. Exploiting the superstition of the primitive natives, claiming that only a silver bullet can kill him, he enriches himself at their expense. He brags in front of a trader, Smithers, that when the inevitable rebellion comes, he will escape to France where he has amassed a large fortune. The rebellion is sudden, and Jones is unable to locate his hidden supplies in the forest, where he loses his way. The fear and disorder felt by Jones is revealed by the steady beat of tom-toms, the ritualistic movements of the witch doctor, and the objectification of the Little Formless Fears (the monstrous crocodile in the Congo jungle, Jeff, the black he had killed). The other characters reveal parts of Jones himself, and symbolic structures are carefully developed. Jones relives his own violent guilty past and finally plunges into the Jungian racial unconsciousness. In each episode he fires a shot from his pistol, the last silver bullet being fired at the sacred crocodile. During this imaginative retrogression to a savage state, Jones circles through the forest ; emerging where he had entered, he is killed by the silver bullets of the rebel tribesmen.

l           The play is important in other ways. In theatrical history, until this play, Negroes had been played by white men with colored faces. For the first time a black was given the opportunity to play a major role. Paul Robeson played it.

l           Anna Christie (1921) earned O'Neill his second Pulitzer Prize. It was made into a silent motion picture, and Greta Garbo used it for her first speaking role on the screen. The 1929 film version was acclaimed by critics in 1962 as one of America's greatest movies.

l           The play is the story of a young girl on a Midwestern farm, who is seduced at 16 by her cousin, and then lives as a prostitute in St. Louis before she comes to New York to meet her father, Chris Christopherson, the captain of a coal-barge. Father and daughter leave New York on a voyage, and the sea that Chris hates so much proves to be the medium of Anna's regeneration. They pick up a boatload of shipwrecked sailors and one of them, the Irish Mat Burke, falls in love with Anna. Her moral integrity compels her to tell Burke the truth, and he and Chris sign for a voyage on the same ship. But Mat's love is stronger than his sense of Anna's shame, and both men go back to Anna, who promises to make a home for them when they return.

l           O'Neill explained the happy ending, most unusual in his dramas, as 'the silly, immature, compromising way' such characters would behave.

l           The Hairy Ape (1922) incorporates another aspect of European expressionism: the concern with political and social change. O'Neill focuses on man's natural animalism and his vision of a supernatural force. The presentation is rather schematic: a black and white polarization of society, in terms of Dionysian-Apollonian conflict.

l           As stoker in the hold of an enormous transatlantic liner, Yank - brutal, stupid, and profane - is the recognized leader of the stokers. He conceives of himself as the modern Prometheus, the titan whose vast energy propels the huge modern machines. When Mildred Douglas, daughter of the ship's owner, makes a visit to the stokehole, she is shocked by the lurid atmosphere, and faints at encountering Yank's brutality. Yank feels he 'doesn't belong.' The 'Hairy Ape', as Paddy his friend calls him, becomes sullen and morose. In New York on Easter Sunday he walks in dirty clothes up Fifth Avenue, trying in vain to insult the aristocratic strollers, who politely ignore him. For annoying the elite Yank is jailed. Upon release he finds that even the radical labor movement rejects him, and so he goes to the zoo to see the gorilla, the only creature with whom he can fee kinship. When he sets it free, to help him wreak destruction, the beast crushes him to death. Yank is the eternal outsider, the rejected alien. As O'Neill said, "Yank is really yourself and myself."

Tennessee Williams

l          

Thomas Lanier Williams (1911-1983), born in Mississippi and reared there and in St. Louis; his father, Cornelius Coffin Williams, a traveling salesman; his mother, Edwina Dakin Williams, the daughter of the local rector.

l           Serious drama on Broadway had for years been losing the fight against the evils of commercialism: the star system and the prohibitive costs of production. Musicals, bedroom farces, cheap thrillers - they expressed the taste of the majority. Williams had to enter the jungle of big business, which he did, playing it at its own game.

l           Williams is not a realist. His mode of imitation rejects the realist principles. Rather, he is a romantic, indebted to Shakespeare, Goethe, Wagner, and the Symbolists. Evidence of his romanticism is his preoccupation with hallucinatory levels of experience: with gargoyles, monsters, the dark-in-light patterns, poetic paradox, good within evil, body against soul, God and Satan.

l           Williams is also an expressionist, deeply concerned with the objectification of subjective vision, its transformation into concrete symbols. Like the expressionists, he regards art as one of the great life forms, an instrument of reconciliation. He searched for a concrete expressive form, a shape congruent with poetic vision, a recurrent motif (The Glass Menagerie).

l           He describes his form as a kind of 'personal lyricism': "The outcry of prisoner to prisoner from the cell in solitary where each is confined for the duration of his life." He views human condition as a state of metaphysical loneliness. He writes of life:

It is a lonely idea, a lonely condition, so terrifying to think of that we usually don't. And so we talk to each other, write and wire each other, call each other short and long distance across land and sea, clasp hands with each other at meeting and at parting, fight each other and even destroy each other because of this always somewhat thwarted effort to break through walls to each other. As a character in a play once said, 'We're all of us sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins.' (Preface to Cat on a Hot Tine Roof)

l           He perceives in the human condition a constant threat of diminution. In the introduction to The Rose Tattoo he says:

