Family Values and Affinity in the Works of Arthur Miller – a Thematic Study
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FAMILY VALUES AND AFFINITY IN THE WORKS OF ARTHUR MILLER – A THEMATIC STUDY A thesis submitted to the BHARATHIDASAN UNIVERSITY in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the award of the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN ENGLISH By D. PRASAD Supervisor Dr. K. SUNDARARAJAN POST GRADUATE AND RESEARCH DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH AVVM SRI PUSHPAM COLLEGE (AUTONOMOUS) POONDI – 613503 THANJAVUR TAMILNADU – INDIA OCTOBER - 2011 ABSTRACT Family is an integral part of the society. Every individual attaches importance to his family. He showers love and affection on his family members and strives for the upliftment of his family. In this context, most of the plays of Arthur Miller depict the life of an individual in the society, and the values he attaches to his family, the emotions shared with his family members. Arthur Miller‟s plays reveal his deep concern for ordinary people and their values. His plays are obviously family concerned. His heroes are failed husband and fathers because, Miller has recognized that the most impressive family plays from Oedipus have modified the concept of family and of the individual under the pressure of society. The first chapter gives an introduction to Arthur Miller and his plays. His contemporary American writers, the themes handled by them. It also deals with the role of family in the plays of the writer. Family in Arthur Miller‟s plays has a vital and major role. Miller regards family as a polis. He treats family as a means to delineate the affectional ties among the members of the family. Also he uses family relationships as something wider in social context. He always sees the family as related to the larger group, the society in inseparable and life-giving ways. Miller uses family as a microcosm of society. He feels that there is something beyond family; the society is to be treated as a larger family. The second chapter analyses the fatherly affection, love, and responsibility shared in a family situation in All My Sons. All My Sons may be considered as a drama of family relationships. Though it appears to be arguing strongly in favour of certain positive relationship between the individual and society, in All My Sons, family relations are predominant. The play deals with the relationship between the mother and the son, the father and the son, the husband and the wife, the brother and the sister and so on. All My Sons deals with large social issues which reveal interaction of various family relationships and their interlinked sentiments and affection for one another. The third chapter brings out the familial affection and mutual love, dedication and sacrifice, portrayed in Death of a Salesman. It depicts the keen interest shown by the father of the family on the upliftment of his sons and to eradicate poverty from his family. In this drama, his emotional attachment and sentiments are brought before our eyes. The nobility in Willy, the protagonist is found not in Salesman, the symbol for the dream of success, but in father, the symbol of love. Till the end of the play, he tries to buy his son‟s love and respect at the cost of his own life. He realizes that he cannot sell himself in life, but can sell himself only in death, by bequeathing to Biff, his paid up life insurance. Thus Death of a Salesman projects Willy‟s obsession with bringing his family up and his great affinity and responsibility for his family member The fourth chapter discusses the love and passion of the protagonist of A View from the Bridge, Eddie Carbone for his niece Catherine which leads to his disaster. Eddie informs his wife that her two cousins Marco and Rodolpho, the illegal immigrants have safely arrived in the country. Catherine also has a surprise for Eddie, she has been offered a job. Eddie protests for a while as he feels that she should continue with her studies, but finally yields to her desires. However his love for Catherine tends to be over-protective. Eddie and his family are essentially decent, hard working people, hardly criminals in the usual sense. He wants to help his Italian relatives, Marco and Rodolpho who come to this country (America) to get work. Eddie even agrees to their plan of breaking the immigration rules to enter into America. This shows Eddie‟s affection for his cousins. Due to his too much of love and care for Catherine, Eddie becomes possessive. He is not able to tolerate the fact that Rodolpho and Catherine have fallen in love. Eddie‟s love for Catherine changes into hatred for Rodolpho. He tries very hard to break this relationship but in vain. He learns that Rodolpho and Catherine have set plans to marry each other. When he is not able to find any other solution, he calls the Immigration Bureau and informs about the illegal