Arthur Miller's Circles of Responsibility: A View from the Bridge and Beyond

Arthur Miller's Circles of Responsibility: A View from the Bridge and Beyond DONALD P. COSTELLO Arthur Miller is a good enough critic· to understand the differences between himself and the other two great American playwrights. And - like almost any artist - he finds his rivals lacking to the degree that they are not himself. Thus, Tennessee Williams is too narrow. Cal on a HOI Till Roof, taken by Miller to be representative of the problem with Williams, suffers from not being a Miller play. Miller wants the Tennessee Williams play to be a contest for power between Big Daddy and his son Brick. But Tennessee Williams mishandled that significant social theme so that "it gets deflected onto a question of personal neurosis." Characteristically, Williams narrowed the important Millerian theme of "mendacity in social relations" to mere "mendacity of human relations.' " Williams was more than anyone else responsible for his era's "translation of current life into the war within the self...2 The Greeks would not have done that. They were more like Arthur Miller than like Tennessee Williams. Those classic "great works are works of a man confronting his society," just as they should be. The greatness of Greek plays is that "They're social documents, not little piddling private conversations.' ' 3 Miller approves of the fact that "Greek drama clearly conceived its right function as something far wider than a purely private examination of individuality ."4 That's what Eugene O'Neill does too. His plays become "finally heroic" when "he deals with men out in society." But O'Neill and the Greeks thrust still further, "seeking for some fate-making power behind the social force itself."5 Miller admires O'Neill because "he reached ... here stood a man who sought ....,,6 O'Neill emulates the " large and thrusting plays" of the Greeks'" O'Neill's plays reach, seek, thrust beyond the narrowness of Williams. O'Neill's plays go beyond the self. They even go beyond family and society. Like the Greeks, they extend all the way to "ultimate fate. ,,8 And most American drama does not. "What is wrong" . with most American drama is that it is too like Tennessee Williams, not Modem Drama, 36 (1993) 443 444 DONALD P. COSTELLO enough like the Greeks and O'Neill (and not enough like Arthur Miller), owing to "its failure to extend itself so as to open up ultimate causes."9 If it is to be great again, "The drama will have to re-address itself to the world beyond the skin, to fate. "10 But not to fate alone. O'Neill's staring at fate can be O'Neill's failing, when it allows him to forget society. "O'Neill himself," Miller reminds us, "described his preoccupation as being not with the relations between man and man, but with those between man and God. ,," If Williams is too narrow, O'Neill can be too broad. During the socially conscious decade of the 1930s, for example, O'Neill's "dirgelike longing for private salvation"12 disconnected him from society. In his private bouts with the cosmos, O'Neill missed the wisdom of the Greeks that showed man "living most completely when he lives most socially. "13 And so Miller believes that O'Neill became, at least temporarily, irrelevant: "When life seemed enslaved to Economics it was old-fashioned and pointless·to stare so at Fate."'4 So where would the ideal playwright locate himself? Surely not staring at his own navel, like one important American playwright, or staring at fate, like another. Arthur Miller positions himself between Williams and O'Neill, so that he searches both self and fate, and - most significantly - everything in between. The obsessive question for Arthur Miller becomes this one: How can a human being work out the interconnections among the ever-widening circles of responsibility: self, family, society, the universe? I think this diagram helps us to understand all of Miller's plays: universe/fate/God society family 8 To Miller all of lhe circles of responsibility are significant, are the bases of morality. To violate the codes of any circle is to sin. Where, and for whom, does - must - a person live...