One ought to be suspicious of any attempt to boil down all the great themes to a single sentence, but this one – “How may a man make of the outside world a home?” – does bear watching as a clue to the inner life of the great plays.
Arthur Miller, “The Family in Modern Drama”
An avid commentator on social perturbations, Arthur Miller (1915-2006) tends to foreground his theatrical statements within the larger context of modern life-relations.
Where does man live? Where does man come from? Whom do his loyalties belong to? His family, his country, himself? How does man make home within or out of the outside world? What is “sacrificed” in the on-going process of social adaptation? How does man make peace with the world? Does man make peace with the world?
Often dismissed by the majority of the critical public as his most Ibsenian play, Miller’s All My Sons (1947) addresses all of these hopelessly intertwining issues about our choice-driven social existence, amidst a chaotic panorama of outside influences, such as a war for example.
In the “Introduction to the Collected Plays”, Miller discusses at great length his initial intention regarding the play’s form and content. He claims to have wanted to write a play for a “prophetic theater” (even though the theatre group he had in mind, namely the Group Theatre, had disbanded several years before). Such a play, he continues, “is meant for people of common sense, and relevant to both their domestic lives and their daily work, but an experience which widens their awareness of connection – the filaments to the past and the future which lie concealed in ‘life’.” In other words, Miller attempted to mold a dramatic reality out of painfully real objective facts , which may or may not resonate with contemporary audiences the way they did in the late forties and early fifties. Yet we cannot help but wonder about the extent of our own present-day relatedness to the suspended ‘normality’ of the play’s breadth. (In the same Introduction, Miller gives the details of his original inspiration for the play’s storyline. He states: “During an idle chat in my living room, a pious lady from the Middle West told of a family in her neighborhood which had been destroyed when the daughter turned the father into the authorities on discovering that he had been selling faulty machinery to the Army. The war was then in full blast. By the time she had finished the tale I had transformed the daughter into a son and the climax of the second act was full and clear in my mind.” (129))
Thematically, the play explores the cruel reality of misguided innocence, either as an effect of prolonged self-denial or as a stamp of sheltered ignorance. We enter the fortified world of the Keller family as they are about to delve into a long-awaited confrontation with the past. Within the sheltered confines of their back yard, we accompany the Kellers as they face the ‘whereabouts’ of their choices. Structurally, Miller’s commitment to the stylistic principles of Ibsen’s Realism (we might say even Naturalism, to an extent) palpably ‘brings to life’ the characters’ dilemmas as they struggle to confront or deny them. The manly prose of his characters’ dialogue functions as a crude filter through which the audience enters the universal singularity of the Keller household. However, the imagery accompanying the all-too-American middle-class setting allows for the presence of certain poetic renditions of a more symbolic nature, such as the fallen tree and the gust of wind that took it down. Thus, we also enter the mythological parameters of Eve and Adam’s Garden of Eden, slightly after the Fall, in this case, signifying the demise of the American Dream, moreover, its innately treacherous offering.
At the opening of Act I, we are introduced to the head of the Keller household, Mr. Joe Keller, whose seemingly laid-back posture and disengaging conversation with his neighbor, the local physician Jim Bayliss, and later on with his son Chris, attests to a not-so-well-hidden sense of culpability. For example, how is he going to tell his wife Kate about the fallen tree? The tree in question had been planted in honor of their younger son Larry, who had been reported as missing in action for over three years. His other son, Chris, informs him that there is no need to break the news to Kate since she beheld the event herself. We can’t help but feel for both Kate and Joe, at this stage in the play, especially after bearing witness to his genuine concern for his wife’s state of mind. At the same time, there is a lurking sensation that Joe’s concern for his family’s, particularly for his wife’s well-being, acts as a screen, a canvas deflecting the true nature of his inner guilt. If he confronts Kate with the reality of Larry’s death (as much as he knows of it at this point in the plot’s development), this would not only destroy her means of coping with their family circumstances but would also seal his own fate, in front of those he ‘lives for’, his wife and his other son, Chris. So when Chris asks for Joe’s approval and support as he plans to marry his younger brother’s fiancé, Ann Deever, Joe once again faces the irreversibility of his past actions, trying to ‘reason’ with his son’s firm decision by pointing towards its potentially devastating effect on Kate’s life.