immigrants. Eddie‟s problems in the beginning are predominantly domestic rather than public. His main problem is his love for his niece Catherine. His attitude of protection and fatherly concern is slowly replaced by possessiveness and passin for Catherine as a young woman. Thus the chapter traces the love, affection, passion, possessiveness of Eddie Carbone. In the fifth chapter the study shows that love, affection, dedication, sacrifice for family, passion, interest to bring up the family are predominant in the plays of Arthur Miller. The study makes it clear that family values, sentiments, love for one another are predominant in the plays of Arthur Miller. INTRODUCTION Of all the literary genres in America, the Drama has the shortest and most sparse tradition. But in the United States of America, Drama was always incapable of keeping pace with the progress in other branches of literature. Although by the nineteenth century, the puritan prejudice against theatre had completely vanished and a great many plays had been produced, they were anything but insignificant. The majority of the plays transcended mediocrity. If the plays were poor, the playwright was also neglected. The tyranny of the actor and the producer held sway in America too, as it did in England. The people‟s need for drama was satisfied often by imported stuff. The period preceding the end of the nineteenth century was a period of dearth in the history of English drama too. The standards of drama had fallen and the theatre had become impoverished. Henry James, to his dismay, felt that the audiences in London demanded nothing but melodrama. But by the end of the nineteenth century, English drama had felt the envigorating influence of Strindberg and Ibsen. A sudden revival in drama took place and George Bernard Shaw, more than any other single playwright, contributed to this revival, but the American theatre was found far behind the times. There were playwrights of some ability like Clyed Fitch whose plays such as The Truth were very popular. By the next decade the playwrights became increasingly aware of the richness of the American scene. William Vaughan Moody‟s The Great Divide contrasts East and West. In The Faith Healer also, Moody shows signs of the fact that he was feeling his way towards adult-theatre. Themes of wide interest and contemporary significances found their way into the theatre by this time. Edward Shelton‟s play The Nigger has as its theme racial tension, whereas in The Boss, the central idea is the antagonism between labour and capital. Augustus Thomas, another playwright sought to dramatize regional peculiarities thus introducing local colour into drama. All these writers however were handicapped by a tendency towards sentimentality and a readiness to follow theatrical convention. The much needed break with conventions took place only with O‟Neill. The rise of the Little Theatre Movement marked in America, the liberation of drama from conventional shackles imposed by the commercial theatre. The Province- town players, a group of young artists and playwrights got dynamism from the leadership of O‟Neill. Broadly speaking, the modern American drama originates from the Little Theatre Movement of the second decade of the present century. By the early twenties, the modern drama was already an old story in major European capitals. Ibsen and Shaw had their hey-day. Ibsen was already a classic and Shaw had left his impact on the English managers. America was behind the times although the American stage knew well Ibsen, Shaw and the rest chiefly in so far as certain isolated plays had succeeded on Broadway. These foreigners, however, were deeply influencing modern American playwrights. In 1929, the American theatre experimented multi directions. It tried to represent life more concretely through abstractions, tried to moralize, satirize, lyricize in terms of new manipulations of space and movement, new concepts and sequences of dialogue, new versions of characterization. It also experimented brilliantly on the matter of stage design; the settings in many cases proved more revealing of theme and motivations than the characters themselves. The novelty was not exclusively a matter of techniques, but part of the general stir of experimental activity in the arts. The most important characteristic of the American theatre after 1916 is its relentless experimentalism – desire to avoid clichés of plot, characterization, dialogue, acting and staging, which had hitherto tended to make the theatre dull and lifeless. In the list of experimentations in dramatic form, T.S Eliot‟s attempts at the revival of poetic play and the works of Paul Green and Thornton Wilder can be mentioned. The major playwrights of this period are Maxwell Anderson, Behrman, Robert E. Sherwood, Philip Barry, Clifford Odets and Lillian Hellman. Anderson wrote plays of many sorts – tragedy, comedy with and without music and melodrama.