Tragedy and the Common Man: Arthur Miller

In Streetcar, Williams arguably presents us with 'ordinary' characters and an anti-heroine in Blanche who does not quite fit in the society in which she finds herself. Read Arthur Miller's (an extremely iconic plawright in modern America) article 'Tragedy and the Common Man' and see if you can pick out some of the key ways that Miller sought to redefine notions of tragedy. Then, try to makes links with Streetcar and consider whether or not 'the common man' - or woman in Blanche's case, is as apt and as effective as a protagonist as the kings and aristocrats of epic tragedy.

February 27, 1949

The New York Times

 Tragedy and the Common Man 

By ARTHUR MILLER

In this age few tragedies are written. It has often been held that the lack is due to a paucity of heroes among us, or else that modern man has had the blood drawn out of his organs of belief by the skepticism of science, and the heroic attack on life cannot feed on an attitude of reserve and circumspection. For one reason or another, we are often held to be below tragedy-or tragedy above us. The inevitable conclusion is, of course, that the tragic mode is archaic, fit only for the very highly placed, the kings or the kingly, and where this admission is not made in so many words it is most often implied.

 I believe that the common man is as apt a subject for tragedy in its highest sense as kings were. On the face of it this ought to be obvious in the light of modern psychiatry, which bases its analysis upon classific formulations, such as Oedipus and Orestes complexes, for instances, which were enacted by royal beings, but which apply to everyone in similar emotional situations.

 More simply, when the question of tragedy in art is not at issue, we never hesitate to attribute to the well-placed and the exalted the very same mental processes as the lowly. And finally, if the exaltation of tragic action were truly a property of the high-bred character alone, it is inconceivable that the mass of mankind should cherish tragedy above all other forms, let alone be capable of understanding it.

 As a general rule, to which there may be exceptions unknown to me, I think the tragic feeling is evoked in us when we are in the presence of a character who is ready to lay down his life, if need be, to secure one thing-his sense of personal dignity. From Orestes to Hamlet, Medea to Macbeth, the underlying struggle is that of the individual attempting to gain his "rightful" position in his society.

 Sometimes he is one who has been displaced from it, sometimes one who seeks to attain it for the first time, but the fateful wound from which the inevitable events spiral is the wound of indignity and its dominant force is indignation. Tragedy, then, is the consequence of a man's total compulsion to evaluate himself justly.

 In the sense of having been initiated by the hero himself, the tale always reveals what has been called his "tragic flaw," a failing that is not peculiar to grand or elevated characters. Nor is it necessarily a weakness. The flaw, or crack in the characters, is really nothing-and need be nothing, but his inherent unwillingness to remain passive in the face of what he conceives to be a challenge to his dignity, his image of his rightful status. Only the passive, only those who accept their lot without active retaliation, are "flawless." Most of us are in that category.

 But there are among us today, as there always have been, those who act against the scheme of things that degrades them, and in the process of action everything we have accepted out of fear of insensitivity or ignorance is shaken before us and examined, and from this total onslaught by an individual against the seemingly stable cosmos surrounding us-from this total examination of the "unchangeable" environment-comes the terror and the fear that is classically associated with tragedy. More important, from this total questioning of what has previously been unquestioned, we learn. And such a process is not beyond the common man. In revolutions around the world, these past thirty years, he has demonstrated again and again this inner dynamic of all tragedy.

 Insistence upon the rank of the tragic hero, or the so-called nobility of his character, is really but a clinging to the outward forms of tragedy. If rank or nobility of character was indispensable, then it would follow that the problems of those with rank were the particular problems of tragedy. But surely the right of one monarch to capture the domain from another no longer raises our passions, nor are our concepts of justice what they were to the mind of an Elizabethan king.

 The quality in such plays that does shake us, however, derives from the underlying fear of being displaced, the disaster inherent in being torn away from our chosen image of what and who we are in this world. Among us today this fear is strong, and perhaps stronger, than it ever was. In fact, it is the common man who knows this fear best.

