“Theater’s ancient burden, and sometimes its glory, [is] the moral illumination of society and the human condition” (Miller 1994a, xv). This is the burden that Miller sees as the timeless force of drama, and the burden he chooses to carry. This choice is especially daring in Miller’s case, as he wittingly refuses the darkly parodic bend of absurdism—the genre of his time—and looks instead to create the contemporary American tragedy, grounding it in the Greek classics and Ibsen. His plays are deeply imbued with the political and social contradictions of his time, bending the laws of classical tragedy accordingly and bringing to the stage protagonists who are not immediately recognizable as heroic and who take root in the common experience of ordinary people. However, the structure of three of his foundational plays—Death of Salesman, The Crucible, and A View from the Bridge—places his characters in a tragic position by having them face an ineluctable “devouring time” (Shakespeare, Sonnet 19), triggered by an action that cannot be undone, while simultaneously uncovering the moral floundering of a society nestled in consumeristic and voyeuristic counter-values. The plays portray the paradoxical temporality of the postmodern world, and they absorb and reshape the idea of a chorus. Both these ideas are used to illuminate the societal structures underlying the action and to rupture immediate empathy, making the tragic position of the characters evident and memorable.
Miller’s approach to tragedy is poignantly significant because it seeks to shape “the social drama of this generation” based on the simultaneous understanding that it cannot be “the same” as it was in the past but that a notion of the tragic is necessary to humankind’s process of self-awareness (Miller 1994b, 61). This combination generates Miller’s specific approach to tragedy, which is intelligently self-aware and creates a lens through which to explore the “paradox of modernity,” as defined in philosophical terms by Heller (15). The roots of Miller’s characters are intrinsically contemporary, hence their relationship with the tragic can serve to illuminate the postmodern experience. In A Theory of Modernity, Heller explores the postmodern mindset by responding to the theories of modernity created by Hegel, Marx, and Weber and rooting her own theory in an understanding of the specific principle generating the postmodern perspective, as well as its relationship with temporality. “The moderns are sitting on a paradox,” she writes, “the modern world is grounded in a principle [freedom] which, in principle, does not ground anything. The fundamental paradox of modernity is [this] freedom, all other paradoxes of modernity, […] truth included, are grounded in [it].” She continues by postulating that all “paradoxes of modernity can be temporalized.” It is in the relationship with time that the postmodern mindset inherently differs from the modern and becomes most interesting in terms of Miller’s approach to the tragic. Heller defines the moderns’ relationship with temporality as based in a “faith in progression” and movement toward a “betterment of the world.” Conversely, the postmodern mindset—which stems from the “ultimate apocalypse,” Auschwitz, which “eroded” the “progressivist legitimation of modernity”—develops a “disbelief in linear progression, even in the case of the natural sciences, makes all models of ‘infinite progression’ suspect.” For Heller, “the postmodern accept life at the railway station. That is to accept living in an absolute present. […] The absolute present includes the future—the future of the present. And it includes the past—the past of the present” (Heller, 9–15). The condition thus described is inescapable and carries in this ineluctable present its tragic core; this is the elemental tragic experience at the heart of Miller’s plays, which he entwines with a sharp political commentary.
Miller anchors his tragedies in the characters’ relationship with time and forges their experience of time as a perpetual standstill. In this his plays are akin to Beckett’s, which is interesting given how deliberately Miller distances himself from theater of the absurd. Time for both these writers becomes the relentless agent of an unavoidable fall, while breaking out of time becomes the only possible action to untangle an otherwise suffocating web. “We enter a time warp,” Bigsby says of Miller’s plays, adding “few writers have been as interested in time, its various ramifications, as Arthur Miller” (2005, 124). This warp allows Miller to bring the tragic sentiment to the stage in utterly contemporary terms, contributing to the reshaping of the form of tragedy by dramatizing a novel relationship between temporality and action. The action in Miller’s plays consistently takes place at Heller’s metaphorical train-less train station, and hence cannot generate change. The “absolute present” in the plays springs from memories of a haunting and conditioning past, which is, as Bigsby remarks, “the burden [the characters] bear,” (2005, 102) and which holds the protagonist’s “moral mistake or hamartia” (Palmer, 3), engulfing any future prospect. Death of a Salesman shapes this structure, with the “presentness of the past,” (Bloom, 30), absorbing the play’s temporal evolution. Time becomes both the only agent of the action and the only villain; Willy’s tragic fall precedes the action on stage and cannot be undone (see Roudané), subsuming the “ontological fall from Grace” that Steiner sees as necessary to the structure of a tragedy (1996, 4). Although, as Bigsby notes, “there is no crime,” (2004, 111), the audience nonetheless witnesses the effect of Willy’s fall and the inescapability of its consequences as a tragic condition.
