"Forget now. Live." The Centrality of Female Characters in Early Plays by Arthur Miller
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| Year of publication | 2017 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | The role of female characters in early plays by Arthur Miller (such as Linda Loman in Death of a Salesman and Kate Keller in All My Sons) has been viewed as anything from marginal to central, depending on a critic’s approach to a play’s treatment of the timeless clash between one’s private life and the society. This traditional tragic conflict is explored and developed in Miller’s domestic tragedies on several levels, such as the structural arrangement of the story narrative, the moral/ethical dilemmas, and affective appeal to the audience. In Miller’s early plays, there are obvious elements of Classical tragedy, which are accommodated to serve contemporary purposes. It is the secondary female characters (Linda, Kate and others) that can be used as an axis of interpretation of the plays on all the above-mentioned levels. The audience can experience a moment of ‘purification’ through female characters, rather than through Willy Loman, Joe Keller and others. When Kate Keller (Mother) sooths her son Chris with, “Forget now. Live,” after a shot is heard when the father Joe Keller commits suicide at the end of All My Sons, she needs but one line to become the leading figure of the restored order of that morally shattered world of the play – as well as that of the audience. |
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