Anxious Masculinity in the Drama of Arthur Miller and Beyond

Salesmen, Sluggers, and Big Daddies

Claire Gleitman

• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781350272989
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Drama
• Index: Literature

Staunchly homosocial, vaguely or overtly misogynistic, anxiously homophobic-this study follows the male breadwinner as he is incarnated in Arthur Miller's most celebrated plays and as he resurfaces in different guises throughout American drama, from the 1950s to the present. Anxious Masculinity offers a compelling analysis of gender dynamics and the legacy of this figure as he stalks through the works of other American dramatists, and argues that the gendered anxieties exhibited by their characters are the very ones invoked with such success by Donald Trump. Claire Gleitman examines this figure in the plays of Miller and Tennessee Williams, as well as later 20th-century writers Lorraine Hansberry, August Wilson, and Sam Shepard, who reposition him in more racially and economically marginalized settings. He reappears in the more recent work of playwrights Tony Kushner, Paula Vogel, and collaborators Lisa Kron and Jeanine Tesori, who shift their focus to the next generation, which seeks to escape his clutches and forge new, often gleefully queer identities. The final chapter concerns contemporary Black dramatists Suzan Lori-Parks, Jackie Sibblies Drury, and Jeremy O. Harris, whose plays move us from anxious masculinity to anxious whiteness and speak directly to the current moment.

1

Strudel and the Single Man: All My Sons and Death of a Salesman

As more than a few critics have observed, Arthur Miller’s dramatic landscape is one in which relationships between men are privileged, all-male enterprises are exalted, and male and female priorities are sharply dichotomized. The linchpin for this polarized system is a philosophical conflict between idealism and practicality that is found in many of Miller’s plays. It is typically gendered and it makes itself felt most strongly in Miller’s two great plays of the 1940s: All My Sons—Miller’s first major success, written in 1947—and Death of a Salesman, generally regarded as his masterpiece, written two years later. In a broad sense, the problem Miller was confronting in these dramas is one he discusses in his essay, “On Social Plays,” originally published in 1955 as the preface to the one-act version of A View from the Bridge. Contrasting modern plays with ancient Greek drama, Miller maintains:

The single theme to which our most ambitious plays can be reduced is frustration … The image is that of the individual scratching away at a wall beyond which stands society, his fellow men. Sometimes he pounds at the wall, sometimes he tries to scale it or … blow it up, but at the end the wall is always there, and the man himself is dead or doomed to defeat in his attempt to live a human life.

(Martin and Centola 1996: 55)

Miller’s phrase “a human life” is rich, as he wields it, and slippery. A human life, he suggests here and elsewhere, would be undergirded by a “standard of values” that would “create in man a respect for himself, a real voice in the fate of his society ….and an aim for his life which is neither a private aim for a private life nor one which sets him below the machine that was made to serve him” (Martin and Centola 1996: 61). This “human life,” it seems, would be achieved through the integration of private and public commitments; that integration would allow a man to “live as a naturally political, naturally private, naturally engaged person” (58). He would be in sync with the domestic and the social world, recognizing both aspects of his selfhood as cohesive aspects of his nature. This integration is forever elusive in Miller’s plays, perhaps because it implicitly resists the far more single-minded ideological assumptions that governed the mid-century, middle-class, white American family unit, in which gender roles were intransigently defined. In David Savran’s words, while the female was expected “to embrace domesticity and contain her sexuality,” the ideal male breadwinner was “an aggressive, ‘go-getting’ businessman” whose central responsibility was to put a roof over his children’s heads and ensure that they grew “up to be like their parents—property-owning husbands and housewives living a life of affluence and abundance” (1992: 7; 8). In “On Social Plays,” Miller offers as an alternative not a total denunciation of the bourgeois dream, nor a demand that we altogether abolish “the machine”—by which he means “the needs of efficient production” (Martin and Centola 1996: 60)—but rather the appealing idea that a man might assign each its proper place within a life that contains both. Yet this goal is forever out of reach for Miller’s males, who simply cannot reconcile respect for themselves and domestic duty, or their ethical sense with their individualistic impulses. This is perhaps one reason why Bigsby has argued that Miller’s overriding concern is “with a baffled idealism” and why Miller himself asserts that the central theme of modern drama is frustration (Bigsby 1984: 139). Miller’s dramas often conclude with the central male character’s suicide because he cannot put his idealistic belief system into practice in any manner other than self-destruction. His wife, by contrast, always survives in part because she has the good and bad fortune to lack the “baffled idealism” of her husband.

