Anxious Masculinity in the Drama of Arthur Miller and Beyond: Salesmen, Sluggers, and Big Daddies 9781350271111, 9781350273009, 9781350272996

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Anxious Masculinity in the Drama of Arthur Miller and Beyond

Related Titles available from Methuen Drama Modern American Drama: Playwriting in the 1950s Susan C. W. Abbotson ISBN: 978-1-4725-7142-7 Staging America Christopher Bigsby ISBN: 978-1-3501-2754-8 The Theatre of August Wilson Alan Nadel ISBN: 978-1-4725-3048-6 Visions of Tragedy in Modern American Drama Edited by David Palmer ISBN: 978-1-4742-7693-1 Fairview Jackie Sibblies Drury ISBN: 978-1-3502-6761-9 A Raisin in the Sun Lorraine Hansberry ISBN: 978-1-3502-3431-4 Death of a Salesman Arthur Miller ISBN: 978-1-4081-0841-3 All My Sons Arthur Miller ISBN: 978-1-4081-0838-3 ­Cat on a Hot Tin Roof Tennessee Williams ISBN: 978-1-4081-1439-1

Anxious Masculinity in the Drama of Arthur Miller and Beyond Salesmen, Sluggers, and Big Daddies Claire Gleitman

METHUEN DRAMA Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, METHUEN DRAMA and the Methuen Drama logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2022 Copyright © Claire Gleitman, 2022 Claire Gleitman has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. Poem on pp. 204–5 reprinted from Ridl, Jack. “From Our House to Your House” from Practicing to Walk Like a Heron. Copyright © Wayne State University Press, with the permission of Wayne State University Press. For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on pp. viii–x constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Ben Anslow Cover image: Death of a Salesman, Wendell Pierce as Willy Loman, Young Vic, London 2019 © Brinkhoff/Mögenburg All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Gleitman, Claire, author. Title: Anxious masculinity in the drama of Arthur Miller and beyond : salesmen, sluggers, and big daddies / Claire Gleitman. Description: London ; New York : Methuen Drama, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2021050803 (print) | LCCN 2021050804 (ebook) | ISBN 9781350271111 (hardback) | ISBN 9781350272972 (paperback) | ISBN 9781350272989 (epub) | ISBN 9781350272996 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Miller, Arthur, 1915-2005–Criticism and interpretation. | Masculinity in literature. | Men in literature. | Gender identity in literature. | American drama–History and criticism. Classification: LCC PS3525.I5156 Z655 2022 (print) | LCC PS3525.I5156 (ebook) | DDC 812/.52–dc23/eng/20211112 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021050803 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021050804 ISBN: HB: 978-1-3502-7111-1 ePDF: 978-1-3502-7299-6 ­ eBook: 978-1-3502-7298-9 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

To David, Philip, and Lucas – three very fine men ­& ­To my dear parents, incandescent in my memory

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­Contents ­Acknowledgments Introduction: The Prison-House of Gender ­1 ­2 ­3 ­4 ­5 ­6

Strudel and the Single Man: All My Sons and Death of a Salesman Witchcraft and the Weird: The Crucible and A View from the Bridge Performing White Male Heteronormativity: A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof Playing Ball on the Margins: Raisin in the Sun, Fences, Curse of the Starving Class Queering a New Generation: Angels in America, How I Learned to Drive, Fun Home Cakewalks and the White Gaze: Topdog/Underdog, Fairview, Slave Play

Notes References Index

viii 1 21 57 83 113 145 171 207 211 219

­Acknowledgments This book could not have been written without the help and support of numerous kind-hearted and inspirational people whom I have been so fortunate to have in my life. To begin, I wish to thank David Palmer and Stephen Marino, who first took an interest in my work on Arthur Miller a decade ago, supported me unfailingly from that point forward, and remained convinced that I would complete this book even when I seriously doubted it myself. Their generosity in sending numerous projects in my direction cemented my commitment to Miller studies. I am indebted too to Sue Abbotson, who lent encouragement and wisdom at crucial moments in the book’s development. I am grateful to so many astonishingly smart and inspiring students and colleagues at Ithaca College, where I have spent my academic career—far too many to enumerate here. I must mention, however, the Center for Faculty Excellence, which, while under the directorship of Wade Pickren, awarded me a grant that put me in touch with Sheri Englund (of Englund Literary Services), whose shrewd guidance in the art of writing a book proposal sharpened my thinking and paved the way for what eventually became this book. Essential to the development of my ideas and readings are the innumerable bright and curious students whom I have taught over the years, in such courses as Dangerous Women in Dramatic Literature, American Drama, and Anxious Masculinity in the American Drama. These students have consistently challenged me, surprised me, and kept my thinking fresh. In the most serious sense, conversations in classrooms with students formed the foundation for my work and made this book possible. I will mention just two of those students here: Anthony Derrick (class of 2010) and Nina Ng (class of 2021), both of whom composed honors theses under my guidance on topics that dovetailed with my own research, allowing for wonderfully productive and stimulating exchanges.

­Acknowledgment

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I owe a debt of thanks to all of my colleagues in the English department at Ithaca College. That department, full of energetic scholars and magnificent people, has been a deeply satisfying professional home for me, beyond anything I could have imagined when I unexpectedly landed there thirty years ago. I am especially grateful for fortifying hallway conversations, ongoing intellectual exchanges, and late-night debates about the meaning of things with Kevin Murphy, Chris Holmes, Jennifer Spitzer, Dan Breen, and (in other, contiguous departments) Carla Golden, Jen Tennant, Kathleen Mulligan, and Jack Hrkach. Above all, I owe an incalculable debt of gratitude to my cherished colleague and dear friend Hugh Egan, who read every word of this book and who for many years has offered me thoughtful feedback, discerning criticism, bolstering humor, and the great and inestimable gift of his loving friendship. Last but surely not least, I turn to my family. My sons, Philip and Lucas, were good-hearted children who rarely complained about their mother’s habit of working long hours in her office. When they discovered I was writing a study of anxious masculinity, they laughingly asked whether I’d learned everything in the book from them. In truth, my sons—who are now adults—are models of level-headedness, intelligence, and human kindness, and I could not be prouder of the men they have become. My husband, David, has been a truly tireless supporter of my sometimes tiresome work. He patiently listened on long car-rides as I read various incarnations of each chapter aloud to him, year after year and over and over as the book gestated. David is the wisest of readers and the most loving of partners. Neither my professional nor my personal life would be what they are without him. Finally, I wish to thank and honor my beloved late parents, the luminous scholars Lila and Henry Gleitman. They have served as models for me of what it means to embrace one’s intellectual and professional life with boundless curiosity, vitality, and joy. The insatiable delight they always took in figuring out how to ask better questions to get to

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­Acknowledgment

the bottom of things, and their commitment to maintaining a sense of humor even at life’s darkest moments, inspires me to this day. I would not be who I am without their example, which I aspire to emulate in all aspects of my personal, professional, and creative life. **** Some of what is contained in this book builds upon previous work, published in the Arthur Miller Journal (volumes 8 and 10, Fall 2013 and Spring 2015) and essays published in Anthology on Arthur Miller for the 21st Century and Visions of Tragedy in Modern American Drama: From O’Neill to the Twenty-First Century. Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologizes for any errors or omissions and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book. The third-party copyrighted material displayed in the pages of this book is done so on the basis of “fair dealing for the purposes of criticism and review” or “fair use for the purposes of teaching, criticism, scholarship or research” only in accordance with international copyright laws, and is not intended to infringe upon the ownership rights of the original owners.

Introduction: The Prison-House of Gender

It is not obvious that anything quite as sensual as the letter Miller sent to Marilyn Monroe in 1956, shortly before their marriage, ever appears in an Arthur Miller play. In an extended sexual fantasy about their future domestic life together, Miller wrote: “I will come again to the kitchen, pretending you are not there and discover you again.” In the fantasy, Miller describes himself as “HUNGRY” as Monroe is imagined to be cooking breakfast. As she cooks, he approaches her: “I will kiss your neck and your back and the sweet cantaloupes of your rump and the backs of your knees and turn you about and kiss your breasts and the eggs will burn” (quoted in Bruk 2014). Miller’s letter captures a complex attitude toward the domestic space and a male’s relationship to it that, this book will argue, reverberates through his playwriting so powerfully as to leave a lasting mark on the American drama of the ensuing seven decades. The post-war, Cold War period during which Miller wrote his most celebrated plays has been described by many cultural commentators as a period marked by an embattled, deeply fraught masculinity, as American males felt themselves to be—in the words of an editorial printed in the mid-century men’s magazine Jem— “bullied, brow-beaten and neglected by the female sex [which had] … banded together to rob us of our independence, dominating qualities, muscularity and masculinity” (quoted in Earle 2009: 7). The projection of this generalized anxiety onto “the female sex,” as expressed with particularly feverish paranoia in the Jem editorial, has been attributed to a variety of factors, including the movement of large numbers of women out of the home and into the workplace during the Second World War, and the change in the nature of male

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work that began with the Industrial Revolution and was cemented, as it were, throughout the first half of the twentieth century. In an increasingly bureaucratized urban work environment, men confronted more competition in the labor force, fewer opportunities for personal advancement, and an alienating sense that they were merely “[d]epersonalized cogs in the corporate machine” (Kimmel 2012: 173). If it is the case that masculinity, as Norman Mailer famously remarked, “is not something given to you, but something you gain,” the stultifying work space no longer seemed to be the site where that gaining could occur (1966: 242). It did not help that the very nature of office work, which relies not on physical strength but on the ability to do often highly repetitive and refined tasks, made it difficult to avoid the British social critic Anthony Ludovici’s emasculating conclusion: men were engaged in a form of labor that “every woman knows she could easily undertake” (1927: 21–2). As the clear dividing line between the male professional and the female domestic realms began to blur, the groundwork was laid for the intense need for masculine over-compensation that finds expression in Theodore Roosevelt’s glorification of the “strenuous life” in the late 1800s, in the Charles Atlas mythos of the 1920s, and in the arduous efforts one detects in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s “to police the borders between male and female identities” (Forter 2011: 2). The same fervent impulse to designate masculinity and femininity as absolute and mutually discrete entities, as E. Anthony Rotundo and Elaine Tyler May have argued, paved the way for an intensifying suspicion of homosexuals and emancipated females, both of whom threatened to smudge that heavily patrolled line. For the purposes of this study, the most revealing manifestation of these cascading anxieties is the ideology of domestic containment that May associates with the post-war period, one that resulted in a vigorous revival of the Victorian doctrine of the separate spheres, which had suffered some erosion in the early decades of the twentieth century due in part to the influence of suffragettes, androgynous flappers and other subversive New Women, and, of course, Rosie the Riveter. Domestic

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containment, May argues, was the homeland’s analogue to the policies of containment that governed foreign affairs in the post-war period in relation to the Soviet Union and that also guided the government’s response to perceived internal threats: The terrifying destructive potential of the atomic bomb would not be a threat if it could be contained…Domestic anticommunism was another manifestation of containment: If subversive individuals could be contained and prevented from spreading their poisonous influence through the body politic, then the society could feel secure. (May 2008: 16)

A similar doctrine, less explicit but no less insistent, provided the infrastructure from which the mythology of the 1950s American dream household grew, with its happily home-bound wife and mother, its hardworking and tough-minded father-provider, and its well-protected and cheerful children, all safely contained within their picket-fenced suburban idyll. That the “Father Knows Best” version of this mythology is and always was a construction and not, for the vast majority of Americans, a reality hardly needs to be said. Nevertheless, powerful public policy measures aligned with the swirling fears of otherness in the time period to incentivize the return to the kitchen of many women who had worked during the Second World War, and to inculcate the view that the family was “a bastion of safety in an insecure world” as long as that family “conformed to the prevailing norms of political and personal behavior,” which generally meant abiding by rigidly maintained gender roles and being heterosexual married parents who were also white (May 2008: 9; 15). Thus, it seems clear that the goal of domestic containment was in part to restore a sense of clarity in an unstable and unpredictable world, and to bolster a heterosexist, patriarchal world view that granted authority to the white male breadwinner while also depicting the white female homemaker as the satisfied, comfortable beneficiary of American capitalist success, queen of her kitchen and surrounded by a boundless array of products that enhanced her domestic prowess and pleasure.

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Anxious Masculinity in the Drama of Arthur Miller and Beyond

In reality, large numbers of American men and women experienced profound dissatisfaction within the rigid ideological assumptions that were ballasting the coveted suburban ranch house lifestyle. This darker tale has been told by cultural historians, and it is also a tale that is told by Arthur Miller’s mid-century plays. Miller offers a stark portrait of personal, sexual, economic, and familial disappointment in his dramas of the 1940s and 1950s, many of which focus on the figure of the white, middle-class male breadwinner, whose unsatisfying private life both contributes to and fails to compensate for an equally unsatisfying professional or public life. The sources of this dissatisfaction, I will argue, are rooted in ideals of masculinity that are largely unobtainable for most of Miller’s males and that place males and females intractably at odds with one another in terms of their values, their hopes, and their self-perceptions. These conflicts have much to do with the Miller male’s complex relationship to the domestic space, which brings us again to the letter to Monroe with which this chapter began. It is noteworthy that Miller places Monroe—famously in the public eye because of her gifts as an actor as well as her astonishing physical beauty—in the kitchen, where he imagines “discover[ing]” her “again.” When he does so, he eroticizes her in strikingly domestic terms, seducing her as she cooks breakfast and metaphorizing her body parts as “cantaloupes.” But the goal of his erotic efforts is to turn her away from her domestic task: as he kisses her breasts, he “turn[s] her about.” One should be wary, of course, of over-reading a private communication that both parties presumably enjoyed; Monroe kept the letter after the marriage ended and until her death six years later. Still, it is difficult not to discern in it the tensions that are laced through Miller’s plays, especially when one bears in mind that he wrote the letter just weeks before their marriage, a union that offered Miller both the promise and the risk of domesticating his exquisite lover, with whom he had been having an extra-marital affair. The fantasy appears at first to be hopeful about constant renewal and rediscovery, as it places the erotic and the edible in harmony and forecasts a satisfying mingling of the sensual and the domestic in the

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couple’s married life together. Yet the fantasy concludes with an overdetermined image that is perhaps unconsciously suggestive of the irreconcilable nature of these realms of human experience in Miller’s own drama, not to mention his marriage: “the eggs will burn.” It is with these tangled and overwrought attitudes toward sexuality, gender roles, and domesticity in view that this book confronts the suited figure of the 1950s male breadwinner—respectable, responsible, and distinctly anxious—as he makes his way across the American cultural scene and the American stage, both in the widely produced plays of Arthur Miller and, in varied fashions, in the plays of some of Miller’s most notable playwriting contemporaries and descendants. My interest is in the gender dynamics—staunchly homosocial, vaguely or overtly misogynistic, anxiously homophobic—underpinning the life of the harried male breadwinner, the more sweeping apprehension about challenges to his supremacy that they both manifest and veil, and the dramatic legacy of this conflicted and often sexually troubled figure in the works of other American playwrights. Miller is regarded by many critics and theatre practitioners as one of the finest dramatic craftsmen of the twentieth century, and his plays are produced ceaselessly in the United States and all over the world. Just as significantly, the iconic figure of Willy Loman—the dogged but disappointed salesman, returning from work with a suitcase of unsold wares in each hand—has left an indelible imprint on the American (and the world) stage, so that subsequent playwrights in the American theatrical tradition have little choice but to contend with him. Hence, after devoting my first two chapters to exploring Miller’s portraits of the male breadwinner in four seminal plays of the 1940s and 1950s, I will proceed to show that this same figure appears, with notable alterations, in the plays of Tennessee Williams, who lived and wrote within the same temporal framework, and then again, mutatis mutandis, in such later twentieth-century dramatists as Lorraine Hansberry, David Mamet, August Wilson, and Sam Shepard, who reposition him in more racially and economically marginalized settings. I will move on to explore the somewhat more recent work of Tony

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Kushner, Paula Vogel, and the collaborators Jeanine Tesori and Lisa Kron, who shift their focus to the children who seek to free themselves from his literal or figurative clutches and forge their own, in some cases gleefully queer identities. Finally, I will turn my attention to three plays by the contemporary Black authors Suzan-Lori Parks, Jackie Sibblies Drury, and Jeremy O. Harris, which make starkly visible what will have been covertly evident before: that is, that anxious masculinity cloaks an anxious whiteness, one that many American politicians down through the ages have capitalized upon (think of Richard Nixon’s dog-whistling law-and-order proclamations and the notorious Willie Horton ad in George H.W. Bush’s first presidential campaign), but perhaps none so flagrantly as Donald J. Trump. Parks, Drury, and Harris’s plays thus speak directly to the troubled moment in which the United States currently stands—but so does Arthur Miller, whose dramas, sometimes derided as past their prime, appear disturbingly fresh as paint when viewed from the vantage point of the Trump years.1 Were it not for the work of this final trio of playwrights, the arc of my study might seem to bend toward optimism, as we will make our way chronologically from Miller’s first major Broadway success, All My Sons (written in 1947), to the musical version of Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir, Fun Home, which premiered in 2013. Miller’s plays of the 1940s and 1950s portray a world in which gender roles are unyieldingly polarized; yet the male characters perceive their power, their privilege, and their value system as keenly under threat. In All My Sons, the men struggle to cling to noble but archaic ideals which are ill-suited to a social moment in which the affluence of the family was meant to be a father and husband’s primary concern. To varying degrees, the play’s females are resistant to the men’s righteous, if fickle, commitment to the larger social good and seek to shift their partners’ focus to the domestic domain that is, generally speaking, the sole concern of Miller’s women. Yet complicating Miller’s portrait of these women as narrowly selfserving protectors of their cozy kitchens is his suggestion that they are also the play’s hard-headed adults, who see the world with grim accuracy. In mid-twentieth-century America as All My Sons reveals it,

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the demands of domesticity are aligned with the demands of capitalism and their tentacles extend everywhere, although relinquishing himself to their grip robs a man of what one character describes as his star. There is no route out of this trap: male characters either acquiesce to the domestic or commit suicide. Death of a Salesman (1949) explores similar conflicts, though Willy Loman expresses no interest in the larger social good. Still, he does have ideals, fragmented and inconsistent though they are, but the play shows him to be buffeted between competing versions of manhood that are mutually exclusive and, in their different ways, equally hopeless. Willy’s life as a traveling salesman, while carrying dim traces of the nomadic and pioneering life that his father lived and that Willy romanticizes, fails to satisfy him. Standing alongside him is Linda Loman, who is at once an ideal mid-century wife and the incarnation of the proverbial ball and chain; she quite literally holds Willy back from following his self-reliant brother Ben into the unconquered territories toward which Ben is headed. Because both Ben and the spaces into which he strives to coax Willy are vanished emblems of a lost past, Linda’s antipathy to them seems even more sensible than the female characters’ suspicion, in All My Sons, of their husbands’ amorphous altruistic impulses. Yet Linda lives up to Willy’s description of her as his “foundation and … support” only in the most practical sense, as she does her best to reorient his gaze toward the domestic sphere without understanding his aching sense of failure (Miller 1976: 18). Linda reassures Willy about his accomplishments as a father and a provider—crucial anchors for successful manhood in the post-war period—but her efforts fail both because Willy is not particularly successful at either and also for reasons that have already been touched on in this chapter. In Kimmel’s words, “all that sober [paternal and professional] responsibility left a gaping void in the hearts of men, where once adventure, risk and sexual passion had reigned” (2012: 180). Willy strives to fill that gap with a sexual affair, and this too fails. The radical contrasts Miller draws between Linda, the wife with the ever-present laundry basket, and the Woman, the mistress with the alluring silk stockings, recall his fantasy

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involving Monroe: domesticity and eroticism are perceived as antonyms and their intermingling spells doom. This too is a recurring motif in Miller’s plays, one that reflects the schizophrenic attitude toward female sexuality of the 1950s, a period that gave us both Marilyn Monroe and Donna Reed. Thus, as my third chapter will argue, in Miller’s two great plays of the 1950s sexuality is linked with witchcraft: explicitly in The Crucible (1953) and implicitly in A View from the Bridge (1955) in the form of what is termed the “weird”—code most obviously for homosexuality, but one might read it as witchcraft as well, recalling Macbeth’s “weird sisters.” Dangerous sexuality is linked with beguiling young females as well as, in A View, a bewilderingly genderfluid male; in both plays, it threatens the central male character’s integrity, his social standing, and his relationship with his middle-aged wife. Stringent codes of behavior govern the dramatic worlds that Miller creates for these plays: Puritan New England in The Crucible and the Italian-American community that resides in Red Hook, Brooklyn, in A View. In The Crucible, female desire (as well as, ironically, the lack of it in older women) is depicted as a corrupting force; yet its containment is equally problematic. The Crucible may take place in the seventeenth century, but its representation of female sexuality as suspect, when granted and also when withheld, links it to the 1950s ethos within which Miller crafted it. Like Joe Keller and Willy Loman before him, John Proctor commits suicide to maintain an idea of himself that cannot be sustained if he lives. The same is true of Eddie Carbone in A View, who also essentially if not literally commits suicide, leaving his wife behind to mourn him. In each of these four plays, the wife survives the husband, arguably due to her status as stolid survivor in a world too abhorrent, too contaminated for the more fragile, more humane males to endure, despite their assumed patriarchal authority within it. One of the great ironies that Miller’s playwriting unearths is that white male privilege in the modern era seems to require the sublimation of primal, natural impulses that Miller shows to be crucial to male self-esteem and to some degree to a fully vital human life, at least from the perspective of males. Those primal

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impulses, also ironically, are simultaneously aroused and forbidden by Miller’s females. Tennessee Williams’ drama too depicts a world that is cruelly materialistic and alienating to the “romantics in an unromantic age,” to adopt C.W.E. Bigsby’s phrase, that are often his protagonists, although unlike in Miller these romantics are not always male (Bigsby 1984: 31). Miller and Williams attained their greatest success as playwrights at close to the same time and they wrote within and against the same landscape. Both doubtless felt the pressures exerted by the House UnAmerican Activities Committee, which targeted suspected homosexuals as rabidly as it did suspected communists; but Williams was not actively engaged, as Miller famously was, in the political dramas of his age. Indeed, perhaps protesting too much, Williams maintains in his Memoirs that, excepting Bertolt Brecht, an artist’s politics are of no particular importance to his work, nor are his “sexual predilections or deviations” (1975: 142). Yet it is difficult to separate Williams’ most celebrated plays from the cultural tremors of his day, from its virulent racism, or from his own for many years closeted sexual identity. In the Memoirs, Williams describes himself as “a decided hybrid” in childhood, “different from the family line of frontiersmen-heroes of east Tennessee” from which his father hailed (12). Williams’ father, a traveling salesman until he was made sales manager at the International Shoe Company in St. Louis, was miserable without “the freedom and wildness” of his former professional life (13). Cornelius Coffin Williams (has any man ever been more ominously named?) went on to become a brutal parent to his two sensitive children in part because of feeling “trapped,” according to Williams’ biographer, “in both his family and his work”: Like many men of his time, goaded by the adventurous spirit of their forbears, he looked upon himself as diminished and imprisoned in a twentieth century where the limits of sales territories had replaced the pioneer’s territorial horizons. (Leverich 1995: 50)

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Anxious Masculinity in the Drama of Arthur Miller and Beyond

In short, the disquiet and disappointments of the male breadwinner were bred in the bone for Williams, though the artistic form they take is inflected by other social convulsions that were at least partially invisible for Miller. Raised in Mississippi and later Missouri, Williams retained an affection for the “grace” and “elegance” he associated with the old South (quoted in Leverich 1995: 54); yet, the racial inequities that were also part of its fabric thread their way through his dramas despite what sometimes appear to be his best efforts to keep them at bay. Race constitutes a vexing undercurrent in both A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), plays that stage the process by which two white males must establish their authority and their status as “gaudy seed-bearers” (to borrow a phrase from Streetcar) in order to take secure possession of a domestic realm that they or others view as rightfully theirs. This expectation is complicated by Stanley Kowalski’s class and his racialized identity—both of which Blanche DuBois seizes upon in her effort to turn her sister Stella against him—and by Brick Pollitt’s disgust for the transactional nature of heterosexual relationships, as the play depicts them, and his own likely homosexuality, which turns him away from his wife Maggie. Stanley is eager to eliminate all rivals to his claim to be the local king, and also to sexually satisfy and dominate his wife, whereas Brick is reluctant to do either. These differences notwithstanding, both Streetcar and Cat conclude with a restoration of the appearance, at least partially sham, of white domestic tranquility in the lower and upper classes respectively, in contrast to Miller’s focus, generally speaking (A View from the Bridge is an exception), on the middle class. This necessitates the elimination or containment of such subversive forces as non-white people, homosexuals, and anyone who seeks to undermine white heterosexual male authority. Similar gendered pressures make themselves felt in the plays of Miller and Williams’ immediate American playwriting descendants, which include Lorraine Hansberry, David Mamet, Sam Shepard, and August Wilson. All but Hansberry were born in the 1940s and hit their prime as writers in the 1970s and 1980s. (Hansberry, born in 1930, had

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her career cut tragically short when she died of cancer in 1965.) In their work the figure of the anxious breadwinner faces new challenges, as he is burdened with the distinct disadvantages of racial and economic marginalization so severe that the small suburban home Willy Loman labors to maintain is hardly imaginable for him. In response to these circumstances, most of these would-be breadwinners can do little more than emit inarticulate, impotent howls of rage. In Curse of the Starving Class (1977) and Fences (1983) in particular, we meet fathers and father-figures who act out angrily and at times violently in response to their inability to succeed according to the rules of white capitalist America. Though Wilson’s play takes place less than a decade later than Salesman and Shepard’s play is to some degree temporally indeterminate, both show the influence of the cultural moment in which they were written by taking a more explicit interest in issues of race and class, and by portraying an even more gravely diminished set of opportunities for the struggling male worker in a stratified and urbanized America. If the alienating nature of Willy’s work as a salesman is neatly captured by the fact that Miller never tells us what he sells, Weston, the owner of a rotting farm in Curse of the Starving Class, is equally befuddled by the market economy from which he tries and fails to make a buck, leaving his family literally and spiritually destitute. In Fences, the play’s Black patriarch is a former professional baseball player who was consigned to the Negro Leagues in the years before Jackie Robinson broke the color line. In the present, Troy is a garbage collector: like Don in Mamet’s American Buffalo, he must make a living from other peoples’ junk, and his shattered dreams leave him at war with his wife, his son and himself. Each character ends his dramatic life in a state of befuddled or enraged despair, convinced that he has been “playing ball,” though the game was fixed from the start and he was never really a player in it. Meanwhile, the smoldering misogyny that is the direct result of these men’s embattled masculinity ensures that their relationships with females are broken down beyond repair, and they end their plays defeated, without arriving at a meaningful understanding of what it is they were up against. The

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Anxious Masculinity in the Drama of Arthur Miller and Beyond

answer, I maintain, is stringent assumptions about masculine success that they have unthinkingly embraced, though their social roles render that version of success unattainable for them. A generation later, in the plays of my next grouping of authors, anxious masculinity veils a closeted sexual identity. My focus here is on Roy Cohn, in Angels in America (1991–3), Uncle Peck in Paula Vogel’s How I Learned to Drive (1997), and Bruce Bechdel in the musical adaption of Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir, Fun Home, written by Lisa Kron and Jeanine Tesori and first performed in 2013. All three male characters would have been born in the 1920s and 1930s (Roy Cohn, of course, is historically real, as is Bruce Bechdel); two are closeted homosexuals, one is a pedophile who preys on both male and female children, and all three manifest an acute self-loathing that results in suicide for two and a death from AIDS for one that is depicted as in part a metaphorical manifestation of that self-loathing, like Big Daddy’s cancer in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Despite being more than a generation younger than Willy, these characters’ attitudes toward sexuality, individualism, and masculine power link them to the other males in this study. Festering within them are sexual compulsions that they act on even as they frantically deny them. Although only Bruce Bechdel is a biological father, the other two males are self-styled fatherfigures for younger people whom they fetishize and in whom they seek to instill gendered and heterosexist assumptions. Roy’s pseudo-son, Joe Pitt, remains a receptive vessel for Roy’s malevolent views to the end, despite Joe’s eventual recognition of his own homosexuality. By contrast, in Drive and Fun Home it is a young female who is the complicated victim and beneficiary of the refusal of her pseudo-father (Peck) or father (Bechdel) to know himself. Moreover, both plays dramatize the process by which the young woman successfully liberates herself from the older man’s belief system and to some degree his influence, while embracing his cherished memory within her own more positive and perhaps queer self-conception. Something similar happens to the younger generation in Angels in America, although it does not happen to Roy Cohn’s designated pseudo-son.

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Written by authors who were all born in the 1950s and 1960s, all but one of whom self-identify as lesbian or gay, these three plays are far more convincingly hopeful than anything within the Miller or Williams canon about the ability of a younger generation to renounce the oppressive and self-defeating attitudes of the anxious male breadwinner, while honoring his dignity. (Biff Loman’s trajectory in Death of a Salesman is sometimes read as a hopeful one, but not particularly convincingly, as I will argue later.) Those younger characters for whom we have the most hope are those who reject the imprisoning gender binaries that structured the lives of their unhappy parents, often replacing them with a liberating sexual fluidity, one that was largely unfathomable in the Miller/Williams era, and that was rapidly contained or banished if it made its presence felt. Thus, the story these later plays tell is somewhat promising, although that promise is achieved by largely concentrating on white middle- and upper-middle-class experience, and also by discarding the domestic realm over which the male breadwinner once presided. At or near their conclusion, Angels, Fun Home, and Drive all feature a female character whose triumph over her circumstances is linked to mobility (flying in two, driving in the third), and that mobility takes her away from a domestic trap, one that involves a male who seeks to control her. Suzan-Lori Parks’s Topdog/Underdog (2001) returns us to the margins and it also returns us to the domestic prison, though one from which females are absent. Written over a decade before Fun Home, Topdog brings us back to the ethos of the Miller moment as well as forward to the moment in which this study has been composed. If one were to trace a genealogy of the Donald Trump phenomenon, a plausible route might pass directly through Death of a Salesman and proceed onward to Topdog/Underdog. Trump’s ascendancy, as more than a few commentators have noted, had much to do with the support of white males who suffered from what Kimmel has called “aggrieved entitlement” (Kimmel 2017); they felt unfairly dislodged from the positions of power that they saw as rightfully theirs. In his presidential campaigns and throughout the four years of his administration, Trump

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Anxious Masculinity in the Drama of Arthur Miller and Beyond

exploited the resulting rage by promising to build walls to keep out immigrants of color, to silence the liberal news media and the forces of the so-called politically correct, and to otherwise wreak vengeance on the fabricated sources of these men’s marginalization, while employing a language of pumped-up masculinity that was both misogynistic and deeply nostalgic. Seen in this context, Death of a Salesman—through its portrait of white men suffering a crisis of masculinity in an America that they intuit deems them disposable—provides a pre-history of the Trump era. Miller’s males are engaged in a fervent effort to patch together a muscular manhood that they can inhabit proudly, in order to mitigate a sense of exclusion whose source is mysterious to them. The compensatory self they strive to shape is backward-looking; Willy Loman borrows heavily, if clumsily, from a set of ideals about American masculinity that is as out of step with the cultural moment in which he resides as were Trump’s promises to revive the coal industry. Still, Willy retains a stubborn faith in those ideals and passes them along to his sons, desperate to mold them into the kind of men that he believes can “make it.” Parks shows how those same ideals trickle down to America’s most disenfranchised and reviled citizens, who seize on them with hopeful desperation. The only characters in Topdog/Underdog are two African American brothers, cruelly and fatefully named Lincoln and Booth. These men live a life beyond Willy Loman’s imagining, though it is perfectly captured by his famous metaphor: “You can’t eat the orange and throw the peel away—a man is not a piece of fruit!” (Miller 1976: 82). Discarded by parents, employers, female partners, and the culture at large, Lincoln and Booth struggle to craft identities from the same conflicted notions about masculine success that so animated and addled the Miller males, but these notions have degenerated to the level of the absurd. Lincoln, the older of the two brothers and the one who is dubbed Pa at one point in the play, aspires to conform to a bourgeois version of respectability; he is proud to have what he boasts is an honest, sit-down job, with benefits—the very terminology associated with the middle-class male breadwinner. That sit-down job, however,

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entails dressing up as Abraham Lincoln, complete with whiteface, and allowing paying clients to pretend to assassinate him. Booth recognizes the demeaning nature of Lincoln’s attempt to “pass”; yet his own quest for stability and self-determination is equally self-deluding. If Lincoln is the marginalized descendant of Willy, striving to employ the tools of capitalism without recognizing his own necessary exploitation within that system, Booth is a would-be Ben. He brags about his total selfreliance and views his brother’s deference to the white-collar status quo as a form of impotence. Yet, for all of Booth’s claims to be capable of thriving magnificently on his brawn and his wits, he is in fact a smalltime thief, and, far from being self-reliant, he is utterly dependent on Lincoln both practically and in his quest for a more potent selfhood. Indeed, the heightened inaccessibility, for these brothers, of the masculine mythologies enshrined in American culture intensifies their self-destructive need to assert themselves as “thuh man,” a phrase they use repeatedly. Parks makes clear, heartbreakingly, how remote the bourgeois domestic dream is for these men and how intensely they long for it. Notably, in Topdog/Underdog the older generation has vanished, as Lincoln and Booth’s parents abandoned them in childhood. They did so, it appears, to unleash themselves from the domestic realm that was meant to be the key to happiness, at least according to the dominant ideology of Miller’s era and to some degree our own. Nevertheless, in the squalid “rooming house room” that they inhabit, Booth insists that they can cobble together a reconstruction of the family life that the play shows they never really had (Parks 2001: 7). Still, Booth tries to create it, though their parents are now gone, their paranoia and misogyny drive women away from them, and picket-fenced suburbia is as far removed from their lives as is the real honest Abe. Yet that “illusion of safety” that May argues the domestic realm offered in the Cold War period continues to exert talismanic power over these men, who yearn for the security and patriarchal authority that they associate with mainstream American life in spite of the fact that it was self-consciously constructed to exclude them (May 2008: 228). It is that very same talismanic power that Donald Trump summoned when he promised his followers to

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Anxious Masculinity in the Drama of Arthur Miller and Beyond

“make America great again.” Among other things, surely this is code for a resurrection of the domestic containment that in reality offered so little to so many, but emphatically promised white males exclusive pride of place. This study will conclude with two plays that premiered in 2018, the precise middle point of the one-term Trump administration. Both plays engage directly with their own present and beyond, while also staging the perpetuation of the problems with which this study began. Fairview, by Jackie Sibblies Drury, and Slave Play, by Jeremy O. Harris, have in common the inclusion among their characters of a white male who believes he possesses a kind of all-powerful oversight that grants him narrative authority over a world he claims to see with perfect clarity. In Slave Play, a white British man named Jim makes this claim specifically about his relationship with his Black female partner when he resists her troubling portrait of their marriage by asserting that his own vision is more trustworthy: “the world shows me who it is/and I see it” (Harris 2019: 140). Jimbo, in Fairview, makes essentially the same claim, albeit in more maniacal terms: “I make a movie in my mind,/ ….I can see it clear as fucking day …./I am in control of all of it …./ you’re in my fucking movie” (Drury 2019: 71–2). This assertion of white patriarchal authority over what is seen and how it is understood is ultimately resisted, in each play, by a Black female who finds a way to reclaim her own story, rejecting the versions of it scripted by white others. Yet these are not really plays of triumph; at best they offer fragile visions of hope that are counterpointed by the persistence of what they long to surpass. As an example, Act 2 of Slave Play reaches its climax when Jim’s wife Kaneisha uses the metaphor of a virus to describe him. Slave Play closed on Broadway in January 2020, before the global pandemic which would soon close all Broadway plays and sicken and kill millions had made its way into the public consciousness.2 Harris could not have known when he wrote his play how remarkably prescient his metaphor would seem, two years later. Yet it provides a perfect summation of the five hundred years and more of the American experiment, which began with the devastating spread of disease from white European colonizers

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to the New World’s indigenous inhabitants, and that seemed in 2020 like it might reach its dismal end with another one. Covid-19 was not “caused” by white Americans, obviously, but it disproportionately impacted Black and brown people, and its severity was aggravated by the reckless behavior of people, many of them white, who flouted rational public health policies which they insisted on viewing, with the encouragement of the president of the United States, as infringements on their rights as Americans.3 Implicitly in so doing they were making claims about who has rights in America and who does not, prioritizing their own over the right of others not to be contaminated with a deadly virus. At the same time, Trump was seeking to secure his reelection by weaponizing the virus for his own gain, referring to it as the “China virus” so as to insinuate that it was inflicted on Americans by an outside menace. In other ways too, as I have already noted, Trump made a habit of summoning the rhetoric of domestic containment, as when he urged what he liked to call “suburban housewives” to vote for him in order to keep danger—in the form, he unmistakably implied, of non-white Americans and darkskinned immigrants—from their nicely trimmed lawns. As he tweeted on July 23, 2020: “Biden will destroy your neighborhood and your American Dream. I will preserve it, and make it even better!” This kind of dog-whistling was characteristic of Trump throughout his presidency and indeed throughout his public life. His success has often hinged on his talent for stoking white grievances and white fears, by, as Casey Ryan Kelly has argued, insisting that “sexually craven dark-skinned predators” in the form of rapacious Mexican drug dealers “constitute a violent threat to the nation” (2020: 203); and by regularly declaring that the inner cities where many Black Americans reside are jungles full of marauding gangs. The jungle is a recurring image in the American drama, as we shall see, constituting a source of both temptation and danger, beckoning seductively to be entered even as it imperils the domestic realm. The inner cities full of Black and brown people operate in the same way in the Trump imaginary; they are invoked as the antithesis of “our neighborhoods,” “zones of lawlessness and primal

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Anxious Masculinity in the Drama of Arthur Miller and Beyond

violence” that affirm white racist assumptions about the necessity for zoning, segregation, militaristic policing, mass incarceration, and other strategies for the control and containment of non-white people (Kelly 2020: 217). Trump’s final gambit seemed to go just a bit too far, when he whipped his irate followers into a frenzy on January 6, 2021, and urged them to storm the Capitol Building; this was too much, at least until he was out of office, for even some of his most craven Republican followers in Congress. It was not too much, though, for the large mob that did just what their president told them to do, in a speech he delivered that day whose rhetorical flourishes were again revealing: Our country has had enough. We will not take it anymore and that’s what this is all about ….We want to go back and we want to get this right because we’re going to have somebody in there that should not be in there and our country will be destroyed and we’re not going to stand for that … And you’re the real people, you’re the people that built this nation. You’re not the people that tore down our nation. (Associated Press 2021)

The flagrant use of “us” versus “them” terminology, the fulminating (later in the speech) against a litany of Black people—American political figure Stacey Abrams, Michelle and Barack Obama, and Oprah Winfrey all received hostile mention—and the reminder that “the wall is built … Now they want to take down the wall …, let everyone flow in … and rip off our country” are all characteristic Trumpian gestures. Certain categories of people are deemed subversives who must be kept out so as to allow the rest of us “to go back and get this right,” through the restoration of a state of affairs that allegedly existed before, one that properly privileged “the real people,” the ones who “built this nation”— code for white people, however illogical that is given the historical facts about enslaved labor. Trump may have lost the 2020 election, but a disconcerting number of American voters and politicians continue to be very much in his thrall, which for many means being entranced by an idea about America

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that hearkens back to an earlier time, that is sexist and racist at its core, and that places the white male provider at its foundation. This version of America is called to mind ceaselessly in order to reassure those who feel they have been displaced: by immigrants, by people of color, by women, by the LGBTQ community. Often when it is summoned, it is accompanied by hostility and a palpable sense of peril, as when Texas Senator Ted Cruz, on May 20, 2021, retweeted a TikTok video juxtaposing an ad for the Russian army with one for the American military. The former features muscle-bound men looking intensely at the camera as they do push-ups and brandish guns; the latter, a cartoon, tells the story of a female corporal who was raised by two mothers before finding her “inner strength” by joining the military. Cruz’s response in his tweet: “Holy crap. Perhaps a woke, emasculated military is not the best idea” (quoted in Cillizza 2021). As ever, the intrusion of a female, and of queerness, into an erstwhile “male” space is seen as endangering heterosexual masculinity—or, as the Jem editorial put it, the male’s “dominating qualities.” This anxiety about displacement, about losing potency, centrality, and privilege in an increasingly heterogeneous America, is the story of our times, and it is also the story told by the American drama that is the concern of this study. It echoes through the plays I will examine and the experiences of their characters, blighting the view—to adopt the image at the heart of Fairview—from the suburban communities that are supposed to embody an all-embracing, benevolent American possibility and promise. “We’re getting your husbands back to work, and everybody wants it,” Trump assured the women in his audience at a rally in Michigan in October, 2020 (quoted in Santucci 2020). The husband who will be helped back to work, as revealed by a century of American drama, is not especially happy to be there, and often neither he nor his wife is a whole lot happier when he is at home. Nevertheless, the boundaries of that home are tightly contained, even as the eggs and perhaps the nation burn.

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Strudel and the Single Man: All My Sons and Death of a Salesman

As more than a few critics have observed, Arthur Miller’s dramatic landscape is one in which relationships between men are privileged, allmale enterprises are exalted, and male and female priorities are sharply dichotomized. The linchpin for this polarized system is a philosophical conflict between idealism and practicality that is found in many of Miller’s plays. It is typically gendered and it makes itself felt most strongly in Miller’s two great plays of the 1940s: All My Sons—Miller’s first major success, written in 1947—and Death of a Salesman, generally regarded as his masterpiece, written two years later. In a broad sense, the problem Miller was confronting in these dramas is one he discusses in his essay, “On Social Plays,” originally published in 1955 as the preface to the one-act version of A View from the Bridge. Contrasting modern plays with ancient Greek drama, Miller maintains: The single theme to which our most ambitious plays can be reduced is frustration … The image is that of the individual scratching away at a wall beyond which stands society, his fellow men. Sometimes he pounds at the wall, sometimes he tries to scale it or … blow it up, but at the end the wall is always there, and the man himself is dead or doomed to defeat in his attempt to live a human life. (Martin and Centola 1996: 55)

Miller’s phrase “a human life” is rich, as he wields it, and slippery. A human life, he suggests here and elsewhere, would be undergirded by a “standard of values” that would “create in man a respect for himself, a real voice in the fate of his society ….and an aim for his life which is neither a private aim for a private life nor one which sets him below the

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Anxious Masculinity in the Drama of Arthur Miller and Beyond

machine that was made to serve him” (Martin and Centola 1996: 61). This “human life,” it seems, would be achieved through the integration of private and public commitments; that integration would allow a man to “live as a naturally political, naturally private, naturally engaged person” (58). He would be in sync with the domestic and the social world, recognizing both aspects of his selfhood as cohesive aspects of his nature. This integration is forever elusive in Miller’s plays, perhaps because it implicitly resists the far more single-minded ideological assumptions that governed the mid-century, middle-class, white American family unit, in which gender roles were intransigently defined. In David Savran’s words, while the female was expected “to embrace domesticity and contain her sexuality,” the ideal male breadwinner was “an aggressive, ‘go-getting’ businessman” whose central responsibility was to put a roof over his children’s heads and ensure that they grew “up to be like their parents—property-owning husbands and housewives living a life of affluence and abundance” (1992: 7; 8). In “On Social Plays,” Miller offers as an alternative not a total denunciation of the bourgeois dream, nor a demand that we altogether abolish “the machine”— by which he means “the needs of efficient production” (Martin and Centola 1996: 60)—but rather the appealing idea that a man might assign each its proper place within a life that contains both. Yet this goal is forever out of reach for Miller’s males, who simply cannot reconcile respect for themselves and domestic duty, or their ethical sense with their individualistic impulses. This is perhaps one reason why Bigsby has argued that Miller’s overriding concern is “with a baffled idealism” and why Miller himself asserts that the central theme of modern drama is frustration (Bigsby 1984: 139). Miller’s dramas often conclude with the central male character’s suicide because he cannot put his idealistic belief system into practice in any manner other than self-destruction. His wife, by contrast, always survives in part because she has the good and bad fortune to lack the “baffled idealism” of her husband. What this chapter will explore, then, is why the male is “doomed to defeat,” why he is incapable of scaling or blowing up the wall, and why Miller’s females seem generally immune to this same problem.

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In the case of All My Sons, the answer is in part that the female is the wall, or she is so closely aligned with what it represents that she assists, to some degree deliberately, in reinforcing it. Death of a Salesman explores similar terrain, but its dramatization of the gender conflict is more nuanced both because its primary female character is more sympathetically drawn and because the homosocial attitudes of its males are to a degree under critique. Yet in both plays the male characters have an ambivalent relationship to the domestic domain, a conflicted site that is at once enticing and at odds with their deepest longings. In All My Sons in particular, those deep longings—which must be repressed to sustain the domestic space—are shown to be the most principled aspects of the male psyche. Indeed, more overtly than in any other play that Miller ever wrote, the female characters in All My Sons are depicted as figures who actively blunt male idealism and stand in opposition to a righteous commitment to the larger social good that, the play suggests, no one can really achieve but to which only men aspire. The narrowness of the main character, Joe Keller’s, sense of responsibility, for which he ultimately punishes himself by suicide, is aided and abetted by his wife’s deeply provincial value system, one that is echoed in more exaggerated form by the Kellers’ coldhearted neighbor, Sue Bayliss, and even in the more ostensibly appealing Ann Deever, whom Joe’s son hopes to marry. Though Ann wavers in her position, the play’s older females do their best to squelch what they view as “phony idealism” (Miller 1974: 38) and to redirect male energies toward compromised bourgeois interests which the women regard as the essence of their lives and, more than that, as life itself. Yet these corrupt guardians of the bourgeois prison are also the play’s staunch realists. While the values upheld by the men are shown to be humane, they are also vague and finally self-defeating. If the wall is “always there,” soul-destroying in its implacable materiality, the moral integrity that would make that fact bearable seems to be beyond the male characters’ power to articulate, much less to enact. All My Sons was Miller’s first serious foray into Ibsenite realism, or into what he himself described as “the Greco-Ibsen form”

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Anxious Masculinity in the Drama of Arthur Miller and Beyond

(Miller 1995: 144). Among other things, the play firmly establishes Miller’s lifelong interest in plays about “what [people] choose to forget.” Every one of his plays, according to Miller, is about “now grappling with then, it’s the story of how the birds come home to roost” (quoted in Bigsby 1997: 7). When the original Broadway production of All My Sons was disparaged by some critics for being “overly plotted, to the point of implausible coincidence,” Miller confessed to privately wondering: …what critics would make of a play in which an infant, set out on a mountainside to die because it is predicted that he will murder his father, is rescued by a shepherd and then, some two decades later, gets into an argument with a total stranger whom he kills—and who just happens to be ….his father. (Miller 1995: 134)1

Miller’s response reveals not only the artist’s expected defensiveness on behalf of his creation, but also an investment in Greek tragedy that outlasted Miller’s investment in Ibsen, whose preoccupations he only partially shared. (He confessed to being puzzled when people claimed that A Doll’s House was about “the inequality of women.” Miller remarked, perhaps with willful perversity: “The women I knew about had not been even slightly unequal; I saw no such problem in A Doll’s House” [Martin and Centola 1996: 180].) Yet both Ibsen and the Greeks bequeathed to Miller a dramatic structure that hinges on a carefully buried secret—in Miller, often though not always of a sexual nature—that resurfaces like the return of the repressed and threatens to dismantle a carefully cultivated social life. Minus the secret’s sexual content, this is the skeleton for the plot of A Doll’s House, as well as (sexual content reinserted) the skeleton for Oedipus Rex. The resulting drama becomes a collision between the public and the private self—or, to put it differently, between the person the character claims to be and the person the unearthed secret suggests he or she may be instead. It is because this collision has social as well as psychological implications that Miller thought of himself as merging the Greek and Ibsenite forms. As it happens, All My Sons is one of Miller’s few plays

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to show little interest in sexual betrayal (though the character Chris’s designs on Ann are viewed by his mother as a betrayal of his dead brother); its focus is more specifically on a conflict between social responsibility and self-interest. The seed for the play was planted by a story Miller heard from his then mother-in-law about a young girl who informed on her father because she learned he was selling defective parts to the military. In Miller’s dramatic recreation of this story, the daughter becomes a son, ostensibly because Miller, in his own words, “didn’t know much about girls then,” although one might add that it would undermine the logic of Miller’s play to associate a righteous gesture of that nature with a female (quoted in Bigsby 2009: 265). All My Sons tells the tale of an ordinary “Joe” who manufactured engines for war planes during the Second World War. One fateful day, Joe knowingly sold a batch of faulty cylinder engines to the Army Air Force, resulting in the deaths of twenty-one pilots. Afterward, Joe successfully evaded responsibility by scapegoating his subordinate, who went to jail; meanwhile, Joe rebuilt his business, thus providing a secure suburban lifestyle for his family and a thriving business that he planned to pass along to his sons. The play takes place three and a half years later, when Joe is forced into a reckoning with his amorality, which prompted his older son Larry, a pilot in the war, to take his own life. Upon learning of Larry’s suicide, Joe kills himself in atonement for his crimes. Although it is unquestionably Joe Keller who is responsible for the play’s central deception, his wife Kate plays a crucial role in staving off the truth of the past to preserve what she and Joe need to believe about their past and present. Moreover, Kate does what she can to ensure that her value system, not the one Joe belatedly discovers and dies for, will be embraced by her surviving son, in the hopes of carrying him into a sustainable, if morally bankrupt, future. Collectively, All My Sons’ females firmly commit themselves to preserving the stifling set of values that is under critique in the play, and they show themselves to be devoid of the existential anguish that afflicts its disillusioned idealists, all of whom are male. The anguish the female characters experience is no less real, but it begins and ends at their own front curb.