The political implications (see Sell) in the play enhance and expand its portrayal of temporality by imbuing it with a poignant search for morality rooted in the ancient relationship between tragedy and the polis. As Brater notes, Miller’s moral search is extensive and deeply indebted to his study of American culture, “creating landscape as vast as Whitman’s [and] a moral center as lucid as Emerson’s” (3). In this light, Charley, Willy’s neighbor in Death of a Salesman, functions as a chorus juxtaposing popular wisdom to Willy’s pursuit of illusions and thereby explicitly forcing the audience to question the societal constructs and urgings underlying Willy’s character. The combination of Willy’s innocent belief in an exquisitely American mythology (see Roudané)—the idea that one might “walk into the jungle” only to “walk out with diamonds” (Miller 2015, 159)—and Charley’s measured approach to events illuminates the societal web as the catalyst of Willy’s past and the conditioning force in his present, tinging Willy’s fall with universal hues and political undertones.
Miller designs the pace of the play through the characters’ lines rather than their actions, so that both the stillness of Willy’s condition and the progression of time around him are constantly obvious, in what is “the beginning of many explosions of form” (Miller 1994c, 14). The characters’ entrances and exits and the juxtaposition of phantasmagorical characters with real ones become crucial in the audience’s experience of the combined agency of time and of a corrupt mythology. Charley first comes on stage between the Woman’s first appearance and Ben’s. Thus positioned, Charley’s presence—which is radically unnecessary to the plot—creates a baseline against which the “collapsed time” (Miller 1994d, 35) Willy experiences can be measured. Further, the Woman’s and Ben’s entrances and exits mark the different scenes in each act and introduce the myths Willy has fallen prey to, thus having the past shape the timing of the action in the present and making time—or rather the memory of past times—the agent of its own stillness. The Woman’s first appearance brings to the stage the shadow of Willy’s fall in Biff’s eyes, as well as the moment when Biff renounces his dream; this specific moment looms over the present and is projected on the future of the play, where it will come into focus. On the other hand, Ben’s first appearance gives a voice and a palpable presence to the mythology that has shaped Willy’s self-awareness; in Bigsby’s words, this is the myth “of a society built on social performance and wedded to the idea of transforming the future.” Simultaneously, it presents “characters whose hopes and illusions seem instantly recognizable and archetypal” (Bigsby 2005, 101).
Through this structure, Miller creates a past that is paradoxically both a timid and a bold presence on stage. The Woman first appears as an intrusion in the present, her influence over it invisible, and her lines hardly remarkable. She thanks Willy “for the stockings. I love a lot of stockings” (Miller 2015, 175). Her presence is wittingly ambiguous; she seems to be a sign of Willy’s breakdown, while she is also the palpable presence of a past that is still shaping the present. In this light, she grants the audience access to Willy’s subconscious awareness. The Woman mentions the quantity of silk stockings she has, while Linda “mends her stockings” in the next scene. In an essay on the “dream tissue” in the play, Livesay notes that “language has always been the structuring field on which [Miller’s] imagination operates” (22). This is particularly significant here as the stockings become both the linguistically signified and a physical signifier. Their physical mending by Linda is symbolic of the economic failings of Willy’s life, while their mentioning by the Woman portrays the cause of that mending both in personal terms—Willy cannot move past the incident with the Woman—and in collective terms—the seduction of easy money.