What this chapter will explore, then, is why the male is “doomed to defeat,” why he is incapable of scaling or blowing up the wall, and why Miller’s females seem generally immune to this same problem. In the case of All My Sons, the answer is in part that the female is the wall, or she is so closely aligned with what it represents that she assists, to some degree deliberately, in reinforcing it. Death of a Salesman explores similar terrain, but its dramatization of the gender conflict is more nuanced both because its primary female character is more sympathetically drawn and because the homosocial attitudes of its males are to a degree under critique. Yet in both plays the male characters have an ambivalent relationship to the domestic domain, a conflicted site that is at once enticing and at odds with their deepest longings. In All My Sons in particular, those deep longings—which must be repressed to sustain the domestic space—are shown to be the most principled aspects of the male psyche.

Indeed, more overtly than in any other play that Miller ever wrote, the female characters in All My Sons are depicted as figures who actively blunt male idealism and stand in opposition to a righteous commitment to the larger social good that, the play suggests, no one can really achieve but to which only men aspire. The narrowness of the main character, Joe Keller’s, sense of responsibility, for which he ultimately punishes himself by suicide, is aided and abetted by his wife’s deeply provincial value system, one that is echoed in more exaggerated form by the Kellers’ coldhearted neighbor, Sue Bayliss, and even in the more ostensibly appealing Ann Deever, whom Joe’s son hopes to marry. Though Ann wavers in her position, the play’s older females do their best to squelch what they view as “phony idealism” (Miller 1974: 38) and to redirect male energies toward compromised bourgeois interests which the women regard as the essence of their lives and, more than that, as life itself. Yet these corrupt guardians of the bourgeois prison are also the play’s staunch realists. While the values upheld by the men are shown to be humane, they are also vague and finally self-defeating. If the wall is “always there,” soul-destroying in its implacable materiality, the moral integrity that would make that fact bearable seems to be beyond the male characters’ power to articulate, much less to enact.

All My Sons was Miller’s first serious foray into Ibsenite realism, or into what he himself described as “the Greco-Ibsen form” (Miller 1995: 144). Among other things, the play firmly establishes Miller’s lifelong interest in plays about “what [people] choose to forget.” Every one of his plays, according to Miller, is about “now grappling with then, it’s the story of how the birds come home to roost” (quoted in Bigsby 1997: 7). When the original Broadway production of All My Sons was disparaged by some critics for being “overly plotted, to the point of implausible coincidence,” Miller confessed to privately wondering:

…what critics would make of a play in which an infant, set out on a mountainside to die because it is predicted that he will murder his father, is rescued by a shepherd and then, some two decades later, gets into an argument with a total stranger whom he kills—and who just happens to be ….his father.

(Miller 1995: 134)¹

Miller’s response reveals not only the artist’s expected defensiveness on behalf of his creation, but also an investment in Greek tragedy that outlasted Miller’s investment in Ibsen, whose preoccupations he only partially shared. (He confessed to being puzzled when people claimed that A Doll’s House was about “the inequality of women.” Miller remarked, perhaps with willful perversity: “The women I knew about had not been even slightly unequal; I saw no such problem in A Doll’s House” [Martin and Centola 1996: 180].) Yet both Ibsen and the Greeks bequeathed to Miller a dramatic structure that hinges on a carefully buried secret—in Miller, often though not always of a sexual nature—that resurfaces like the return of the repressed and threatens to dismantle a carefully cultivated social life. Minus the secret’s sexual content, this is the skeleton for the plot of A Doll’s House, as well as (sexual content reinserted) the skeleton for Oedipus Rex. The resulting drama becomes a collision between the public and the private self—or, to put it differently, between the person the character claims to be and the person the unearthed secret suggests he or she may be instead.