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Anxious Masculinity in the Drama of Arthur Miller and Beyond

­ ll My Sons’ action takes place entirely, and suggestively, in the A secluded backyard of Joe’s home. The opening stage directions immediately inform us what the house cost when it was first built, how nicely painted it is, and how effectively the poplars function to cut off any view beyond the Kellers’ yard—thus isolating them from the larger world. The home as Miller describes it is a textbook example of post-war domestic containment. Yet the Kellers’ sheltered abode contains an apple tree, planted in Larry’s honor, which has fallen down, with obvious and troubling implications: this Edenic realm is emphatically postlapsarian. When the curtain opens, three men are chatting amiably in the pleasant outdoors; as they do, Miller inflects further ambiguity into his portrait of the suburban haven. While reading the daily paper, Joe remarks that he no longer reads the news and takes an interest only in the want ads, signaling a conversion from social responsibility or at least social awareness to an exclusive focus on what people want, materially. His neighbor, the doctor Jim Bayliss, reveals his own cynicism when he responds to another neighbor’s idealized version of the medical profession—this neighbor, Frank Lubey, recently saw a movie about a doctor who “help[ed] humanity”—with the dry retort: “I would love to help humanity on a Warner Brothers salary” (6). The men’s conversation is interrupted when first Jim and then Frank are called indoors by their wives. Jim’s wife Sue arrives first, to inform her husband that a patient is trying to reach him. When Jim remarks that he has better things to do than to hold the hand of a patient who is not really sick, Sue replies acidly that for a fee of ten dollars he can take the trouble to hold the man’s hand. Though Sue is described as past forty, fretful, and overweight, Frank’s wife Lydia is a high-spirited young woman of twenty-seven. Yet Lydia too, though attractive and vital, calls Frank in to tend to domestic affairs: she tells him that their toaster is malfunctioning and she is helpless to fix it. Thus, women invade what remains of the pastoral, natural world; they focus male attention on quotidian matters, and they draw them in to what Jim, at least, views as hostile territory: as he exits the stage to enter his home, he expresses a

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dry longing “to take a trip around the world for about 30 years” (Miller 1974: 9). The serene home, it seems, is also a prison maintained by females for the containment of breadwinning men. Jim and Sue Bayliss are the most extreme example of the philosophical oppositions that divide the genders in this play, although they regard themselves as typical. In a strikingly chilly scene in Act 2, Sue encounters Ann Deever in the backyard of the Kellers’ home. With the omniscience of the paradigmatic nosy neighbor, Sue has accurately ascertained that Ann is here to marry the Kellers’ son Chris, though Joe’s wife Kate does not yet know it. Hence, she offers Ann advice about the importance of securing a husband who has money (which Chris does), and then proceeds coldly to ask her, once she and Chris are married, to do Sue the favor of moving elsewhere. Her reasoning is that she attributes Jim’s bitter sense that he is imprisoned to Chris’s idealistic influence: “Every time he has a session with Chris, he feels as though he’s compromising by not giving up everything for research.” But research, she complains (echoing her husband’s earlier line about a Warner Brothers salary), fails to pay the bills: “You’ve got to give up your life to go into it.” Thus, Sue outlines the conflict in the starkest of terms: to pursue an ideal, one must sacrifice what Sue defines as life, by which she means family. The reconciliation of the private and the public that would allow a man to have “respect for himself,” obtained through his possession of “a real voice in the fate of his society,” is deemed an idle dream by Sue Bayliss (Martin and Centola 1996: 61). She goes on to insist that Chris’s idealism is a mere pose, masking an essential materialism that they all share: “[I]f Chris wants people to put on the hair shirt let him take off his broadcloth. He’s driving my husband crazy with that phony idealism of his” (Miller 1974: 38). In short, Sue argues that there is no conflict, really; idealism is always phony—Chris’s expensive clothes expose his bourgeois marrow, despite his sanctimoniousness—and there is no room for it in “life.” Yet a belief that one ought to be “better than it’s possible to be,” in Sue’s words, which Chris hypocritically awakens in Jim, creates guilt in males and threatens the nest that it is the female’s single-minded objective to maintain.

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Anxious Masculinity in the Drama of Arthur Miller and Beyond

To some degree, Jim corroborates Sue’s sense of things, and he too extrapolates from his circumstances to all males and, by implication, all females. Act 2 concludes with the revelation of secrets that is the hallmark of the well-made play—the form that Miller inherited, via Ibsen, from Eugène Scribe. Chris learns that his father, whom he has always revered, approved the decision to send the faulty cylinder engines forward and thus was responsible for the deaths of the twentyone pilots. Deeply shaken, Chris departs into the night, and Act 3 opens with his mother seated outdoors in a rocking chair, apprehensively awaiting his return. Jim appears in her yard to reassure her that Chris is merely tracing a trajectory that characterizes all men’s lives: “These private little revolutions always die,” he explains. “The compromise is always made … [E]very man … [has] a star, but once it’s out it never lights again.” Jim explains how his own star went out as follows: One year I … took off … to New Orleans … ; I lived on bananas and milk … It was beautiful. And then she came, and she cried. And I went back home with her. And now I live in the usual darkness. I can’t find myself; it’s even hard sometimes to remember the kind of man I wanted to be. I’m a good husband. (Miller 1974: 61; emphasis added)

Jim’s terminology is as stark as his wife’s, suggesting that this unhappy pair share the same, gendered world view. To be a good husband, one must sacrifice the kind of man one wishes to be—even, Jim suggests, one’s very self. The self that Jim has lost is one with integrity, committed to the welfare of others and also to beauty; integrity and beauty as he depicts them are tied not only to social responsibility but also to the ascetic withdrawal from bourgeois materialism that he conjures when he tells Kate that he lived on bananas and milk. The vagueness of Jim’s description robs it of some credibility—he says that he studied “a certain disease”—yet Jim sees in his own necessary compromise the compromise all men make. One must sacrifice one’s better self, and Miller’s notion of a fully “human” (which seems synonymous with humane) life, in response to the call and the cry of the female, which

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draws the restless male back to the domestic realm to which she is linked. Chris too, Jim says, will arrive at this recognition: “Chris is a good son—he’ll come back” (home). Chris’s position in the play as a younger man perched on the edge of the disillusionment Jim describes is a complex one. He is indeed an idealist, as Sue claims, and he speaks reverentially about the experiences he had in the war as he watched men who served under him dying for one another and manifesting what he calls a “kind of … responsibility. Man for man.” Having witnessed the self-sacrificing and loving actions these men performed on behalf of other men, he experiences profound discomfort returning to capitalist America, with its booming postwar economy. Although he has gone to work for his father, he feels the money he earns is tainted, covered in the blood of soldiers whose deaths are rendered meaningless if their only consequence is to bolster a ratrace in which everyone is out for his own gain. Chris has invited Ann, who was once engaged to Larry, back to his family home to propose marriage; yet she notes worriedly that his interactions with her have exhibited what she perceives as shame. Chris corroborates her view when he admits that he feels “ashamed somehow” to be part of the ratrace, and he contrasts that shame with the selfless love of men for men. Yet when Ann reassures him that he has a right to everything he has, including his father’s money, Chris responds happily with the promise: “I’m going to make a fortune for you!” (Miller 1974: 30; 31). Hence, it appears that, in order to achieve a life that will include Ann, Chris has to embrace a set of priorities that hinges on accumulating money. Earlier in the play, Chris complains to his father that the family business fails to inspire him but, if he must engage with it, he wants it to be “beautiful.” He goes on: “I want a family … I want to build something I can give myself to” (Miller 1974: 15). Yet Chris’s claim that grubbing for money could become beautiful (a word Jim also employed, though in a very different context) if one directed it toward building a family is undermined by a half-echo later, when he notes that he wishes to erect a “monument” to the selfless heroism and devotion he witnessed on the battlefield (31). It is something to solidify his faith in that responsibility,

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“[m]an for man,” that Chris really wishes to build, yet he capitulates to a materialist ethic that, arguably, he projects onto Ann when he tells her that he will make a fortune for her. Ann’s response is a demur, as she lightly wonders what she would do with a fortune. Chris’s desire to marry Ann, whom he has not seen in five years, seems impetuous, sexless and immature, a strategy to rationalize his entrance into his father’s business and both to erase his brother’s troubling memory—as Ann was his brother’s “girl”—and to imbue Chris with the integrity of the older son who once possessed her. If Ann becomes Chris’s, Larry— linked metaphorically with the death of the pilots—can be forgotten; simultaneously, Larry is reborn in the form of Chris, who now has what Larry had. Yet this strategy is not really working for Chris, who cannot help but entwine Ann with his father’s money and find both shameful. Moreover, though the issue is undeveloped in the play, Chris’s shame may also stem from a sense that his acquisition of Ann is a violation of that responsibility, “man for man,” that he venerates, as—at least in Chris’s mother’s eyes—Ann is always and forever owned by Larry. (If one accepts this reading of Chris’s shame, it appears that All My Sons does not participate in the same homosocial bonding rites that are so prevalent in Death of a Salesman, where, as we shall see later, it is a point of pride between brothers to hand women along to one another. Then again, it is difficult to engage in a bonding exercise with a brother who is no longer alive; Larry’s absence, arguably, transforms what might be a male bonding ritual into a violation of fraternal loyalty.) Ann’s own posture, as it happens, is somewhat unstable in the play, complicating what so far has appeared to be a fairly simple gender binary. To some degree, as already suggested, Chris imposes a value system on her that she does not appear to share, perhaps to justify his own subterranean if anxious attraction to a bourgeois life (hinted at also in Sue Bayliss’s remark about his broadcloth) and his culturally generated sense that he must supply one for his future wife. But Ann shows no interest in money except to claim that Chris has a right to it; her motive, it seems, is merely to reassure him. It is her own father who, unbeknownst to her at the time, Joe sold down the river; yet, because she believes

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him to be culpable, she has turned her back on her father completely, never once visiting or writing to him from the moment he was jailed. As she tells Joe in Act 1, Steve Deever willfully shipped out parts he knew to be defective, and for this he cannot under any circumstances be forgiven. Ann exhibits an unswerving ethical compass—or so it first appears. Late in the play, she learns the truth about her father, which is that he was merely a gullible pawn; it was not he but Joe who approved the sale of the defective parts. Somewhat puzzlingly, given her previous moral stance, she responds to this knowledge by offering Joe and Kate a deal: if they will allow Chris to marry her, which Kate has thus far rigidly resisted, she will not reveal Joe’s guilt: “[E]verything will end …, we’ll go away, and that’s all.” Ann shifts her position two pages later, both because it is so important to Chris that Joe atone for his act and because Kate will not accept her deal; still, her attitude here is troubling. She seems to discard her responsibility both to others and to the truth, as she makes it clear that she will allow her father to go on moldering in jail for a crime he did not commit and she will allow Joe to continue advancing a fiction, as long as she can obtain her domestic dream. Her reasoning, as she explains it to Kate, is that she has been “so lonely” (64; 65). Domestic containment comes to mean a containment of the truth within the family so that there can be family, at any cost. As it happens, her belief that Chris might be set free if they all agree to keep their mouths closed and part company shows little understanding of Chris, who, despite his own aching sense of conflict, genuinely believes in what he calls honor and would loathe himself if he turned his back on it—though he also surely will loathe himself for goading his father to die for it, as the end of the play suggests. It is Kate—always referred to by the playwright as Mother—whose task it becomes to soothe her son and redirect his focus to life (though perhaps not a “human” one) when both of his male role models turn out to have taken theirs. Kate, Terry Otten argues, fits the category of “strong female characters” in Miller, because she is aware of her husband’s guilt and stands firmly beside him (Otten 2002: 16). Yet Kate’s determination to guard and wield the family secret for her own complicated ends

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prompted Harold Clurman to call her the play’s villain and Miller himself to describe her as “sinister” (Clurman 1958: 67; Roudane 1987: 370). Throughout the play, Kate fiercely insists that Larry is alive against all evidence to the contrary, and she requires others to collude in this fiction because “there’s God, so certain things can never happen” (Miller 1974: 24). Although initially Kate appears to be claiming that a just God would not allow her son to die, we come to understand that she is instead making a claim that hinges on her knowledge of Joe’s guilt, and likely also the Abraham and Isaac story: God, she reflexively insists, would not allow a son to be killed by his own father. Keller repeatedly points out that Larry never flew a P-40; still, Kate sees that Larry’s death in a plane crash connects him to the other dead men and renders his father figuratively responsible. As it happens, we eventually learn that Larry killed himself because he could not bear his knowledge of his father’s action; thus, Joe was literally responsible for Larry’s death. Without knowing this, Kate links the father’s crime with the son’s death and hence can be said to manifest a broader sense of responsibility that her husband lacks or struggles to keep at bay. Yet Kate works avidly to make what is false true, even though this entraps her family in the past and stands in the way of Chris and Ann’s happiness, because she is unable to relinquish a life that has palpably lost all meaning and a belief in a moral order that is undermined by her own amorality and the facts as she knows them. Kate’s motives are layered, but she emphatically perpetuates the conditions Miller is dramatizing in All My Sons. At the end of Act 1, Kate has premonitions that the security of her fragile secret may be under threat because of a telephone call from Ann’s brother George, who has just visited their father in prison. Learning that George is on his way to see Ann, Kate ends the act by three times urging Joe to “be smart.” As Joe storms into the house in a fury, the stage directions tell us that “Mother” remains alone onstage, “stiffly, staring, seeing” (Miller 1974: 34). It is here that Kate’s more sinister qualities come into view. Though it was Joe who committed the crime on behalf of the business that sustains their family, it is Kate who works to maintain the lie that is now the real foundation of that family—as Linda

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Loman props up her husband’s self-deluding self-image because her own depends on it. But while Linda seems unconscious of her collusion with Willy’s fictions of self, Kate clearly “sees” even as she insists on not seeing. In Act 2 George Deever arrives with his portentous news and Kate proceeds to put a domestic spell on him, willfully striving to disarm him and suppress his principled indignation with the allure of the good life. After noting that the war, in which he also fought, made him old, she reminds George of the advice she gave him when he left home: “don’t try for medals.” Discouraging grand dreams and acts of selfless heroism, Kate plies George with food, foisting a sandwich and his favorite juice on him. When Lydia, who George once dated, enters the stage, Kate scolds George for not marrying her (as Lydia could have fed him), and reprimands both Chris and George for “think[ing] too much.” Being smart, it seems, is distinct from a kind of thoughtfulness that threatens the self-absorption that sustains hearth and home. Lydia’s husband Frank earns Kate’s praise because he reads nothing but Andy Gump —that is, the comics. Thus, he has three children and a house that is paid off. “Stop being a philosopher,” she urges George, “and look after yourself ” (Miller 1974: 49; 52). The implications could not be clearer: reflection, idealism, and a concern for others are destructive impulses for a man, as they draw him away from the domestic realm and his proper role within it as provider, the successful performance of which relies on blinkered individualism. She goes on to reproach George further: “While you were getting mad about Fascism Frank was getting into her bed.” It was the men’s lofty principles, she concludes, that robbed her of Larry and left George aging and alone. Had George allowed himself to give in to erotic temptation, he would have been less prone to the self-defeating temptations of political thought, and his reward would have been lasting domestic comfort and the company of a very pretty and very fertile girl. Kate’s appeal almost succeeds. Ann notes that she has George “hooked already,” and he does appear like a fish on a line, reeled in by Kate’s promises of food, dates, and the creature comforts of the unexamined life: “She makes it seem so nice around here,” he remarks,

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“with a catch in his [hooked?] throat” (Miller 1974: 51). It isn’t until Kate slips and forgets the lie that allowed Joe to get away with his crime—he claimed to have been laid up with a flu the day the cylinder heads were found to be faulty—that the spell is broken; George’s clarity returns and with it so does his righteous stance. Once this occurs, Joe dedicates himself to trying to persuade Chris that he acted on his behalf, though Kate continues to strive, pathetically, to hold together her sense of a moral order that is contingent on Larry being declared alive: “God does not let a son be killed by his father” (57). In effect, Kate displaces responsibility onto God, who has indeed permitted the unthinkable, as Kate by now well knows. In Act 3, she shows no interest in seeing her husband authentically atone for his crimes; on the contrary, being “smart,” she suggests that he offer to go to prison precisely because she knows Chris wouldn’t ask that of him: “But if … he could feel that you wanted to pay, maybe he would forgive you” (62). Kate’s concern remains fetishistically focused on the preservation of her family. When Jim describes the devastating experience of disillusionment he believes Chris to be undergoing after discovering his father’s guilt (“He probably just wanted to be alone to watch his star go out”), Kate’s reply verges on the comical: “Just as long as he comes back” (61). That Chris is going to come back, Jim makes clear, without his soul appears to be of no concern to her whatsoever. By the end of the play, all of the males in Kate’s family are shattered by their confrontation with the self-serving disregard for the larger good that Joe’s behavior manifested and that Sue Bayliss argues is fundamental to all human beings, though some lie to themselves and claim to be better. Seeing this, Chris is overcome by the shame he previously associated with his attraction to Ann and to money: “I can’t look at myself.” Larry, learning of his father’s terrible act, wrote in a suicide letter to Ann: “I can’t face anybody.” Joe is driven to suicide by Chris’s shaming words: “You can be better!” (Miller 1974: 67; 68; 69). It may well be a recognition that he could not be better that motivates Joe’s suicide. As it happens, no male character in the play is able to transform his shame into responsibility. Larry dies rather than bringing his father

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to justice and Joe kills himself rather than facing the consequences of his crime. Chris “dissolves,” in Benjamin Nelson’s words, “in a puddle of indecision” (1970: 89) and ends the play lamenting the outcome he himself brought about: “I didn’t mean to.” In response, his mother wraps her arms around him and soothes him with words that promise to preserve the status quo, or the impenetrable wall, as the play has depicted it: “Don’t take it on yourself. Forget now. Live” (69). Once again, “living” is associated with unconsciousness and an abdication of personal responsibility. While men, too, exhibit this stance (Sue Bayliss is right about that), they loathe themselves for it. Women are its steely advocates. Hence, we might be led to conclude, All My Sons uncritically subscribes to the misogynistic assumptions of its day and of some of its main characters. “There can be no evasion of the burden of individual human responsibility,” Harold Clurman wrote in his articulation of the meaning of the play, capturing what has traditionally been understood to be the Miller credo (1947: 108), and in All My Sons men alone understand this. According to Jim Bayliss, it is only every man who has a star—that is to say, an ethical sense of responsibility that lights him from within, gives beauty to his sacrifices, and detaches him from the corrupt material realm. Women lack this star, Jim suggests; worse still, they work methodically to extinguish it in men. To a significant extent, the play supports this reading. Sue has nothing but scorn for her husband’s ideals. Kate more seductively but no less bluntly makes it clear that intellect and social responsibility are the enemies of domestic comfort as she strives to quell George Deever’s morally upstanding rage. And even Ann is willing to bury the truth to obtain the marriage she desires—without which, she asserts, there is no life for her. Life for each woman is contingent on bringing males to a state of moral forgetfulness. Yet it is also the case that the ethical creed to which the males pay inconsistent homage is described by them in the most abstract of terms, as if they are groping for something elusive that they cannot really pin down. When Frank proposes to Jim that he might “help

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humanity,” his model is a Hollywood film whose title he has forgotten. Jim, as we have noted, nostalgically recalls trying to cure an unnamed, vaguely referenced disease, and Chris praises the “responsibility. Man for man” and the honor he feels to be absent in post-war America without ever being able to articulate what it was these men honored or felt a responsibility for, apart from one another. In short, the realm of responsibility and masculine honor that the male characters exalt is one that they can neither access nor clearly express in words. There is something persistently nebulous and even suicidal about the men’s palpitating sense of integrity, as if to suggest that the mythic male value system is always already lost and men can do nothing but lament its absence or die seeking it. As we shall see shortly, when Linda Loman holds Willy back from the jungle, one senses she is right to do so because the jungle—though Willy links it with self-reliant freedom— no longer exists and symbolizes only death. In analogous fashion, when Chris Keller idealizes the beauty of men dying on the battlefield, he notes approvingly that the men killed themselves for one another. Once he learns of Joe’s guilt, Chris seems determined to drive his father into the grave, at least as Kate sees things, and, with his shrill insistence on his father’s failure to be “better,” Chris in effect does just that. Over the course of his career, Miller stages a veritable parade of suicides, as his male characters repeatedly find that they can fulfill their idealized views of themselves and one another only through self-erasure. Perhaps the plays’ women have little choice but to try to protect these fragile men from their hopeless if noble dreams, and to point them toward a life that is compromised but the only life there is. As Maggie, in Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, will tell her idealistic husband Brick: “[L]ife has got to be allowed to continue even after the dream of life is—all—over” (Williams 1983: 44). Maggie’s definition of life, as distinct from “the dream of life,” is implicit in each of Miller’s women’s use of the same term: it is pragmatic rather than idealistic and it is self- rather than other-oriented. But the alternative, in Cat as well as in All My Sons, is self-loathing, disappointment, and selfdestruction.

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In the end, in Miller’s play (and arguably in Williams’), the “certain disease” that once upon a time Jim went off to cure appears to be the disease of bourgeois living, for which, it seems, there is no cure. And it is with this claim that we must return to Joe Keller, who stands at the heart of the play and is its chief criminal. There is no evidence that Kate influenced Joe when he made his fateful and, as things turned out, murderous decision, any more than Gertrude can be said to have plotted the death of King Hamlet. On the contrary, when Joe suggests that Kate was somehow behind his actions—“You wanted money,” he declares—she vigorously denies it: “I didn’t want it that way” (Miller 1974: 63). One may find echoes, here, of Chris projecting his financial desires onto Ann; Joe seems quite comfortable in the domestic paradise he has constructed for his family. But the play also hints that Joe was once different. Pointedly, we are told in Act 1 that he does not read the news “any more” (Miller 1974: 6). He thrives on the neighborhood kids’ confusion regarding his history, to his wife’s annoyance, which renders him a heroic policeman rather than a lowly ex-con. Buried within Joe is a nostalgia for the same ethical values that the other men revere. “[O]n my word of honor,” he likes to declare to the local boy, Bert, as if the word “honor” might still carry meaning (11). Yet when Joe justifies his decision to prioritize his business and his family, which are inextricable for him, over the larger good, he does so in a manner reminiscent of another titan of self-serving amorality, Brecht’s Mother Courage. “I’m in business,” he declares to his stunned son, “You lay forty years into a business … what could I do …, let them take my life away? ….Chris, I did it for you” (58). Yoking together his business, his life, and his child, Joe insists that his action was at once self-sacrificing and self-preserving, though the cost of it ultimately is both his sons and his life. Like Mother Courage, Joe gains nothing that matters to him by caring for nothing beyond his family’s welfare and his own, and his suicide may indicate a recognition of his failure—one Brecht famously denies to Mother Courage. By embracing such attitudes, Joe has capitulated to what Miller repeatedly suggests is a female value system (although Brecht, we should note,

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does not; a female character, Kattrin, is Mother Courage’s indisputable if fragile moral hero), one fundamentally associated with and propelled by females despite the fact that Kate did not actively encourage Joe to approve the sale of the cylinders. It is a value system from which most of the play’s males instinctively recoil (the highly unintelligent, sweetly silly Frank is an exception), and to which they ultimately succumb, if they live. Unlike Brecht, Miller offers no viable alternative to that value system because those males who might be its spokesmen are undermined at every turn by their inarticulacy (they lack the language that might serve as a vessel for their dreams), their hypocrisy (Chris betrays a subliminal longing for what he elsewhere decries, though he wishes to render it “beautiful”), and their inability to transform their ideals into meaningful social action. Thus, although in some ways the play reinforces the notion of the separate spheres—men have ideals that connect them to the larger world, women focus on home and hearth— Miller suggests that the two have merged, problematically. Men have been drawn into the bourgeois realm so that those ideals, however passionately felt, have collapsed into self-defeating abstractions that have lost all credibility, largely through the men’s duplicity and their absorption within what they claim to loathe. Instead of serving the needs of others or even dying heroically, man for man, on the battlefield, Joe works to maintain the suburban lifestyle that satisfies no thoughtful man in the play. By surrendering to that realm, he turns his back on an ethical code that is shown to be unsustainable precisely because, as Jim notes, the “compromise is always made.” What Jim refers to are the compromises men make to accommodate the exigencies of capitalism, whose tentacles reach everywhere. As Chris laments bitterly, the allmale, mythologized realm of the battlefield existed to fuel big business: the love a man can have for a man, as manifested by the sacrifices of soldiers, resulted in a whole lot of people being able to drive fancy cars and purchase new refrigerators. Even Jim’s foray to New Orleans was tainted by the bourgeois realm he sought to flee. The bananas-andmilk subsistence regimen to which he refers was actually a fad diet

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first promoted by George A. Harrop, a professor at Johns Hopkins University, that proceeded to “sweep the country,” according to a 1934 article in The Milwaukee Journal (Harrop 1934). It appears that there is no longer any pristine realm to which one can “simply take off ” and free oneself from the demands of the material, and the male characters’ evocation of a world in which it might be otherwise is as remote as a fairy tale. The play’s final moment shows two contrasting responses to this state of affairs, and the contrast is again gendered. Devastated by his failure to live up to a standard in which he seems at last to believe, Joe shoots himself, following through on a vow he made earlier when he noted that he and Chris were father and son, “and if there’s something bigger than that I’ll put a bullet in my head!” (Miller 1974: 63). In sentencing himself to death, Joe appears to acknowledge that there is something bigger than that private, if precious, relationship, though he can do nothing whatsoever to build on this recognition, as is characteristic of male epiphanies in the play. Kate adopts a different stance and asks her son to do the same, pointing him toward the posture that will allow him to go on living, albeit in the usual darkness. In so doing, she seems finally to come to terms with something she has until now half-resisted: “Forget now. Live” (69). Although she preaches otherwise to George Deever, within the family Kate has insisted unyieldingly on remembrance, as she believed that remembering Larry would keep him alive and resolve the moral conflicts that threaten to demolish her world—moral conflicts that are troubling to her, we should recall, only because of their threat to the well-being of her family. But Kate’s last words suggest a full and arguably “smart” understanding of what the play also depicts, which is that there is no refuge from amorality, no island of beauty that can be carved out within or outside of the prevailing corruption. One can either evade that in death or accept it through forgetful living. The play stages no other options. Thus, we must conclude that it is the women in All My Sons who fully recognize the fallen nature of their world, who know how to assist males who will listen to survive within it, and who can adapt themselves to it without

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evident threat to their own sense of self. By contrast, some of Miller’s males do adapt and survive, and Chris Keller may prove to be one of them; we cannot know, as the curtain falls on Kate’s attempt to soothe and hush him. But there is no space for the kind of man that Miller’s men claim to long to be in the inescapable prison-house of bourgeois living, which is presided over protectively by females who are alone in feeling at home there. **** Seen in this light, All My Sons becomes a rich exploration of the soulsickening potential of the way of life Richard Nixon notoriously touted in the 1959 “kitchen debate” with Nikita Khrushchev, in which “diversity” meant that housewives could choose from among a great variety of different washing machines.2 The American dream is inextricably tied to capitalism and, although capitalism does not have to mean ruthless individualism, it usually does—at least if one is to be successful as that era understood the term (and as ours largely does as well). In Death of a Salesman, written two years after All My Sons, Miller continues his exploration of this phenomenon in a play that is more complex than All My Sons stylistically and in its treatment of character. The opening stage directions inform us that the Salesman’s home has something of the “air of the dream” (Miller 1976: 11), which the play evokes by shifting back and forth through time, in contrast to All My Sons’ strict linearity, and by having its actors literally violate the boundaries of realism, as when they walk through imaginary wall-lines in the flashback scenes. This dream-like quality underscores the main character’s mental decay, the insubstantiality of his aspirations, and his alienated relationship to the present and the past, neither of which offer him secure footing in his search for a satisfactory manhood. In Salesman, Miller contextualizes the male breadwinner’s frustrated attempts to do his manly duty by rooting his self-perception in a recognizable set of ideals about American manhood that developed over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and that have seeped into Willy Loman’s self-perception as uncritically absorbed

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articles of faith. While Joe and Kate Keller strive to contain the truth about Joe’s actions in order to maintain their secure lifestyle as well as their surviving son’s esteem, Willy’s domestic and mental state are profoundly frayed when the play begins and he has long ago lost his favorite son’s reverence. Like Joe, that loss occurs because of a secret deception, although it is of a sexual nature and kills no one. Nevertheless, Willy is engaged in a frantic quest to render himself once again a man worthy of filial admiration. Willy longs to be heroic while remaining anxiously torn as to what constitutes heroism in a modern context — almost as if he is anticipating the debates about what constitutes a modern tragedy that the play itself would generate. As Miller described Willy’s problem in his essay “The Salesman Has a Birthday”: The tragedy of Willy Loman is that he gave his life, or sold it, in order to justify the waste of it. It is the tragedy of a man who did believe that he alone was not meeting the qualifications laid down for mankind by those clean-shaven frontiersmen who inhabit the peaks of broadcasting and advertising offices. (Martin and Centola 1996: 15)

In referring to those “Mad Men”—not a reference Miller, of course, would recognize—as frontiersmen, Miller suggests a conflation that is crucial to Willy’s thinking. Hopelessly but also hopefully (Willy is most endearing in his sweet hopefulness), Willy seeks to imbue the corporate arena in which he toils with the self-reliant individualism and redblooded muscularity of an earlier era, one that is evoked by the pantheon of dead male heroes who haunt the edges of his consciousness. Among those heroes are his father, who represents self-made manhood; his brother Ben, the virile proto-capitalist who conquers jungles; and Dave Singleman, who transplants both qualities into the corporate world. Each of these figures seems more mythic than real, because they have been passed through the filter of Willy’s wishful and also self-loathing imagination. What they have in common is wanderlust, perfect selfreliance, and the freedom to thrive in an all-male universe. Indeed,

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every fantasy of fulfillment that Willy has in the play is exclusively male. When he considers following Ben into the jungle, he exclaims, “Me and my boys in those grand outdoors!” (Miller 1976: 85). His wife goes unmentioned. As it happens, Linda Loman does her best to cater to Willy’s fantasies while keeping him rooted in the domestic sphere—by, for instance, excluding herself from a celebratory family dinner, as she knows Willy will be happiest if the occasion includes just his sons. But despite an affection for Linda that appears genuine, Willy cannot fulfill his culturally constructed understanding of masculine success without becoming, like his male heroes, an essentially if not literally single man. It is for this reason that the Loman men collapse women into two categories: they are either “strudel”—sexual objects to be consumed— or saintly mothers who are never viewed as sexually enticing or even fully sustaining companions. Both the strudel and the saint-mama exist to prop up the male ideal, which, if fully achieved, permits the male to discard them. Yet the exalted ideal of single manliness remains forever beyond Willy’s grasp. Ironically it may be that Biff achieves it when he ostensibly rejects Willy’s dream and heads off to the West to reclaim a life that he describes as beautiful (recalling Jim and his New Orleans foray), but that appears to feature only himself, alone in those grand outdoors. In his important history of American masculinity, E. Anthony Rotundo argues that the meaning of manhood in American culture underwent a series of transformations as the nation itself took shape. What Rotundo describes as “communal manhood”—an ideal fostered in colonial America which yoked the male’s place as head of the household to his place in the larger social system and saw both as divinely sanctioned—metamorphosed in the nineteenth century into a conception of “self-made manhood” that developed in response to the spreading of a market economy and the growth of the American middle class. In this context, a man’s sense of identity emerged “from his own achievements” and not from some set of cosmic absolutes (Rotundo 1993: 3). A man’s self-worth was vitally linked to his professional success, and eschewing work altogether or breaking down in response to its pressures was perceived as unmanly. Such traits as competitiveness

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and aggression came to be regarded as inherent in males and to some degree admirable, whereas females were viewed, under the doctrine of the separate spheres, as moral bulwarks that existed to guard the domestic realm and temper their husbands’ innate brutishness—which was at once socially necessary and destructive if left unrestrained. In the twentieth century, however, the nature of male work changed dramatically. If in the nineteenth century a “true man” was “a self-reliant being who would never bow to authority,” the increasingly urbanized and hierarchized workforce rendered that kind of autonomy unobtainable for most workers (Rotundo 1993: 251). With the workplace no longer functioning to uphold masculine identity, men sought other forms of reassurance. The term “sissy” came into common usage and women came to be perceived as “largely irrelevant to the fulfillment of [male] longings” and even hostile to their essential nature, because of their traditional connection to domesticity and their tendency (once prized) to curb men’s wilder impulses (Rotundo 1993: 273; 289). It is in the context, then, of a transformation of values that Willy’s tragedy takes place. This transformation occurs amidst massive social and economic mutations that, Miller suggests, create at least two generations of maladjusted males; Willy’s anxieties trickle down to his sons, who worry endlessly about how they can do work that they enjoy and still “be something” (Miller 1976: 26). That dividing line between what one does and what one is, or feels one should be, is one their father seeks to straddle by cobbling together a self from mismatched remnants of bygone eras. In the play’s first memory sequence, which enacts Willy’s return from a sales trip, Willy advertises his accomplishments in such a way as to lay bare his definition of masculine success, which is a patchwork of qualities borrowed from his dead male role models. The key features, it appears, are boundless movement (Willy makes much of the fact that he traveled fluidly from Providence to Waterbury to Boston to Bangor and then straight home); being known (“they know me,” Willy blusters, “ … up and down New England”); operating with an effortless authority that stems from one’s indomitable selfhood (he crows that he never has to wait in line to see a buyer; “‘Willy Loman is

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here!’ That’s all they have to know, and I go right through”); and virility (Miller 1976: 31, 33). When Biff eagerly questions his father about his experiences on the road, it becomes clear that both males know the requisite lingo, which is larded with violent imagery: Biff  Did you knock them dead, Pop? Willy  Knocked ’em cold in Providence, slaughtered ’em in Boston! (33)

Although successful salesmanship surely relies more on a smooth tongue than a strong right hook, Willy’s need to insist that his work manifests toughness, or what Theodore Roosevelt called “the great fighting, masterful virtues,” stems from the same impulse that prompts him to demean the boy next store, Bernard, as “anemic” and a “worm” (Miller 1976: 32; 40). One senses that, if Bernard were not their neighbor, the Loman men would have to invent him, as a perfect foil for their sense of themselves as popular, boxing Adonises. Notably, it is in the presence of Linda that Willy’s self-portrait collapses, as she peppers him with questions that—unlike Biff ’s—fail to conform to the script. When Willy boasts about his earnings in Providence, inflating them by more than double, Linda is delighted and pulls out a pencil to calculate the bills they now can cover, prompting him to back-pedal nervously. In the face of her further questioning, Willy reveals the truth: he grossed a paltry two hundred. That admission of failure prompts a total, if for now temporary, collapse of Willy’s carefully wrought fiction of success, as Linda reminds him (not unkindly, but anxiously) of their unpaid bills and the chronic breakdown of their various purchases, all of which are motivated by another set of carefully wrought fictions constructed by the American capitalist machine to dupe people like the Lomans. “They got the biggest ads of any of them,” Linda says about a broken refrigerator (Miller 1976: 35).3 Willy has moments throughout the play in which he recognizes that he has been taken in by something with which he simultaneously colludes. Later, in a conversation about the refrigerator, Willy demonstrates an understanding of what has come to be known

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as planned obsolescence, noting that the usefulness of objects persists only until they are paid off (73). But he does his best to ward off such recognitions. Seconds after admitting that he slaughtered no one in Boston, he tries to revive the delusion—“I’ll knock ’em dead next week,” he promises—but in Linda’s presence he cannot maintain it and goes so far as to acknowledge that he is neither popular nor physically impressive. Linda does what she can to restore his self-confidence, praising his attractiveness and describing him as wonderful, and yet it is precisely on the heels of her description of him as handsome that the laughter of Willy’s mistress is first heard. Linda is not sufficient to reinforce Willy’s faith in his manliness and even (without meaning to) challenges it, because she is inextricably yoked to the domestic realm, which is the realm of the practical. But Willy’s desired sense of self is rooted in ideals that are more primal than practical, and more poetic, too, and they are best exemplified by the esteemed triumvirate that is always whispering in his ear: his father, his brother, and Dave Singleman. Willy’s memories of his father are mediated through his brother Ben, who also disappeared from Willy’s life long ago; hence, both strike us as figments of Willy’s transfiguring imagination. Willy’s father, according to Ben, was: a very wild-hearted man. We would start in Boston, and he’d toss the whole family into the wagon, and then he’d drive the team … through … all the Western states … and sell the flutes that he’d made on the way. (Miller 1976: 49)

Willy’s father—at least as conjured by Ben conjured by Willy—was forever on the move across an as-yet untamed American frontier. As Una Chaudhuri has observed, Willy’s tragedy is linked to his “alienation from the expansive American dream of ceaseless motion,” a dream that in Willy’s day has supposedly been replaced by a different dream exalting fixity within the secure framework of a single-family home (1995: 126). But Willy feels boxed in by his home and glorifies his peripatetic father, who journeyed ceaselessly while making flutes that he both played and

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sold. Yet this hint of the aesthetic (Willy too is gifted at making things and appreciates beauty) did not transform him into a worm, because he was “wild-hearted” and a successful provider. Willy never asks his brother and Ben never explains why this perfect professional and familial arrangement could not be maintained. Perhaps it became clear, as Kimmel argues, that by the late 1880s “The era of the Heroic Artisan was over” (2012: 63). What we know is that Willy’s father deserted the family for unspecified prospects in Alaska when Willy was a baby. Yet this abandonment—though it left Willy feeling “kind of temporary” about himself (Miller 1976: 51)—did not decrease his awe. On the contrary, Willy does his best to shore up his fragile self-image with fragments from his father’s story. When he boastfully catalogues the cities through which he traveled to peddle his wares, we hear a strained echo of the father, driving the team across the country. But Willy’s travels leave him lonely and fearful, not fortified by a sense of manly prowess. One reason is that, whereas his father sold a product he made himself, one with evident value for him, the object Willy carts in his sample cases is never identified, reminding us of Marx’s idea about the estrangement of the laborer who lacks a direct relationship to the product he toils to sell. Clearly, Willy carries with him, along with whatever is in the sample cases, a keen sense of lack. A palpable fear of failure prompts his need to endlessly explain why he entered business rather than embracing the self-reliant traits he believes his father manifested. That these same traits were presumably responsible for his father’s disappearance is a fact that goes unmentioned in Willy’s reverent evocations. Willy recalls his brother with an even more febrile sense of his own inadequacy. Ben, in Willy’s words, is a man who “knew what he wanted and went out and got it!” (Miller 1976: 41). Ben’s certainty of his destiny prompted him to enter the jungles of Africa at age seventeen and emerge, four years later, rich. Since Ben invited Willy to join him and Willy declined, he embodies Willy’s regrets about a road not taken, one that might have granted him a greater sense of masculine fulfillment. That Miller wishes us to recognize that road as a fantasy is made clear

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by the absurd route Ben supposedly traveled to get to it: he explains that his intention was to find his father in Alaska, but he had a “faulty view of geography” and so ended up in Africa by mistake (Miller 1976: 48). One wonders if somewhere en route from South Dakota to Africa Ben might have stopped to ask someone for a map. (Then again, as is well known, real men don’t ask for directions.) The point of Ben is his mythic status, his embodiment of a supreme masculinity defined by an incontestable virility that Willy extols without being able to emulate it. Unlike Willy, both Ben and his father lived in nature; the father in particular is associated with the lost pastoral that is evoked by the sound of the flute we hear when the curtain rises. Ben’s relationship to nature is more Manifest Destiny than Robert Herrick: by wrenching diamonds from the untamed wilderness, he became a man, and a mocking icon of what Willy feels he should be. Indeed, the interchangeability of places like Alaska and Africa is more than comical; it is telling. For Ben, such places are merely sources of wealth, not particularized locations with their own histories, cultures, and citizenries. Though his ruthless disregard for the people he tramples will outlast him in the form of countless American captains of industry, Ben reveals that he is a relic of a vanished era when he scornfully contrasts urban living and office work with what a man can accomplish with brute strength in the remote hinterlands: “Get out of these cities, they’re full of talk and time payments ….Screw on your fists and you can fight for a fortune” in the unexplored territories in which he and Willy’s father roamed (Miller 1976: 85). In an 1888 magazine essay, Horace Porter said much the same thing in a fervent defense of the frontier life: Let one [man] remain in a quiet city, playing the milksop … leading to an unambitious namby-pamby life, … while the other goes out on the frontier, runs his chance in encounters with wild animals, finds that to make his way he must take his life in his hands and assert his rights … [He] will become the superior of the lad who has remained at home. (quoted in Kimmel 2012: 66)

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Willy, the “lad who … remained at home,” is tortured by regret because he rejected Ben’s offer. However, Ben is exaggerated to the point of ludicrousness so that we understand he is a mirage. Even in the late nineteenth century the new continents toward which he beckons had begun to pass. Still, his mystical allure is a direct threat to Willy’s link to Linda, and she shows she recognizes this by instinctively fearing him. In the Act 2 memory sequence in which Ben appears, Linda enters carrying the wash, as she always does in the past-tense scenes. As an emblem of the domestic sphere, she tries again to shift Willy’s gaze toward home and hearth, though in a manner that hints at compromise. “You’re doing well enough, Willy!” she cries, reminding him of how beloved he is by his sons (Miller 1976: 85). The exaltation of the father/provider that the mid-twentieth century offered as a new anchor for masculine self-esteem is one to which Willy clings while also sensing that, in submitting to the demands of the domestic, he has lost the wild-heartedness he idolizes in his father and brother.4 Ben too had a wife; she allowed him to produce the seven sons that are another mark of his manliness and it is she who writes Willy to tell him Ben is dead. But Ben never mentions her or his children and it is hard to reconcile their existence with the romanticized portrait of his rugged frontier existence; thus, he retains his status as an embodiment of what Roosevelt called “the strenuous life.” It is no surprise, then, that Willy must convince himself that he can permeate his work life with the muscularity he associates with his father and brother, as well as the “old honor” that is another important piece of Willy’s male-oriented mythic arsenal,5 and it is through Dave Singleman that he strives to do that. Willy explains to his indifferent boss that it was Dave Singleman who persuaded him to remain in sales rather than heading to Alaska. Singleman, as Willy describes him, was able to be mobile while remaining static (in old age, he could contact buyers in thirty-one different states, allegedly without leaving his room); he inhabited the world of business but carries a whiff of the pastoral green world in his green velvet slippers;6 and he gives tender-hearted Willy faith that a man in business can earn the love and

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lasting respect of untold numbers of people. Singleman is the perfect conflation of all of Willy’s wishes except the one that is fundamental to our understanding of Willy even as on some level it shames him. As his name underscores, Singleman is successful because he commits himself to sales with utter single-mindedness. It may be true, as Willy claims, that hundreds of salesmen attended his funeral, but no family members were there because he appears to have had none. It is here, then, that we must turn to the status of females and the role men assign to them to buttress their anxious egos. While Kimmel argues that Happy and Biff “avoid traditional expressions of manhood” because they see their father’s failure (2012: 169), in fact Happy and Biff ’s understanding of what it means to be male is tightly circumscribed by their father’s belief system. Hence Biff is oppressed by the sense that he’s “like a boy” because he is not in business, or married, which he defines, notably, as being “stuck into something” (Miller 1976: 23). Happy is in business, albeit at a rather low level, but he exhibits the same conflicts we saw in Willy; he feels stuck, lonely, and perpetually in search of strategies whereby he might display his male prowess. “Sometimes,” he tells Biff, “I want to … rip my clothes off in the middle of the store and outbox that goddamn merchandise manager” who stands between him and a promotion. More hapless than happy, Willy’s younger son cannot accept that his ability to box naked is irrelevant to any promotion he might receive. Forever overcompensating, he longs to demonstrate his worth to the more powerful executives to whom he must defer, which he accomplishes by “ruin[ing]” women who are involved with them. Happy appropriates other men’s women, he explains: “Whenever I feel disgusted. The only trouble is, it gets like bowling … I … keep knockin’ them over and it doesn’t mean anything” (Miller 1976: 24; 25). In his bowling simile we can hear some of Willy’s terminology; Happy’s female conquests become objects to be knocked over, but they grant him no more satisfaction or professional acclaim than Willy is able to collect on the road, hawking his unnamed product. Happy does imagine that he might one day enter a serious relationship with someone who has “character” and “resistance! Like

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Mom” (Miller 1976: 25). Laying aside the question of whether Linda has these qualities, Happy does a good job of ensuring that the women who attract him will manifest neither. When a woman named Miss Forsythe enters the restaurant where he is due to dine with his father and brother in Act 2, Happy deprives her of character, carving her into discrete parts to be obtained and consumed: “Strudel’s comin’,” he announces, and proceeds to admire her “binoculars.” To overcome potential resistance Happy lies to her, claiming that Biff is a quarterback for the New York Giants and that he attended West Point. When Miss Forsythe falls for the lie, Happy is disgusted and bemoans the scarcity of “good” women to be found in the world (Miller 1976: 100; 103). Thus, he perpetuates the circumstances that keep him alone and forever disappointed by females who are nothing like Mom. As we have seen, the “good woman” also has her disadvantages. Linda actively restrains Willy from following his brother into the jungle—and although there is no jungle, really, Willy feels emasculated because he failed to enter it. She confronts Willy, though not maliciously, with his material failure and, because his sense of self is wrapped up in his ability to provide for her, she threatens his faith that he is a man. In Act 1, Willy’s explanation for why he wants to “grab” her when he is on the road and “kiss the life” out of her is more convincingly read as an explanation for why he has his affair. Speaking of the loneliness he feels during his travels, he says, “I get the feeling that I’ll never sell anything …, that I won’t make a living for you, or … the boys” (Miller 1976: 38). The laughter of the Woman punctuates Willy’s delivery of this line and invites a return to his oddly violent declaration that he wishes to “kiss the life” out of Linda, whom he typically calls his pal and desexualizes. If Linda is defined by her ubiquitous basket of washing and by the stockings she constantly mends, the Woman wears stockings, which Willy supplies for her. Miller once remarked that the ideal Linda would be “a woman who looked as though she had lived in a house dress all her life, even somewhat coarse and certainly less than brilliant” (Martin and Centola 1996: 46). Willy turns to the Woman, a sexual siren in contrast to his dowdy wife, as a necessary prop to

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his self-esteem when he has the frustrated sense that he is failing as a successful provider. Ultimately, this too fails, and it does so because Willy and his sons cannot prevent the dichotomous concepts central to their self-images from becoming hopelessly entangled and blurred. While Gayle Austin suggests that the play colludes with its characters in revering male bonding and marginalizing females—so much so that she bemoans the “valorization of this play in the American canon” (1989: 61)—Miller is unflinching in his portrait of the human costs of a homosocial ethos in which bonding with men is contingent on the degradation of women and less manly men, though his focus is mainly on the harm this does to men. Happy may attend the weddings of those executives whose fiancées he has ruined, but he clearly has meaningful friendships with none of them. Willy may turn to the Woman for reassurance when he fears he has failed to be the kind of provider his sons can worship, but the direct result is that his treasured eldest son calls into question his manhood. Biff, we will recall, visits Willy on a business trip to ask him to persuade his teacher to change a failing grade. All Willy needs to do, Biff believes, is to show Mr. Birnbaum “the kind of man you are.” If Willy displays his glittering manhood and talks to him, Biff says, “in your way,” Birnbaum —who talks with a “lithp”—will bend irresistibly to his will.7 But once Biff discovers that his father is an adulterer, Willy is transmuted into “a phony little fake” whose talk loses its magic: Mr. Birnbaum, Biff now declares, “wouldn’t listen to you” (Miller 1976: 118; 121; 120). The “little” seems effeminizing, particularly since Willy is apparently a big man, and the man with “the lithp” and the once exalted father trade places. Happy too, at what is arguably his ugliest moment, strips his father of the identity Willy covets. As Willy is talking to himself dementedly in the restaurant bathroom, Happy essentially denies knowledge of him, pronouncing him “not my father” and “just a guy” (Miller 1976: 115). He does so, not incidentally, to impress the woman he has named Strudel, suggesting again the dark underside of homosociality. Both father and sons utilize sexually alluring women to fortify their masculine self-

