Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Gleitman, Claire

Titel

"...then she came, and she cried. And I went back home with her": Arthur Miller's "All My Sons" and The Prison-House of Gender

Ist Teil von

• The Arthur Miller journal, 2013-10, Vol.8 (2), p.27-42

Ort / Verlag

Howard Beach: St. Francis College

Erscheinungsjahr

2013

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

ProQuest_Literature Online_英美文学在线

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Yet Lydia too, though attractive and vital, calls Frank in to tend to domestic affairs; she tells him that their toaster is "off again" and she is helpless to fix it. [...]women invade what remains of the pastoral, they focus male attention on quotidian matters, and they draw men in to what Jim, at least, views as hostile confinement: 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" (9). [...]we might be led at this juncture to conclude, All My Sons is a narrow product of its time, a play that uncritically embraces the misogynistic assumptions of its day and some of its main characters. Unlike Brecht, Miller offers no viable alternative to that value system, because those male characters who might be its spokesmen are undermined at every turn, by their inarticulacy (they lack the language that might serve as a vessel for and transmitter of their dreams), their hypocrisy (Chris betrays subliminal longings for what he elsewhere decries, though he wishes to find a way to render it "beautiful," like Willy Loman's fantasies about importing heroic ideals into the corporate workplace), and their utter inability to transform their ideals into meaningful social action. [...]although in some ways the play reinforces the notion of the separate spheres-men have ideals that connect them to the larger world, women are fiercely focused on home and hearth-Miller suggests that the two have merged, deeply problematically: men have been drawn inescapably into the bourgeois realm so that those ideals, however passionately felt, have collapsed into self-defeating abstractions that have lost all credibility largely through the men's own duplicity and their absorption within what they claim to loathe. The play stages no other options. [...]we must conclude that it is the women in All My Sons who fully recognize the fallen nature of their world, know how to assist males who will listen to survive within it, and adapt themselves to it without evident threat to their own sense of self.