The Banality of Addiction: Arthur Miller and Complicity Grant Gosizk

Modern Drama, Volume 61, Number 2, Summer 2018, pp. 171-191 (Article)

Published by University of Toronto Press

For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/696362

Access provided by Carthage College (6 Sep 2018 17:42 GMT) The Banality of Addiction: Arthur Miller and Complicity

GRANT GOSIZK

ABSTRACT: While much has been written on Arthur Miller’s relationship to the post-war intelligentsia, few critics have explored the influence that intellectual debates on Holocaust complicity had on the author’s 1960s catalogue. Building on the similarities between the theory of the “banality of evil” offered in Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusa- lem (1963) and Miller’s Herald Tribune article on the Nazi trials in Frankfurt (1964), this article suggests that the playwright’s interest in emerging theories of complicity became a central concern of After the Fall (1964) and Incident at Vichy (1964). Strongly influenced by Theodor Adorno’s and Jean-Paul Sartre’s work on aesthetic responses to post-war guilt, Miller used these plays to dramatize competing responses to the concept of “ubiquitous complicity” for the Holocaust. Using the aesthetic language of addiction spectacle scenes, which a strong tradition of American temperance theatre had popularized, Miller evaluated the mechanics of complicity and offered a dramatic thesis on its importance to anti-fascist activism. I conclude that, in both plays, the representation of addiction became the primary means through which Miller participated in contemporary critical debates on post-war guilt.

KEYWORDS: Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, Incident at Vichy, After the Fall, medical humanities, guilt

Although his was a remarkably prolific career, Arthur Miller did not produce a single theatrical work between 1956 and 1964. Attributing this hiatus to the author’s post-war political activism, the noted Miller biographer Christopher Bigsby suggests that, “[l]ike so many others at this time,” Miller “began to acknowledge the significance of the Holocaust, the shock of which [. . .] led to a two-decade-long silence” (Arthur Miller: 1962–2005 11). Throughout this period of professional inactivity, Miller travelled extensively, attending sym- posia on anti-Semitism and the Jewish diaspora in France, Austria, and the Soviet Union, all the while re-evaluating the global consequences of the Holocaust and his relationship to them as a writer. These trips, and specifically

© University of Toronto doi: 10.3138/md.61.2.0860r GRANT GOSIZK a tour of the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp in 1962, profoundly influenced the formal and theoretical character of the author’ssubsequent work, with some critics suggesting that “the Miller who returned to the theatre in the mid-1960s was a different man from the one who had written the essay ‘On Social Plays’” (Bigsby, Arthur Miller: 1962–2005 27; see also Bigsby, Review 401). Upon returning to the United States in 1963, Miller produced two plays, both of which were explicitly concerned with the historical contexts and consequences of the Holocaust: Incident at Vichy (1964) and After the Fall (1964). Incident at Vichy, a one-act play about racial inspection in Nazi-occupied France, dramatized the interactions of guilt, responsibility, and free will within totalitarian regimes. After the Fall, Miller’s psychological drama staged in the shadows of a German concentration camp, offered a thesis on guilt in the post-war era: “no one they didn’t kill can be innocent again” (32).1 This thematic emphasis on the Holocaust brought with it a number of formal and stylistic departures from the author’s previous work; perhaps the most notable of these was in Miller’s conception of guilt, which resonated with many of the critical debates on complicity that followed the publication of Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963). On 16 February 1963, Arendt published the first instalment of a serial report on the trial of Adolf Eichmann: a former Nazi lieutenant colonel tried – in the first Nazi trial held in Israel – for “crimes ‘against the Jewish people’” for his role in organizing the transportation of millions of people to ghettos and concentration camps (Arendt, Eichmann 7). While Arendt agreed with the court’s contention that Eichmann “played a central role in an enterprise whose open purpose was to eliminate forever certain ‘races’ from the surface of the earth” (277), as well as its conclusion that “no one, that is no member of the human race, can be expected to want to share the earth with [him]” (279), she objected to the ethnic specificity of the charges brought against him and the potential “partiality of Jewish judges” (259). Given the legal pre- cedent set at the Nuremberg Trials, where organizers of the Final Solution were tried for “crimes against the members of various nations” (6), she contended that the Israeli insistence upon the Jewishness of the victims and the adjudicators had “ulterior purposes,” albeit “the noblest of ulterior purposes” (253). Citing Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion’s declaration that the Eichmann trial should lead “the nations of the world to know . . . and they should be ashamed” (qtd. in Arendt 10) and remind Israelis that “only the establishment of a Jewish state had enabled the Jews to hit back” (10), Arendt declared the prosecution of Eichmann a “show trial” (4): it abstracted the legislative imperative for a “trial [of] his deeds” in order to declare publicly the horrors of the Holocaust and to validate Israeli statehood (5). In short, Arendt

172 Modern Drama 61:2 (Summer 2018) The Banality of Addiction believed that the crime for which Eichmann was tried had been fabricated in order to make Eichmann a spectacle, a “scapegoat” for the whole of anti- Semitism, at the expense of the western tradition of criminal justice (286). The resulting threat, Arendt believed, was not that Eichmann would receive an unjust sentence but that trying him as the “monster responsible” for the Final Solution (8) – when in reality he “had no motives at all,” apart from “an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advance- ment” (287) – abstracted legal determinations of guilt into evaluations of complicity that fundamentally obstructed justice. Instead, she contended, The logic of the Eichmann trial, as Ben-Gurion conceived of it, with its stress on general issues to the detriment of legal niceties, [. . .] demanded exposure of the complicity of all German offices and authorities in the Final Solution – of all civil servants in the state ministries, of the regular armed forces, with their General Staff, of the judiciary, and of the business world. (18) The result was “almost ubiquitous complicity, which had stretched far beyond the ranks of [Nazi] Party membership” (18). Drawing a distinction between the legal tradition of a “trial [of] deeds” and judgments of responsibility that considered indirect involvement, Arendt suggested that, if the two were conflated, as in the Eichmann trial, all would be found complicit with the Final Solution (5). Spatializing the concept, the author claimed that, when considering complicity, “the degree of responsibility increases as we draw further away from the man who uses the fatal instrument with his own hands” (247). Unsurprisingly, Arendt’s report was highly controversial, with critical thinkers from all over the world debating the mechanics of complicity and its value in conceptualizing guilt for the crimes of the Final Solution.2 Of these thinkers, most fell into two camps: those who believed that acknowledging complicit responsibility for the Holocaust denied the criminal responsibility of the perpetrators and blamed victims, on the one hand, and those who believed that complicity with the Final Solution was inevitable and acknowledged it as integral to post-war, anti-fascist activism, on the other. While Miller sided with Arendt, Theodor Adorno, Jean-Paul Sartre, Daniel Bell, and other theorists who advocated the radical potential of acknowledging complicit guilt for the Final Solution, the author remained concerned about its value for those resigned to inaction against social injustice. In an article, originally published in the New York Times under the title “Our Guilt for the World’s Evil” (1965) – which defended Incident at Vichy against a barrage of negative reviews addressing the play’s supposed endorsement of Arendt’s work – he worried that many who accepted their complicity with the injustices of World War II would punish themselves with guilt “to keep from

