Loyola University Chicago Loyola eCommons Dissertations Theses and Dissertations 1973 Suicide in the Plays of Arthur Miller: A View from Glory Mountain Sonia Wandruff Slavensky Loyola University Chicago Follow this and additional works at: https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss Recommended Citation Slavensky, Sonia Wandruff, "Suicide in the Plays of Arthur Miller: A View from Glory Mountain" (1973). Dissertations. 1401. https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss/1401 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses and Dissertations at Loyola eCommons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Loyola eCommons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. Copyright © 1973 Sonia Wandruff Slavensky SUICIDE IN THE PLAYS OF ARTHUR MILLER: A VIEW FROM GLORY MOUNTAIN By Sonia Wandruf f Slavensky A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Loyola University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy June 1973 "One sees that there will be no ecstasy," Madame Lhevine said. "And that is when the crisis comes. It comes, you might say, when we see the future too clearly, and we see that it is a plain, an endless plain, and not what we had thought--a mountain with a glory at the top." --Arthur Miller, "The Prophecy" ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I should like to thank the people who helped make this dissertation possible. I am pa~ticularly grateful to my advisor, Professor Stanley A. Clayes, through whose guidance and encouragement my somewhat unorthod6x approach to an unorthodox subject was allowed to develop. My thanks to my teacher and friend, the late Herbert Abel, Professor of Classics, who made the Ancients live for me, and to Pro­ fessors Rosemary Harnett and James Rocks, my readers, for their kind cooperation. Thanks also to Dr. John Weiss who sent me Dr. Steiner's work, and Dr. J.F. Prilby, Chicago­ Read Mental Health Center whose generous contributions of materials and bibliography were of immense help. To Melvin D. Faber whose fine dissertation "Suicide in Shakespeare," provided the groundwork for my research, but especially to my children, Leah and Rael, without whose love and faith none of this could have been possible. Finally, to the short-sighted English professor who shall go unnamed, but who inspired this dissertation by remarking that he had never met a man like Willy Loman. My undying gratitude. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS . • • . • • . • • • . • • . • . • . iii PREFACE ............................................. v CHAPTER I. ATTITUDES AND REACTIONS TO SUICIDE ANCIENT AND MODERN ....................... 1 II. SUICIDE IN DRAMA FROM HEROIC SUICIDE TO HAMARTIC SCRIPT ....................... 28 I I l. SUICIDE AS UNITY IN ALL MY SONS .......... 71 IV. THE HAMAR T IC PLAYS . 119 Death of a Salesman The Crucible A View From the Bridge v. AFTER THE FALL: THE ENDLESS PLAIN ....... 183 A Memori of Two Mondays The Mis its After the Fall Incident At Vichy The Price VI. CONCLUSION ............................... 217 A SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY . .. 225 iv PREFACE To study and understand the use of suicide in the work of a modern dramatist presents special difficulties. For example, it would be foolish to ignore the various psycho-social and cultural influences which have condi­ tioned both the playwright and his audiences to think and feel' very negatively about the subject of suicide; on the other_hand, it would be just as foolish to ignore influ­ ences not easily measured through statistical and psycho­ logical analyses which create some positive attitudes to­ ward the same problem. My conviction that both science and mythology must be accounted for led to my discovery of the work of Claude Steiner, whose theory of life scripts syn­ thesizes both scientific and mythological view of suicide and emerges with the concept of a personalized mythology-­ the Hamartic script--which is acted out by a contemporary hero--the Hamartic hero. My research on suicide in drama clearly confirmed the presence of a dramatic convention, including a suicidal hero and a stock situation, which is expected to evoke the same response each time it is repeated. Supposedly then, the convention of dramatic suicide should be recognized as an archetypal action which has become an established pattern or "script," and which is recognized by virtually every v known culture. There is no doubt that Arthur Miller, first unconsciously, then consciously, uses this pattern to great advantage. Miller, in fact, has so integrated the idea and convention of suicide into the central texture of his drama­ turgy that it has become an indelible stamp of his personal style and thought. It is also an important key to his de­ velopment. Though suicides