 Now, if it is true that tragedy is the consequence of a man's total compulsion to evaluate himself justly, his destruction in the attempt posits a wrong or an evil in his environment. And this is precisely the morality of tragedy and its lesson. The discovery of the moral law, which is what the enlightenment of tragedy consists of, is not the discovery of some abstract or metaphysical quantity.

 The tragic right is a condition of life, a condition in which the human personality is able to flower and realize itself. The wrong is the condition which suppresses man, perverts the flowing out of his love and creative instinct. Tragedy enlightens-and it must, in that it points the heroic finger at the enemy of man's freedom. The thrust for freedom is the quality in tragedy which exalts. The revolutionary questioning of the stable environment is what terrifies. In no way is the common man debarred from such thoughts or such actions.

 Seen in this light, our lack of tragedy may be partially accounted for by the turn which modern literature has taken toward the purely psychiatric view of life, or the purely sociological. If all our miseries, our indignities, are born and bred within our minds, then all action, let alone the heroic action, is obviously impossible.

 And if society alone is responsible for the cramping of our lives, then the protagonist must needs be so pure and faultless as to force us to deny his validity as a character. From neither of these views can tragedy derive, simply because neither represents a balanced concept of life. Above all else, tragedy requires the finest appreciation by the writer of cause and effect.

 No tragedy can therefore come about when its author fears to question absolutely everything, when he regards any institution, habit or custom as being either everlasting, immutable or inevitable. In the tragic view the need of man to wholly realize himself is the only fixed star, and whatever it is that hedges his nature and lowers it is ripe for attack and examination. Which is not to say that tragedy must preach revolution.

 The Greeks could probe the very heavenly origin of their ways and return to confirm the rightness of laws. And Job could face God in anger, demanding his right and end in submission. But for a moment everything is in suspension, nothing is accepted, and in this sketching and tearing apart of the cosmos, in the very action of so doing, the character gains "size," the tragic stature which is spuriously attached to the royal or the high born in our minds. The commonest of men may take on that stature to the extent of his willingness to throw all he has into the contest, the battle to secure his rightful place in the world.

 There is a misconception of tragedy with which I have been struck in review after review, and in many conversations with writers and readers alike. It is the idea that tragedy is of necessity allied to pessimism. Even the dictionary says nothing more about the word than that it means a story with a sad or unhappy ending. This impression is so firmly fixed that I almost hesitate to claim that in truth tragedy implies more optimism in its author than does comedy, and that its final result ought to be the reinforcement of the onlooker's brightest opinions of the human animal.

 For, if it is true to say that in essence the tragic hero is intent upon claiming his whole due as a personality, and if this struggle must be total and without reservation, then it automatically demonstrates the indestructible will of man to achieve his humanity.

 The possibility of victory must be there in tragedy. Where pathos rules, where pathos is finally derived, a character has fought a battle he could not possibly have won. The pathetic is achieved when the protagonist is, by virtue of his witlessness, his insensitivity, or the very air he gives off, incapable of grappling with a much superior force.

 Pathos truly is the mode for the pessimist. But tragedy requires a nicer balance between what is possible and what is impossible. And it is curious, although edifying, that the plays we revere, century after century, are the tragedies. In them, and in them alone, lies the belief-optimistic, if you will, in the perfectibility of man.

 It is time, I think, that we who are without kings, took up this bright thread of our history and followed it to the only place it can possibly lead in our time-the heart and spirit of the average man.

A03 - Critical Thematic Opinions

1. The Past

"Everyone carries around all the selves they have ever been, intact, waiting to be reactivated in moments of pain, of fear, of danger. Everything is retrievable, every shock, every hurt. But perhaps it becomes a duty to abandon the stock of time that one carries within oneself, to discard it in favour of the present, so that one's embrace may be turned outwards to the world in which one has made one's home."