Modern Drama 61:2 (Summer 2018) 173 GRANT GOSIZK being punished” (“Guilt” 75).3 Miller believed that, if not “transformed into responsibility,” guilt could impinge on the “ethical postulate” that demanded accountability and counteraction against injustice, “becom[ing] a ‘morality’” in itself (74–75). As Susan C.W. Abbotson suggests, Miller believed that “guilt alone is never the answer because, as a passive reaction, guilt is destruc- tive as opposed to the active reaction of accepting responsibility” (398). Indeed, Miller’sreturntothetheatreinthe1960s principally concerned these ethical debates surrounding complicity: namely, its ability to motivate responsibility or induce being resigned to inaction. For Miller, staging the distinctions between these two responses to complicity was problematic. Inherently defined by the passivity and inaction of everyday life, complicity itself seemed to defy theatrical representation. While a particular character’s recognition of complicity could be revealed diegeti- cally, performing responses to it required the superimposition of a trait that had both ethical and physical dimensions. Recognizing the potential of addiction to signify moral and physical decline – a potential mobilized by the American temperance movement with its strong tradition of propagandistic theatre – Miller used addiction to dramatize apathy in After the Fall and Inci- dent at Vichy. By imposing the affliction on characters at pivotal moments in a narrative, during which they grapple with their own guilt for the Holocaust, Miller was able to distinguish theatrically between the positive and negative consequences of post-war guilt. In Incident at Vichy, a German army major’s descent into alcoholic inebriety gives the recognition of his complicity with Nazi occupation in France a visually performable character while simulta- neously ethicizing his resignation. Likewise, in After the Fall, a woman’s habitual barbiturate use becomes the visual manifestation of her reluctance to accept responsibility for historical injustices. In both plays, addiction is integral to dramatizing the ethics of complicity and to articulating Miller’s stance in one of the most controversial debates in twentieth-century American intellectual history. Drawing on contemporary theories of complicity and Miller’s career- long fascination with the relationship between guilt and addiction, I analyse After the Fall and Incident at Vichy as Miller’s most concerted attempts to par- ticipate in intellectual debates on post-war guilt. While analyses of the representations of guilt in these plays are myriad, none has adequately situated those representations within the context of post-war debates. Brenda Murphy discusses Arendt’s theories of guilt but focuses on the archetypes of “forgiveness” and “promise” discussed in The Human Condition (1958), with only brief attention paid to the importance of Eichmann in Jerusalem to Miller’s work. Likewise, Alison Forsyth situates Miller’s work in a long tradition of 1960s Shoah theatre, but Miller’s theoretical engagement with post-war guilt

174 Modern Drama 61:2 (Summer 2018) The Banality of Addiction is not discussed. Even Terry Otten’s The Temptation of Innocence in the Dra- mas of Arthur Miller, which skilfully attributes After the Fall’s ennui to the existentialist rhetoric of Albert Camus’s The Fall (1956), overlooks the play’s debt to a contemporary critical debate on complicity, except for a brief dis- cussion of Paul Tillich’s interpretation of the myth of Eden in Existence and the Christ (1957) (Otten 112).4 Accenting the author’s intellectual dialogue with Arendt, Adorno, and Sartre not only enables a re-evaluation of some of Miller’s least appreciated plays but also adds to the growing body of critical work noting the author’s affinities with New Left politics.5 Likewise, associating this intellectual tradition with the representation of addiction contributes to research on the representation of the addict in modern American culture.6

In an interview for the Paris Review in 1966, Arthur Miller described his first childhood theatre experience as a low-budget “morality play about taking dope.”7 In that play, The Chinese were kidnapping beautiful blond, blue-eyed girls who, people thought, had lost their bearings morally; they were flappers who drank gin and ran around with boys. And they inevitably ended up in some basement in Chinatown, where they were irretrievably lost by virtue of eating opium or smoking some pot. (qtd. in Carlisle and Styron 204) Dramas such as this were immensely popular throughout the early twentieth century, with theatre companies as diverse as the Provincetown Players and the Women’s Christian Temperance Union using addiction as a subject for inquiry and representation. Despite Miller’s facetious description of this play’s melodramatic conception of right and wrong, dramas that polarized representations of sobriety and inebriety along a moral spectrum belonged to a tradition of temperance theatre that indelibly informed Miller’s aesthetics of morality. Throughout the American temperance movement, discrete sobriety organizations used popular media to promote their particular ideological stances on intoxicating substances. Whether promoting moderate drinking practices, abstinence from all intoxicating substances, or legislative prohibition, these organizations used songs, dramas, poems, novels, lectures, and paintings to convey the negative physiological and moral effects of narcotic and alcoholic inebriety. The emerging American tradition of theatrical melodrama proved to be particularly well suited to temperance ideology, in that, as Bruce Mc- Conachie suggests, melodrama presented its subject with a “didactic univer- sality which dr[ove] out all contradiction and ambiguity by excluding the historically specific and the psychologically complex” (189). Indeed, the genre