are found in all Miller's best plays but The Price, the entire body of his work is concerned with suicidal individuals and their personal struggles. He does, in effect, use suicide as the metaphorical embodiment of what he believes to be the modern equivalent of the heroic behavior seen in the tragedies of Sophocles, Euri­ pides, Shakespeare, Racine, and of course, Ibsen--all of whom used the convention of dramatic suicide to express heroic defiance in the face of catastrophe. For Miller, as we shall see, the course of his development as a playwright and thinker can be measured by the evolution of his view of suicide. vi CHAPTER I ATTITUDES AND REACTIONS TO SUICIDE ANCIENT AND MODERN There is but one philosophical problem and that is suicide. --Camus1 Before suicide could become part of the stage voca­ bulary it had to take its form and meaning from life. One must then speculate that dramatic suicides had their roots in real events which in time underwent a mythologizing pro- cess and were subsequently dramatized in an idealized form. Reactions by the audience became, in turn, very highly stereo­ " typed. Depending on the context, some stage suicides called forth condemnation from the audience while others called forth admiration, or the desired "catharsis" of pity and fear. 2 The point being that heroic suicide became a stage convention and the suicidal hero became a type, which as we all know means that he had to fulfill some of the audience's preconceived expectations. As Warshow explains, it is not 1Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus (New York: Vin­ tage Press, 1955), p. 3. 2see Melvin D. Faber, "Suicide in Shakespeare" (un­ published Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles, 1964). Faber theorizes that.suicide has.always been acceptable in some contexts and inexcusable 1n others. p. 29££. 1 2 necessary, in the case of such a type, for there to be any correspondence between audience experience and the stage ex­ perience: "It is only in an ultimate sense that the type appeals to its audience's experience of reality; much -more immediately, it appeals to previous experience of the type itself: it creates its own field of reference. 111 It is this field of reference that will be explored before we turn to the task of exploring suicide in the plays of Arthur Mil­ ler. In the next two chapters I will in fact be establish­ ing the principles peculiar to the world of the suicide, principles which seem often to be the inverse of what most of us think of as the normal world. We shall begin with some history, or rather pre­ history. The exact beginnings are somewhat vague but the .Golden Bough speaks of early customs which required the king or chief to kill himself when he showed signs of age, dis- ease, wounds or other imperfections. There were in addition some kings who were required to execute themselves before their people at the end of an alloted period of time. The execution took the form of public sacrifice before an idol and consisted of gradual auto-dismemberment until, weak from loss of blood, the king, in mortal agony, cut his own throat. As the ritual is completed, relates Frazer, "whoever desires 1Robert Warshaw, "The Gangster as a Tragic Hero," in Tragedy: Vision and Form, ed. by Robert W. Corrigan (San Francisco: Chandler Publishing Company, 1965), p. 154. Originally from Robert Warshaw, The Immediate Experience (Doubleday, 1954), pp. 127-133. 3 to reign another twelve years and undertake this martyrdom for love of the idol, has to be present looking on at this: and from that place they raise him up as king."l As kings became wiser, they chose substitutes who were allowed the dubious privilege of dying for their kings. Often the king permitted the substitute to reign for a short period to qualify for his role and the victim was royally treated prior to being sacrificed. 2 Though the next step in the evolution is not discussed by Frazer, it seems logical to surmise that the substitutes, too, had their moments of inspiration during which one or another of them discovered that the sacrifice could be transformed into a symbolic ritual which achieved the same effect without loss of life. Thus the bloody sacrificial rite became, somehow, a benign ritual. Even so, because suicide had been reserved for the king-god or his substitute, the suicides of slaves or com- moners were bound to incur severe penalties for usurpation of the kingly privilege. In fact, there is still an aris- tocratic aura surrounding the idea of suicide; we still debate the right of the individual to take his own life-- 1sir James G. Frazer, The Golden Bough, ed. by Theodore H. Gaster (New York: The American Library, 1959), p. 281. 2This is similar to the practice of Samurai warriors who killed themselves in order to serve their leader in the next world.