Searching for Suppressed Voices: The Gaze and Its Implications in Early Cold War Plays of Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams ________________________________________ A Dissertation Presented to The Graduate School of Literature Fukuoka Women’s University ________________________________________ In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy By Hiromi OKAURA 2015 CONTENTS Acknowledgements …………………………………………………………………. ii Introduction …………………………………………………………………………. 1 Part One Women and Gaze: Performance Beyond Male Objectification Chapter 1. Gaze and Resistance in Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire ………………………………………. 10 Chapter 2. Being Bewitched: Women’s Performative Resistance in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible ……………………………………………………... 33 Part Two Men and Gaze: Suffering in the Panoptic Society and Family Chapter 3. Gaze and American Male Identity in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman ……………………………………………. 53 Chapter 4. Searching for the Subjective Male Gaze in Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie …………………………………………… 73 Part Three Hidden Desire: Male Homosexual Gaze Chapter 5. Gaze and Homosexual Desire in Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge …………………………………………. 92 Chapter 6. Implied Homosexuality and the Representation of the Southern Plantation in Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof …………………………………………. 117 Conclusion ………………………………………………………………………... 136 Bibliography ……………………………………………………………………… 146 Acknowledgements First and foremost I would like to show my deepest gratitude to Dr. Scott Pugh, my dissertation supervisor, who read the entire draft patiently and provided carefully considered feedback and extremely helpful comments. His insightful criticism and suggestions along with sincere encouragement were of inestimable value for my study, and made my Ph.D. pursuit possible and persuasive. I would also like to thank the professors of the Department of English at Fukuoka Women’s University, especially to Emeritus Prof. Hirotoshi Baba, Prof. Kimiko Tokunaga, and Emeritus Prof. Mitsuyoshi Yamanaka, who provided enormous assistance to me during my study at the university. I also have to thank Emeritus Professor Kenichi Takada at Aoyama Gakuin University, who has stimulated my interest in American literature, and encouraged me to continue my study of American plays in Fukuoka. Across the sea, my thanks go to Doctor Stephen Johnson, Director of the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Toronto, who generously gave me material and immaterial support and opportunities to advance my research. Meeting many energetic scholars and attending classes and workshops in the Centre for Drama provided great learning experiences and priceless knowledge for my future research. As Tennessee Williams says, “Life is partly what we make it, and partly what it is made by the friends we choose”, so finally, I would like to thank my friends and many talented scholars I met, not to speak of my family, whose continuous kind support and assistance enormously helped motivate me to complete my dissertation research successfully. Hiromi Okaura (Yamaga) July 2015 ii Introduction There is no question that Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams are two of the leading playwrights in postwar American theater, and specifically their early plays written and performed during the late 1940s and the 1950s are renowned around the world as their masterpieces. In this dissertation, I will analyze six of their plays during the specific period (the late 1940s to the 1950s) known as the early Cold War period by focusing on the gaze and other visual activities (such as visual pleasure, desire, and the suffering of looking and being looked at), in searching for the hidden implications in the realistic family plays which were dominant at that time. While employing various theories which explore the implications inherent in the gaze, I develop an analysis of the thematic significance of these plays, which can be found in the characters’ ways of looking, the gaze relations and the effects among the characters, and audience gaze (in other words, how the plays affect viewers in the theater). Specifically, I emphasize three aspects of the gaze: women performing their identities in opposition to their roles as passive objects of male gaze (in Part One), white middle or lower-middle class men who are suffering from being looked at, namely, men as gaze objects (in Part Two), and hidden male homosexual desire in looking at men (in Part Three). As a conclusion, I will argue that this study of gaze activities reveals invisible and suppressed voices in these early Cold War plays, expressing women’s desire, subjectivity, and resistance, white middle-class men’s weakening of masculinity and individuality, and prohibited male homosexual desire, all of which foreshadow irresistible voices, which emerge in the 1960s. As evidenced by a succession of box-office hits, such as A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Death of a Salesman (1949), The Crucible (1953), and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), postwar American theatre in the 40s and the 50s was dominated by two very different canonical male white playwrights; one is the heterosexual Arthur Miller, who 1 consistently explored social and political issues, and the other is the homosexual Tennessee Williams, who placed special emphasis on personal and psychological issues. Their plays have been performed and acknowledged internationally with unanimous applause, and “theatrical and critical fashion continues to champion the ostensibly universal qualities of the plays . .” (Savran 6, 1992). However, I am concerned here with the national aspects of the United States, because as Savran explains, “theatrical production is so deeply and intricately ideological, and . during the postwar period, the Broadway theater was a genuinely popular art (at least for the middle classes) . .” (6, 1992). Thus, it is clear that the early famous plays of Miller and Williams act as a mirror of postwar America in the early Cold War period. During the 40s and the 50s (specifically after WWII and before the era of Civil Rights and other liberation movements), a particular notable change could be seen in American society and American family: conservatism. Historical and social events such as women’s suffrage in the 1920s, the Depression in the 1930s, and WWII encouraged women’s self-reliance and their participation in work and society. However, at the war’s end, the men returning from war took women’s jobs, and these changes gave rise to conservatism and a return to “family values”, whether women wanted such a regression or not. The G. I. Bill and booming postwar economy also contributed to these values and an increase in middle-class nuclear families based on a male breadwinner and a housewife. In addition, as historian Elaine Tyler May indicates, various anxieties including the threat from the Soviet Union and nuclear war also promoted such conservatism, leading to “the domestic confinement” in the American ideal family, as a refuge or shelter from the dangerous Cold War world. Moreover, within the conservatism of the 40s and the 50s, “Sexual nonconformity [homosexuality] was now defined as a national security threat . .” (Nicolay). Senator Joseph McCarthy charged that “the State Department had reinstated a homosexual despite the growing crisis over national security. [And] Suddenly, homosexuals were 2 said to pose as great threat to the government as members of the Communist party” (Corber 62, 1993). Such homophobic tendencies were evidently enhanced by “the publication in 1948 of the first Kinsey report, which challenged the stereotype of the effeminate homosexual with statistical evidence that gay men did not differ significantly from straight men” (Cober 63, 1997). In other words, since “gay men could not be easily identified and were present in all walks of American life, then they resembled the Communists, who had allegedly infiltrated the nation’s political and cultural institutions and threatened to subvert them from within” (Cober 64, 1997). Such a conservative social background and ideological bias during the Cold War period greatly encouraged the rise of the nuclear family based on heterosexual marriage. In particular, the white middle-class suburban family based on binary gender distinctions was emphasized in popular TV dramas in the 50s such as “The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet”, and “Leave It to Beaver”, and as historian Stephanie Coontz indicates, such a visual template was ideologically imposed on people as the only acceptable American traditional family. The stereotypical family is also reflected in the early well-known family plays of Miller and Williams, even though they managed to include the dark hidden aspects in some ways too, in contrast to simply optimistic happy families on TV. When considering the implied “dark hidden aspects” in these plays, which cannot be directly represented in the dialogues, theories of the gaze (in the broad sense of looking activities) must be very effective tools for examining implications of non-verbal communication1, such as power relations, gender inequality, problems of identity, unrestrained desire and resistance to social norms and ideology. Theoretical consideration of the gaze has been increasingly active since the 1970s. Jeremy Hawthorn succinctly summarizes the basic point that “looking is far from being a neutral process of information gathering: our looking activities are saturated with the residues of our social and cultural existence―for