Arthur Miller: A Critical Study (review)

For over four decades, the core of Arthur Miller scholarship has consisted of a number of book-length studies entitled Arthur Miller (with occasional subtitles), each seeking to treat all of his plays to date, sometimes with commentary on his other writings. Authors have included Dennis Welland (1961, 1979, 1983. , and 1985), Sheila Huftel (1965), Edward Murray (1967), Leonard Moss (1967, 1980), Benjamin Nelson (1970), Ronald Hayman (1970, 1972), Neil Carson (1982), and June Schlueter and James K. Flanagan (1987). Others have covered Miller's oeuvre with edited collections of essays: Robert W. Corrigan (1969), James J. Martine (1979), Robert A. Martin (1982), Harold Bloom (1987), Steven R. Centola (1995), and Harold Bloom again (2000).

Christopher Bigsby offers a new entry, eighteen years after Schlueter and Flanagan, and brings his own considerable work on Miller to a culmination, with the magisterial Arthur Miller: A Critical Study. Bigsby treated Miller in Confrontation and Commitment (1967), the second volume of A Critical Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Drama (1984), and Modern American Drama, 1945–2000 (2000), and he edited both Arthur Miller and Company (1990) and The Cambridge Companion to Arthur Miller (1997).

In brief, Bigsby offers a close reading of every one of Miller's fictional works, ranging from the well-known and much-studied plays produced between 1947 and 1968 (All My Sons to The Price) to the short stories and unpublished early plays. He unpacks characters, story, action, and ideas, sometimes referring to choices in prominent productions and commenting on their critical reception. He organizes the material chronologically (following the example of every one of the Miller studies mentioned above), interrupting the flow only to insert, at appropriate points, chapters on special topics: Miller's use of time and history in relation to the American experience, tragedy in Miller, the problem of creating literature in response to the Holocaust, and Miller as a Jewish writer.

The through line is Miller himself. Bigsby becomes his virtual Boswell, explicating not the playwright's life (although including connecting narratives to trace his career from play to play) as much as his work and his working process. Whenever possible, Bigsby returns to unpublished drafts of the plays in order to explain Miller's choices, sifts through the playwright's notebooks, and cites Miller's own comments on shaping the material. Clearly, Bigsby sees the plays not as isolated phenomena but as the careful expressions of one man's developing sensibility, and that man's mind provides the connecting thread that gives a logic to the whole.

Those who know Bigsby as an American studies scholar, as the author of works on Albee, Mamet, and many others, will not be surprised that he draws multiple connections between Miller and other writers. For example, the chapter on Death of a Salesman refers to Mark Twain's The Gilded Age, Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie, John Updike's Angstrom novels, Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh, Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire, William Inge's The Dark at the Top of the Stairs, David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross, William Faulkner's Light in August, Henry James, Erich Fromm's The Art of Loving, Benjamin Franklin, Horatio Alger, Jr., Friedrich Nietzsche, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, Albert Camus, Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot and Krapp's Last Tape, and Miguel de Unamuno. Bigsby's approach suggests that we can best understand Miller's work by considering its relationships with other literature.

Bigsby draws on impressive resources and on his ongoing contact with Miller himself (apparently initiated some time in the 1970s). He cites at least seven personal interviews with Miller, refers to unpublished texts held at the University of Michigan and the University of Texas at Austin, and quotes from typescripts of unpublished works that Miller made available to him (Resurrection Blues, Finishing the Picture, "The Turpentine Still," and the novel version of The Man Who Had All the Luck).

Bigsby does not engage with the scholarly...