It is because this collision has social as well as psychological implications that Miller thought of himself as merging the Greek and Ibsenite forms. As it happens, All My Sons is one of Miller’s few plays to show little interest in sexual betrayal (though the character Chris’s designs on Ann are viewed by his mother as a betrayal of his dead brother); its focus is more specifically on a conflict between social responsibility and self-interest. The seed for the play was planted by a story Miller heard from his then mother-in-law about a young girl who informed on her father because she learned he was selling defective parts to the military. In Miller’s dramatic recreation of this story, the daughter becomes a son, ostensibly because Miller, in his own words, “didn’t know much about girls then,” although one might add that it would undermine the logic of Miller’s play to associate a righteous gesture of that nature with a female (quoted in Bigsby 2009: 265). All My Sons tells the tale of an ordinary “Joe” who manufactured engines for war planes during the Second World War. One fateful day, Joe knowingly sold a batch of faulty cylinder engines to the Army Air Force, resulting in the deaths of twenty-one pilots. Afterward, Joe successfully evaded responsibility by scapegoating his subordinate, who went to jail; meanwhile, Joe rebuilt his business, thus providing a secure suburban lifestyle for his family and a thriving business that he planned to pass along to his sons.

The play takes place three and a half years later, when Joe is forced into a reckoning with his amorality, which prompted his older son Larry, a pilot in the war, to take his own life. Upon learning of Larry’s suicide, Joe kills himself in atonement for his crimes. Although it is unquestionably Joe Keller who is responsible for the play’s central deception, his wife Kate plays a crucial role in staving off the truth of the past to preserve what she and Joe need to believe about their past and present. Moreover, Kate does what she can to ensure that her value system, not the one Joe belatedly discovers and dies for, will be embraced by her surviving son, in the hopes of carrying him into a sustainable, if morally bankrupt, future. Collectively, All My Sons’ females firmly commit themselves to preserving the stifling set of values that is under critique in the play, and they show themselves to be devoid of the existential anguish that afflicts its disillusioned idealists, all of whom are male. The anguish the female characters experience is no less real, but it begins and ends at their own front curb.

All My Sons’ action takes place entirely, and suggestively, in the secluded backyard of Joe’s home. The opening stage directions immediately inform us what the house cost when it was first built, how nicely painted it is, and how effectively the poplars function to cut off any view beyond the Kellers’ yard—thus isolating them from the larger world. The home as Miller describes it is a textbook example of post-war domestic containment. Yet the Kellers’ sheltered abode contains an apple tree, planted in Larry’s honor, which has fallen down, with obvious and troubling implications: this Edenic realm is emphatically postlapsarian. When the curtain opens, three men are chatting amiably in the pleasant outdoors; as they do, Miller inflects further ambiguity into his portrait of the suburban haven. While reading the daily paper, Joe remarks that he no longer reads the news and takes an interest only in the want ads, signaling a conversion from social responsibility or at least social awareness to an exclusive focus on what people want, materially. His neighbor, the doctor Jim Bayliss, reveals his own cynicism when he responds to another neighbor’s idealized version of the medical profession—this neighbor, Frank Lubey, recently saw a movie about a doctor who “help[ed] humanity”—with the dry retort: “I would love to help humanity on a Warner Brothers salary” (6).

