While not the exclusive theatrical commentators of the American family and American family life, Arthur Miller (1915–2005) and Edward Albee (1928–2016) did sit on unique perches to view families in the United States. Miller and Albee wrote their early plays during back-to-back historical moments, each of which exhibited noted change in American family life. This essay juxtaposes Miller’s late 1940s postwar United States—and how disillusionment affected the American familial unit—with Albee’s early 1960s United States—and the countercultural rumblings that put the very notion of American familial stability into question. Both Miller and Albee explore the hopes and illusions of the “American Dream” by investigating crises of post-World War II American family life.
However, the thirteen-year difference in Miller’s and Albee’s ages gave Miller and Albee, half a generation apart, distinctive perspectives on their contemporary crises facing American culture and the changing cultural mores affecting family life. Focusing on seminal plays at the beginning of both of their theatrical careers—Miller’s All My Sons (1947) and Death of a Salesman (1949) and Albee’s American Dream (1961) and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962)—I argue that both Miller and Albee recognize that changing conceptions of family and family life arise from this crisis of American familial units. This essay examines the emerging disillusionment and destabilization of the American family from the late 1940s through the early 1960s through Miller’s and Albee’s critiques of the so-called “American Dream.”
By dwelling on the American Dream narrative that was, in part, fantasy in the post-World War II the United States, both Miller and Albee observe how the illusory status quo that emerges from the notion of the American Dream had very real and harmful effects on American families. In their back-to-back historical moments, and taken together, Miller’s and Albee’s critiques of the American Dream work analogously to the biblical narratives of Eden and the Expulsion from Eden. Miller’s All My Sons and Death of a Salesman explore, respectively, “The Temptation” and then “The Fall” of the American Dream, while Albee’s American Dream and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? examine the “Expulsion” of American families in relation to the American Dream.
States of the Union/Births of a Nation
In short, Miller’s work reflects and symbolizes the American family that birthed the early “Baby Boomers” (mid-1940s to mid-1950s); Albee’s work does the same for the American families that gave birth to “Generation Jones” (mid-1950s to mid-1960s). Miller, especially in All My Sons and Death of a Salesman, tends to see individuals as driven by American cultural values, mores, and biases. In writing about families, Miller’s focus really is on American culture as subtly pernicious and destructive of people’s lives, resulting in tragic outcomes. Albee views the problems with families, instead, in a tragicomic and humanistic manner: while there is something about human beings that makes them fundamentally incapable of genuinely loving each other, this does not prevent some from continuing to try to connect. The tragedy of the human condition for Albee is not driven by cultural factors—such as the shallowness or fraudulence of the American Dream, as Miller might suggest—but stems from people’s inability genuinely to connect with each other in honest and fulfilling ways. However, Albee’s humor, while biting, does demonstrate that the will to live—to connect and love—is there and that however disconnected humans may feel from one another, that insatiable desire to love and be happy cannot be suppressed by the status quo.
- Keller:
She’s out of her mind.
- Mother:
Altogether! […] Your brother’s alive, darling, because if he’s dead, your father killed him. Do you understand me now? As long as you live, that boy is alive. God does not let a son be killed by his father… (Miller, 139)
All My Sons shines a light on the psychological shrapnel the war left in American families.
- Biff:
Baby, together we’d stand up for one another, we’d have someone to trust.
- Happy:
If I were around you—
- Biff:
Hap, the trouble is we weren’t brought up to grub for money. I don’t know how to do it.
- Happy:
Neither can I!
- Biff:
Then let’s go!
- Happy:
The only thing is—what can you make out there?
- Biff:
But look at your friend. Builds an estate and then hasn’t the peace of mind to live in it.
- Happy:
Yeah, but when he walks into the store the waves part in front of him. That’s fifty-two thousand dollars a year coming through the revolving door, and I got more in my pinky finger than he’s got in his head. (Miller, 164–165)
The Lomans are one of these representative tragic families left to dry in the new postwar US economy, not touched by the same prosperity that has swept up many in its rising and powerful wake.
A little over a decade later, Albee’s early plays emerge in a quite different United States. John F. Kennedy is President and the postwar economic windfall that blossomed in America in the 1950s is being felt by more and more families. Albee’s American Dream (1961) and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962) are less concerned with the tragedy of people who fail to achieve success as defined by the American Dream than with the hollowness and shallowness the pursuit of this Dream has brought about in our society. By the early 1960s, a desire for “keeping up with the Joneses,” and what happens to individuals because of the status quo, becomes tragicomic for Albee. He thinks there is something petty, and also funny, about this quite-silly quest to be a part of the hegemony. Trying to keep up with the Joneses, too, is sad because that quest is meaningless and distracts attention away from where the attention needs to be focused: on relationships that matter.