Modern Drama 61:2 (Summer 2018) 175 GRANT GOSIZK of melodrama, as Peter Brooks contends, depended upon the reduction of character and conflict to “clearly identified antagonists” that compete until “the expulsion of one of them” (17) and the “total articulation of the moral problems” (56). In their application to temperance politics, these aesthetic maxims were manifested in dramas that pitted moral, middle-class temperance advocates against criminal inebriates in didactic theatrical spectacles of recovery or pre-determined decline. Thus, these dramas presented “a universe in which there existed a hierarchy of truths that were to be accepted abso- lutely” (Frick 57): intemperance was immoral; sobriety, the foundation of middle-class sociability. And melodrama thus came to be viewed as a “progressive genre for a progressive ideology” (61). While using a standardized model of melodramatic conflict, performances of addiction throughout the nineteenth century differed significantly according to their specific temperance ideology. Addressing a one-hundred- per-cent increase in per capita alcohol consumption in the years between 1790 and 1830, the first wave of organized temperance ideology emerged from a Federalist political scene that viewed “[i]ncreased drinking [as] symbolic of decline in the power and prestige of the old aristocracy” founded upon Chris- tian and class-marked ideals of self-discipline, and thus it promoted moderate drinking practices to preserve the established social conditions (Gusfield 39; see also White 4, 26–27). Corresponding to this political agenda, contemporary theatrical depictions of addiction emphasized the negative effects of an immoral, inebriate, and upwardly mobile working class upon the mercantile elite and presented temperance values as a means of preserving the moral and social status quo. Conversely, the individualist reform tradition of temperance propaganda that proceeded from Federalist discourse became closely associated with the politics of the antebellum Whig Party that came to power between 1840 and 1850 in the wake of the Second Great Awakening. Con- cerned with how moral values “signified something about a person’s social position or expected social position in an evolving class society” (Wilentz 50; emphasis added), these organizations promoted the reformation of inebriety as part of a moral transformation that was synonymous with middle-class ascendency. As such, dramatic propaganda from this period followed a “generic structure” that “takes the shape of an inverted arc”: “the young family man (always a mechanic, clerk or merchant) takes to drink and slides into complete moral and financial degradation before renouncing alcohol and ful- filling his destiny as he rises on the ladder of economic success and social prestige” (Mason 98). Likewise, temperance reform throughout the postbellum period was predominantly informed by a prohibitionist discourse that promoted legislative intervention to support the nativist politics of late-nineteenth-century populism. Shifting its political focus from the “conservative and progressive

176 Modern Drama 61:2 (Summer 2018) The Banality of Addiction reforms” of previous decades to “[p]opulism and radical social Christianity,” prohibitionism perceived alcohol and narcotics as tempters that affected not only native-born Americans but also immigrants, whose ethnic drinking cultures and moral capabilities were continually called into question (Gusfield 94; see also Musto 65–66). John W. Frick suggests that the dramatic propaganda of this period transferred the blame of intemperance to “external causes and shade[d] the late-nineteenth-century temperance drama toward alcohol’s inherent qualities and capacity to enslave the drinker” by emphasizing the addict’s irreformability and making a spectacle of his or her violent inebriety (169). Despite the party politics that dramatically altered the structure and imagery of temperance theatre over the nineteenth century, all of these depictions shared a moral and aesthetic logic in which inebriety was viewed as a physical manifestation of immorality. Whether associated with ethnic alterity, secularity, or class inferiority (according to the discrete political agendas of the dominant temperance society), addiction remained the antagonist in temperance melodrama’s representations of a moral binary. If more complex than the gendered and racialized archetypes of the temperance theatre that began Miller’s theatrical career, the author’s own portrayals of addiction continued in the tradition of temperance theatre by mobilizing this affliction as a moral signifier. In one of his first theatrical works, The Great Disobedience (1938) – an unpublished prison play about corporate influence within state penal systems – Miller uses the representation of morphine addiction to challenge the simple binary of guilt and innocence afforded by the logic of penitentiaries.8 One of the play’s central narratives concerns a prison psychiatrist’s attempt to cure an inmate’s narcotic addiction as a prison-wide drug smuggling network undercuts his efforts. Given its circumstances, this narrative gives rise to serious questions about agency and intention in guilt. Emphasizing the unequal power dynamics between guards and prisoners as well as between the sober and the inebriated, Barrington, the prison addict, describes being manipulated by jail staff into par- ticipating in an illicit market of contraband: “I didn’twantit...Ididn’twant it. They shove it between the bars . . . I can’tkeepawaywhentheydothat” (36). Undermining the Manichaean logic of the prison system, within which guards are innocent and convicts are guilty, Miller presents the addict–subject as neither innocent nor wholly guilty; rather, he is complicit in his imprison- ment. It is through the archetype of the addict that Miller undermines the binary opposition between guilt and innocence and imagines more nuanced conceptions. Building on the liminal figuring of the addict’s guilt in The Great Dis- obedience, Death of a Salesman (1949) uses the performance of drunkenness to manifest complicity theatrically. Halfway through the second act, Willy, Biff,

Modern Drama 61:2 (Summer 2018) 177 GRANT GOSIZK and Happy Loman find themselves at a dinner they can’t afford, lying to one another about their jobs and prospects, with nothing to do except “get a load on” (83). The scene is predicated on a confession: Biff, who had a job interview earlier that morning, not only failed to get the position but also stole the manager’s pen, and he must confess to his family. He divulges the secret to his brother, but the two argue about whether to tell their father – for Willy has spent his entire life fostering delusions of grandeur, and as financial mis- steps challenge these projections, he has become increasingly depressed. Finally recognizing that his reluctance to intervene in his father’s delusions directly contributes to Willy’s suicidal tendencies, Biff, “high” and “slightly alcoholic,” decides to admit that he has never been a successful businessman, was not offered the job, and has no financial prospects (84). While Biff ulti- mately loses his resolution and lies to his father yet again, the scene’s major contribution to the play is its representation of complicity, with Biff’s guilt over his inaction performed by means of his physiological transformation from sobriety to inebriety. Even in regards to casting, Miller saw a correlation between addiction and guilt. In his autobiography, Timebends, Miller admits that Ed Begley was se- lected to play Keller in the original production of All My Sons (1947) “because he was a reformed alcoholic and still carried the alcoholic’sguilt” (133). Like both Barrington and Biff Loman, Keller is a character whose guilt expresses itself not through direct action but through compliance and passivity: he knew the war planes he helped to manufacture were faulty, but he failed to intervene. Also like them, Keller is described as “aguiltyman” whose “traits could be matched” with the alcoholic’s even though “their causes were completely unre- lated” (133). While Miller’s choice of Begley to play Keller was based on the addict’s subliminal and persistent association with guilt rather than on inebriety’s innately performable character, the choice spoke to the addict’s unique potential to suggest a complex sense of guilt. Miller’s interest in this potential increased after Arendt published Eich- mann in Jerusalem, a work the Partisan Review described as a complete redis- tribution of “political and moral responsibility” in the post-war era (“Editor’s Note”). Not only did Miller closely follow the criticism of Arendt’s work throughout this period; one of the most popular of the myriad responses was his own “The Nazi Trials and the German Heart,” published in the New York Herald Tribune in March of 1964. Less a critique of Arendt’s report than an application of her theories, Miller’s article reported on the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials held in December 1963, the first of their kind in West Ger- many. There, Miller witnessed the same phenomenon that struck Arendt: the “terribly and terrifyingly normal” character of the accused (Arendt, Eichmann 276). While the contextual similarities with Arendt’s report are uncanny,

