According to Christopher Caudwell, every artist has his or her own way of expressing their works. They tend to register a particular pattern in terms of the themes, styles, arguments and language use which seems prevalent in almost all of their works. Arthur Miller is among the prolific literature authors and playwrights in America with; ‘All My Sons,’ ‘A View from the Bridge,’ ‘The Crucible’ and the ‘Death of a Salesman’ as some of his most read texts that have also won several prizes. This paper attempts to look into the various literary trends that Miller has set in his works.
Most literary works are influenced by a writer’s personal experience in life. Their childhood growth and even family influence their perspectives in how they view things and particular issues in life. Therefore, for a reader to understand literature works effectively, it is important to have a background study of the life of the author. For this case, Arthur is seen to have a tough family life with several divorces and remarriages. In his autobiography as discussed by Martin Gottfried, he discusses how he moved from one marriage to another, leaving children behind (Gottfried 9). His life is well highlighted in his maturity and after he joins the university. He does not discuss his childhood and only mentions that he was of a mixed nationality origin with a Jewish mother and a Polish father. His life as a family man has greatly influenced his works with every text being centered on the theme of family and the challenges in the family as a unit in the society.
In his works, Arthur explains the relationships of the men in the family in terms of father and son. The fathers in Arthur Miller’s plays are seen to be strict with bringing up their sons and there exists a big rift between the two parties to an extent one would think that Miller and his father were never in good terms or in his many families, he was never in good terms with the sons. For example, in All My Sons, Joe Keller brings about the death of his son Larry (Christopher 5). Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman also imposes a false dream on his son so that the son could live as the father wished
The father figure in these plays is presented to be a total failure just as Miller had failed in his fatherly life as he kept neglecting his children. Characters like Quentin’s father in After the Fall, Victor Franz in The Prince commit suicide over their fatherly roles while Moe Baum in the American Clock gets psychological disorders and fail to be the best father to his children.
The son characters in Miller’s plays are presented to be fighting for some independence that is supposed to separate them from their fathers’ autocracy. They seem to realize the failure of their fathers and they put up the vehement fight to prove to the fathers that they could do whatever they wished with their lives. With the desire to be better than their failure fathers, they tend to live their lives the way they want without being so obedient to their fathers. Chris Keller in All My Sons and Biff Loman in Death of a Salesman are the son-characters used by Arthur Miller to represent the determined sons in the community who by far get successful on their own after disregarding their fathers’ input in their lives.
Still, on family, Arthur presents family women as being very strong in their wifely duties of ensuring the smooth running of the family affairs. Initially, the women are seen to take pride and always defending their husbands even in times of trouble as seen in Miller’s earlier texts in which Kate Keller in All my Sons and Linda Loman in Death of a Salesman exhibit this characteristic. After Arthur Miller had some rough experience with life and divorcing severally, his perspective about the plight of women in the family changed. He started viewing women differently, as people who would despise their men when they failed. For instance, Quentin’s mother and Victor’s in his later texts despise their husbands to a point that Victor’s wife literary vomits on her husband for being financially unstable.
Arthur is recognized for his unique stylistics in literature. Even though he writes tragedy plays, he goes further to challenge legendary playwrights like William Shakespeare by trying to argue out that the pace they set does not mean it should be the standard format for all playwrights across generations (Bradbury and Richard 9). In the ancient plays, a play was regarded a tragedy if the main character who was always taken to be very powerful and influential, with a high status in the society, was brought down and even killed (Jonathan 34). For Arthur, he uses characters that do notf have high status for heroes. These characters go through life and the storyline revolves around them. Eventually, they are faced with situations and in the course of taking responsibility, their downfall comes looming. He uses characters like Eddie Carbone in A view from the Bridge, John Proctor in The Crucible who is a longshoreman and a farmer respectively as tragic heroes. He also applies a lot of realism, as defined by Lee Alison, in his work unlike the rest of fantasy-filled plays (Alison 23).
In conclusion, from the above discussion, Arthur Miller is presented as an outstanding playwright who is greatly influenced by his life experiences to write his plays. His personality of trying to stand out uniquely from the norm is also manifested in his choice of stylistics. He embraces realism other than unfathomable content that the readers can hardly identify with.
Works Cited
- Caudwell, Christopher. Romance and realism: a study in English bourgeois literature. Princeton University Press, 2015.
- Dollimore, Jonathan. Radical tragedy: religion, ideology and power in the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
- Gottfried, Martin. Arthur Miller: his life and work. Da Capo Press, 2009.
- Lee, Alison. Realism and Power (routledge Revivals): Postmodern British Fiction. Routledge, 2014.
- Malcolm Bradbury and Ruland Richard, From puritanism to postmodernism: a history of American literature. Routledge, 2016. Pp. 12- 67