America’s Prelapsarian Era in Its Death Throws
The change in focus from Miller to Albee—the move away from a focus on cultural values to one on individual psychology (making Albee perhaps more like Eugene O’Neill than Miller)—is driven by changes in American culture. In post-World War II America, the focus really was on the triumph of American culture, and Miller was one of the critics suggesting that self-congratulations may rest on only a shallow or delusional sense of how that culture actually operates in people’s lives. By the early to mid-1960s, the focus is much more on a kind of individualism and self-expression: a rejection of the accepted culture, a counterculture movement, so the culture itself is no longer the driving force it had been for Miller in the 1940s. The metaphorical Fall in the late 1940s—when there is a feeling that America, the victorious de facto superpower, was on an inevitable rise—affected those who could not envision their lives as part of this Eden. Appropriately, then, All My Sons and Death of a Salesman examine an American climate that either propagates excess and greed as a natural extension of capitalism, as in All My Sons, or that leaves behind those who are not equipped for the ways that capitalism helps only the strongest to survive and leaves behind those who are weak, flawed, or naïve, in Salesman. In these two plays, the loss comes about either by exploitation or by unawareness, both of which are possible only because of innocence and lack of knowledge.
American culture moved between the 1940s and the 1960s to this more virulent form of individualism, which extended on into the Reaganism of the 1980s and the Trumpism of today. Albee traced much of this throughout his career by continuing to explore the dark side of that self-centered individualism. Albee is post-prelapsarian in that, working in the tradition of Miller, he also exposed the dark side of the individualism that Americans always had assumed was a fundamental ideal of American democracy, one without any negative consequences. The main difference between the two playwrights, however, comes down to their differing worldviews, which can be attributed to the differences in the America each playwright experienced in the formative years of his early adulthoods. Perhaps this is why Miller, after exploring what leads his characters to a Fall in the early years of his career in the late 1940s and early 1950s, looks back in hindsight across the world that Albee explores and names his 1964 autobiographical play, After the Fall. As Brenda Murphy has argued (314), in After the Fall, writing for Miller is a therapeutic way to forgive oneself or others, and this play, turning back to our Eden and post-Edenic metaphor, appropriately focuses on individual toil, its effects on the individual, and the need to forgive.
To extend our Eden analogy, Miller focuses on the prelapsarian moment. All My Sons is a play about temptation. War and unfettered capitalism offer opportunistic deals with the devil, which precipitate a fall and can end only in tragedy. In Death of a Salesman, Willy’s past infidelity, his temptation well before the present in which the play is set, is largely what brings about Willy’s fall. In both All My Sons and Death of a Salesman, the loss comes with the gift of knowledge of our past shortsightedness–which ultimately is the very goal of tragedy.
In The American Dream and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Albee’s focus is on families who must face the world after the Fall. He encourages us not to delude ourselves into blindly thinking we are still in Eden, pleading for humans to use their ability to see the world as it is—a harsh place—but one that can be cultivated by humans. Humanity, Albee implores, must toil to cultivate humanity, and that begins by cultivating one relationship at a time.
Unlike in Miller’s elegant tragedies, this Edenic and post-Edenic analogy is not immediately self-evident from the basic plot of Albee’s plays. The source of Albee’s “absurd tragicomedy” (Bennett, 19–20) and “humanis[m]” (Bennett, 68), or, what I call here, Albee’s tragicomic humanism in a post-Expulsion world derives from the challenge of connecting to other humans against the backdrop of an American culture of rugged individualism without the balance of genuine social networks, the supports that are required for humans to belong to and feel a sense of community. The American Dream is Beckettian in its use of non-sequiturs, and this represents, much like Harold Pinter’s small talk, a failure of communication. But while the failure of communication for Pinter is due to the lack of a “questioning voice” (Pinter, qtd. in Ford), for Albee both the play The American Dream and the American Dream in people’s lives are dream-like: non-linear, illogical, delusional, and illusory. Like O’Neill’s pipe-dreams, the American Dream causes a fracturing of families who, as its result, cannot communicate as a unit, which is simultaneously the cause and the effect of building both a national myth and the society’s familial units around a flimsy illusion.