178 Modern Drama 61:2 (Summer 2018) The Banality of Addiction unlike her strict methodological commitment to the “trial [of] deeds,” Mill- er’s report implored readers to consider their own complicity with the Final Solution. In the same article, he stated, So the question in the Frankfurt courtroom spreads out beyond the defendants and spirals around the world and into the heart of every man. It is his own complicity with murder, even the murders he did not perform himself with his own hands. The murders, however, from which he profited if only by having survived. (“Nazi Trials” 67–68) Expanding Arendt’s conception of complicity, Miller claimed that all who survived the Holocaust owned a portion of its responsibility. This sentiment stood in direct contrast to Arendt’s, who sceptically regarded “organized” or “universal” guilt as dissipating responsibility to the detriment of individual culpability. Instead, Miller conceived of life after World War II as perpetually and inevitably engaged in the injustices of the Final Solution. While distinct from the responsibility attributed to those convicted of crimes against humanity, Miller’s conception of complicity consigned post-Holocaust life to a sense of perennial guilt, rooted in the impossibility of innocence in the post-war era. Nor was Miller alone in this proposition, which participated in a wave of intellectual debates about complicity that had been steadily gaining critical attention since the war’send. Among the most noted of these critical responses was Theodor Adorno’s Prisms (1955), with its famous dictum that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” (34). While primarily concerned with “the extent to which the critic is implicated in the culture he or she examines,” as Naomi Mandel suggests (65; emphasis in original), Adorno’s emphasis on the state of this relationship “assign[ed] culture a quality of complicity with the horrors of the Holocaust” (68). Modifying his statements eleven years later in Negative Dialectics, Adorno reaffirmed this position: it may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems. But it is not wrong to raise the less cultural question whether after Auschwitz you can go on living [. . .]. [M]ere survival calls for the coldness, the basic principle of bourgeois subjectivity, without which there could have been no Auschwitz; this is the drastic guilt of him who was spared. (362–63) Rather than emphasize a critic’s complicity with her subject, Adorno, like Miller, clearly demarcated a relationship between Holocaust guilt and post- war life that was both inevitable and irrevocable. The same was true of Sartre, who significantly influenced Miller’s 1960s catalogue in both content and form.9 Sartre suggested that the one unifying characteristic of the world was its complicity with the Final Solution: “people

Modern Drama 61:2 (Summer 2018) 179 GRANT GOSIZK of the same period and community, who have lived through the same events, who have raised or avoided the same questions, have the same taste in their mouth; they have the same complicity, and there are the same corpses among them” (What Is Literature? 50). While Sartre acknowledged that “we have lived in shame because of our involuntary complicity with the anti-Semites, who have made hangmen of us all,” he shared Arendt’s hope that recognition of this disposition could instigate radical intervention (Anti-Semite 151). Sartre believed that, united by shared guilt, “perhaps we shall begin to understand that we must fight for the Jew, no more and no less than for ourselves,” and thus he held futurity to be complicit (151). This emphasis upon the progressive potential inherent in the acknowledgement of complicity echoed Arendt’s earlier work on the subject in “Orga- nized Guilt and Universal Responsibility” (1945). Despite being better known for its stance against considerations of complicity when formulating state sanctions for the crimes of World War II, Arendt’s essay also suggested that complicity played a productive role in activism. Concluding with a plea for the recognition of complicity in considerations of future anti-fascist crusades, Arendtclaimedthatitwas“[u]pon them and only upon them, who are filled with a genuine fear of the inescapable guilt of the human race, that there can be any reliance when it comes to fighting fearlessly, uncompromisingly, everywhere against the incalculable evil that men are capable of bringing about” (132). Discussions of the role of complicity in anti-fascist activism were not re- stricted to intellectual treatises, as Miller’s two plays After the Fall and Inci- dent at Vichy directly discuss the subject of complicity and its political value. Premiering only months after his Tribune article “The Nazi Trials and the German Heart,” Incident at Vichy was popularly received as a response to the Auschwitz trials, according to Gene A. Plunka (157). Principally concerned with the ethics of inaction for those involved in and subjected to the racial inspection processes in Nazi-occupied France, the play, like Arendt’s Eich- mann, was popularly rebuked for supposedly suggesting that guilt for the Holocaust was collectively shared and thus diminishing individual responsibility for the Final Solution. Plunka summarizes: Coming on the heels of Hannah Arendt’s treatise on the banality of evil in Eichmann in Jerusalem, critics challenged Miller’s premise that if all of us are complicit with Nazi crimes, then none of us can be held responsible; in short, Miller, like Arendt, was accused of removing the Germans from the burden of their Holocaust crimes. (158) On the contrary, both plays serve to clarify the author’s stance on complicity’s value beyond an Arendtian conception of “organized guilt.” After all,

180 Modern Drama 61:2 (Summer 2018) The Banality of Addiction

After the Fall and Incident at Vichy deploy the archetypes of a long tradition of American temperance theatre that associated inebriety with immorality and inevitable decline in order to shade distinctions between two differing consequences of complicity. Throughout the temperance movement, sobriety organizations used an established aesthetic lexicon for their dramatic propaganda, which made a spectacle of the addict’s violent criminality and determi- nistic fate in order to reinforce didactically a moral imperative for temperance values. These aesthetic devices were later used by discrete temperance organizations with adjacent social reform interests, such as evangelism, suffragism, abolitionism, and populism, to attach a similarly binary morality to their respective political interests. Just as some temperance supporters emphasized the “callous disregard for humanity” that both slaveholders and liquor sales- men seemed to share in order to associate abolition with the moral value (and political leverage) of the temperance movement, so too did others use the spectacles of drunken domestic violence to advocate for women’s hygiene, suffrage, and children’s welfare programs; and so too did Miller use depictions of addiction to ethicize conceptions of complicity (see Zieger 63). On the one hand, Miller bemoaned the complacency that might emerge in response to a widespread sense of complicity; on the other, he drew inspira- tion from Arendt’s suggestion that the acknowledgement of complicity could lead one to “fight fearlessly, uncompromisingly, everywhere against the incalculable evil that men are capable of bringing about” (“Organized Guilt” 132). In Incident at Vichy, these two potential results of a sense of complicity are dramatized through the opposing narratives of its two main characters: Von Berg and an unnamed Wehrmacht Major. The former, a dethroned Austrian prince wrongfully detained by Nazi authorities, struggles with a sense of guilt derived from his knowledge that he will be released without consequence while other prisoners face deportation and certain death; the lat- ter evaluates his personal guilt for the racial inspection of detainees, despite his personal objections to the process. Each character responds to his sense of complicity in a markedly different way, with the distinction made visible through the representation of inebriety. Inspired by a fellow prisoner’s declaration that it is “not your guilt I want, [but] your responsibility” (289), Von Berg’s recognition of his own complicity becomes the impetus for his radical intervention. Offering his identification documents to one of his fellow prisoners and ensuring the man’s safety at the expense of his own, Von Berg makes a concerted effort to use his personal influence to undermine Nazi eugenics. While the effective- ness of this act is undercut by the play’s final scene – which features the transportation of new Jewish prisoners to the deportation centre – Von Berg’s actions nonetheless testify to the value for anti-fascist activism of recognizing