Ben’s presence is specular to the Woman’s and gives corporeal presence to the mythology that underlies both Willy’s dream and the societal constructs in which it is grounded, giving Willy’s individual fall a collective and political quality. Willy defines the myth that Ben brings to the stage as foundational to America: walk into a jungle and walk out with diamonds. Through Ben, Miller embeds what Otten has called “the corrosive ethos of American capitalism” (133) into the play’s fabric. The smokey implausibility of Ben’s story casts it as the blueprint of an irrational, potentially damaging belief in the power of personality, while Ben’s physical presence and his existence as Willy’s brother grounds the phantasmagorical story in the play’s plot, making it a catalyst for the characters’ actions and reflecting the power of a pervasive but corrupt system on the individual.
Miller’s use of Charley is also fundamental in the audience’s understanding of the dynamic interplay of personal and political implications and in the creation of a motionless temporality. Charley takes on the role that was assigned to the chorus in Greek tragedy and becomes a mediator between the audience and the action presented on stage. The problematic definition of the chorus has been written on extensively (see Foley); however, certain key aspects occur repeatedly across Greek tragedies and have come to define the term. Primarily, “by the conventions of the tragic, state choruses cannot initiate, control, or take action” and their “effective interventions are verbal rather than physical.” Further, “choral identity is defined by the questions that choral action and behavior might obliquely raise about leadership in a democracy” and “all choruses gravitate towards traditional wisdom” expressing “cultural memory” or “political views” (Foley, 22–24). This position is Charley’s position in the play: external to the action, his verbal interventions serve to illuminate the play’s political implications and to question Willy’s choices from the point of view of cultural wisdom. Miller himself has frequently addressed the significance of Charley’s character as “the other,” the possible alternative to Willy’s way of life, bringing to light the possibility to choose an alternative to the myth of “personality” that conditions Willy (Miller 1994d, 150).
While Miller presents through Willy’s own words the mythology that has shaped the frozen time that impedes his capacity to act, it is Charley’s reaction that shows those stories’ corrupt roots. Charley’s lines consistently punctuate Willy’s shortcomings, gently underscoring their implications. His first words in the play are “Everything all right?” after Willy has introduced him as “a man of few words” and after the Woman first appears. That simple question serves to underscore the evident crack in Willy’s ability to live in the present; it also turns Charley into a reliable presence for the audience as he clarifies the Woman’s ambiguous appearance. This allows Miller to embed a commentary on the nature of Willy’s fate that is political and makes it the outcome of a societal unconscious combined with an individual shortcoming.
Further, when Willy recounts the figure of the salesman by describing Dave Singleman’s funeral, he is constructing an alluring fable, capturing an image of glamor in the shiny, green, velvet slippers the audience never sees. As he says elsewhere, recalling Biff’s offers of college scholarships, “that’s the wonder, the wonder of this country, that a man can end with diamonds here on the basis of being liked!” Charley’s line, “Willy when are you going to grow up?” breaks past these myths and brings their absurdity to light (Miller 2015, 169). Willy’s blindness to the falsity of the promise is tragic precisely because Charley’s words identify Willy’s needs, but Willy refuses to hear them. Their confrontation turns time into an oracle, announcing an ending that is fixed and a destiny that has become star-crossed, creating the “elemental condition of tragedy” (Otten, 133), or in Miller’s own words, a notion that “birds [will] come home to roost” (Miller 1994e, 9)
Willy’s tragic fate exists specularly in Biff; their confrontation in the present is but a reflection of their confrontation in the past—in the only moment when Willy was forced out of his blindness and into a sharp instant of self-awareness. Willy’s faith in the potential for Biff to achieve greatness is nestled in the need to retract the specific moment when he fell in Biff’s eyes, and hence it is doomed to fail. Further, it springs from the necessity to perpetuate the myth, thus corroborating its truth and undoing the squalor of the present. Willy presents Biff by seaming together his son’s destiny and the country’s: “In the greatest country in the world a young man with such—personal attractiveness, gets lost” (Miller 2015, 159).