(From Latecomers, novel by Anita Brookner, 1988)

"A Streetcar Named Desire makes it clear that for Williams the act of fleeing always becomes the act of reliving the past. Flight forces the presence of the past on his characters as the presence of what they attempted to flee."

-Donald Pease in Tennessee Williams: A Tribute

- Consider how the 'onstage' events of the play seem to be repeating events in Blanche's past life.

2. Death:

"Death is my best theme, don't you think? The pain of dying is what worries me, not the act. After all, nobody gets out of life alive."

(Tennessee Williams to a reporter in 1963)

Consider what Blanche has to say about dying in Scene 1 and Scene 11. Consider what Blanche loses when she loses Belle Reve and Allan. How important is the intervention of the flower vendor in Scene 9?

3. The South:

"I write out of love for the South...It is out of a regret for a South that no longer exists that I write of the forces that have destroyed it."

(Tennessee Williams, quoted by his mother in Remember Me To Tom)

"You knew you were passing through a ruined kingdom. The myths, even in the moment you discovered them, were worm eaten...The lawns and columned porticos were never far from the tangled swamps with old flowers...And always drifting against the sky were the long grey-white tufts of Spanish moss on spreading live-oak trees. The live-oak was indeed a creepy symbol of the South, for in the sunlight and at a distance it was a majestic sight, and the Spanish moss trailed from its branches like the plumes of a jousing knight. As you get closer, the knight was slightly fly-brown. In the twilight the moss was grey fuzz...and you saw that it was a parasite clinging to the outline of a healthy tree."

(Alistair Cooke in Talk About America, 1968)

"The Southern accent gives Streetcar its music, its irony, its lyrical plangency, its curious decadent tone. These are not to be found on the page, silent. They are in that pervasive, strong, clinging accent which has so much dispossession in it. Williams's plays are full of dispossessed people who we feel were once gentle but who find the jungle has caught up with their gracious clearings and spaces and the animals with their civilised pursuits. We hear in it, too, a kind of self-defeat, self-delusion, a weakness, so we wonder what lies behind the gentleness, the civil behaviour."

(Gareth Lloyd Evans in The Language of Modern Drama, 1977)

Note: Some critics have noted that the battle between Blanche and Stanley is the conflict between the old world values of the South (see Blanche in Scene 10, the speech beginning, "A cultivated woman...) and the agressive materialism of the new urban world.

4. Survival:

"The play, and its author, beg the question of the price of survival."

"His idea of heaven had turned into a hell of his own making."

(John Lahr, from an article on Tennessee Williams in The Guardian, 2.2.88)

Note: Look at each of the characters and consider what they see as their salvation. Who 'survives' the events of the play? Who fails to survive? What is the price of their survival?

Critical Perspectives

Some critical perspectives on the play. More to follow over half term...

Blanche DuBois - heroine, aggressor or victim?

According to Christopher Innes, Blanche represents:

 "the decaying South, neurotic and corrupted, hiding from herself behind artifical allusions."

 (Christopher Innes in John Russell Brown (ed) 1995: 422 

Blanche is running away from a past that we learn about slowly during the play. (Remember things are always revealed slowly in the genre of domestic tragedy). Frail, highly strung, ethereally dressed in white, she seems always to be out of place in her surroundings. She is the visible manifestation of Southern gentility, thrust into the seething modern world, unable to cope either emotionally or financially, having lost both her young husband and her family plantation. (Sean McEvoy, 2009 Tragedy A Student Handbook, English and Media Centre)

In this respect Blanche can be seen to represent what Felicia Hardison Londre calls:

"the evolution of the social system from the old agrarian South, burdened by its past...to the post-war urban-industrial society in which Stanley's class has gained leverage."

(Felicia Hardison Londre in M.C. Roudane 1997: 54)

And so where does the tragedy lie? Is it Blanche's rape, her defeat and eventual institutionalisation or elsewhere? Londre argues that Williams:

"intended a balance of power between Blanche and Stanley, to show that both are complex figures whose wants and behaviours must be understood in the context of what is at stake for them."