On the other hand, we also encounter Joe’s almost perverse fetishism of playing ‘cops and robbers’ with the neighborhood children, something that Kate strongly objects to, and cannot fully comprehend, living as she has with her own sense of concealed complacency and shame. With the first act drawing to an end, we continue to grow more aware of Joe Keller’s submerged moral and legal liability. He did walk with his head high the day he was acquitted for the crime which led twenty-one young men to their premature deaths; he did show them, his neighbors, that he still had his dignity and pride, but does this courageous act prove his non-involvement with the shipping off of the faulty parts, does his display of certainty at a time of great disbelief assert his innocence? In his view of his world, it seems that he has been exonerated; nonetheless, the lines of ‘his world’ are being constantly blurred, by Chris’s wish to marry Ann Deever, the former fiancé of his long-departed but never given-up-on son Larry and also the daughter of the little man who took the final blame for his war-time decision, his partner Steve Deever, by Kate’s stubborn dismissal of Larry’s death, and ultimately by his perturbed conscience.
In that respect, the question of the crime(s) in the play is no longer a simple matter of who did it or why it was done in the first place. With the arrival in Act II, the arrival of Ann’s brother George and the subsequent verbal confrontation between him and Chris on the one hand, and between Joe and Chris on the other, the trouble(s) caused by Joe Keller’s protracted self-denial come full circle. We are faced with a man who can tell right from wrong, but refuses to take any responsibility for his participation in morally challenging social involvements. Thus, Miller remarks Joe Keller “is not a partner in society, but an incorporated member, so to speak, and you cannot sue personally the officers of a corporation.” Moreover, this assumption opens up another area of interest when examining the impact of varied innocence in a larger social frame. If Joe Keller is taken to be ‘living outside’ acknowledged social morality, due to certain choices he has made along his path, to what extent is he a product of the deviant nature of socio-economic rules and regulations, particularity at a strife-filled time of financial depression and its warring aftermath, and to what extent is he a making of his own, ‘independent’ decisions? One way of approaching this rather expansive scholarly pursuit is to examine more closely the Ibsenian method at work in Miller’s play.
Throughout his theatrical essays and in a large section of his 1987 autobiography, Timebends, Miller openly acknowledges the outstanding influence Henrik Ibsen’s work has had on his writing, particularly to earlier plays such as All My Sons (1947) and Death of a Salesman (1949), while having searched for a way to create a play based on factual occurrences. Miller recognizes Ibsen’s skill when dealing with the hard facts of modern life, since “a situation in [Ibsen’s] plays is never stated but revealed in terms of hard actions, irrevocable deeds; and sentiment is never confused with the action it conceals.” What better way to depict the hidden nature of the Keller household’s (dis)-engagement with the futile past than by resorting to Ibsen’s slowly-evolving exposition. We do feel the burdened prolonged duration of Act I; we almost dismiss it as being too slow. Then again, for the past to creep upon the present, time is of the essence.
Miller is fully aware of the strenuous effect of such a technique on the patience of modern audiences. He recognizes our impatience with trite matters of characters sitting down, leisurely, and discussing events which had preceded the immediate circumstances of the play, since “in “life” they would be busy with the present.” However, when dealing with time, in all of its continuity, as a relevant factor in the questioning of the moral implications of truth and innocence behind an individual’s action or a society’s involvement, the Ibsenian method of presentation makes a useful tool.
