The Plays of Arthur Miller

A Major Theme:
Unrelatedness and Alienation

Prof S. C. MATHUR
Professor of English, University of Roorke, Roorke

Arthur Miller has tried to diagnose and locate the maladies afflicting the modern man in his plays. The theme of unrelated­ness and alienation is the most important and crucial one for the playwright. It is the most pervasive theme in the plays of Arthur Miller as has been rightly pointed out by Benjamin Nelson. He says, “Like Monte Sant Angelo all of Miller’s writing is invisibly prefaced by the words E. M. Forster inscribed in his novel, Howard’s End, ‘only connect’. It is precisely this lack of connection, followed by the realization of its importance, and the ultimate commitment to its achievement which forms the underlying thematic pattern of Miller’s plays”.¹

The problem of unrelatedness is a recurrent theme in the plays of Miller. He attacks and lays siege on “the fortress of unrelatedness”.² That man is not only related to the immediate members of his family but has got a wider responsibility to the outside world is a theme that constantly recurs in his plays. All great and serious plays, according to him, are ultimately involved with the basic problem, “How may a man make of the outside world a home”? ³

The problem of unrelatedness is a major theme in the plays of Miller. In his first major play, All My Sons, Joe Keller’s myopic vision does not allow him to look beyond the four walls of his home and immediate family. He is unable to comprehend the fact that there is a world beyond his immediate neighbourhood to which he is also responsible. He fails to be the good man, the good citizen that his son, Chris, demands. His fault according to Miller and Chris, is that he does not recognize any allegiance to society at large. The fact that a man belongs not only to himself and his family but to the world beyond it is not intelligible to him. In the words of Benjamin Nelson, “Keller’s crime is the consequence of the pervasive illness of unrelatedness. It is this bland but lethal disease that is so frightening for Miller because it plunges into jungle anarchy all civilization’s attempts at order and meaning. And it is against this barrier of unrelatedness that Chris Keller hurls himself”. ⁴

Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman like Joe Keller in All My Sons is completely oblivious of the needs of the society and is primarily interested in the welfare of his own immediate family members – his sons, Happy and Biff. John Proctor, in the play The Crucible, stands as a symbol of those who went to the scaffold cheerfully because they were more concerned about securing the approval and recognition of their actions by other members of the community and did not want their fair names to be sullied. Eddie Carbone, in the play A View from the Bridge, shows the same concern and wants to get his fair name and respect in the eyes of his community. The play A Memory of two Mondays, portrays very poignantly the dull routine, the warping of the soul and the crushing conformity that it produces. In this play Miller has revealed that depersonalization and alienation are at the core of the sickness of modern man. The play After the Fall, deals with the theme of separateness, breaking of faith and betrayal. In the words of Quentin, the protagonist of the play, “Everything is one thing you see. I do not know what are we to one another”.⁵ Quentin is shocked at the realization that in this world people can be so easily disposed off. The idea of separateness bewilders Quentin as one character after another tries to become a separate person in the play – Looise, Mickey and Mother. As soon as we find that our interests are not identical with someone, we start behaving like a separate person, forgetting completely even our long association and friend­ship with him. Quentin, on seeing the betrayals, becomes disgusted and disillusioned and finally tells Maggie, a character in the play. “We are all separate people. I tried not to be but finally is – a separate person”.⁶ The fact that we have become com­pletely indifferent to the needs of others and have lost the human touch has been shown in the play Incident at Vichy, as the Major, a character in the play, says: “There are no persons any more, don’t you see that. There will never be persons again”.⁷ In Arthur Miller’s play The Price, Walter becomes as a separate person and deserts his old father to pursue his own medical career. The father also acts as a separate person in the play when he does not help Victor, his son, with his money at a time he needed it the most. Thus, we find that the theme of unrelatedness, separate­ness and alienation is a recurring theme in the plays of Arthur Miller.

Perhaps the most disturbing experience of modern man has been the pervasive sense of alienation. Modern man finds himself cut off from his roots, alienated and lost, in an atmosphere of moral and cultural decay that surrounds him on all sides. The vision of modern man is essentially that of a lonely figure, cut off from his immediate social and cultural milieu. In the modern world people live in a closed, alien world of encapsulating rooms, walls and windows suggesting imprisonment of their self and separation from other human beings. And it is this acute sense of disconnectedness that accumulates their awareness of loneliness and self-alienation. We are a daily witness to the social and spiritual alienation of the individuals who, though they remain in physical proximity, find it impossible to communi­cate with one another as people in the modern world have developed an attitude of indifference and callousness. Modern life is not integrated by any social purpose or moral value. On the other hand, we find man controlled and regulated by his physical needs and selfish motives. Arthur Miller has tried to show in his plays that no man can lead a life of isolation completely cut off from the rest of the society.

The fact that modern man finds himself completely alone and totally cut off from the society has led to the frantic quest for community. Arthur Miller has tried in his plays to find an answer to the question as to “how in the modern world is it possible to recapture the primary group values of affection,’ compassion, solidarity and responsibility”? ⁸ All these values –­ binding man to man – are hardly to be seen in the present-day world. The lack of personal relationship means social distance, lack of social cohesiveness and lack of responsibility for one another. In most of the cases, it is the ineffectuality of their love and affection that identifies their feeling of alienation, loneliness and apartness from others. For the loss of man’s capacity to love is by far the greatest loss in modern times. An icy coldness devoid of all warmth has developed in our love relationship. In modern life we find that love, the loveliest of all emotions, often ends in betrayal. The failure and futility of love in the modern world has resulted in making man all the more lonely and lost. Love has lost its human significance and spiritual overtones. Men and women already conscious of their separation from one another get more separated instead of attaining any sense of one­ness and emotional integrity. Quentin’s unsuccessful marriages in After the Fall are an eloquent testimony of this separateness. Thus, we can conclude that throughout his long dramatic career Arthur Miller, the great American playwright, was pre-occupied with the problem of human relatedness and solidarity–the question of making the outside world his home.

Notes
¹ Benjamin Nelson, Arthur Miller: Portrait of a Playwright (London: Peter Owen, 1970), p. 315.
² Arthur Miller, Collected Plays with an Introduction (New York. The Viking Press, 1957), p. 19.
³ Arthur Miller, “The Family in Modern Drama” Atlantic Monthly, 197, No. 4 (April 1956), p. 36.
⁴ Benjamin Nelson, Arthur Miller: Portrait of a Playwright (London: Peter Owen, 1970), p. 86.
⁵ Arthur Miller, After the Fall (New York: Bantam Books, The Viking Press, 1964), p. 32.  
⁶ Ibid, p. 16.
⁷ Arthur Miller, Incident at Vichy (New York: The Viking Press, 1965), p. 54.
⁸ Paul Blumberg, “Sociology and Social Literature: Alienation in the Plays of Arthur Miller” American Quarterly 21, No. 2 (Summer 1969). p. 293.