The men’s conversation is interrupted when first Jim and then Frank are called indoors by their wives. Jim’s wife Sue arrives first, to inform her husband that a patient is trying to reach him. When Jim remarks that he has better things to do than to hold the hand of a patient who is not really sick, Sue replies acidly that for a fee of ten dollars he can take the trouble to hold the man’s hand. Though Sue is described as past forty, fretful, and overweight, Frank’s wife Lydia is a high-spirited young woman of twenty-seven. Yet Lydia too, though attractive and vital, calls Frank in to tend to domestic affairs: she tells him that their toaster is malfunctioning and she is helpless to fix it. Thus, women invade what remains of the pastoral, natural world; they focus male attention on quotidian matters, and they draw them in to what Jim, at least, views as hostile territory: as he exits the stage to enter his home, he expresses a dry longing “to take a trip around the world for about 30 years” (Miller 1974: 9). The serene home, it seems, is also a prison maintained by females for the containment of breadwinning men.

Jim and Sue Bayliss are the most extreme example of the philosophical oppositions that divide the genders in this play, although they regard themselves as typical. In a strikingly chilly scene in Act 2, Sue encounters Ann Deever in the backyard of the Kellers’ home. With the omniscience of the paradigmatic nosy neighbor, Sue has accurately ascertained that Ann is here to marry the Kellers’ son Chris, though Joe’s wife Kate does not yet know it. Hence, she offers Ann advice about the importance of securing a husband who has money (which Chris does), and then proceeds coldly to ask her, once she and Chris are married, to do Sue the favor of moving elsewhere. Her reasoning is that she attributes Jim’s bitter sense that he is imprisoned to Chris’s idealistic influence: “Every time he has a session with Chris, he feels as though he’s compromising by not giving up everything for research.” But research, she complains (echoing her husband’s earlier line about a Warner Brothers salary), fails to pay the bills: “You’ve got to give up your life to go into it.” Thus, Sue outlines the conflict in the starkest of terms: to pursue an ideal, one must sacrifice what Sue defines as life, by which she means family. The reconciliation of the private and the public that would allow a man to have “respect for himself,” obtained through his possession of “a real voice in the fate of his society,” is deemed an idle dream by Sue Bayliss (Martin and Centola 1996: 61). She goes on to insist that Chris’s idealism is a mere pose, masking an essential materialism that they all share: “[I]f Chris wants people to put on the hair shirt let him take off his broadcloth. He’s driving my husband crazy with that phony idealism of his” (Miller 1974: 38). In short, Sue argues that there is no conflict, really; idealism is always phony—Chris’s expensive clothes expose his bourgeois marrow, despite his sanctimoniousness—and there is no room for it in “life.” Yet a belief that one ought to be “better than it’s possible to be,” in Sue’s words, which Chris hypocritically awakens in Jim, creates guilt in males and threatens the nest that it is the female’s single-minded objective to maintain.

To some degree, Jim corroborates Sue’s sense of things, and he too extrapolates from his circumstances to all males and, by implication, all females. Act 2 concludes with the revelation of secrets that is the hallmark of the well-made play—the form that Miller inherited, via Ibsen, from Eugène Scribe. Chris learns that his father, whom he has always revered, approved the decision to send the faulty cylinder engines forward and thus was responsible for the deaths of the twenty-one pilots. Deeply shaken, Chris departs into the night, and Act 3 opens with his mother seated outdoors in a rocking chair, apprehensively awaiting his return. Jim appears in her yard to reassure her that Chris is merely tracing a trajectory that characterizes all men’s lives: “These private little revolutions always die,” he explains. “The compromise is always made … [E]very man … [has] a star, but once it’s out it never lights again.” Jim explains how his own star went out as follows:

One year I … took off … to New Orleans … ; I lived on bananas and milk … It was beautiful. And then she came, and she cried. And I went back home with her. And now I live in the usual darkness. I can’t find myself; it’s even hard sometimes to remember the kind of man I wanted to be. I’m a good husband.