Modern Drama 61:2 (Summer 2018) 181 GRANT GOSIZK one’s complicity. Decades later, Mandel would claim that “complicity pre- cedes the charge of collaboration or the conclusion of culpability” and “is, in fact, the condition of possibility for the articulation of these charges” (22; emphasis in original). Similarly, Von Berg articulates his own complicity with a fascist authority he innately opposes by recognizing his own responsibility for the crimes from which he profits, if only in survival. And thus he creates an opportunity to act against this fascist authority. The Wehrmacht Major’s recognition of his complicity with the racial inspection processes of the Nazi detention centre inspires very different results. Like Von Berg, the Major is disgusted by the facility and by his role, however detached, in its deportation tactics; this disgust leads to a period of profound speculation on the ethics of inaction, during which he absents himself from its proceedings. Yet when he returns, “‘high’–with drink and a flow of emotion” (280), the recognition of his complicity and, more importantly, the ubiquity of complicity in fascist occupation become a justification for his inaction. In a conversation with one of the prisoners, Leduc, he asks, MAJOR: It means nothing to you that I have feelings about this? LEDUC: Nothing whatever, unless you get us out of here. [. . .] I will love you as long as I live. [. . .] MAJOR: It’s amazing; you don’t understand anything. Nothing of that kind is left, don’t you understand that yet? [. . .] There are no persons anymore, don’t you see that? There will never be persons again. [. . .] I have you at the end of this revolver – (indicates the Professor) – he has me – and somebody has him – and somebody has somebody else. (280–81) If Von Berg’s recognition of complicity incites a radical gesture, the Major’s guilt functions only as leverage in an emotional transaction, one that en- courages self-preservation and the abdication of responsibility for social injustice on the grounds that evil has become banal. While both active and apathetic responses to complicity are given equal representation, Miller’semphasisontheMajor’sinebrietycreatesalegiblemoral difference between the two. Conforming with the monster-metamorphosis motif popularized in temperance discourse – in which substance abuse facilitates amarkedphysicaloremotional transformation – the Major’s transition from anti-fascist German soldier into Nazi accomplice is explicitly marked by his drunkenness. In the prohibitionist discourse of temperance media, the moral connotations of addiction were visualized through spectacular physical transfor- mations into monsters and inhumanly violent villains. This motif was famously depicted in Robert Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886),

182 Modern Drama 61:2 (Summer 2018) The Banality of Addiction for example, and in Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Black Cat” (1843), each of which ethicizes its protagonist’s transition from sobriety into inebriety by pairing it with a supernatural transformation. In the former, the moral consequences of Dr. Jekyll’s thinly veiled alcoholic indulgence are conveyed through not only the criminal acts he commits while intoxicated but also the transformation that he undergoes into the brutish, racialized, and class-marked Mr. Hyde. Like- wise,inPoe’sstory,thenarrator’s transition from sobriety to inebriety is ethicized not only through his spectacular assault upon the cat but also through the haunting that occurs thereafter. Speaking generally on the device, Susan Zieger has suggested that the monster-metamorphosis motif in temperance literature correlated “[t]he horror of realizing that one has become the detested Other” with “the dramas of self-transformation by which middle-class professional men ruined themselves through drink” (185). Like Dr. Jekyll’s transformation into Mr. Hyde, the Major’s transition into complacent complicity is superimposed upon a typical temperance narrative of moral inevitability. This superimposition imbues his decisions regard- ing his complicity with the same connotations of immorality as would have attached to his alcoholism in a temperance discourse. Von Berg’s response, at once sober and the reverse of complacent, is ethicized inversely. The superimposed motifs that condemn the Major vindicate Von Berg: because he does not drink, none of the moral opprobrium implicit in temperance imagery attaches to his response to his complicity. Moreover, the play’s tableau conclusion reinforces his being the moral opposite of the Wehrmacht Major. They stand looking into each other’s eyes during a chaotic search for an es- caped prisoner: “They stand there, forever incomprehensible to one another, looking into each other’s eyes” and “staring at each other so strangely” (291). This approach to ethicizing the distinctions between differing responses to complicity also appears in After the Fall,withitssimilardebttoEichmann in Jer- usalem. Echoing Arendt’sfamouscritiqueof“collective guilt”–that, “where all are guilty, nobody in the last analysis can be judged” (“Organized Guilt” 126) – Leslie Epstein has described After the Fall as representing a “world of guilt” in which personal and social injustices “dissolved into the sins of the world, so [that] the guilt of the Nazis fade[d] into the general culpability of mankind” (171). Bigsby, also drawing on Arendt’s work, suggests the opposite – that the play contests this axiom – and concludes that “the desire to insist on innocence is itself at the very root of human cruelty” (Arthur Miller: 1962–2005 50). Miller himself suggested that the negative reviews of After the Fall reminded him of the “righteous indignation which greeted Hannah Arendt’s controversial book, Eichmann in Jerusalem” (“With Respect” 66). However, unlike in Incident,in which the representation of drunkenness is used to distinguish between the positive and negative consequences of accepting Holocaust complicity, the