The presentation of Biff’s destiny as a natural effect of his personality is clearly juxtaposed to Bernard’s figure; Bernard’s success shows the falsity of the myths that have guided Willy and Biff. Further, Willy’s relationship with Biff bends backward in time, with their greatest proximity coming before the beginning of the play, and perhaps having never existed. As Willy looks offstage, he speaks to a son who does not exist in the same way that he addresses a brother who is not there.
Aristotle viewed drama as the imitation of action. In Salesman, the tragedy is presented as the action of time: set in motion by an individual’s fall spawned by a flawed myth, it is set to generate its own unchangeable future. As Steiner suggests in The Death of Tragedy and again in “‘Tragedy,’ Reconsidered,” the notion of tragedy in contemporary terms is problematic, and Miller himself acknowledges this in multiple essays. Nonetheless, the tragic sentiment is present—if in exquisitely contemporary terms—in Death of a Salesman. Steiner identifies the problem with creating a contemporary notion of tragedy in the progressive waning of the idea of Fate. He finds “the axiomatic constant in tragedy [to be an] ontological homelessness,” an “estrangement from life … man’s ontological fall from grace [without which] there can be no authentic tragedy” (2004, 3). A secular world, he argues, loses this state. Interestingly, though, the collapsed time that imprisons Willy—and that Heller carefully identifies as a definitive marker of the postmodern mindset—reconceptualizes the idea of Fate or of a fall from Grace by rooting it in a scientific, and hence secular “ontological homelessness.” The cause of Willy’s fall is not divine; it lies in the spell of time, which he can neither undo nor break out of without dying. Steiner closes “‘Tragedy,’ Reconsidered” by stating that our “bewilderment with grief in the world [will find] new expressive forms growing out of Woyzeck, out of Godot,” reading the latter as the possible point of transition into “post-metaphysical, post-metaphoric modes” (9). It is in this light that Death of a Salesman is inherently tragic in that it frames the tragic sentiment in a postmodern world, much as in Beckett’s works, despite Miller’s concerns about theater of the absurd. Further, while Willy’s character certainly slips into pathetic moments, as Heilman notes (15), his position in time never does. Constantly reminded of a painful past, he experiences his life as an unstoppable march of time that he no longer can control or overturn.
When the defining scene in the play finally is revealed, it is set in the past but relived in the present, revealing it as the action of time. The Woman’s laughter in the Boston hotel room brings to the stage the mockery of time. In being revealed to Biff, the squalor of Willy’s life becomes real and inescapable. The greatness to which Willy aspires—the personality, the popularity, the green slippers, the fortune—morphs into a pathetic delusion, coloring the presence of the “little rubber pipe” that Linda removes and returns to the gas furnace in the basement. If “death lies at the end of tragedy like the ultimate promise of form [offering] a retrospective grace” (Bigsby 2005, 118), the death that befalls Willy is more complicated and less liberating. Death breaks him out of time; as such, it liberates him and, as Bigsby remarks, Willy’s life “is drained of the tragic” (2005, 118) because Willy dies hopeful. However, Willy’s death does not resolve the paradox of a temporality that is constraining in its unfolding; therefore, it is not cathartic for the audience, although it does touch upon a human universal: the condition of existing in time.
The structure of The Crucible is in many ways nestled in the study of temporality and the tragic sentiment that emerges in Death of a Salesman. In The Crucible, Miller deliberately expands his study of a corrosive mythology by exploring the possibility for a “knowledgeable campaign” to create “not only a terror, but a new subjective reality, a veritable mystique which gradually [assumes] a holy resonance” (Miller 1994f, 153). The play’s historical backdrop morphs into an archetypal study in the mechanics of a pervasive mythology that undoes individual conscience and thought; this shift projects the play onto a timeless canvas. The plot itself is as historical as it is allegorical and abstract; it operates simultaneously on a symbolic plane—by virtue of the deliberate parallels with both McCarthyism and Nazi Germany—and on a realistic plan, becoming a kind of morality play. In this light, it stands as a symbolic warning of the potential for rational thought to come undone at the hand of skilfull propaganda, a hauntingly prophetic message for our own times. Further, Miller distorts the historical account, by reshaping Abigail’s character and story to interlace the private and the public, heightening the tragic sentiment in the play. Thus constructed, the play shares a core element with Othello, with a “witchcraft of the wit” replacing the hand of fate as the source of tragedy. The fall is then grounded in the individual’s inability to break past the blinding fabric of words used to corrupt and the society that is easily bent by them (See Lombardo on Othello as the first modern tragedy in this sense).