Miller’s homage to Ibsen’s Realism in All My Sons is not only present in the dialogue exchange of Act I; we journey with his presence at hand all throughout the play. Kate’s assertion of Joe’s innocence is directly tied to her astrological beliefs (Miller had initially called the play The Sign of the Archer). After the trial and Joe’s arrest, she has carved out a space within the perturbed nature of her life with Joe based on the mystic precepts of astrology; she lives her life in Joe’s world by believing in the genuine power of mysticism since the alternative is not only murderous but debilitating to her further existence. We tend to wonder throughout the play, particularly in Act II, when she tries to disarm George’s anger and send Ann away from Chris, about how much she actually knows regarding Joe’s involvement in Larry’s untimely death. Nevertheless, her acute sense of mysticism is not far from Ibsen’s use of realism, which is simply to say that life as we experience it contains “mysteries…which no amount of analyzing will reduce to reason,” and yet “it is perfectly realistic to admit and even proclaim that hiatus as a truth.”
Dialectics aside, Kate’s commitment to the safe haven of astrological beliefs only reaffirms her and Joe’s determination to keep the past at an arm’s length. She desperately needs to believe that Ann must remain faithful to Larry’s promise; if Chris and Ann eventually get married, her sense of sheltered innocence will be irreversibly contaminated. Then, she would be forced to face retribution for her act of collaboration in the death of her dear son Larry. As a character, Kate does not grow with her tragic awareness, she is left struggling with the prospects of avoiding final judgement. In a way, she is similar to the character of her older son, Chris, who is one step away from emerging as a tragic figure. The relationship between Chris and Joe marks the crux of the play’s examination of submerged innocence, in all of its misguided futility. He remains the play’s idealist even after the truth of his father’s past actions comes inevitably out in the open; in a sense, Chris’s character lends the play its much needed, even if somewhat deluded, moral center.
In other words, we might say that the play’s central conflict lies not within the relationship Chris has with his father, with his parents, but rather with himself.
Who is he? His father’s son? A man scarred by the atrocities of war? A lover? A responsible adult?
His exit at the end of Act II does not help solve the dilemma of his existence within the pseudo-parameters of Joe Keller’s world. We see him as the ultimate idealist, passing on the viability of core moral truths, and yet lacking the capacity to view his own susceptibility and self-imposed innocent ignorance. He tends to transfer his impassivity as a man onto his father’s denial of the evil nature of his fraudulent action, coming of as a Christ figure. Whether this trait of Chris’s character was purposefully developed by Miller or not, at times, as an audience we learn to suspect the over-the-top moralistic character of his final speeches, since his stern idealism subverts the moral essence behind his statements. This delving into a rather duplicitous solipsism only enhances the foundational thematic exploration of Miller’s play – that of misconstrued and misused innocence.
In light of this assertion, we come to question again the spiritus movens of Joe Keller’s crime. Was he just an extended arm of the duplicitous nature of a morally corrupt post-industrialist society in a time of economic crisis, or is he a self-made man, carving out his path as he sees fit? The realist framework of Miller’s play does not allow for such a clear-cut division. Man is a social animal, to Miller’s understanding, and as such he is as much the product of his environment as it is a result of his free will. Therefore, the decrepit nature of Joe Keller’s crime is not merely a singular action of an individual’s corrupt psyche. It is a socially-driven fallacy in a time when the normality of human choices is no longer a binary supposition, when villains demonstrate a deep commitment to family values and a strive to keep their seemingly marginal social role afloat. (When men and women look for comfort and surety by stepping over other people’s corpses, patching up a morally grounded existence with the diabolical threads of dissembling innocence, making a home out of what the world has to offer them.)
Ibsen’s method of realist representation calls for a drama of higher consciousness. When the audience is about to exit the theatre, they should not only carry with them a sense of implicit or transferred guilt, but also a sense of partaking upon a valid causation as the past and present become parts of the same time continuum. Nevertheless, this method of socially-active dramaturgy can be a rather too-assertive, presumptuously preaching activity. And yet, it is precisely Miller’s overly didactic quality of realism in All My Sons that forces us, as a disengaged post-modern audience, to grasp the intricate nature of our responsibility towards society, in all of society’s idealistic presumptive grandeur and misconstrued sense of moral values.
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