The Cambridge Companion to Arthur Miller ed. by Christopher Bigsby (review)

504 BOOK REVIEWS different plays featuring two major types: the chaste, modest, "angel in the house," contrasted with her bold, conniving counterpart. But since they are two sides of the same coin, neither type is portrayed as effectively challenging patriarchal inscriptions; indeed, the resourceful innkeeper Mirandolina is dismissed for her insincerity rather than praised for her political astuteness (I 17). Chapters four and five deal respectively with the plays of D'Annunzio and Pirandello, contrasting the former's aristocratic, decadent super-heroes and doomed Jemme-Jatales with the latter's middle-class misogynistic patriarchs and disposable female possessions. The strengths of these chapters are the portrayals of interrelated, and hence flawed, constructions of both masculine and feminine character types. In the chapter on D'Annunzio, the portrayal of "femininity as fantastic ... the product of patriarchal fantasy" (t41), while showing his "fragmentation ...false idealization and false problematiz.tion" (146) of the inferior "Other," requires more framing as aristocratic nostalgia. So too, Pirandello's patriarchal obsession with staging the differential importance attached to age and ageing for men and women (170-7 I) should be exposed as a traditional male tactic to control female reproduction. The concluding chapter suggests that a new era h.s begun with Rame's "female parts," who question "traditional assumptions concerning gender relations in a fundamental set of mostly everyday social spheres" (203). Rame's revolutionary Italian feminist agenda, with its active awareness of the political and social context shaping women's lives (2t6), has made a difference. But, not surprisingly, even while foregrounding gender oppression, the same unwillingness to expose the connections between capitalism and helero-patriarchal exploitation of women leaves GUnsberg puzzled as to why Rame's work may actually reinforce traditional values (242). In conclusion, this text provides interesting gendered readings of a wide selection of texts. While reluctant to explore fully the connections between patriarchal ideologies and changing socia-economic circumstances, its historical overview of gender constructions still encourages readers to seek answers to the contradictions it unmasks. I Ludic Feminism and After (Ann Arbor, 1996),7. ROSA Ll ND KE RR , UNIVERSITY OF ALBERTA, EDMONTON CHRISTOPHER BIGSBY , ed. The Cambridge Companion to Arthur Miller. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press [997. Pp. 277, plus 29 pages of introductory material, illustrated. $59.95; $18.95, paperback. Like others in the Cambridge Companion series, this survey of Arthur Miller's work and its criticism is an excellent overview of Miller's oeuvre. In Book Reviews 505 fact, it's better than others in the series, having a higher consistency of excellence in the individual essays. The editor, Christopher Bigsby (no longer C.W.E. Bigsby), well known for his work on Miller and modem drama, has contributed a solid introduction and two essays to the collection; other contributors include such well-known Miller scholars as Brenda Murphy, Stephen Centola, Matthew Roudane, Thomas Adler and William Demastes. Like others in the series, it includes a chronology, an introduction and a series of essays, followed by a bibliography. Unlike others, the bibliography is in essay form and does not include Miller's own works. The essays are largely chronological in order; thus there is some repetition of points as individual essayists say the same things about Miller, sometimes using the same plays as illustration , but this never becomes excessive. As a survey, the essays document the essential Miller. There is little new for even the casual Miller scholar, except perhaps in the discussion of Miller's unpublished college plays and the films made 'from his work. Bigsby's introduction is brief, only eight pages, followed by Brenda Murphy on Miller and "The Tradition of Social Drama." Placing him in the tradition of Greek drama and Ibsen, she goes no further than A View from the Bridge, not considering the social-drama implications of After the Fall, The Ride Down Mt. Morgan and Broken Glass. Bigsby, in his next chapter, provides a long discussion of Miller's early plays, placing them in the Depression era's receptivity to plays urging political agendas. He emphasizes the centrality of family conflict in Miller's plays - brothers against father, new generations against old, a son sacrificing college - without mentioning the autobiographical elements...