Arthur Miller - Research Paper Example

?Arthur Miller Arthur Miller was one of the leading American playwrights of the twentieth century. He was born in October 1915 in New York to a women's clothing manufacturer, who lost everything in the economic collapse of the 1930s. Living through young adulthood during the Great Depression, Miller was shaped by the poverty that surrounded him. The Depression demonstrated to the playwright the fragility and vulnerability of human existence in the modern era. After graduating from high school, Miller worked in a warehouse so that he could earn enough money to attend the University of Michigan, where he began to write plays. Miller's first play to make it to Broadway, The Man Who Had All the Luck (1944), was a dismal failure, closing after only four performances. This early setback almost discouraged Miller from writing completely, but he gave himself one more try. Three years later, All My Sons won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award as the best play of 1947, launching Miller into theatrical stardom. All My Sons, a drama about a manufacturer of faulty war materials, was strongly influenced by the naturalist drama of Henrik Ibsen. Along with Death of a Salesman (his most enduring success), All My Sons and The Man Who Had All the Luck form a thematic trilogy of plays about love triangles involving fathers and sons. The drama of the family is at the core of all of Miller's major plays, but nowhere is it more prominent than in the realism of All My Sons and the impressionism of Death of a Salesman, a play which secured Miller’s reputation as one of the nation’s foremost playwrights. Also in 1956, Miller married actress Marilyn Monroe. The two divorced in 1961, one year before her death. That year Monroe appeared in her last film, The Misfits, which is based on an original screenplay by Miller. After divorcing Monroe, Miller wed Ingeborg Morath, to whom he remained married until his death in 2005. The pair had a son and a daughter. Miller also wrote the plays A Memory of Two Mondays and the short A View from the Bridge, which were both staged in 1955. His other works include After the Fall (1964), a thinly veiled account of his marriage to Monroe, as well as The Price (1967), The Archbishop's Ceiling (1977), and The American Clock (1980). His most recent works include the plays The Ride Down Mt. Morgan (1991), The Last Yankee (1993), and Broken Glass (1993), which won the Olivier Award for Best Play. Miller also wrote the plays A Memory of Two Mondays and the short A View from the Bridge, which were both staged in 1955. His other works include After the Fall (1964), a thinly veiled account of his marriage to Monroe, as well as The Price (1967), The Archbishop's Ceiling (1977), and The American Clock (1980). His most recent works include the plays The Ride Down Mt. Morgan (1991), The Last Yankee (1993), and Broken Glass (1993), which won the Olivier Award for Best Play. Although Miller did not write frequently for film, he did pen an adaptation for the 1996 film version of The Crucible starring Daniel Day-Lewis and Winona Ryder, which garnered him an Academy Award nomination. Miller's daughter Rebecca married Day-Lewis in 1996. With Tennessee Williams, Miller was one of the best-known American playwrights after WW II. Several of his works were filmed by such director as John Huston, Sidney Lumet and Karel Reiz. Arthur Miller was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1949 for Death of a Salesman. He has come to be considered one of the greatest dramatists in the history of the American Theatre, and his plays, a fusion of naturalistic and expressionistic techniques, continue to be widely produced. Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman stems from both Arthur Miller's personal experiences and the theatrical traditions in which the playwright was schooled. Miller is in some way accusing a culture that encourages "wrong" values and campaigning against an uncharitable social order that deprives honest workers of constructive labor, then discards those who are no longer useful. The play recalls the traditions of Yiddish theater that focus on family as the crucial element, reducing most plot to the confines of the nuclear family. Death of a Salesman, which opened in 1949, tells the story of Willy Loman, an aging salesman who makes his way "on a smile and a shoeshine." Miller lifts Willy's illusions and failures, his anguish and his family relationships, to the scale of a tragic hero. The fear of being displaced or having our image of what and who we are destroyed is best known to the common man, Miller believes. "It is time that we, who are without kings, took up this bright thread of our history and followed it to the only place it can possibly lead in our time-the heart and spirit of the average man." Although the play premiered in 1949, Miller began writing Death of a Salesman at the age of seventeen when he was working for his father's company. In short story form, it treated an aging salesman unable to sell anything. He is berated by company bosses and must borrow subway change from the young narrator. The end of the manuscript contains a postscript, noting that the salesman on which the story is based had thrown himself under a subway train. Arthur Miller reworked the play in 1947 upon a meeting with his uncle, Manny Newman. Miller's uncle, a salesman, was a competitor at all times and even competed with his sons, Buddy and Abby. Miller described the Newman household as one in which one could not lose hope, and based the Loman household and structure on his uncle and cousins. By the words of a critic, Joyce Carol Oates, Death of a Salesman  