Modern Drama 61:2 (Summer 2018) 183 GRANT GOSIZK addiction imagery in After the Fall is used to demonstrate an untenable insistence on innocence in the post-war era. Primarily concerned with one man’s investigation of the boundary between guilt and innocence, After the Fall re-enacts the memories of its protagonist, Quentin, as he reflects on his ethical relationship to the major events of his life. Throughout the play, characters emerge whose respective deeds and relationships to the protagonist serve to call into question the nature of complicity. The most formidable of these is Quentin’s wife, Maggie, whose tragic drug overdose at the play’s conclusion represents a response to the recognition of complicity and becomes the impetus for Quentin’s own acknowledgement that complicity can have a productive end. Throughout the first half of the play, Maggie is characterized by a naïve honesty that often reveals her own cooperation with those who manipulate and exploit her. Plagued by hallucinations in which the ghost of her mother criticizes her ethics, Maggie describes being born into the sins of her parents: QUENTIN: Well – possibly you felt she didn’t want you to call me. MAGGIE: (astounded) How’d you know that? QUENTIN: You said she was so moral. And here you’re calling a married man. MAGGIE: Yes! She tried to kill me once with a pillow on my face ’cause I would turn out bad because of – like her sin. (86) Associating her mother’s abuse with morality, Maggie shows a fundamental characteristic of her self-conception: that she not only feels responsible for the immoral behaviour in which she actively participates – subliminally acknowledging, as Quentin suggests, her role in instigating a romance with a married man – but also understands her own existence as a manifestation of her mother’s wrongdoings. Taking this perspective on complicity as a lens for viewing Maggie’s personal life, Quentin describes Maggie’s sexual liaisons – with a “long line of grinning men” who “chewed and spat [her] out” (95) – as acts that fulfilled her unconscious desire to give “to those in need” (92–93). He goes as far as to suggest that she cooperated in the unjust business deal- ings that plagued her early in her career because she “seem[ed] to think” that she “owe[d] people whatever they demand[ed]” (96). It is Maggie’s acknowledgement of her complicity that Quentin first ad- mires, calling her ability to “tell the truth, even against yourself” (87), “proof, somehow, that people can win” (101), which is to say that they can outlive the sins of their past. Extrapolating this idea into a more general comment on the nature of guilt in the post-war era, Quentin applauds Maggie’s recognition of her complicity as the apex of morality: “You’re a very moral girl, Maggie. [. . .] You’re not pretending to be [. . .] – innocent!” (87). Having declared the immorality of pretending innocence in the post-war landscape, Quentin

184 Modern Drama 61:2 (Summer 2018) The Banality of Addiction decides to confront his own “terror of complicity” (95) and thereby condemn the “whole high administration of fake innocence!” (96–97). He accordingly turns toward the concentration camp wall that overlooks the stage and asks, “Who can be innocent again on this mountain of skulls?” (127). However, Maggie’s understanding of complicity quickly changes. After discovering an excerpt of Quentin’s journal in which he questions his ability to love and admits to contemplating suicide, Maggie begins indulging in intoxi- cants and renounces all responsibility for the injustices of her life. Throughout Act Two, Quentin challenges this renunciation, imploring Maggie to recognize that, in their marriage, they “used one another” (120) –“you’ve got to start to look at what you’re doing” (116;emphasisinoriginal)– only to be met with her persistent objections. Like Incident at Vichy, which used the performance of inebriety to address the complacency that complicity can beget, After the Fall uses a representation of addiction in order to demonize an equally untenable response to complicity: an insistence on innocence in a post-war climate in which merely to exist is to be complicit in the injustices of the past. Citing Maggie’s habitual barbiturate use as a way of renouncing guilt and indefensibly maintaining innocence, Quentin extols upon the ways in which Maggie’s addiction has altered her understanding of complicity: You eat those pills to blind yourself, but if you could only say, “I have been cruel,” this frightening room would open. If you could say, “I have been kicked around, but I have been just as inexcusably vicious to others, called my husband idiot in public, I have been utterly selfish despite my generosity, I have been hurt by a long line of men but I have cooperated with my persecutors –” [. . .] But no pill can make us innocent. Throw them in the sea, throw death in the sea and all your innocence. Do the hardest thing of all – see your own hatred and live! (121) Asserting that recovery from addiction and the recognition of complicity are integral parts of the same process of “see[ing] your own hatred and liv[ing],” Quentin makes abundantly clear the relationship between addiction and the insistence on innocence. Drawing on the language of temperance spectacle, which physicalized the moral degeneration of addiction through the performance of the addicted body, Miller ethicizes the insistence on innocence (and the corollary denial of complicity) in a way that makes the ethical breach visually legible. Much like the antebellum temperance “sensation scenes” that appealed to a “spectator’s understanding of purity and sanctity” by playing to concerns that were “closely tied to and expressed by the body” (Hughes 84), Miller ethicized the post-war insistence upon innocence by emphasizing its association with the negative corporeal experiences of addiction. As Amy Hughes suggests,

Modern Drama 61:2 (Summer 2018) 185 GRANT GOSIZK

Antebellum temperance discourse and iconography tended to spectacularize normalcy and deviance, setting them side by side. The pure and sober man ensured economic, professional, and familial stability; whereas the impure drunkard, his mind pickled with liquor, lost all. Horrifying and grotesque, the DTs [delirium tremens] served as sensational evidence of a man’s abjection, his deplorable failure to stay within the boundaries of middle-class normalcy. (84) Performances of the addicted body were popular throughout the temperance movement, with many of the most famous temperance dramas, including W.H. Smith’s The Drunkard; or, The Fallen Saved (1844) and Elliot McBride’s Under The Curse (1881), presenting visceral performances of alcoholic overdose. In Smith’s The Drunkard, the spectacular scene of protagonist Edward Middle- ton’s delirium tremens – including spasms and hallucinations – presents the addict–subject as the embodiment of immorality in a didactic gesture toward the morality of sobriety that emphasizes his physical exceptionality: (on ground in delirium) Here, here, friend, take it off, will you? – these snakes, how they coil round me. Oh, how strong they are! there, don’t kill it, no, no, don’t kill it! give it brandy, poison it with rum, that will be a judicious punishment, that would be justice, ha, ha! justice! ha! ha! (33) Similarly, Miller ethicizes Maggie’s response to the recognition of complicity by emphasizing the physical exceptionality that her addiction creates. By manifesting Maggie’s approach to guilt through the performance of addiction, Miller provides a contrast against which Quentin’s sober recognition of complicity can be presented. Questioning his complicity with Mag- gie’s overdose in his famous catechism, “In whose name do you ever turn your back – (he looks out at the audience) – but in your own? [. . .] Always in your own blood-covered name,” Quentin quickly turns his attention “toward the tower” of the concentration camp, questioning if he, like the rest of humanity, is not also complicit in its atrocities: “I know how to kill? . . . I know, I know – [. . .] And I am not alone, and no man lives who would not rather be the sole survivor of this place than all its finest victims! [. . .] [B]ut my brothers built this place; our hearts have cut these stones!” (126–27). Quentin suggests that, when one acknowledges one’s complicity with the world’s evil, the opportunity “not to be afraid” of life presents itself: To know, and even happily that we meet unblessed; not in some garden of wax fruit and painted trees, that lie of Eden, but after, after the Fall, after many, many deaths. Is the knowing all? And the wish to kill is never killed, but with some gift of courage one may look into his face when it appears, and with some stroke of love – [. . .] forgive it; again and again . . . forever? [. . .] No, it’s not certainty, I don’t feel that. But it does seem feasible . . . not to be afraid. Perhaps it’s all one has. (127–28)

