A View From The Bridge -Arthur Miller
American Literature
A View From The Bridge
Arthur Miller
Arthur Miller : Life and Work
Arthur Miller was born in Manhattan in 1917 in a conventional, well-to-do Jewish family. As a boy, he was a good athlete, interested in sports, and decidedly nonintellectual by nature. When he was thirteen, economic conditions forced his father to give up his business and to move the family to a small house in Brooklyn. During the next ten years, he worked as a delivery boy for a bakery, a dishwasher, a waiter, a warehouse clerk, a truck driver, a factory labourer, a singer at a local radio station, and a writer of over thirty radio plays. All this experience left him with a great respect for hard work. After his schooling, Miller began reading works of Shakespeare, Brecht, Shaw, O’Neill, Ibsen and others and was deeply influenced by them. In 1934, Miller enrolled in journalism in the University of Michigan, and eighteen months later, began writing plays. His first play, Honors at Dawn, a piece written in four days, won the Avery Hopwood Award, and gave him great confidence in his ability to write plays. During the next few years, he wrote several radio plays, most of which were very successful. His No Villain (1937), They Too Arise (1938), and The Man Who Had All The Luck (1944), were all well acknowledged by contemporary critics. Miller’s All My Sons (1947) won the New York Drama Critics Circle award, and he was given the Pulitzer Prize for his Death of a Salesman (1949) and the Antoinette Perry Award for The Crucible (1953).
Miller’s A View from the Bridge was first a Broadway production, which he later turned into a full-length play. His most successful plays are carefully planned with powerful characters and usually depict how the pressures of society distort and destroy human relationships. All My Sons, is a story of guilt from the past permeating and destroying the present, and central to it is the theme of betrayal. Joe Keller, an industrialist, has committed the double crime of firstly selling the government a batch of faulty cylinder heads during the war, which cause the death of twenty-one pilots; and later laying the American Literature blame on his innocent manager, Deever, who has to serve a prison sentence. The emotional tangles of the situation are concentrated by the fact that the Keller and Deever families have always been close friends: young Chris Keller and Ann Deever are even in love. So the parallels and contrasts provide frequent dramatic opportunities. In Death of a Salesman, the whole life of the Loman family is dominated by Willy Loman’s idea of “success”, which he sees as a ladder leading from a brilliant athletic career at school to a good job and a life surrounded by scores of influential friends and admiring neighbours. The play is an admirable blend of pathos and satire, and there has been much argument about whether or not it is a tragedy. A glance at Miller’s works shows that his output has been small but it has maintained a very high standard, and that he is a dramatist of passion, conviction and intelligence.
Desire Under The Elms-Eugene O'Neill
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
A View from the Bridge by Arthur Miller: Summary
Miller’s characters function more intelligibly as fathers, sons, husbands, or wives in a family setting than as citizens in society. Of course, the protagonist of A View from the Bridge acts in a specific social milieu that conditions his sense of guilt and his sense of dignity. Yet for Eddie Carbone guilt and dignity derive from an intimate attachment: his fatherly concern for his niece is obsessive. For the first time, in this play sexual desire and jealousy become the dominant components of reality. Eddie’s fervent insistence on his niece’s loyalty carries with it an implication of physical attraction. Eddie refuses to accept such an implication and involuntarily bears his emotional secrets with his words and actions. From the beginning of the play his extreme possessiveness suggests his strength of a passion he will not acknowledge. The thought that Catherine could be contaminated by the world’s wickedness or subjected to another man’s authority is intolerable to him. Morbidly sensitive about her claim to adulthood, he dislikes her short skirts, her clacking high heels, her wavy walk, her chats with Louis, and her plan to get a job. Though she is almost eighteen, he insists that she is a baby. But Catherine has grown up and her feminine maturity represents a potential threat to the innocent, affectionate rapport between uncle and niece. Beatrice, Eddie’s wife, detects this threat. She feels obliged to warn the naive girl not to throw herself at him as if she was twelve years old or appear in front of him when she is half dressed. Alfieri, a lawyer refers more directly to Eddie’s motives. Eddie’s agitated responses to such statements attest to his unwillingness to admit the presence of this motive.