It is this continual rush of time, so violent that it appears to be screaming, that deprives our actual lives of so much dignity and meaning, and it is, perhaps more than anything else, the arrest of time which has taken place in a completed work of art that gives to certain plays their feeling of depth and significance... Contemplation is something that exists outside of time, and so is the tragic sense... If the world of a play did not offer us this occasion to view its character under that special condition of a world without time, then, indeed, that characters and occurrences of drama would become equally pointless, equally trivial, as corresponding meetings and happenings in life.'

l           Williams hopes to extract from art a truth greater than the one to be found in real life. The central problem of his anti-realist dramaturgy is how to reconstitute felt experience so as to create absolute truth.

l           In his concept of form he follows the romantic theory in ascribing to art the ability to mediate between dark drives and luminous truth, between body and soul.

l           Dramatic form must represent something more than personal experience: it must be related to the collective unconscious.

l           In the theater communication is more difficult than in the plastic arts. The playwright must articulate his work so that the spectator must grasp its intent within the space of two hours. Moreover the spectator must believe that his understanding is universal, something which links him with the whole of humanity:

For a couple of hours we may surrender ourselves to a world of fiercely illuminated values in conflict.' (Preface to The Rose Tattoo)

l           Williams uses the 'eye' of the motion picture camera. His images are composed as by montage; they are made up, after the manner of cinematic technique, by the superposition of figures one upon the other. This technique, introduced into literature by Joyce, appears also in the work of O'Neill, Thornton Wilder, Apollinaire, Giraudoux, Claudel, Picasso, Cocteau. With it he is able to arrest time, to focus upon the details of his vision, to emphasize elements of its structural composition, to vary his point of view. Each play is composed like a poem: the dramatist spins out symbolic figures. A Streetcar is composed of 11 theatrical images; Summer and Smoke, also 11; Camino Real, 16 scenes; Orpheus Descending, 9.

l           For Williams the play is an ordered progression of concrete images, giving sensible shape to the lyric moment.

l           Tennessee Williams has always written freely about his life, feelings and his way of making plays. In a program note he captured some of the spirit behind his drama:

In St. Louis we suddenly discovered there were two kinds of people, the rich and the poor, and that we belonged more to the latter. If we walked far enough west we came into a region of fine residences set in beautiful lawns. But where we lived, to which we must always return, were ugly rows of apartment buildings the color of dried blood and mustard. If I had been born in this situation I might not have resented it deeply. But it was forced upon my consciousness at the most sensitive age of childhood. It produced a shock and a rebellion that has grown into an inherent part of my work.

l           Williams calls it a 'bitter education'. His peculiar sensationalism is partly the result of his Southern education.

l           The South, much of which retains many characteristics of primitive societies, has developed a conventional perspective described as 'Southern agrarianism.' Its primordial interpretation of man's struggle in an unfriendly universe has produced a highly developed iconography.

l           This Southern aesthetic has provided for the drama of Williams a kind of basic linguistic structure comparable to that which appeared in the elementary stages of Greek tragedy. Like the Greek myths, this Southern apprehension has a socio-politico-religious grounding in a primitive society where the critical phases of the life struggle are interpreted in an intricate symbolic language.

l           As early as The Glass Menagerie, Williams began to create myths of modern life; he began to weave the dark images of his personal vision together with certain sociological, psychological, religious, and philosophical contents, in a schematic explication of modern life. This activity was accelerated in middle plays such as A Streetcar, Summer and Smoke, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Rose Tattoo, and Camino Real. In these works, he seems to have progressed to the creation of symbols of greater density, richer texture.

"We all have in our conscious and unconscious minds a great vocabulary of images, and I think all human communication is based on these images as are our dreams; and a symbol in a play has only one legitimate purpose which is to say a thing more directly and simply and beautifully than it could be said in words.

I hate writing that is a parade of images for the sake of images; I hate it so much that I close a book in disgust when it keeps on saying one thing is like another; I even get disgusted with poems that make nothing but comparisons between one thing and another. But I repeat that symbols, when used respectfully, are the purest language of plays. Sometimes it would take page after tedious page of exposition to put across an idea that can be said with an object or a gesture on the lighted stage." (Preface to Camino Real)

l           Increasingly Williams attempted to create a kind of ideograph in which form and content, feeling and meaning, understanding and reason are wholly unified. Like Bertolt Brecht, Williams conceives of a symbol so filled with meanings that it embodies the whole of experience within its structural frame.

l           In The Glass Menagerie he uses 'memory' as a rationalizing ground, as a point of reference around which his images are clustered. But the memory has a disadvantage: it embodies exactly the suggestion of personal limitation which he wishes to transcend. So he has used other devices, many associated with the practices of surrealists.

l           In A Streetcar and Summer and Smoke he creates symbols which have as their rationale progressive 'insanity'. Following André Breton, Salvador Dali, and Giorgio de Chirico, he uses insanity, intoxication and dream, as an interpretation of experience. The insanity mechanism has certain advantages (over memory), especially for works with tragic implications, for it suggests extremity in human circumstance. The confinement of Blanche to the asylum is a sign of annihilation. Or the prefrontal lobotomy which threatens Catharine Holly in Suddenly Last Summer is equivalent to classical 'death'. The risk is that the modern spectator will feel the moral and intellectual superior of a deranged protagonist.

l           Williams continued his search for other answers to the problem of "objective correlatives". In Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Sweet Bird of Youth he employs intoxication. For Brick, truth exists in alcohol; it is alcohol which stops the flow of natural time and freezes the moment of experience in 'metaphysical stasis':

Brick: I have to hear that little click in my head that makes me peaceful. Usually I hear it sooner than this, sometimes as early as - noon, but -

- Today, it's - dilatory....