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image, but in so doing they blight their relationships with other men. Most crucially, the affair that was meant to help Willy prove he is a man results in Biff losing faith in his manliness—a faith upon which, above all else, Willy’s faith in himself rests. Similarly, the men struggle to keep the women in their lives in their assigned places. When Happy first meets Miss Forsythe, he asks her whether she happens “to sell” (Miller 1976: 101). As Kay Stanton has argued, this is “a double entendre on prostitution” (1989: 73) and in this regard places Miss Forsythe in her expected category: she is the object to be bought and sold, a whore. Yet selling is what Happy himself does, and what Willy does too. Though selling is something Happy projects on Miss Forsythe to cheapen and objectify her, he risks a dangerous dissolution of his own selfhood if women, too, can sell. Further aggravating this collapse of categories is the fact that the women whom the Loman men view as sexual commodities play a crucial role in their professional advancement. In both of her appearances, the Woman promises to put Willy “right through to the buyers” (Miller 1976: 39; 116). The first time she declares this, Willy responds by slapping her behind—a sexual gesture intended to secure her status as sexual plaything, though one might read frustration, even aggression, in it as well. Willy, as previously noted, likes to boast that he never has to wait in line to see a buyer; the magical talisman of his name, his badge of selfhood, is sufficient to enable him to go right through. The Woman’s declaration reveals otherwise: as a receptionist, she has the power to provide access to important men, power that she can also withhold. Willy in effect purchases her professional favors by giving her stockings and having sex with her; a threatening gender reversal is suggested here. In a similar vein, when Biff is stymied in his effort to meet with the successful Bill Oliver, he tries fruitlessly to date his secretary. In a world in which, as Willy’s friend Charley remarks cynically, the only thing a man has is what he can sell, he might find that he is worth nothing more than the woman he denounces as beneath his notice, and he may need her—may need to prostitute himself to her, if we can go that far—too. This also explains Willy’s habit of

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frequently interrupting and silencing his wife: having slipped to the bottom of the business world hierarchy, so that his young boss Howard callously shushes, humiliates, and finally fires him, Willy strives to maintain some semblance of masculine power by subjecting his wife to the same treatment. In this Hobbesian environment, women and effeminized men must be constantly disparaged because the Lomans fear a dangerous erasure of the distinction between them. For her part, Linda puts up with this treatment without complaint, and it is difficult to enter into a serious debate about how she feels about it because Miller does not allow us the same insight into her nature that we are allowed of Willy. We never learn whether she knows of the affair. We suspect she does not, as she is baffled by Biff ’s rage at his father, but we are granted no certain answer. We are told that she “more than loves” Willy, and she has so merged with him in her self-understanding that for her it follows naturally that her sons lack “any feeling” for her if they lack feeling for their father (12; 55). Yet in Miller’s opening description of Linda he describes her as imaginatively limited in comparison to her husband, whose longings she is said to be incapable of uttering or even fully comprehending (12). Her response to Willy’s suicide is to repeatedly assert that she can’t understand it. These limitations prompt Linda to resist Willy’s dreams while habitually glossing over his flaws and errors, in a loving but naïve effort to cling to the life they lead. Yet it is not obvious that Linda could have brought her husband around to seeing what she at times does see, which is that he is not a great man. In her famous appeal on behalf of the dignity of the common man, she admits that he is “not the finest character that ever lived” (Miller 1976: 56). To be sure, she never says such a thing directly to Willy, whom she mostly compliments and protects. But it seems clear that Willy’s failure to fit the contours of manliness as he understands them—to be “success incarnate,” a man who could “lick the civilized world”—is a problem no wife could remedy, given the secondary status of women in the Loman psychology (41; 64). Rather, it necessitates constant jostling for power with other men in order to be denied. As an example, Willy insists on a view of himself that precludes his taking

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a job with Charley, because Charley is in the “not a man” category and so Willy cannot work for him without becoming less than “not a man”; this view leads directly to his suicide. When Ben, in his final evocation of the jungle, promises Willy that it is “dark … but full of diamonds,” he offers him the ultimate victory in an all-male battle. “[H]e’ll worship me for it!” Willy says, referring to Biff, “[H]e’ll be ahead of Bernard again! … I always knew … we were gonna make it, Biff and I!” (135). In this fantasy, everything is obliterated except what Willy most prizes: the exaltation of his precious son, that son’s success as manifested through the eclipsing of another male, and the filial worship Willy requires to believe he has value as a man. That Biff denounces Willy’s dream, in their climactic scene together, as hopeless self-deceit would be a terrible rebuke to Willy except that he cannot bring himself to hear it. Yet in an important sense, Biff does not reject Willy’s dream at all. At the end of the play, Biff explains his father’s demise as a failure of self-knowledge, and he contrasts himself, saying: “all I want is out there, waiting for me, the minute I say I know who I am!” (Miller 1976: 138). This idea so closely echoes Willy’s portrait of Ben, the icon of self-reliance—“The man knew what he wanted and went out and got it!”—as to put into question Otten’s claim that Biff “gains independence from … his father’s life of illusion” (2002: 57), as well as Leah Garrett’s claim that Biff forges “a new, more astute, and articulate form of manhood” (2010: 183). On the contrary, Biff ’s westward trajectory is as retrograde as Ben’s jungle, as one of Biff ’s own earlier lines unintentionally reveals. In Act 1 he tells Happy that the two of them “don’t belong in this nuthouse of a city”; instead, they “should be mixing cement on some open plain” (61). In this line, Biff echoes Horace Porter while underscoring the absolute gone-ness of the mythic frontier. One mixes cement, of course, to build cities. Yet when Biff commits himself to going west, in the short term he outdoes Willy in his fulfillment of the dream. Willy could not follow in Ben’s footsteps because, for all his conflicted feelings, he could not bring himself to leave Linda and he surely would not leave his sons; to the end, Willy thinks in terms of “Biff and I.” Biff, by contrast, goes alone, fulfilling

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his one desire to be outdoors. He will become, we can imagine, Dave Singleman without the city, Willy’s father without the troublesome family, Ben without the seven sons, Jim Bayliss alone in beauty with no weeping female calling him home. Biff will become the consummate single man, entirely one with nature and unencumbered by domestic ties. Or at least he will until cement, or a commitment to some other human being, tracks him down. It is perhaps because the entire play has deconstructed our faith in the sustainability of this ideal that Biff ’s plan seems so implausible—and so heartless. We are left to wonder what will become of Linda, with no one but unhappy Happy to keep her company. Yet her final lines, which conclude the play, have implications for Biff ’s future. Incapable to the end of understanding her husband’s existential disappointment, Linda expresses bewilderment at his grave, noting that she made the final payment on their house that day and thus they are now “free.” But of course, the Lomans are not free, and the sheer fact of home ownership will not alter that. Although Biff begged his father to let him “out of it” (109), Salesman makes painfully clear, as did All My Sons, that there is no “out of it”—and not for Bernard either, who many readers wish to see as a character who slips the confines of rigidly defined masculine success. But Bernard grows up to embody almost all of Willy’s ideals. We learn that he has two sons, travels from his home to Washington to practice law, and hobnobs with people who have their own private tennis courts. This portrait of affluence, professional mobility and domestic achievement, crucially defined via marriage to an invisible woman and the creation of male children, may result in contentment for Bernard but it hardly constitutes an escape, pace Garrett, from “the standard American dream” (Garrett 2010: 183). Biff, meanwhile, heads back to the only place where he ever experienced pleasure. He seeks to discover anew that life in nature that his grandfather and uncle allegedly enjoyed, one harmonically and one through plunder. But Miller’s 1961 film The Misfits provides a possible dark coda to Biff ’s story in the form of Gay Langland, an aging cowboy who makes his living by rounding up wild mustangs and selling them

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to be slaughtered for dog food. He does so, he tells the distressed Roslyn (played by Marilyn Monroe), “to keep myself free.” With similar self-deception, Linda sobs, “We’re free,” as Miller undercuts her with his grim closing stage directions: above the fragile Loman home, “the hard towers of the apartment buildings rise into sharp focus” (Miller 1976: 139). There is no freedom, for Langland or for Linda, from those hard towers, which loom over everything, mustangs as well as people. There is also, for Linda, no longer any “we”—a “we” from which Willy tried to wrench himself even as he clung to it with need and arguably with love. As for Biff, we know that the hard towers will find him as surely as mixed cement creates pavement. Death of a Salesman stages the growing pains of a generation of men who feel “kind of temporary” about themselves because the old ballasts for masculine identity no longer obtain and the industrialized hypermodernity from which they recoil is inescapable. For all of Willy’s bluster, no man in the play’s present tense proves to be capable of “lick[ing] the civilized world.” He must either become part of it, as Bernard does, or find himself a piece of fruit, discardable once consumed—or perhaps both, first one and then the other. Restless, dissatisfied, and ill-equipped to prosper in that realm, men like Willy, Biff, and Happy are left adrift, torn between pugnacious, misogynistic fantasies of empowerment and a longing for an irredeemably lost past where their muscles mattered.

­2

Witchcraft and the Weird: The Crucible and A View from the Bridge

In Christopher Bigsby’s biography of Arthur Miller, he precedes his account of Miller and Marilyn Monroe’s first meeting, which took place in 1950, by devoting attention to Monroe’s tendency to dress in what Miller described as “almost ludicrously provocative” ways. Miller’s cousin Morton concurred that Monroe’s approach to clothes was “seductive, indeed indecent”: on one occasion, according to Morton, she turned up with Miller at a gathering in “a skintight, see-through dress with a clear view of pubic hair,” attracting the gaze of everyone in the room, including the Rabbi who would eventually marry them (Bigsby 2009: 388). In his autobiography, Timebends, Miller himself recalls an early encounter with Monroe, during which she does not appear to have been dressed indecently (Miller describes her as wearing “a beige skirt and a white satin blouse”), but, Miller remarks, “the sight of her was something like pain.” He goes on: I knew that I must flee or walk into a doom beyond all knowing. With all her radiance she was surrounded by a darkness that perplexed me …. Flying homeward, her scent still on my hands, I knew my innocence was technical merely, and the fact blackened my heart, but along with it came the certainty that I could, after all, lose myself in sensuality. This novel secret entered me like a radiating force ….I sensed a new play in me, and a play was my very self alive. (Miller 1995: 307)

That play would eventually become The Crucible. The Crucible’s relationship to the Cold War moment in which Miller wrote it, as well as the archival process in which he engaged and the

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liberties he took with the historical record, is all well known.1 What this discussion wishes to engage is the play’s interest in an illicit sexuality so powerful that it endangers a man so that he might, to adopt Miller’s language, “lose [himself].” Both of Miller’s most important plays of the 1950s, The Crucible and A View from the Bridge, feature a young woman—an orphaned niece in each case, who has been taken in by her uncle—whose startling, emergent sexuality constitutes “a darkness that perplex[es]” older males, although in A View from the Bridge this is coupled with an even more perplexing erotic fluidity as manifested by a male of indeterminate sexuality. Miller’s response to Monroe’s threatening allure, as captured in the passage from Timebends, has revealing implications for both plays, as he describes Monroe as potentially spelling his “doom” and also as engendering creativity in him. The “novel secret” that is his own susceptibility to corrupting sexuality “entered” him, invigorated him, and ultimately gave birth to two plays that explore this same tension. Yet another remark by Miller, this time from his introduction to his Collected Plays, is pertinent. In noting the hostile response that The Crucible received from its 1953 opening night audience, which was well aware of the play’s relevance to contemporary events, Miller observed that “the real and inner theme” of The Crucible becomes increasingly evident as more time elapses between its performance and the McCarthy era. That real and inner theme, he wrote, is “the handing over of conscience to another, be it woman, the state, or a terror, and the realization that with conscience goes the person, the soul immortal, and the ‘name’” (Martin and Centola 1996: 162). The seemingly inhuman and hostile otherness of “woman” is underscored by Miller’s grouping of her with “the state, or a terror,” in opposition to one’s conscience. Much of the power of The Crucible derives from its gripping depiction of the way in which a community’s repressed longings and terrors become embodied by a group of people—most of them also erstwhile members of the community—who are scapegoated and punished in what takes the form of a ritualistic mass purging. Although Miller’s analogy was McCarthyism, this phenomenon has occurred

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repeatedly throughout human history, as Miller recognized. Nazism offered an example, as do, somewhat more recently, the “recovered memory” allegations against day-care providers in the United States in the 1980s and 1990s, and, more recently still and yet again in the United States, the frenzied determination to drive out immigrants from a nation of immigrants. A recurring image in The Crucible is the “hideous and desolate wilderness” that is summoned by William Bradford in Of Plymouth Plantation, upon which the Puritans projected their generalized fears and which cried out to be colonized as surely as did the “wild men” who—according to Bradford—lurked in its dark “woods and thickets” (Bradford 1651/1981: 70). But in The Crucible this wildness creeps from the community’s fringes to its center by way of its young females, who appear to have been infected by their encounter with that wildness, as Young Goodman Brown is in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s famous story. Before the play begins, a cadre of white adolescent girls along with a West Indian slave named Tituba go into the forest to dance and conjure spirits. As the play opens, one of those girls has fallen into a state of fitful semi-consciousness that no one knows how to cure or diagnose. In response, the people of Salem seek to explain the inexplicable by converting it into a language familiar to them. Thus, they rapidly determine, the girls are visited not by irrational impulses from within, but by “hurtful, vengeful spirits” from without that can be banished if the community adheres to its shared and incontestable text (Miller 2003: 14). In the fevered context of religious fanaticism and embattled paranoia that is Puritan America, life’s inscrutable mysteries—such as why one woman loses seven babies in infancy when another raises eleven healthy children to adulthood—become not only explicable but identifiably someone’s fault. Intriguingly, for all of this group’s intense religiosity and although of course they regard witchcraft as supernatural, they seem determined to link human misfortune to human actors, albeit ones conspiring with the Devil. In so doing, some of the most disempowered of Salem’s denizens—such as the young servant girl Mary Warren—acquire the power to determine whether others will live

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or die, as well as an unfamiliar and giddy self-certainty. When Mary is interrogated about the origins of her conviction that another woman has been seeking to kill her, she reports: I­ never knew it before ….But then … she sit there, denying and denyin …, and … I hear a voice, a screamin’ voice, and it were my voice—and all at once I remember everything she ever done to me! (54–5)

Describing her conviction as something remembered, Mary suggests— like a recovered memory patient—that her newfound knowledge has always been within her, despite the fact that she “never knew it before.” Although Miller is undoubtedly interested in the way in which the Salem catastrophe is an outgrowth of the Puritans’ commitment to a rigid social order contingent on racial and gender hierarchies as well as stern sexual repression, the play also reinstalls—as is so often the case in Miller’s work—the misogyny it exposes and to some degree critiques. At the heart of The Crucible is the character John Proctor and his struggle to regain his moral probity in the wake of a betrayal that violates his understanding of who he is as a man. That betrayal was brought about by the irresistible attractions of the seventeen-year-old Abigail Williams, a rivetingly beautiful girl and a born actor who, we are told, possesses “an endless capacity for dissembling” (Miller 2003: 8). Abigail, it is clear, is the play’s real witch; she is the ringleader for the coterie of girls who disobediently frolic in the woods and then accuse numerous others of being witches. To be sure, Abigail and the others are impelled by a fear that Miller renders with some compassion. Most poignant among them is Tituba, enslaved and alone, who is goaded into identifying witches when Abigail accuses her of being the source of her own rebellious and unruly impulses: “She sends her spirit on me in church; she makes me laugh at prayer! … she’s always making me dream corruptions! … I hear her singing her Barbados songs” (Miller 2003: 41). Indignant about what she describes as the “blackening” of her name (22), Abigail finds in the Black enslaved woman a readily available scapegoat, one whom

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the white villagers are quick to believe has trafficked with the Devil. In response, Tituba points to others and the contagion spreads, as Abigail, the sickened child Betty, and three additional teen-aged girls join with increasing hysteria in identifying community members whom they claim to have seen cavorting with the Devil. Though not as vulnerable as Tituba, these girls all endure straitened circumstances, as Miller repeatedly makes clear. Abigail is an orphan whose uncle has taken her in, who might at any moment be cast out again, and who feels a keen need to distinguish herself from the enslaved class. Speaking about her former job as a house-servant to the Proctors, Abigail declares, “They want slaves; not such as I. Let them send to Barbados for that. I will not black my face for any of them!” (Miller 2003: 11). Mary Warren, who currently works for the Proctors, is whipped by them when she is disobedient. When she becomes a proud official of the court, she has her revenge: “I’ll not stand whipping anymore! … I’ll not be ordered to bed no more,” she gains the courage to declare, “ … I am eighteen and a woman, however single!” (56–7). Yet by rooting Abigail’s motivations primarily in her desire to supplant Elizabeth Proctor, her rival for John Proctor’s love, Miller suggests—without historical evidence, as the actual Abigail Williams was just eleven and John Proctor was sixty—that the real origin of the Salem frenzy was insidious female sexual jealousy.2 Thus, he imitates the Salem villagers in substituting the concrete for the ineffable. The upstanding John Proctor is transformed into an animal by the wild wickedness of Abigail, and, like his creator, “lose[s] [him]self in sensuality.” Both Abigail and John describe him as a stallion during their sex, a metaphor that enables John to dissociate himself from the animal into which he claims her sexual magnetism transmutes him. “The promise that a stallion gives a mare I gave that girl,” he tells Elizabeth (Miller 2003: 58). For all his protests, John clearly feels bereft of self-knowledge by a sexual betrayal that he regards as inconsistent with the man he believes himself to be. As it happens, the shame that his infidelity has instilled in him nearly saves his life: late in the play, contemplating whether he has it in him to face death rather than

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confessing to a falsehood, John ruefully remarks that he is “not that man,” not “a saint” (126). In the end, though, John’s shame provides a pathway to transcendent goodness, which exalts him while revealing limitations in both of the women who loved him. Abigail is more than limited; she is increasingly shown to be a coldhearted villain. In Act 1, she threatens the other girls with violent retribution if they disclose their illicit actions in the woods, and her language links her to devilishness as well as to what the Puritan world perceived as dangerous human otherness: Let either of you breathe a word … and I will come to you in the black of some terrible night and I will bring a pointy reckoning that will shudder you. And you know I can do it; I saw Indians smash my dear parents’ heads … and I have seen some reddish work done at night, and I can make you wish you had never seen the sun go down. (Miller 2003: 19)

Abigail’s ruthlessness is associated with her having witnessed the violent actions of Indians, who murdered her parents; their horrific act makes similar horrors conceivable for her. When she turns her venom on Elizabeth and later on John, they designate her an enemy to all that is divine. Upon learning that Abigail has accused her of witchcraft, Elizabeth declares, “The girl … must be ripped out of the world” (72). Although the on-stage audience is horrified, Miller clearly means for us to view Elizabeth as correct in her assessment of Abigail, who pushes pins into her own belly in a malevolent effort to frame and thus displace Elizabeth in John’s affections. When the Salem judges seem inclined to believe Abigail, John cries, “You are pulling Heaven down and raising up a whore!” (110). This is the final verdict on Abigail, who disappears from the play in Act 4, having robbed her uncle and left him penniless. There is no clear information about what happened to the historical Abigail Williams after the witch trials, though Miller claimed—in the epilogue to the play, entitled “Echoes Down the Corridor”—that she became a prostitute (135).3 Within the confines of the drama, all we know for certain is that she vanishes

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from Salem and her energies are let loose on the world, irrepressible and unquestionably dangerous to males. Despite knowing her true nature, John struggles to separate himself from Abigail’s enchanting erotic influence. It does not help that— although he is, in Abigail’s words, “no wintry man”—John has married a “wintry” wife, who fails to put enough salt in their meals or in their life (Miller 2003: 22). In a scene between them in Act 2, John kindly gives Elizabeth credit for seasoning their rabbit well, though he has secretly added salt to it; he criticizes her, however, for failing to bring flowers into the house and for allowing it to be “winter in here” (49). John, unlike Elizabeth, has a keen aesthetic eye as well as, in Wendy Schissel’s words, a “sensual awareness of spring’s erotic promise” (1994: 467); he appreciates the warmth of the soil, the smell of the lilacs, and the beauty of Massachusetts in spring. But despite his efforts to make peace between them, Elizabeth cannot let go of John’s one mistake in life, which was his sexual affair, and she continues to allow “an everlasting funeral” to march around her heart. Exhausted by her unrelenting resentment, John expresses angry regret for having “wilted” in response to her suspicions—there is a suggestion, here, that she unmans him— and for having “confessed” to her, thus granting her unearned power: “Some dream I had must have mistaken you for God that day. ….Let you look sometimes for the goodness in me and judge me not” (52). Elizabeth defends herself, arguing: “The magistrate sits in your heart that judges you,” and it is doubtless true that John is at least as hard on himself as his wife is. Indeed, he suffers agonies in his effort to find his way back to the man he once believed himself to be, as he oscillates between acknowledging realistically that he is no “saint” and viewing himself as “black” with sins and weak as “a woman” (Miller 2003: 126; 132). (We may note again here, as we did in Salesman, the anxiety that results when the dividing line between self and other, white and Black, male and female, seems to blur.) But Elizabeth’s role in John’s quest for redemption is complex and inconsistent. By Act 4, just as John—who by now also has been accused of witchcraft—is struggling to decide whether to save his life with a false confession, Elizabeth

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takes responsibility for his adultery: “It needs a cold wife to prompt lechery” (126–7). If female sexual desire is corrupting to John, so is the lack of it in his wife, whom we see “[blush] with pleasure” only once in the play, when her husband has falsely praised her cooking (48). Having confessed to frigidity, Elizabeth begs John for forgiveness, declaring about him, “I never knew such goodness in the world” (127). By reinstalling John as the essence of goodness, whose one error in life was rooted in the sexual excess and the sexual dearth exhibited by two females, Elizabeth essentially seals his fate. In some ways, the ground is laid for this in an earlier event. Although she is described by John as the essence of honesty, in Act 3 Elizabeth refuses to publicly call him a lecher, though doing so—unbeknownst to her—might have exposed Abigail’s malevolence; her reason is that she wishes to save his name. In this regard, although with the best of intentions, she colludes with John’s fetishization of his name while linking it to a lie. In Act 4, John asks Elizabeth to play the role he claims she has performed with grim tenacity for the past seven months in their household, as his judge: “I come into a court when I come into this house,” he complained in Act 2. But in Act 4, when John turns to her desperately as he is on the verge of offering a lie that will save him from the gallows, she rejects this role: Proctor  It is evil, is it not? It is evil? Elizabeth  … I cannot judge you, John … ! (Miller 2003: 127)

She will not judge him and yet in refraining to say anything she makes her opinion clear: she cannot disagree that a false confession of witchcraft is evil, though she also will not tell John to go to his death. Left with no judge but his own internal moral compass, the stage directions tell us that he “moves as an animal, and a fury is riding in him” (Miller 2003: 127). The imagery is suggestive, perhaps conjuring the female goddesses, the Furies, who torture those with guilty consciences, as well as the animal that John becomes in response to erotic femininity. Seen in this light, John has internalized both females

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from whose influence he sought to unleash himself at earlier points in the play. His initial impulse now is to lie in order to go on living, embracing his imperfections: “Let Rebecca go like a saint,” he says, speaking of a virtuous elderly woman who cannot be coerced into confessing, “for me it is fraud!” (128). But the demand that he sign his name to the false confession prompts a reversal; John renounces the lie rather than tarnishing his name, which ascends in significance beyond his soul: “I have given you my soul; leave me my name.” When they will not, he tears up the confession, proclaiming that he has at last found his way back to goodness. By refusing to commit a public sin of proclaimed dishonesty, John finally atones for his private sin of dishonest adultery. His final action is to kiss Elizabeth with “great passion” (133), as if to suggest a return of sexual feeling for her—although, notably, there is no indication in the stage direction of whether she returns his passion. John’s glorification of his name over his soul can be read as signifying his rootedness in the quotidian world. He is, after all, a hardworking farmer who rarely goes to church and scorns the hypocritical sanctimoniousness of the Reverend Parris and others of his ilk. Miller’s similarly secular world view makes itself felt in the play’s final moment, complicating our admiration for Proctor’s self-sacrifice and Elizabeth’s contribution to it. As Proctor leaves the stage for the gallows, the Reverend Hale—formerly an enthusiastic participant in the witch trials but by Act 4 a horrified critic of them—begs Elizabeth to intervene. “Woman, plead with him,” he beseeches her. “It is pride. … Be his helper! What profit him to bleed? Shall the dust praise him? … Go to him, take his shame away!” (Miller 2003: 134). Hale suggests that Proctor’s martyrdom is wasteful and useless, and offers him nothing meaningful, not even a heavenly reward. Yet—in contrast to what we observed in earlier Miller plays, where it was the role of women to bring men down from the clouds—Elizabeth refuses to do as Hale urges. “He have his goodness now,” she declares, “God forbid I take it from him” (Miller 2003: 134). On the one hand, her emphasis on individual conscience as a supreme value stands at the heart of the play and at the heart of Miller’s entire oeuvre. In this

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regard, Elizabeth may appear to be a moral hero, one who helps John regain his conscience and say an emphatic “no” to the Salem madness. Simultaneously, though, she may be read as a Fury who insists on seeing John goaded to goodness through a “shame” that is rooted in his sexual betrayal of her, a shame that she will not take away. One is reminded of John’s remark earlier in the play: “Elizabeth, your justice would freeze beer!” (53). It may well be of interest that part of what drove Miller away from his first wife, Mary Slattery Miller, whom he finally divorced in 1956, was “the severity of [her] moral judgements.” In a highly autobiographical play that Miller began to sketch in September of 1953—eight months after The Crucible’s premiere—a married couple becomes “sexually estranged, mostly because her severity drained him of desire”; as a result, “the wife becomes [the husband’s] conscience and he becomes impotent both within the marriage and beyond it” (Bigsby 2009: 475). Though this particular play was never written, there are hints of its central conflict in the relationship between Elizabeth and John Proctor. John’s self-sacrifice restores his good name, but it also manifests the same inability to accommodate goodness to living that we have seen in other Miller males, while maintaining the dichotomized view of females that characterized the earlier plays. In this context, it is worth glancing backward at Act 2, Scene 2, a scene in which John and Abigail meet in a wood at night. This scene takes us into the wilderness and shows us the energies—dangerous, vital—that are let loose there. Miller wrote the scene after the play’s Broadway premiere but it is often excluded from productions and it is consigned to an appendix in all reading versions of The Crucible that the playwright approved. In the Viking Critical Library edition, Gerald Weales describes it as “not an obligatory scene … either dramatically or thematically” (1971: 154). Yet it allows Abigail a moment in which to defend herself, in ways that slightly mitigate her villainy. Just as Hester Prynne pleads her case to Arthur Dimmesdale in a “primeval forest” where she argues that their sex “had a consecration of its own” (Hawthorne 1850/1988: 133), Abigail proclaims that having sex with John taught her “goodness.” By

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granting her sexual knowledge—or, as she puts it, by burning away her “ignorance”—he allowed her to see the community as hypocritical, and she renounces the shame she previously felt “when the wind lifted up my skirts.” In this brief moment, Abigail becomes the spokesperson for natural expressions of physicality and sexuality, which she insists are not shameful and that she aligns with God. Yet Abigail’s more sinister qualities return to view when she makes it clear that she is willing to see countless people murdered in order to, in her words, “cleanse this town properly,” and she sounds decidedly threatening when she promises John: “From yourself I will save you” (Miller 2003: 141; 140; 143). John ends the scene “in terror,” perhaps feeling something akin to what Miller felt after his first fateful meeting with Monroe: “I knew that I must flee or walk into a doom beyond all knowing.” Yet that “doom” is also linked, as we have seen, with vital creativity as well as sensuality. In short, Elizabeth and Abigail offer John starkly opposing definitions of goodness and, to embrace either, John must sacrifice some portion of his conscience or his fullest sense of self. Abigail’s definition is linked with sex and the renunciation of shame, but it can only be enjoyed by accepting dishonesty, even murder; it is also linked with dangerous otherness in the form of murderous Indians, the “black” of night, and the uncanny energies that inhabit the wilderness. Elizabeth’s is linked with a punishing moral purity that is achievable only through the renunciation of the body and of life itself. John is driven to his death, it seems, by the inescapable contradictions inherent in living as a man in an always fallen world, one in which females are shown to be either treacherous temptresses or uncompromising scolds. **** A View from the Bridge—which Miller wrote first, in 1955, as a oneact and then, a year later, as a full-length play—features the same triangle: a married man, a wife with whom his sex life has broken down, and a bewitchingly appealing younger female. The play has other clear connections to Miller’s life; its main character becomes an informant, as Miller himself laudably refused to do, although in A View

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the informant’s actions are rooted not in politics but in psychological turmoil. In the play’s opening monologue, Miller establishes its immediate location and its broader mythic backdrop, and he also begins to lay out the terms within which we are to understand the protagonist’s dilemma. As a distant foghorn blows, the lawyer and choric figure Alfieri makes his way along a street, past two longshoremen who are pitching coins against a tenement building, and into his law office. Delivering his opening remarks directly to the audience, Alfieri draws a contrast between the New York he knew in his twenties—the New York of the 1920s and 1930s, of Al Capone and Frankie Yale—and the New York of the play’s present day, which is the 1950s. As Alfieri describes the contrast, Capone and Yale lived in an era defined by precision and clarity, whereas the present is distinctly hazier. Frankie Yale died, Alfieri tells us, by being cut “precisely in half by a machine gun.” In the “quite civilized” present day, however, men “settle for half ” and the lawyer no longer keeps a pistol in his filing cabinet (4). This suggestive distinction between being cut precisely in half and settling for half, between determining fates with pistols and with law books, is threaded through A View from the Bridge, and it has particularly telling implications for Eddie Carbone, the play’s hero-victim. Like so many Miller males, Eddie is ferociously determined to assert his masculinity in a context that disallows the precision and firm knowledge he craves. From the start of the play, Eddie’s masculinity is under threat because of his inability or unwillingness to have sex with his wife; because of sexual longings for his young niece that he cannot acknowledge or act upon; and because of his status as an Italian-American longshoreman working in the slums of Red Hook, Brooklyn. Eddie’s predicament becomes a crisis when his opponent for his niece’s affection turns out to be an illegal immigrant whose sexuality, in Eddie’s eyes, is of a dubious nature. It is to a significant extent Rodolpho’s fluidity—the impossibility, that is, of fully knowing and thus overpowering him—that drives Eddie to panicked distraction. In response, Eddie becomes increasingly and at last fatally determined to establish his own heterosexual prowess and to prove that Rodolfo is gay. Both efforts are doomed, and the reasons

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are embedded in the utter wrongness of Alfieri’s proclamation at the end of the play. He notes that “the truth is holy,” and he admires Eddie for permitting himself to be “wholly known.” Yet A View from the Bridge suggests that the truth, though it may be holy, must remain in shadows, and no man can be wholly known, because to give access to that wholeness would be to display the unholy, slippery, and unstable nature of identity and sexual desire in a context that demands binary absolutes even as it destabilizes them. Thus, Alfieri’s opening sentence introduces a problem that is at the heart of A View from the Bridge. “You wouldn’t have known it,” he says, “but something amusing has just happened.” Alfieri is speaking of the way in which the two longshoremen nodded “uneasily” at him as he passed them. Their unease is elicited by his synecdochic connection to the law, which generates mistrust from these men of Sicilian descent. Alfieri’s offhand remark to the audience foregrounds the question of what can and cannot be known, and by whom. Although Alfieri treats the audience as his confidantes—he speaks directly to us, shares with us his worries and awful forebodings—we are also immediately marked as outsiders: we cannot fully know the unspoken codes of this ItalianAmerican world into which we are being partially initiated. As Alfieri proceeds to explain those codes, he distinguishes between Justice, which is deeply valued in Red Hook, and the law, which is viewed as untrustworthy. Frankie Yale, he goes on, was not the only mobster in the community who was “justly shot by unjust men” (Miller 1981: 4). Alfieri’s word choices are marked by the slipperiness that pervades the play and that will unsettle Eddie’s life. Indeed, although the codes that govern “the self-contained world of Red Hook,” as Donald P. Costello has argued, are regarded by its inhabitants as “clear” (1993: 448), the play stages a constant disruption of that clarity that is ever-present in its language and that has both psychological and social consequences. For instance, describing the society of Red Hook, Alfieri draws a clear line between then and now—between the earlier decades of the twentieth century, when inherited Sicilian notions of wild justice reigned, and the mid-century, when we became more “civilized” by

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adopting conventional American mores. Yet he also emphasizes the universality of Eddie Carbone’s story, which prompts him to imagine another lawyer “in some Caesar’s year,” who, confronted by a similar saga, “watched it run its bloody course” (Miller 1981: 4). Thus, Alfieri’s attempt to cut time precisely in half—between a romantic yesteryear and a tepid modernity—is complicated by the glimmers of timelessness he sees in Carbone’s story, as well as by the fact that American and Italian identity is tightly interwoven in Red Hook and in Alfieri himself, who was born in Italy. If Alfieri struggles to maintain the distinctions his opening monologue explores—between then and now, justice and law, Italy and America, disorderly romance and tidy civilization—we find in Eddie Carbone a drastically magnified version of the same problem. In his opening scene with his seventeen-year-old niece Catherine, whom he and his wife have raised, Eddie expresses admiration for her prettiness even as he gives voice to the discomfort that her fetching appearance elicits in him. He describes her new skirt and hairstyle as beautiful, at once compliments and critiques her by remarking that she looks like a college girl, and tells her that her skirt is too short. Admitting more than he means to, Eddie informs Catherine that she has been giving him “the willies” because of her new habit of “walkin’ wavy” (Miller 1981: 6; 7). This descriptive choice of words for the swing that has entered Catherine’s walk suggests undulations or curves invading something meant to be straight, as waves disturb smooth water. It is noteworthy also that Eddie perceives himself as infected with “the willies” by Catherine’s irresistible, if unintended, enticements; she creates a disturbance in him. Like Marilyn Monroe, whose “childish voracity” Miller felt he needed to escape, Catherine’s clothes as well as her distressing blend of girlishness and blooming adulthood are blamed for attracting reluctant male attention (Miller 1995: 307). Later in the play, Eddie’s wife Beatrice will scold Catherine for walking around in front of Eddie in her slip, and for behaving like a little girl around him. Both titillated and confounded by Catherine’s appeal, Eddie first insists that she is a baby who cannot understand sexual desire, only to

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assert moments later that she is becoming “a big girl” and so mustn’t be so friendly to the neighborhood’s males (Miller 1981: 7; 8). When he learns of Catherine’s new job as a stenographer, Eddie objects because its location will require her to walk past a plumbing company, and plumbers, he complains, are “practically longshoremen” (15). Eddie’s sense that Catherine is at risk from longshoremen thinly veils his buried recognition that she is at risk from him, just as his flailing effort to define her first as a baby and then as a big girl at once denies her blossoming seductiveness and identifies it as dangerous and in need of suppression. In this same vein, Eddie repeatedly insists that Catherine is “like a madonna,” which, as Iska Alter argues, “controls her eroticism by recasting it in suppressive religious terms” (1989: 128). If this Madonna is to be allowed to enter the outside world, she must heed Eddie’s emphatic warning that she must trust no one. Although Beatrice attempts to insert a more generous perspective—“She likes people. What’s wrong with that?”—Eddie replies with an incomprehensible if also telling proclamation: “Because most people ain’t people” (16; 17; 18). If Catherine were to take this advice seriously, she would need to learn how to distinguish those rare people who in fact are people, hence trustworthy, from the larger mass of people. Since everyone is designated “people,” this would surely be a challenge, and in any case Eddie has already declared that nobody is to be trusted, which would suggest that all people are not people—including, one must presume, himself. The failure of language that Eddie’s phrase, “most people ain’t people,” displays has suggestive implications for his effort to assert himself as a protective patriarchal authority who can navigate a world fraught with unfathomable threats. Repeatedly, Eddie attempts to locate those threats outside of his home and to school his wife and niece in strategies that will ward them off. Noting that the neighborhood is full of “stool pigeons” planted by the Immigration Bureau, Eddie instructs Beatrice and Catherine to see nothing, say nothing, and know nothing regarding the illegal immigrants—Beatrice’s cousins—who will soon take secret residence in their home. “If you said it you knew it,” he counsels

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Catherine, “if you didn’t say it you didn’t know it” (Miller 1981: 20). This claim is of course specious; one can know a great deal without saying it. Yet Eddie has complicated reasons for wanting to aver that what is not said is not known, thus eradicating guilt and erasing illicit desire. Indeed, his swirling anxieties prompt him to express a concern about the immigrants’ encroachment on his territory before he has even met them and despite the fact that he has agreed to harbor them in his home: his wife’s natural magnanimity, he worries, will result in his ending up on the floor with Beatrice and “they’ll be in our bed” (11). Though Eddie cannot know this yet, it is not the bed he shares with Beatrice that the immigrants (or one of them) will invade, but rather an imagined one with Catherine, which he cannot bring himself to admit he desires. Nevertheless, his remark exposes a half-conscious foreboding that the external threat may infiltrate the domestic space, and in an intimate fashion. Beatrice, it is clear, does recognize the sexual tension that exists between her husband and their niece, though she does not witness the astonishingly Freudian scene between them that demonstrates that sometimes a cigar is manifestly not just a cigar. When Catherine eagerly offers to light Eddie’s cigar for him, he allows her to do so, while warning her not to burn herself. She blows out the match “Just in time,” and leaves the scene “almost guiltily” to help her aunt with the dishes. Eddie, meanwhile, “stares at the smoke flowing out of his mouth” (Miller 1981: 24). The phallic imagery is too obvious to require comment, but the scene also yet again suggests that Catherine is both the source of danger and in danger, as she ignites the flame that fills her uncle’s mouth with smoke, feels an inchoate guilt, and receives a warning from Eddie about burning herself. The stage is now set for the conflagration that the immigrants’ arrival will bring about. When Beatrice’s cousins arrive, Catherine is immediately taken with Rodolpho and their connection is underscored by a moment almost as sexually charged as the cigar scene. Catherine asks if he likes sugar, he replies eagerly that he likes it very much, and she pours some into his cup as Eddie looks on, “his face puffed with

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trouble” (Miller 1981: 37). Marco, Rodolpho’s elder brother, ignites no such anxieties in Eddie in part because he is married and hence expresses no interest in sugar. In numerous respects, Marco, though a foreigner, affirms Eddie’s assumptions about masculine behavior. Most notably, when Rodolpho describes his fantasy of returning to Italy and wowing his compatriots with a blue motorcycle, Marco remarks wryly that only those who are wifeless can “have dreams” (33). Like so many males who populate Miller’s plays, Marco recognizes that domestic life has burdened him with responsibilities that necessarily curtail idle dreams and fantasies. Marco is hardworking and doggedly devoted to his wife and family; hence, for Eddie, he is recognizably male: Marco, he notes approvingly, “goes around like a man” (39). Yet Marco too will offer a challenge to Eddie’s sense of himself as the heteronormative male provider, precisely because Marco fits that role so perfectly, whereas Eddie does not. It is Rodolpho, however, who is the play’s central manifestation of disruptive fluidity. The first quality that Catherine calls attention to in him is his shock of blond hair, which Rodolpho explains with his characteristic laughing charm: “A thousand years ago …, the Danes invaded Sicily” (Miller 1981: 27). For Eddie, Rodolpho is “more than kin and less than kind” in at least two respects: he is Beatrice’s cousin and eventually aspires to be his surrogate daughter’s husband; he is more Italian than Eddie, having been born there; and yet his blondness suggests other affiliations, as does his devotion to American pop culture, which ironically renders him alien to Eddie, who does not trust the US government and staunchly identifies with Sicilian values. Rodolpho’s singing repertoire is gleefully expansive and multicultural, and he has not been in the Carbone household for ten minutes before he begins crooning “Paper Doll,” a popular American jazz song in the 1940s and 1950s. Eddie puts a quick stop to the singing, ostensibly because it might arouse the authorities’ suspicion, as his home has never before (according to Eddie) contained anyone who sang. If Rodolpho advertises his hybridity, Eddie instantly takes steps to curb it by attempting to pin him down. In a scene with Beatrice in

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Act 1, he complains that Rodolpho is “like a weird” and “like a chorus girl”; hence Eddie does not “like his whole way.” Later, he describes Rodolpho as “like an angel” (Miller 1981: 39; 57). The repetition of the word “like” captures Eddie’s inability to pinpoint what precisely Rodolfo is, a problem that invades his sense of himself as surely as the brothers invade his home, upsetting a patriarchal authority that was tenuous before they arrived. It does not help matters that, just as Eddie is feeling nonplussed by Rodolpho, Beatrice confronts him with his sexual failures by asking him when she is going to be “a wife again” (40). By not having sex with Beatrice, Eddie not only strips Beatrice of her identity as wife; he undermines his own identity as husband and risks revealing taboo affections for Catherine. Hence, his instinct is to insist that he cannot talk about it. This is of a piece with his previous claim that if something is unsaid, it is not known. Alfieri notes that Eddie’s behavior when they first meet leads him to suspect that he has committed a crime, though he comes to understand instead that “a passion … had moved into [Eddie’s] body, like a stranger” (54). The threat, once located outside, has by now penetrated not only Eddie’s home but his body. That it has done so is further confirmed by Eddie’s remarks about Rodolpho when he seeks out Alfieri’s legal advice. Fierce in his convictions and yet helplessly inarticulate, Eddie repeats: “The guy ain’t right … he ain’t right.” He goes on: He’s a blond guy. Like … platinum ….He sings … high ….I mean if you came in the house and you didn’t know who was singin’, you wouldn’t be lookin’ for him you be lookin’ for her … Couple of nights ago my niece brings out a dress which it’s too small for her ….He takes the dress …; one-two-three, he makes a new dress. I mean he looked so sweet …, like an angel—you could kiss him he was so sweet. (Miller 1981: 57)

Although Eddie’s halting declarations are meant to indict Rodolpho for his effeminacy, it is not a reach to propose that the young man’s confusing fluidity has awakened feelings in Eddie that he comes close to admitting when he notes, “you could kiss him he was so sweet.” Like

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Savran, I would argue not that this necessarily reveals “homosexual attraction,” as Weales maintains, but rather “how the fear of effeminacy,” in Savran’s words, “slides into homophobic panic, which, almost inevitably, slides into homosexual desire” (Weales 1969: 135; Savran 1992: 42). That is to say, it is not that Eddie, though claiming to be one thing (straight), turns out to be another (gay). It is rather that Rodolpho’s gender-bending qualities destabilize the certainties that governed Eddie’s view of the world, unleashing possibilities that those certainties strove to deny. Earlier in the play, Eddie commanded his wife to “straighten” Catherine out (Miller 1981: 50). Eddie exhibits an increasingly frenzied need to recover a world without, as it were, waviness, where right can be separated from wrong and “he’s” can be distinguished from “she’s”—a world, as it happens, already disrupted by his own wayward desires for Catherine. Nevertheless, when Catherine and Rodolpho dance in front of him near the end of Act 1, Eddie delivers a string of insults that imply that Rodolpho has violated readily discernible, gendered rules with which Eddie himself faithfully complies: “I can’t sing, I can’t make dresses, so I’m on the water front. But if … I could make dresses, I wouldn’t be on the water front … I would be like in a dress store” (Miller 1981: 70). Yet, even as Eddie contrasts himself with Rodolpho, Miller’s stage directions blur them together, describing Eddie as “weirdly elated” when he draws Rodolpho into a boxing lesson. “[L]ike a weird” is one of the pejorative phrases that Eddie has applied to Rodolpho (70; 39). The boxing lesson comes to an abrupt close when Eddie delivers a rough blow to his supposed pupil. This is at last too much for Marco, who challenges Eddie to lift a chair by one of its legs. Eddie finds he cannot do it, but Marco can and, when he does, he holds the chair threateningly over Eddie’s head. If Eddie just for a moment out-performs Rodolpho in a homosocial rite, it is Marco who emerges as the greatest performer of heteronormative masculinity, a title Marco earns not only because of his superior physical brawn but because his relationship to his off-stage wife conforms to heterosexual and homosocial rules. Eddie lacks Marco’s muscular strength, he is failing as a sexual partner

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to his wife, and his desires for Catherine cannot be publicly exhibited or even spoken aloud. Hence, he has no platform upon which to perform a masculinity that he needs, with ever-intensifying urgency, to display.4 Rodolpho’s sexuality, in contrast to Marco’s, remains stubbornly queer as the term is used by gender theorists. Julia Serano, for instance, defines queer as anyone “who falls outside of straight mainstream expectations and assumptions … regarding sex, gender and sexuality” (2013: 10). Rodolpho surely qualifies. Always indecipherable, he reduces Eddie, as we have seen, to incoherent stammers. For his part, Rodolpho rejects the absolutes that Eddie flings at him. Though Eddie insists that he wishes to marry Catherine only to become a citizen, Rodolpho confidently stakes out more nuanced territory, averring that he both wishes to have Catherine as his wife and he wishes to be an American citizen. He claims, in other words, that multiple motives can coexist. As for his sexual inclinations, when Catherine appeals to him to teach her, in Act 2, he somewhat disturbingly calls her his “little girl” (merging him again with Eddie perhaps?), and leads her into a bedroom in Eddie’s home; when she emerges, she is adjusting her dress. Wertheim argues that Eddie is confronted here “with incontrovertible proof of Rodolpho’s masculinity and heterosexuality,” and surely we are invited to assume that a sexual act has taken place (1997: 110). It is of interest, though, that Miller does not stage the scene or even permit us to see the couple kissing; hence, there is nothing incontrovertible about what happens in the off-stage space. Clum too concludes that Rodolpho is shown to be “not really homosexual” (2000: 16), but again I would argue that the play never pins down what Rodolpho “really” is. It does not follow from my reading that homosexuality is rendered sympathetically in A View; it is not rendered at all, and Rodolpho is not a character we come to know internally. But it is important to recognize that it is his instability that makes him a threat to Eddie’s masculinist view of himself. To be sure, Rodolpho plans to marry Catherine at the end of the play, but marrying a person does not confirm one’s sexuality and the wedding does not take place within the confines of the play. Thus, Miller preserves the character’s status as queer—in the sense

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again of indeterminate and hence disruptive to the fixed categories upon which Eddie relies. Eddie’s final attempt to stabilize Rodolpho takes place when Catherine declares that she can no longer remain in Eddie’s home: “You know I can’t,” she tells her uncle. “You know that, don’t you?” Her pointed if evasive insistence on what Eddie knows prompts an action that seems at last to admit knowledge: Eddie suddenly pulls her to him and kisses her directly on the mouth. Moments later, when Rodolpho moves to attack him, Eddie restrains his arms and abruptly kisses him as well; afterward he says tauntingly: “You see?” What can be seen, however, is not self-evident. If Eddie’s goal was to identify Rodolpho, once and for all, as “a weird,” he instead arguably queers his own identity. Having worked avidly to conceal one kind of deviant desire, Eddie potentially reveals two, as the effort at containment backfires and the sluice gates in his complicated psyche burst open. Whatever his stated motive, Eddie fulfills the impulse to which he gave voice when he described Rodolpho’s appearance as so sweet “you could kiss him.” Nevertheless, he proceeds to insist that he now possesses the irrefutable knowledge that Miller repeatedly shows to be illusory: “He didn’t give me the right kind of fight, I know it … the guy ain’t right” (Miller 1981: 82; 83; 85). As the play moves toward its grim conclusion, Eddie’s strategies bespeak a mounting desperation. “I want my respect,” he tells his wife, “What I feel like doin’ in the bed and what I don’t.” Again Eddie refuses to quite utter what it is that he is talking about but his meaning is clear, if his claim is unconvincing: his masculine authority now hinges upon not having sex with his wife. He also declares that Beatrice must accept his testimony about Rodolpho purely because wives are required, by unwritten gendered rules, to believe their husbands: “If I tell you that guy ain’t right don’t tell me he is right.” When Beatrice, protesting, asks how he can know, Eddie’s answer is simply, “Because I know” (Miller 1981: 89; 90). Though Eddie has failed to enact any of the rites associated with heterosexual male prowess—he has not defeated his rival for his (forbidden) love, he has not demonstrated superior judgment, he has not performed sexually—he claims to possess unequivocal knowledge

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because he is the husband. Finally, Eddie informs on Marco and Rodolpho, thus becoming the enemy he previously claimed existed outside his home, and transforming from a revered figure in his adored niece’s eyes to a “rat” (106). Desperate to establish himself as the standard by which maleness should be judged, Eddie ends up as a traitor to the shared system of values that coheres Red Hook. Eddie cannot admit that he has sabotaged himself and turns furiously on Marco, who spat in his face in full view of the Red Hook community when the Immigration authorities came to arrest him. Rodolpho, seeking peace in the family, apologizes to Eddie for his failure to ask for Catherine’s hand, but Eddie dismisses him now as a mere “punk” and shifts his focus to Marco, the man he claims has unjustly stolen his name. Though in one respect Eddie is the polar opposite of John Proctor—the former adamantly refused to oblige the powers-that-be by finger-pointing others; Eddie gives Marco up to the authorities—the two characters merge in their fierce concern for their name, a concern Willy shares. “I am Willy Loman,” he cries near the end of the play, as if that assertion carries undeniable weight (Miller 1976: 132). Perhaps the name becomes the vital linchpin for the self because there is so little of certainty otherwise to undergird it. And just as Willy, Joe Keller, and John Proctor’s deaths can be read as spurred in part or in full by their inability to match their names with their life’s actions, by their need to reclaim a self-knowledge that only self-erasure can grant them, Eddie hurtles self-destructively toward his own death when he projects his rage on Marco. By publicly shaming Eddie, Marco has now supplanted Rodolpho as the man who must be quelled, and Eddie foists on him the recriminations he earlier hurled at Rodolpho: “He knows that ain’t right. To do like that? To a man? Which I put my roof over their head … Now gimme my name … Marco knows what’s right from wrong” (Miller 1981: 111). In a fulminating barrage of accusations, Eddie suggests that it is now Marco who knows what is “right” but has betrayed rightness, who has violated a sacred code of maleness, and who holds the key to its return. He demands from Marco both the return of his name and implicitly,

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an acknowledgment of his successful masculinity, one that inheres in Eddie’s success as a breadwinner (“I put my roof over their head”), and his willingness to engage in a physical fight. As Beatrice points out, this is blatant displacement. An apology from Marco will not appease Eddie, as “That’s not what you want,” his wife tells him, “and you can never have her!” (109). In denying this, Eddie continues the frenzied flight from self-knowledge in which he has been engaged throughout the play, even as he insists that what is known is clearly identifiable and must be uttered aloud—perhaps to justify his own utterance of what was meant to remain closeted, in the form of the two untoward kisses and his disclosure of the secret regarding the illegal aliens. Eddie’s unreasonable demand results in his own death, as he lunges at Marco with a knife. Marco grabs Eddie’s arm in such a way as to turn the blade inward toward Eddie’s body; thus, Eddie’s death verges on suicide. In Alfieri’s final monologue, he suggests that Eddie brings about his own death because he cannot reconcile his sensibility with the world in which he lives. “[N]ow we settle for half,” Alfieri says again in the play’s closing moments, and Eddie would not or could not do so. Yet, though Eddie may have “allowed himself to be wholly known,” as Alfieri claims, surely he did so unwillingly. Eddie Carbone is a man who staunchly persists in viewing the world in uncompromising terms that will confirm a version of himself that the play shows to be largely fictional. Whether it is his hopeless desire for his niece, the homoerotic stirrings that Rodolpho arouses in him, or a combination of the two, Eddie clearly sought to keep his desires from being known, and in his dying words to Catherine he asks a question that he cannot fully articulate: “Then why—?” Eddie has “ever but slenderly known himself ” because the whole truth about who he is fails to conform to established norms for acceptable masculine behavior that Eddie has completely internalized. We may conclude that it is because of his inability to accept the enemy he fears lurking within that he is so determined to find and expose an enemy without, although that brings upon him the righteous wrath of his community. Alfieri, the play’s good-hearted if limited narrator, admits that Eddie’s death is “useless,” but he still tries

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to patch together some degree of certainty in his closing monologue, pronouncing “the truth … holy” (which, intriguingly, is more than Hale, a man of God, is willing to grant to John Proctor). Yet A View from the Bridge seems to ask us to hear the pun in Alfieri’s line: the play shows that human character resists our attempt to reduce it to any single truth, holy or otherwise, as Eddie attempts to do with Rodolpho and as his neighborhood at last does to him. Though Marco pronounces Eddie an animal, Alfieri is more accurate in calling him “perversely pure.” Eddie Carbone is a murky blend of contradictory impulses, as uncontainable as his “weird” nemesis. Perhaps it is because, despite himself, Eddie exposes what is meant to be contained—the disruptive, tangled and anarchic nature of his sexual desires, so at odds with the single-minded view of himself that he dies to maintain—that Alfieri both loves him and also mourns him “with a certain … alarm” (Miller 1981: 112; 113). Taken together, this quartet of Miller plays stages the total failure of containment, and the slipperiness of the categories upon which his characters rely to solidify their shaky sense of themselves as suitably masculine. “A father is a father!”; “I gave you an order”; “I should have roared you down”; “A wife is supposed to believe the husband”: each of these lines is uttered at a moment when the male protagonist feels that something shameful within himself might be released.5 In each case, to conceal it, he calls on the hegemonic authority that is meant to be his by gendered right. What threatens him, as we have seen repeatedly, is difficult for him to pinpoint or name, although Eddie’s favored description of Rodolpho comes close: he is “a weird,” a term for witches from the seventeenth century through the nineteenth century, though for Eddie it is code for homosexual. The term suggests alien status, fundamental otherness, something uncanny and strange. In reality, of course, in seventeenth-century Salem and in 1950s America it was often women, gays, and people of color who were under threat, because they were seen as potentially disruptive to the patriarchal, heterosexist, white status quo. The uncomfortable recognition that the beautiful bombshell might refuse to be domesticated is implicit in the term,6 but Miller’s plays suggest that male authority disintegrates because

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the white male himself does not know how to wield it anymore, in an increasingly domesticated and heterogeneous landscape. Within that landscape, it becomes more difficult to identify subversive antagonists, to discriminate between the “right” and the “weird” kind of guy, both out in the world and within the male’s own, turbulent psyche. It is for this reason that the performer of machismo masculinity requires otherness as much as he fears it. On June 20, 2018—at a moment, not coincidentally, when he had just backed down on a particularly cruel component of his “America First” immigration policy—Donald Trump mocked a male protestor at a rally in Minnesota, by remarking: “Was that a man or a woman? … I couldn’t tell … [G]o home to your mom, darling. Go home” (Miller and Fritze 2018). The tactics of toxic, anxious masculinity have not changed, nor has the instinctive objective to contain.

