IV.

Miller and the Purpose of Theater

In Miller’s plays, the past exerts an inescapable influence on the present. Embattled fathers and sons and competitive brothers, all guilt-ridden, must atone for their betrayals. Willy Loman, Miller’s most famous guilty father, like Joe Keller in All My Sons, commits suicide, thereby completing the disfiguring role model he has bequeathed to his sons. In A View from the Bridge (1955), Eddie Carbone, a longshoreman, kills himself after finally recognizing that his betrayal of his niece’s boyfriend, an illegal alien, has been motivated by jealousy.

Individual guilt often unfolds in Miller’s plays against momentous backdrops: for example, the Depression, the Holocaust, and the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) investigations of the 1950s. For Miller, theater served as a forum for social and political enlightenment. His play The Crucible (1953), although concerned with the Salem witchcraft trials, was actually aimed at the then widespread congressional investigation of subversive activities in the United States during the late 1940s and early 1950s. The drama won the 1953 Tony Award. Miller himself appeared before the HUAC in 1956. He was convicted of contempt for refusing to name “leftist” associates, but the conviction was later appealed and reversed.

Questions of guilt and individual responsibility persist in Miller’s later dramas, including Incident at Vichy (1964), about French Jews sent to death camps during the German occupation of France in World War II; The Price (1968), in which two brothers confront memories of the Great Depression; and The Archbishop’s Ceiling (1977), on the Soviet treatment of dissident writers.