Arthur Miller, in his dramas, trades with the unfairness of society’s moral values and the characters who are vulnerable to its inhuman treatment. A good bulk of these dramas were really successful and earned legion awards. Harmonizing to Brooks Atkinson, a critic for the New York Times, Miller’s play Death of a Salesman was successful because the drama “is so simple in manner and so inevitable in subject that it barely seems like a thing that has been written and acted. For Mr. Miller has looked with compassion into the Black Marias of some ordinary Americans and softly transferred their hopes and anguish to the theatre” ( Babusci 1261 ). This drama, in 1949, received the Pulitzer Prize, the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, the Antoinette Perry Award, the Donaldson Award, and the Theater Club Award ( A Brief Chronology of Arthur Miller’s Life and Works, hypertext transfer protocol: //www.ibiblio.org/ … ).
Miller has said that he could non hold written The Crucible at any other clip for it is said that a drama can non be successful unless it speaks to its ain clip ; therefore McCarthyism was widespread when this drama was written. Everyone was afraid of Communists, merely like everyone was afraid of enchantresss during The Crucible. This drama won the Antoinette Perry Award and the Donaldson Award ( Bloom, Modern Critical Interpretations: Arthur Miller’s The Crucible 55 ). His drama All My Sons was concerned with a adult male, Joe Keller, selling faulty cylinder caputs to the Air Force during World War II, doing the decease of 21 pilots, one of whom was his senior boy. The drama focuses around this act and the effects that arise from it. The drama won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. All of Miller’s plays focal point on one cardinal thought, this thought being that members of our society are frequently victimized by people with a false sense of ethical motives.
In the drama Death of a Salesman Willy Loman is unjustly fired from work when he asks his foreman, the immature Howard for a occupation in the metropolis ; he is tired of selling on the route because for one, he’s been making it for 34 old ages and he is no longer bring forthing, and two, he wants to be near to his household. He “is one of society’s victims, one of those “who landed in the ash can.” As Miller explains it, society chews up Willy because he has broken “the jurisprudence which says a failure in society and in concern has no right to populate” ( Bloom, Modern Critical Interpretations: Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman 96 ). In Howard’s office Willy recalls the memory of whom he considered a great salesman, Dave Singleman. He was good liked and popular with his purchasers, even to his decease. Hundreds of salesman and purchasers were at his funeral. Willy wanted to be merely like this adult male, but … all the purchasers he one time knew are dead, and all the new age purchasers care about is acquiring a trade over and done with. There’s no personality in it any longer. He can’t pay his insurance … “In brief glimses, Willy recognizes that he is a victim. After he is fired, he complains to Charley, “After all the main roads and the trains, and the assignments, and the old ages, you end up deserving more dead than alive” ( Bloom, Modern Critical Interpretations: Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman 96 ). And his foreman doesn’t even attention. During the scene in his office he is preoccupied with his “new plaything” a wire recording equipment. As Willy’s life falls apart, the voice of Howards five-year-old boy, rhenium corded on the wire, intones the capitals of the provinces: “The capital of Alabama is Phoenix ; the capital of Arkansas is Small Rock.” “It’s a concern, child, … and everybody’s got ta draw his ain weight.”
“ In the daze of find a kid has fallen ill, and the town leaps to shout witchery. Abigail to get away floging embraces the alibi, and in the general craze retribution interruptions out” ( Bloom, Modern Critical Interpretations: Arthur Miller’s The Crucible 3 ). Reverend Parris has caught Abigail and her friends, with Tituba, dancing in the forests. Shortly afterwards, his girl Betty falls ailment, she saw Abigail imbibe blood in the forests as portion of a expletive to kill Goody Proctor, intuition is aroused and negotiations of witchery Begin … Abby decides it would be fun to play along ; she denounces many adult females as holding ties with the Devil. “The “evil” in the drama focuses on Abigail as the fountain caput, even though she is non its most scarey look. It’s non her actions that condemn her … instead ; it’s the agencies she uses to prosecute her terminals. She is willing to give the community and everyone in it, to overthrow the map of the Law, in order to derive her aims. Her evil, so, sums to a shrewd usage of the lip service, greed and malice that thrive in her neighbours under the stalking-horse of seeing justness done. Her power arises from her ability to change over her psychic energies and the wilful chase of her ain aims into a echt airy craze. At bottom Abby knows that her prophetic tantrum is self-induced, that the witchery she denounces is non-existent ; but once the tantrum is on her, she can bring forth a convincing public presentation and bring on the same sort of craze in the kids. Her existent demonism is her abuse of the inviolable office of informant to derive her ain terminals …” ( Bloom, Modern Critical Interpretations: Arthur Miller’s The Crucible 43 ) .
The cardinal character of ALL MY SONS, Joe, is a little man of affairs who during the war sends out faulty aeroplane parts which he hopes will non be used in existent combat. However, he will non remember cognition of these parts for fright his ground forces contracts would be canceled and his concern and his household ruined as a consequence. The drama presents the gradual revelation of these facts to the man of affairs’s younger boy, Chris, a former ground forces officer. The disclosure brings with it a realisation that 21 male childs were killed as a effect of the usage of the faulty stuff. Joe Keller is now forced to accept the personal guilt that comes with this act even though he was truly unable to visualise the public effects of what for him was a private act. From an ethical point of view he feels like he did nil wrong, for “it is non that he can non state right from incorrect but that his dramatis personae of head can non acknowledge that he, personally, has any feasible connexion with his universe, his universe, or his society” ( Bloom, Modern Critical Interpretations: Arthur Miller’s All My Sons 104 ). He believes that “household is the most of import thing and that what is done in the name of household has its ain justification” ( Bloom, Modern Critical Interpretations: Arthur Miller’s All My Sons 28 ). “I did it for you, it was a opportunity and I took it for you. I’m sixty-one old ages old, when would I have another opportunity to do something for you? … For you, a concern for you!” ( Bloom, Modern Critical Interpretations: Arthur Miller’s All My Sons 65 ).