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Performing White Male Heteronormativity: A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Tennessee Williams, born three years before Arthur Miller and a Broadway success before Miller was (The Glass Menagerie, Williams’ first smash hit, premiered on Broadway in 1944, predating All My Sons by three years), cannot be viewed as inheriting themes from Miller in any credible sense; in some regards the opposite may well be true. However, for the purposes of this study, which foregrounds the figure of the anxious male breadwinner as it emerges in Miller’s playwriting and goes on to permeate the American drama, I have chosen to move next to Tennessee Williams, to explore the version of this figure that appears in Williams’ work without making claims about influence in either direction. Instead, I argue that Williams and Miller were breathing the same air and, for all their differences stylistically and temperamentally, both dramatists wrote plays that feature male characters seeking to fit a mid-century template to which they often fail to conform naturally and must instead adjust themselves to, through sheer force of will, determined muscularity, or anguished resignation. The Glass Menagerie (1944) offers an exception, granting its main character the choice (à la Biff) of flight. Echoing the paradigm we saw recurrently in Miller, Glass Menagerie’s narrator/protagonist Tom is torn between his own very real poetic yearnings and a stifling domesticity within which his mother seeks to imprison him. Tom’s desire to be a writer ultimately prompts him to reject her demand that he fill the abandoned shoes of his father, who himself turned his back on the domestic realm after falling “in love with long-distance”

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(Williams 1972: 30). But unlike Biff, Tom is under no illusion that he can truly turn back time, though in his incantatory opening monologue he teasingly claims to have that power (29). What the play shows instead is that Tom drifts backward in memory as he moves inexorably forward, locked in time’s clutches as we all are. He eventually leaves the miserable “hive-like conglomerations of cellular living units” that constituted his childhood home for other cities that he says “swept about him like dead leaves, leaves that were brightly colored but torn away from the branches.” Surrounded by death images and shards of his abandoned past, Tom has privileged self-preservation over his ties to his mother and sibling, as Biff does, but he is haunted by guilt and sorrow as a consequence. “Laura, Laura,” he says about his fragile sister, “I am more faithful than I intended to be!” Moreover, what Tom recognizes is what Biff by implication sought to deny: “nowadays the world is lit by lightning!” (Williams 1972: 137). Biff ’s flight west seeks to elude “nowadays,” but “nowadays” is ever-present in Williams’ playwriting, despite Miller’s claim that Williams’ work exhibited “a radical politics of the soul” rather than “the ballot box” (Martin and Centola 1996: 438).1 That “nowadays” makes visible the brutal demands of both heteronormativity and whiteness, issues that are only partially acknowledged in Miller’s playwriting. (As we have seen, Miller grants the gender-fluid Rodolpho some degree of plausible deniability via his link with Catherine, and Tituba is his only character of color.) Miller himself, perhaps recognizing an affinity, described Williams’ pervasive theme as “the romance of the lost yet sacred misfits” (quoted in Spoto 1985: 250). The “misfits” whom I will examine in this chapter must find a way—through brute force, deception, or both—to persuade the outside world that they are something they are not, or not quite, which is in one case straight and in the other simultaneously hyper-masculine and a member of the rising white middle class, the very line Willy and his sons struggled and failed to straddle. Other links between the two playwrights are also readily drawn. A Streetcar Named Desire and Death of a Salesman—written within two

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years of each other, in 1947 and 1949 respectively, in the immediate post-war period—both feature as their central male character a traveling salesman facing the potential collapse of his patriarchal status within his home and his community. In each drama, females to some degree operate as an obstacle to the male’s quest to view himself as a satisfactory, self-reliant male even as they function as crucial pillars for his self-esteem. But the plays end quite differently. Willy Loman, as we have seen, is drawn into the “jungle [that] is dark but full of diamonds”— that is, to his suicide—by a compulsion to compensate for an acute sense of masculine failure (Miller 1976: 135). Stanley Kowalski, by contrast, triumphantly reestablishes his absolute dominance in his household and his community, fending off the threat posed to him by his sisterin-law, the fading Southern belle Blanche DuBois. The difference in the men’s fortunes has much to do with each one’s relationship to ideals of masculinity that neither can fully embody but that Stanley is far more skilled at performing. Stanley’s ferocious ability to compel others to affirm his performed selfhood is due in part to his brute strength. But he also has the good fortune to be surrounded by effective foils who unwittingly reinforce his claimed status as the consummate American male: that is to say, self-reliant, driven, virile, and white. Intriguingly, Tennessee Williams too employs the jungle metaphor, and he does so at the point when Stanley is on the verge of his ultimate triumph. Just prior to his rape of her, Blanche hears sounds “like cries in a jungle” (Williams 2004: 159). This contrast between the two men— the jungle signifies death for Willy, conquest for Stanley—is not the only respect in which Stanley is the inverse of Willy. The home that Stanley provides for his wife, Stella, is far from sumptuous, as her sister is quick to point out, but there is no evidence that Stanley aspires to the white picket fence suburban ideal that Willy has embraced. If Willy nostalgically recalls a time when wisteria grew in his backyard, Stanley revels in his urban environment and manifests no obvious insecurities about his masculinity. In contrast to Willy, who worries that he talks too much, Stanley is the essence of taciturnity; his first line is a monosyllabic grunt: “Meat” (Williams 2004: 4). He unselfconsciously

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strips to his undershirt in front of the sister-in-law he has just met; he is unabashedly and at least from Stella’s perspective electrifyingly sexual; and, as Williams’ stage directions ornately inform us, he is a “gaudy seed-bearer” (25). We learn shortly thereafter that he has impregnated Stella and that, in her estimation, he is successful at his job because of his unique drive. That drive coupled with the gaudy seed-bearing appears to assure him a productive future. We know little about his past, apart from the fact that he has Polish ancestry and was a Master Sergeant in the Engineers’ Corp during the Second World War. These details aside, Stanley inhabits the present, as underscored by his last line in the play, which is, “Now, honey. … Now, now, love … Now, love” (179). In this regard Willy, who is bewildered by modernity, has far more in common with Blanche, who recoils from the gritty urban present and longs for the return of a romanticized agrarian world while also being tormented by the more troubling sexual aspects of her past. Not only does Stanley show no interest in the pastoral past; insofar as Blanche’s arrival exhumes it, he would like to see it buried again and forgotten. Although these characteristics are surely crucial to Stanley’s success—he is in step with the present and conforms to a traditional understanding of masculinity—Blanche nevertheless exposes anxieties in him that are profound enough to motivate him to destroy her, and she does so by arguing that he is in effect too basely male. The very qualities in Willy that prevent him from feeling fully masculine but which root him firmly in the American middle class—his suburbanized softness, his commitment (albeit wavering) to a bourgeois value system that requires a suppression of primal impulses in favor of the routinized rules of office work—are the qualities Blanche sees as lacking in Stanley. In her most impassioned denunciation of him in the play, which she delivers after Stanley has violently attacked Stella on his poker night, Blanche argues that he represents a catastrophic evolutionary descent that Stella ought to resist. Noting that Stanley is “common,” Blanche tries to reawaken memories in her sister of their genteel background: “You can’t have forgotten that much of our growing up … that you

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suppose that any part of a gentleman is in his nature!” She goes on to claim that Stanley is worse than merely ordinary: There’s something … bestial … even … ape-like about him … Bearing the raw meat home from the kill ….[T]here has been some progress since then! … In this dark march toward whatever it is we’re approaching … Don’t hang back with the brutes! (Williams 2004: 82–3)

Blanche contrasts two types of males here: the gentleman and the beast, the man who is linked with civility and tenderness and the man who eschews progress and atavistically hunts his prey in the jungle. It is ironic that Blanche uses this terminology, as she herself is so firmly linked with a vanished past, one evoked by the dead and gone plantation known as Belle Reve. But that irony might well be conscious: Blanche does not recognize modernity as progressive, if it installs at its helm people like Stanley. Blanche’s argument has no impact on Stella, who hurls herself into Stanley’s arms immediately in the wake of it. But it does have an impact on Stanley, who feels Blanche’s insults keenly. We know this because he repeats her words three scenes later: “That girl calls me common!” (Williams 2004: 118). To understand why Blanche gets so deeply under Stanley’s skin we should note that, despite the power Marlon Brando’s performance, in the famous 1951 film version of Streetcar, has had in shaping all future interpretations of the role, the character as written is not necessarily the incarnation of exquisite masculinity that was young Brando. In an early stage direction, Williams tells us that Stanley is about five feet eight or nine, which makes him of average height for his time period but not imposing, which may explain his obsession with the Napoleonic code. More tellingly, when Stanley first encounters Blanche, he justifies his impulse to remove his shirt by explaining that a person can catch a cold “sitting around in damp things, especially when you been exercising hard like bowling is” (26). In reality Stanley’s main pastimes—bowling and poker—require skill but little brawn. Of relevance too is the fact that, though he pronounces himself king of

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his domain, Stanley is a marginalized figure in the larger society that surrounds Elysian Fields. Blanche makes this clear when she derides him as a Polack and hurls racialized insults at him: he is a beast, an ape, “a little bit on the primitive side” (39). Notably, when Stella tells Blanche that Stanley is Polish, Blanche says: “Oh, yes. They’re something like Irish, aren’t they? … Only not so–highbrow?” (16), a joke that elicits laughter from both women. As is well known, both Irish and Polish immigrants were the victims of negative, racialized stereotyping in the early parts of the twentieth century. To overcome this, many sought to erase native identity markers and establish themselves as fully fledged Americans, which they accomplished (as Matthew Jacobson [1999] and others have argued) in part by bonding with white immigrant groups against African Americans and other dark-skinned immigrants. This phenomenon continues to this day, as manifested by the hostility to immigration—particularly from what Donald Trump dubbed “shithole countries”—displayed by the descendants of immigrants. Trump’s comment, made at a White House meeting on January 11, 2018, clearly conveyed the view that there is a hierarchy of immigrants based on skin color; he distinguished the so-called “shit-hole countries,” such as Haiti and Africa, from Norway, which he deemed a source of more desirable (that is to say, whiter) immigrants (Watkins and Phillip 2018). To some degree, this competitive pursuit of approved American status, which requires marginalized otherness to offset it, is the cultural phenomenon being staged in Streetcar. In his opening stage direction, Williams describes New Orleans as a cosmopolitan city characterized by a “relatively easy intermingling of races” (Williams 2004: 3). Yet the play largely keeps Black and brownness out of sight while insistently reminding us of its existence. A “Negro Woman” makes a brief appearance, we hear disembodied “brown fingers” playing on a distant piano (3), a Mexican Woman arrives late in the play symbolizing death. One Latino man, Pablo, is a member of Stanley’s poker group. Apart from him, the play’s named characters are all white. Still, the encroaching if mostly absent presence of people of color underscores Stanley’s uneasy determination to establish his own whiteness—which

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was at best “probationary” in this time period, as Blanche’s remarks about him make clear and as Virginia H. Cope has pointed out (2014: 503)—as well as his gendered supremacy, his status as “one hundred percent American” (Williams 2004: 134).2 Blanche challenges all three as an embodiment of whiteness, due to her name, her clothing (a white suit and pearls), and her association with the “great big place with white columns,” a bastion of white wealth and privilege, albeit now gone (9). Blanche’s delicate hyper-femininity also reflects her aristocratic origins, in contrast to Stanley’s rough and tumble physicality, as does her firmly entrenched American identity. Speaking to Stanley’s poker buddy, Mitch, Blanche remarks that her earliest American ancestors were French Huguenots, which means they likely emigrated to the United States in the seventeenth century. In short, there is a strong undercurrent of anxiety in Stanley’s retaliation against Blanche, aroused by what he perceives as an assault on his status and selfhood. He counterattacks by methodically dismantling Blanche’s sense of self, which relies on external validation. The reasons for this are in part existential: Williams suggests, as does Miller, that selfhood by its nature is unstable and contingent on others’ affirmation. But this phenomenon is aggravated, in Blanche’s case, by the evaporation of the world she once knew, which bolstered her identity in crucial fashions. At several points in the play she describes the ignominious collapse of Belle Reve, which, she claims, gradually disintegrated due to the “epic fornications” of her male ancestors, again linking male hypersexuality with destruction, not drive (Williams 2004: 44). Left behind were maladapted women incapable of taking hold of their lives now that their privileges were gone, as illustrated by an exchange Blanche recalls having with her mother, who was demanding that she tend to a dying relative. Blanche responded dolefully, “But couldn’t we get a colored girl to do it?” (148). A key signifier of the dissolution of Blanche’s status is the disappearance of servile Black labor, which her family could no longer afford. Still, Blanche does her best to cling to her former sense of self, while also recognizing that it is sustainable only through others’ indulgence.

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She makes this clear in the song she sings as she bathes off-stage in the magnificently contrapuntal Scene 7: “Say, it’s only a paper moon, Sailing over a cardboard sea. But it wouldn’t be make-believe If you believed in me!” Stanley’s onstage reply to this plaintive request is an emphatic no; “Sister Blanche is no lily!” he tells Stella (Williams 2004: 120; 119). Stanley assiduously blackens the allegedly lily-white Blanche not only in her sister’s eyes but in Mitch’s, whom she has been attempting to woo. Once Mitch learns the unsavory facts that Stanley unearths about Blanche’s sexual past, Blanche transforms from a prim virgin into a whore whom he pronounces “not clean enough” to bring home to his mother (150). From the perspective of the perpetually bathing Blanche, there is no crueler insult. Equally noteworthy is that an off-stage woman, Mitch’s mother, becomes the alleged barometer that deems Blanche insufficiently clean. Whereas, as we have seen, Willy and his sons try and fail to use women to undergird their desired personae, in Streetcar women are effectively coopted within a frame of mind whose nature is captured by the play’s last line: “This game is seven-card stud” (Williams 2004: 179). To maintain his centrality in the domestic space and yet not suffer the emasculation that plagues Willy, Stanley effectively masculinizes it, so that Blanche’s critique of him is nullified along with her humanity. He accomplishes this in opposition to Blanche’s efforts to do the opposite. In her early scenes, when she is making some headway in her effort to forge an alliance with Stella, she manages to redecorate the Kowalski home, filling it with her jasmine scents, her rhumba music, her adorable paper lantern. She also elicits defiance in Stella, who calls Stanley “stupid” and an “idiot” when he becomes convinced that Blanche is swindling them. In response, Stanley proclaims, “The Kowalskis and the DuBois have different notions,” prompting his wife’s retort: Stella  Indeed they have, thank heavens!—I’m going outside ….You come out with me. … Stanley  Since when do you give me orders? (Williams 2004: 34–35)

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­ y aligning herself with the DuBois, and by asserting herself against B Stanley, Stella challenges Stanley’s absolute sovereignty. So too do his male subordinates, who briefly take the women’s side in Scene 3 when Stanley objects to their music. Mitch even allows himself to be drawn into Blanche’s orbit when he enters the female space and dances with her, prompting Stanley’s explosion of violence at the end of the scene. Stanley’s counterattack, as already suggested, involves out-witting Blanche at her own game and declaring her repugnantly sexual. Though Blanche seeks to persuade Mitch that her tawdry past was rooted in fear and a lonely desire to fill her “empty heart,” not lust, Stanley is the better persuader (Williams 2004: 146). The reason, it seems clear, is Mitch’s own tenuous masculinity. A sensitive man who lives with his mother, Mitch is mocked by Stanley in Scene 3, who offers to fix him a “sugar-tit,” or baby pacifier. Mitch’s susceptibility to Blanche’s lies, brought to light by Stanley, further demoralizes him, prompting compensatory macho aggression—he demands that she grant him what he has “been missing all summer,” meaning sex—and his rejection of her as marriageable. This behavior does little to reinstall Mitch’s confidence that he is adequately male, something he could only really receive from Blanche, who earlier called him her Rosenkavalier and Samson (99; 107). After all, Blanche needed Mitch to be masculine—albeit in the courtly manner that she approves—to prop up her own preferred posture as desirably feminine. The performances are, or would be, reciprocal. Stanley, by contrast, buttresses his masculinity at other men’s expense. In the play’s final scene, when Mitch tries to intervene as Blanche is about to be taken to a mental institution, Stanley easily overcomes him. Mitch is sobbing when we last see him. If masculinity, to return again to Mailer’s famous remark, is not something “given to you, but something you gain,” Streetcar suggests that this is accomplished not through “small battles with honor” but through a performative style that can be mastered only by some and that their onlookers are coerced or brutalized into affirming (Mailer 1966: 242). Blanche’s airy and bodiless efforts to reassure Mitch of his gallantry— when he brags that he has been working out, she agreeably pronounces

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him “awe-inspiring” (Williams 2004: 107)—are no match for Stanley’s emasculating insults and his assertions of homosocial loyalty. When Stella asks Stanley why he shared with Mitch the sordid gossip he dredged up about Blanche, he replies: “Mitch is a buddy of mine … I’d have that on my conscience the rest of my life if I … let my best friend get caught!” (125– 6). These claims about male camaraderie are tactical, part and parcel of Stanley’s effort to bring Mitch around to Stanley’s view regarding female sexual promiscuity, which renders Blanche tainted goods, “ruined” in Happy Loman’s parlance, unworthy of marrying (Miller 1976: 35). Equally essential is the obliteration of Blanche’s fictive self, upon which her ability to affirm Mitch’s depends. Her painstaking effort to present herself as a virginal Southern belle, rather than the desperately wounded woman that she is, is brought definitively to an end when she and Stanley are alone while Stella is in the hospital giving birth. Stanley declares, “Not once did you pull any wool over this boy’s eyes.” The declaration is untrue; in the play’s early scenes Stanley is quite taken in by Blanche’s performance, mistaking her fake furs and rhinestone jewelry for signs of wealth. Perhaps it is in part being for a time duped into belief that generates Stanley’s fury. Stanley must punish the seeming icon of white aristocratic wealth for briefly intimidating and disempowering him. Stanley’s rape of Blanche is the final step in his effort to reduce her to the animal she once claimed he was: “Tiger— tiger! … We’ve had this date … from the beginning” (158; 162). In effect declaring that he and Blanche have equivalent desires, Stanley pulls her “down off them columns” as he earlier proudly declared he did to Stella—and in both cases he does so with sex (137). Here too we may detect a revealing contrast with Willy. His relationship with Linda appears largely sexless, despite his declaration that, when he is on the road, he longs “to grab [her] … and … kiss the life outa [her]” (Miller 1976: 38). The slight edge of violence in the line, as we earlier observed, becomes more notable when we recall that it is when Willy is on the road that he sees his mistress. If females inspire anger and frustration in Salesman’s males, in Streetcar the most hypermasculine of men can bend them completely to his will and thus

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become the man he wishes, and he accomplishes this in part through sexual power. When Blanche asks Stella whether she has any objections to the life in which she has landed, and the beatings that are a recurring feature, Stella replies with unmistakable clarity: “There are things that happen between a man and a woman in the dark—that sort of make everything else seem—unimportant” (Williams 2004: 81). It is the “seem” in the line that is arresting. Blanche candidly acknowledges, when she sings “it wouldn’t be make-believe If you believed in me,” her reliance on others’ belief to sustain what would otherwise reveal itself as fiction. Stanley makes a very different declaration in the last scene of the play. At this point, Blanche has been fully broken and Stanley has regained his supremacy in the eyes of his male friends, who are losing to him at poker and respond with frustrated awe to what they view as his astonishing good luck. “Luck,” Stanley counters, “is believing you’re lucky … To hold front position in this rat-race you’ve got to believe you’re lucky” (Williams 2004: 163). Stanley in effect rewrites Blanche’s lyric: it wouldn’t be make-believe, he proclaims, if I believe in me. Through this declaration, Stanley pronounces himself fully self-reliant, Willy’s ideal male made flesh. Yet the play shows otherwise. Stanley’s self-perception is as dependent on external validation as is Blanche’s. We know this in part because of a telling remark from Stella, delivered when she is admitting that she allowed Blanche to be taken to a mental institution despite being informed by Blanche that Stanley raped her. As justification, Stella says, “I couldn’t believe her story and go on living with Stanley.” Thus, the line reveals, Stella has chosen what and whom to believe. (Note that she does not say, “I didn’t believe her story,” which would be an altogether different assertion.) In so doing, she has elected to believe what she all but admits to knowing is a lie, and she has done so to allow life to “go on,” for the Kowalskis, unaltered (165; 166). Stanley’s lie, and by extension his fiction of self, becomes truth because Stella opts to believe it and to disbelieve Blanche—who, it so happens, is not lying. It is more than ironic that an act of savage violence allows Stanley to triumph over the woman who critiques him for being savagely violent.

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Stanley destroys Blanche through an assertion of a brutal virility that his wife finds thrilling but that the couple must half-deny in order to remain comfortably ensconced within the domestic realm they have crafted for themselves. I do not mean that Stella finds Stanley’s rape of Blanche thrilling; quite the contrary, she would clearly find it horrifying if she acknowledged it. But the primal violence in Stanley that allows it to happen she does find thrilling, as she asserts repeatedly in the play. As just one example, she reports to Blanche that Stanley has a habit of smashing objects, including all the light-bulbs on their wedding night, and “I was—sort of—thrilled by it” (Williams 2004: 72–3). The rape, too, is accompanied by the smashing of glass, although it is a broken bottle and it is Blanche who smashes it in a futile effort to fend Stanley off (162). Thus, one form of violence, which Stella has normalized, slides into another form of violence that cannot be normalized and thus must be denied. The Kowalski marriage survives Stanley’s rape of Blanche because both spouses tacitly agree to not believe that it occurred. Virility, Death of a Salesman suggests, has been suburbanized out of the Miller male, and Willy and his sons lament its absence; they are tormented by the fear that they are failed men, a condition that can be escaped only through suicide or a self-deluding flight from bourgeois society. Stanley, by contrast, labors at essentially the same job that disappointed Willy, in a similarly boxed-in urban environment.3 He is not especially athletic, adventurous, or wealthy, and yet he manages to persuade others and himself that he is Ben, the paragon of self-reliant, rugged masculinity. Although he asserts that he is self-made, his success derives from his ability to manipulate and destroy others, to determine what they believe. He does this in the context of the very cutthroat, dog-eat-dog world that so alienated Willy, which is not the antithesis of the jungle, as Willy supposed, but the jungle itself, full of “inhuman … cries” (Williams 2004: 159). It is no accident that Stanley is repeatedly linked with the roar of a locomotive, that quintessential symbol of modernity and industrialization. The “game” is most assuredly “sevencard stud” and only a certain kind of man can play it.

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Those people who do not fit neatly within the parameters of such a world—the most obvious “misfits”—are deemed mad, as Blanche is, or “disgusting,” as is Blanche’s closeted gay husband Allan Grey, whose death she recalls while we again hear the sound of that intrusive locomotive, suggestive of Allan’s inability to maintain a fictive self that his world would abide. But Stanley too is a misfit (who isn’t?), but one who earns the right to pronounce himself “one hundred percent American” once he has eliminated from the rat-race he inhabits any rivals for the front position he claims to have secured purely through the power of his own belief. Those rivals include not just Blanche, the female who insisted he was unbefitting of the role of male breadwinner, of husband and father: “A man like that is someone to go out with— once—twice—three times ….But live with? Have a child by?” (Williams 2004: 81). They also include those people of color who are definitively relegated to the margins at the moment of Stanley’s supreme triumph. In response to the inside straight Stanley draws in their final poker game, Pablo expresses his frustration: “Maldita sea tu suerto!”, to which Stanley replies, “Put it in English, greaseball” (162). It is notable that, just as he is ousting the English teacher Blanche from his home, the inarticulate Stanley demands that the Latino Pablo speak the hegemonic national language. Furthermore, he hurls the same insult at Pablo that Stella hurled at him when she was under Blanche’s sway, to which he violently objected. “Your face and … fingers are disgustingly greasy,” she declared in Scene 8, “wash up and help me clear the table.”4 In response, Stanley exploded: “Pig—Polack—disgusting—vulgar—greasy!”—them kind of words have been on your tongue … too much around here. What do you two think you are? A pair of queens? … I am the king around here … ! (131)

­ is subsequent action was to hurl his cup and saucer to the floor, H a clear response to Stella’s demand that he assist with housework. Stanley places himself securely at the center of his small world by demoting the alleged queens, whose claims of privilege are linked with

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their class, color, and gender, and by subordinating the one man of color hitherto allowed a role in it, at whom the term “greasy” is now directed. After cursing Stanley’s “rutting luck,” Pablo does not utter another line in the play. Without contradicting Blanche’s view that Stanley is a regressive force, Williams clearly wanted his audience to recognize him as a troubling forecast of what was to come. In a letter to Joseph Breen, censor for Hollywood’s Production Code Administration, in response to his desire to eliminate the rape from the film version of Streetcar, Williams argued for its necessity by noting that the play is about “the ravishment of the tender, the sensitive, the delicate, by the savage and brutal forces of modern society” (quoted in Lahr 2014: 227). Miller too saw tenderness as incompatible with a modern capitalist ethos, though he suggests that females are entwined with that ethos and that it leaves no space for a fully secure masculine sensibility. By contrast, Williams suggests that survival in modern society requires the performance of a noxious hyper-masculinity that is hostile to otherness, brutally protective of its own power, and founded on selfinflating falsehoods. The play ends with Stella holding a baby in a blue blanket as her husband’s fingers enter her blouse while he intones the word “Now” seven times. Stanley is able to attain a satisfying identity as a father-provider—and the father of a son, no less—who can thrive in the “Now” not because of some essential quality (“drive”) that Willy lacks, but because Stanley knows how to control how he and others are perceived in such a way as to successfully perform the version of masculinity that his moment requires. Stanley needs Pablo and Blanche as surely as the Loman men needed Bernard, but he is far more effective at using these foils to his own gain, crafting a white male supremacist identity for himself that hinges on his ability to obtain belief and eradication as required. Luck, it seems, is believing that you’re king around here, and also believing that you’re white—and getting others to believe it, too. ****

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From the moment that A Streetcar Named Desire begins, Belle Reve is irretrievably gone and references to it intertwine nostalgic longing with a stark recognition of the human exploitation that this supposedly tender age relied on and condoned. Hence and appropriately, the plantation’s name conjures something lovely but illusory: Beautiful Dream. Belle Reve comes to mind again in connection with a vital line delivered by Maggie the Cat, in Tennessee Williams’ 1955 play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Maggie is speaking to her husband Brick, who, for reasons never decisively explained but that clearly pertain to his guilt and longing for his dead best friend Skipper, has ceased having sex with her and is steadily drinking himself to death. Speaking of Brick’s relationship with Skipper, Maggie maintains: It was one of those beautiful things … they tell you about in the Greek legends ….[I]t was love that never could be carried through to anything satisfying … [L]ife has got to be allowed to continue even after the—dream of life is—all—over. (Williams 1983: 41)

In Cat just like Streetcar, the “beautiful … dream of life” is all over from the time the play begins, and an idealistic character—this time a male— is called on to accept and come to terms with that. What precisely the nature is, or was, of that “dream of life” is hard to pinpoint, largely because the characters and at times the playwright speak about it with elusive imprecision. But it seems indisputable that the “it” to which Maggie enigmatically refers is the love between Skipper and Brick, a love that certainly constituted homosexual longing on Skipper’s end and might have on Brick’s as well. Thus the “dream of life” involves the possibility of open, consummated love between two men. More generally, it involves a state of being in which, to quote from Miller’s commentary on Cat, there is an absence of “the element of … materiality.” It is not surprising that Miller was alert to this theme in Williams’ work, as it is so ubiquitous in his own and it is particularly overt in All My Sons. Brick, Miller argued, recognizes that in order to “reproduce himself, to become … the father, the master

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of the earth,” he must give up his “banner of purity” and enter into a transactional, “tainted and impure world” (Martin and Centola 1996: 190). As Bigsby also has pointed out, that general impurity or sickness from which “the whole culture suffers” is symbolized by the cancer that is killing Brick’s father, Big Daddy, which his other son Gooper describes as a “poisoning of the whole system due to the failure of the body to eliminate its poisons” (Williams 1983: 121; Bigsby 1984: 87). Brick is expected to enter into a heteronormative, racist, and capitalist system as a sign of his attained potency and manhood, but doing so will involve him in the mendacity, avarice, and compromise that rightly sicken him. It is notable that, when Maggie insists that “life has got to be allowed to continue,” she is using almost the exact words that Stella’s neighbor Eunice used when she was endorsing Stella’s decision not to believe Blanche’s claim about Stanley’s rape: “Don’t ever believe it. Life has got to go on. No matter what happens, you’ve got to keep on going” (Williams 2004: 166). This firm philosophy of pragmatics over morality is one Maggie preaches as well and, just as was true for Stella, Brick’s physical survival depends on accepting it even as his ethical survival requires him to reject it. Famously, Williams had trouble with the final act of Cat, which he reluctantly revised in response to his director, Elia Kazan’s, serious reservations about it. Regardless of which version of Act 3 one reads (and I will discuss both), the central questions that beg to be answered before the play can conclude are: To whom will Big Daddy leave his massive estate? And: Will Brick have sex and thus reproduce with Maggie? The two questions are linked, as Big Daddy is purportedly unwilling to leave the estate to Brick if he cannot sober up and produce progeny, although he detests his avaricious son Gooper and his daughter-in-law Mae, whom Maggie aptly describes as a “monster of fertility” (Williams 1983: 11). The countless “no-neck monsters” that Mae and Gooper have successfully produced and that they insistently display for Big Daddy’s approval are the perfect embodiment of their ugly, materialistic relationship. Just as Mae and Gooper are loveless baby-making machines, driven to procreate to secure the estate, their

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children are grotesque creatures with animal names who perform charmless songs by rote when their parents tell them to, and then return to their usual habit of hurling buttered biscuits or firing cap pistols at the nearest adult. The location of the play, and the focus of Gooper, Mae and also Maggie’s acquisitive energies, is a twenty-eight-thousand-acre cotton plantation in the middle of the Mississippi Delta. Its original owners were a pair of men, clearly implied to have been lovers, named Jack Straw and Peter Ochello, who—with help from Big Daddy once they hired him as overseer—built it into the most prosperous plot of land in the Delta. Though Big Daddy reports that he went to work for Straw and Ochello “like a nigger in the fields,” the labor performed by actual Black people, who would have been sharecroppers when Big Daddy arrived on the plantation in the early twentieth century, never receives mention. On the contrary, Big Daddy maintains that the magnificence of the plantation is the result of his efforts alone and he pronounces it his “kingdom” (58; 167). To be sure, Big Daddy’s immense property grants him more license to claim to own a kingdom than did Stanley’s dingy two-room flat. But his assertion of total self-reliance, of having brought the plantation from nothing to its current state of lushness entirely by himself, is even more false, and it is part and parcel of the general tapestry of lies that Brick is required to sign on to in order to enable his survival. Notably, just as he did in Streetcar, Williams creates the play’s world through a lavish employment of Black bodies even as he erases Black individuality. Cat contains numerous Black servants, often referred to simply as “the Negroes.” In the text, they are interchangeable (at one point, Williams writes, “One of the Negroes, Lacey or Sookey, peeks in” [1983: 50]); the names that they do have are childish nicknames, like the names of the no-neck monsters; and they are “relegated to peripheral positions,” in Crandell’s words and never become developed characters (1997: 337). Still, perhaps partly against the wishes of the surface text, the “Negroes” become hyper-visible because Williams draws them into the play’s most chaotic moments, as when they join the children

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in singing happy birthday to Big Daddy and, in the revised version of Act 3, when they run about yelling, “Storm comin’!” to underscore an actual and metaphoric change in the weather (Williams 1983: 158). Most notably, as Big Daddy and Brick’s confrontation reaches its climax in Act 2 and just as Brick declares that “Mendacity is a system that we live in,” we hear the song, “Pick a Bale of Cotton,” sung from off-stage and Mae appears to announce that the field hands are singing it for Big Daddy (100). Whether or not Mae is correct that the off-stage Black singers intend to offer a tribute to her father-in-law, the song—believed to have originated as a plantation work song and first recorded in the 1930s—glosses over the horrors of chattel slavery even as it reminds us of them: Gonna jump down, spin around Pick a bale of cotton Gonna jump down, spin around Pick a bale a day Oh lordy, pick a bale of cotton Oh lordy, pick a bale a day. (Baker 1933/1997)

Similarly, America’s original sin haunts the margins of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and its very marginalization is an aspect of the mendacity that Brick deplores, though it is one with which the playwright at least partially colludes. Cat takes place on a single day, during which Maggie seeks to persuade Brick to put his childish dreams behind him and fill the patriarchal shoes of his dying father. Those dreams had Skipper at their center. Brick’s broken-down state is symbolized by the crutch he must rely on, having broken his ankle while drunkenly jumping hurdles on the high school playing field where he and Skipper once competed together as young athletes. As we learn from Maggie in Act 1, from boyhood Brick and Skipper had a relationship that was uncommonly loving but that could not be consummated, both because of the rampant homophobia of the time period and because of Brick’s own resistance to

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allowing their bond to become corporeal, a resistance rooted either in his internalized homophobia or in his ethereal contempt for all things bodily, or both. Notably, Maggie maintains that, before Brick terminated all sexual relations with her, he was a wonderful lover because he was “indifferent to it” (18). Whether or not this is Maggie protesting too much (does indifference improve a person’s love-making?), Brick reports to his father that he and Maggie “never got any closer together than two people just get in bed …, not much closer than two cats on a— fence humping” (96). While Brick’s portrait is far more negative, neither description suggests that he took any pleasure or found any meaning in heterosexual sex at any point in his life, suggesting either that he is a closeted homosexual or that he simply recoils from all sexual activity. The play allows for both readings. Either way, Brick’s chilly detachment elicits desire in many of the other people in his life, as they vie for a closeness that Brick denies to everyone. Maggie even argues that she and Skipper had sex in order to use one another as conduits to the immovable, untouchable Brick. But the story of their sexual encounter is more complicated than that, as Maggie goes on to make clear. She reports that, after they all graduated from Ole Miss and after Maggie and Brick married, Brick and Skipper rejected numerous attractive job offers in order to continue being football heroes perpetually. Not unlike Biff and Happy, who search fruitlessly for ways to merge their adolescent athleticism with some business enterprise so as to never have to grow up, Skipper and Brick used sports as a refuge from the adult world. In their case, it was important that this refuge is one of the rare places in American society that sanctions intimacy between males. Yet this realm largely excluded Maggie in a manner she could not abide. Hence, she confronted Skipper with her suspicions, ordering him to either put a bridle on his feelings for Brick or admit them openly to him. Afterward she followed up, one night when Brick was not present, by effectively coercing Skipper into an attempt to prove his heterosexuality to her: “When I came to his room that night …, like a shy little mouse at his door, he made that pitiful, ineffectual attempt to

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prove that what I had said wasn’t true” (Williams 1983: 42–3). After that humiliating and, for him, woefully revealing sexual failure, Skipper plunged into the drug and alcohol addiction that rapidly led to his death. It is ironic that Maggie the Cat here characterizes herself as a mouse, as her actions are more persuasively described as slyly feline: she was the one who came to Skipper’s hotel room, stalking her prey to goad him into his “pitiful, ineffectual attempt.” Like Stanley raping Blanche to remove her as an obstacle by proving she is not what she claims, Maggie’s action verges on corrective rape, though her goal was not to turn Skipper straight but to prove that he was gay. As she herself acknowledges, in this fashion she destroyed him by confronting him with a truth that she knew could not be told. It is this fierce determination to win at any cost, as Maggie says elsewhere, that accounts for her ability to maintain her position on the hot tin roof. But if Skipper was successfully eliminated from the equation by Maggie’s action, Brick is no Stella; he is far more resistant to believing Maggie’s representation of things, in part because he cannot free himself from the view that doing so implicates him. As he reports to Big Daddy in their lengthy scene together in Act 2, he believes Maggie infected Skipper with the notion that he and Brick were a self-deluding version of “that ole pair of sisters,” Jack Straw and Peter Ochello (Williams 1983: 96). In fact, Maggie firmly insists that only Skipper had desires for something “not perfectly pure” between them (42). She may insist on this because it benefits her (it is preferable not to believe that one has married a closeted gay man), but she asserts it consistently. But Brick—as Douglas Arrell has argued persuasively, quoting Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick—is “in a state of homosexual panic” (2008: 63). He expresses frantic revulsion when the subject of homosexuality comes up in his conversation with his father, so that he can barely sputter out his objections: Don’t you know how people feel about things like that? How, how disgusted they are … ? … [A]t Ole Miss when it was discovered a

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pledge to our fraternity. … attempted to do a, unnatural thing with— . …We told him to git off campus, and he … got!—All the way to …. North Africa. (92–3)

The lack of specificity as to whom the pledge sought to do something “unnatural” with is notable, as is the place to which he fled. Africa, which was in Miller a geographically fluid realm for escaping domesticized capitalism, is now the place to which outcast homosexuals flee, a yet again dimly conceived elsewhere that resides outside of the otherwise inescapable assumptions about acceptable masculinity to which Brick, and before him Willy, is chained. It is of interest too that remote locations which, in reality, are the homes of people of color are used, in Miller and Williams, in a manner analogous to the way that Black bodies generally are: without any serious investigation of what they actually contain. Just as the pledge’s possible gayness aroused disgust and necessitated his banishment, Brick cannot acknowledge Skipper’s homosexual feelings without fearing them in himself. His response is to pursue the “click” in his head that sufficient alcohol provides, a click that brings him right back to what he seeks to repress. As Brick finally reveals to Big Daddy near the close of their Act 2 confrontation, after Skipper’s failed sexual act with Maggie he made an attempt to do just what she asked, which was to admit his true feelings. He phoned Brick and offered a drunken confession; in response, Brick hung up on him, and the two men never spoke to each other again in their lives. The disgust with himself that this anxious recoil engendered is at the root of Brick’s alcoholism, as he uses his numerous trips to Echo Spring to obtain the “click” in his head that constitutes both a flight from knowledge and a compulsive repetition. After all, the click that makes him “peaceful” also replicates the sound of him hanging up the phone, turning his back on his truest and only friend—as well as, perhaps, on the truth about himself (130). Whether or not Brick is “actually” gay is finally unknowable, as he is so consumed by homosexual panic that he can never allow himself

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to find the answer, and Williams too refuses to divulge it for reasons that have been described as both artistic and anxiously homophobic.5 What is clear is the horror the possibility induces in Brick and the equal horror of the alternative he is offered. Brick seethes with disgust for Maggie, the woman who transforms the “one great true thing” in his life into something “dirty” through her insinuations, her sex with Skipper, and her very existence (Williams 1983: 42). If he does not feel sexual attraction to the exquisitely beautiful Maggie, the world assumes he must be gay; what other explanation can there be? Big Daddy also admits to sexual repulsion for his wife, Big Mama, though her obesity, her comical grotesqueness, and her advanced age provide him with a more conventionally acceptable justification within his misogynistic culture. His repulsion, however, appears to have always been there. In one suggestive passage, he tells Brick that his wife “makes me sick” as a result of “having slept with her too many years. Should of quit … sooner but ….she never got enough of it—and I was good in bed” (74). Though Big Daddy boasts about being good in bed, he does not claim to like sex; he describes his wife as the desirous one, not himself. In this respect, his relationship mirrors Brick and Maggie’s. Unlike Brick, though, Big Daddy tellingly declares that, in spite of feeling nothing but repulsion for Big Mama for the past forty years, he nevertheless “laid her!—regular as a piston” (84). Moments after boasting about forty years of stoically doing his marital duty, Big Daddy feels a spasm of pain, which is the bowel cancer he does not yet know he has. He goes on to tell his son, who has been speaking about his hatred for the mendacity that surrounds him, “I’ve lived with mendacity—Why can’t you live with it?” (84). Arrell, among others, has drawn attention to the fact that, in response to the ferocious defensiveness his searching questions about Skipper induce in Brick, Big Daddy seeks to reassure his son: “I knocked around in my time” (Williams 1983: 90). Though Big Daddy does not specify what he means, bowel cancer, as Arrell points out, “is associated in Williams’ writings with homosexuality” and is “the price that must be paid for a homosexual secret” (2008: 66). While agreeing, I would make

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the argument differently, maintaining that it is Big Daddy’s mendacious performance of something he does not feel, in order to contain and deny that secret, that rots him from the inside. Despite (or arguably because of) despising his wife, and despite perhaps being queer himself, Big Daddy presents himself as an icon of heteronormative masculinity and encourages his son to follow his example. Once he learns, falsely as it turns out, that he is suffering merely from a spastic colon, Big Daddy determines that he is going to make up for the forty years he wasted “laying” his wife and find himself “a choice one” to have sex with instead. Irrespective of her price, he tells Brick that his plan is to strip the purchased woman naked and “choke her with diamonds …, smother her with minks and hump her from hell to breakfast” (Williams 1983: 74). This mixture of eroticism, violence, and the material reveals an intense hatred for women and the assumed insincerity of their desires. Big Daddy fantasizes about choking and smothering the “choice one” with the very objects he has used to obtain her. Hence it becomes clear that the main difference between Big Daddy and Brick is that Big Daddy dutifully performs heteronormativity with a hypermasculine gusto, while mistrusting female sexuality just as his son does and believing that heterosexual relationships are transactional at their core. And the play largely confirms this belief. While it is certainly possible to argue that Maggie loves Brick, her desire for him is so tightly intertwined with her desire for the estate as to render the two inextricable. She needs the estate to care for Brick, as she recognizes that it requires money to care for a drinker, and she needs Brick to obtain the estate that will allow her to escape from the grinding poverty that caused her misery in her childhood. Though Maggie is far more multidimensional and also far more attractive than the single-mindedly grasping Mae, Big Daddy blurs the line between them when he says that his daughters-in-law have the “same look about them” (60). Brick concurs, noting that both women are as nervous as cats on a hot tin roof because of their shared fixation on the lavish piece of land for which they vie (60). As for Big Mama, she suffers no financial insecurity but displays a similarly frenetic materialism. Big Daddy recalls that, when

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they traveled to Europe together, she spent her time buying everything in sight as if Europe were nothing but a gigantic firesale. Living and feverish consumption are as thoroughly synonymous, in the culture Williams depicts in Cat, as are living and lying. The hideous Reverend Tooker, who arrives like a vulture at Big Daddy’s birthday party to see how he can profit from the patriarch’s imminent death, is a nearly allegorical embodiment of the grasping greed that is quite general, and that is not confined to females. Big Daddy recognizes the soullessness of this manner of existence, and yet he seems determined to root Brick in it, arguing repeatedly that there is no alternative. Throughout Act 2 he seeks to persuade Brick to hold onto his life, something Brick can do only by accepting the mendacity that they both agree is a precondition for living. As Big Daddy puts it, “You’re my son and ….now that I’m straightened out, I’m going to straighten out you!” (Williams 1983: 77). The term “straight” was in use since at least the early 1940s to mean “not homosexual” or “to cease homosexual practices and to indulge … in heterosexuality” (OED). Indeed, Williams employs the term “straight” in just this way at one point in his Memoirs (1975: 53). This is not all the term means as Big Daddy uses it, but it is part of what it may mean. Big Daddy, like Maggie, urges Brick to put away childish things, to stop knocking around and to face the truth that mendacity is an inescapable aspect of life to which a man must find a way to accommodate himself, if he wishes to live. As of the end of Act 2, Brick makes clear that he will have none of this. When Big Daddy urges him to acknowledge his own involvement in mendacity in the form of his refusal to face truth with his friend Skipper, Brick responds with a retaliatory challenge: “Who can face truth? Can you?” (Williams 1983: 98). Then he hurls in his father’s face the terrible truth that his relatives have so far kept from him (though not out of kindness; their motive is strategic), which is that he is dying of cancer. Big Daddy responds by collapsing; we are told that his face crumbles like broken plaster as he leaves the stage decrying the liars who have deceived him, until his voice gradually dies out—in the original

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version of the play, never again reappearing. The devastation wrought by this truth-telling makes clear what Maggie knew from the start, and that Blanche knew too, which is that sensitive people cannot endure stark reality. Maggie uses her knowledge of human nature tactically, unlike Blanche; as we have seen, she willfully confronts Skipper with truth when she knows it will benefit her. (Blanche’s one analogous action, when she told her closeted gay husband that he disgusted her in the immediate wake of seeing him in bed with another man, was not deliberate but the impulsive result of her shock, and she spends the rest of her life haunted by guilt, sorrow, and regret for this cruelty.) Maggie also tells lies tactically, when they serve what she views as her own and Brick’s ends. Brick, though, is unwavering. Rather than accept that one must lie to live, he seeks oblivion. Or at least he does in the original Act 3 that Williams wrote. There, Maggie proceeds to furiously assert her will, concocting a lie that she is pregnant. Big Mama responds joyously, stating about Brick: “The responsibilities of a father will—.” She does not finish the sentence, but dashes off-stage, vowing to share the news with Big Daddy immediately (Williams 1983: 137). In the eyes of his mother, Brick is now on his way to becoming a man by virtue of becoming a father, and he has earned the inheritance that Big Daddy will likely grant him once he learns of the pregnancy. Brick says little and continues to have his mind on the click. The play concludes with Maggie blackmailing Brick into a sex act (not unlike what she did to Skipper, though this time she hopes it will succeed) by taking away his two crutches—the literal one and also his liquor—which she promises to return after he assists her in turning the pregnancy lie into a reality. Brick, passive to the end, replies that there is nothing left to say. When Maggie claims that she loves him, he utters a line that precisely echoes something his father said to Big Mama in Act 2, also in response to a declaration of love: “Wouldn’t it be funny if that was true?” (132). If Maggie’s love is acknowledged as true, it will entwine Brick in the very mendacity he detests: about the pregnancy, about his own feelings, perhaps about his very identity. Accepting Maggie’s truth means

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accepting and engaging in lies, including performing the requisite version of masculinity that will grant them a child, a future, and a valuable estate. The play’s ending seems to suggest that Brick will do that, but not because of any shred of desire. Rather, he is defeated and simply gives up. He will perform what his culture demands of him— and that way cancer lies, as the play has already shown us and as the repetition of Big Daddy’s language reaffirms. The revised ending, though, suggests something altogether different. Williams rewrote his third act in accordance with his director’s wishes, though there was disagreement between them in the years afterward about the degree to which Kazan pressured Williams to revise.6 Williams himself reports, in his Note of Explanation in the approved published edition of the play, that he wanted Kazan to direct the play and so complied largely against his better judgment. Kazan felt that Brick should be altered in some salutary fashion by his confrontation with Big Daddy, that Big Daddy should return in Act 3, and that Maggie should be more sympathetic. Williams disagreed with all of these suggestions excepting the last one, and his ambivalence is palpable in the revised Act 3, known as the Broadway version. Brick, last sighted at the end of Act 2 hurling truth at his father as a vindictive weapon and repeating his conviction that liquor is the only way out of an unbearable system of mendacity, appears on the second page of the Broadway version of Act 3 to acknowledge that he has lied to no one but himself and to declare that he should be sent at once to Rainbow Hill (137). Where on earth this flood of self-knowledge and this sudden willingness to enter the local rehab clinic comes from is anyone’s guess, particularly as we are told that there is no lapse of time between Acts 2 and 3. A storm that was merely metaphoric in the original Act 3—Maggie says, after telling her lie about being pregnant, “I didn’t know that my little announcement was going to provoke such a storm!” (128)—becomes literal in the Broadway one, as thunder, wind, and rain descend on the household and the servants run around battling the elements, creating drama. The playwright seems no longer to trust his own play.

