Versions of Heroism in Modern American Drama: Redefinitions by Miller, Williams, O’Neill and Anderson

185 Pages·1991·18.06 MB·English

by  Julie Adam (auth.)

VERSIONS OF HEROISM
IN MODERN AMERICAN DRAMA
Versions of Heroism
in Modern American
Drama
Redefinitions by Miller, Williams,
D'N eill and Anderson
JULIE ADAM
Pal grave Macmillan
ISBN 978-1-349-21365-8 ISBN 978-1-349-21363-4 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-21363-4
© Julie Adam 1991
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1s t edition 1991
All rights reserved. For information, write:
Scholarly and Reference Division,
St. Martin's Press, Inc., 175 Fifth Avenue,
New York, N.Y. 10010
First published in the United States of America in 1991
ISBN 978-0-312-05779-4
Ubrary of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Adam Julie, 1955-
Versions of heroism in modern American drama: redefinitions by
Miller, O'Neill, and Anderson / Julie Adam.
p. em.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-312-05779-4
1. American drama (Tragedy)-History and criticism. 2. American
drama-20th century-History and criticism. 3. Miller, Arthur,
1915- -criticism and interpretation. 4. O'Neill, Eugene,
1888-1953-Criticism and interpretation. 5. Anderson, Maxwell,
1888-1959-Criticism and interpretation. 6. Heroes in literature.
I. Title.
PS336.T7A3 1991
812'.05120905-dc20 90-48822
CIP
To my Parents
Contents
Acknowledgements ix
Introduction 1
1 Heroism Reconsidered 12
2 Idealism as Heroism 40
3 Martyrdom as Heroism 65
4 Self-reflection as Heroism 88
5 Survival as Heroism 121
Conclusion 152
Notes 159
Bibliography 162
Index 175
vii
Acknowl edgements
I wish to thank Frederick J. Marker, my former thesis supervisor,
for his guidance and encourAgement during the writing of the
dissertation, a project out of which this book grew. My appreciation
also goes to Alexander Leggatt for offering his advice about possible
revisions. Last, but certainly not least, I wish to thank my parents,
Jan Adam and Zuzana Adam, for providing various forms of
support, emotional and otherwise; in particular, I am indebted to
my mother for fostering in me an early interest in literature and to
my father for not trying to steer me to a more practical career.
ix
Introduction
I
This book is an exploration of redefinitions. It considers the various
ways in which Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Eugene O'Neill
and Maxwell Anderson approach the issue of dramatic heroism and
the related literary problem of modem tragedy. During my research
of critical approaches to modem dramatic tragedy I became inter
ested in the fascination tragedy has held for numerous playwrights,
and in the fervour with which a number of practitioners of modem
drama have insisted on being considered part of an uninterrupted
tradition of tragedy. In spite of working within an American liberal
democratic setting, with its optimistic tendencies and its glorifica
tion of individualism, these dramatists wish to emulate a dramatic
form reflecting a philosophy of life and a view of the world totally
alien to their own and to those of their culture and possibly, as some
have suggested, no longer relevant for the modem age.
One critical cliche says that there can be no heroism in literary
works because there are no instances of heroism in .modern life.
Anyone having the benefit of a lack of acquaintance with the
literary world will know that such an estimate of the contemporary
world and its inhabitants is nonsense. When critics and writers
refer to the lack of heroism in the modem era frequently they are
not only glorifying the past and measuring the present against a
past that is occasionally a figment of their imagination but also, I
suspect, more often than not referring not to life but to art. That
is, the modem literary imagination is non-heroic - grounded in
an essentially democratic, egalitarian philosophy - and yet often
excessively preoccupied with questions of heroism.
Some playwrights' desire to belong to an exclusive club of 'classic'
writers - for instance, practitioners of tragedy - is understandable in
view of the overwhelming power of the popular, especially in the
United States. The American interest in literary tragedy and heroism
in the twentieth century has, I believe, to do with a passionately felt
need to be part of an uninterrupted literary tradition and to see
a direct, glorious line from the ancients - in the case of tragedy,
1
2 Versions of Heroism in Modern American Drama
Aristotle and the Greek dramatists whose works he describes in the
Poetics - to the moderns.
The playwrights examined here can be viewed as 'traditional' in
the sense that Eliot, in his 'Tradition and the Individual Talent',
defines the word in his discussion of the 'historical sense'. He
states that
