Job in Anderson's Winterset

JOB IN ANDERSON'S WINTERSET MAXWELL ANDERSON'S Winterset has a certain unity which has ofteR been denied the play. Once we view this drama through its most pervasive parallel, the Book of job, the unity becomes apparent. job, the hitherto unnoticed element, is an aid toward a grasp of the playas a unified totality, providing a dominant theme and resulting in a new perspective. This unity will be found by viewing the theme not as "justice" or "love," but as the overpowering of vengeance by love, as the rejection of a lesser for a greater good. At any rate there is an interplay, and a movement from one to the other, of the two themes, justice and love. The Sacco-Vanzetti parallel points up this relationship. Scene iii of Act I moves from the puerile romanticism of an anonymous girl's seduction to an equally youthful, particularized verbal battle of cops and radicals to the ethereal first love of Mio and Miriamne and finally to the horrible, mysterious murder of Shadow. Here we have love-justice-Iove-justice developed in one scene, but the two kinds of love and the two kinds of justice are antipodal: the first two are common, worldly, particular; the last two are universal. So in this scene there is almost the admission that the play sets out to universalize the contemporary themes of romantic love and social injustice . The theme of justice has already been established in Act I: Trock has been released from prison after serving the sentence of justice, and Garth is struggling with himself to overcome his personal defeat which arose from injustice. In Scene iii the themes of love and justice are juxtaposed, and Mio reveals that the bitterness of his search for justice precludes love: he cries, "Enduring love, oh gods and worms, what mockeryl" And the plot becomes twisted up in the conflict of love against justice, until it is untangled by the conquest of love. This interpretation of the theme is entirely consistent with job's fight for justice ending in an ::qJarently "blind" affirmation. But in order to see Mio's struggle as parallel with job's we must consider the evidence leading to this broad conclusion. One writer points out some interesting contributions of Hebraic lore to Winterset, the bridge underneath which the action takes place 32 1963 JOB IN ANDERSON'S Winterset 33 being a Hebraic time-space symbo1.1 Another, John Mason Brown, at least indirectly links Anderson to the Job theme: "The finest statement of what is enduring in high tragedy's timeless blueprint is not to be found in the Poetics but in the Book of Job."2 Brown sees Job's febrile grasp for the incomprehensible and his capacity for passionate suffering as the stuff of which tragic heroes are made. And with this type,not the individual Job, in mind, Brown comments, "No contemporary understands the exaltation of the tragic pattern better than Maxwell Anderson."3 There is one direct allusion to the Book of Job in Winterset which, like the one direct aIIusion in Night over Taos to the Biblical Absalom , indicates that Anderson has these sources more than casually in mind. In Winterset Mio's friend Carr, upon being reunited with Mio, comments: "Last time I saw you you couldn't think of anything you wanted to do except curse God and pass OUt."4 Mio perhaps at one time was ready to take the advice of Job's wife, but before the opening of the play he has OLgot a new interest in life." He has begun a probe for the truth that can clear his father's name. This slight indication of Job in Winterset is only a pointer towards the basic likeness of Mio to Job. Both heroes are suffering in a similar tragic situation. Both attempt a search for justice, work out their own justice through confiict with a set of "comforters," and achieve an optimistic resolution. Job's tragic situation is essentially a degradation and an alienation from both God and mankind. The loss of wealth is misfortune and the bodily sores are pitiable, but greater pain comes from being a social...