- I just haven't got the right level of alcohol in my bloodstream yet!

l           Similarly, Alexandra del Lago, the fading movie queen of Sweet Bird, controls her perception of reality, her consciousness, by means of drugs.

l           A third rationalizing apparatus is the 'dream organization', a pattern claimed by the surrealists. In the prologue to Camino Real the desert rat 'Don Quixote' speaks these explanatory lines:

And my dream will be a pageant, a masque in which old meanings will be remembered and possibly new ones discovered, and when I wake from this sleep and this disturbing pageant of a dream, I'll choose one among its shadows to take along with me in the place of Sancho... (Prologue)

l           Another kind of symbolism is taken over from the great scientific naturalists Herbert Spencer and Charles Darwin. Williams interprets human existence as life in a great 'zoo', a retrogressive step from the 'glass menagerie.' He postulates biological existence as the fundamental 'ground of reality' and so the loss of procreative power is a sign of death.

l           Gradually, in his later works, Williams put together a kind of modern myth, a symbolic representation of the life of modern man. His myth is not an organic form surfacing from the unconscious life of man. It differs from the great natural structures which have evolved through world religions and even from popular myths (e.g. the legendary American cowboy). His myth is synthetic: composed, after the manner of cinematic montage, from the fragments of many ethical, philosophical, social, poetic, intellectual and religious perspectives. It mirrors modern man's dilemma - his need for a comprehensive system of interpretation, for a structure which can restore meaning to life.

l           In a seminar on Camino Real convened at Bochum, in 1953, some of the latent contents in Williams's myth were discussed at length. The scholars identified his linguistic structure as expressionist in kind, but pointed out that his form was clothed in symbolic contents specifically related to the 'American imagination.' They noted that Williams the observer, standing at mid-point in the 20th century, attempted to represent all the forces, ideas, values, systems of thought, and modes of behavior which impinge upon the position of the American in our time. There appear to be three major schemata for this synthetic structure: (1) the ritual myth of the theater, (2) the literary myth of the 20th century American, and (3) the Freudian-Jungian myth of modern man.

l           (1) He attempts to interpret vision by means of the myth of the theater. It was Nietzsche who rationalized Shakespeare's perception of the 'world as theater', the 'theater as world'. Many writers, e.g. the existentialists, have pursued this line of reasoning, suggesting that the theater is the ground for ultimate reality, the instrument for discovering permanent truths (e.g. The Glass Menagerie). His symbols are indebted to the religious legends of the ancient Greeks and Northern Europeans, but also figures drawn from Christian ritual. Like Shakespeare, he is haunted with images of the suffering Christ. His works abound with symbols drawn from the passion plays: the Redemption of Mary Magdalene; Christ before Pilate; the Crucifixion; the Descent from the Cross; the Harrowing of Hell; the Sorrowing Mother of God.

l           Williams thinks that man is the great sinner, the transgressor against moral law. Like St. Paul, he views human existence as a condition marked by unavoidable transgression. Man is a creature in need of a mode of salvation, in search of a power which can transcend that of natural life. Like many Christian theologians, he defines this saving power as human love. Throughout his work one can see the linguistic apparatus of Christian theology: progression of sin, suffering, guilt, punishment, and expiation. He prescribes a theological resolution for human suffering: the dark cycle of suffering is complemented by a transcendent progression of love, sympathy, contrition, sacrifice, and understanding.

l           (2) Like Joyce, Pound and Eliot, Williams interprets the myth of the 20th-century American in terms of literary achievement, which is a 'myth of human development' in which the milestones in man's progress or retrogression are marked by literary achievement.

l           In each play he describes a region of this native ground: St. Louis, New Orleans, the Delta, Mississippi, and an assortment of Central American towns. But his geography is essentially imaginative: the region of conflict which he symbolizes is the modern American mind (Blanche, with her talk of poetry and arts, versus the laborer Kowalski, with his life of animal joys). In Summer and Smoke the protagonist, Alma, is a symbol of traditional humanist values: 'She seems to belong to a more elegant age, such as the Eighteenth Century in France.' In the end it is the animalistic John Buchanan who - like Stanley - conquers this relic of past civilization. Through such characters Williams explores the question of choice for civilization itself, a choice between past and present, between soul and body.

l           (3) His most important imaginative structure is his psychological myth. It is primarily linguistic in nature: it attempts to determine how, not why, life occurs. It has many sources: it illustrates the dependence of Freudian theory on perceptions out of the Greek and Judeo-Christian traditions. The triadic concept of reality associated with Christian theology is paralleled by Freud's organization of the ego, super-ego and id. Freud provides objective equivalents for the Christian cycle of sin-guilt-expiation-catharsis.

l           Williams, like Freud, establishes human personality in its animal origins. For both, sexuality is the symbol of being, the symbol of freedom, the great liberator, the only valid manifestation of religion and love, the only synonym for life.

l           Freud's 'libido' is easier to project than the more abstract concepts of 'social acceptance', 'the will-to-power', 'the will-to-meaning'. His point of departure is a primitive interpretation of sexual anxiety as life anxiety.

l           Williams modifies the rigid structure of the early Freudian system with Jung's theory. For Williams Jung's theories meet certain problems for which the Freudian orthodoxy does not provide explication. The most obvious of these arrangements is Jung's theory of image-making: his concept of primordial and archaic forms written in the collective unconscious. In connection with poetic types Jung wrote (Psychological Types, 1923, pp. 271-72):