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Big Daddy returns as requested, no longer crushed by his collision with truth. On the contrary, he is stronger than ever. He tells a joke about an elephant at a zoo whose enormous phallus catches the attention of a little boy, who asks what it is. The child’s flustered mother replies that it is “nothin!’,” to which her husband retorts boastfully, ‘“She’s spoiled’” (Williams 1983: 165). The joke serves no function other than to underscore Big Daddy’s link to heterosexual prowess; hints of possible queerness are erased. And now Maggie tells her lie about her pregnancy directly to Big Daddy, in front of whom she kneels. She describes her pregnancy as her birthday gift to him, whereupon he helps her back to her feet, studies her, and proclaims: “Uh-huh, this girl has life in her body, that’s no lie!” (167). Maggie always symbolized life in the play, but in the sense of compromised necessity, as the gritty antithesis to “the dream of life.” When Big Daddy declares that she has “life in her body,” he appears to suggest not that she is the only available life jacket in a corrupt world, but that she is a genuinely redemptive life force. “Announcement of life beginning!” Maggie says solemnly, and Brick intones, “JESUS.” Embittered resignation has given way to a portentous scene of rebirth—or, in Brenda Murphy’s words, “a hopeful affirmation of the possibility for the regeneration of the human soul” (1992: 128). Most shockingly, the Brick who formerly (that is, just moments ago in Act 2) drank because of his disgust with mendacity now becomes forcefully mendacious, defending Maggie when Mae and Gooper insist that she cannot possibly be pregnant. He lies with her about their having sex, he expresses admiration for her, and he praises the version of truth for which she stands, which hours ago he vigorously denounced. When he is at last alone with her, she still seizes his alcohol from him (just temporarily in both versions, it should be noted; in each case she says that after sex they will get drunk together), but she does not need to steal his crutch. Brick asserts that he admires Maggie before sitting voluntarily on the edge of the bed. He never expresses defeat and no longer delivers his grimly ironic line echoing Big Daddy. Instead, Maggie is given the play’s final words, in which she reaffirms

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her intention to function as a source of love for Brick as well as the determination that makes her like a cat on a hot tin roof. Thus, Williams delivered the conclusion Kazan evidently encouraged but surely did not force him to write, one that appears to suggest that Brick will conquer his alcoholism and his possible homosexuality. Truth no longer kills; it strengthens. And heterosexuality is shown to be a restorative, not a rapacious force. Yet even as Williams ostensibly capitulated to Kazan’s sense of what a Broadway audience would be eager to consume, rewriting his play so as to largely gloss over its critique of a society that Brick found unendurable and in which homosexuals (and also maybe asexuals) must either lie or die, he gave Maggie a phrase that does not appear in the original and that is subtly deflating. In her last line she promises to give Brick’s life back to him “like something gold” he has discarded (Williams 1983: 172). The simile seems at once too trite for Williams and apt in context: Maggie, it may remind us, is and always was linked to materialism. Williams’ choice to rewrite the play was as well, as Price has pointed out: “By changing Cat to conform to Kazan’s formula, Williams achieved the smash hit he desired” (1995: 329). In so doing, he confirmed the implicit message of his original Act 3. To live, and to succeed on Broadway, is to lie, for survival or profit or both, and “the dream of life” in which things might be otherwise is indeed all over. Most importantly for our present purposes, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof presents masculinity, in Savran’s words, as “a site of division and instability,” but that instability is papered over in the Broadway Act 3, and this happens through an embrace of a heteronormativity which, in the previous acts, filled Brick and Big Daddy with disgust, though the latter considered it inevitable. Savran goes on to maintain that homosexuality is “the obstacle that must be overcome if the greed and ugliness embodied by Gooper and Mae are to be forestalled and Brick and Maggie [are to] conceive a child in the very bed once occupied by Jack Straw and Peter Ochello” (Savran 1992: 101–2). On the contrary I conclude that Maggie and Brick, particularly in the revised Act 3, become merely a more physically attractive version of Gooper and

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Mae, as they surrender to the exigencies that render life analogous to “something gold.” It is worth returning to the moment in the Broadway Act 3 when Big Daddy performs hypermasculinity to the hilt, telling his elephant phallus joke with Brick as his intended audience. “Ain’t that a nice way to put it, Brick?” he asks as he describes the female elephant in heat and Brick replies: “Yes, sir, nothin’ wrong with it.” Referring to the elephant’s erection, Big Daddy asks, “Ain’t I tellin’ this story in decent language, Brick,” inviting Brick’s assent: “Yes, sir, too ruttin’ decent!” (Williams 1983: 165). As Brick learns at his father’s knee how to be a man deserving of “twenty-eight thousand acres of the richest land this side of the river Nile” and as Maggie kneels before the plantation titan and king of all he surveys, we hear the field-hands singing off-stage, “I Just Can’t Stay Here by Myself.” That song, a Negro spiritual, features the following lyrics, which may operate subversively to undercut the apparent domestic harmony achieved in the surface action: “My mother has gone, and left me here / My father has gone and left me here / I’m going to weep like a willow / And mourn like a dove / O Lord, I cannot stay here by myself.” Thus, as the story of a family inheritance reaches its seemingly triumphant conclusion—one contingent on masculine vigor and an acceptance of an unchangingly heterosexist, capitalistic, and racist system—the field-hands’ song offers a melancholy counterpoint. It is one depicting family rupture, loneliness, and weeping. That is the story that Williams’ original version of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof told too, and even as he closets it in the revision, it makes itself heard.

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Playing Ball on the Margins: Raisin in the Sun, Fences, Curse of the Starving Class

As we make our way from Miller and Williams’ mid-century plays to the dramatists who succeed them, we enter a period in which the American Every(low)(hu)man was no longer presumed to be middle-class, heterosexual, male, and white. Nevertheless, there is no shortage of American plays written between the late 1950s through the 1980s that inherit Miller’s preoccupations and particularly his interest in the disappointed patriarch confronting, or more often railing against, the dissolution of his power and potency. Culturally, of course, a great deal changed in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, as many Americans engaged in a struggle to create a society whose opportunities could be available to a greater range of human beings. Still, historically disadvantaged groups struggled to find a foothold in a nation whose privileges continued to skew strongly toward white males. Numerous geopolitical, cultural, and economic events contributed to a widening sense of disunity, uncertainty, and discord. While the attack on Pearl Harbor resulted in sweeping, unifying support for American involvement in the Second World War, as did the economic growth that the war brought about, the Vietnam War had the opposite effect, generating massive cultural divides that continue to fester today. Meanwhile, the economic recession of the mid-1970s brought the post-war boom to a definitive halt, and the Civil Rights, women’s and gay rights movements that gathered steam in the same three decades posed new challenges to traditional assumptions about white heterosexual male authority. A far from complete list of playwrights grappling with the implications of these social and economic rumblings would include Lorraine Hansberry, Edward Albee, David Mamet, John Guare, and the two later

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twentieth-century dramatists who are the primary focus of this chapter: Sam Shepard and August Wilson. Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, written in 1959 and a crucial predecessor for Wilson, picks up where Miller left off in order to show that the glittering advantages of domestic containment, with its tidy houses and friendly neighbors waving to one another over white picket fences, were generally out of reach for Blacks in the mid-century. As is well known, mass-produced communities such as Levittown frequently barred people of color (and also Jews) from purchasing homes there, because real estate developers saw the all-white status of these enclaves as a vital selling point. Nevertheless, Hansberry’s play ends with the African American Younger family moving into the suburban neighborhood of their dreams, despite the opposition of its white residents. That move is enabled when Walter, the family patriarch, confronts a white representative of the community organization that hopes to keep the Youngers out, who at first reduces Walter to “a small boy” (Hansberry 1994: 147). But Walter “[comes] into his manhood,” in his mother’s words, when he stands up to the white man and declares that the family will not be prevented from purchasing what he declares is “our house” (151; 148). The play’s optimism is qualified, surely, by Walter’s naïve if heartfelt insistence that the Youngers’ action is apolitical: “We don’t want to make no trouble for nobody or fight no causes” (148). The white members of the neighborhood Improvement Organization clearly see the Youngers as occupiers, a word that their representative uses, and Hansberry’s own family endured a terrifying backlash when they moved into an all-white community on the South Side of Chicago, nearly resulting in the eight-year-old Hansberry’s death when someone threw a brick through their window. But A Raisin in the Sun does not tell the story of the struggles to come, though it may hint at them. Instead, its final moments are suffused with buoyant hope, as Mama retains her plant (a clear symbol of the family’s indomitable spirit) while pronouncing her son Walter a man at last. This psychological evolution is brought about when he embraces his status as the family patriarch and homeowner—when he is about to achieve, that is, the very position within which Miller’s males chafe.

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For their part, Albee, Mamet, and Guare have all written plays about the anxiety of white males confounded by emasculating females (Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Oleanna), dog-eat-dog capitalism (American Buffalo, Glengarry Glen Ross), and the allure of American celebrity (House of Blue Leaves)—forces that their male characters believe should facilitate their power and privilege, but which instead undermine it. Mamet’s American Buffalo exhibits particularly close affinities to Miller before him and Shepard afterward. If the alienating nature of Willy’s work as a salesman is neatly captured by the fact that Miller never tells us what he sells, Mamet’s 1975 play focuses on a man who owns a junk shop, suggesting further degradation in the labor on which a man must base his fragile sense of self. Don, like Willy, has no clear sense of the worth of the objects he sells, and the paranoia this generates drives him to criminal desires, although he is as hapless a thief as he is a salesman. Women are absent from the play, but the ones we learn about arouse ire in the male characters. When Don’s equally incompetent wouldbe partner in crime, Teach, hears about a man with whom Don is struggling to do a business deal, Teach declares: “Guys like that, I like to fuck their wives” (Mamet 1976: 28). Happy Loman would not have used this kind of language, but the sentiment is the same. As American Buffalo reaches its close and all the men’s bluster comes to naught, Teach is reduced to the absurdly redundant act of “trashing the junkshop,” as he recognizes that the credo on which he has based his life—“The freedom … Of the Individual … To Embark on Any Fucking Course that he sees fit … The country’s founded on this” (Mamet 1976: 72–3)—has done nothing for him. Mamet suggests that revered values in American society, to which these men devote frequent if inarticulate lip service—individual freedom, free enterprise, self-reliance—have degenerated into brutal self-interest, leaving under-educated males like Teach and Don howling with rage on the margins, baffled by their inability to “take what’s ours” (75). Their hostility not just to women (regularly described as “cunts”) but to what they call “fruits” (32, 54), “spics” (92), and “nigger[s]” (100) is yet another sign of their sense of “aggrieved entitlement,” to use Kimmel’s phrase again, their belief that

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something rightfully theirs has been stolen by someone who belongs beneath them on the economic totem pole. Mamet’s males, like many in Kimmel’s study, are incapable of fathoming why they “live like cavemen” (103), despite their supposed inherent prerogative, and they project their rage outwards at the bands of “gooks and spicks and queers” (to quote a line from “a popular racist skinhead band” to which Kimmel refers [2017: 253]), and also women, that they believe have supplanted them. Both A Raisin in the Sun and American Buffalo explore the question of whether the lauded American dream can be accessed by people who toil on the margins, racially or economically. If Mamet’s answer is an emphatic no (one that he offers without indicating too much sympathy for the outcasts, it should be added), Hansberry’s is a qualified yes. A Raisin suggests that a home in suburbia might just quell the rage of a man like Walter—who earlier was ready to accept his grim fate, in a world comprised of “the takers and the ‘tooken,’” as inevitably one of the “tooken” (Hansberry 1994: 141)—and bring him to paternal maturity. But it seems crucial to the play’s optimism that it ends precisely where it does, before the characters’ entrance into the hostile white community and before Walter takes his place as homeowner/breadwinner, with all the burdens and disappointments that we have seen to accompany that role. Reminiscent of so many of his male predecessors in the American dramatic canon, earlier in the play Walter dreams of coming “home from my office downtown somewhere” in a black Cadillac, greeting a male gardener who is trimming his hedges, and buying his wife pearls (110). His fantasies are at once vague (he does not mention what he would do in that office) and wildly unrealistic. Still, he declares with pained frustration, “I am a man—and I think my wife should wear some pearls in this world!” As Hansberry’s stage directions inform us, “The word ‘Man’ has penetrated [Walter’s] consciousness” and so has a definition of that word that hinges on presiding over other men and adorning his wife with jewels—in short, on a kind of wealth and power that remain inaccessible to him in a racist and socially stratified America, despite his move to Clybourne Park (143).

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But we do not follow him there, and at the end of Act 3 he is able to savor an experience of achieved masculinity which his mother describes as being “like a rainbow after the rain” (Hansberry 1994: 156). Of course, rainbows never last for long. Nothing even that fleeting occurs for the patriarchs in Shepard’s Curse of the Starving Class and Wilson’s Fences, both of whom struggle financially and experience only frustration as they seek to reconcile the demands of domesticity with their grandiose self-mythologies. Wilson’s Fences ostensibly concludes with hints of hope, whereas Curse of the Starving Class is far bleaker. Yet at their core each play stages a collision of optimism with disappointment, as the beleaguered male breadwinner is shown to be, Tantalus-like, forever on the verge of grasping something he thinks he is owed, only to see it snatched away for reasons he cannot comprehend. Meanwhile, the soul-searing impact of being deemed disposable is manifested through the (mis)fortunes of the next generation. Whereas Fences takes place in an urban space, Sam Shepard’s Curse of the Starving Class might be read as a glimpse into an older Biff ’s future in what he hoped would be the untrammeled west, assuming he decided to seed some version of domesticity there. As it happens, by the time Shepard wrote Curse in 1976, he had successfully crafted not just a reputation as America’s most promising young playwright, but a persona that Biff would envy. As described by Carla J. McDonough, Shepard, “[o]ften photographed in cowboy hat and boots,” was “something of an American cultural icon”: “the maverick, independent modern-day cowboy” (1997: 37).1 Yet, she goes on to observe, “Shepard’s focus in play after play is the literally or metaphorically displaced cowboy who has lost the open spaces of the western frontier and become entangled in familial and/or business relationships that compromise his ability to be independent and free” (1997: 38). The hard towers, it seems, do overtake the maverick cowboy, for reasons having to do— as McDonough notes—with “issues of manhood” (53). Those issues involve what the play suggests is a necessary and potent wildness that links the male with the natural world and which the contemporary, industrialized one threatens to civilize out of him. Domesticity, the

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play shows us, is at once irresistible and inimical not just to masculine potency but to something inherently American that is eroding. While in this regard Curse might sound like Death of a Salesman all over again, Shepard’s play takes Willy’s hopes and dreams and ramps them up, underscoring their absurdity as well as their insidious allure for the conflicted and, in this case, preposterously inept male provider. Curse of the Starving Class had its first production in 1977, which was also the first year of Jimmy Carter’s presidency. In the Carter administration, the need to forestall the decline of rural America was a key domestic policy concern. But Carter failed to win reelection to a second term and the family farm was among the ensuing casualties. By the early 1980s, Evaggelos Vallianatos writes, “The Reagan USDA chose to return to cannibalism as usual and the family farm was … brought to the edge of extinction” (2012: 2). In Curse, Shepard shows this decline already well underway on a moldering avocado farm barely maintained by the fracturing, dysfunctional Tate family. The set as conjured by the opening stage directions is instantly suggestive of failed containment, and the combustible threat, it appears, is none other than the father. Not only is the kitchen in a state of shabby disarray, but it features a pile of wooden debris that turns out to be the remains of a broken door—one, we learn later, that the family patriarch, known as Weston, knocked down in a drunken attempt to enter the house from which his wife, Ella, had barred him. Without the stabilizing presence of a reliable father, the rest of the family seems bereft of any clear understanding of how to live the conventional domestic life for which they also clearly long. The play’s first line, uttered by Ella as she watches her son Wesley cleaning the mess she believes her husband should be cleaning instead, is: “You shouldn’t be doing that” (5). Moments later, Ella complains about Weston: “That’s no way to get into a house,” before musing that he might instead have climbed through a window (6). In the same scene, after Wesley urinates on his sister Emma’s 4-H project while his mother looks on indifferently, Emma asks: “What kind of a family is this?” (12). For his part, Wesley laments the preceding evening’s events because he finds it mortifying to have the police “come to your own house.”

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He adds, “Makes me feel like we’re someone else” (6). Together, these lines indicate that the characters see themselves as falling short of an idea of family so remote that their attempts to describe it border on the cartoonish, even as they critique one another for violating its rules. At the same time, their own impulses (such as Wesley’s act of urinating on his sister’s project) are destructive to the domestic civility that they claim to value. In short, a battle between civility and savagery stands at the poetic heart of Curse of the Starving Class, and its characters teeter between these two poles. The females in the play, Ella and Emma, are broadly representative of each extreme and they are facilitators of or at least vessels for the destruction the play laments, albeit not always maliciously. Ella’s role is certainly destructive. Although her desire to cast her husband from the home is understandable, it is also a violation of traditional domestic assumptions and, since she turns out to be engaged in an extramarital affair with a cad, it does not place her in a positive light. In the ensuing action, Ella speaks vehemently for civility and tries to get her son to be more “sensitive” (Shepard 1976: 13). Yet she is willing to trade both her home and her children for a fantasy of a more refined lifestyle that she associates vaguely with Europe, where they have “Paintings … Buildings. Fancy food” (13). Her affair is with a sleazy lawyer who is transparently a conman. (Emma neatly sums him up in one word when she pronounces him a “motherfucker”—though she is, at that moment, ostensibly speaking to the refrigerator [19]). Too self-absorbed to see his sinister nature, Ella enlists the lawyer’s assistance in selling the house in which her children live, completely abdicates her role as a maternal figure, and only recognizes that she is the victim of a con when her daughter has died. Thus, Ella’s insistence that the family “cooperate” in her pursuit of bourgeois respectability is shown to be quite literally deadly, as Emma recognizes from the start of the play (17). For her part, once her dutiful effort to carry out her 4-H project is foiled by her brother and mother (the latter boils the chicken that Emma had been steadfastly tending for a year), Emma gives up on domesticity

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altogether and spends the rest of the play trying to flee from it. Her exuberantly defiant nature makes her both appealing and unusual in the Shepard canon, in that she “[rebels] against female stereotypes,” as Bonnie Marranca has pointed out (1980: 24). But Emma’s efforts repeatedly fail, in part because of a femininity she cannot escape and that might have made her dangerous to males and to herself had she lived. The curse to which the title in part refers is within Emma, who is having her first period within the action of the play. Her mother’s response is to insist that she avoid swimming, as she claims that doing so while menstruating can cause a girl to bleed to death. Ella’s maternal advice exhibits either stunning ignorance or an attempt to instill fear in Emma, or both; either way, it links female biology with peril. In Ella’s ensuing commentary on what she insists are unsanitary sanitary napkins, she suggests that a woman’s menstrual period risks infecting her with a rampant American disease. The napkins, she remarks, say “sanitized” on the package, but: [T]hey’re a far cry from ‘sanitized’ … Those quarters carry germs. Those innocent looking silver quarters with Washington’s head staring straight ahead … Spewing germs all over those napkins. (9)

The money that is required to buy sanitary napkins connects them, and connects females, to the destruction of the natural world that the play repeatedly insists is being executed by the corporate zombies whom Wesley later maintains are invading their home and the nation and eradicating both (31). A woman’s menstrual cycle, it seems, draws her into a process of commodification and consumerism that is both diseased and fundamentally American, as the reference to Washington’s head underscores. This is not unlike Miller’s suggestion, in All My Sons, that the female is necessarily tethered to a materialist capitalism because of her domestic instincts. Emma does everything she can to separate herself from the corporate zombies, whom she despises. But she lacks the combustible chemical in her blood—nitroglycerine—that she says makes her father

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and brother dangerous and is also its hapless victim. Every one of Emma’s efforts to rebel against civility—again, to not cooperate because doing so “leads to dying” (17)—ends in failure, most notably when she attempts to embrace a life of crime near the close of the play. Before she goes, she contrasts herself with her brother when he laments that he is going backward, by which he means he is becoming his father; unlike Wesley, she is convinced that she knows how to look ahead. But Emma is metamorphosing into Ella as surely as Wesley is becoming Weston. Although her early plans for escape are in defiance of traditionally female roles (among other things, she fantasizes about becoming an auto mechanic in Baja, Mexico, and she shoots up a local bar while on horseback), her Baja fantasy culminates with her successfully duping her mother and making “a small mint,” which shows that even in fantasy she cannot escape the general entanglement with dog-eat-dog monetary transactions and deceptions that have so fatally bewitched her parents (30). Moreover, after shooting up the bar, Emma manages to get out of jail by making sexual advances to the police sergeant. This is the same strategy that Ella hoped would facilitate her own escape, but it does neither female any good in the end. In her final stage moment, Emma proclaims that she is gone, “Never to return” (62). A huge explosion off-stage makes these lines darkly ironic, as we learn that she has been blown up by a bomb meant for her father. The resulting fire, according to an unsavory man in a suit, will not last long: “It’s just a gelignite-nitro mixture. Doesn’t burn for long. May leave a few scars … but nothin’ permanent” (64). Not unlike American Buffalo, Curse suggests that America’s underclass is highly explosive but has a short fuse; when confronted by the counterforce that is corporate America, the Tates are powerless and simply burn themselves out. We see this demonstrated in far more detail in the dramas of Weston and Wesley, the would-be male breadwinner and his son. As the play’s title makes clear, Shepard is interested in class in a nation that has traditionally preferred to view itself as class-less. In this spirit, Ella rebukes her son for constantly gazing in the refrigerator: “How can you be hungry all the time? … We’re not rich but we’re not

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poor … We’re somewhere in between” (12). That very in-betweenness, though, gnaws at Wesley and his father. Weston, in particular, is tantalized by the possibility that he might ascend in a society where he imagines all kinds of new marvels are being developed, although Wesley is skeptical from the start. In fact, Wesley’s striking early monologue, which we hear shortly after the start of Act 1, can be viewed as the play in miniature, and it is notable that he delivers it while trying to perform the role his father has abandoned. As he does his best to clean up the residue of Weston’s violence and to restore order to the home, Wesley recounts the events of the night before in what at first takes the form of a series of smoothly sensuous sentences. As he lay on his back in the dark, he recalls: “I could smell the avocado blossoms. I could hear the coyotes … I could feel myself in my bed in my room in this house … I could feel this country close like it was part of my bones” (7). Wesley describes a feeling of personal connectedness to the human and the natural world and to the nation, one that conjoins him with all those who sleep around him, both people and animals, and that involves many of his senses. As the monologue continues, his focus shifts to the Second World War-era model airplanes that hang above his bed. Those airplanes bring about a turn in the monologue; Wesley now imagines that he is about to be invaded by some “foreigner,” a thought that leads to a memory of his father’s violent invasion of the home the night before. Wesley relays the confrontation between his parents that ensued and his language grows fragmented: “Man cursing. … Mom screaming … Dad crashing away.” Once Weston drives off, the monologue reverts to silence; the natural sights and sounds dissipate, although “far off the freeway could be heard” (8). Through its syntactic erasure of the “I”—prominent in the opening sentences, and gone in its last, passive voice phrase—Wesley’s monologue captures the play’s overall suggestion that subjectivity and human connectedness are being decimated by the annihilation of the natural world, figured by the freeway, the only remaining sound reference in the final phrase. At the same time, Wesley suggests that

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any clear sense of who the “enemy” is—which seemed comfortingly obvious during the Second World War, in which Weston fought, flying planes like the ones in the hanging mobile—is gone. Now, Wesley’s own father has become the foreigner who threatens to invade him, as will occur, almost literally, later on in the play. Still, Wesley’s objective and his point of view remain consistent throughout much of the ensuing action: he wants to maintain the family home and he views the urban developers, from whom his mother selfdeludingly believes she can profit, as antagonists. When Ella declares, “Land is going up every day,” she is unconscious of her own irony: to become profitable, land must go down, and it is not people like Ella who will benefit when it does. Wesley sees this clearly while also expressing sympathy for his parents, whom he claims are unable to think because “they’re behind the eight ball all the time” (Shepard 1976: 29). Weston too, we learn later, is engaged in various hopeless business deals: he has bought a piece of worthless land in the desert and he has sold the family farm, due to the conniving efforts of the very same lawyer who is carrying on an affair with his wife. Weston is triply screwed by Taylor because the lawyer looks respectable and speaks impressively. Taylor smoothly persuades both Ella and Weston that he can foresee what will be profitable in the future in a way that they cannot; thus, they become pliable tools for the numerous zombies who, Wesley forecasts, will encase the natural world in cement and steel girders, resulting in a “zombie city!” (31). While his parents see dollar signs, Wesley sees this industrial and economic colonization of rural America as yet another enemy invasion, one that will destroy their way of life, leaving them with nothing. “[I]t means more than losing a house,” he tells his sister, “It means losing a country” (31). If in the Second World War the enemy was perceived as existing outside the US borders, by the time of the Cold War that understanding had become muddied by the widespread belief that numerous Americans had succumbed to foreign ideologies; thus, the terms generated to describe them—Reds, Communists, subversives—were essentially code for “not American.” Even that concocted clarity has been lost in Curse, in which the enemy,

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whomever precisely that is, has moved in on the family like “a creeping disease,” in Wesley’s words, so that Ella at one point describes herself as feeling like a foreigner because she is trying to capitalize on the alleged value of her own property (59; 41). In fact, Ella’s willingness to jump ship and join forces with the zombies does render her a traitor to her family and to her role as the maternal caretaker. But Curse makes clear that she and her husband are also befuddled victims of people like Taylor, who manipulate and deceive them into believing they can grab their piece of the pie. Taylor’s allure, as already suggested, has to do with an apparent respectability that Ella links with class, a category as mystical to her as the quality of “being liked” is to Willy Loman. When she declares, early in the play, that Wesley is sensitive, she compares him to her father, who we later learn was a pharmacist who belonged, according to Weston, to “a different class of people,” one populated by professionals who never raised their voices (Shepard 1976: 55). Ella insists that Wesley is connected to this different (read: better) class of people via his circumcision, which she says is almost identical to her father’s. This different class is simultaneously privileged and refined. Wesley’s supposed connection to his sensitive grandfather links him, in his hopeful mother’s view, with respectable people like Taylor, whom Ella praises as polite; he is someone, she says, who comes directly to the front door, unlike Weston, who breaks doors down. Yet, as previously noted, Wesley is also connected to Weston through the nitroglycerine that is in his blood and through what Weston later calls the poison that is passed along from father to son. Indeed, the impossibility of escaping parental influence is underscored by the similarity of the characters’ names, which is not accidental. Ella easily bleeds, as it were, into Emma, who, as we have seen, adopts her mother’s sexualized tactics and her look-out-fornumber-one attitude, to no avail. As for Wesley, he in effect becomes Weston in Act 3. Though his goal is to be reborn, as Weston insists he has been, instead Wesley takes on his father’s clothes and his very being. Wesley’s transmutation into Weston is manifested by a collapse from

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civility into savagery, as he proceeds to butcher the lamb he spent the first two acts striving to cure (it was infested with maggots) and then to ravenously devour the food in the refrigerator in a hopeless effort to satiate his literal and spiritual hunger. But giving in to the part of him that is linked to the “different class of people” that is Ella’s side of the family might portend an even worse fate. Within the symbolic network of the play, Wesley’s circumcision comes to be associated not just with respectability, but with castration and sedation, a link that is hinted at in Act 2 when Weston encourages Ella to take a nap on the hard kitchen table, which he proclaims is better than a bed: “That’s the trouble with too much comfort … Makes you lose touch … go into a coma.” As an antidote, Weston proposes a “good hard table to bring you back to life” (Shepard 1976: 56). The suggestion here is that when human beings lose touch with the primal savagery that is coursing through their veins through an excess of domestication, they become narcotized, emasculated, or comatose— like the zombies whom Wesley and Emma instinctively recognize as deadening. As Willy Loman also insists, “The world is an oyster, but you don’t crack it open on a mattress” (Miller 1976: 41). Willy makes this assertion when he is lamenting his failure to walk alongside Ben into the jungle, which means embracing adventure and risk, and leaving his family behind. In the view of both patriarchs, domesticity or “too much comfort” robs a man of something vital to a fully satisfying life—something from which women perhaps can benefit as well (Ella does fall deeply asleep on the table), though they are often shown to be ensnared by its antithesis. Yet so are men, and herein lies the real disaster that Curse dramatizes. We first meet Weston near the end of Act 1. He arrives in a fury, and his booming voice chases his son off the stage. Noticing that there is a lamb in the kitchen, Weston asks with exasperation whether he is standing inside or outside of his house. The dissolution of any clear dividing line between inside and outside is another indication of the failure of domestic containment, though Weston would like to believe otherwise, as he pronounces himself: “MR. SLAVE LABOR … HOME

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TO REPLENISH THE EMPTY LARDER” (Shepard 1976: 26). In fact, what Weston has brought home to fill the bellies of his hungry family is a bag full of artichokes—not exactly the first item that comes to mind when one craves a hearty meal. As his description of himself as “MR. SLAVE LABOR” also implies, there is no satisfying the hunger that plagues Shepard’s men within the confines of the domestic realm, which depletes and disempowers them. Yet there is no escaping it either, as Taylor maintains late in the play when he critiques the Tates for failing to recognize their need to “cooperate,” the same word Ella used when scolding Emma for her rebelliousness. Taylor goes on to insist that the Tates must “play ball” in order to “become part of us.” If they refuse, he says, they will be “left behind” (46). The choice is a stark one: either merge with the zombies or be mowed down by them. In this respect, Curse shows the hopelessness of Biff Loman’s flight west, one, we will recall, that his own throwaway remark about mixing cement on an open plain anticipated although he failed to grasp its implications. The family farm, built on the open plain, will in due course become yet another suburb, surrounded by cement and strip malls, unless it is devoured by a massive corporation, which amounts to the same thing. Through Weston’s disintegration as a character, we can see the disintegration of the figure of the male domestic provider within the wreckage of the disintegrating rural domestic space—as well as his inability to forge a sustainable place for himself outside of it. The reason in part is that there is no outside of it any longer, as indicated by Weston’s vague fantasies about moving to Mexico, the mythic American frontier for which Willy and Biff longed having utterly failed him. Yet Shepard suggests that Weston has also failed the frontier, and he has done so because he has been so utterly ensorcelled by the fantasy offered by Washington’s quarters, which carry germs. At the start of Act 3 we see a momentary resurrection of hope in the form of a thoroughly cleaned up Weston, who is folding laundry in a kitchen that he has rendered spic and span. In high spirits, Weston tells a story to the lamb, whose maggot infestation he has largely cured, about a past event in his own life which took place out in the field with a flock of his

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own lambs, while he was “doing the castrating …, a thing that has to be done.” As he was in the midst of cauterizing them, he recalls, a giant eagle appeared, doing some “suicidal” acrobatics in the sky as it sought to snatch the “fresh little remnants of manhood” that Weston was removing from the cauterized lambs. Sensing what the eagle desired, Weston began to toss it the lamb testicles. As the eagle swept down to catch them, Weston cheered for it and found himself consumed by a feeling of thrilled exhilaration that he had not enjoyed since he flew his B-49 during the Second World War. The speech suggests a victory of the wild, free, quintessential symbol of America over the domesticated lamb, as it ingests that lamb’s male power and soars, doing exuberant flips in the sky. Weston clearly identifies with the eagle, whose swooping aeronautics he compares to his own as a bomber pilot in the war. Yet he is doing domestic chores as he speaks. When Wesley enters the stage, Weston explains that he has cleaned himself up as the result of an experience he had that morning when he took a walk around the farm. Traversing the orchard, he found himself questioning his own identity: “It didn’t feel like me.” As Weston’s description continues, it reveals itself as a precise reversal of Wesley’s Act 1 monologue, which moved from sensual connectedness to alienation. Weston, by contrast, moves from not knowing who he is to a powerful feeling of ownership: “I was … the one walking on my own piece of land.” That feeling paves the way for a ritualized rediscovery of his selfhood, as he removes his filthy clothes, bathes, and feels he has been reborn; this then permits him to reclaim his home and his family and to see both as integrally linked to the natural world: “I felt like I knew every single one of you … [O]ur bodies were connected ….It was a reason of nature that we were … together under the same roof ” (Shepard 1976: 51; 52). Deeply moved by this newfound connectedness, Weston finds himself suddenly full of hope. Yet Weston’s joy is short-lived. Wesley forces him to confront the fact that he owns precisely nothing, having frittered away his meager livelihood through foolish deals with conmen. When Weston pleads despondently that he has finally managed to surmount his various debts and burdens,

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Wesley replies, “They’ve got it … worked out so you can’t … They’ve moved in on us like a creeping disease” (Shepard 1976: 59). The “they” to whom he refers are the zombies, who deliberately awaken a materialist hunger in people like Weston in order to manipulate and profit from them, as Linda Loman’s defense of her family’s choice of refrigerators also implied (“they got the biggest ads of any of them” [Miller 1976: 35]) and as Weston finally dimly sees. Explaining his tendency to continually buy things without evident value that he could not afford, he says: I figured … [they] wouldn’t be so generous if they didn’t figure you had it coming in … The whole thing’s geared to invisible money … If it’s all an idea and nothing’s really there, why not take advantage? … I just played ball. (Shepard 1976: 60)

Weston thought he understood the economic value system of his culture, which told him to bank on the future, borrow, and spend. But the insubstantial nature of capital bewilders people like Weston, and it does so, the play suggests, with conscious intent. Weston did just what Taylor told him he should do: he played ball. In so doing, he became fatally infected by the disease of bourgeois living (Curse of the Starving Class teems with disease imagery), which ironically lured him away from the family that is meant to be at its core. He notes ruefully that he “kept looking for it”—by which he means whatever it is he felt would salve his restless soul—“out there,” though all along it might have been found “right inside this house” (60). The play ends with Weston in flight to Mexico, where Emma predicts he won’t last a day. Emma herself is blown up by the car bomb, and Ella and Wesley are left to survey the devastation of their home and their lives. As they do, Ella asks Wesley to complete Weston’s story about the eagle. Though Marranca has argued that Shepard has trouble completing his plays and points to the end of Curse as an example— “He seems to run away from the energy he unleashes in his characters, unable to confront and control the rhythms of imagery he himself has set in motion” (1980: 14)—the completion of Weston’s story effectively

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brings Curse’s multiple symbols together in a potent image of an America at war with itself. Wesley notes that, as the eagle is swooping down in pursuit of the lambs’ testicles, a tom cat arrives on the scene and seizes them. In a rage, the eagle descends on the cat and carries it shrieking into the sky, whereupon the two begin to fight. It is Ella who tells us what ensues, in the play’s closing lines: “The cat’s tearing [the eagle’s] chest out, and the eagle’s trying to drop him, but the cat won’t let go … And they come crashing down to the earth ….Like one whole thing” (Shepard 1976: 66). Ella’s image suggests an unwinnable, unending fight to the death between America’s opposing impulses, between the wild and the domesticated, the spiritual and the material. These competing energies are mutually interdependent—they are “one whole thing”—but they are also mutually destructive; they can neither coexist nor disentangle. Males who give in to the domestic realm become cauterized, emasculated zombies, which “leads to dying.” Those who cling to their savagery become suicidal and burn themselves out. Females are helpless to alter matters and arguably worsen them, as carriers of the curse that passes ineluctably from generation to generation. The original sin that set this hopeless phenomenon in motion, it seems, is a betrayal of the natural world, creating a psychic hunger in its characters that no quantity of well-stocked refrigerators can fill. All of the Tates express a longing to escape to places removed from American industry, but in terms at least as vague as what we found in Miller. Wesley at one point suggests that he will depart for Alaska because it is “full of possibilities. It’s undiscovered” (32)—which, in the mid-1970s, surely was not so. There is no longer any undiscovered country (laying aside Hamlet’s), and the more the characters seek one the more they find themselves, in J. Chris Westgate’s words, “trapped in a network of roadways that continually ….delivers them not into the wilderness, but rather into more and more roadways” (2005: 734)—or, to put it differently, on a freeway that inhibits rather than facilitates meaningful freedom of movement. In short, the family’s devastation is a direct consequence of the commodification of everything, including human relations, which tears

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the Tates apart as surely as the cat tears out the eagle’s chest. They can find no place for themselves within a system that is designed to swindle and dispose of them, as the skinned lamb carcass brought on stage in the play’s final moment by two giggling criminals clearly signifies. Weston’s complicity in ravaging the “paradise,” the piece of land that he claims granted him a brief taste of selfhood, shows the total collapse of the figure of the male breadwinner, as the comfortable, contained domesticity he is supposed to preserve is both out of reach for him and hostile to his true nature (Shepard 1976: 58). **** One might make the same claim about Troy, the patriarch in August Wilson’s 1985 play Fences. Wilson’s play was written nearly a decade after Curse of the Starving Class, but it takes place in 1957, which places it within reasonable proximity of Death of a Salesman’s time period. And, notwithstanding the fact that Wilson denied having read Miller’s play at the time he wrote Fences, the dramas feature striking similarities (Savran 1988: 292). Fences’ Troy Maxson is yet another father-provider wedded to rigid notions about successful masculinity that he fails to live up to and passes along to his male children. Very like Willy, Troy struggles to make an adequate living, has an adulterous affair, and sabotages his relationship with a son whom he seeks to mold not quite in his own image. Much critical ink has been spilled on the question of whether each of these protagonists is meant to be viewed as a victim of his cultural moment or as an “obstinate” bully, as Myles Weber has maintained about Troy (2014: 670). While Tom Driver argues that Death of a Salesman is “confused” on this matter but partly blames Willy “for his dishonesty and lack of will” (1980: 312), Savran counters that, though Willy’s delusions are critiqued, his fundamental longings are not: “Unfailingly, the play eulogizes the contents of the Loman imaginaire by its romanticization of a self-reliant and staunchly homosocial masculinity” (1992: 36). The same can be said about Curse, which roots Weston’s failures in the alienation he suffers because he cannot accommodate his explosive masculine sensibility to the

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moment in which he lives. If that explosiveness is destructive, this is the fault not of that explosiveness (which the play links to the eagle, whose wings make a sound like “a thunder clap” [Shepard 1976: 50]), but of the containment to which domesticity and industrialized capitalism subjects it now that the American frontier is gone, and which the father-provider lacks the will or the economic wherewithal to resist. Wilson’s Troy expresses no nostalgia for the lost American frontier, never a locus of freedom for African American writers. Yet he does display a restlessness rooted in a journeying impulse that his wife arguably seeks to contain—or, more aptly here, to fence—as well as heroic longings that his status as a Black man inhibits. Troy thus becomes a bully because of the frustration engendered in him by his inability to be what he calls at one point “a different man”—by which he means a man unimpeded not only by racism but also by domestic expectations (Wilson 1986: 69). As we saw Jim Bayliss do in All My Sons, Troy places the role of “good husband” in opposition to what he sees as his essential self, that part of himself “that I ain’t never been” (69). Troy is burdened, in short, by culturally imposed definitions of satisfactory masculine attainment that he simultaneously pursues and flees. Our sympathy for him is complicated, however, by the toxically masculine terms with which he is drawn. That toxic masculinity is both critically examined and, as bell hooks has argued, to some degree reinscribed (1990: 18). Another reason for the critical uncertainty about the degree to which we are to critique these characters for their failures is that both Salesman and Fences blatantly manifest a tension that, Jonathan Culler has argued, is fundamental to the work of imaginative literature—a tension between what Culler calls “exemplarity” and “singularity”: A literary work … is typically the story of a fictional character, but to read it as literature is to take it as in some way exemplary … Novels, poems, and plays, in their singularity …., invite their readers to become involved in the predicaments and the consciousness of narrators and characters who are in some sense posited as exemplary. (Culler 2007: 33)

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This tension, Culler goes on, prompts the reader to seek to discover the extent to which the single character exemplifies something beyond itself. We can see this tension at work immediately in Salesman, which locates the play in a particular place (Brooklyn) and time (its own) and whose stage set is at once real (there is a kitchen, a table, a refrigerator) and dream-like. Willy Loman’s emphatically allegorical name, coupled with the fact that Miller first introduces him as the Salesman, beckons us to view him as broadly representative of a large swath of (at least as originally conceived, white) males, “low men,” salesmen—a plural as well as a singular. Shepard’s set too, we may note, both establishes and destabilizes realism, with its working refrigerator and gas stove as well as curtains that are said to be suspended in midair. Moreover, it concerns a uniquely peculiar family that is also broadly representative of a subset of Americans who belong to the same struggling class. Wilson’s set more concretely calls for a realistically drawn exterior of a home which is located in a small back alley in a large city—unnamed at first, but we soon discover that it is Pittsburgh. The play is firmly set in 1957 and its characters are all certainly Black. Yet the preface that follows Wilson’s diegetic scene-setting not only clearly casts Troy as exemplary, but it does what Culler says imaginative works generally decline to do, which is to “explore what they are exemplary of ” (2007: 33). In Troy’s case, the preface tells us, the answer is African Americans who participated in the Great Migration and settled in northern cities through the early and middle twentieth century. Intriguingly, despite Wilson’s claim to have not read Salesman, the preface seems to place itself explicitly in dialogue with, if not Salesman, the message of Salesman as intoned by countless high school English teachers; that is, the play reveals the lie that is the American dream. Wilson’s preface asserts, however, that the American dream was not a lie for many; rather, he refers to the “solid dream” that Europe’s impoverished citizens embraced when they departed their home nations and flowed into US cities. Once there, Wilson writes, each was constrained in what he could accomplish merely “by his talent … and …. capacity for hard work.” For Europe’s diasporic destitute, it was “a dream dared and won.”