Miller lifts Salem out of its historical context, using it to shed light on a “paradox in whose grip we still live. […] For good purposes, even high purposes, the people of Salem developed a theocracy […] to prevent any kind of disunity that might open it to destruction by material or ideological enemies,” he argues, “and the theocracy designed to protect them then became the agent of destruction” (Miller 2015, 350). In a similar way to Death of a Salesman, the crucial action that embodies Proctor’s moral fall precedes the play, hence the play’s arc lacks an evolution and is only a summation of effects, with time never moving away from the influence of the past.
The mythology that moves The Crucible rests on principles that are seamlessly projected into the future and that are inherently American. Bigsby speaks of the “kinetic energy [which] surges through the wormhole from 1692 to 1953” and of a moment that is “both in time and outside of time, which is to say within a myth” (2005, 128). Further, the “ontological homelessness” necessary in a tragedy morphs into an “ontological homelessness” with words, which can manipulate thoughts turning the mind onto itself. In writing about Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Bigsby notes “if George and Martha are capable of creating a complex mythology rather than face their situation, then so too is the society they represent;” their “faith in abstractions” is their ultimate undoing (1967, 261). Miller’s portrayal of abstractions is analogous, if more poignantly political; in many ways, it is rendered more unsettling precisely because of the ease with which 1692 is the shadow of 1953 and perhaps a prophetic shadow of today’s world.
In order to heighten the connection between the individual and the collective, Miller rewrites Abigail’s character and introduces physical seduction in the story-line. This nests a powerful feminine tragedy within the public tragedy and makes the tragic sentiment emerge empathetically and more poignantly for the audience, bringing history onto an individual plane. Abigail is a makeshift Iago, who ignites the words in Hale’s book and brings the theocracy into action. On the other hand, it is the characters’ implicit need for a Devil that fuels events. In this light, the catalyst and agent of the tragedy is both individual and collective, each working in specular position, making the distinction between public and private obsolete. The interplay between the public actions that shape the polis and cause its doom and the individual choices that trigger and underlie the communal ones makes The Crucible a kaleidoscopic tragedy, where a private blindness to consequences reverberates in a public one. Miller addresses the community’s need for a Devil explicitly by writing that “like Reverend Hale and others on this stage, we conceive the Devil as a necessary part of a respectable cosmology.” He then concludes “the necessity of the Devil may become evident as a weapon, a weapon designed and used time and time again […] to whip men into surrender.” He also notes that no audience ever has laughed at the line that introduces Hale: “We cannot look to superstition in this. The Devil is precise” (Miller 2015, 349–50). This comment makes the collective sentiment that underlies the actions of the community extend, at least potentially, to the audience.
Abigail’s effect on the children is specular to the effect that Hale’s books have on the community. The gravitas in Hale’s language makes both the community’s fear and the rhetoric used to heighten it palpable. His books are “weighted with authority,” while his ability to identify the Devil’s work comes from the fact that “the marks of his presence are definite as stone.” The corporeal quality Miller gives to ephemeral qualities characterizes the transition from simple politics to a “political policy equated with moral right, and opposition to it with malevolence” (Miller 2015, 350–53). The weight in Hale’s books and words is the weight of malevolence brought into action; the destruction of this comes shrouded in an archetypal force. It is in this respect that the “ruling orthodoxy” performs a “ritual of conformity.” (Bigsby 2005, 149). The action of fate is triggered therefore not by the will of the gods but by an inability of the people to have a will outside the dogma they are fed.
