Arthur Miller Journal最新文献

All My Sons 我所有的儿子

Arthur Miller Journal Pub Date : 2023-01-01 DOI: 10.5325/arthmillj.18.2.0171

David Palmer

{"title":"All My Sons","authors":"David Palmer","doi":"10.5325/arthmillj.18.2.0171","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/arthmillj.18.2.0171","url":null,"abstract":"No one writing today on Arthur Miller is better positioned than Claire Gleitman, the Dean of Humanities and Sciences and a professor of English at Ithaca College, to help us approach All My Sons. She recently authored Anxious Masculinity in the Drama of Arthur Miller and Beyond (Bloomsbury Methuen 2022), and tensions she identifies there, which began arising in the late nineteenth century as traditional American conceptions of masculinity confronted modern bureaucratized industrial capitalism, are the source of the tragedy in this play.Working broadly in the approach taken by theorists like Judith Butler, who holds that gender is not a trait individuals have, like brown eyes, but a display of the self through performance, Gleitman argues in Anxious Masculinity that American culture in the 1940s, when Miller wrote All My Sons, demanded of both males and females that they earn their gender by actualizing a limited set of socially endorsed tropes. That’s the source of the anxiety: the awareness that failure to meet this demand is possible. For males, the model arose from idealization of our nation’s frontier past. A man went into the wildness of the surrounding world, and through his own wild ruggedness, dominated and tamed it, making a safe place for his family, who followed him. As devoted as he was to his family, he persistently sought new challenges to overcome outside the home as a way of continually expressing his independence and manly prowess. Women in this national myth should seek to marry men who could succeed in this quest for dominance, bringing their less rugged feminine virtues to creating the orderly and joyful homes that followed in their husbands’ conquest of the wild. From the man’s perspective, women outside marriage were part of the wild he sought to conquer; only within marriage did they acquire this sanctified role. By the 1940s, the capitalist marketplace had replaced the frontier as the arena of challenge, but the myth of manly prowess and the pursuit of domination—being “big,” as Willy Loman would say—remained the same.Clearly, there are tensions hidden within these national gender myths. What obligations does a man have to the community in which he engages? Are other people merely means to his own ends as he pursues dominance and security? And what of the husband’s commitment to the family? As he constantly seeks new challenges outside the home to display his prowess, is he not abandoning the role of co-nurturer that his wife, as guardian of domesticity, needs of him? Are wives, having been blocked from directly entering the wildness outside the home, merely voices of virtue gently restraining their husbands’ inherent wildness, or are they Lady Macbeth, the source of values and ideas driving their husbands to strive ever more strenuously for dominance?All of this is further complicated by the rise of bureaucratized industrial capitalism, where most men are doing jobs—for example, in offices or on assembly lines—that requir","PeriodicalId":40151,"journal":{"name":"Arthur Miller Journal","volume":"65 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135442038","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

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Harry Ransom Center Lecture Harry Ransom中心讲座

Arthur Miller Journal Pub Date : 2023-01-01 DOI: 10.5325/arthmillj.18.2.0133

Christopher Bigsby

引用次数: 0

Death of a Salesman 推销员之死

Arthur Miller Journal Pub Date : 2023-01-01 DOI: 10.5325/arthmillj.18.1.0085

S. Marino

引用次数: 0

Blonde (2022) 金发美女(2022)

Arthur Miller Journal Pub Date : 2023-01-01 DOI: 10.5325/arthmillj.18.1.0116

Molly Marino

引用次数: 0

Elegy for a Lady 《淑女挽歌》

Arthur Miller Journal Pub Date : 2023-01-01 DOI: 10.5325/arthmillj.18.2.0208

Matthew Pozzuolo

{"title":"Elegy for a Lady","authors":"Matthew Pozzuolo","doi":"10.5325/arthmillj.18.2.0208","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/arthmillj.18.2.0208","url":null,"abstract":"Arthur Miller’s Elegy for a Lady has long been overlooked as one of his lesser produced plays. However, productions of said play, such as the one Always Love Lucy Theatre displayed at Trenton Public Library, show the significance of this overlooked one-act. While this show lacked the traditional staging utilized in a theater—it took place in a local library—it subsequently proved that Miller shows (particularly such intimate shows) can truly be performed anywhere to great effect. Seating was limited and intimate with around eighteen audience seats, but this turned out to be the perfect environment for Miller’s 1982 play. The actors helped add to this intimate feel by joining the people and world around them before the show started. This helped the audience feel connected to the actors on stage once the show began as though they were everyday people. This feeling of intimacy combined with the actors projecting like real people paid off later in the play, making the story they undergo feel as though it was a shared human experience of all who attended.The scene was set with various props including handbags, a sweater, a kettle, and five scarves (three of which were cheetah print, with the rest being individual designs). The items on the table lent themselves to a more contemporary interpretation of the play rather than an eighties setting. While the play is directed to take place in “what slowly turns out to be a boutique” (5), the actors did not shy away from the fact that they were performing on site in a library. In fact, this alternate location lent itself to the narrative at times as they utilized the books and shelves that made up most of the space as though they were part of the store.Immediately upon entering the scene, there was a sense of closeness between the two characters that proved integral to the story and their interpretation. This production amplified the personal connection struck by the Man (Joseph Fusco) and Proprietress (Saima HuQ), even as complete strangers. In fact, they seemed to take solace in being strangers, as this developed a theme that was heavily leaned upon in the production: the idea of finding comfort in the unknown. Leaning into this interpretation lent itself well to the subtleties of the text as well as the play’s intriguing ending when the Proprietress says, “You never said her name,” to which the Man smiles, almost conspiratorially, and responds, “You never said yours” (19).There are a multitude of instances in the play where we see the Man unsure of something present within his life, particularly his lover. Yet he references how she also feels unsure in him because she feels as though he is only using her for pleasure. The Man seems to be looking for something “perfect” in both the item he is shopping for as well as within his relationship. However, he seems unable to find this idea of “perfect.” This production leaned heavily into the idea of not knowing what “perfect” truly is, even though we as humans st","PeriodicalId":40151,"journal":{"name":"Arthur Miller Journal","volume":"8 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135446716","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

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Anxious Masculinity in the Drama of Arthur Miller and Beyond: Salesmen, Sluggers, and Big Daddies 阿瑟·米勒戏剧中焦虑的男子气概及其后:推销员、重击手和大爸爸

Arthur Miller Journal Pub Date : 2023-01-01 DOI: 10.5325/arthmillj.18.1.0043

B. Murphy

引用次数: 0

Incident at Vichy 维希事件

Arthur Miller Journal Pub Date : 2023-01-01 DOI: 10.5325/arthmillj.18.1.0119

Jax Donnellan

引用次数: 0

Covering Up the Cracks: Arthur Miller, Twenty One Pilots, and the American Literature of Neurosis 《掩盖裂缝:阿瑟·米勒、21名飞行员和美国神经症文学》

Arthur Miller Journal Pub Date : 2023-01-01 DOI: 10.5325/arthmillj.18.1.0027

John Henning