The great problems of life [...] are always related to the primordial images of the collective unconscious. These images are really balancing or compensating factors which correspond with the problems life presents in actuality.

l          

This is not to be marveled at, since these images are deposits, representing the accumulated experience of thousands of years of struggle for adaptation and existence. Every great experience in life, every profound conflict, evokes the treasured wealth of these images and brings them to inner perception; as such, they become accessible to consciousness only in the presence of that degree of self-awareness and power of understanding which enables a man to think what he experiences instead of just living it blindly. In the latter case he actually lives the myth and the symbol without knowing it.

or,

l           I can only gaze with wonder and awe at the depths and heights of our psychic nature. Its non-spatial nature conceals an untold abundance of images which have accumulated over millions of years of living development and become fixed in the organism. My consciousness is like an eye that penetrates to the most distant places, yet it is the psychic non-ego that fills them with non-spatial images. And these images are not pale shadows, but tremendously powerful psychic factors. The most we may be able to do is misunderstand them, but we can never rob them of their power by denying them. (Jung, Freud and Psychoanalysis, in Collected Works, 1953)

l           Jung's system is more flexible and poetical than Freud's. A second advantage for Williams is Jung's eclecticism, his ability to synthesize a large group of perceptions relevant to the life of Western man. In his theory of archetypes, Jung provides a symbolic structure that accounts for the whole pattern of Western history: cultural, political, social and intellectual. Williams finds an appropriate poetic symbol for human experience in Jung's concept of the 'human odyssey', the journey toward understanding (see Jung's Modern Man in Search of a Soul, 1934):

Nobody can stand the total loss of the archetype. When that happens, it gives rise to that 'frightful discontent in our culture,' where nobody feels at home because a 'father' and 'mother' are missing. Everyone knows the provisions that religion has always made in this respect. Unfortunately there are very many people who thoughtlessly go on asking whether these provisions are 'true' when it is really a question of a psychological need. Nothing is achieved by explaining them away rationalistically.' (Jung, 'Concerning the Archetypes')

l           Eternal truth needs a human language that alters with the spirit of the times. The primordial images undergo ceaseless transformation and yet remain ever the same, but only in a new form can they be understood anew. Always they require a new interpretation if, as each formation becomes obsolete, they are not to lose their spellbinding power. (Jung, 'Psychology of Transference')

l           In Jung's poetic image of the odyssey - the search for self and soul - Williams finds a symbol for the reality of his description. He also finds justification for his belief in art as a mode of transcendence, as a reconciling symbol.

l           One of the most controversial aspects of Williams's drama is his use of an anti-heroic protagonist as an image of man. He appears to reject the Aristotelian concept of the protagonist and to substitute for it an anti-hero, the personification of a humanity that is neither good nor courageous. In Blanche, Alma, Brick, Kilroy, Val, Chance, Shannon, we see this anti-heroic image of man.

l           Aristotle's definition of the hero is contradicted by our contemporary perception of reality; his hero is 'a man who is not eminently good and just, yet whose misfortune is brought about not by vice or depravity, but by some error or frailty.' In his famous rejection of classic dramatic theory, Arthur Miller suggests that the image of man in the 20th century must be rooted in an open system of values appropriate to a democratic society.

l           One of the most dramatic changes affecting our idea of hero is that embodied in the science of psychology: our classic notions of 'goodness', 'nobility', 'courage'. Equally affecting has been the political history of modern Europe: a record of suffering and wars. Because of a new sense of historical crisis, the hero, a man of action, has grown less appealing as an image of present moral aspirations than the anti-hero, a man of reflection and contemplation. But perhaps an even more profound change in perspective has been the growing influence of the Judeo-Christian ethic on the moral aspirations of the common man. The principles of Christianity have become, in the past century, a more meaningful part of a common standard for human action. The substitution of the 'inner-directed' ethic of Christian protagonist for the 'outer-directed' heroism of the Greek hero has been one of the significant post-modern adjustments in Western drama. This has altered the idea of tragic action and has produced a new concept of dramatic character.

l           In a discussion of contemporary form, René-Marill Albéres describes (La Révolte des écrivains d'aujourd'hui, Paris, 1949, p.141) the contemporary anti-hero as a 'theological protagonist.' He is an image of man seeking to know the universe, to define its purpose, and to discover his ultimate meaning in its pattern: 'The contemporary theater, like the novel, becomes a search, a quest. It makes itself idealistic, its characters force themselves toward that which they can never find.' [The moral universe out of which the anti-hero has emerged is described by T. S. Eliot in the 'East Coker' movement of Four Quartets.]

l           The anti-heroic quest is a journey toward moral commitment. This is the theme of The Night of the Iguana, the story of a heretic, a world-weary priest, Shannon, who searches the earth for the face of God. He follows the moral progression described by St. John of the Cross as the 'dark night of the soul.' He proceeds in contrary motion, in flight from the presence of God; but, like St. John, he finds that the 'way down' leads up. He declares that his search has brought him finally to that presence which he has sought: 'Yes, I see him, I hear him, I know him. And if he doesn't know that I know him, let him strike me dead with a bolt of his lightning.'

l           Williams's construction of his anti-hero, his 'negative saint', is based on a radical perception of new dangers for mankind: societal regression, humanity's capitulation to the laws of the jungle (A Streetcar), moral and spiritual disintegration of mankind (Cat, Camino, Suddenly, Sweet, Night).

l           His protagonists are conceived in anti-traditional terms, as humanity diminished by time and history. Each is characterized by an inner division, fragmentation, 'un-beings' caught in the destructive life-process.

