Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

“Miller and Women” with reference to his novel After the Fall

2012; Volume: 4; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês

10.9790/0837-0450912

2279-0845

Itishri Sarangi,

Theatre and Performance Studies

The play is a violent speech against women "a verbal attack".The play After the Fall includes a thinly disguised portrayal of Miller's unhappy marriages.Miller has used the stage as a medium to justify and rationalize the cathartic explanation of his life including his two failed marriages.The play is also an implication that there is no such thing as private life.Miller, however, manages to bring them together into the play.Marriage is said to be a legal union between men and women by mutual consent.Here, the irony of marriage is that it fails to assure happiness.Unlike other plays of Miller which are male oriented, where the women remain conventional and shadowy figures, diffused and unfocussed, in After the Fall, we find an exception, and see a noticeable change of attitude towards sex in general and women in particular.In the play, Quentin returns to the past to discover the true nature of his guilt to reveal his life and urge the audience to be aware of the limits of love, friendship, truth and justice.Ultimately, he realizes that the family is pivotal for a smooth and easygoing life.Harold Clurman finds "After the Fall a signal step in the evolution of Arthur Miller as man and artist" (Themes and Variations 96).After the Fall focuses Quentin and his problem with women.The play is a violent speech against women "a verbal attack."The play After the Fall includes a thinly disguised portrayal of Miller"s unhappy marriages.The play was published after a gap of seven years.Until then, Miller had written nothing for the stage.When the play was produced in 1964, many spectators considered the play offensive and embarrassing.Quentin is Miller"s prototype and the play is highly autobiographical.Symbolically, Miller is the protagonist of this play.His life including his two failed marriages, his childhood, is reflected in the character of Quentin.The play presents the events of American history, the effects of war, the Depression, the McCarthy era, the holocaust on the minds of the people.Miller dramatized all this with power for sixty years.Morris Freedman says, "We may read After the Fall along with Death of a Salesman, All My Sons and The Price as a kind of Galsworthian family tetralogy, an integrated saga in which there is a thematic progression.The play may be read, indeed, as a work about the same family considered under changing circumstances and from different perspectives.The development of the first play to fourth play provides a record of the changing values of American middle class family life during the period in which they are written"(Freedman 43).Miller has used the stage as a medium to justify and rationalize the cathartic explanation of his life including his two failed marriages.The play is therefore, a sort of therapy session, recapitulating painful dull events where he explains his shattered relationship from his childhood, his nagging wife Lousie, his neighbors and the struggle of the co-workers torn between integrity and career.Miller, however, manages to bring them together into the play.With themes such as introspection, betrayal, responsibility and innocence, the play is outstandingly penetrating and brilliantly written.The bright spot in the play is Maggie who is a clear reflection of Marilyn Monroe.The play is also an implication that there is no such thing as private life."The play was about how we-nations and individualsdestroy ourselves by denying that this is precisely what we are doing.Indeed, if Maggie was any reflection of Marilyn, who had many other dimensions, the character"s agony was a tribute to her.For in life, as far as the public was concerned, Marilyn was practically barred from any conceivable connection with suffering; she was the golden girl, the forever young goddess of sexuality, beyond pain and anxiety, a mythically anesthetized creature outside the reach of ordinary mortality, and hence of real sympathy" (Timebends 527).Marriage is said to be a legal union between men and women by mutual consent.Here, the irony of marriage is that it fails to assure happiness.In After the Fall, the protagonist Quentin is in search of a woman in his life.Miller"s relationship with Augustha Miller, Mary Grace Slattery, Marilyn Monroe, Inge Morath, and Agnes Barley reveals his fractured inner self.Miller"s first two marriages ended in divorce.Maybe Miller was doing the right things for quite wrong reasons by going into a relationship for the third time.In a way, Miller shatters the institution of marriage, which Bernard Shaw tries to save in Candida.The play is one of the most experimental works of Miller, and is about a person who discovers himself and reveals his identity.Miller is also aware of his personal failure as a son, husband and friend.All the characters in After the Fall are a flashback of Miller"s memory.The entire play deals with self-analysis, a clash between his personal life and the society around him.According to Nelson,After the Fall juxtaposes a man"s agonizing confrontation of heart of darkness in himself and in humanity with the tenuous and illogical hope that springs, not from the evasion of