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Wilson goes on to declare that this dream—generously made available to “each man”—was denied to just one group: the descendants of enslaved Africans (Wilson 1986: xvii). Later in the play, Troy nearly quotes from the preface when he tells the story of his young manhood, which is a story about disappointed journeying, though the journey was from south to north rather than from east to west. Once there, he discovered that he could obtain neither a job nor a place to live: “Colored folks living … on the river-banks ….in shacks made of sticks and tarpaper” (Wilson 1986: 54). In the preface, Wilson says the following about men of Troy’s generation: “The city rejected them and they ….settled along the riverbanks … in … ramshackle houses made of sticks and tar-paper” (xvii). Troy’s name, like Willy’s, functions allegorically, linking him to the pivotal moment in which he resides: Maxson is an amalgamation of the Mason-Dixon Line. The year 1957, the preface reminds us, is the same year the Milwaukee Braves were led to a World Series victory by their African American right fielder, Hank Aaron, but it precedes the “hot winds of change” brought about by the Civil Rights Movement (xviii). This is a transitional year, a line between two epochs in African American experience. Yet the name “Maxson” also can be read as signifying Troy’s status as male, as a “maximum son” to a father who, we learn, goaded Troy to “become a man” at age fourteen through an act of violence (Wilson 1986: 52). That violence, Troy makes clear, was rooted partly in his father’s experience of racism (he was an unsuccessful sharecropper), but more than that in an experience of corrosive domestic imprisonment. As the single parent of eleven children, he felt weighted down by his sense of responsibility toward them. Still, though he longed to act upon his “walking blues,” Troy’s father remained with his family (51). Unlike Willy Loman’s father, who did act on his walking blues, Troy’s father staved off his wanderlust but nursed a diabolical fury that drove Troy away and hatched his manhood. Troy does not need to tell us that in adulthood his father is “kicking in [his] blood.” Right before he recounts the story of his father’s brutality, we witness Troy’s volatile

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rage at his son Cory’s insubordination: “Thinking he’s gonna do what he want, irrespective of what I say” (49). Immediately after we hear the paternal tale, Troy reveals that—upon fleeing his father and arriving in Pittsburgh after walking two hundred miles in search of freedom—he met his first wife and had a child because he was “anxious to be a man” (54). That anxiety, rooted in the sense that to be a man one must be (in the memorable words of Biff Loman) “stuck into something … married” (Miller 1976: 23) but simultaneously nomadic, wild and free, is at the core of the exemplary tragedies of the Loman, Tate, and Maxson males. Like his father, Troy sees the task of putting a roof over his family’s head as an essential test of his manhood: “A man got to take care of his family” (Wilson 1986: 38). It is a test that he does not really pass; he was able to purchase his home only by appropriating money his brother Gabriel received after suffering a grievous injury in the Second World War. The home, we learn, is decrepit, in need of paint, and peppered with signs of Troy’s deferred dreams, including an unused baseball bat. Despite great talent, Troy was consigned to the Negro Leagues because the National and American Leagues did not admit Blacks when he was in his prime. In the present-tense action of the play he is a garbage collector. Troy’s disposable nature—recalling Willy’s remark about a man as an orange peel, cast away when the fruit that is his essence is devoured—is literalized by the work he does, hauling away others’ garbage, and by the detritus that fills his yard. American Buffalo also again comes to mind. “You make life of garbage,” Don says to Teach late in the play, though the claim applies literally to Don himself, who sells junk for a living (Mamet 1976: 10). As diminishing as such work would be, virtually the first thing we learn about Troy is that he is large, and that that largeness has informed his sensibility in crucial fashions. Willy too is written as physically large; in an honest moment with Linda, he bemoans the fact that he is fat and says that another salesman mockingly compared him to a walrus. Still, Linda aptly describes him as a “small man” (Miller 1976: 56), shrinking with exhaustion in the face of his many failures. In like fashion, Troy strains to “fill out” his dimensions in perpetual

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opposition to the diminishment to which his life subjects him (Wilson 1986: 1). In Scene 1, we see him avidly working to craft mythic status for himself. His friend Bono introduces the audience to this reflexive habit when he instructs Troy, in the play’s first line, to put a halt to his lying. Unmoved, Troy contrasts himself with a co-worker named Brownie and by extension “them kind of people” (2) —that is, Blacks who defer to white men—and proceeds to recount tales about not only his baseball heroics but his epic duels with Death, with whom he claims to have “wrestled for three days and three nights” (12). While Willy transforms his generally unsuccessful sales expeditions into manly bare-knuckle battles (“Knocked ’em cold in Providence, slaughtered ’em in Boston!”), Troy depicts himself as both Jesus and a savior for his race: in their wrestling match, he describes Death as garbed in a white robe with a hood, evoking a Ku Klux Klansman. His wife Rose both appreciates Troy’s bardic gifts and debunks them, noting cheerfully that he tells the same tall tale differently each time he trots it out. But Troy maintains his position in part by ensuring that Rose maintains hers; when she first enters, he tells her, “This is men talk, woman … [G]o on back in the house … I got some talk for you later ….You go on and powder it up” (6). Though Rose largely holds her own against this homosocial humiliation, Wilson’s first description of her again calls to mind Linda Loman, who not infrequently plays the role of Willy’s punching bag and his apologist. Miller’s stage directions report that she evinces “an iron repression of her exceptions” to her husband’s failings (Miller 1976: 12). Similarly, Wilson tells us that Rose “ignores or forgives [Troy’s] faults, only some of which she recognizes” (Wilson 1986: 5). Thus, both males rely on self-mythologies that involve battle imagery, as well as the blind devotion of females whose entrenchment in the domestic sphere is necessary to their husbands’ masculine identity. A crucial contrast between Troy and Willy, however, is found in their treatment of their sons. Whereas Willy is deeply invested in Biff ’s imagined football career, Troy discourages and ultimately destroys Cory’s chances of being recruited by a college football team, although

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Cory makes clear that he sees college sports merely as a stepping stone to an education. Yet Troy willfully avoids hearing this, repeatedly insisting that the white man will not allow Cory any kind of future in professional sports. While Willy wants his sons to be the man he longs to be but half-knows he is not, Troy is so determined to prevent Cory from following in his footsteps that he projects this desire on Cory so that he can thwart it. In a supremely irrational speech, Troy instructs his son: “You go and get your book-learning so you can work yourself up in that A&P or ….get you a trade” (35). Though college would enable Cory to acquire “book-learning,” Troy deprives him of his one path for entry and insists that he do some form of manual labor—he suggests fixing cars or building houses—to which book-learning would contribute little. Troy’s motives are surely linked in part to his need for patriarchal authority; he reminds Cory that he is “the boss around here,” the only one who gets to “do the saying” (36). Yet Troy also seems to aim to preemptively disillusion Cory, saving him from the disappointment that Troy believes must inevitably follow any attempt to ascend in a white, racist world. Accordingly, he seeks to bully his son into precisely the kind of blue-collar jobs that Willy scorns (“Even your grandfather was better than a carpenter,” Willy sneers [Miller 1976: 61]), and he expresses a philosophy of life that directly contradicts Willy’s well-known credo, “Be liked and you will never want.” In an early scene, Troy responds to Cory’s melancholy question as to why Troy “ain’t never liked” him with a cruel reply: “You about the biggest fool I ever saw.” He declares that it is his job, his responsibility, and his duty to provide for Cory and “liking your black ass wasn’t part of the bargain. Don’t you … go through life worrying about if somebody like you … You best be making sure they doing right by you” (Wilson 1986: 38). Rendered realistic to a fault by his aching disappointment, Troy tells Cory he can hope for little in America while simultaneously preaching the most fundamental of American values, albeit not Willy’s: “He’s got to make his own way.” Troy has long ago given up on the unlimited promise of success that, Wilson’s preface reminds us, was made only to whites and in which Shepard’s Weston—still

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a white man, though a member of the starving class—continues to believe, at least until the play’s end. Troy’s focus instead is on the dignity that he believes can be derived from a hardheaded, unsentimental commitment to self-reliant work. Yet even as he convinces himself that he has learned from his bitter experiences, he is precisely recapitulating his father’s dehumanizing attitude, and he will fulfill his stated desire to see Cory move as far away from his own life as he can by driving him away with violence, just as his father did to him. Unlike Troy’s mother, who walked out on the family when Troy was eight, Rose is devotedly faithful. Yet that faithfulness is itself a problem. Although Troy admits that everyone must die, he boasts about defeating death himself and proclaims that, during sex with Rose, his goal is to “fall down on you and blast a hole into forever” (Wilson 1986: 10; 40). Willy never reaches such heights of grandiosity and Linda is largely desexualized; yet he does make his revealing reference to wanting “to kiss the life” out of Linda when he is on the road. The slippery link in both lines between sexual desire, violence, and death suggests a subliminal hostility that the men’s adulterous affairs bring to the surface. Just as Willy worries—right after expressing his desire to kiss the life out of Linda—that he might not be able to make a living for her, Troy precedes his reference to their sex life by noting that he arrives home from work each pay day only to find his family lined up at the door with their hands out. Troy views the domestic realm upon which his masculine selfhood depends as a deadening assembly line, one that deprives him of the potential to be a “different man.” When he is with his mistress Alberta, Troy says, he is freed of having to fret about how to pay the bills or maintain the roof. We saw this same conflict, memorably, with Cat’s Big Daddy, who viewed “the choice” prostitute he hoped to purchase as an escape from the routine of “laying” his wife “regular as a piston”—a routine he comes to believe has robbed him of his potency, though his alternative sexual fantasy also hinges on his patriarchal buying power (Williams 1983: 74; 84). Kimmel captures the dilemma well when he describes the predicament of mid-century American males who felt anxious about

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their potentially emasculating domestic role while also feeling unable “to break free” of it “to become rebels on the run” (2012: 185). Willy’s longing to be a rebel on the run is manifested by his regret over failing to follow his brother into the jungles of Africa—a notably retrograde, imperialist fantasy. Troy fantasizes about conquering devils whose form keeps shifting but that at least once is said to be a “White fellow” (Wilson 1986: 15). Incapable of acting on these dreams of dominance over other males, Willy and Troy have extramarital affairs. Troy tells Rose that being with Alberta offers him the opportunity to “steal second,” to be a rebel without—the image suggests—quite breaking the rules (Wilson 1986: 70). Willy’s affair too, we noted, is both an enticing escape from his responsibilities and a reminder of them, as his lover, a receptionist, repeatedly promises to provide him with access to the buyers that he requires to successfully do his job. Both men are riven with frustration by domestic demands that they explicitly regard as enforced by women. They flee those women temporarily for mistresses who exist outside the confines of the domestic and yet recall, literally or imagistically, their professional failures: granting access to otherwise aloof buyers; stealing second but only in the Negro Leagues. When Troy’s lover dies in childbirth, Rose agrees to raise his out-of-wedlock daughter. But her loyalty does not stop Troy from seeing her as a prison guard and an enforcer of time’s passage—a link we also saw in Salesman. Biff frets that he is “like a boy” because he is not married and in business (Miller 1976: 23). It is clear that he would prefer to remain a boy, but time marches on and women are shrill reminders, as men perceive them, of that bleak fact. When Rose points out, while Troy is carrying on his affair, that tomorrow is Friday, he objects, complaining that his entire post-baseball working life has involved a weekly countdown to Fridays. After she learns of Alberta’s death, Rose seeks to comfort him, with a generosity that strains credulity; Troy’s response is to declare that her mind is on Alberta’s insurance money. He is unapologetic when he brings his infant home to Rose: “A man’s got to do what’s right for him.” Yet in insisting on his right as a man to follow his selfish impulses wherever they take him,

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Troy drives away virtually everyone who cares for him and ends up “a womanless man” (Wilson 1986: 73; 79). Troy’s final battle is with Cory, who, by the play’s penultimate scene, feels nothing but resentment for him. Challenging his father to prove himself in the two fashions that mean the most to Troy, Cory calls Troy “just an old man” incapable of “whupping” him anymore, and strips him of his one accomplishment in his quest to be a man in middle-class terms: “It ain’t your yard,” Cory yells, “You took Uncle Gabe’s money” to purchase it (Wilson 1986: 87). Cory describes Troy as a man who could not fulfill his basic responsibility to care for his family without the aid of stolen blood money. In ghastly retaliation, Troy hurls a racist epithet at his son: “You just another nigger on the street to me!” (87). Here, Troy gives voice to the racism that his blustering about masculinity sought to overcome; instead, it erupts in a venomous attack on his own child, who is driven from the home whose reason for existence was to shelter him. The last scene in Fences, as in Salesman, is the patriarch’s funeral. Though one son in each case (Happy, Lyons) seems poised to follow in his father’s unhappy footsteps, the other carves his own path: Biff plans to return west and Cory is thriving as a Marine. Yet each dramatist undercuts the suggestion that these younger men have escaped their fathers’ influence by reinstalling the same masculinist assumptions that so bedeviled the previous generation. Biff shrugs off what he calls his father’s phony dream by acting on his own walking blues; he becomes the man who knows what he wants and goes out and gets it, a version of his uncle Ben and his grandfather, leaving his grieving mother behind. As for Cory, he frees himself from Troy’s incessant barking of orders and authoritarian demands that his son call him “sir”—in order to join the Marines, the most disciplinary branch of the armed services. Though we hear little about Cory’s years in the Marines, we know he joined in 1959 and has served for six years. Those years saw the beginning of the Vietnam catastrophe as well as other misadventures abroad that extensively involved the Marines. Thus, Cory has planted himself squarely in the ultra-masculine killing

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machine of the white supremacist superpower against which his father railed his whole life. The inescapability of a gendered and, as bell hooks argues, sexist value system (1990: 18) is further reinforced when Rose delivers her equivalent to Linda Loman’s renowned defense of her husband’s mediocrity. “I … know he meant to do more good than ….harm,” Rose says about Troy, after admitting to uncertainty about whether he was right or wrong in his actions (Wilson 1986: 97). Yet just after pointing attention to Troy’s fallibility, Rose quickly builds him up again, adopting the language of toxic masculinity on which he thrived. Her first thought upon meeting him, she recollects, was: “here is a man … you can open yourself up to and be filled to bursting.” Though she goes on to declare that Troy was so big that he left no room for her, she describes this erasure of her selfhood as her own mistake. She claims her decision to commit her life to Troy as her choice, but then follows this declaration of agency with a half-contradiction of it: “that’s what life offered me in the way of being a woman, and ….I grabbed hold of it with both hands” (98). Thus, Rose in effect affirms the restrictive, gendered assumptions that led her to subordinate her life to Troy’s even as he publicly humiliated her for homosocial ends, abandoned her, and expected her to raise his illegitimate child—which she now calls a blessing. Fences ends with Gabriel—who believes himself to be the Archangel— trying and failing to blow his trumpet to tell St. Peter to open the gates of heaven for Troy. His failure prompts him to do what Wilson describes as a “strange” and “atavistic” dance followed by a howl rooted in trauma. If Gabriel appears to summon, through this atavistic dance, his African origins, and the trauma of African American experience, the stage direction ends by asserting that “the gates of heaven stand open as wide as God’s closet” (Wilson 1986: 101). A seeming critique of toxic masculinity is overtaken by its reinscription, and an African gesture is overtaken by a Christian one. Though some readers view this final moment as hopeful (and the 2016 film version certainly staged it that way), the echo of the preface in Gabriel’s failed blowing—

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“the hot winds of change … had not yet begun to blow full”—may suggest instead that the only way out available to characters locked in socio-historical and gendered roles is through divine intervention. But while Fences unquestionably critiques the former—that is, the racist structures that impeded Troy’s ability to be the great athlete he had it in him to become—it largely turns its back on a critique of Troy and the gendered attitudes he has embraced, instead celebrating the fact that his sensibilities will be perpetuated through Cory. This seems clear from Cory’s last exchange with Rose. He is not garbed in his father’s clothing, as Wesley was, but he might as well be if we believe his mother, who insists: “You Troy Maxson all over again.” Cory protests that he does not want to be Troy, to which Rose replies, “You can’t be nobody but who you are” (Wilson 1986: 97). The implication is clear: who Cory is is who his father was. Moments before, Cory describes Troy’s impact on him in a manner that recalls Curse’s suggestion that fathers inevitably penetrate their sons with their very being: “Papa was like a shadow … digging in your flesh … Trying to live through you” (96–7). Cory has spent the past six years in flight from the father whom he felt to be pursuing him, but Rose tells him that the flight is pointless, as is his quest to craft an independent self. More than that, she seems to maintain that Cory should welcome the fact that he is “Troy Maxson all over again.” She vows to deliver the same favor to Raynell, the child of Troy’s dead mistress: “I’m gonna do her just like your daddy did you” (98). Since a significant component of what Troy did for Cory was to deprive him of the future of which he dreamed, Rose’s determination to “do [Raynell] just like” Troy “did” Cory almost sounds like a threat, casting some doubt on Wilson’s assertion that Raynell is both “the hope for the future” and fully “free” at the end of the play (Savran 1988: 301). To be sure, we learn that Raynell has planted a garden in the yard Rose was so desperate to transform into an achieved image of domestic containment and, although it has not yet bloomed, Rose is optimistic that in time it will (Wilson 1986: 71). One might argue that this is because the rage-filled, disappointed patriarch has been removed from

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it. Yet out of his ashes rises his reincarnation, a kinder and gentler Troy who, it seems, will recapitulate traditional patriarchal assumptions. Cory is a near anagram of Troy, as Wesley is of Weston, and Fences draws to a close with Raynell and Cory singing a song Troy learned from his own (quite brutal) father. Although Troy’s father is said to have made the song up, it also shows evidence of being part of the so-called “floating” tradition in Blues music, whereby lyrics make their way from one song to another, their origins often unclear. Troy’s father’s song contains the lyric: Old Blue died and I dug his grave I dug his grave with a silver spade Let him down with a golden chain. (99)

Identical phrases can be found in Blind Lemon Jefferson’s “One Kind Favor,” written in 1927: Just dig my grave with a silver spade. Well, dig my grave with a silver spade. You may lead me down with a golden chain.

As the song supposedly composed by Troy’s father replicates another song, these characters’ very beings float ineluctably from one generation to the next, “Just like the change of the guards,” as Wesley says ruefully in Curse, because basic assumptions about gender fail to alter meaningfully (Shepard 1976: 61). “[T]hat’s what life offered me in the way of being a woman,” Rose declares, speaking about her own life, determined and overshadowed by Troy’s (Wilson 1986: 98). Cory, for his part, must accept that rejecting Troy’s influence is impossible and the only man he can be is “Troy Maxson all over again” (97). If we doubt that this is so, we need only glance at Cory’s response when his stepbrother remarks that he has heard Cory is thinking about getting married. Cory replies: “Yeah, I done found the right one, Lyons. It’s about

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time” (93). Yet again, time marches on, which means that marriage and domesticity beckon. Whether the results will be any happier for him than they were for his father we cannot know for sure—we do not, after all, meet the alleged “right one.” But the play has all but assured us that, in the words of another celebrated American playwright, at least as far as gender relations are concerned, “the past is the present … It’s the future too” (O’Neill 1989: 87).

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Queering a New Generation: Angels in America, How I Learned to Drive, Fun Home

The catalyzing events in the contemporary Gay Rights Movement were the Stonewall Riots, which took place in New York City in 1969. The authors whose works will form the focus of this chapter—four out of five of whom are in legal same-sex marriages as of this writing—were children of that era: Paula Vogel was born in 1951, Tony Kushner was born in 1956, Alison Bechdel was born in 1960, and Lisa Kron and Jeanine Tesori were both born in 1961. The fathers and father-figures who loom large in their plays—Uncle Peck, Roy Cohn, and Bruce Bechdel—were all born in the 1920s or 1930s, making them roughly a decade or more younger than Biff and Happy Loman. (Death of a Salesman, which was written in 1949, takes place in its own day; Biff is thirty-four in the play and was thus born in about 1915. Happy is slightly younger.) Yet the corrosive values that ravage their personal lives and that to varying degrees they seek to pass along to their actual or pseudo-children are in many respects identical to those we have identified with Miller’s fathers and sons. Homosexuality is seen as taboo, though two of these characters are certainly gay; traditional gender roles are to be rigidly upheld; and any sexual activity that transgresses heteronormative boundaries is a secret (albeit sometimes a “delectable” one, to use one of Roy’s favorite words) to be contained at all cost. Because Peck, Roy, and Bruce are all attracted to what they deem forbidden, each man satisfies his desires covertly while also seeking to impose conventional gendered assumptions on his chosen

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protégé, arguably to compensate for his own anxious and predatory transgressions. Tony Kushner’s magisterial play, Angels in America—whose first part premiered in 1991, followed by its second part in 1992—is enormous in scope and scale and will not receive a discussion commensurate with its size here. My focus will be primarily on Roy, a character based, of course, on the historically real Roy Cohn (1927–86), who happens to have been a mentor, even a “surrogate father,” to the young Donald Trump (Elving 2018). In Angels in America it is the fictional Joe Pitt—a closeted gay Mormon lawyer—whom Cohn takes under his wing, explicitly describing their relationship as “[l]ike a father to a son” (Kushner 1995: 64). A closeted gay man himself, Cohn responds to the homophobic environment of 1980s America by embracing its virulent hostility with a disgusted relish, insisting that the defining features of homosexuality are powerlessness and invisibility: “Homosexuals are men who know nobody and who nobody knows. Does that sound like me … ?” (51). As it happens, Roy’s description does sound in some ways like him: by design, he is a man “who nobody knows,” due to his concealment of a profound aspect of his selfhood. To that end, Cohn essentially splits himself in two, denying that he is what his body does: “Roy Cohn is not a homosexual. Roy Cohn is a heterosexual man … who fucks around with guys” (Kushner 1995: 52). In like fashion, when he is diagnosed with AIDS by his doctor, Roy declares that AIDS “is what homosexuals have. I have liver cancer” (52). Roy regards his political power—or, in his words, his “clout” (51)—as the constitutive element in his identity, not the workings of his body, and it is understandable that he would want to think so, as his doctor has just explained that HIV results in the body’s immune system ceasing to function: “Sometimes the body even attacks itself ” (48). In response, Cohn proclaims that he can detach himself from his body and from all other bodies, literal and metaphoric: the phrase “fucks around with guys” suggestively implies distance, even control and manipulation, as distinct from “fucks guys.”

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At the core of Roy’s philosophy of human existence is the assumption that a man should exist in isolation from others, a belief he seeks to inculcate in Joe Pitt: Life is full of horror; nobody escapes … ; save yourself. Whatever …. needs from you, threatens you … [P]eople are so afraid; don’t be afraid to live in the raw wind …, alone … Let nothing stand in your way. (Kushner 1995: 64)

Roy’s remarks are full of contradictions: if “nobody escapes,” then how is Joe supposed to save himself? If “people” are afraid, how can Joe avoid being afraid? Most importantly, Roy himself quite clearly “needs from” Joe—specifically, he needs Joe to “be a good son” and to act as Roy’s mole in Washington, DC, to protect him from the disbarment committee (62)—and thus threatens him. Even more sinister, though, is the barbaric individualism that Roy preaches, his insistence that others’ need constitutes a threat and the right response is single-minded selfpreservation. Specifically, Roy wishes for Joe to unleash himself from the needs of his mentally ill wife Harper and embrace the ruthless selfreliance that is at the core of Reagan’s America. Indeed, for Kushner Roy Cohn is emblematic of a state of mind that, Angels in America suggests, was epidemic in the Reagan era, one that festers within the body politic and trickles down to infect individuals (another example of the body attacking itself), as the character Louis makes clear in a scene he shares with Joe. After speaking about Reagan’s loveless family, whose members he maintains only speak to one another through their agents, he argues that the same detachment characterizes American society more broadly: “No connections. No responsibilities. All of us … falling through the cracks that separate what we owe to ourselves … and what we owe to love.” He goes on, later in the same scene, to describe what he calls “Reagan’s children”: “Selfish and greedy and loveless and blind … You’re scared. So am I. Everybody is in the land of the free” (Kushner 1995: 77; 80). The children in the metaphorical nation-family have become criminally selfish, having been abandoned by the patriarchal figures

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whose role was to care for them and to model a system of justice involving mutual responsibility and compassion. The scene takes place in front of the Hall of Justice in Brooklyn, which Joe at one point imagines as empty because the people who keep it running have “up and abandoned it” (Kushner 1995: 78). In Part II of Angels, titled Perestroika, we learn that even God has abandoned the human race, seduced by the selfish individualism that defined the Reagan era. As a consequence, humanity has come “unglued” (176), no longer e pluribus unum but scattered, callously detached, unencumbered by others’ needs. As for Reagan, his indifference to the plight of AIDS sufferers in the early years of the crisis was notorious, as was his attack on the welfare system, which he argued nurtured “welfare queens” and exacerbated the problem of fatherlessness among America’s poor (Clift 1986). The social safety net, according to Reagan in his 1986 State of the Union Address, “encourage[d] family breakups” and “degrad[ed] the moral worth of work,” prompting impoverished people to become dependent on others, lazy, unwilling to be self-sufficient. Reagan’s position— which ironically accused poor parents of a lack of responsibility while absolving the government of responsibility for its citizens—sought to justify what Kushner shows to be a cruel abandonment of the most vulnerable members of American society. The result, the play suggests, is not only a fraying of the social fabric (figured elsewhere in Angels as the hole in the ozone level), but a contamination of the individual, who becomes toxic by flouting what the character Belize calls “the hard law of love.” “It goes hard for you,” Belize tells Louis, who has abandoned his AIDS-stricken lover Prior, “if you violate the hard law of love” (Kushner 1995: 106). The phrase captures what Belize sees as our sacred obligation to recognize ourselves as strands within “a great net of souls,” necessarily and productively responsible for and interlaced with one another (275). For the purposes of the present study, what matters is the role of fathers, father-figures, and potential fathers in maintaining the integrity of that net of souls. God, Reagan, and Roy, all explicitly referenced as fathers, do the opposite. As the play’s central embodiment of the notion

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that responsibility to others is a trap and identity is contingent on where one fits “in the food chain” (Kushner 1995: 51), Roy’s “villainy,” in Daniel Dervin’s words, “expands to Shakespearean dimensions” (1999: 64). Like Iago, his bewitching magnetism is matched only by his megalomania. He has shades too of Milton’s Satan: he tries to tempt Joe to help him, like the prince of darkness, to “turn off the sun” (Kushner 1995: 73). Roy’s first word and his last is “Hold,” and indeed he is a prophet of stasis, of a reactionary conservatism that demands that we remain precisely where we are, looking neither forward nor back and grasping for power and profit from where we stand. Barely human, he longs to become less so: “I wish I was an octopus,” he tells Joe, “ … Eight loving arms and all those suckers” (17). The anarchic vision that undergirds Roy’s politics is also shared with the impressionable Joe: “I see the universe … as a … sandstorm in outer space …, but instead of grains of sand it’s shards and splinters of glass” (19). This hellish view of the cosmos, lawless and chaotic, justifies and validates Roy’s “every man for himself ” creed. Although Roy’s belief system might prompt another man to run, Joe is entranced and, when we next see him, he seeks to persuade his wife Harper that they should go to Washington. Harper resists, not least because she is agoraphobic, but Joe presses the point, telling her that he yearns to go “where something good is happening” (Kushner 1995: 29). As a skeptical Harper listens, Joe defends his view that goodness can be found in Washington by linking Reagan with the restoration of truth, law, and order. Although Roy promised Joe nothing in his new job but “something nice with clout,” and seemed to imply the antithesis of order when he declared, “God bless chaos” (21), Joe opts to view his impending move as an adjunct to Reagan’s success in making America “better,” “[m]ore good,” indeed great again. Convinced that Reagan has enabled America to rediscover its “sacred position among nations,” he aspires to be a part of that emerging greatness: “I need something big to lift me up,” he informs Harper (32). The vaguely phallic quality to Joe’s image is unconscious but no accident. While he is professionally ambitious, Joe’s restlessness with

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Harper has far more to do with his repressed homosexuality, as Roy may well intuit. In their first scene together when Joe tells Roy that he needs to speak with his wife before deciding whether to accept Roy’s offer, Roy’s response is tart: “Your wife. Of course … Talk to your wife” (Kushner 1995: 22). Yet when Joe finally comes out to Roy late in Perestroika, while Roy is dying of AIDS in the hospital, Roy responds with a full-blown homophobic panic. He tries to move away from Joe; when his IV tube holds him back, he yanks it out of his arm so that blood spurts from him. He shouts at Joe to “Get the fuck away from me” and silences him frantically when he tries to speak. “I want you home,” he bellows, “with your wife” (219). In this climactic moment with his pseudo-son, Roy clings fiercely if hysterically to the position he shared with Joe earlier in the play, which is that fathers must be “hard, unfair …, cold,” so that their sons can “grow strong in a world like this” (Kushner 1995: 62). Despite the thirty years that stand between them, Roy’s position is reminiscent of (if also far harsher than) Big Daddy’s and Maggie’s, and it reflects a static assumption about the world: “This isn’t a good world” (62). In this not good world, there is only one route to strength and it involves “straightening” oneself out, as Big Daddy put it, embracing or at least successfully feigning the bellicose, heteronormative masculinity that both men suggest is the only route to power. When Roy admits to Belize moments later that he has been “reviled” all his life and Belize—a Black, gay former drag queen —replies, “Join the club,” Roy retorts sharply: “I don’t belong to any club you could get through the front door of ” (221). This is in part because Belize is not white, but it is also due to Belize’s frank embrace of his queer, marginalized identity and also his fundamental compassion, which Roy links with weakness. Speaking to the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg later—in whose trial and execution Roy played a significant and legally improper role—he calls pity “Repulsive.” In his last breath he manipulates Ethel into displaying maternal kindness toward him and declares, “I WIN!” when she succumbs (247). To the end, he rejects his sexual identity and his body (“I don’t want to be a man. I wanna be an octopus” [247]), although his body does lay him low and he denies his sexual nature to

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no avail. Not only is he felled by the disease he insisted he could not have, but he learns from Ethel that, once the disbarment was sealed, one of the members of the disbarment committee remarked: “Finally. I’ve hated that little faggot for thirty-six years” (245). In short, Kushner gives Roy demonic dimensions but also portrays him as a man victimized by his cultural moment, one whom Belize insists deserves compassion despite granting others none. The reason has less to do with Roy and more to do with the kind of human society that Kushner seeks to bring into being. That society becomes possible when we shake off the attitudes ingrained in Roy Cohn and—less satanically but no less insistently—in most of the fathers we have encountered in this study, all of whom are products and perpetuators of the anxiously homophobic culture of the mid-twentieth century. Within that culture, Stephen J. Bottoms points out, “It was virtually impossible … to avoid forming a complicity with the ideological assumptions of the mask of heterosexism one was obliged to wear for the sake of self-defense” (1996: 169). In a younger generation, Kushner shows that resisting those assumptions is difficult but not impossible. Despite viewing Roy as “the polestar of human evil” (Kushner 1995: 227), Louis gravitates for a time toward a Roy-like way of thinking, as indicated by his desperate self-defense in his break-up scene with Prior, whose AIDS diagnosis terrifies Louis. “I have to find some way to save myself ” (85), he cries, echoing Roy’s chilling dictum: “save yourself ” (64). Yet Louis finds his way back to Prior and a concern for others that Belize helps to facilitate when he insists that Louis perform the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, over the corpse of Roy Cohn, whom Belize describes as their “vanquished foe” (256). The ceremony of forgiveness that Belize demands involves two Jews, Louis and Ethel Rosenberg, and two queer men, Louis and Belize; implicitly, they bring Roy back into the club in which he denied membership, honoring aspects of his identity that he associated with weakness, marginalization, and disempowerment. Louis’s emotional journey reaps forgiveness from Prior, though that forgiveness is juxtaposed with the hard-headed insistence—key to the thinking of Angels in America—that we can move on from our

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pasts but we cannot and must not erase them. Notwithstanding that he still loves him, Prior tells Louis that they cannot reconcile as lovers, as Louis cannot wish away the pain he has caused. Still, Louis is part of the newly constituted family that gathers at the Bethesda Fountain in New York City’s Central Park in the epic drama’s final scene—a family, notably, defined by sexual fluidity. Louis, Belize, and Prior are all gay and Hannah, Joe’s mother and Prior’s new friend, seems to have shed her Mormon rigidity (though not her faith) after receiving an “enormous” orgasm from a hermaphroditic Angel, equipped with eight vaginas and “a Bouquet of Phalli,” that appeared to her a number of scenes before (175). Working in tandem with what Chaudhuri describes as its “new theology of constant motion,” Angels offers fluidity as a salutary antidote to fixity, or the inflexible doctrines of Roy Cohn and Ronald Reagan (1995: 259). That fluidity manifests itself not just in sexuality but in the play’s narrative style, which glides back and forth seamlessly between naturalism and exuberant magical realism, as well as its suggestion that we can imagine beyond what we have experienced. Disruptive imagination is alluring in Angels in America but, from Roy’s perspective, it is also darkly threatening. When Belize conjures an afterlife teeming with disorder and unpredictability, such as garbage that takes the form of precious gems and “dance palaces full of music … and racial impurity and gender confusion” (209), Roy assumes he is describing Hell. He responds with fear and suspicion when Belize names this “negation” of Roy’s presumptions Heaven. Similarly, the agoraphobic Mormon wife Harper is governed at first by the unbending strictures of her faith and upbringing, as indicated by her response when she meets Prior in a shared hallucination/dream early in the play: Prior  I’m a homosexual. Harper  Oh! In my church we don’t believe in homosexuals.

As Prior and Harper seek to understand the confounding fact that they have never met one another and yet are sharing a hallucination, Harper posits: “Imagination can’t create anything new … It only recycles bits

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and pieces from the world,” which it goes on to reassemble into what we call visions. “Nothing unknown is knowable,” she concludes confidently (Kushner 1995: 38). Yet Harper moves past this limiting view of the imagination and comes to believe that it is possible to conceive beyond what we know to exist, a belief that permits her to offer the play’s most hopeful vision. It is when she finds the courage to leave Joe and her apartment for San Francisco that she has her vision, which encapsulates the play’s imaginative, collectivist, and humanitarian ideal. Aboard a plane— another important example of fluidity and a significant sign of liberating psychological progress given Harper’s agoraphobia—and approaching the tropopause, she sees souls rising from the dead: Souls … of people who had perished, from famine, from war, from the plague … And the souls of these departed joined hands … and formed … a great net of souls, and the souls were … the stuff of ozone, and the outer rim absorbed them, and was repaired. (Kushner 1995: 275)

Harper’s vision is spiritual, but it is enacted by humans, albeit dead ones. Together, these souls of the dead take part in an act of collective forgiveness—famines, war, and plagues often result, at least to some degree, from human beings neglecting or abandoning one another— one that repairs the hole in the ozone layer, another product of human inattention to the greater good. What restores that hole is a coming together of what formerly had spiraled apart. By joining hands and clasping ankles, the dead succeed in creating a protective “net of souls.” All of this is the process—practical, imaginative, visionary—that maybe, just maybe, can take us away from the toxicity of Roy Cohn’s formative years and our own, the brutally divided moment during and immediately following the Trump era. Both eras were marked by rampant infectious diseases that were particularly lethal for marginalized populations and that were divisively politicized. Kushner does not suggest that a cure—metaphoric or literal—is easily found, and it is notable that Joe, Roy’s pseudo-son, is not part of the newly

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constituted family that gathers for animated conversation at the Bethesda Fountain. When we last see Joe, he is asking Harper to take him back, an analogue to Louis’s action but a more disturbing one, because by clinging to Harper Joe continues effectively to deny that he is gay. Though he claims to have changed, he never renounces the pernicious decisions he wrote as a clerk for a conservative judge, one of which denied the right of homosexuals to receive equal protection under the law, nor does he renounce his admiration for Roy. Joe remains under Roy’s sway to the end, although Belize might be giving him more than practical advice when he urges him—after Roy pulls the IV tube from his arm and smears Joe with his blood—to not touch the blood, which is both actually and symbolically infected.1 The closeted white male Republican makes minimal progress in the play. Harper’s last piece of advice to him is to “Go exploring” with the aid to his imagination of the Valium that she no longer needs (Kushner 1995: 273). The play does not show us whether Joe takes her advice. As for Belize, the play’s lone Black character, it is worth noting that his role in Angels exclusively involves urging white people to behave better. Unlike Williams, a playwright whose influence on Kushner is palpable, Kushner gives his Black character a name, a great deal of stage time, and deep importance to the tale Angels tells. Yet Belize has little identity beyond his role as “the archetype of the mammy,” in Joshua Takano Chambers-Letson’s words (2012: 147). Ironically, in Perestroika Belize remarks on Louis’s failure to know him despite their years of friendship, mentioning that he has “a man uptown,” a crucial detail about his life to which Louis is oblivious because he never bothered to ask (Kushner 1995: 228). The play largely mirrors that indifference to Belize’s private life; in contrast to its other main characters, we know nothing beyond this scant detail about his romantic partner, his parentage, the home in which he lives. Belize exists only in relation to the white male characters whose foibles he comments on and seeks to mend. He displays astonishing kindness to all of them, including Roy, who hurls racist bile at him and whose anti-gay political machinations he knows well. Nevertheless, Belize gives Roy important information

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about the early azidothymidine trials, which he might plausibly have wished to withhold from someone already so extraordinarily privileged. When Roy asks why Belize is granting him this inside information, Belize replies, “I wish I knew” (160). Supplied with no other answer, the audience is left to conclude that Belize is goodness itself, which makes him vivacious and loveable in performance, unquestionably the play’s moral center. But it also renders him something of an abstraction, a version of the Magical Negro trope. Such concerns about Belize’s character were rarely voiced in the years closer to when the play was written and I have only recently begun to hear them from students in the classroom. This is an indication that Angels itself, for all of its richness and majesty, exists in history and is not in every respect capable of imagining beyond its own moment. Thus, the play, intentionally and not intentionally, willfully and blindly, counterpoints hope with failure, visionary imagination with the stubborn status quo, “the sting of disappointment [with the] dream of a better world” (Chambers-Letson 2012: 147). **** Imagination is also integrally linked to psychic movement in Paula Vogel’s How I Learned to Drive, written in 1997, and Jeanine Tesori and Lisa Kron’s 2013 musical adaption of Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir, Fun Home. “Sometimes to tell a secret,” Li’l Bit tells us in the suggestive opening lines of Drive, “you first have to teach a lesson” (Vogel 1997: 9). To some degree, this is the guiding principle of Fun Home as well. These richly moving plays about familial trauma feature further signs of kinship. Both are presented from the perspective of a female narrator who is in effect writing—and, in Fun Home’s case, drawing— her past, which she assembles for the audience in collage-like form, moving backward and forward through time and space. Each narrator is struggling to come to terms with her sexual and psychological identity, which was productively informed and also damaged by her relationship with an older male: an uncle, Peck, in Drive and a father, Bruce, in Fun Home. Both Peck and Bruce exhibit sexual compulsions

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that they simultaneously act upon and deny. The truth about the men’s forbidden desires is the most obvious secret in each play: Bruce is a closeted homosexual and Peck is a pedophile. Although it might seem problematic to compare these very different hidden identities—one is a sexual orientation, unjustly stigmatized; the other is a psychiatric disorder, profoundly dangerous to others when acted upon—Bruce’s tortured relationship to his homosexuality prompts him to engage in sexual activities with high school-aged boys. Like Roy and Uncle Peck, Bruce is poisoned by a secret he will not acknowledge, even to himself, and the consequence is that he does become dangerous to others, though not to the degree that Peck does. Another secret is the younger woman’s sexual and artistic sensibility, which emerges in productive tension with what her paternal guide seeks to impose on her. In each play, the female narrator comes to recognize that she is a victim and also a beneficiary of her fraught relationship with her father or pseudo-father. Each man dies prematurely, likely through suicide, but the female narrator successfully incorporates his cherished memory within her own more positive and—certainly in one case, likely in both—queer self-conception. To underscore that more fluid self-conception, Vogel and Tesori/Kron, like Kushner, self-consciously manipulate playful, non-linear dramatic forms. This formal experimentation works in tandem with the narrators’ discovery of their queer selfhood, serving to disrupt the rigid, heteronormative assumptions that drove their beloved and destructive mentors to suicide. Hence, both plays conclude with an image of mobility that suggests psychological and creative freedom, just as Harper’s dramatic journey culminates with a transcendent vision facilitated by her flight on an airplane. Ostensibly, the primary role that Li’l Bit’s uncle plays in her life is as her teacher. While Vogel keeps Peck shrouded in uncertainty, so that we know little about the source of the demons with which he struggles, we do know that teaching is a role he loves and one that brings out what is best and worst about him. As Li’l Bit’s teacher he offers an antidote to her family’s vicious misogyny, instructing her to value “the fire in

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[her] head” and declaring that her body is not a source of shame but beautiful, even sacred (Vogel 1997: 46). If Li’l Bit’s grandmother insists that large breasts are crippling, Peck counters that they are “celestial” (11). When her grandfather mocks the notion that reading Shakespeare could help her in life—a life that largely requires her, in the old man’s judgment, to be able to “lie on her back in the dark”—Peck replies that her ambitions are “wonderful” (14). Moreover, in many ways Peck contradicts the assumptions about masculinity that are articulated and enforced by the rest of Li’l Bit’s family. In her 1960s childhood, she tells us, Peck was the only man she knew who did dishes. Although Peck’s wife Mary defends the silence in their marriage by noting that men in Peck’s generation wish “to be quiet about” their emotional lives, Peck seeks out a relationship with Li’l Bit in part because she “help[s] by talking” to him (44; 45). Furthermore, though Mary sardonically declares that Second World War veterans like Peck “didn’t have ‘rap sessions’ to talk about their feelings,” Peck tells the young Cousin Bobby that men “cry all the time. They just don’t tell anybody” (44; 24). Yet if Peck seems to encourage children to think more expansively about gender categories and to break the rules of the adult world, there is always a menacing underside to these interactions. In Bobby’s case, Peck reels him in like the fish he is teaching the boy to catch by promising not to reveal his secret vulnerability and cajoling him into a conspiratorial bond. “[T]here’s a really neat tree house where I used to stay for days,” he tells the child, “But it’s a secret place—you can’t tell anybody we’ve gone there” (Vogel 1997: 25). Once Bobby has agreed, he is trapped by their secret pact and by his misbehavior (Peck promises him beer), and so becomes complicit in his own victimization. While Peck appears to offer a liberating escape from the normative assumptions of adulthood, his openness is in part a ploy that enables his abuse and secures his power. The metaphoric implications of the fishing lesson are sufficiently overt to invite us to view Peck as fully conscious of his predation and the strategies he uses to inveigle children. “Takes patience and psychology,” he says to Bobby, ostensibly speaking of the art of fishing, though just a page earlier, in a scene involving Li’l Bit

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during which she hesitated to participate in a sexual act, he remarked: “I’m a very patient man” (24; 23). “Okay, tip the rod up,” he instructs Bobby when a pompano latches onto his line, “hook it—all right, now easy, reel and then rest—let it play” (24). It is impossible not to think about the seven years Peck devoted to slowly ensnaring Li’l Bit, patiently winding her into his clutches and delicately manipulating her to endure more of his advances. “Nothing showing,” Li’l Bit insisted, referring to her breasts, when she was thirteen years old and Peck persuaded her to allow him to photograph her. “Nothing showing,” Peck agreed, before adding: “Just a peek” (40). The fishing monologue also underscores Peck’s tendency to undercut and reinscribe traditional gender assumptions in the same breath, both telling the male child that it is normal to cry and encouraging him to make that yet another secret. Bobby does not have “to feel ashamed about crying” not because crying is not shameful, but because Uncle Peck won’t tell—and Uncle Peck won’t tell, it is strongly implied, in exchange for another act that will fill the child with greater shame still and that also must be kept a secret. It is, Peck says, “something special just between you and me” (Vogel 1997: 25). Thus, the same need to not talk about one’s troubles that Mary associates with Peck’s generation is being inculcated in Bobby through Peck’s lessons and through his abusive actions. Peck assures Bobby, “There’s nothing you could do that would make me feel ashamed of you” (24–5). Though Peck is referring to Bobby’s crying, the line also hints at what almost certainly will take place in the tree house to which Peck promises to take the boy. Thus, Peck creates an insidious closed circle, entrapping the child in a harmful relationship with the very man who is the only adult from whom he can seek comfort, as only Peck will not be ashamed of him once Bobby engages in the coerced sexual act. In the same manner, Peck allows the eleven-year-old Li’l Bit to drive a car although, as she says, “it’s against the law at my age.” Peck agrees: “And that’s why you can’t tell anyone I’m letting you do this” (Vogel 1997: 56). The darker motive of his secretiveness is again laid bare: having cajoled the child into forbidden behavior as well as a shared

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covenant, he can feel certain that she will not tell her mother when he molests her. Similarly, Peck’s worshipful attitude toward Li’l Bit’s body, though a salutary counterpoint to the degrading commentary she hears from others in her life, is disturbing and strategic, as his none-too-subtle goal is to seduce her. In fact, a recurring lesson that Peck teaches Li’l Bit throughout the years that he is her most important teacher, lurking beneath his apparent expansiveness, is that gender roles are absolute; she is fundamentally a sexual object, unless she can be reimagined as male. After all, we learn that, despite encouraging Li’l Bit to read Shakespeare, Peck envisions a future for her as a Playboy model—albeit in the Ivy League issue. In short, Peck reinstalls conventional assumptions about gender even as he challenges them, and he does this most vividly when he teaches Li’l Bit to drive—for real this time, when she is fifteen. During the driving lesson, Peck links the ability to drive with self-confidence, freedom, and independence. “When you are driving,” he tells Li’l Bit solemnly, “your life is in your own two hands” (Vogel 1997: 33). But in the midst of this crucial episode, in which Peck bestows on his pupil the tools she will ultimately use to release herself from him, he also tells her, “You’re the nearest to a son I’ll ever have … I want to teach you to drive like a man.” Peck urges Li’l Bit to masculinize herself to attain “power” and “maximum control”; yet he also teaches her the impossibility of accomplishing this when he explains why he applies the female pronoun to his car: “[W]hen you close your eyes and think of someone who responds to your touch—someone who performs just for you and gives you what you ask for—I guess I always see a ‘she’” (34). Peck’s desire to empower Li’l Bit and grant her free will is at odds with his desire for her sexual submission and his fundamentally intransigent and patriarchal assumptions about gender. For Li’l Bit, the route out of the apparent trap of gender and abuse is fluidity, as manifested by the play’s form and by her own emerging sexual identity. When the adult Li’l Bit instructs the audience, “Sometimes to tell a secret, you first have to teach a lesson,” she usurps Peck’s role as teacher as well as his habit of employing secrets strategically, but she

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reverses his trajectory. Whereas with Peck a shared secret precedes and paves the way for a dismaying and, for the pupil, disempowering and traumatic lesson, Li’l Bit’s lesson comes first: she guides the audience through the play’s events in such a way as to encourage a nuanced view of Peck, delaying the revelation of the secret (which is his molestation of her when she is eleven) until quite late in the play, by which point we have come to know him in all his troubling but touching complexity. Li’l Bit, the play hints, is a developing writer. (These hints appear most overtly in the scene when she meets a much younger man on a bus and seduces him. She tells him that she is preparing to teach a class, implying that she is now a graduate student, and she employs a dramaturgical metaphor to describe their sex together [Vogel 1997: 28].2) In keeping with these hints about her professional future, throughout the play Li’l Bit deftly controls the narrative, deciding moment by moment —as Peck claimed, largely falsely, that she did in their relationship—where to draw the line. In Graley Herren’s words, she is “an active choreographer of her memories,” who deliberately and artfully determines what to reveal and when, in such a way as to make clear that “she now enjoys creative control over this material” (2010: 106; 107). Her aesthetic choice is to construct the past in patchwork form, moving back and forth through time while persistently reminding us that we are seeing that past through the prism of her recollecting mind. One example of this is the stylized way in which the play is performed. We see on stage “two chairs facing front—or a Buick Riviera, if you will” (Vogel 1997: 10). When Peck is supposedly touching Li’l Bit’s breasts, the actor “makes gentle concentric circles with his thumbs in front of him” (11). Li’l Bit summons her past for us and asks us to imagine what she chooses not to show. Thus, she takes control and abdicates it, implicitly undermining the patriarchal certainty that governed Peck’s treatment of her in her youth. Throughout their relations, Peck operated in a manner that presumed knowledge of the secrets of her heart, as indicated by his insistence that “nothing is going to happen between us until you want it to,” the suggestive “until” implying both that she will ultimately want it and that he will know it when she does (23).