 (Felicia Hardison Londre in M.C. Roudane 1997: 50)

At stake for both is something essentially selfish - escape for Blanche, sexual satisfaction and dominance for Stanley - and the inference of this is that none of these old or new social forms is equipped to be anything other than, essentially, self-serving and vicious. 

Melting Pot taken from (Sean McEvoy, 2009 Tragedy A Student Handbook, English and Media Centre, p202)

At the play's conclusion, nearly every character is onstage. Indeed, outside of the Southern Blanche and Polish Stanley, the whole cast takes in a wide range of age, colours and ethnic backgrounds to paint a picture of a particular swathe of American society. These are the down-at-heel- newcomers, the lower depths working hard to better themselves the American way, in the troubled pursuit of the American Dream. The tragedy in this play, just as in Williams' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, lies not in personal circumstances, but in the lives and losses of the culture and the society itself. In the final scene Eunice, comforting Stella, says that, "Life has got to go on. No matter what happens, you've got to keep on going." As the play ends, the men return to their cards and Stella receives her baby from Eunice it is clear that life and the community are still going to go on. In the face of great struggles this must always be the case and here, in this melting pot of people trying to better themselves, Williams is showing us that just to carry on is sometimes the hardest, most tragic thing of all.

The original Broadway production of A Streetcar Named Desire showcased vividly Williams' desire to create plays that exist in a clearly living, fully-realised world...He wanted to create theatre that had the fluid quality of imagination, allowing the audience to see, hear and feel more than just one flat, dimensionless aspect of his character's lives. The design for A Streetcar Named Desire allows for this beautifully, showing not only both rooms of the Kowalski apartment, but also elements of the apartment above, the alleyway, the street and the bars nearby. In creating a world so fully-layered and complex, he succeeds in stripping away binary certainties from his drama, creating a vibrant, dense and complex world where only the true goodness lies in a sense of social togetherness. All human life is here, and alive it certainly is.

Homework questions for Thursday

1. What comment do you think Tennessee Williams is making in his organisation of the characters in the scene - the women with Blanche - the men playing cards? (A02 - form and structure/shaping meaning)

2. How does Blanche's long speech about death draw together the main elements of her illusion? (A01, A02)

Expressionism in Scene 10

Following the SD:


Lurid reflections appear on the walls around BLANCHE. The shadows are of a grotesque and menacing form. She catches her breath, crosses to the phone and jingles the hook. STANLEY goes in to the bathroom and closes the door.

Scene 10 then moves in to an expressionistic mode as reality becomes distorted by Blanche’s subjective vision of it.
 

NB: If something is subjective it is based on a individual’s personal perception and is influenced by their own thoughts/feelings.

 

'Expressionism' was a cultural movement, initially in poetry and painting, originating in Germany at the start of the 20th century. Its typical trait is to present the world under an utterly subjective perspective, violently distorting it to obtain an emotional effect and vividly transmit personal moods and ideas.

 

 Following this, Williams blurs the distinction between subjective and objective reality by momentarily making the apartment's walls become 'transparent.' Thus, the sordid reality of exterior - tthe street (the prostitute's encounter with the drunkard, the violence, the theft etc) mingle with the interior of the apartment. In effect, Williams uses this dramatic technique to (a) exemlify what reality is to Blanche: i.e. violence, immorality, theft etc and also (b) as a metaphor for Blanche's internal conflict. She sees some of her own personal struggles being played out on the street.

In Scene 10, Williams pits the weak against the strong. Scene 10 is when Blanche is arguably at her most fragile and Stanley is at his most jubliant. (Remember he is just about to become a dad!) Therefore, the tragic impact of his rape of her is all the more potent.

Stanley's rape of Blanche seems to have been fated all along; "We've had this date with each other from the beginning!"

 

By not showing the rape on stage, Williams heightens the sense of its offensiveness and ultimately reflects notions of acceptable stage behaviour held by Americans in the 1940's. Our sense of the rape's inevitably is another reason perhaps as to why it is unnecessary to stage it.