Most remarkably, on an individual plane, The Crucible is truly a feminine tragedy. Where on a public level, Proctor, Hale, and Danforth are the dominant characters, privately, the confrontation is between Abigail and Elizabeth Proctor. Abigail’s manipulation of the children only to imprison Elizabeth gives the play an active villain and a personal intent to destroy. Conversely, Elizabeth’s staunch morals make her akin to Antigone in terms of defiant heroism, even in the face of death. Abigail’s ability to transform Betty’s accusation that she “drank blood” into an advantage by telling the girls that she will “come to [them] in the black of some terrible night” defines her character (Miller 2015, 340–41). Further, her power over the girls mirrors Hale’s power over the community; her lies run parallel to his refusal of reason, creating the spine of a community so fragile that it cannot know itself, again like today. Proctor’s refusal to lie publicly, and hence lose himself, is specular to Elizabeth’s refusal to yield privately. The mirroring of themes and characters throughout the play is pervasive.
The feminine is juxtaposed to the masculine, much as the public is juxtaposed to the private; their constant interlacing in a cosmology where balance rests on the interaction of the parts gives The Crucible a timeless quality. The tragic sentiment that emerges is the one that Cassius discusses with Brutus in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, finding the fault “not in our stars but in ourselves” (Act 1, Scene 2).
The collapsed timeframe and the use of a chorus to create a timeless comment are reprised and extended in A View from the Bridge. Although the balance between the intimate, psychological tragedy, and the political is reversed, the structure remains analogous. The temporal standstill is created by a veritable chorus, whose interventions explicitly move the play onto a mythological and allegorical plane. The structural progression from Death of a Salesman, through The Crucible, and culminating in A View from the Bridge increases in terms of the audience’s responsibility in evaluating the events. All three plays lack a catharsis and a clear resolution of the central conflict, as that conflict is embedded in the action of time and is thus ineluctable. However, the level of abstraction of the tragic arc consistently increases, lifting empathy from the characters and transforming them into a comment on the tragedy of existing in time while blind to the vicissitudes time brings.
Alfieri’s interventions condition the audience’s experience of the play. He expands time infinitely, nodding to the story’s ancient roots: “I often think that behind that superstitious little nod of theirs lie three thousand years of distrusts” (Miller 2015, 440). This lifts the events on the stage and projects them onto an archetypal canvas more powerful and more prominent than that of the previous two plays. Time is a strong agent in this play; it is presented as a loop, with the action having already taken place both in terms of Alfieri’s knowledge of the story and in terms of its roots in ancient history—yet it is also about to begin. The societal implications in this play reach the very core of the American nation, laying bare the difficulty of handling integration in a society rooted in immigration. Further, the play’s beginning contains the play’s ending not just in Alfieri’s introduction but also in the action on stage. The opening scene introduces both the individual and the political plan; the “two submarines,” whose lives need saving and whose condition can be “snitched to the Immigration” are presented alongside Eddie and his “strangely nervous” interest in his niece, nodding to the play’s ending on both planes (Miller 2015, 440–43).
Alfieri defines Eddie’s character in terms of his condition, heightening the tragic implications of existing in time with little personal agency, of having to reckon with moments accrued blindly, of mindlessly becoming the catalyst of a destiny. Eddie is presented as “as good a man as he had to be,” and as having “never expected to have a destiny” (Miller 2015, 451). The audience’s responsibility in the moral grounding of the play is heightened, as they must judge the societal fabric Eddie is born in as well as his personal choices. “The law is only a word for what has a right to happen,” Alfieri warns the audience, placing both the play’s political implications and the personal choices in the hands of a kind of fate that time inevitably will reveal.
Thus structured, Miller’s tragedies create a foundational study on the ineluctable action of time both in political and individual terms, offering an illuminating view of the postmodern paradox of time as an agent of stillness, on the fabric of American mythology, and on the resurfacing of a tragic mode centered around a rational but blind cosmos.