has proved to have been a brilliant strategy on the part of the thirty-four-year-old playwright to temper his gifts for social realism with the Expressionistic techniques of experimental drama like Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude and The Hairy for by these methods Willy Loman is raised from the parameters of regionalism and ethnic specificity to the level of the more purely, symbolically “American.” Carol states that even the claustrophobia of Willy’s private familial and sexual obsessions has a universal quality, in the plaintive-poetic language Miller has chosen for him. As we near the twenty-first century, it seems evident that America has become an ever more frantic, self-mesmerized world of salesmanship, image without substance, empty advertising rhetoric, and that peculiar product of our consumer culture “public relations”—a synonym for hypocrisy, deceit, fraud. Where Willy Loman is a salesman, his son Biff is a thief. “Yet these are fellow Americans to whom “attention must be paid.” Arthur Miller has written the tragedy that Illuminates the dark side of American success—which is to say, the dark side of us.”(Carol) If we look at the play the way that Frank Androlino sees it, we will see that much of the play takes place in a psychological construct which Willy creates. An Eden-like paradise which lies at the center of his neurosis, it is characterized by the paradoxical union of reality and his delusory fulfillment of his grandiose dreams of omnipotence. Willy's paradise is identified with the time in which Biff and Happy were growing up in Brooklyn, when they expressed, reflected, and validated his belief in their virtual divinity. Willy ironically incorporated the human concept of progress and the future, time's movement, into his changeless paradise. He believed that Biff, who was already “divine” as a football player, would become more so as a businessman. However, Willy never experiences the future which is part of normal chronological time because he recognizes only the hyperbolic future which he believes is latent in his paradise. To his destruction, he seeks to actualize it. The initial situation in Death of a Salesman doesn’t last for long and leads to a conflict. Willy’s mental wanderings are getting worse; he is preoccupied with Biff’s aimlessness and inability to find success in business.. But there comes a complication. On the same day, both Willy and Biff’s high expectations are dashed to the ground. Willy goes to his boss, Howard, to try to get a non-traveling job but ends up getting completely fired. Meanwhile, Biff waits for six hours to see Oliver, only to be reminded that he is nobody in the man’s eyes. This climax earns it’s stripes in two different ways. The first is psychological: Biff realizes he and his entire family have been living a lie. The second is more of an action-based climax, and takes the form of the huge blow-out argument between Biff and his father. This is followed by much shouting and crying, and at last Willy finds out that Biff really does love him. That would be great and we’d probably have a happy ending if it weren’t for the small fact that we hadn’t gotten to the suspense stage yet. Now that Willy has realized that Biff loves him, he wants to do anything he possibly can to make his son successful. In his mind, Willy hears Ben saying that "the jungle is dark but full of diamonds," but sadly ignores the "dark" bit while he shoots for the "diamonds" part. The suspense, of course, is that we’ve heard this suicide song and dance before, so we’re not sure if he’ll actually go through with it. This suspense is heightened by the fact that Willy’s family is in bed thinking everything’s fine, which we all know in any movie, play, or work of literature means horrible things are coming soon. Willy’s death was actually a foregone conclusion. The play’s title and Linda both predict it. What was unsure earlier in the play was why Willy would commit suicide. At the conclusion of the play, it is totally clear that Willy was wrong about himself. Not that we ever thought otherwise, but practically no one comes to his funeral. Biff now realizes that his father didn’t know himself and picked the wrong path. He will certainly not follow in his father’s footsteps. Happy, on the other hand, defends his father’s misguided dreams and decides to take them on himself. The tone of this play is angry, impatient, and frustrated (Biff towards Willy and Willy towards Biff). Fearful and somewhat helpless (Linda). Desperate (Willy), and it  tends to vary every once in a while. Usually the tone is tender and questioning, but sometimes the tone is brutal because Miller has to stress the importance of Willy’s actions. Willy blends his dreamy memories with reality, thereby creating a mood of reminiscence and wishfulness. We feel sympathetic to the brothers but angry at the father. As for atmosphere, constricted atmosphere, mostly everything happens by their small home, only dreams and off stage references to previous events. Bibliography Ardolino, Frank. “Miller's Poetic Use of Demotic English in Death of a Salesman.”Studies in American Jewish Literature 17 (1998): 120-28. Cardullo, Bert. “Death of a Salesman and Death of a Salesman: The Swollen Legacy of Arthur Miller.”THE COLUMBIA JOURNAL OF AMERICAN STUDIES. http://www.columbia.edu/cu/cjas/june_miller.html. 9 March 2011. Oates, Carol, Joyce. “Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman:A Celebration.” Michigan Quarterly Review, Fall 1998. http://usf.usfca.edu/fac-staff/~southerr/arthurmiller.html. 9 March 2011. Galvin, Rachel. “Arthur Miller Biography.” http://www.neh.gov/whoweare/miller/biography.html. 10 March 2011 Read More