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American capitalistic tyranny and state terrorism within its own territories (most of them acquired by force and war) have, indeed, a long, ugly, ignominous history. And today’s sensitive Americans feel a huge sense of moral unease over the ways of their slave-driving ancestors and corporation chiefs who had reduced their workers to commodity, or who had dehumanised them. Several earlier White playwrights and novelists such as Jack London, Mark Twain, Upton Sinclair and Theodore Drieser had shown transparently and powerfully how "the American Dream" of "the Pilgrim Fathers" had been most shamefully jettisoned en route. Arthur Miller, the radical playwright with a distinct vein of Marxism in his thought was sufficiently familiar with the forces of the capitalistic economy and with state terrorism, when he started writing his plays in the early 1950s. He had been brought up in a Jewish home during the Depression years, and he had seen how capitalism could destroy a whole civic society when things were not going well for it. Its basis being the stock-market economy (whose vagaries could reduce families to beggars and utter penury), it worked like a soulless machine whose god was Mammon — not Jesus Christ. His was an archetypal mind — the mind that bristles up to a condition of combat the moment it sniffs an affront to its distinctive mark. All these virtues may be seen dramatised with passion and vision in frame after frame when we read or watch a Miller play. Perhaps the only major play which is not political per se is A View from the Bridge. One early play called A Memory of Two Mondays is also not a political drama, but a tender, nostalgic, perhaps autobiographical work, conceived in love and pathos. Miller’s view, also to be seen in other plays is that society is an imperfect, though ineluctable necessity, something which will always remain flawed, inviting agonising reappraisals. Whereas in such great American playwrights as Elegene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams, the tyranny of lust is dramatised in frame after frame, in Miller, the passions are severely chained to ethical choices, as, for instance, in A View from the Bridge and they have no amoral, autonomous existence of their own as such. From this, says Miller, "flows the necessity for scenes of high and open emotion." His two earlier plays, All My Sons and Death of a Salesman written in an Ibsenian vein were regarded as "Marxian". All My Sons, wrote Miller, was "a play written for a prophetic theatre.... a play which is meant to become part of the lives of the audience." In All My Sons, Joe Keller’s dastardly anti-social act of selling defective cylinder heads to the Air Force during the War leads to a crisis of conscience in Chris, his younger son, when he realises the full horror of "the tainted money", and the unreality of his own existence. If his father’s crime creates a moral revulsion in Chris, it can only be dramatically vindicated in Joe Keller’s suicide. Death of a Salesman became an instant success on the stage, as Willy Loman, who represents the common man as a tragic hero, is out to give his two dear sons, Biff and Happy "a place in the sun". He wants to ensure their future even if it involves his own life. It has been often considered a Freudian, expressionist play. American economic "philosophy" compells small persons to be driven towards their own doom and destruction. All dreams of Willy Loman are thus strangulated before they are born. A Salesman driven from pillar to post, he finds no exit in the end. Miller’s most moving and allegorical play, The Crucible, omposed and stagedwhen the McCarthy terror was at its heights, was an act of intellectual daring. Miller was conscious of the dangerous consequences — witch -hunting of all radical writers in the USAunder the pretext of combating the creeping "menace" of Communism. Arthur Miller wrote The Crucible to accept the gauntlet, and stand up to defend his values. Perhaps in no other play is the drama of conscience so powerfully enacted as in this play. The five constituents of the tragedy — individual, family, society, church and state — are so interlocked in a grim, relentless struggle that the criss-cross of conflicting loyalties presents a most challenging test of the protagonist’s moral fibre. And it’s in the quality of his defiance that the greatness of the tragedy lies. John Proctor’s splendid and awesome fight against the theoretic charlatanry and devilry, or McCarthyism of his day is, above all, a testimony of the authenticity of the individual conscience. He dies on the scaffold, but in so doing he vindicates not only himself but also the spirit of man. For a moment, his spirit
quails — so does the spirit of Shaw’s Joan or of Eliot’s Beekeet
— but the irresponsible and imperishable voice of truth which resides
not only in flawed saints but even in ordinary, decent mortals, finally,
will not be denied. And it’s this transformation of ordinary human
clay into something like granite which gives The Crucible a majestic
tragic sweep in the end. John Proctor stands unique in this respect
among Miller’s creations, not because of any inherent superiority, but
because of the intensity of his moral response. He found the moment of
choice when "action was uniquely his own". He is not going to
face "the horror of handing over conscience to another". Life,
thinks Proctor, is "God’s gift" which cannot be given up for
any fanciful principle. In a tragic scene which is almost Shakespearian
in the quality of its spiritual appeal and moral beauty. In the end, I
wish to quote one of Miller’s most insightful critics, Robert A.
Martin seven words — "conscience, commitment, responsibility,
identity, hope, faith, courage — sum up Miller’s world-view, as he
puts it.
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