The Living and the Dead in All My Sons

THE LIVING AND THE DEAD IN ALL MY SONS LOOKED AT SUPERFICIALLY, Arthur Miller's All My Sons may appear to be simply a social thesis play. Such classification-a valid one if severely qualified-is suggested both by the timeliness of the story and by the presence of considerable overt social criticism. The story itself is obviously calculated to engage the so-called social conscience. Stated in the simplest terms, the play dramatizes the process by which Joe Keller, a small manufacturer, is forced to accept individual social responsibility and, consequently, to accept his personal guilt for having sold, on one occasion during World War II, fatally defective airplane parts to the government. However, while this bare-bone synopsis is essentially accurate, it does, in fact, do violence to the actual complexity of the play. In his well-known essay "Tragedy and the Common Man,"l Miller comments , ... Our lack of tragedy may be partially accounted for by the turn which modern literature has taken toward the purely psychiatric , or purely sociological. . . . From neither of these views can tragedy derive, simply because neither represents a balanced concept of life. What is reflected here is Miller's own careful avoidance of the "purely " this or that. And it might similarly be said that no satisfactory understanding of Miller's All My Sons may be derived from a criticism which commits itself to a "purely" or even predominantly sociological or psychiatric view. The sociological view is particularly limiting in that it carries with it the temptation to approach the dramatic action from the level of broad socio-cultural generalizations and, consequently, to oversimplify character and action and, stumbling among subtleties of characterization, to accuse the playwright of a confusion of values which belongs appropriately to the characters in their situations.2 Actually, like most of Miller's plays, All My Sons demands of the reader an awareness of the deviousness of human motivation, an 1 Arthur Miller, "Tragedy and the Common Man," Theater Arts, XXXV (March, 1951). Often reprinted. 2 See Samuel A. York, "Joe Keller and His Sons," Western Humanities Review, XIII (1959), pp. 401-407. 46 1964 AU My SO'M' 41 understanding of the way in which a man's best qualities may be involved in his worst actions and cheapest ideas, and, in general, a peculiarly fine perception of cause and effect. Nowhere is it suggested that the social realities and attitudes that are brought within the critical focus of the play can be honestly considered outside of some such context of human aspirations and weaknesses as is provided by the play; and nowhere is it suggested that the characters are or can be judged strictly on the basis of some simple social ethic or ideal that might be deduced from the action. The characters do not simply reflect the values and attitudes of a particular society; they use those values and attitudes in their attempt to realize themselves. And it is these characteristics that give All My Sons, and other Miller plays, a density of texture so much greater than that of the typical social thesis play, which seeks not only to direct but to facilitate ethical judgments upon matters of topical importance.3 For most of us there is no difficulty in assenting to the abstract proposition which Chris puts to his mother at the end of the play: You can be better! Once and for all you can know now that the whole earth comes through those fences; there's a universe outside and you're responsible to it. And there is no problem either in giving general intellectual assent to the morality of brotherhood for which Chris speaks. There is, however, considerable difficulty in assenting to the actual situation at the end of the play, in accepting it as a simple triumph of right over wrong. For the play in its entirety makes clear that Joe Keller has committed his crimes not out of cowardice, callousness, or pure self-interest, but out of a too-exclusive regard for real though limited values, and that Chris, the idealist, is far from acting disinterestedly as he harrows his father to repentance. Joe Keller is a...