Miller was particularly interested in the destructiveness of his hidden but irresistible passion. The rivalry in the situation rises upon the entrance of Rodolpho and Marco, brothers who have illegally entered the United States from Sicily. At first Rodolpho dominates the conversation and impresses Catherine with his exuberant charm. Eddie had addressed his first remarks mainly to Marco. But he is soon eclipsed by his brother and speaks progressively fewer lines. This reticence, together with the defensive nature of his occasional comments, subtly indicates his growing uneasiness and resentment. Later, Eddie’s responses reveal the death of his turmoil. He insists that Rodolpho is an irresponsible thief, who breaks into a home and wants to marry Catherine only to obtain American citizenship. This accusation, however inaccurate, is not nearly so far-fetched as the next, that the blond Rodolpho must be a homosexual as well as a thief. Eddie entangles himself in his delusion and tries to prove it to his niece by kissing Rodolpho before her. The grossness of this act and the irrationality of his accusations, further alienates Catherine and indicates the intensity of his desperation. Shame and hopelessness drive Eddie to a still more irrational deed, seeking to protect his family’s integrity, he destroys it. He violates the code of honour of his social world by betraying his brothers, and unintentionally, the relatives of a friend, to the immigration authorities. Disgraced now both in his neighbourhood and his home, he is delivered from humiliation by death.
A View from the Bridge may be seen as a psychological study that shows the self-destructiveness of an inflexible, passionate individual, but Miller hoped to enlarge his scope beyond that of psychological analysis. Eddie’s behaviour is seen to be idiosyncratic, erratic and shameful, and he is as fanatic and as uncompromising as a Greek tragic hero. There is a vendetta situation in which Marco avenges Eddie’s disloyalty, and Eddie in turn feels injured by Marco’s insults. Miller explains that he introduced the feud idea to broaden the ethical frame of reference and to highlight the interior dilemma of family loyalty. Miller’s play seems an attempt to utilize the austere technique of Sophocles in a modern setting.
The play is strongly effective on stage, yet except in the broadest sense as a story of a man driven by a secret passion it has lesser relevance than the story of Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman. Like Willy, Eddie does not fully understand or at least admit the force that is destroying him, and is only concerned with saving his name. He is destroyed by his need to secure a place in society. Eddie is proved morally wrong for denouncing the illegal immigration. In the play, Miller presents the characteristics of actual speech as when he shows Rodolpho, the young Italian talking in idiosyncratic English. Miller is also very good at building up warmth in his characters, as in the case of Catherine.
Analysis of "A view from the Bridge"by Arthur Miller
A View from the Bridge is the story of a New York longshoreman, Eddie Carbone, and of his jealous love for his niece and ward, Catherine. He is sheltering two Italian immigrants, relations of his wife, who have entered the country illegally. Rodolpho, the younger of them, and Catherine fall in love. Eddie fights their engagement with everything he can think of. He tries to prove that Rodolpho is a homosexual, and he argues that he wants an American wife only for the sake of an American passport. He refuses to admit the real reason for his opposition – that he himself loves the girl. Finally he tips off the police about the immigrants. When Marco, the older one, is arrested, he spits in Eddie’s face and accuses him of betraying them. Eddie calls him a liar, demands an apology, fights him and is killed.
The power of the play is in the wild power of Eddie himself. He is a man possessed, a man who refuses to ‘settle for half’, and he reveals yet another recurrent theme of Miller’s – that of the tragic force of obsession. In his Preface to his Collected Plays, Miller used precisely the same phrase of Willy Loman, that of refusing to ‘settle for half’, and also said that if he wrote The Cubicle he would make the judge’s obsession with his holy and wholly evil task much more central.
A View from The Bridge contains all the familiar themes too – of loyalty, of betrayal, and of the need for a name, for public esteem. Eddie, the central figure, is a magnificent animal. The other characters, too, are very realistic and represent different aspects of modern man.
American Literature
The Native American Oral Tradition
Go to Home page
Comments
Post a Comment