l           Williams gives shape to his anti-hero through the manipulation of a mythic glass, by showing his relationship to archetypal patterns. He superimposes parallel visions - shadow images - of modern man. His anti-hero is a man of many identities: his Tom a 'Hamlet', his Catharine a 'Cassandra', his Brick an 'Orestes', his Big Daddy an 'Agamemnon'. Blanche descends into the underworld described as 'The Elysian Fields'. In the critical scene preceding her destruction, Williams gives Orphic voice to the night: '...The night is filled with inhuman voices like cries in a jungle. The shadows and lurid reflections move sinuously as flames along the wall space.'

l           Williams's anti-hero is not a man or woman, but rather a schematic presentation of extended moral possibilities. In each character he presents a composite image, a montage of roles. Alma says,

I've thought many times of something you told me last summer, that I have a doppelgänger. I looked that up and I found that it means another person inside of me, another self, and I don't know whether to thank you or not for making me conscious of it! - I haven't been well.... For a while I thought I was dying, that that was the change that was coming.

l           In his presentation of character, Williams follows Pirandello's method of exposition - a character is an agglomeration of roles:

For the drama lies all in this: in the conscience that I have, that each one of us has. We believe this conscience to be a single thing, but it is many-sided. There is one for this person, and another for that. Diverse consciences. So we have this illusion of being one person for all, of having a personality that is unique in all our acts. But it isn't true. We perceive this when, tragically perhaps, in something we do, we are as it were, suspended, caught up in the air on a kind of hook. Then we perceive that all of us were not in that act, and that it would be an atrocious injustice to judge us by that action alone... (Pirandello, Six Characters in Search of an Author)

l           Like Jungian psychology, Pirandello's theory defines character as a loosely unified grouping of identities. Man is a configuration of masks, in search of a reconciling symbol.

l           This pattern of organization presents serious theatrical problems. How can such a concept of character be realized in the sensible form of the drama? Brecht solved this problem by introducing into the drama large quantities of discursive material. They explain the conflicted nature of the protagonist's character through the use of monologues, films, notes, and other 'teaching devices.' O'Neill and Miller also have used these devices. Although Williams makes some use of the interior monologue [Dorrit Cohn would use 'quoted monologue'], he has been inclined to figure inner conflict in more theatrical terms. He follows the example of Shakespeare in revealing character through schematic arrangement. Like Hamlet, Blanche reveals her inner nature by playing out her conflicted roles: school-teacher, Southern belle, poet, sister, savior, and prostitute. Similarly, Alma, Brick, Quixote, Chance, Val, Shannon, play out a range of characters, as they don first one mask and then another.

l           Although interpreted by Pirandello, this idea of character development should be credited to Shakespeare. It may be described as the 'Hamlet organization': a theatrical example of this multiple concept of human personality. Hamlet is alternately prince and jester, lover and knave, courtier and politician, poet and ribald jester.

l           Williams takes this 'existential' Hamlet as his point of departure in his organization of anti-heroic character.

l           The anti-heroic protagonist of Williams is designed to reveal the nature of suffering as it appears in the 20th century: an object of pity and terror. To the question: Of what meaning is the fate of his emotional, spiritual and moral cripples, Williams's answer reflects the gradual usurpation of the pagan idea of tragedy by the Christian concept of human worth. For the Christian ethic holds every man a sinner, redeemable only through love.

l           Williams's anti-hero has also been called the fugitive kind. Within this generic term there is a variety of types:

l           the artist. A Williams artist need never put a word to paper or paint to canvas for it is his temperament, his inclination, that defines him. As Harold Clurman says of Blanche ("Lies Like Truth"): "She is a poet even if we are dubious about her understanding of the writers she names."

l           the insane or disturbed; there's a gallery of neurotics and hysterics in his drama

l           the cripple

l           the sexual victim or specialist (virgins waiting to be initiated; whose who will not be, for they have chosen chastity in order to escape corruption; the professionals and those amateurs so talented that they could go professional; the homosexuals, implicit and explicit; those with a desperate need for sex as a stimulant or punishment). What they have all in common is an extreme sensitivity.

l           the foreigner. Two things are at work here: (a) a fact and (b) a myth. It is a fact of American society, at least of the small-town Southern society, that the foreigner, even when he ceases to be foreign, is an outsider. It is a myth, one from northern Europe that has been passed on to the US, that the Mediterranean peoples (Italians, Sicilians, Mexicans) live richer, wilder, more open lives than the cold, closed northerners. In Williams's plays, unlike Miller's, there are no Jews, and very few Negroes, because these are the favorite outsiders of American writers.

l           The outsider is the man or woman who by virtue of his or her strangeness is particularly sensitive and vulnerable to attack. On the contrary, the insider is the one who is protected by his/her insensitivity and strong identification with the dominant group and its conventions. The classic example is Stanley Kowalski, the insensitive brute who drives Blanche to destruction. We should take Williams's word for what the play is about: "The rape of Blanche by Stanley is a pivotal, integral truth in the play, without which the play loses its meaning, which is the ravishment of the tender, the sensitive, the delicate, by the savage and brutal forces of modern society."

l           Now the concept of the outsider, the fugitive kind, is on the point of evaporating, of becoming an existential statement about human beings in general. Clearly Williams is attracted to the former group.

l           If Williams' mankind is fugitive, then something has to be in pursuit. His characters are menaced by (1) by other people; (2) by themselves; and (3) by the universe.

l           Although Williams's characters are constantly hurt and harried by those around them, they are also tortured by something within themselves: guilt and fear primarily. As Williams says,