(Miller 1974: 61; emphasis added)

Jim’s terminology is as stark as his wife’s, suggesting that this unhappy pair share the same, gendered world view. To be a good husband, one must sacrifice the kind of man one wishes to be—even, Jim suggests, one’s very self. The self that Jim has lost is one with integrity, committed to the welfare of others and also to beauty; integrity and beauty as he depicts them are tied not only to social responsibility but also to the ascetic withdrawal from bourgeois materialism that he conjures when he tells Kate that he lived on bananas and milk. The vagueness of Jim’s description robs it of some credibility—he says that he studied “a certain disease”—yet Jim sees in his own necessary compromise the compromise all men make. One must sacrifice one’s better self, and Miller’s notion of a fully “human” (which seems synonymous with humane) life, in response to the call and the cry of the female, which draws the restless male back to the domestic realm to which she is linked. Chris too, Jim says, will arrive at this recognition: “Chris is a good son—he’ll come back” (home).

Chris’s position in the play as a younger man perched on the edge of the disillusionment Jim describes is a complex one. He is indeed an idealist, as Sue claims, and he speaks reverentially about the experiences he had in the war as he watched men who served under him dying for one another and manifesting what he calls a “kind of … responsibility. Man for man.” Having witnessed the self-sacrificing and loving actions these men performed on behalf of other men, he experiences profound discomfort returning to capitalist America, with its booming post-war economy. Although he has gone to work for his father, he feels the money he earns is tainted, covered in the blood of soldiers whose deaths are rendered meaningless if their only consequence is to bolster a rat-race in which everyone is out for his own gain. Chris has invited Ann, who was once engaged to Larry, back to his family home to propose marriage; yet she notes worriedly that his interactions with her have exhibited what she perceives as shame. Chris corroborates her view when he admits that he feels “ashamed somehow” to be part of the rat-race, and he contrasts that shame with the selfless love of men for men. Yet when Ann reassures him that he has a right to everything he has, including his father’s money, Chris responds happily with the promise: “I’m going to make a fortune for you!” (Miller 1974: 30; 31).

Hence, it appears that, in order to achieve a life that will include Ann, Chris has to embrace a set of priorities that hinges on accumulating money. Earlier in the play, Chris complains to his father that the family business fails to inspire him but, if he must engage with it, he wants it to be “beautiful.” He goes on: “I want a family … I want to build something I can give myself to” (Miller 1974: 15). Yet Chris’s claim that grubbing for money could become beautiful (a word Jim also employed, though in a very different context) if one directed it toward building a family is undermined by a half-echo later, when he notes that he wishes to erect a “monument” to the selfless heroism and devotion he witnessed on the battlefield (31). It is something to solidify his faith in that responsibility, “[m]an for man,” that Chris really wishes to build, yet he capitulates to a materialist ethic that, arguably, he projects onto Ann when he tells her that he will make a fortune for her. Ann’s response is a demur, as she lightly wonders what she would do with a fortune. Chris’s desire to marry Ann, whom he has not seen in five years, seems impetuous, sexless and immature, a strategy to rationalize his entrance into his father’s business and both to erase his brother’s troubling memory—as Ann was his brother’s “girl”—and to imbue Chris with the integrity of the older son who once possessed her. If Ann becomes Chris’s, Larry—linked metaphorically with the death of the pilots—can be forgotten; simultaneously, Larry is reborn in the form of Chris, who now has what Larry had. Yet this strategy is not really working for Chris, who cannot help but entwine Ann with his father’s money and find both shameful. Moreover, though the issue is undeveloped in the play, Chris’s shame may also stem from a sense that his acquisition of Ann is a violation of that responsibility, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Prison-House of Gender
• 1 Strudel and the Single Man: All My Sons and Death of a Salesman
• 2 Witchcraft and the Weird: The Crucible and A View from the Bridge
• 3 Performing White Male Heteronormativity: A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
• 4 Playing Ball on the Margins: Raisin in the Sun, Fences, Curse of the Starving Class
• 5 Queering a New Generation: Angels in America, How I Learned to Drive, Fun Home
• 6 Cakewalks and the White Gaze: Topdog/Underdog, Fairview, Slave Play
• Notes
• References
• Index
• Imprint