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His line “I’m not gonna do anything you don’t want me to do” carries the same implication, superficially reassuring her that he will not act against her will but subliminally hinting that any act he does perform will be welcomed by her, because he knows her desires better than she does (11). In humane contrast, Li’l Bit acknowledges the mystery of other human beings by not presuming to know the answers to her most crucial questions: “Who did it to you, Uncle Peck? How old were you? Were you eleven?” (54). The questions hang in the air; they offer unsettling possibilities, but not certainty. She also leaves us in the dark about her sexual identity, as when she describes the rumors about why she was kicked out of college: “Some say I got caught with a man in my room. Some say ….I fooled around with a rich man’s daughter … I’m not talking” (16). Later in the play, when she is eighteen and Peck asks if she is seeing other men, she replies: “well, yes, I am seeing other — listen. It’s not really anybody’s business” (51). By keeping the gender unspecified, Li’l Bit maintains her privacy and resists fixity. In a similar vein, Li’l Bit embraces Peck’s lessons and refuses to be bound by them. Like her uncle, she feels freest when she is driving and in her closing monologue she echoes much of his language, with telling exceptions. Whereas Peck remarks, while speaking about his car, “Treat her with respect,” Li’l Bit adjusts the line ever so slightly: “You’ve got to treat her … with respect” (Vogel 1997: 57; ellipses are Vogel’s). The tiny addition of the ellipses as well as the added imperative (“You’ve got to”) intensifies the initial dictum and insinuates, ever so subtly, Peck’s failure in this regard. Li’l Bit follows these lines with a lighthearted but firm act of disobedience, holding to her view that the radio is “the most important control on the dashboard” although Peck rebuked her for that pronouncement earlier in the play (57). Yet she enacts his larger message about taking “maximum control” of her life into her own two hands by turning the radio down on the shrill voices speaking to her from her past, seizing control of her turbulent memories (33). In the play’s final moments, she places Peck in the back seat of her car, where she can continue to see and even smile at him—but in her rearview mirror. In so doing, she locates him firmly in her past while not

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denying and to a degree welcoming his continued influence upon her. The stage directions tell us: “They are happy to be going for a long drive together” (58). After adjusting the rear-view mirror, Li’l Bit declares, “And then—I floor it.” Li’l Bit moves forward into an uncertain future over which she nevertheless has assumed authority and the ability, on her own, to inhabit the driver’s seat—the very position where Peck once held sway in order to teach, mold, cherish, and assault her. It may be worth pointing out as a side note that, just as current readers are more inclined to critique Belize’s status as a Magical Negro—a Black character whose raison d’etre is to improve the whites who are the play’s fundamental concern—than its original audience typically was, the #MeToo movement has impacted how audiences now receive How I Learned to Drive. Of course, as Andrew Kimbrough has noted, even in the late 1990s and early 2000s some audience members resisted Vogel’s textured and, to a degree, sympathetic depiction of Uncle Peck; one early critic went so far as to describe the play, rather redundantly, as “‘repulsively revolting’” (Kimbrough 2002: 48). But the predominant critical response was not only more positive than that but fully receptive to the idea that Peck and Li’l Bit’s bond is “in some appalling way, a real love story,” as Ben Brantley described it in his New York Times review, in which he also called Peck “the most engaging pedophile to walk across an American stage” (Brantley 1997). For her part, Vogel made clear in interviews that part of her goal was to discover “if audiences will allow themselves to find [the relationship] erotic” (quoted in Drukman 1997), and the play includes one overtly erotic moment, in the scene that takes place on L’il Bit’s eighteenth birthday, when she and Peck meet in a hotel room for what turns out to be the last time. Just before she finally rejects him, Peck asks Li’l Bit to lie beside him on the bed and examine her feelings. She does so, and the Greek Chorus describes her thoughts in a mesmeric and lyrical passage that makes clear that Li’l Bit is experiencing sexual longing. The Male and Female Greek Chorus sensually evoke Peck’s eyes, his physical scents, the hint of the former Marine in his walk, his “[neatly] pressed khakis” and the “whisper of [his] zipper.” When the Female Greek Chorus murmurs

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that L’il Bit could “just reach out,” L’il Bit concludes the thought: “Hold him in your hand” (Vogel 1997: 52). The line is sexually charged, but it also signals a power shift, as we have been told repeatedly that Li’l Bit was so small at birth that Peck could hold her in the palm of his hand, a superficially tender but also troubling image for his control of her. At the very moment when she might take the lead sexually, Li’l Bit recognizes that she must instead embrace her newfound power to end the relationship, which is just what she does. But it is not easy: the stage direction tells us that she “wrenches herself free,” although no one is physically holding her when she does (52). Still, today I find in my classroom that the eroticism Vogel hoped audiences would recognize in the relationship is objectionable as a reading to many of my students. Instead, their inclination is to read Li’l Bit’s decision to retain Peck in the back seat of her psychic life as a sign of her lasting trauma, not as a mature and healthy recognition that he contributed to awakening precious aspects of her adult selfhood even as he also permanently damaged her. This same shift in sensitivities has been reflected in recent productions, such as one at the Round House Theatre in Bethesda in 2018 which, seemingly overcorrecting for performances that rendered Peck as “too charming,” depicted him instead as “a major creep from the get-go,” according to a reviewer of the production, complete with “oily hands” (Catlin 2018). The play was slated to have a major Broadway revival during the 2020–21 season, bringing Mary-Louise Parker and David Morse back to the roles they originated in 1997, but that had to be shelved until the spring of 2022 because of the pandemic. How the play’s deeply complex, unsparingly clear-eyed and yet consistently humane portrait of its troubled male victimizer and victim will be received on Broadway in the post #MeToo moment is a question, as a consequence, whose answer must wait for another day. **** If the musical Fun Home shares some of Drive’s qualities, its intertextuality adds yet another layer to its fluidity, one that is not

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present in Drive. What we see on the stage in Fun Home is the process by which something else—the graphic memoir—is being made. Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic was written in 2006; the musical that Lisa Kron and Jeanine Tesori crafted seven years later both refers to its source and shows the narrator, Alison Bechdel, creating it. Yet in the original Broadway production the audience saw just one panel from the ur-Fun Home; otherwise, we were left to imagine what Alison gropes to create. The absence of the resulting text helps to destabilize any single authority, including that of memory, which Alison tells us early on she does not trust, though she has nothing else to work with as she strives to patch together a portrait of the father she barely knew. The fact that Alison is present in three incarnations—as her small, middle, and eldest selves—also prevents any single perspective, or consistent self, from dominating the play. Meanwhile, Alison’s father emerges as a far more authoritarian figure—if also, to his young protégé, far less abusive—than Peck is in Drive, and never sexually so. Bruce’s maniacal desire to impose order on the Gothic revival house in which the Bechdels live leads him to turn his children into unpaid domestic help whose role is to assist him in ensuring that “chaos” is artfully concealed. As driving acts as a metaphor for Peck’s longing for control, Bruce’s fastidious determination to “polish and … shine/ … rearrange and realign” the disorder in his home metaphorizes his urge to mask the “[bad] foundation,” the “[s]omething cracking, something rotting” that he fears in himself (Tesori/Kron 2014: 64). Linked to this effort is Bruce’s job in the “Fun Home,” as the children refer to the Bechdel funeral home, where Bruce deftly embalms corpses so as to “remove all … signs of trauma” (11). Here too his activities create a polished veneer over something anarchic that lurks below. Like Li’l Bit, Alison plays a dual role for her father. She reveals her likely queer nature at an early age and shows signs of being artistic. Ostensibly, Bruce strives to control these qualities, insisting that Alison wear barrettes and declaring that people will talk about her behind her back if she refuses to wear dresses. When she comes out as a lesbian,

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Bruce says she has “a flair for the dramatic” and discourages her from “putting a label” on herself (Tesori/Kron 2014: 47). At the same time, he speaks in a code that, as an eighteen-year-old, she cannot understand when he reveals in a letter, “There have been a few times in my life when I thought about taking a stand, but I’m not a hero. Is that a cop out? Maybe so. It’s hard sometimes to tell what is really worth it” (47). Alison fails to grasp that Bruce is gingerly coming out to her and merely sees his confession as a manifestation of his need to be “the expert.” In response, she defensively pronounces herself “not like him”: “I’ve never been like him, and he can’t deal with that” (47). The truth is the opposite: she is quite like him, and Bruce can’t deal with that. Yet Bruce simultaneously denies and encourages those features in Alison that he has repressed in himself, dismissing her declaration that she is a lesbian while sending her novels by Colette. When the child Alison begins to experiment with cartooning, Bruce responds as usual by imposing order on what he deems unruly “fun”: “This is visually confusing,” he asserts. “Sure, cartoons are fun, but I’m showing you … how to do something substantial and beautiful … [Y]ou have the potential to become a real artist … But that means you have to learn the craft; you have to study the rules” (Tesori/Kron 2014: 35). When Alison defends her own vision, Bruce cascades into a telling aesthetic rage: “You want to take a half-baked mess to school, you want to embarrass yourself like that it’s fine with me” (36). His need to police her art, like his efforts to police her clothing, stems from a spiraling sense of shame that prompts him to renounce anything that, as it were, draws outside the lines, violates “the rules,” or has a whiff of transgressive disorder. Yet he also claims Alison as his masterful product: “[S]he learned everything she knows from me,” he tells her college girlfriend, with what sounds like pride (56). As Bruce wishes to claim Alison even as he rewrites aspects of who she is, Alison too wishes to claim Bruce by fixing him in a form that will make sense of a distressingly unknowable past. This is in some ways less overt in the musical than it is in the graphic memoir, in which Bechdel remarks that her desire to identify Bruce as “‘gay’ in the way

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I am ‘gay,’ as opposed to bisexual or some other category, is just a way of keeping him to myself ” (Bechdel 2007: 230). Yet the musical too is freighted with the intensity of Alison’s need; its opening lines, sung by Small Alison, are “Daddy, hey Daddy, come here okay? I need you,” though Daddy only rarely complies (Tesori/Kron 2014: 1). Near the musical’s end, Bruce takes a drive with Medium Alison, who is replaced by adult Alison in a manner that again recalls Vogel’s play. Both dramas move toward a climactic drive, though what occurs in each is quite different. In Drive, the eleven-year-old Li’l Bit is molested by her uncle; in Fun Home, nineteen-year-old Alison listens to her father’s tentative admission of his early homosexual experiences in what turns out to be their last meaningful conversation before his suicide. As dissimilar as these events are, they are revelatory and also in their own way shattering for the female characters—and the result is a lasting disassociation that both playwrights underscore through staging. When the child Li’l Bit takes her drive with her uncle, the Teen-aged Greek Chorus speaks her words, but it is thirty-five-year-old Li’l Bit who sits in Peck’s lap as they are spoken. In Fun Home, forty-three-year-old Alison takes the place of Middle Alison in the car, “living [the event] again” that so baffled her younger self. As the adult Li’l Bit’s body responds to her uncle’s molestation in a way that signals the richly complex emotions of decades of retrospection and hard-earned forgiveness (as an example, she strokes his face and relaxes against his body, whereas her elevenyear-old self was tense and weeping), adult Alison gives voice to the years of regret that followed this car ride. “Make this not the past,” she sings, “There’s a moment I’m forgetting where you tell me you see me/ Say something, talk to me!/ … This can’t be our last—” (Tesori/Kron 2014: 62). Alison trails off and Bruce brings an abrupt end to her song with the words, “That was fun.” Given how often Bruce puts a stop to fun, it is poignantly ironic that he pulls out of the most serious exchange he has ever had with his daughter by deeming their drive together, the last one they will ever take, merely “fun.” Alison, like Li’l Bit, is left with unanswerable questions, and a longing for as well as a fear of relatedness. It is just four months after she

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comes out to her parents that Bruce commits suicide, and the proximity of these events may or may not be coincidental, though Alison can never know. “What did it feel like to step in front of a truck, Dad?” she asks her long-gone father. “What did it feel like to see it coming right at you … And just let it hit you? Why? Was it because of me? Did it have nothing to do with me? What Happened?” (Tesori/Kron 2014: 63). Would it help or hurt to know that her own coming out triggered her father’s suicide? Would it help Li’l Bit to know that her uncle too was abused? While these questions must be left unresolved, Alison recognizes herself, as Li’l Bit does, as the complicated product, in ways both good and ill, of her father’s refusal to know himself. And, like Li’l Bit, she rejects her father’s rules and credits him for who she becomes, and she too does so through a metaphor of movement. In his final song before he commits suicide, Bruce sings, “I’m falling into nothingness/or flying into something so sublime” (64), lines that Alison sang about her first sexual experience (33). And just as Peck “flew” suicidally “down the steep basement stairs” of his house after having spent seven years (suggestively, the same number of years that he spent as Li’l Bit’s teacher and abuser) drinking himself to death, Bruce falls or leaps in front of a truck (Vogel 1997: 54). Alison, by contrast, tells us that she “leapt out of the closet,” adopting Bruce’s imagery in such a way as to embrace her sexual identity as well as her artistic freedom (Tesori/Kron 2014: 33). Alison Bechdel, of course, became a cartoonist, which she affirms as art though her father denigrated it as merely “fun.” Yet she implicitly and explicitly acknowledges her home, and her father, as crucial to engendering that “fun,” as Li’l Bit knows she learned to feel at her freest while driving in spite and because of her uncle. In Fun Home’s final moment, Small Alison plays airplane with Bruce, who hoists her into the air with his feet on her belly as she remarks excitedly that she can “see all of Pennsylvania.” Immediately afterward, adult Alison delivers the play’s last line, which is a description of the one graphic image that the audience is permitted to see: “Caption: Every so often there was a rare moment of perfect balance when I soared above him” (Tesori/ Kron 2014: 69). Like Li’l Bit going for a “long drive” with her uncle

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firmly deposited in the back seat, Alison credits her father for the “perfect balance” that he helps her to achieve, even as she positions herself as “above him” in flight (68). Thus, in all three plays it is a female who achieves some degree of liberating mobility that permits her to leave a more static male figure behind. All three plays link psychological progression with sexual and aesthetic fluidity, in the characters’ lives, their art, and the plays’ own forms. By contrast, the chief patriarchal figures in each play—Roy Cohn, Uncle Peck, and Bruce Bechdel—are paralyzed, on “Hold,” and haunted by demons whose origins they are determined not to see. All three fit the description that was offered of Roy Cohn on a panel anonymously contributed to the AIDS Memorial Quilt in the late 1980s: “Bully. Coward. Victim.” Victimized by heteronormative, hypermasculinist assumptions that they have internalized and are terrified of violating, they do their best to clothe longings that they believe to be deviant in acceptable garments, pronouncing AIDS liver cancer in Roy’s case, or proposing marriage to the youthful object of his desires in Peck’s. The father-figure’s anxious self-loathing takes the form of a bullying insistence that his protégé embrace his dismal view of the world. “You’re on earth, goddammit!” Roy bellows at Joe, irritated by the younger man’s idealism, “Plant a foot” (Kushner 1995: 74). Young Bobby is coached not to let anyone catch him crying, and Small Alison is goaded into wearing a dress so as not to “be the only girl … not wearing one” (Tesori/Kron 2014: 29). And yet, though all three older men die lonely deaths, for the younger generation these are by and large plays of triumph and healing, with Joe Pitt as an important exception. As the eldest Alison puts it, in a caption that would find its way into her graphic memoir: My Dad and I both grew up in the same small Pennsylvania town. And he was gay. And I was gay. And he killed himself. And I … became a lesbian cartoonist. (Tesori/Kron 2014: 9)

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S­ exual self-knowledge, movement, living and drawing outside of the patriarchal lines is possible, these plays insist, although it is difficult and requires great courage, struggle, self-examination, and imagination. In my next chapter, I will consider whether it also requires the privilege of whiteness.

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Cakewalks and the White Gaze: Topdog/Underdog, Fairview, Slave Play

“How do we historicize the event of the dehistoricized?” (Bhabha 1994: 283). This paradoxical question, posed by Homi K. Bhabha, haunts the dramas of Suzan-Lori Parks, Jackie Sibblies Drury, and Jeremy O. Harris to which I shall turn in this final chapter. Both Topdog/Underdog, by Parks, which premiered off-Broadway in 2001, and Slave Play, by Harris, which had its Broadway premiere in 2019, overtly take place beneath the long shadow of historical oppression and racist violence in the United States. Fairview, by Drury, first produced in 2018, is less explicit in its engagement with African American history but no less searing in its portrait of the ongoing impact of racism in a nation where Black people are constantly subjected to what one reviewer has described as “the warping power of the white gaze” (McNulty 2020). Indeed, at a crucial moment in Fairview’s second act, an unseen white man describes the events transpiring on the stage—which involve the interactions of a Black family and which, we come to understand, a group of disembodied white characters are watching along with the actual audience—as “another cakewalk!” A cakewalk, a different white character explains, is “a racist dance/where black people pretend they have easy lives” (Drury 2019: 67). The dance originated on plantations and was performed by enslaved people with the actual goal of parodying their white slave owners. But the slave owners failed to get the joke and loved the cakewalks, which were eventually incorporated into minstrel shows and performed by white actors in blackface. Park, Harris, and Drury’s dramas all ask their (likely predominantly white) audiences whether Blacks in America can ever be freed from performing for a simultaneously uncomprehending and appropriating white gaze.

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All three of these plays contain vestiges of the figure of the anxious male breadwinner, as well as equally insistent vestiges of the mixed longing for and aversion to domestic containment with which we have found him to be linked. However, Drury and Harris move beyond anxious masculinity to portray anxious whiteness, more explicitly and knowingly than any of the plays addressed so far, and its devastating impact on Black lives. All three plays were written prior to the terrible spring and summer of 2020, but Harris’s Slave Play seems stunningly prescient, as noted in Chapter 1, in its evocation of a virus that is simultaneously metaphoric and literal, that emanates from white people, and inflicts catastrophic violence, “biological warfare,” on Black and brown bodies (Harris 2019: 143). The summer of 2020 is when the murders of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and other Black men and women; the incitement of white supremacist activity by an increasingly unhinged Donald Trump; and the grievous impact of Covid-19 on communities of color all combined to reignite the Black Lives Matter movement, inspiring protests against racism in cities across the United States. While white people of course did not engender the virus that is Covid-19, the inaction of the Trump administration worsened it exponentially, as did the many thousands of mostly white people who were led to perceive sensible precautions, such as mask-wearing and social distancing, as a violation of their rights. It became increasingly clear that no one was safe from this galloping virus, but systemic racism resulted in a demonstrably greater risk for Black Americans, who so frequently lack the economic scaffolding, the cultural capital, and the freedom from racism and historical trauma that work to the benefit of white lives. Imaginative transcendence of the sort we saw in the previous chapter requires privilege, and trauma that takes the form of a great hole in history is not as easily overcome. The phrase “the Great Hole of History” comes from an earlier play of Parks’, entitled The America Play and written in 1993 (Parks 1994: 159). Despite marked stylistic differences, The America Play and Topdog/Underdog are linked by their shared deployment of a character who shapes his public self around an absence he cannot fill, which is Abraham Lincoln. In both plays, the central character bears an

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uncanny resemblance to the sixteenth president, apart from the not insignificant fact that he is Black. This “natural God-given limitation” notwithstanding, the look-alike scrapes together a living as a Lincoln impersonator, and the point in Lincoln’s life that he ritualistically performs is its end: the violent moment of the assassination (Parks 1994: 163). Day in and day out, the faux Lincoln sits in an arcade, garbed in beard and stove-top hat, awaiting paying customers eager for the opportunity to “shoot” him dead. It is the look-alike’s job to slump in his chair, only to revive in time for the next paying Booth. In both plays, this scenario allows Parks to ask searching questions about African American history, which is also an absence that cannot be filled. In her 1994 essay “Possessions,” Parks noted that her playwriting project is to “make’ history” where it does not exist: “I’m working theatre like an incubator to create ‘new’ historical events” (Parks 1994: 4; 5). Yet the results for Parks’ Lincolns are bleaker than this conception metaphor might lead us to expect. Both characters seek to mimic the past as a strategy for carving out a present and future he can call his own—that is, in this sense, new. In each case the effort is futile: the role absorbs the man, and an implacable and most assuredly old history engulfs him. Aggravating the problem, the Lincolns collude in their own erasure, as they find themselves compelled to play roles within a grand narrative that is not theirs but which mesmerizes them, rendering them willing but subjugated captives of the story America tells itself about what constitutes history as well as what constitutes successful masculinity. Thus, these characters perfectly embody the literary theorist Linda Hutcheon’s description of what she calls the ex-centric, which is “ineluctably identified with the center it desires but is denied” (2003: 60). The America Play offers some fragile hope that a younger generation might release itself from the grip of this longing, but Parks offers a darker portrait in Topdog/Underdog, which shows that desire for centrality consuming and destroying the two main characters, a pair of brothers fatalistically named Lincoln and Booth. Although in her essay “Elements of Style” Parks claims that realism cannot “accommodate the figures which take up residence inside me,”

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Topdog/Underdog is at least to some degree a realistic play, unlike the much more surreal The America Play (Parks 1994: 8). In fact, at first glance Topdog appears to fit squarely in the kitchen-sink tradition that we associate with Miller’s version of American theatre, although notably the characters do not own a sink. The play takes place, the opening stage directions tell us, “here” and “now,” as Death of a Salesman takes place “today,” but whereas Miller’s dramas tend to be situated in and around his characters’ actual homes, Topdog is set in a “seedily furnished rooming house room” (Miller 1976: 10; Parks 2001: 4; 7). The play’s action is neatly linear and covers one week, and its characters’ names, which their father gave them as a joke, invite us to understand them in part allegorically, as both exemplary and singular, like Willy [Every] Loman and Troy Maxson. But Lincoln and Booth’s economic status is far lower than Willy’s and even Troy’s. If the play “revisits the critique of family and American society first staged by Arthur Miller,” as Patrick Maley has observed, it shows us that family in tatters and the sons locked in a hopeless “battle to the death” in the domestic wreckage their absent parents left behind (2013: 188).. The brothers’ conflicted longing to be “just regular people living in a house” signals the continued allure of the narrative of middle-class domestic attainment, although all of the markers of that status are out of reach for Lincoln and Booth (Parks 2001: 68). As just one crucial example, when we meet the brothers, they are essentially orphans because their parents abandoned them years before, leaving them with a “raggedy” photo album and sketchy memories of a childhood which they embellish with willful fantasies. Although the brothers long ago gave up expecting their parents to return, Booth attempts to manufacture an equally raggedy version of domesticity in the temporary abode he shares with Lincoln, constructing bookshelves out of milk crates. As he explains to Lincoln: I was thinking we dont got no bookshelves we dont got no dining room table so Im making a … modular unit you put the books in the bottom and the table top on top ….Youd sit there, I’d sit on the edge of the bed. Gathered around the dinner table. Like old times. (Parks 2001: 13)

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­ incoln points out that they also own no books, the photo album aside, L nor do they have running water, a toilet, or, as previously noted, a sink. Still, Booth does his best to simulate the domestic scene, whose centerpiece is a family gathered around a dinner table, that he links with vanished and only vaguely recollected “old times.” Forlorn though these efforts seem, Booth has high hopes for the salvation and sex he anticipates he will receive from his permanently off-stage girlfriend Grace (sometimes called Amazing Grace), whose affections he seeks to cement with the ring he has stolen for her. Notably, the ring is fake—Booth describes it as “diamond-esque”—and his anxiety about its efficacy is manifested by his care in selecting a ring a size too small for Grace so that she cannot easily remove it, as she did with the last one he stole for her. But Grace in both the literal and figurative sense is unobtainable for these men, although their need for a secure masculinity requires her. In this all-male drama, the brothers may bluster about sexual conquests in ways that recall Happy and Biff, but mothers, wives, and girlfriends to prop up their self-esteem are the stuff of legend, as remote as Abraham Lincoln. In their absence, Lincoln and Booth are left to play-act, as they do at the start of Scene 2 when Booth returns from a particularly gratifying afternoon of shoplifting, and displays his stolen wares for his delighted brother: Booth  Lordamighty, Pa, I smells money! Lincoln  Sho nuff, Ma. Poppas brung home thuh bacon … Booth  Oh lordamighty Ima faint, Pa! Get me muh med-sin! … Lincoln  Thinkka thuh children, Ma! (25; 26)

As Patricia Stuelke points out, this seems like a performance of a performance, “a debased replica of a flawed replica of suburbia,” so disconnected from what it seeks to enact as to highlight that absence (2017: 766). Precariously perched on the distant fringes of white American domestic comfort, the brothers take on parodic versions of the roles their parents discarded, filtered through the Southern Gothic, with a little cakewalk thrown in.

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Despite their shared desolation, Lincoln is assigned top-dog status for much of the play because he appears to have found a way to accommodate himself to his position in life. As a younger man, Lincoln moved beyond his rough beginnings successfully, if not quite legally, by becoming a consummate three-card monte hustler, raking in cash from unsuspecting marks. But after his partner was killed Lincoln decided to go straight, and by the time of the play’s action he has taken the job that his name foretold: he is a Lincoln impersonator who performs the assassination, wearing whiteface, in an arcade. While Booth deems this a “fucked-up job,” one that imprisons Lincoln in precisely the time period African Americans most long to escape (“when folks was slaves and shit”), Lincoln believes that his new occupation has provided him with a path to an honest living: it is a “sit down job” with benefits (Parks 2001: 22; 35; 53). The irony is palpable: Lincoln does indeed sit down all day long for the benefit of the presumably white patrons who pay to shoot him. By taking on this role, Lincoln endorses the value system of the bourgeois culture against which he pitted himself when he played three-card monte. But, although Booth tries to lure Lincoln back to his card-playing life, it is crucial to Lincoln’s self-perception that he is not going back, as he vows frequently. He is firmly convinced that he has freed himself from his miserable background and that he has an unwavering sense of identity despite his vocation, which, he recognizes, hinges on artifice. “I was Lincoln on my own before any of that,” he says, in reference to the fake beard and top hat he dons to perform Lincoln (30). Lincoln’s identity, he asserts confidently, is neatly detachable from the role he plays for a living and from those aspects of his personal past that he wishes to disown. For Lincoln, one’s past is like an article of clothing, a metaphor he employs when he compares himself to his father, who left his wardrobe behind when he abandoned his sons: “I said to myself that’s ….what I would do: wear it out and then leave it hanging … and not come back” (30). Thus, even as Lincoln adopts the language associated with the male breadwinner when he boasts about his sit-down job, he celebrates his connection to a father who removed the garb of domesticity and abandoned his sons, not unlike Willy Loman’s father, without a backward glance.

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Booth, by contrast, retains an attachment to the past that prompts him to cling to whatever remnants of it that he can. In addition to saving the five-hundred-dollar bill that his mother supposedly gave to him in a nylon stocking when she departed, Booth longs for old times and tries, as we have noted, to recreate them. Yet seemingly in opposition to this impulse, Booth is scornful of honest work and ekes out his living through small-time thievery and sponging off of Lincoln’s earnings, while imagining he can refashion himself in his brother’s former image by becoming a three-card monte player. In the play’s opening moments, Booth is alone, rehearsing his performance of the patter that accompanies the scam: “Watch me close watch me close now” (Parks 2001: 7). Booth’s performance, the stage directions tell us, is awkward and inauthentic, and he enacts the scam with imaginary money as he dodges imaginary policemen. Booth, like his brother, is masquerading in a role that he will never be capable of inhabiting authentically. Later in the same scene, Booth announces his intention to change his name from Booth to 3-Card. Though his desire to discard the name “Booth” is understandable, Booth’s sense that he can reinvent himself by altering his name is at least as illusory as his brother’s conviction that he can escape his past by removing a piece of clothing. Booth reveals his own insecurity on the matter when he informs Lincoln of the strategy he will use to ensure that others call him by the new name: “Anybody not calling me 3-Card get a bullet” (19). At least initially, Booth’s seething paranoia is not aimed in his brother’s direction. On the contrary, in Scene 1 he informs Lincoln that today is the day when they will “solidify the shit” between them (Parks 2001: 20), by which he means they will join together as a wildly lucrative scamming team, playing three-card monte and acquiring incalculable amounts of cash and dazzled female attention. Just a page later, however, in response to Lincoln’s resistance to the scheme, Booth erupts in a rage, pronounces his brother a “shiteating motherfucking … limpdick uncle tom,” and accuses him of standing in the way of his own success. For all of Booth’s declarations about brotherly solidarity, much of Topdog/Underdog takes the form of a battle between the brothers for

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the title of top-dog, which they variously believe derives from cardplaying skills, economics, sexual dominance, and the securing of a firm inheritance. But what we come to understand is that top-dog status really hinges on forging an authentic selfhood, one that they can regard as fully theirs. Lincoln and Booth live unstable and hyper-theatrical lives (it is worth remembering that John Wilkes Booth was an actor, and that Abraham Lincoln was watching a play when Booth shot him), in a society that enjoys the spectacle they provide but relegates them to the sidelines, whether or not they are abiding by its rules. In this context, each longs to prove himself “my own man” or, better still, “thuh man” (82; 85). It is this hopeless desire to triumph over and become “thuh man” that is at the core of the men’s complicated relationship to the larger culture and to one another. Ironically, Lincoln’s steady self-confidence for the first half of the play stems in part from a clearheaded understanding of the limits of his agency. Despite intermittently giving voice to macho pride when he recalls his three-card monte days, Lincoln acknowledges that his partner Lonny’s death exhibited his insignificance in a system within which men like Lincoln and Lonny are never winners. Lonny was shot, Lincoln explains, but no one knows by whom, nor does anyone care. It was this recognition that prompted him to reconcile himself to his demeaning job—he is paid less than the white “Lincoln” who held the job before him and is subjected to a daily ritual of inspection that the white workers do not endure—as the necessary price for a modicum of economic security. It is only when he is deprived of that job in a literally dehumanizing fashion (he is replaced by a wax dummy) that Lincoln expresses dissatisfaction with his status and questions the parental departures that he previously took in his stride. In Scene 5, in a discussion of their childhood, the brothers agree that the family’s movement into what Lincoln calls the “best fucking house in the world” was the beginning of its end, but they disagree about why (Parks 2001: 64). In Lincoln’s judgment, the acquisition of a house should have held the family together:

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It werent perfect but ….they’d bought it …, figuring we could be a family … and them things … [they] was struggling against, would just leave them be. Them things would see thuh house and be impressed and … leave them be. Would see thuh job Pops had …., the food on the table … and it would … let us all be, just regular people living in a house. (67–8)

Having obtained the quintessential indicators of gendered domestic security—the house, the father’s job, the food on the table, the clean clothes with the buttons the mother sewed on “all right”—Lincoln believes the family should have remained safe from whatever it was “out there” that threatened them. Booth’s position is precisely the reverse. In his view, it is the house and all it connotes that splintered the family. In his words, “thuh whole family mortgage bills going to work thing was just too much” (Parks 2001: 68). Booth identifies domestic existence itself as the threat, or rather the burden, that drove the parents away. Yet Booth fluctuates on this matter and Lincoln does too, and it is unsurprising that they do. The holy grail of bourgeois suburban family life, with a house at its center, beckons to them; they recognize it as the ultimate signifier of success and comfort even though the quest for it may have alienated their parents and even though they, as young Black men, are often identified as its nemesis. An illustrative demonstration of this double bind can be found once again in a speech by Donald Trump, delivered at a rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on June 20, 2020, in which he warned his receptive (if small) audience of the nightmare that would befall suburban homeowners if the police were to be defunded: ­ ey, it’s one o’clock in the morning, and a very tough … hombre, a very H tough hombre is breaking into the window of a young woman whose husband is away as a traveling salesman.1

For an audience of mostly white people wearing MAGA hats, Trump’s warning was potent despite being absurdly anachronistic: the traveling

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salesman livelihood was starting to unravel even in Willy Loman’s day, as was the gendered dynamic that rendered males the protectors of helpless damsels. Still, Trump’s point could not have been clearer. The “young woman” under threat is coded as white and the “tough hombre” who invades her domestic sanctuary is Black or brown. Having internalized this opposition, Booth associates conformity to the white status quo with degradation and impotence: “Yr dick,” he says, speaking about what he argues Lincoln’s job has done to him, “is hanging there …, little whiteface shriveled-up blank-shooting grub worm” (Parks 2001: 45). The whiteface that Lincoln dons to perform “Lincoln” makes its way to his penis. But Booth’s efforts to assume the role of the highly sexualized “tough hombre,” a role thrust on him by the larger culture, reveal themselves as hollow bluster in part because of the absence of females, desiring or victimized. Though he spends a lot of time talking about the magnum-sized condoms he wears, Booth mostly masturbates to old porn magazines while waiting hopelessly for Grace to turn up. Meanwhile, even as he castigates Lincoln for his refusal to return to criminality, Booth’s language betrays him. “Here I am,” he tells his brother indignantly, in response to Lincoln’s reluctance to cooperate with the three-card monte scheme, “interested in an economic opportunity, willing to work hard …, trying to earn a living” (21). At the very moment Booth seeks to detach himself from the system he believes has rendered his brother impotent, he adopts the terminology of neoliberal capitalism, demonstrating that its tentacles are everywhere even though its benefits are not. Lincoln too wavers in his attitude toward a system that he views as both the one avenue to security and as demoralizing and disempowering. Late in the play, after being fired, Lincoln returns to playing three-card monte, and when he does so he contemptuously denounces what he previously endorsed, namely: “thuh boys who dont have thuh balls to get nothing but a regular job” (Parks 2001: 84). In contrast to those ball-less breadwinning boys, Lincoln proclaims: “[M]y shit is back … I got my shit back” (83–5). The repetition of the word “back” is revealing: what Lincoln perceives as restorative advancement

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is instead a regressive move. He has returned to the allegedly discarded self in relation to which he earlier vowed, “I aint going back” (22). Yet that vow was always self-deceiving, as Booth understood: “You aint going back but you going all the way back” (22). If his job as an impersonator locked Lincoln in the historical past, his role as a threecard monte scam artist locks him in an equally hopeless conflict with the present. The hideous truth that Topdog/Underdog gradually reveals is that the deck is stacked against these men regardless of how they play their cards. They cannot possibly be “thuh man” in any of the various games they play, cannot claim the role of father without progeny, forefather without power, or top-dog without a credible underdog. As Myka Tucker-Abramson has argued, quoting Audre Lorde’s famous phrase, Topdog “forces us to confront the difficulty of having only the master’s tools for the necessary task of dismantling his house,” and though she is speaking here about language, the argument pertains more generally (2007: 79). Lincoln and Booth cannot conceive of any route to power that does not bring them directly back to narratives that render them as either invisible or thugs—including the narrative of the suburban dream as simultaneously critiqued and revered in an American dramatic tradition passed along from Miller to Williams to Hansberry to Wilson and beyond. When Booth returns home in Scene 6 and hears Lincoln ask rhetorically, “Who thuh man?,” the climax to which the entire play was headed is clearly upon us. Each man has just had an encounter with the world outside the rooming house room, in which he attempted to assert his prowess: Lincoln through three-card monte and Booth through violence. Inevitably, each is drawn back home to a final encounter with his brother and with his very self—or, rather, with his multiple selves, both those he performs and those he has inherited from history. Lured into a confrontation by Booth—who boasts, “Ima be thuh man and you aint gonna be shit”—Lincoln agrees to play a game of three-card monte that he proceeds to win. Reveling in his victory, Lincoln declares that it is the first move “that separates thuh Player from thuh Played.” That first move, he goes on, involves knowing “that there aint no winning”

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(Parks 2001: 106). Yet what Lincoln fails to understand and perhaps only grasps in the seconds before his death is that he too is and always has been one of the Played, not merely subject to but complicit with white America’s determination to erase his story from the story it tells about its origins and meaning. The best manifestation of this larger cultural project of erasure is articulated by Lincoln himself when he explains to Booth that he cannot allow his performance of Lincoln’s death to become “too real” because that would scare the customers. “People are funny,” he explains, “about they Lincoln shit.” With immense if troubling perceptiveness, Lincoln asserts that people prefer to view their “historical shit in a certain way”; they like it to “unfold the way they folded it up. Neatly like a book. Not raggedy and bloody and screaming” (Parks 2001: 52). Yet it is precisely those “raggedy and bloody and screaming” aspects of the American past that convey the experiences of African Americans, who have been brutalized and deprived of their full stories. Nevertheless, Lincoln complies with his customers’ desires for a “neat,” or whitewashed, history because he believes he can profit by doing so, making an honest living playing Honest Abe. To play that role, Lincoln must scam himself: he must accept the indignity that is a regular feature of his work life and he must avoid pondering the implications of gratifying the appetites of people who wish to step into the skin of a notorious advocate of slavery. It would be a somewhat different matter, perhaps, if his performance involved the recitation of one of Lincoln’s famous speeches. Instead, the Black man performs Lincoln’s destruction at the hands of the very forces of racism and violence that will pursue Lincoln (the character) into the twenty-first century. The Black man in whiteface “paid awful wages to dress up as the white man who ‘emancipated’ him,” as TuckerAbramson has argued, is a devastating and “concrete symbol of our time” (2007: 87). In the end, Lincoln unwittingly goads his brother into murdering him when he mocks Booth’s faith in the authenticity of his inheritance, insinuating that the nylon stocking their mother left behind for Booth—which he has not touched in all the many years since their

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parents’ departure—is likely empty. In so doing, Lincoln levels an allout assault on the realness of everything on which Booth has founded his foundering life: the realness of the inheritance, of their own fraternal bond, and of their mother. “Howd you know,” Lincoln asks Booth jeeringly, “she was for real?” after also, moments before, putting into question whether the two men are truly brothers (Parks 2001: 106). Not incidentally, what preceded this scene was an off-stage confrontation between Booth and Grace in which she manifestly failed to confirm his masculinity. In retaliation, as Booth reveals just prior to the play’s conclusion, he murdered her: “Who thuh fuck she think she is … Telling me I dont got nothing going on” (107). When Grace refuses his ring, depriving him of his one path to culturally approved masculinity, he becomes the tough hombre instead: “I showed her what I got going on” (107). Lincoln unknowingly continues what Grace began by stripping Booth of the one thing he believed he possessed, which was proof of an inheritance (familial, emotional, economic) that might allow him to be, in some fragile sense, “thuh man,” or at least a man for whom someone—importantly, a mother—once cared. In response, Booth astonishes his brother by behaving in an entirely predictable fashion: he kills Lincoln. Lincoln’s fatal error, it seems, is his belief that he can outsmart history. Bereft of an inheritance, personal or cultural, Lincoln attempts to concoct an identity for himself that will allow him to profit from a gapped version of the American past while ignoring its racist underpinnings. Instead, he and his brother become history’s dupes, “condemned,” as Verna Foster puts it, “to relive a representation of history they do not know how to remake,” one in which Booth inevitably must kill Lincoln (2005: 35). Desperate to find a footing in a culture that has disinherited them as their parents have, the brothers end up permanently relegated to the margins, performing roles for others’ amusement that result in their annihilation. It is significant that all of Topdog takes place within the confines of Booth’s seedy temporary home; the outside world remains invisible, a sign of their inability to make a mark on it. Booth’s first instinct after his fratricide is to state aggressively that he is going

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to reclaim his inheritance, but the final stage direction tells us that he “crumples” instead. Though he asserts that he is going to “go out there and make a name for myself ” (reminding us, perhaps, of Biff, who decrees that all he wants awaits him “out there” as soon as he achieves self-knowledge), there is no meaningful “out there” into which Booth can venture, not even an idealized western frontier that he imagines (Parks 2001: 110). Nor does he really possess a name of his own, as John Proctor does, that he can fetishize. Booth’s name was a sour joke foisted on him by his “foe-father,” to adopt a pun Parks uses in The America Play, and it means nothing at all once Lincoln is dead. As the lights darken on Topdog, all Booth can do is to hold his brother’s body close and let out a wordless wail, having murdered the one person who shared his desolation and gave meaning, however bleak, to his name. Booth has no identity and no history without Lincoln, no inheritance worth preserving without Lincoln to reassure him that it is real. That inheritance was Booth’s last hope, the one guarantee of an identity and a past that might not be raggedy. When Booth mournfully accuses his dead brother, whom he cradles in his arms, of having “stole my inheritance, man,” the audience should recognize who the real thief is, even if Booth does not. It is an America that has robbed Booth and Lincoln of a history that could sustain their selfhood. That America watches Black male bodies “close” only to fetishize them, casting them as antagonists in the tale of domestic success to which we are told we should all aspire, and beguiling them with promises that amount to nothing more than a hustle (Parks 2001: 110). **** The impact of the watchers on the watched becomes more explicit as a theme in Fairview, a Pulitzer-prize winning play by Jackie Sibblies Drury that the New York Times pronounced “dazzling and ruthless” when it opened in 2018 at the Soho Repertory Theatre in New York City (Brantley 2018). The play’s epigraph is taken from Franz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks; it reads: “‘Dirty nigger!’ or simply ‘Look! A Negro!’” (Drury 2019: 6). Drury adds: “This, reversed, is the play.” In keeping

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with this idea, she opens Fairview with the stage direction, “Lights up on a negro.” We see the character Beverly “peeling carrots, real carrots, on a theatre set that looks like a nice living/dining room in a nice house in a nice neighborhood” (7). After a time, the stage directions tell us, Beverly “looks at herself in a pretend mirror hung on the fourth wall.” This, we are assured, is “a very normal thing to have happen in a play” (8). As Beverly assesses her reflection, noting to herself that she “looks good,” her husband Dayton enters and observes her, prompting Beverly to feel herself “being looked at” and to cry: “What are you looking at?” (8). Ostensibly, what is being looked at is a Black family that is happily ensconced in what Raisin in the Sun’s Younger family so longed to obtain: that is, “a nice house in a nice neighborhood” and everything that that implies. The Frasier home contains a whole host of touchstones of upper-middle-class bourgeois achievement. Beverly and Dayton serve French wine, fancy cheeses such as Brie and Humboldt Fog, and assorted root vegetables at their dinner parties. Their family consists of at least two generations of college-educated people. The most serious issues confronting them are whether their academically stellar high school-aged daughter (who has taken six honors or AP classes annually, plays three varsity sports, and participates in choir, debate, and yearbook) will take a gap year before going to college, and whether the celebration Beverly is preparing for her mother’s birthday will be as perfect as she hopes. The Frasiers seemingly embody what the white character Jimbo describes in Act 2: they are a Black family with enough money that their race, he claims, “disappears and they’re just rich” (55). Race is never mentioned in Act 1, and the stakes in the unfolding drama appear to be exceedingly low, with a burnt birthday cake functioning to bring about the act’s comically melodramatic climax. In short, this family seems to have traveled to a sublime idyll where race is rendered invisible by virtue of their acquisition of the suburban American dream. Even the mid-century gendered division of domestic labor has been restored, as Beverly presides over the preparation of dinner and her sexiness is admired by her husband after he brings home the bacon or, more specifically, the root vegetables.

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And yet rapidly there are hints that Fairview is not at all what it seems to be; instead, as Shane Breaux has argued, it “strategically mirrors the realism of American family drama” in order to exhibit “white society’s distortions of black individuality through theatrical representation” (2020: 78). For the reader, these distortions call attention to themselves in the form of the play’s stage directions, which underscore the artificiality of what is occurring on the stage. We see not a nice living/dining room, but a theatre set that looks like one—a facsimile. When Beverly’s sister Jasmine arrives on the scene, she too looks at herself “in the pretend mirror”: everything we are viewing, we are pointedly reminded, is pretend, including that invisible fourth wall that realism asks audiences to ignore. A soliloquy that the teen-aged Keisha delivers is described by the stage directions as “a theatrical device where a character talks aloud and no one onstage can hear them” (Drury 2019: 7;12; 26). In Brechtian fashion, Drury prohibits—even mocks—the willing suspension of disbelief that realism relies on and instead highlights the fakery that is inherent in theatre. The viewing audience is not privy to these stage directions, and this is at once obvious and important: the emphasis on artifice is evident in performance but also might be overlooked, allowing audience members (particularly, one imagines, white ones) to be lulled into a state of comfort that should trouble them later. For now, what is available for spectators to detect are exaggerated performances that gesture toward sitcoms, as well as occasional moments that interrupt the action jarringly, as when there is a sudden, unexplained glitch in the music Beverly is listening to. Most strikingly, Keisha’s soliloquy constitutes a sharp change in tone, a momentary abandonment of the general good cheer. “My future … looks so ….bright,” Keisha tells the audience, “But I feel like something … is keeping me from what I could be.” That something, she continues, “thinks … it has made me who I am” (27). What that something is that is inhibiting Keisha’s formation, even contorting it into unnatural shapes, becomes increasingly evident as the play develops but again is hinted at from the start. The play appears to take place in a Cosby Show realm, an imaginary suburb (perhaps

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called Fairview) where wealth obliterates all racial tensions, thus insinuating that racism can be transcended through hard work and that success in capitalist terms is available to all. As Henry Louis Gates once remarked, “There is very little connection between the social status of black Americans and the fabricated images of black people that Americans consume each day” (Gates 1989). And that of course is the aim of sitcoms like The Cosby Show: to offer fabricated images that erase the complexities, difficulties, and inequities endured by Black Americans—even wealthy ones. What Fairview does is to make us (if not immediately, eventually) see those distortions in action, and the pain and erasure—and also and simultaneously the hyper-visibility—that they perpetuate. Even as the play seems to offer a portrait of serene post-racialism, it also features characters that conform to stereotypes notoriously appealing to white consuming audiences. The Frasier family’s interactions are funny, the women are sexy and sassy, they occasionally break into spontaneous bursts of jolly song and dance. At one point, after emerging from a shower, Keisha begins to do a dance that involves smelling her armpits and rubbing her belly. Soon, her aunt Jasmine and her mother join her and all three begin dancing and singing: “Oooooo, all the boys/ Oooooo, let them see me” (26). The seers for whom the Frasiers perform become starkly evident, while remaining for a time invisible, in the next two acts. Act 1 concludes with Keisha’s discovery that the cake is burnt, which prompts her mother to faint. Surprisingly, when the lights come up again at the start of Act 2, we are back where we began: “Lights up on a negro” (Drury 2019: 31). Beverly is once again “peeling carrots, real carrots” (31). This time, however, the same characters silently mime the same motions we observed in Act 1 while the audience hears a conversation carried on by unseen speakers who are all clearly white. These speakers are engaged in a disturbing party game that involves identifying what race or ethnicity they would choose to be if they could be reborn magically in a different form. As the white speakers offer their responses, we hear a parade of well-worn stereotypes. A male character named Jimbo would like to be

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Asian because they are all “so pent up,” but in his embodiment of being Asian he says he would be rebellious instead (35). Mack informs the others that he would opt to be “Latinx.” Like the notorious Amy Cooper in 2020, who falsely accused a Black bird-watcher of threatening her even as she carefully described him as an African American man in her call to the police, Mack gets the polite lingo correct while proclaiming that being Latinx would free him to be “fiery” and “passionate” (41; 43). Bets, a white European, expresses irritation with what she views as the boring American obsession with race, but she obligingly offers that the race she would choose to be is a Slav, “coming from Serbia, or someplace like that” (47). (Needless to say, “Slav” is a language group, not a race.) As these characters flaunt their obtuseness, the well-meaning liberal Suze struggles to intervene, telling Jimbo at one point that she does not think he is “really looking at what [he is] talking about” (Drury 2019: 33). But Suze’s line carries more weight than she knows and applies equally to her, although her tone is more pious if no less self-regarding when she finally shares that she would choose to be African American in homage to an important figure in her childhood, who she explains raised her: My family, we had a ….but she was more than that, she was this lovely … Her name … (Quavering) Her name was Mabel. (51, ellipses Drury’s)

(A Black student of mine, upon first reading the play, remarked at this point: “Of course it was.”) Suze delicately dances around and away from the word “maid,” which would disclose Mabel’s subservient status in the household as well as Suze’s own privilege. She proceeds to boast that, in contrast to what she calls “regular people,” she was often served corn bread and collard greens by Mabel, whom she calls both her “mom” and her “heart” and whom she has clearly transformed, in her fluttering imagination, into her very own Magical Negro (51; 52).

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As the racist commentary intensifies, the play underscores the ways in which watching can constitute a failure to see, as when Suze, with her usual piety, instructs the others on Racial Blindness. It is not until well into Act 2, though, that Fairview makes explicit that the disembodied voices are watching the same play we are. This happens when Mack suddenly says, “look at the way they talk to each other,” and everyone for a moment ceases speaking in order to watch the onstage performers going through their motions. When the Frasier family begins to dance, their unseen observers are thrilled. Like the white audiences of cakewalks, they fail to understand that they are watching a performance tailored to their racist expectations and they view the dance as a representation of the realities of Black lives and Black desires. “I just love it when they dance!” Bets exclaims, and the others agree: “Ooooh … they love to dance … (Yeeeahh), black people sing” (88). Once it becomes evident that the disembodied voices emanate from the audience, the spotlight shifts from those being watched to the watchers, fictional and real. If the overt nature of the stereotyping we hear in Act 2 might at first appear to invite complacent superiority in the actual audience, who can assure themselves that they would never say such ridiculous, racist things, that self-righteousness is dislodged if audience members perceive that, while watching Act 1, they were engaging in the same patronizing enjoyment of the dancing spectacle that the voices now express. The aptness of the play’s epigraph is now clear: “Look! A Negro!” These characters too are Lincolns in an arcade, catering to the desires and fixations of white patrons. Most disturbingly, Act 2 concludes with an explosion of toxic narcissism from the character Jimbo, who describes a movie (perhaps a reference to Hostel, a 2005 American slasher film) in which wealthy American backpacking college students travel to Europe only to find themselves in a dystopian nightmare in which they are imprisoned among demented wealthy people who have “killing-people fetishes” and where everything is “all brown and bloody/and everyone is dirty and screaming” (Drury 2019: 69). Ultimately, the college students are sold to the rich people, who proceed to murder them in horrifying fashions.