186 Modern Drama 61:2 (Summer 2018) The Banality of Addiction

While negating the possibility of innocence in the post-war landscape through his allusions to Adam and Eve’s post-lapsarian banishment, Quentin’smono- logue suggests that the ongoing recognition of individual complicity with historical and personal injustices is integral to preventing their recurrence. This idea shares its thesis with Arendt’s famous maxim that, “[u]pon them and only upon them, who are filled with a genuine fear of the inescapable guilt of the human race, can there be any reliance when it comes to fighting fearlessly, uncompromisingly, everywhere against the incalculable evil that men are capable of bringing about” (“Organized Guilt” 132). This conclusion is further rein- forced by the play’s denouement, which presents in tableau Quentin’s mis- deeds even as it preserves the possibility of futurity: “He moves away with her [a new lover] as a loud whispering comes up from all his people, who follow behind, endlessly alive” (128). Quentin’s recognition of his complicity with his failed ro- mances, his family’s disintegration, his colleague’s death, and the Holocaust itself ensures that these memories will not be forgotten; it also forestalls their recurrence and thus presents the only way for Quentin to conceive of “risk[ing] it again” by continuing to live (76). Therefore, for Quentin, guilt – and particularly the recognition of an insidiously passive complicity – is not only indis- pensable in accounting for past injustices but also crucial to conceptualizing the possibilities of life after World War II. In After the Fall and Incident at Vichy, the two works in which Arthur Miller most directly addressed contemporaneous theories of post-war guilt, the representation of addiction works dramatically to theatricalize unethical responses to the concept of ubiquitous complicity. While addiction is used differently in each text, both plays emphasize the addict’s transformative potential. In Incident at Vichy, Miller presents the Major’s transformation from sobriety to alcoholic inebriety as a physical manifestation of his transition from innocence to complicit collaboration, an act that not only physi- cally marks his moral culpability but also distinguishes between a recognition of complicity that justifies injustice and one that mobilizes counter action. Similarly, After the Fall presents Maggie’s transition from sobriety to addiction as a moral emblem of her untenable insistence on innocence in the post- war era. Thus, it is in these dramas that the author made his most concerted contributions to contemporary theories of complicity and post-war guilt. Directly addressing noted theorists such as Arendt, Adorno, and Sartre, Miller presented the recognition of universal complicity as the first step toward the possibility of ethical survival in the post-war world. Mandel recently suggested that “complicity is the condition of possibility for accountability” and that “accountability without complicity is not accountability at all” (217). So too did Miller reveal recognition of complicity as the first step toward grappling ethically with the atrocities of the past, precisely by

Modern Drama 61:2 (Summer 2018) 187 GRANT GOSIZK mobilizing tropes of addiction influenced by temperance discourse. After the Fall and Incident at Vichy therefore help us to re-evaluate the political Miller, who until recently had been under significant fire, and to understand how his representations of addiction contributed to theories of complicity in the 1960s.

NOTES 1. The edition of After the Fall cited here is Secker and Warburg’s first Brit- ish edition of the “revised final stage version” of the play (1965) – originally printed in the United States by Viking Press in 1964. Because the arguments made in this article are predominantly historical and thus aim to best represent the author’s thoughts on the contemporary historical and cultural context, I have used the original published edition, despite subsequent editions that have “restored” the text to its original form. 2. Suggesting that no book of the past decade had “provoked as much con- troversy,” between 1963 and 1965 the Partisan Review reserved a lengthy section of each issue for public responses to Arendt’s Eichmann (“Editor’s Note”). Contributors included Mary McCarthy, Daniel Bell, Lionel Abel, and many others. 3. This article was later retitled “Guilt and Incident at Vichy” and was published in the author’s collected essays. 4. For more on Miller’s relationship to Camus’s The Fall, see Campo; Kop- penhaver; Royal. 5. Alan M. Wald’s recent suggestion that Miller was a “struggling Marxist playwright since the late 1930s” is just one example (182). 6. For more on the representation of addiction in modern American culture, see Banco; Borst; Cannon; Frick; and Zieger. 7. While the play that Miller saw is unknown, the timeline implicit in the article would suggest that it was produced around 1925. 8. The Great Disobedience was submitted as an assignment for one of Miller’s first writing courses at the University of Michigan. It remains unpublished but was most likely performed by the university’s performance collective while Miller was a student. 9. Despite never meeting Sartre, Miller had numerous professional liaisons with the existentialist philosopher. In 1957, Sartre adapted Miller’s The Crucible into a French film widely circulated in East Germany; in the late 1940s, Miller visited Paris’s Montana Bar (a popular existentialist haunt) and heard Sartre speak; and the friendship of Miller’s third wife, Inge Morath, with Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir certainly meant that the playwright was familiar with their work (see Bigsby, Miller: 1915–1962 254, 304, 305, 313; Bigsby, Arthur Miller: 1962–2005 2, 258, 260). Several critics have noted similarities between Miller’s 1960s output and Sartre’s

188 Modern Drama 61:2 (Summer 2018) The Banality of Addiction

“drama of situation”–a style of radical playwriting that emphasized a character’s exercise of free will (see, e.g., Lowenthal).

