I didn’t feel I had anything to say to these people.
This is in keeping with Miller’s view of the way individuals interact in society and also explains why he stopped writing for the theatre for nine years: “From where I stood, the country was going exactly one hundred and eighty degrees in the opposite direction. However humble, the hero is nevertheless given a social function so that his actions have implications for society at large. Hence his preference for the down-trodden individual, who is often not really aware of what is happening to him. 588.ĢIt is probably Miller’s sense of moral outrage which leads him to focus more on the victims of injustice, rather than on the way the system allows injustice to flourish.
Nothing is as visionary and as blinding as moral indignation” 2. And that is why facts, for those who turned left – now as then – could mean so little. Rather it was a moral catastrophe, a violent revelation of the hypocrisies behind the facade of American society. His condemnation of the excesses of capitalism or materialism is ultimately the result of a moral rejection: “At the time it was beyond me to rationalize my feelings, but I knew that the Depression was only incidently a matter of money. However, there were other cases in which he refused to compromise over aesthetic and ethical aspects of his work, leading him to write in his autobiography Timebends: “History bends the ease with which I could in the sixties, understand the fear and frustration of the dissident in the Sovietized world was the result, in some great part, of my experience before the Un-American Activities Committee in the fifties” 1 Despite references to his Marxist sympathies during the thirties and early forties, the main thrust of Miller’s criticism is essentially moral, a word he uses frequently in the autobiography. This is especially true of his work during the fifties when he was involved in several confrontations with the authorities, the most well-known of which is his appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1956. 408.ġMany of Arthur Miller’s plays undoubtedly provide us with a critical perspective on American society and its values.
1 Miller, Arthur, Timebends, New York, Grove Press, 1987, p.
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