Fear and evasion are the two little beasts that chase each other's tails in the revolving wirecage of our nervous world. They distract us from feeling too much about things. ("The Timeless World of a Play")

Arthur Miller

l           When Miller began his career in the early 1940's, there were no subsidized theaters, no permanent repertory companies, no avant-garde, not even the alternative commercial theater that later developed 'Off-Broadway.' Professional theater was confined almost entirely to New York City, and it was in the hands of commercial managers. The key figure in the business was not the writer nor the director but the producer. He found the script, hired the director, raised the financial backing, rented the theater, supervised the budget. His reasons were almost purely monetary: to make a profit. Anything that was not a 'hit' was a 'flop'; hence the 'hit-flop' approach. As the risks multiplied, the incentive for producing serious drama declined. Off-Broadway and Off-Off-Broadway began to provide an alternative to the purely commercial theater, leaving the show-business field almost entirely to musicals and popular comedy.

l           A problem with his plays is their acknowledged autobiographical nature. 'The writer who wants to describe life,' Miller once explained, 'must describe his own experiences.' The 'best work that anybody ever writes is the work that is on the verge of embarrassing him... where he puts himself on the line.' Miller does not so much create other people as divide himself up into a number of personae. Some see it as his inability to enter sympathetically into the lives and problems of characters very different from his own.

l           Arthur Miller was born on 17 October 1915 in New York City; lived the first 14 years of his life in Harlem, then a fairly prosperous middle-class area of mixed ethnic composition. His father, Isidore, had come to America from Austria with his parents and had worked his way up to become a successful manufacturer of ladies' coats. His mother, Augusta, a first-generation American born in New York, had taught public school before her marriage. Although not orthodox, the Millers could speak Yiddish, observed Jewish customs, and gave their children a fairly sound background in Judaism.

l           In 1929 the family moved to the Midwood section of Brooklyn, then a semi-rural suburb of New York City, a move occasioned by a slackening in the Miller business.

l           The 'crash' of 1929 and the Depression which followed it were the major influences on the playwright's slowly developing view of life. His father never recovered his financial position. The failure of the economic system called into question everything that young Arthur had seen or learned up to that time. The promise had been a fake. The 'reality' was not the chauffeured limousines of Harlem, but the breadlines of New York and the man fainting from hunger on a back porch in Brooklyn. Miller became convinced that there was an invisible world behind the apparent one, and he began to search for the hidden laws that would explain this catastrophe.

l           His high school academic record wasn't good enough to get him into university, so he worked at a variety of jobs, as for example, shipping clerk in an automobile-parts warehouse in Manhattan at $15 a week. It was there that he discovered serious literature. He was drawn to the Russian novelists, especially Dostoievsky.

l           In 1934 he applied to the University of Michigan, enrolled in journalism and became a night editor on the student paper; became attracted to the socialist ideals of the time.

l           In his second year he tried for one of the annual Hopwood literary prizes. He submitted a drama, No Villain, and was awarded the first prize of $250. Miller transferred out of journalism into English and in the playwriting course offered by Professor Kenneth Rowe. He was introduced to the dramatic work of Ibsen. Rowe admired Ibsen's emphasis on social problems and questions of moral values, integrity, etc.

l           Miller revised No Villain which, under the title They Too Arise, was awarded a $1250 award by the Theatre Guild's Bureau of New Plays. He also wrote his second play, Honors at Dawn, which won him his second Hopwood Award. His third play was The Great Disobedience.

l           After graduation he joined the Federal Theatre Project, but reports of communist influence made Congress refuse renewal of funds (see House Committee on Un-American Activities).

l           Miller married Mary Slattery, a Catholic and daughter of an Ohio insurance salesman, who was a secretary in a publishing house.

l           Miller established himself as a writer for radio. He heard the story of a businessman from the Middle West whose financial success led him first to believe that everyone was trying to rob him, and finally to commit suicide. The Man Who Had All the Luck (1944) failed after four performances. The production, however, won him a Theatre Guild Award.

l           Focus (1945), a novel, deals explicitly with his Jewish experience.

l           In 1945 a visiting relative told him the story of a girl who denounced her father when she discovered that he had been supplying defective engine-parts to the Army. For two years Miller tried to embody the theme in dramatic action. He resolved not to express any idea unless it was literally forced out of a character's mouth. The finished script, called All My Sons, was picked up by producers Harold Clurman, Elia Kazan and Walter Fried. The play opened at the Coronet Theatre on 29 January 1947 and ran for 328 performances. It won the Drama Critics' Circle Award, was produced in Paris and Stockholm and made into a film.

l           Miller bought a house in Brooklyn and a farm in Roxbury, Connecticut, built a split-shingle cabin in which he could seclude himself to write. He started writing a play about a salesman he had known when he worked for his father, which he titled The Inside of His Head. Re-named Death of a Salesman, it was first produced in Philadelphia in January 1949, and moved to New York the following month.

l           The play ran on Broadway for 742 performances, won the Pulitzer Prize, the Antoinette Perry Award and the Drama Critics' Award. It earned its author royalties amounting to about $160,000 a year from the New York production, and an equal amount from two or three touring companies.

l           Miller's outspoken opposition to political persecution and his sympathy for leftist causes brought him unfavorable attention from right-wing commentators and the unwelcome attention of the House Committee on Un-American Activities.

