Winterset: Four Influences on Mio

WINTERSET: FOUR INFLUENCES ON MIa l\1AXWELL ANDERSON'S 1935 VERSE TRAGEDY, Winterset, has elicited more critical comment than any of his other plays, and with good reason. It is his deepest work, both in complexity of plot and in quality of characterization. Often scholarly comlnent has contributed to an appreciation of this American slum tragedy; occasionally it has obscured the author's intentions by misunderstanding the major struggle of the play-Mio Romagna's change from a vengeful pursuer of those who wrongly condemned and executed his father to one who would forgive and forget the past. Part of the difficulty in analysing Winterset lies in the sensational nature of the story. Because Mio is seeking the real killers of the paymaster for whose death his father was executed, the critic can be misled into seeing this as the central issue. The play thus becomes little more than a murder mystery, with the discovery of the killer's apparent identity in Act II the high point of the drama. Even when the reader realises that Mio's shift from vengeance to forgiveness is the heart of the drama, the multiplicity of forces that bring about this character change are themselves a second source of confusion in understanding the play. Four different persons-three living, one dead -are together responsible for the change which occurs over the three acts of the play, making it a study, in slow motion, of the psychological forces that bring about the main character's reversal of direction. The most obvious of these forces is Mio's love for Miriamne. When the teen-age son of Bartolomeo Romagna, a man executed more than a decade earlier for the robbery-slaying of a paymaster, comes to a slum tenement in search of someone who could identify the real killer, he meets and falls in love with Miriamne quite by accident. This newfound love later becomes one of the forces changing Mio, but to see it as the only significant one is to oversimplify the action. Mio's love for Miriamne is neither the first nor the foremost influence on him. In Act II Mio makes his way to the apartment of Garth Esdras, a man who reportedly knows about the killing, only to discover that Garth is Miriamne's brother. He also learns that someone else is seeking Garth-Judge Gaunt, the man who presided over the trial of Mio's father. The judge's mind is wandering from the fear that his 408 1972 FOUR INFLUENCES ON ]vIIO 409 biased handling of the anarchist's trial may have condemned an innocent man to death, and he wishes to clear his conscience by confronting Garth, the one man not called in the case. Mia and Judge Gaunt question Garth, but although he was present at the killing, he denies all knowledge of the event in order to avoid implicating himself. The younger Esdras fears not only the police but also the gangster Trock, who engineered the robbery and has threatened Garth with death if he discusses the case. When Garth's testiInony proves useless, Mia turns on the Judge, accusing him of prejudicial conduct of the case. Although Mia becomes more and more angry in his accusations, the Judge calmly reasons that all reviews of the trial, including his own, point to one weakness in the case-Garth Esdras was not called. Now that his testimony has been heard, there is obviously no point in calling a new trial. Although Mia reluctantly agrees with the Judge's logic, his failure to clear his father's name so angers him that he threatens Gaunt with murder. Judge Gaunt replies that this would be a logical action on the part of a murderer's son, and Mia begins to realise for the first time the extremes to which his quest has driven him. In the heated exchange over the trial, the Judge becomes the first of four persons to help Mia change his life purpose from one of revenge to one of forgiveness. He forces Mia to face the one thing he had feared most, that his father might have been guilty after all. At this point Mia...