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  • Stone Tower: The Political Theater of Arthur Miller
  • Christopher Bigsby
Jeffrey D. Mason . Stone Tower: The Political Theater of Arthur Miller. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008. Pp. 328. $49.50.

The title of Jeffrey Mason's book is a reference to the concentration camp tower that appears in the background of Arthur Miller's After the Fall and which lights up at moments of betrayal, whether in private or public life. The image derived from his 1962 visit, with his wife-to-be Inge Morath, to the Mauthausen concentration camp. She, an Austrian and daughter of a man who had joined the Nazi Party, was laying before an American Jew her own sense of complicity with an evil she had resisted but by which she nonetheless felt tainted. He was acknowledging the immediate relevance of a history which so many had conspired to deny, and which had entered his own work only obliquely. It was a key moment in his life, focusing, as it did, his sense of his Jewish identity, but also his awareness that here was an extreme example of a failure of what he liked to call human charity, which he had otherwise tracked through individual lives or political systems. Thereafter, he would return to the scene of this particular crime—in Incident at Vichy, Playing for Time, and Broken Glass. But the fact is that After the Fall also invokes the hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) as it explores failures in Miller's own life.

The thesis of Jeffrey Mason's book is that while Miller has been widely discussed as a social dramatist, less attention has been paid to him as a political playwright. As a result, Mason gives just as much attention to Miller's response to the Holocaust and to HUAC as he does to delineating the degree to which the personal and the public are always intertwined in his work. The result is an astute and detailed analysis of Miller's political engagements and the interplay between these and his plays.

Miller does not emerge from this analysis as a Brechtian, for whom drama is a weapon or dialectical device. He is not political in the sense of offering a particular model of social or political organization. As Miller said of Tennessee Williams, there is a politics of the soul. He was a natural existentialist for whom individuals and nations alike are the product of the choices they make. His emphasis on the importance of the past derived from the fact that he was determined to underscore the fact that, as he was fond of saying, the chickens always come home to [End Page 401] roost. Acts have consequences and it is necessary to acknowledge responsibility for this. The guilt which infects so many of his characters is without utility until it is transformed into such responsibility. He felt the same way about societies and nations. That was the essence of his politics and his morality.

Jeffrey Mason's book benefits from an understanding of this. It is not simply another study of Miller's works. It is hard to deny the relevance and force of his thesis or its utility as an approach. Beyond this, however, he ventures two chapters in which he explores other aspects of Miller's work. One deals with Miller's female characters; the other explores the significance of violence. On the whole, he is inclined to accept a reading of key women characters as passive, little more than audiences to dramas played out by men whose existential dilemmas are assumed to be central. He is, perhaps, somewhat ungenerous in this regard, though he does explore other women who have a greater leverage on moral issues. His examination of violence concentrates on Resurrection Blues as if this study of a postrevolutionary society offered some kind of coda to his politics. The dust has yet to settle from that play so that he may yet prove to be right.

This is a book that invites debate. Indeed, given its central thesis, it places debate at the heart of Miller's work—a debate over human nature as expressed not only...

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