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Although Jimbo asserts that the students had never been anywhere like that before, his vision suggests the country from which they came, despite the fact that the screaming, bloody nightmare of Black and brown bodies is usually imperceptible to them. Indeed, the line “everything’s all brown and bloody/and everyone is dirty and screaming” offers a striking echo of the “history shit” that, Lincoln points out in Topdog, Americans do not like to see: “They like it to unfold the way they folded it up … Not raggedy and bloody and screaming” (Parks 2001: 52). In Jimbo’s version, the hidden truths about the nation become manifest in an upside-down version of American life, one in which brutality is rampant but crazy rich people are selling, torturing, and sawing apart other rich people, turning their lives “brown and bloody.” A rich man even decapitates himself, rendering him “the victim of his own damn thing” (Drury 2019: 70). It is as if the psychopathology inherent in the American experiment, which allowed the country to be founded on slavery and, later, mass incarceration even as it pronounced itself the land of the free is released and visited on those who traditionally benefit from it. As Jimbo explains, “whatever the fuck you come up with to do to somebody else/ ….ends up getting used on you,” which he calls moral. But there is nothing cathartic or righteously retributive about Jimbo’s vision because ultimately it is contained within a movie that he controls. His self-hatred fuels his vision and allows him to continue to maintain his megalomaniacal supremacy: All those motherfuckers are watching my fucking movie.  … you want to make me the villain? That’s fine because you’re in my fucking movie motherfucker. (Drury 2019: 72)

J­ imbo venomously embraces his status as villain and insists that all those (implicitly non-white) people who vilify him would be “fucking lost” without him, as they would have no idea what to do with themselves without him to root against (73). Thus, he maintains his status as the

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controller of the fiction within which others must perform, the one who determines what, who, and how we see. It is in Act 3 that Fairview most forcefully demonstrates the ways in which the white gaze willfully obscures what it is looking at, in a theatrical version of the uncertainty principle. In this act, the white characters whom we previously heard as disembodied sound become all too visible, as they invade the Fairview home and take on roles within the family’s story. In so doing, they project on the Black characters their own stereotypical assumptions, so that Mama—the grandmother whose birthday is being celebrated and who up till now remained upstairs—is embodied by Suze as a “good-hearted black grandma,” her fantasy Mabel incarnated (Drury 2019: 79). Beverly and Jasmine’s brother Tyrone, as performed by Jimbo, wears a baseball cap and a chain, raps, says “dope” a lot, proclaims that the beer Dayton offers him is not the kind of beer the Frasiers would serve, and demands a Colt 45 instead. Mack enacts Keisha’s good friend—and, it was earlier implied, lesbian partner—as a “drag version” of a Black teenager who arrives with a pregnancy test to announce that Keisha is pregnant, though Keisha insists that this is literally impossible (86). Meanwhile, Jimbo-as-Tyrone reports that Dayton has gambled away the family’s money, transmuting the Frasiers’ story into A Raisin in the Sun, the one play by a Black author that white theatre-goers are likely to know. When Mack adds that Jasmine is a drug addict, Bets (who has turned up as an alternative, sexed-up version of Mama) shrugs, “It’s a common story” (90; 95). “Look! A Negro!” has become what it always masked, which is “Dirty nigger!” As the play moves toward a chaotic crescendo in which the characters engage in an increasingly violent food fight, Keisha brings the action to a halt by seeking to engage with Suze in an aside. When Suze-asMama informs Keisha that she has watched her throughout her entire life, Keisha recognizes what the “something” is that has kept her from being what she could be, to which she referred uncertainly in Act 1. Suze’s presence, with her “loud eyes” and “loud guilt,” has prevented Keisha from being able to know herself independent of the intruding white gaze (100). Thus, she calls on Suze and, moments later, all the

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white-identifying members of the audience to engage in a radical and potentially transformative act, one in which they switch places. Breaking that fourth wall which, from the opening stage directions, Drury reminded us was pretend, Keisha steps into the audience space and asks those spectators who identify as white to relinquish the seats that have always been theirs and move onto the stage. The goal is to provide a space for Keisha and her “colorful people” to talk together, unimpeded by whiteness (104). As numerous critics have reported, in performance most spectators oblige and the results are productively discomfiting for all concerned.2 Among other things, this exercise makes “the disparity in audience demographics in commercial US theatre … impossible to ignore” (Breaux 2020: 85), as the stage likely becomes crowded with numerous white bodies and the auditorium suddenly contains only a relatively few non-white spectators, as well as the Black cast members and whatever stagehands are non-white. Suddenly too, the lights that once existed to help the audience see the spectacle on stage now are there to allow others to see them, so that the gazers become the gazed upon, trying on the Otherness, hyper-visibility, and performativity that Drury shows to be ever-present in Black lives as a consequence of the racist projections, desires, and fears of the dominant white society. What might become possible through this repositioning, Keisha suggests, is a story that is not predetermined by white assumptions, one that allows for the existence of Blackness undefined by and disentangled from Whiteness. In the stirring monologue that concludes Fairview, Keisha struggles at first to tell that story, because the well-worn narratives of Black experience as expected and consumed by white audiences— which generally feature extraordinary toil and unlikely success against nearly insurmountable odds—keep getting in her way. When she finally is able to push through and past those narratives to construct her own, it features a person who “worked hard,” who did their best, and who managed to become what she says all of us fundamentally always are: “A person Trying.” As she continues to construct her tale, she describes that person as looking around to behold “the mountains of effort/ … they had built

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with their trying,” at the “heaps of family,” the “good enough hills” and the “better next time.” Taking in that view, Keisha remarks that the person next looked first to their right and then to their left—as the actor herself also does, likely (if the audience was cooperative) seeing only people of color, now, on either side of her—in order to ascertain “what you had done/to try to make the life that you have lived.” Surveying that view on either side of her, Keisha concludes about her imagined person: They took it all in. And in their estimation they found all of it, their view over all of it, the sum of all of it, to be fair. (Drury 2019: 105–6)

In this moving vision of achieved “fairness,” Drury takes in much of the American drama that has preceded her, which, as we have seen again and again in the preceding chapters, is often a drama about someone who worked hard and sought “to do well by their family,” in order to construct a home and a life for that family that is “fair” in two and perhaps three senses (105). But repeatedly those differing meanings are in collision rather than in concert, as “fair” in the sense of lovely is often equated with “fair” as light-skinned, which disallows fairness in the sense of equity and justice. The suburban house on the hill with a fair view traditionally has been the province of privileged whiteness; it almost inevitably appears to be obtainable only through the subjugation or marginalization of others; and, as this chapter has already discussed and as the Trump campaign repeatedly insinuated, it positions Black and brownness as its menacing, invasive, and violent antithesis. The word “fair” reverberates, at first implicitly and eventually explicitly, through Fairview, signifying perhaps the name of the suburb where the family lives in Act 1, the white gaze of the unseen commentators in Act 2, and maybe, just maybe, equity in Keisha’s closing line. But the fairness that Keisha imagines is contingent on

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something that might be achievable only in the theatre—often a predominantly white space but also typically a liberal one and one that Drury persistently reminds us is pretend—where whites cooperatively comply with what they know to be their merely temporary decentering. Even here, and even as Keisha gorgeously and wishfully envisions the possibility that her “colorful people” might look to their right and their left and find what they see “to be fair,” her very use of that word brings her back to what she seeks to escape, as “fair” always and ineluctably signifies both just, and also light or white. Justice in America, it seems, cannot be disentangled from the prevailing power system that designates whiteness as central (the white spectators in Act 2 constantly link themselves with what they call regular or normal), that links whiteness with attractiveness (“fair” again), and that continues to insist on the white male’s supreme right to script all stories: “you’re in my fucking movie/motherfucker” (Drury 2019: 72). **** If Fairview’s strategy is to first soothe its audience with what appears, in Jasmine’s words, to be “a good old family drama,” only to pull the rug out from beneath them in its later acts, Jeremy O. Harris’s Slave Play does not permit even that momentary illusion of comfort. When Slave Play opened on Broadway in 2019, the Playbill included an essay by Morgan Parker which began with the words, “This might hurt” (Parker 2021). To guarantee that the audience —which, for a Broadway production, was virtually certain to be even whiter than the spectators who saw Fairview in its off-Broadway and regional theatre runs—could not evade that necessary discomfort, the production’s scenic designer turned the back wall of the set into an enormous mirror that reflected the spectators’ faces back at them, forcing them to watch themselves watching. And what they watch is indisputably startling. Like Fairview, Slave Play is not what it first appears to be, and it too is provocatively playful in its manipulation of theatrical form. The opening act takes place “on the cramped quarters of the MacGregor Plantation’s overseer’s cottage” and the first character we see is a young Black woman named

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Kaneisha, designated “a slave” by the stage directions (Harris 2019: 9). Yet the music that she hears and begins to dance to is, anachronistically, Rihanna’s “Work.” As she dances with seductive abandon, a white man named Jim appears and stands watching her, visibly aroused. Upon recognizing that she is being watched, Kaneisha expresses confusion and embarrassment to, as she calls him, “Massa Jim,” but Jim denies that he is her master: “Naw, see I’m the overseer/I oversee … I don’t own ya” (12). This distinction is immensely important to Jim, who goes on to note that he worked very hard for the “little plot of God’s green” that he possesses and thus “Might as well be a nigga m’self ” (15). Kaneisha responds wryly, pointing out that, whether she calls him Massa or Mista, Jim remains a white man holding a whip in his hands. This opening turns out to be a snapshot of the devastating conflict that will unfold as the play proceeds. Can an overseer, one who “oversees,” convincingly deny the power that oversight grants him? In the opening scene, Kaneisha and Jim’s interaction becomes increasingly erotic as they continue, edgily if also playfully, to probe the power dynamic between them. When Jim demands that Kaneisha eat a cantaloupe that he has thrown onto the ground, she says that she dislikes the taste of the fruit. As in Miller’s letter to Monroe, referred to in the opening chapter, the cantaloupe is woven into their sexual foreplay. However, Jim first mistakes it for a watermelon, a notoriously racist trope, prompting Kaneisha to both correct him and redirect the sexual and racial imagery toward him, and not flatteringly. She describes a cantaloupe’s flavor as “sort of empty in your mouth./It aint sweet the way it should be/it sort of taste like the color of its skin./ White./ … it just sit there/like this block of nothing” (Harris 2019: 24). Provoked by this implicit denial of his sexual appeal and potency, Jim cracks his whip and commands her to eat the cantaloupe off the floor on her hands and knees, which she does in a deliberately seductive if also self-degrading manner, wiggling her behind “like a dog wagging her tail,” which further excites Jim (Harris 2019: 25). Throughout the scene Kaneisha eggs Jim on, goading him into belittling her as “a nasty negress./ A nasty, lazy negress,” though he is resistant to adopting this

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language (28). When he finally gives in and makes use of it at the scene’s climax, Kaneisha becomes extremely aroused as she urges him on: “are you gonna whip me if I come Massa Jim?/Are you gonna whip me?/ For being a nasty negress?” (57). To her enormous disappointment, Jim loses his erection, and in what is suddenly revealed to be a British accent he says, “This doesn’t work for me” and calls out repeatedly: “Starbucks” (58; 59). Jim and Kaneisha’s interactions bracket a series of scenes in Act 1 that contain two other interracial couples: a white woman (Alana) and a mixed-race man (Philip); and a white man whose skin tone is said to be off-white (Dustin) and a very dark-skinned Black man (Gary). These scenes also take place on the MacGregor Plantation and also feature sexualized interactions between a female slave owner and an enslaved man in the case of the first couple, and a white indentured servant and another enslaved man in the second. Each scene involves degrading violence that becomes kinkily erotic, though only the white woman, Alana, seems fully comfortable with what transpires. Rihanna’s music and other discordant notes provide hints, but it is not until Act 2 that we discover that what we just witnessed was indeed slave play. The characters, whom we learn in Act 2 inhabit the contemporary present, were performing roles from the antebellum past as part of a therapeutic exercise focused on interracial couples with sexual problems. Two female therapists who also turn out to be an interracial romantic pair have devised what they call Antebellum Sexual Performance Therapy to treat such couples; in each one, it is the Black partner who no longer experiences sexual pleasure, to the bewilderment of their white lover. In the case of Kaneisha and Jim, the role play became too disturbing— for Jim, not for Kaneisha—prompting him to utter the safe word, “Starbucks,” that signaled to the therapists that they should bring the exercise to a close. Although the therapists, Tea and Patricia, seem more pretentious than proficient, and their language is self-congratulatory and jargonfilled, their interest in “dissecting racial trauma” is clearly at the core of Slave Play (Harris 2019: 101). As the couples seek to explore and

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diagnose what took place between them, the various “blind spot[s]” of the non-Black partners come into view (102). Dustin fervently resists being identified as white, which Gary sees as an aspect of his privilege: “you get to exist in this ambiguity of non-whiteness” (133). And Alana just as furiously denies that her attraction to Philip had anything to do with his skin color, though she originally met him when she and her white (then) husband asked him to join them in a cucking activity that involved, in Philip’s agonized words, inviting “the little nigger boy/ … into the house/to dick you down” while her husband sat in a chair and watched (126). As it was in Topdog and Fairview but more salaciously this time, the Black body is exploited for white consumption. Alana’s insistence that the cucking event “had NOTHING to do with race” sounds as stubbornly self-deluding as Jim’s later declaration to Kaneisha that “the words you are now asking me to use/make me see the world in a way that I do not find helpful” (Drury 2019: 126; 140). He claims that words, and particularly the racialized words that the role-playing exercise demanded he adopt (such as “negress”), get in the way of a vision of the world that he describes as “not blurry.” Sounding every inch the overseer, Jim proclaims: “I don’t need to make sense of it with words/ because the world shows me who it is/and I see it” (140). Yet, in their current state of tension, Jim says that his vision has been obstructed by Kaneisha’s gaze. “[A]ll I have seen is you looking at me,” he asserts, offering a kind of inversion of Keisha’s argument about the white gaze in Fairview. Kaneisha looks at him, he states, “as though I were some type of virus/As though my presence is sickening,/As though the love you once had for me has mutated” (141). The repeated phrase, “as though,” emphasizes Jim’s claim that Kaneisha is projecting a falsehood on him that is obscuring the truth about who he is. His desire is to allow what he sees—his clear gaze (or, we might venture, his fair view), unimpeded by language—to supersede what she sees, as well as the words she uses to represent or, in Jim’s view, misrepresent what she sees. Instead and ironically, Kaneisha seizes on Jim’s language, which grants her a discovery that serves as the climax of Act 2. “You’re a virus,”

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she says to him, “You’re THE virus./ ….Your presence IS sickening” (Harris 2019: 142). Kaneisha turns the tables here not only on Jim but also on Tea and Patricia, who have spent much of Act 2 pathologizing the Black partners in each couple, whom they argue have what they call RID (Racialized Inhibiting Disorder), as well as “obsessive-compulsive disorder/with acute musical-obsession disorder” and alexithymia, which is the “inability to/describe your own feelings” (106; 107)—in addition to the anhedonia that has brought them all to seek therapy. But, in a ferocious and eloquent tirade that goes on for three pages, Kaneisha insists that the sickness in fact is ingrained in white people, in a very literal fashion. Although the therapists protest that they are scientists, Kaneisha refutes their diagnosis, arguing that her sexual difficulties are rooted in the unshakable knowledge “that when [Jim’s] people landed on this land/a third of the indigenous population of the entire continent/died of disease” (143). Jim’s ancestors infected the native population through their very presence, and many generations later he continues to carry and spread that virus. Just as Kaneisha arrives at this recognition—that it is “an undiagnosed, undiagnosable thing” in Jim that is interfering with their marriage—Rihanna’s “Work” suddenly begins to play again, bringing the act to a close as she covers her ears with her hands. Perhaps it is the lyric, “I mean who am I to hold your past against you?” in the song that troubles her. “Work” is still playing when Act 3 begins. This act, titled “Exorcise,” is the shortest of Slave Play’s three acts and it features just Kaneisha and Jim in intense conversation as they pack their bags to leave the plantation and unpack what transpired in the therapy session and in their relationship to date. As she traces their origins as a couple, Kaneisha tells Jim that in her predominantly white school in Virginia the children were often taken to plantations on field trips. But because of her mother’s warning that she must make the enslaved elders haunting the walls of the plantations proud, Kaneisha “never had those formative moments of/making out beneath the lynching tree/or being fingered behind the cotton gin,” as other girls in her school did (Harris 2019: 153). Kaneisha’s powerful image suggests that the long

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shadow of historical trauma, racist violence, and exploitation loom relentlessly over interracial pairings, prompting her to recoil from any desire to be “touched by a white boy.” That is, until she met Jim, who seemed reassuringly foreign and “Un-American” to her (153). Yet, she concludes now, he still has the virus. And of course he does. As a British man, Jim is not un-American; rather he is the Ur-American, whose ancestors began the American experiment, which from its founding entwined proclamations of liberty and independence with conquest, enslavement, and the decimation of non-white populations. Still, Kaneisha notes that she was proud to be dating Jim at first, and proud when people would look at them and do “a triple take”: “You became this sort of champion/and I became Helen of Troy” (Harris 2019: 154). If Jim is Paris, Kaneisha is his alluring captive, stolen away and taken to a foreign land. When their sex life dissipates, her friends advise her to spice things up: “Have you tried choking?/ A little rape play?” (155). Thus, violence and domination pervade the relationship, at its best and its worst. It has now dawned on Kaneisha that she is sleeping every night “with a demon/who thinks he’s a saint”—by which she means a white man who refuses to acknowledge his complicity with a history of racist savagery. In so doing, she feels she has betrayed the Black elders, who cannot give their blessing to the partnership until Jim acknowledges his demonic nature. In short, Kaneisha must hold Jim’s past against him, and she wants him to do the same. Jim acquiesces to Kaneisha’s wish in a sudden and shocking fashion. Pushing her violently onto the bed, he begins to use the language that so upset him in Act 1: “Shut up you dirty negress” (Harris 2019: 158). He tears off her clothes, gags her, cracks his whip, and licks her body while telling her that she tastes like dirt. The audience watches a violent sexual assault ensue, during which Kaneisha fights, screams, bleeds, and finally yells “Starbucks!” Afterward, she releases what Harris describes as an “all-hands-on-deck type of cry” as Jim stares at her, “not sure what came over him … as the last light of the Virginia dusk begins to fade away.” Her cry transmutes into a laugh, and she kisses Jim, who now

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begins to sob: “It is an ocean of tears with waves, convulsions, and from its depths escapes a wail, warbling out from tumultuous guts.” Through the imagery in these stage directions Harris evokes the Middle Passage, the anguish of enslaved people as they traveled on packed ships across “an ocean of tears” to even greater misery on plantations like this one in Virginia, which still carries their torment and despair in its “slight breeze” (161). What “came over” Jim was precisely what Kaneisha needed from him, which is a full manifestation of the virus that continues to exist within him and that he exhibits in an explosion of racist venom and sexual violence. Just as she asked, he both acknowledges and enacts his demonic nature, and Kaneisha expresses her gratitude in the play’s final lines: “Thank you, baby./ Thank you for listening” (Harris 2019: 161). Whether this release constitutes an expulsion of the demon within that will allow Jim and Kaneisha a future together is unclear, though the Broadway cast discussed that very question in an interview with the New York Times in January of 2020. Asked whether the marriage between Jim and Kaneisha survives past the end of the play, their assessments were divided, intriguingly, along racial lines. The Black actor who played Gary, Ato Blankson-Wood, said no: “What we witness in that last act is a true exorcism of our racist and violent history in America within their relationship, and I don’t think you can come back from that.” Joaquina Kalukango, who played Kaneisha, felt that it depended on the performance and what she called “the energy of the room”: “Sometimes I feel like I need to make this clear: ‘They are not staying together! This is really messed up!’” But Paul Alexander Nolan, who played Jim, was more sanguine; asked if the pair stays together, he replied, “I think they do. I’m speaking from my character’s point of view, and I want the marriage to work” (Harris and Ugwu 2020). For his part, Jeremy O. Harris did what playwrights do, which is to refuse to provide answers: “I think that’s for you to tell me” (Harris and Ugwu 2020). And rightly so, of course; Slave Play concludes ambiguously. Can Kaneisha now “lie [in bed with Jim] with grace,” having attained her elders’ blessing because Jim fully disclosed and

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reckoned with the virulence that lurks within him (Harris 2019: 158)? Does his savage role-play constitute real therapy at last, releasing and freeing him from the devilishness of centuries of white patriarchal violence? Or does Kaneisha’s expression of thanks constitute her own release from Jim, a necessary if hard-won freedom signified by her last physical act as indicated in the stage directions: “Kaneisha slowly moves away from him, pulling herself to her feet” (161)? Jim and the actor who played him understandably want the marriage to work, but Kaneisha’s work may very well necessitate the realization that she is only attracted to Jim when she abases herself to him, suggesting that her attraction pulls her backward, retraumatizes her, and forces her “to relive,” as Verna Foster argued about Lincoln and Booth, “a representation of history” that degrades her and leaves her powerless (Foster 2005: 35). If the ex-centric figures in Topdog/Underdog are doomed to be beguiled and finally destroyed by the center that debases them, and if Keisha displaces that center in order to try on its position as watcher, Kaneisha’s conclusion allows us to consider the possibility that the center may at last be rejected—that the woman who both desired it and was its object of desire may move beyond it to something new and as yet undiscovered. We can consider that hopeful possibility only tentatively, of course. It is noteworthy that, although Kaneisha’s last line is “Thank you for listening,” moments before that utterance she again yells the safe word, “Starbucks,” to bring Jim’s attack to an end. And “Starbucks” arguably has some of the same resonances as does “fair” in Fairview. That is to say, it allows Kaneisha to escape from Jim’s attack—as “fair” in its final usage suggests an escape from or more hopeful alternative to the racist circumstances that Fairview depicts—and yet it also brings her right back to the universe that enabled that attack in the first place, just as “fair” also returns Keisha to whiteness. Starbucks, after all, is a multinational corporation that is worth many millions of dollars and that has been embroiled in numerous controversies involving alleged violations of fair-trade agreements in Ethiopia, overpricing of its products in China, unfair labor practices in the United States and elsewhere, and racial

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bias exhibited by employees against Black customers in Philadelphia. In short, though it is surely not the worst example of any of the above and despite being the brainchild of three Seattle friends who bonded over good coffee and Moby-Dick, Starbucks stands at the very heart of the neoliberal regime whose primary goal is to make the wealthy wealthier and that is no friend, generally speaking, to people of color in the United States or around the world. As a safe word, then, “Starbucks” may offer an unsafe refuge. **** Slave Play, whose Broadway run concluded in January of 2020, brings us close to the moment in which this study is being written while allowing us to ask whether we, as Americans, have moved beyond the moment with which we began. Though Harris could not have anticipated it when he wrote the play, the virus to which Kaneisha refers inevitably summons, for anyone who was alive and conscious in the years 2020 and 2021, the terrible pandemic that—as of this writing—has killed nearly 800,000 Americans and whose rapid spread was exacerbated by the reckless behavior of people, many of them white, who shrilly protested that their rights were being compromised by rational public health policies. As vulnerable communities in the United States, including Black and brown ones, suffered disproportionately, the president insisted on referring to Covid-19 as “the China virus” and deliberately stoked the racist anxieties of his white voting base, seeking to shift the conversation about what was sickening whom. In just one week in September 2020, the White House cancelled racial sensitivity training in federal agencies, an action that Trump justified in a tweet by pronouncing critical race theory “a sickness that cannot be allowed to continue” (September 5, 2020, Twitter); and he threatened to defund California schools that incorporated the 1619 Project—the New York Times’ 2019 initiative reframing American history around slavery— into their curricula, calling the project un-American. “We want our sons and daughters to know the truth,” Trump declared in his speech at the Republican National Convention in August of 2020, “America is

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the greatest and most exceptional nation in the history of the world.” What he meant by this was evident too in his claim that Black Lives Matter protests, and the Democratic Party more broadly, constituted a threat to “The Suburban Housewives of America.” “Biden will destroy your neighborhood and your American Dream,” he tweeted on July 23, 2020, “I will preserve it, and make it even better!” A week before Election Day, at a rally in Michigan, he promised women voters: “We’re getting your husbands back to work.” This, he added, is what “everybody wants.” He also informed what he described as “suburban women,” during a campaign stop in Pennsylvania, that they should like him because “I saved your damn neighborhood.” Speaking to Lesley Stahl during an interview for “60 Minutes” he reiterated the same claim: “Suburban women, you should love me because I’m giving you security.” Trump’s meaning was not at all difficult to discern, and it brings us directly back to the goals of domestic containment. Jane De Hart has argued that, in times of national crisis, “formative configurations of gender, sexuality and nationhood” are “often reasserted, sometimes coercively, in constructions of national identity” (De Hart 2010: 143). Thus, Trump displaced the sources of our current crisis onto sinister, foreign forces (“the China virus”); he declared that the solution was to tighten our borders; and he insinuated that non-white citizens constitute a sickness—displacing the virus yet again—one that endangers American values and America’s females, who are assumed to be white housewives, tied to the suburban home that is at the very heart of the American dream. As noted in the title of a September 2020 New York Times article, “Trump [Cast] Himself as the Defender of White America” who promised to make America great again by whitening it, by restoring a 1950s understanding of proper gender roles, and by portraying the outside world as a menacing threat to American interests, to be ignored and ostracized to the greatest extent possible (Baker 2020). In short, Trump’s promises, his dog-whistles, the gendered and racialized talismans he waved in front of the white American voter, all tapped into a recognizably 1950s Cold War mindset, one in which

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“regular people living in a house” would remain firmly and securely divided along gendered, racial, and national lines. As it turned out, the appeal did not work. Despite his fervent claims to the contrary, Trump lost the election definitively, although not as resoundingly as many Democrats had hoped. For the nearly 75 million Americans who voted for him in 2020, Trump’s version of America maintained its attraction—despite the pandemic, despite the economic collapse, despite the racial upheavals, despite his dogged and feverish insistence on calling lies truths, summoning to mind Jimbo: “this is my fucking movie.” Or perhaps instead because of all of these things. The ultimate anxious breadwinner, Donald Trump has never been what he claimed, as a father, husband, or a businessman. But he recognized the necessary power of those roles for a captive American audience and throughout his professional life he sought to play them to the hilt, conning Americans about his business prowess as Willy Loman sought to con his wife and sons (“Knocked ’em cold in Providence, slaughtered ’em in Boston”), and masquerading as a loyal family man (“There is a great deal of love in the Trump family,” his third wife Melania declared in her partly plagiarized 2016 Republican National Convention speech), although his philandering, his boasts about sexual assault against women, and his indifferent parenting are all widely known. Yet the more the pandemic raged, the more Trump conjured the collective mythology, a version of American exceptionalism that trickles down to the suburban home and renders it familiar, pristine, safe from danger, lily-white, glisteningly fair in its unfairness. I will conclude this study with a poem, written in 2013 by Jack Ridl, entitled “From Our House to Your House,” as it succinctly captures this same mystique, one that we have found to be ubiquitous in the American drama and the American psyche for the past seventy-five years: It is 1959. It is the cusp of the coming revolution. We still like Ike. We are still afraid of Sputnik. We read Life magazine and Sports Illustrated

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where the athletes grow up shooting hoops in the driveway, playing catch in the backyard. We sit on our sectional sofa. My mother loves Danish modern. Our pants have cuffs. Our hair is short. We are smiling and we mean it. I am a guard. My father is my coach. I am sitting next to him on the bench. I am ready to go in. My sister will cheer. My mother will make the pre-game meal from The Joy of Cooking. Buster is a good dog. We are all at an angle. We are a family at an angle. Our clothes are pressed. We look into the eye of the camera. “Look ’em in the eye,” my father teaches us. All we see ahead are wins, good grades, Christmas. We believe in being happy. We believe in mowing the lawn, a two-car garage, a freezer, and what the teacher says. There is nothing on the wall. We are facing away from the wall. The jungle is far from home. Hoses are for cleaning the car, watering the gardens. My sister walks to school. My father and I lean into the camera. My mother and sister sit up straight. Ike has kept us safe. In the spring, we will have a new car, a Plymouth Fury with whitewalls and a vinyl top. (Ridl 2013: 6)

Just as we have seen in so many of our plays, the “jungle” that is “far from home” is kept at bay by the home, even as that jungle both threatens and beckons. At the foundation of that home is a set of seemingly fixed certainties: mother makes the meal, father teaches confidence, we have a two-car garage and a president who keeps us safe. These certainties assure us that hoses “are for cleaning the car”; thus, we do not have to think about how policemen use hoses against Black bodies. Our Plymouth may have “whitewalls and a vinyl top,” but it nevertheless carries the name “Fury.” Keisha believes firmly in being happy, but

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she also recognizes that “something” is keeping her from being what she could be. That “something,” the unfolding drama of the anxious breadwinner has shown us, may be that very thing for which we so long, which shimmers like diamonds but is selfish and self-deluding, racist, misogynistic, and hierarchical at its core. It cannot be achieved without others’ losses; its fairness relies upon unfairness. “Imagine,” Willy proclaims to his brother Ben as he makes his way, dreams intact, to his car and his suicide, “When the mail comes, he’ll be ahead of Bernard again!” (Miller 1976: 135). Starbucks.

Notes Introduction 1

2

3

For an example of such derision, see Morris Dickstein (2009), who refers to Miller’s writing as full of phrases “vulnerable to parody,” “risible,” and “portentous,” and to Miller himself as regarded by his fellow Americans as “a figure from a bygone age.” The first patient to be diagnosed with Covid-19 was a resident of Washington State, on January 20, 2020, according to the CDC. But it would be some time before most Americans recognized the pandemic’s proliferating danger. For a discussion of why such disparities existed, in terms of the pandemic’s impact, see Drexler (2020).

Chapter 1 1

2

3

Among those critics who disparaged All My Sons was Robert Brustein (1977: 22), who described its plotting as “farfetched.” See also Nelson (1970: 93), who argues that All My Sons’ “controlled contrivances” transform its later acts “into a blatantly rigged minefield.” Bigsby (1984: 172) argues that “the very neatness of its constructions” closes “the spaces against ambiguity”; and Otten (2002: 14) refers to its “excessive plotting and dependence on chance incidents.” See May (2008: 19–23) for a fuller discussion of this debate as it illuminates the cult of domesticity in the Cold War period. See also Savran (1992: 4), who explores how the kitchen debate “transcends the Cold War” and exhibits “the politics of masculinity.” Beverly Hume’s argument (1985: 8) that Linda is materialistic, which she bases largely on this scene, is unconvincing. Linda shows no interest in ­possessions apart from necessities and no “material longings”; she thinks in stolidly practical terms and is merely concerned about unpaid

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4

5

6 7

Notes bills. Her willingness to mend her old stockings rather than to request new ones is clearly designed to contrast her with the more extravagant and sexualized Woman. Linda shows no more desire for a fortune than Ann Deever does, but she does define her life (as Ann does) in narrowly domestic terms, as her final monologue makes clear. To her mind, owning the home renders the Lomans free. Willy, if he were alive, would not agree. Steven M. Gelber (2000: 82), among others, points out that fathers in the post-war period were meant to “[bring] home the paycheck” and “be warm and nurturing parents,” a role that both solidified a man’s status as a successful “suburban dad” and risked emasculating him. It is Happy who speaks of the “old honor” that he imagines he and Biff can recapture via their sporting goods scheme (Miller 1976: 63), but he clearly inherited this vocabulary from Willy. Gail Federman (1995: 31) points out that in the late nineteenth century the term “honorable” was a synonym for “manly”; it still carries this charge for the Lomans. Kay Stanton (1989: 70) first made this connection regarding the green slippers and the green world. See Savran (1992: 40–2) for a rich discussion of the significance of the lisping teacher.

Chapter 2 1 2

For this history, see, among other sources, Bigsby (2003: vii–xxv) and Bigsby (2009: 411–56). It should be noted that Miller felt he had found evidence of a sexual interaction in the court records, from this passage: “During the examination ….both [Abigail and Ann Putnam] made offer to strike at said Proctor [whom they had accused of witchcraft]; but when Abigail’s hand came near, it opened, whereas it was made up into a fist before, and came down exceedingly lightly as it drew near to said Proctor, and at length, with open and extended fingers, touched Proctor’s hood very lightly. Immediately Abigail cried out her fingers, her fingers, her fingers burned.” It is a little hard to discern why this description led Miller to his certainty (“I was sure John Proctor had bedded Abigail”). But even if he

Notes

3

4

5 6

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was correct, the eleven-year-old might more reasonably be viewed as the sixty-year old’s victim, not his seducer. See Miller (1996: 160). According to Marilynne Roach (2004: 518), “Abigail Williams, haunted to the end, apparently died before the end of 1697, if not sooner, no older than seventeen.” Although Wertheim (1997: 111) argues that Eddie is “strong in approved homosocial bonding,” Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick’s seminal argument on the subject emphasizes that male bonding takes place through male rivalries over females. (See Sedgewick 1993: 21–7.) But Catherine is not a socially acceptable object of desire for Eddie; hence, he cannot display his feelings for her, openly compete for her, or display his victory if he were to win her. All My Sons (Miller 1974: 42); Death of a Salesman (Miller 1976: 121); The Crucible (Miller 2003: 52); A View from the Bridge (Miller 1981: 90). See May (2008: 106–7) for a discussion of such terminology, which originated in the 1930s. Today’s widely used terms, “hot” and “smokin’,” carry similar connotations: she may burn.

Chapter 3 1 2

3

4

For an extensive discussion of the degree to which Williams can be deemed “a political writer,” see Hooper (2012: 20–69). For a discussion of Williams’ ambivalent relationship to “the prospect of miscegenation,” see van Duyvenbode (2001: 214). Crandell (1997: 344) also observes that Blanche’s arrival triggers Stanley’s need to “erase the traces of Otherness in him.” To be precise, Stanley travels for a factory, selling parts, which would place him lower on the economic ladder than Willy, whose working conditions are more clearly white collar. Still, both men travel for a living and neither engages in hard labor. What may be worth noting too, though, is that Stanley seems to have known no other world apart from the urbanized one he inhabits, whereas Willy, who is much older than Stanley, recalls (or at least believes he does) both a different work and a different home-scape, which contributes to his dissatisfaction. I am indebted to a student of mine, Nina Ng, for first drawing this echo to my attention.

210 5 6

Notes For discussions of this topic, see for example Price (1995), Crandell (1999), and Bak (2004). For a full discussion of this debate, and an extensive description of the process by which the revision came about, see Murphy (1992: 97–130). Most critics, including Murphy, agree that Kazan did not exert undue pressure and that Williams revised voluntarily, sensing that Kazan was right about what would make his play successful, though he bitterly regretted it afterward.

Chapter 4 1

Marranca (1980: 16–17) also described Shepard’s cultivated persona at this time as “a cool, laid back cowboy, an outsider, a man in control of things,” which is the identity Biff seeks.

Chapter 5 1 2

See Kruger, who also makes this point (1997: 164). This moment is the closest the play comes to disclosing the autobiographical elements—Li’l Bit, in addition to being a writer, is on her way “to upstate New York”; Vogel received her MA (and, years later, her PhD) at Cornell University—that Vogel only explicitly acknowledged in 2020. See Collins-Hughes (2020).

Chapter 6 1

See C-Span.org (2020) for the full transcript.

2

See, for example, Holdren (2018) and Tran (2019).

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Index Locators followed by “n.” indicate endnotes Abrams, Stacey 18 African American (Black Americans) 18, 140, 188 “biological warfare” 172 cakewalk 171 and fabricated images 187 Great Migration 132 history 171, 173, 182, 192 murders of 172 systemic racism 172 in whiteface 182 white immigrant groups against 88 Albee, Edward 113, 115 All My Sons (Miller) 6–7, 21, 23, 55, 97, 120, 207 n.1, 209 n.5 Ann and Chris, relationship 27–32, 34, 37, 208 n.3 “certain disease” 28, 37 compromises 28, 36, 38 critics 24 disillusionment (Jim) 29, 34 Fascism 33 female characters 7, 23, 25, 31 Frank Lubey 26, 33, 35 George Deever 32–5, 39 idealism (Chris) 27–9, 40 Jim and Sue Bayliss 23, 26–9, 34–8, 55, 131 Joe and Kate Keller 8, 23, 25–7, 30–7, 40–1, 78 “man for man” responsibility 29–30, 36, 38 separate spheres 38 Steve Deever 31 suicides, parade of 23, 25, 34–7 value system, male/female 6, 23, 25, 30, 36–8

Alter, Iska 71 American dream 3, 17, 40, 45, 55, 116, 132, 185, 203 Angels in America (Kushner) 12–13, 146–7, 151 Belize 148, 150–2, 154–5, 162 Ethel Rosenberg 150–1 fluidity 152–3, 168 Joe and Harper Pitt 146–50, 152–4, 156, 168 Louis 147–8, 151–2, 154 Perestroika 148, 150, 154 Prior 148, 151–2 Reagan era 147–9, 152 ­Roy Cohn 12, 146–55, 168 system of justice 148 anxieties 1–2, 19, 63, 86, 89, 115, 134, 202 anxious masculinity 6, 12, 81, 172 Arrell, Douglas 102, 104 Atlas, Charles (mythos) 2 Austin, Gayle 51 Bak, John S. 210 n.5 Bechdel, Alison 6, 12, 145, 155, 164–5, 167. See also Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (Bechdel) Bhabha, Homi K. 171 Bigsby, C.W.E. 9, 22, 57, 98, 207 n.1 Black Lives Matter movement 172, 203 Blankson-Wood, Ato (Slave Play, Harris) 200 Bottoms, Stephen J. 151 Bradford, William, Of Plymouth Plantation 59 Brando, Marlon 87

220

Index

Brantley, Ben 162 Breaux, Shane 186 Brecht, Bertolt 9 Mother Courage 37–8 Breen, Joseph 96 Brustein, Robert 207 n.1 capitalism 7, 15, 38, 40, 103, 115, 120, 131, 180 Capone, Al 68 Carter, Jimmy 118 Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (Williams) 10, 12, 36, 97, 100, 111 Big Daddy 12, 98–100, 102–11, 137, 150 Big Mama 104–5, 107 Brick’s relationship (Skipper/ Maggie) 10, 36, 97–111 Broadway version 108, 110 “dream of life” 36, 97, 109–10 hypermasculinity (Big Daddy) 105, 111 Mae and Gooper 98–9, 109–11 mendacity (Brick) 100, 106–9 “monster of fertility” 98 “Negroes” 99–100, 111 characters of color 103 “Pick a Bale of Cotton” (song) 100 Reverend Tooker 106 Chambers-Letson, Joshua Takano 154 Chaudhuri, Una 45, 152 Civil Rights Movement 113, 133 Clum, John M. 76 ­Clurman, Harold 32, 35 Clybourne Park 116 Cold War period The Crucible (Miller) and 57 cult of domesticity in 207 n.2 domestic realm 15 plays 1 Colette 165 Cope, Virginia H. 89 The Cosby Show 186–7

Costello, Donald P. 69 Covid-19 17, 172, 202, 207 n.2 Crandell, George W. 99, 209 n.2, 210 n.5 The Crucible (Miller) 8, 57–8, 66, 209 n.5 Abigail Williams 60–4, 66–7, 208 n.2 and Cold War moment 57 goodness, opposing definitions 67 “hideous and desolate wilderness” 59 illicit sexuality 58 John and Elizabeth Proctor, relationship 8, 60–7, 78, 208 n.2 Mary Warren 59–61 McCarthyism 58–9 Puritan world 8, 59–60, 62 Reverend Hale 65 self-sacrifice (John) 66–7 Tituba 59–61 witchcraft and sexuality 8, 62–4, 208 n.2 Cruz, Ted 19 Culler, Jonathan, exemplarity and singularity 131–2 Curse of the Starving Class (Shepard) 11, 117–18, 130, 141–2 civility and savagery 119, 121, 125, 129 early monologue (Wesley) 122–3, 127 Ella 118–21, 123–5, 128–9 Emma 118–21, 124–6, 128 Taylor 123–4, 126, 128 Wesley 118–25, 127–9, 141–2 Weston 11, 118, 121–8, 130, 136 Death of a Salesman (Miller) 7, 13–14, 21, 23, 30, 40, 84, 92, 118, 130, 132, 138, 174, 209 n.5 Ben 41–2, 45–8, 54–5, 94, 125, 206 Bill Oliver 52

Index

221

Dave Singleman 41, 45, 48–9, 55 Happy and Biff Loman 42, 44, 49–56, 92, 115, 145, 175, 208 n.5 homosociality 23, 30, 51, 130 ­Linda Loman 7, 32–3, 36, 42, 44–5, 48, 50, 53–6, 92, 128, 134–5, 137, 140, 207–8 n.3 Miss Forsythe 50, 52 professional mobility and domestic achievement 55 “The Salesman Has a Birthday” 41 staging 40, 56, 132, 174 status of females 49 sexual commodities 52 “strudel” 42 Willy Loman (see Willy Loman (Death of a Salesman, Miller)) De Hart, Jane 203 Dervin, Daniel 149 domestic containment 2–3, 31, 114, 125, 131, 141, 172, 203 goal of 3 post-war 26 resurrection 16 “suburban housewives” 17 domesticity 5, 43, 83, 117–19, 125, 130–1, 143, 174, 176, 207 n.2 in Cold War period 207 n.2 demands of 7, 117 and eroticism 8 gendered domestic security 179 and sexuality 22 Driver, Tom 130 Drury, Jackie Sibblies 6, 16, 171–2, 184, 186, 192–4. See also Fairview (Drury)

Keisha 186–7, 191–4, 197, 201, 205 Mack 188–9, 191 staging 16, 171, 185–6, 189, 192 Suze 188–9, 191 Tyrone 191 Fanon, Franz, BlackSkin, White Masks 184 “Father Knows Best” mythology 3 Federman, Gail 208 n.5 female domestic realms 2 female sex/sexuality 1, 8, 22, 61, 64, 67, 92, 105, 156, 159 and queerness 19, 146, 156, 164 Fences (Wilson) 11, 117, 130 Alberta 137–8 ­Blues music, “floating” tradition 142 Bono 135 Cory 134–7, 139, 141–2 Gabriel 134, 140 Raynell 141–2 Rose 135, 137–8, 140–2 sexist value system 140 Troy Maxson 11, 130–42 Floyd, George 172 Foster, Verna 183, 201 French Huguenots 89 Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (Bechdel) 6, 12–13, 155, 164 Fun Home (Tesori & Kron) 6, 12–13, 155 Alison/Small Alison 164–8 Bruce Bechdel 12, 155–6, 164–7 fluidity 163, 168 queerness 164–6 suicide (Bruce) 166–7

Fairview (Drury) 16, 19, 171, 184–5, 194, 197, 201 Beverly 185–6, 191 cakewalk 171, 187, 189 Dayton 185, 191 Jasmine 186–7, 191, 194 Jimbo 16, 185, 187–91

Garrett, Leah 54–5 Gates, Henry Louis 187 Gay Rights Movement 113, 145 Gelber, Steven M. 208 n.4 gender/sexuality 4, 8, 12, 27, 58, 67, 76, 96, 105, 140, 143, 157, 161, 203 and abuse 159

222

Index

conflict 23 domestic security 179 dynamics 5, 180 hierarchies 60 roles 3, 5–6, 22, 141, 145, 159, 203 sexual and aesthetic fluidity (plays) 168 and witchcraft 8, 59, 62–4, 208 n.2 Guare, John 113, 115 Hansberry, Lorraine 5, 10–11, 113–14, 116, 181. See also A Raisin in the Sun (Hansberry) Harris, Jeremy O. 6, 16, 171–2, 194, 199–200, 202. See also Slave Play (Harris) Harrop, George A. 39 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, “Young Goodman Brown” 59 Herren, Graley 160 Herrick, Robert 47 heteronormativity and whiteness 73, 75, 84, 88–9, 98, 105, 110, 145, 150 homosexuality 8, 10, 12, 75–6, 80, 101–4, 110, 145, 150, 154, 156 features of 146 as taboo 145 ­homosociality 5, 23, 30, 51, 75, 92, 130, 209 n.4 House UnAmerican Activities Committee 9 How I Learned to Drive (Vogel) 12–13, 155 imagination 155 Male and Female Greek Chorus 162 Mary 157–8 queerness 156, 164 staging 160, 162–3, 166 Teen-aged Greek Chorus 166 Uncle Peck and Li’l Bit, relationship 12, 155–63, 166–7, 210 n.2

Hume, Beverly 207 n.3 Hutcheon, Linda 173 Ibsen, Henrik 28 A Doll’s House 24 idealism phony idealism 23, 27 and practicality 21 immigrants 14, 17, 19, 59, 71–2, 88 encroachment 72 sexuality 68 Immigration Bureau 71 Industrial Revolution 2 Jefferson, Blind Lemon, “One Kind Favor” 142 Jem 1, 19 Kalukango, Joaquina (Slave Play, Harris) 200 Kazan, Elia 98, 108, 110, 210 n.6 Kelly, Casey Ryan 17 Khrushchev, Nikita 40 Kimbrough, Andrew 162 Kimmel, Michael 7, 46, 49, 137 “aggrieved entitlement” 13, 115–16 Kron, Lisa 6, 12, 145, 155, 164 Kruger, Steven F. 210 n.1 Ku Klux Klansman 135 Kushner, Tony 5–6, 145–8, 151, 153–4, 156. See also Angels in America (Kushner) labor force, men in 2, 209 n.3 Levittown 114 Lincoln, Abraham 15, 172–84, 189–90, 201 Lorde, Audre 181 Ludovici, Anthony 2 Mailer, Norman 2, 91 male(s) 14, 73, 80–1, 85, 87, 92, 115–16. See also women

Index and domestic space 4, 22, 126, 129, 137–8 dominating qualities 1, 19 ­homosocial attitudes 5, 23, 30, 51, 75, 92, 130, 209 n.4 in labor force 2, 209 n.3 rivalries over females 209 n.4 sanctions intimacy 101 male breadwinner 3–4, 14, 22, 40, 95, 117, 121, 130, 176 anxious 11, 13, 83, 172, 204, 206 disquiet and disappointments of 10 language and 176 portraits of 5 Maley, Patrick 174 Mamet, David 5, 10, 113, 115–16 American Buffalo 11, 115–16, 134 Marranca, Bonnie 120, 128, 210 n.1 masculinity 1–2, 4, 11, 42, 47, 68, 76, 79, 81, 85–6, 91, 96, 108, 110, 117, 131, 139, 157, 173, 175, 183 anxious 6, 12, 81, 172 crisis of 14 and femininity 2 heteronormative 73, 75, 84, 98, 105, 110, 145, 150 heterosexual 10, 19, 68, 76–7, 101, 109, 113, 146 homosocial 5, 23, 30, 51, 75, 92, 130, 209 n.4 men’s fortunes 85 politics of 207 n.2 toxic 131, 140 May, Elaine Tyler 2, 15, 207 n.2, 209 n.6 domestic containment 2–3 McDonough, Carla J., “issues of manhood” 117 #MeToo movement 162–3 Miller, Arthur 1, 6, 8, 13, 21, 24–5, 32, 38, 40, 51, 56–7, 65, 68, 75–6, 80, 83–4, 89, 96–7, 103,

223

113, 115, 129–30, 132, 135, 174, 181, 207 n.1, 208 n.2 “baffled idealism” 22 Collected Plays 58 “Echoes Down the Corridor” 62 “the Greco-Ibsen form” 23 “human life” 21–2, 28 Ibsen, Henrik 24, 28 Marilyn Monroe 1, 4–5, 8, 58, 67, 70, 195 misogyny 35, 60 Morton 57 Oedipus Rex 24 “On Social Plays” 21–2 Plays (see specific Miller’s plays) Timebends 57–8 well-made play 28 ­Miller, Mary Slattery 66 The Milwaukee Journal 39 The Misfits 55 Monroe, Marilyn 1, 8, 57–8, 67 “childish voracity” 70 Miller’s letter 1, 4, 195 Morse, David 163 Murphy, Brenda 109, 210 n.6 New York Times 162, 184, 200, 202–3 Ng, Nina 209 n.4 Nixon, Richard 40 Obama, Barack 18 Obama, Michelle 18 Ochello, Peter 99, 102, 110 Oedipus Rex 24 Otten, Terry 31, 207 n.1 Parker, Mary-Louise 163 Parker, Morgan 194 Parks, Suzan-Lori 6, 13–15, 171, 173. See also Topdog/Underdog (Parks) The America Play 172–4, 184 “Elements of Style” 173 “Possessions” 173

224

Index

phony idealism 23, 27 Porter, Horace 47, 54 Price, Marian 110, 210 n.5 Prynne, Hester 66 queers/queer identities 6, 76–7, 150–1, 156, 164 race/racism 10–11, 133, 135–6, 139, 141, 148, 171–2, 182, 185, 187–8, 195, 200–1 A Raisin in the Sun (Hansberry) 114, 116, 185, 191 Walter 114, 116 Reagan, Ronald 147–9, 152 Reed, Donna 8 Ridl, Jack, “From Our House to Your House” 204–5 Roach, Marilynne 209 n.3 Robinson, Jackie 11 Roosevelt, Theodore 44 “strenuous life” 2, 48 Rosie the Riveter 2 Rotundo, E. Anthony 2, 42 “communal manhood” 42 Savran, David 22, 75, 110, 130, 207 n.2 Schissel, Wendy 63 Second World War 25, 113, 157 ­airplanes and monologue 122–3 workplace during 1, 3 Sedgewick, Eve Kosofsky 102, 209 n.4 “self-made manhood” 41–2 sexuality. See gender/sexuality Shepard, Sam 5, 10, 11, 114–15, 117–18, 120–1, 126, 128, 132, 136, 210 n.1. See also Curse of the Starving Class (Shepard) Slave Play (Harris) 16, 171–2, 194, 200, 202 Alana 196–7 Antebellum Sexual Performance Therapy 196 Dustin 196–7

“Exorcise” 198 Gary 196–7, 200 Jim and Kaneisha 16, 195–202 Philip 196–7 Racialized Inhibiting Disorder (RID) 198 Rihanna, “Work” 195–6, 198 Tea and Patricia 196, 198 Stahl, Lesley 203 Stanton, Kay 52, 208 n.6 Straw, Jack 99, 102, 110 A Streetcar Named Desire (film) 87, 96 A Streetcar Named Desire (Williams) 84 Allan Grey 95 Belle Reve 87, 89, 97 blackness/characters of color 88–9, 99 Blanche DuBois 10, 85–96, 98, 102, 209 n.2 Elysian Fields 88 gaudy seed-bearing 10, 85–6 hyper-femininity (Blanche) 89 hypermasculinity 89, 91–4, 96 Irish and Polish immigrants 88 males, types 87 Mitch 89–92 Pablo 88, 95–6 Stanley Kowalski 10, 85–92, 95–6, 98, 209 n.2 Stella 10, 85–8, 90–6, 98 whiteness 88–9 Stuelke, Patricia 175 suburban dream 181, 185 Taylor, Breonna 172 Tesori, Jeanine 6, 12, 145, 155, 164 Topdog/Underdog (Parks) 13, 171, 197 Abraham Lincoln 14–15, 172–84, 190, 201 ­Grace 175, 180, 183 John Wilkes Booth 14–15, 173–84, 201 three-card monte game 176–8, 180–1

Index Trump, Donald J. 6, 13–15, 19, 146, 153, 172, 179–80, 204 “America First” immigration policy 81 “China virus” 17, 202–3 “shithole countries” 88 “suburban housewives” 17 Tucker-Abramson, Myka 181–2 unfair labor practices 201 urban work environment 2 Vallianatos, Evaggelos 118 Vietnam War 113 A View from the Bridge (Miller) 8, 10, 21, 58, 67, 209 n.5 Alfieri 68–70, 74, 79–80 Beatrice 70–4, 77, 79 Catherine 70–9, 209 n.4 Eddie Carbone 8, 68–80, 209 n.4 failure of language 71 fluidity 8, 58, 68, 73–4, 79–80, 84 heteronormative masculinity (Marco) 73, 75 immigrants’ encroachment 68, 71–2 informant’s actions 67–8 Marco 73, 75–6, 78–80 Red Hook, society of 8, 68–70, 78 Rodolpho 68, 72–9, 84 Vogel, Paula 5–6, 12, 145, 155–6, 162–3, 166, 210 n.2. See also How I Learned to Drive (Vogel) Weales, Gerald, Viking Critical Library edition 66 Weber, Myles 130 “weird” 8, 74–5, 77, 80–1 Wertheim, Albert 76, 209 n.4 Westgate, J. Chris 129 whiteness 84, 88–9, 169, 192–4, 201 anxious 6, 172 embodiment of 89 Williams, Cornelius Coffin 9

225

Williams, Tennessee 5, 9–10, 13, 83–6, 88–9, 96–9, 103–4, 107–8, 110–11, 113, 154, 181, 209 n.1, 209 n.2, 210 n.6 Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (see Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (Williams)) The Glass Menagerie 83 Memoirs 9, 106 A Streetcar Named Desire (see A Streetcar Named Desire (Williams)) survival in modern society 96 ­Willy Loman (Death of a Salesman, Miller) 5, 7, 11, 14, 41, 43–4, 48–51, 56, 78, 85–6, 92, 94, 115, 118, 124–5, 130, 132–3, 136–8, 174, 176, 180, 204, 208 n.3 anxious breadwinner 11, 41, 206 “kind of temporary” feeling 46, 56 portrait of Ben 54 suicide 53–4, 206 tragedy 41, 43, 45, 134 Wilson, August 5, 10–11, 114, 117, 130, 133, 135–6, 140–1, 181 American dream 132 Fences (see Fences (Wilson)) Winfrey, Oprah 18 witchcraft 62–4, 208 n.2 sexuality and 8 as supernatural 59 women 52–3, 65–6, 80, 85, 90, 96, 105, 116, 121, 129, 138, 168 emasculating 115 and gay rights movements 113 on home and hearth 38 inequality of 24 male rivalries over 209 n.4 profound dissatisfaction 4 suburban 203 workplace during Second World War 1, 3 Yale, Frankie 68–9

226

227

228

229

230