Suicide in the Plays of Arthur Miller

267 Pages·2016·10.35 MB·English

by  Sonia Wandruff Slavensky

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Dissertations Theses and Dissertations
1973
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Sonia Wandruff Slavensky
Loyola University Chicago
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Copyright © 1973 Sonia Wandruff Slavensky
SUICIDE IN THE PLAYS OF ARTHUR MILLER:
A VIEW FROM GLORY MOUNTAIN
By
Sonia Wandruf f Slavensky
A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School
of Loyola University in Partial Fulfillment of
the Requirements for the Degree
Doctor of Philosophy
June
1973
"One sees that there will be no ecstasy," Madame
Lhevine said. "And that is when the crisis comes.
It comes, you might say, when we see the future too
clearly, and we see that it is a plain, an endless
plain, and not what we had thought--a mountain with
a glory at the top."
--Arthur Miller, "The Prophecy"
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I should like to thank the people who helped make
this dissertation possible. I am pa~ticularly grateful to
my advisor, Professor Stanley A. Clayes, through whose
guidance and encouragement my somewhat unorthod6x approach
to an unorthodox subject was allowed to develop. My thanks
to my teacher and friend, the late Herbert Abel, Professor
of Classics, who made the Ancients live for me, and to Pro
fessors Rosemary Harnett and James Rocks, my readers, for
their kind cooperation. Thanks also to Dr. John Weiss who
sent me Dr. Steiner's work, and Dr. J.F. Prilby, Chicago
Read Mental Health Center whose generous contributions of
materials and bibliography were of immense help. To Melvin
D. Faber whose fine dissertation "Suicide in Shakespeare,"
provided the groundwork for my research, but especially to
my children, Leah and Rael, without whose love and faith
none of this could have been possible. Finally, to the
short-sighted English professor who shall go unnamed, but
who inspired this dissertation by remarking that he had
never met a man like Willy Loman. My undying gratitude.
iii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS . . . . . . . . • • . . . • • . . • • • . • • . • . . . . . . . . • . . . iii
.............................................
PREFACE v
CHAPTER
I. ATTITUDES AND REACTIONS TO SUICIDE
ANCIENT AND MODERN ....................... . 1
II. SUICIDE IN DRAMA FROM HEROIC SUICIDE
TO HAMARTIC SCRIPT ....................... . 28
I I l. SUICIDE AS UNITY IN ALL MY SONS .......... . 71
IV. THE HAMAR T IC PLAYS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119
Death of a Salesman
The Crucible
A View From the Bridge
v.
AFTER THE FALL: THE ENDLESS PLAIN ....... . 183
A Memori of Two Mondays
The Mis its
After the Fall
Incident At Vichy
The Price
VI. CONCLUSION ............................... . 217
A SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 225
iv
PREFACE
To study and understand the use of suicide in the
work of a modern dramatist presents special difficulties.
For example, it would be foolish to ignore the various
psycho-social and cultural influences which have condi
tioned both the playwright and his audiences to think and
feel' very negatively about the subject of suicide; on the
other_hand, it would be just as foolish to ignore influ
ences not easily measured through statistical and psycho
logical analyses which create some positive attitudes to
ward the same problem. My conviction that both science and
mythology must be accounted for led to my discovery of the
work of Claude Steiner, whose theory of life scripts syn
thesizes both scientific and mythological view of suicide
and emerges with the concept of a personalized mythology-
the Hamartic script--which is acted out by a contemporary
hero--the Hamartic hero.
My research on suicide in drama clearly confirmed the
presence of a dramatic convention, including a suicidal hero
and a stock situation, which is expected to evoke the same
response each time it is repeated. Supposedly then, the
convention of dramatic suicide should be recognized as an
archetypal action which has become an established pattern
or "script," and which is recognized by virtually every
v
known culture. There is no doubt that Arthur Miller, first
unconsciously, then consciously, uses this pattern to great
advantage. Miller, in fact, has so integrated the idea and
convention of suicide into the central texture of his drama
turgy that it has become an indelible stamp of his personal
style and thought. It is also an important key to his de
velopment.
Though suicides are found in all Miller's best plays
but The Price, the entire body of his work is concerned
with suicidal individuals and their personal struggles. He
does, in effect, use suicide as the metaphorical embodiment