... the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the
pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense
compels a man to write not merely with his own generation
in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature
of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature
of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes
a simultaneous order. This historical sense, which is a sense
of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes
a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes
a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his
contemporaneity. (4)
An American-turned-Englishman, Eliot consciously and deliber
ately sets out to place himself and his culture within 'the whole
of ... literature'. His insistence on the coexistence of past and
present is indicative of both a historical sense and an awareness
of a relative lack of historical dimension in his country of origin.
Eliot discovers the obvious: that art does not exist in a vacuum; that
there is no understanding of the present without an understanding
of the past. What also emerges from his analysis, however, is an
acute concern not only with the origins of the present in the past,
and the dependence of the modem on the traditional, but also with
the weighty presence of the past. Furthermore, although Eliot hints
at a historical development, or a process, his controlling image in
the discussion is the mosaic, the collage (as in 'The Wasteland') and
his sense of the past is mythical rather than strictly political or even
historical, in the usual contemporary sense of the word.
The four playwrights under examination use the past - both
personal and social - in a similar manner, and this tells us some
thing about their approach to heroism and tragedy. Although their
dramas do not have the intellectual weight of Eliot's writings, and
the 'history' they dramatize is often a private history, their analysis
of the relationship between past and present - as revealed through
such figures as Willy Loman, Blanche DuBois, James Tyrone, and
Introduction 3
others - partakes of an awareness, comparable to Eliot's, of the
presence of the past. Miller's After the Fall best illustrates the
problematic relationship of past to present, of political reality to
private survival and ultimately of social and individual action to
public and private guilt. The play is an apolitical and ahistorical
dramatization of history; it is an entirely internalized view of the
past - historical and political reality as stream-of-consciousness.
As the title suggests, history is life after the Fall; history - in the
most sinister guises of McCarthyite betrayals and of Nazi atrocities
- here emblematizes knowledge, or more specifically, consciousness
of evil, and thus must necessarily lead to guilt. Clearly, such
an understanding of the past is moralized and mythical, rather
than strictly political. In such diverse plays as Miller's Death of a
Salesman and After the Fall, O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night
and Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire the characters' attitudes to
the past are ambivalent: the past is a place they must flee but also
a haven from the present; it seems to be separate from the present
and yet an inextricable part of it. On a private scale, in Death of a
Salesman, the past is not merely where Willy came from, but rather
exists simultaneously with the present. Interestingly enough, the
past in these plays is a place rather than a time, and thus is not
only recalled by the characters but also lived in. The transparent
'walls' of the set of Death of a Salesman, A Streetcar Named Desire, The
Glass Menagerie, as well as other plays, facilitate the simultaneous
dramatization of past and present. Repeatedly, various characters
for instance Willy Loman, Blanche DuBois, Mary Tyrone, Quentin
- appear to be living in the present but in the course of the play
discover that they are firmly - some more so than others - planted
in the past and that their hold on the present is tenuous at best.
This understanding of the past and consequent dramatic use of the
past is very different from Ibsen's usage in such plays as A Doll
House, The Wild Duck or Strindberg's in Miss Julie. As in Eliot's
schema, the past is not simply a sequence of events leading up
to the present and exerting an influence on it, but rather events
occurring simultaneously with 'present' events and thus inevitably
complicating them.
Miller's and Williams' approaches to tragedy depend on their
attitudes to and treatment of the past in their plays. They, as well
as O'Neill and Anderson, appropriate the tradition of tragedy; for
them the tragic view of life is not a philosophy of a specific culture
with its particular assumptions about existence clearly tied to a