Arthur Miller and American Tragedy

Abstract

Although Miller’s approach to tragedy has roots in the Greeks and Ibsen, his vision is fundamentally American, based on hopes and delusions embodied in the American Dream. Rejecting the ahistoricism of theater of the absurd, Miller based his tragedies on characters’ confrontations with the way their present has inevitably emerged from betrayals in their past. In Death of a Salesman, The Crucible, and A View from the Bridge, the characters’ struggles with a past that irremediably controls them blend with America’s political need to rewrite the darker undertones of its roots in terms of the myth of the self-made man, the potential for justice to become persecution, and the challenges of integration, charging Miller’s tragedy with a poignant political edge, one that is ever more relevant today. Further, his specific and innovative approach to temporality makes his plays a reflection of the postmodern mindset and stretches the very fabric of tragedy, imbuing it with the unsettling quandaries of modernity.