l           The Crucible opened in New York on 22 January 1953 at the Martin Beck Theatre, and ran for 197 performances. Critical response of both audiences and journalists was mixed. It was probably inevitable, given the atmosphere of the times, that most people would see in it a thinly disguised attack on the investigations of the House Committee and by implication a plea of innocence for all of its victims.

l           Miller's next Broadway show opened, with little success, on 29 September 1955 with A View from the Bridge (Pulitzer Prize) and A Memory of Two Mondays.

l           Miller's marriage ended in a Reno divorce on 11 June 1956, by which time he was involved with Marilyn Monroe, the Hollywood sex symbol of her day. To many the relationship seemed like a charming fairy tale. They first met in Hollywood in 1950, introduced by Elia Kazan. They married on 18 June 1956. They flew to London where Marilyn began work on The Prince and the Showgirl and Miller collaborated with Peter Brook on A View from the Bridge. He wrote The Misfits (1961), a so-called cinema-novel, fiction based on what the camera can see. It is actually the script of a motion picture for his wife Marilyn Monroe.

l           Marilyn had two miscarriages. She became emotionally involved with Yves Montand while filming Let's Make Love. She divorced from Miller in January 1961.

l           After the Fall (1964) is his most experimental and controversial drama. Although Miller denied that the play was any more autobiographical than his other work, the general perception was that the scenes between Quentin and Maggie were almost embarrassingly documentary. It is a play in two long acts in which the quasi-autobiographical protagonist seeks self-knowledge, a sense of the meaning of his past as he reviews his marriages and other major experiences.

l           Miller got involved with Ingeborg Morath, a photographer who studied in Berlin, Budapest and Vienna. They got married in February 1962. Marilyn Monroe died in August 1962.

l           In 1964 he dramatized a story he had first heard in 1955, Incident at Vichy. It is set in a police waiting-room during a round-up of suspected Jews in occupied France during World War II. It tells of a German aristocrat who is brought to an awareness of his complicity in the Nazi evil and who attempts to atone for his guilt by helping a Jew to escape. It is a rather transparent moral fable on Miller's favorite theme. The play opened on 4 December 1964 to generally favorable reviews.

l           In 1965 the National Theater of Great Britain mounted a production of The Crucible under the direction of Sir Lawrence Olivier; a successful off-Broadway revival of A View from the Bridge. Miller was elected International President of PEN.

l           The Price was successfully staged in Philadelphia in 1968, and two one-act plays, Fame and The Reason Why, were produced in New York in 1970;

l           Other works: Up from Paradise, a musical version of The Creation of the World and Other Business (1972); The Archbishop's Ceiling, a drama about politics, art and sex in a Iron Curtain country (1977); The Creation of the World - Miller's most radical departure from realism, is a serio-comic treatment of the book of Genesis; The American Clock (1979) depicts an American family caught in the Depression.

l           All My Sons, his first successful play, is about basic human emotions and inner drives. Self-preservation and propagation of the species are the two chief drives in human nature. Consequently all men possess a tendency to evaluate themselves and their families above the society of which they are a part; to place their private welfare before the common good.

l           Miller individualizes this universal drive through Joe Keller, an American war-profiteer, a symbolic Everyman who is devoted to his family. Other characters in the play are Chris, his eldest son, Larry, reported missing in the war, Kate, his wife; Steve Deever, his partner, and his children, Ann and George.

- cracked cylinder-heads

- like a tautly written mystery story

- indebted to Ibsen, who adapted methods of Greek tragedy to realist drama.

l           Ibsen perfected what has been called 'the play of ripe circumstance' in which, in a relatively short period of stage time, the events of a whole lifetime are put into a perspective which gives tragic significance to the catastrophe: the art of withholding information about the past until it is most useful dramatically, how to create a web of cause and effect

- a conflict between two sets of values: - the one represented by Kate and Joe (capitalistic system of competition, 'the land of the great big dogs...you don't love a man...you eat him.') and the other of the generation of Chris, Ann, George, and Larry, a world of justice where everyone gets what he deserves. Chris and Larry articulate a still higher ideal, a New Testament law of love and co-operation rather than the Mosaic 'eye for an eye'.

l           Death of a Salesman (subtitled 'Certain private conversations in two acts and a requiem') succeeds as a character drama, an excellent example of so-called 'middle-class tragedy,' a 'drame bourgeois rather than genuine 'high tragedy' (Gassner, 365),a winner of the Drama Critics Circle and Pulitzer. It was written in almost a single burst of creative inspiration, from personal experience not from an outside source; it is one of the few instances when Miller has projected himself into a character quite unlike himself, writing from the point of the view of the father rather than the alienated son.

l           Willy, a 63 year-old salesman who no longer trusts himself to drive his car, comes back to his Brooklyn home instead of going on his prescribed trip. His sons decide to go into business and the older one, Biff, intends to ask his employer for 'an inside job.' Willy is fired instead as a superannuated employee and Biff does not get a loan, disappearing instead with Oliver's fountain pen because petty thievery has been ingrained in him since boyhood. The disappointed Willy goes home in a distracted condition and kills himself. Out of these meager external materials, Miller has fashioned a comprehensive drama by pushing into motives and causes.