WORKS CITED Abbotson, Susan C.W. Critical Companion to Arthur Miller: A Literary Reference to His Life and Work. Facts on File, 2007. Adorno, Theodor W. Negative Dialectics. Translated by E.B. Ashton, Routledge, 1973. Adorno, Theodor W. Prisms. Translated by Shierry Weber Nicholsen and Samuel Weber, MIT P, 1967. Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Penguin, 1994. Arendt, Hannah. “Organized Guilt and Universal Responsibility.” Essays in Understanding, 1930–1954. Harcourt Brace, 1994,pp121–32. Banco, Lindsey Michael. Travel and Drugs in Twentieth-Century Literature. Routledge, 2010. Bigsby, Christopher. Arthur Miller: 1915–1962. Phoenix, 2008. Bigsby, Christopher. Arthur Miller: 1962–2005. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2012. Bigsby, Christopher. Review of Stone Tower: The Political Theater of Arthur Miller. Comparative Drama, vol. 43, no. 3, 2009, pp. 401–2, https://doi. org/10.1353/cdr.0.0067. Borst, Allan G. Towards National Identity: Addiction, Subjectivity, and American Literary Culture. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2009. Brooks, Peter. The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess. Yale UP, 1976. Campo, Carlos. “Friendship as Unifying Motif in The Fall and After the Fall.” Arthur Miller Journal, vol. 3, no. 2, 2008, pp. 33–40. Cannon, Eoin F. The Saloon and the Mission: Addiction, Conversion, and the Politics of Redemption in American Culture. U of Massachusetts P, 2013. Carlisle, Olga, and Rose Styron. “The Art of the Theatre II: An Interview with Arthur Miller.” Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, vol. 3, Secker and Warburg, 1967, pp. 197–230. “Editor’s Note.” Partisan Review, vol. 30, no. 2, 1963,p.210. Epstein, Leslie. “The Unhappiness of Arthur Miller.” TriQuarterly, vol. 3, 1965, pp. 165–73. Forsyth, Alison. “The Trauma of Articulation: Holocaust Representation in After the Fall and Broken Glass.” Arthur Miller Journal, vol. 3, no. 2, 2008, pp. 41–60. Frick, John W. Theatre, Culture and Temperance Reform in Nineteenth- Century America. Cambridge UP, 2003.

Modern Drama 61:2 (Summer 2018) 189 GRANT GOSIZK

Gusfield, Joseph R. Symbolic Crusade: Status Politics and the American Temperance Movement. U of Illinois P, 1963. Hughes, Amy E. Spectacles of Reform: Theater and Activism in Nineteenth- Century America. U of Michigan P, 2012, https://doi.org/10.3998/ mpub.4993455. Koppenhaver, Allen J. “The Fall and After: Albert Camus and Arthur Miller.” Modern Drama, vol. 9, no. 2, 1966, pp. 206–9, https://doi.org/ 10.3138/md.9.2.206. Lowenthal, Lawrence. “Arthur Miller’s Incident at Vichy: A Sartrean Interpretation.” Modern Drama, vol. 18, no. 1, 1975, pp. 29–41, https:// doi.org/10.3138/md.18.1.29. Mandel, Naomi. Against the Unspeakable: Complicity, the Holocaust, and Slavery in America. U of Virginia P, 2006. Mason, Jeffrey D. “Poison It with Rum; or, Validation and Delusion: Antebellum Temperance Drama as Cultural Method.” Pacific Coast Philology, vol. 25, no. 1/2, 1990, pp. 96–105, https://doi.org/10.2307/ 1316809. McConachie, Bruce. Melodramatic Formations: American Theatre and Society, 1820–1870. Iowa UP, 1992. Miller, Arthur. After the Fall. Secker and Warburg, 1965. Miller, Arthur. Death of a Salesman: Certain Private Conversations in Two Acts and a Requiem. Penguin, 1961. Miller, Arthur. The Great Disobedience. Unpublished manuscript, Arthur Miller Collection, Special Collection Library, University of Michigan Library, 1938. Miller, Arthur. “Guilt and Incident at Vichy.” Echoes Down the Corridor, edited by Steven R. Centola, Methuen, 2000, pp. 69–76. Miller, Arthur. Incident at Vichy. Arthur Miller Plays: Two, Methuen, 1988, pp. 243–93. Miller, Arthur. “The Nazi Trials and the German Heart.” Echoes Down the Corridor, edited by Steven R. Centola, Methuen, 2000, pp. 62–68. Miller, Arthur. Timebends: A Life. Harper and Row, 1988. Miller, Arthur. “With Respect for Her Agony – but with Love.” Life, Feb. 1964,p.66. Murphy, Brenda. “Arendt, Kristeva, and Arthur Miller: Forgiveness and Promise in After the Fall.” PMLA, vol. 117, no. 2, 2002, pp. 314–16, https://doi.org/10.1632/003081202X62079. Musto, David F. The American Disease: Origins of Narcotic Control. Yale UP, 1973. Otten, Terry. The Temptation of Innocence in the Dramas of Arthur Miller. U of Missouri P, 2002.

190 Modern Drama 61:2 (Summer 2018) The Banality of Addiction

Plunka, Gene A. Holocaust Drama: The Theater of Atrocity. Cambridge UP, 2009, https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511576591. Royal, Derek Parker. “Camusian Existentialism in Arthur Miller’s After the Fall.” Modern Drama, vol. 43, no. 2, 2000, pp. 192–203, https://doi.org/ 10.3138/md.43.2.192. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Anti-Semite and Jew. Translated by George J. Becker, Schocken, 1972. Sartre, Jean-Paul. What Is Literature? Translated by Bernard Frechtman, Methuen, 1981. Smith, W.H. The Drunkard; or, The Fallen Saved. Ames’, Clyde, OH, 1856. Wald, Alan M. Trinity of Passion: The Literary Left and the Antifascist Crusade. U of North Carolina P, 2007, https://doi.org/10.5149/ 9780807882368_wald. White, William. Slaying the Dragon: The History of Addiction Treatment and Recovery in America. Chestnut Health Systems, 1998. Wilentz, Sean. “On Class and Politics in Jacksonian America.” Reviews in American History, vol. 10, no. 4, 1982, pp. 45–63, https://doi.org/10.2307/ 2701818. Zieger, Susan. Inventing the Addict: Drugs, Race, and Sexuality in Nineteenth- Century British and American Literature. U of Massachusetts P, 2008.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR grant gosizk is a PhD Candidate and Assistant Lecturer in the Centre for American Studies and the School of English at the University of Kent. His dissertation, “Acting Addicts: The Theatre between the Wars on Drugs,” explores the legacies of temperance aesthetics in post-Prohibition American theatre.

Modern Drama 61:2 (Summer 2018) 191