of what he believes to be the modern equivalent of the
heroic behavior seen in the tragedies of Sophocles, Euri
pides, Shakespeare, Racine, and of course, Ibsen--all of
whom used the convention of dramatic suicide to express
heroic defiance in the face of catastrophe. For Miller, as
we shall see, the course of his development as a playwright
and thinker can be measured by the evolution of his view of
suicide.
vi
CHAPTER I
ATTITUDES AND REACTIONS TO SUICIDE
ANCIENT AND MODERN
There is but one philosophical problem and
that is suicide.
1
--Camus
Before suicide could become part of the stage voca
bulary it had to take its form and meaning from life. One
must then speculate that dramatic suicides had their roots
in real events which in time underwent a mythologizing pro-
cess and were subsequently dramatized in an idealized form.
Reactions by the audience became, in turn, very highly stereo
" typed. Depending on the context, some stage suicides called
forth condemnation from the audience while others called
forth admiration, or the desired "catharsis" of pity and
2
fear. The point being that heroic suicide became a stage
convention and the suicidal hero became a type, which as we
all know means that he had to fulfill some of the audience's
preconceived expectations. As Warshow explains, it is not
1
Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus (New York: Vin
tage Press, 1955), p. 3.
2
see Melvin D. Faber, "Suicide in Shakespeare" (un
published Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Los
Angeles, 1964). Faber theorizes that.suicide has.always
been acceptable in some contexts and inexcusable 1n others.
p. 29££.
1
2
necessary, in the case of such a type, for there to be any
correspondence between audience experience and the stage ex
perience: "It is only in an ultimate sense that the type
appeals to its audience's experience of reality; much -more
immediately, it appeals to previous experience of the type
111
itself: it creates its own field of reference. It is
this field of reference that will be explored before we turn
to the task of exploring suicide in the plays of Arthur Mil
ler. In the next two chapters I will in fact be establish
ing the principles peculiar to the world of the suicide,
principles which seem often to be the inverse of what most
of us think of as the normal world.
We shall begin with some history, or rather pre
history. The exact beginnings are somewhat vague but the
.Golden Bough speaks of early customs which required the king
or chief to kill himself when he showed signs of age, dis-
ease, wounds or other imperfections. There were in addition
some kings who were required to execute themselves before
their people at the end of an alloted period of time. The
execution took the form of public sacrifice before an idol
and consisted of gradual auto-dismemberment until, weak from
loss of blood, the king, in mortal agony, cut his own throat.
As the ritual is completed, relates Frazer, "whoever desires
1
Robert Warshaw, "The Gangster as a Tragic Hero," in
Tragedy: Vision and Form, ed. by Robert W. Corrigan (San
Francisco: Chandler Publishing Company, 1965), p. 154.
Originally from Robert Warshaw, The Immediate Experience
(Doubleday, 1954), pp. 127-133.
3
to reign another twelve years and undertake this martyrdom
for love of the idol, has to be present looking on at this:
and from that place they raise him up as king."l
As kings became wiser, they chose substitutes who
were allowed the dubious privilege of dying for their kings.
Often the king permitted the substitute to reign for a short
period to qualify for his role and the victim was royally
2
treated prior to being sacrificed. Though the next step in
the evolution is not discussed by Frazer, it seems logical
to surmise that the substitutes, too, had their moments of
inspiration during which one or another of them discovered
that the sacrifice could be transformed into a symbolic
ritual which achieved the same effect without loss of life.
Thus the bloody sacrificial rite became, somehow, a benign
ritual.
Even so, because suicide had been reserved for the
king-god or his substitute, the suicides of slaves or com-
moners were bound to incur severe penalties for usurpation
of the kingly privilege. In fact, there is still an aris-
tocratic aura surrounding the idea of suicide; we still
debate the right of the individual to take his own life--
1
sir James G. Frazer, The Golden Bough, ed. by
Theodore H. Gaster (New York: The American Library, 1959),
p. 281.
2This is similar to the practice of Samurai warriors
who killed themselves in order to serve their leader in the
next world. The custom of suttee may also have begun at
this time, as may the origins of patriotism.or the pract~ce
of sending mercenaries or commoners to war instead of aris
tocrats.