l           The story proceeds in two dimensions - real time and remembered time. The 'external plot' deals with the last 24 hours of Willy's life from his return home late Sunday night to his death Monday evening. The 'internal plot' treats the past from Willy's earliest memories of his own father to the fateful summer of Biff's failure in high school. Whereas the film version of the play showed Willy's memories as flashbacks, the stage production of Elia Kazan shows past and present existing simultaneously. (Jo Mielziner created a skeletal setting which provided three interior playing areas and permitted a variety of other scenes to be played on a large forestage. The house was set against a backdrop which could be transformed by a change of lighting from an oppressive cityscape to a leafy pastoral. This permitted a rapid alternation between the scenes in the present and others from Willy's memory of the past.) In outline, the play is very similar to an Ibsenite play of ripe circumstance except that the exposition of events from the past is dramatized instead of being simply reported.

l           It is a Freudian play (father-son relationship), but Willy is both father and son, the quintessential boy-man, the eternal adolescent arrested at an early stage of development, unable to help his own son to a healthy maturation. In a sense Willy and Biff are more like brothers than father and son, and it is Biff who grows up first.

l           Willy's problems as a father - a direct result of his own deprivation as a son: the play extends over three generations. Willy remembers his father: 'All I remember is a man with a big beard, and I was in Mama's lap, sitting around a fire, and some kind of high music.' The music is, of course, the flute music which sounds periodically during the play and which, Miller says in the stage directions, tells of 'grass, trees and the horizon.' The pastoral associations of music are related to the wanderings of the Loman family 'through Ohio, and Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, and all the Western states' where the elder Loman made and sold his flutes. But he was also a great 'inventor' who 'with one gadget' could make more in a week than Willy would make in a lifetime. The patriarch of the Loman family is a shadowy ideal who embodies a variety of qualities: musician, craftsman, salesman, inventor - a combination of Wandering Jew and Yankee pedlar. But 'Dad left when I was such a baby...I never had a chance to talk to him and I still feel - kind of temporary about myself.' Willy has chosen to imitate the salesman side of his father, especially influenced by David Singleman, an old New England salesman who came to represent for Willy the father he never knew. Singleman would 'pick up his phone and call the buyers, and without even leaving his room, at the age of 84, he made his living.' Singleman represents free enterprise with a human face, and it is part of Willy's tragedy that he never realizes that such a system does not exist. He even worships the very ruthlessness that helps to destroy him. The other side of his father - the inventive and irresponsible - is epitomized by Ben, who, as Willy's older brother, constitutes another substitute father-figure. There is a quality of unreality about Ben which suggests the generalized characters of Expressionist drama. He communicates cryptically: 'when I walked into the jungle, I was 17. When I walked out I was 21. And, by God, I was rich!' He functions as a dramatic embodiment of those qualities of assurance, daring and lack of scruples which Willy secretly admires but does not possess. He represents the spirit of social Darwinism or laissez-faire.

l           The play is also about Willy's attempt to adjust. He convinces himself and his sons that success is a product of being well-liked. So the play illustrates how a good man can be destroyed by the 'wrong dream' of a shallow, materialistic life based on false ideals. The theme is certainly universal.

l           Willy represents any man whose illusions have made him incapable of dealing realistically with the problems of everyday life. He is the victim of spiritual emptiness. Biff, however, recognizes at the end of the play that there are higher values in life. Charley, too, shows some insight for the nobler things of life. At the funeral, when Linda wonders why Willie should choose to die when 'he only needed a little salary,' Charley replies, 'No man only needs a little salary.' 

l           Despite his petty character, a man devoid of moral integrity, Willie does have a tragic flaw, though. He is a self-deluded man who has lost the power to distinguish between reality and the obsessions that dominate his life. A single god - popularity - justifies a multitude of sins. It is in this egocentric sense that Willie possesses a tragic flaw. He is personally responsible for his obsession with false values and success worship.

l           Miller's central preoccupation is not social, not psychological, but existential. Throughout his career Miller has been preoccupied with the role the individual plays in his own fate. Why do people behave so differently in moments of crisis? Why were some men crushed by the Depression while others survived unscathed? Since the external factors were more or less the same for everyone in the 1930s, clearly the differences were within. Those who believed in the system felt guilty for their failure and gave up the struggle.

l           The secret of survival seemed to lie in the discovery of the hidden laws. In the pursuit of this discovery the greatest obstacle was not the absence of facts, but the willful blindness that rendered many people incapable of seeing those facts. At its core, Death of a Salesman is a play about the destructive nature of dreams. The play focuses on the conflict between facts as they are, and the attempts of various persons to ignore or disguise those facts. The conflict is not embodied in any particular moment of crisis (except perhaps in the last scene between Willy and Biff), but it is all-pervasive. The Lomans engage in constant deception to conceal the truth from themselves. In the final confrontation Biff cannot make his father face the truth. In terms of tragic resolution there is no self-knowledge. Willy has too much emotional capital tied up with his dreams of Biff's magnificence, and he prefers to sacrifice his life rather than his illusion. The ending is ironic in that Miller intends the audience to see that Willy is deluded and that a way out exists. As Willy says of Biff, the door of his life was wide open if he had had the courage to go through it. The 'tragedy' of Willy Loman's suffering and death is that they are unnecessary.

l           Certainly there is no question that the world of Willy Loman is the world of Arthur Miller's youth.

- Willy - patterned on a salesman who worked for Miller's father

- like Biff, Miller was a poor student and a good athlete who failed to get into university and worked at a variety of odd jobs before finding his true vocation

l           As George Ross observes, the play is not about an unsuccessful salesman so much as it is about a Jewish family. The tight family bond, the intense pressure on the eldest son, the strong rivalry between close friends, the anxiety to fit in and be popular are all a little more understanding in a Jewish immigrant context. Finally, the tone of the work - a blend of pathos and irony - is very close to Jewish literature with its long tradition of turning pain into humor.