Albee’s families are not cohesive units but, like the nation itself, collections of disparate individuals who have differing agendas. This contrasts with a healthy family: a group of people, brought together by blood or by choice, who have interwoven goals and a mutual support system that provides an environment in which individuals grow and flourish through their interrelationships. Especially in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Albee explores the American Dream’s demand that this familial health depends upon the presence of a husband and wife raising two children with a dog in a house with a white picket fence. Here Albee examines a particularly American First Couple: not Adam and Eve but a George and Martha who not accidentally share the names of our first President and his wife. In Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? the demonic illusion is that George and Martha need a child, an idyllic son—“…the apple of our eye…the sprout…the little bugger…” (Albee, 210)—to complete their own American Dream. This delusion has to be exorcized in order for them to move beyond the pain, anger, and frustration in their marriage to realize that they, too, can be a beautiful American family,
Instead of filling a lack that is a societal lie in the first place—thinking the Joneses have it all and one must do as the Joneses do and have what they have in order to be happy—we all need to embrace what we do have, even if it’s just the two of us: “MARTHA: Just…us? / GEORGE: Yes” (Albee, 311). George and Martha are all George and Martha need, which at first is scary, for it opens a world that is free of predetermined illusory social values and gives each of us the responsibility to create real value for ourselves in our own lives. If George and Martha can do this, they will be just fine, just the two of them.
Conclusion: Apocalypse, Now?
While the critical exploration of traditional and non-traditional families occupies many pages of Albee’s oeuvre and, particularly, his most iconic plays—in addition to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? think of A Delicate Balance, Seascape, and The Goat—arguably the most vivid image that Albee ultimately leaves us near the end of his career is the bloody dead goat, Sylvia, an image that, in a fashion, bookends Albee’s career with Jerry from his early play The Zoo Story (1959). Jerry often is seen as a Jesus-like character, running into the knife to save Peter from the status quo. Sylvia, like Jerry, is a metaphorical second coming, not this time of Jesus but of the Apocalypse.
Miller’s tragedies are just that: Tales of humans with tragic flaws coming up against not fate but the ever-present unfeeling touch of American culture. In this respect, Miller is really an American version of a Greek tragedian , where American culture acts as unrelenting and inescapable, much like Fate. But unlike Greek tragic heroes and heroines, who cannot escape their tragic fate because they cannot escape their tragic flaw, Miller understands that American culture and society can change for the better. Tragedy can be averted. Miller’s tragedies, then, do come with an ounce of hope.
Albee, on the other hand, spent his career having his characters journey through the morass of American illusions in search of other characters with whom to connect and journey on. And in this way, Albee really is a tragicomic humanist. But with The Goat, Or Who is Sylvia? (Notes Toward a Definition of Tragedy) (2000) Albee asks, what we mean by “tragedy”? I am not suggesting that Albee is defining “tragedy” in the theatrical sense but pondering something like the following. Albee spent his career seeing tragedy and joy and laughter arising simultaneously; that is how life generally operates. What then would something that is pure tragedy look like to Albee? Of course, Albee’s The Goat is quite possibly Albee’s funniest and most uproarious play, but that is essentially what makes everything more tragic by the time we get to the end. The bloody end signals not just tragedy but apocalypse: everything and everyone is destroyed. Genuine human connection is impossible. Ultimately, we all merely are alone, merely observing other’s lives but not authentically part of them.
The Goat is a tragedy because Albee created a situation that is too absurd, too hopeless, moving past contradictions about love and its limits to a tragic confrontation with the ultimate impossibility of genuine connection, an apocalypse of all we thought we valued. This is not merely the absurd, and here I differ with Kuhn (5). In The Zoo Story, though it seems irrational to Peter, Jerry makes sense of his murder-suicide. In Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, George and Martha are in an absurd situation: they want children but the world will not give them any. The play is not a full tragedy because George and Martha ultimately make sense of their situation and realize that they have each other and that might be enough. However, in The Goat, the situation cannot be resolved. Stevie’s murder of Sylvia resolves nothing; it merely expresses her rage at the fact that nothing can be resolved. All the way back to the Greek dramatists, that irreconcilability has been the heart of tragedy.
Similarly, Miller’s Resurrection Blues (2002), a satire about a dictator who hopes to crucify one of his political prisoners, whom the local people believe to be Jesus, so that he can sell the film rights for a huge profit, also depicts people as ensnared by human nature. Human will and moral courage are depicted here as far from capable of overcoming the other forces that drive our actions. As Jeffrey D. Mason notes, the play “closes with a renunciation of expectations, of any belief that the future could constitute progress beyond the present” (657). At the end of this play, there is no progress possible: the “blues” of this “resurrection” mourns the fact that the Resurrection is, subsequently, followed by Judgment Day, when humanity’s fate is sealed. Miller bemoans the lack of progress that humans have made, and should Judgment Day come, there would be a need to sing the “blues.”
Despite this pessimistic interpretation of the endings of The Goat and Resurrection Blues, I do not believe that either Albee or Miller saw our futures as hopeless. Indeed, that is why each of them wrote. Both authors believed that by showing the apocalyptic effect of our failures to genuinely connect with other people they would encourage us to pursue more authentic ways of engaging. Empathically finding each other may be the only way to find our humanity and ultimately ourselves.