**Blanche's rape symbolises the final destruction of the 'old' South's genteel fantasy world**

 

Key Points from Scene 8 and Homework Questions for Thursday

• A disjointed scene with many shifts in mood.
• Three quarters of an hour later: 3 Unities (action, time and place). Full impact of tragedy realised by presenting the scene in this way. The tragedy is compacted and resultantly its impact intensified for effect.
• Light described in SD: “blazes” & “pierced.”
• Blanche tries to maintain a brave face even though she says, “I’ve been stood up by my beau.”

Key points for consideration in Scene 8

• What is the significance of Blanche’s story about the parrot?
• How is Stanley portrayed as increasingly animalistic in this scene? Find a quote to support your viewpoint.
• Consider Stanley and Stella’s relationship.
• At the end of Scene 8, Stella goes in to labour. Williams uses this incident to resolve a difficult part of the plot and provide some momentary relief for Blanche. This is an example of his use of deus ex machina = Latin phrase ‘god out of the machine’: essentially a plot device often used by playwrights to resolve difficult parts of the plot.
• ‘Nobody, nobody, was tender and trusting as she was. But people like you abused her, and forced her to change.’ – Discuss/argue/persuade – Is this Williams showing his sympathy to his tragic heroine and thus perhaps affording sympathy to fragile femininity?

HOMEWORK QUESTIONS FOR THURSDAY

1. How does Mitch’s absence contribute significantly to this scene?

2. Why does Stanley bristle when Blanche uses the word ‘Polack?’ (Link to context)

·         3. What part do telephone calls play in the structure of the scene? Why does Williams incorporate them?

Key Points from Scene 7

Some notes on the key points from Scene 7. Remember, they are only notes and resultantly you must combine them with things we have discussed in class, your own analysis, wider reading etc etc etc. Being able to comment on DRAMATIC METHODS and the EFFECTS these produce is what is crucial now that you are at AS Level so you must be considering this at all times if you want the top marks this year.

• Scene full of dramatic contrasts.

• THE TWO BLANCHES ARE COUNTERPOISED: facts vs. her illusions.

• Cheerful mood of pleasant anticipation as Blanche’s birthday is organised juxtaposed with Stanley’s destructive account of Blanche’s past misdemeanours.

• Denouement: the point in the play at which things become clear.

• Blanche’s ruin is sealed by the end of Scene 7.

• STAGE  DIRECTION: “Blanche is singing in the bathroom a saccharine popular ballad which is used contrapunctually with Stanley’s speech.”  Discuss the effects of Williams constructing the scene in this way and the impact it has on the tragic nature of what is happening.

•  Bathroom is a functional symbol in Scene 7 as it is used to reveal the dual world of Blanche’s existence with the tension between her and Stanley.

• “Sister Blanche is no lily!” – destruction of Blanche’s image of purity and innocence.

• What do you think Stanley’s motives are for telling Stella? How does Stella react?

• Significance of Blanche’s song:

“It’s a Barnum and Bailey world, Just as phony as it can be –

But it wouldn’t be make-believe If you believed in me!”

• Blanche’s future rest in Mitch believing in her act or believing in her strongly enough to make the act reality.

• STELLA: “It’s pure invention!”

•  Blanche’s song – asserts the capacity of the imagination to transform mere facts.

• CONSIDER: How does the fanciful way that Blanche perceives the world heighten the tragic impact of the play?

•   “And as time went by she became a town character. Regarded as not just different but downright loco-nuts.” cf. Elements of the Southern Gothic.

• STELLA: But when she was young, very young, she had an experience that – killed her illusions!

• STELLA: This beautiful and talented young man was a degenerate.

(Southern Gothic Literature and the tendency of writers to detail the plight of the ostracised.  Link with modern domestic tragedy and the ordinariness of its characters. Antithetical to epic/classical tragedy and people of nobility). 

• SD: The distant piano goes into a hectic breakdown. Effects of dramatic methods?