All My Sons

Abstract

No one writing today on Arthur Miller is better positioned than Claire Gleitman, the Dean of Humanities and Sciences and a professor of English at Ithaca College, to help us approach All My Sons. She recently authored Anxious Masculinity in the Drama of Arthur Miller and Beyond (Bloomsbury Methuen 2022), and tensions she identifies there, which began arising in the late nineteenth century as traditional American conceptions of masculinity confronted modern bureaucratized industrial capitalism, are the source of the tragedy in this play.Working broadly in the approach taken by theorists like Judith Butler, who holds that gender is not a trait individuals have, like brown eyes, but a display of the self through performance, Gleitman argues in Anxious Masculinity that American culture in the 1940s, when Miller wrote All My Sons, demanded of both males and females that they earn their gender by actualizing a limited set of socially endorsed tropes. That’s the source of the anxiety: the awareness that failure to meet this demand is possible. For males, the model arose from idealization of our nation’s frontier past. A man went into the wildness of the surrounding world, and through his own wild ruggedness, dominated and tamed it, making a safe place for his family, who followed him. As devoted as he was to his family, he persistently sought new challenges to overcome outside the home as a way of continually expressing his independence and manly prowess. Women in this national myth should seek to marry men who could succeed in this quest for dominance, bringing their less rugged feminine virtues to creating the orderly and joyful homes that followed in their husbands’ conquest of the wild. From the man’s perspective, women outside marriage were part of the wild he sought to conquer; only within marriage did they acquire this sanctified role. By the 1940s, the capitalist marketplace had replaced the frontier as the arena of challenge, but the myth of manly prowess and the pursuit of domination—being “big,” as Willy Loman would say—remained the same.Clearly, there are tensions hidden within these national gender myths. What obligations does a man have to the community in which he engages? Are other people merely means to his own ends as he pursues dominance and security? And what of the husband’s commitment to the family? As he constantly seeks new challenges outside the home to display his prowess, is he not abandoning the role of co-nurturer that his wife, as guardian of domesticity, needs of him? Are wives, having been blocked from directly entering the wildness outside the home, merely voices of virtue gently restraining their husbands’ inherent wildness, or are they Lady Macbeth, the source of values and ideas driving their husbands to strive ever more strenuously for dominance?All of this is further complicated by the rise of bureaucratized industrial capitalism, where most men are doing jobs—for example, in offices or on assembly lines—that require little rugged manliness; men must admit that women could do these jobs at least as well. Bureaucracies allow little space for independence amid often demeaning hierarchies, and industrial-scale capitalism requires large consumer markets to sustain itself. Despite the lingering frontier myth of individualistic manliness, most men by the 1940s were cogs in organizations that provided them income with which their families could purchase goods and services sold by other organizations, items that now had become household desires if not necessities in a giant consumer economy. The frontier and its individualism and manly independence had vanished, but its myth of manhood still lingered in an economy that offered many people few ways in which the myth could be fulfilled. Anxious Masculinity traces this disconnect between myth and social opportunity from Miller’s plays of the 1940s and 1950s through works by Tennessee Williams, Lorraine Hansberry, August Wilson, Sam Shepard, Tony Kushner, Paula Vogel, and on into the twenty-first century.This is the vision of American society and the construction of gender identity that Gleitman brings as she introduces us to All My Sons, and the sophistication and social perspective of this vision protect her from the banal moralism that other commentators have brought to interpreting the play. Consider her balanced view of Joe Keller:Quoting Jeremy Herrin, the director of the 2019 Old Vic production starring Sally Field and Bill Pullman, Gleitman agrees that Joe “isn’t a villain but an awful lot like all the rest of us” (xxiv).She then uses this understanding of Joe to reveal the complexity of his son Chris’s situation, enabling us to see Chris as a man in despair, someone quite different from the preachy and pretentious moralist he sometimes is taken to be. Just as Joe, engaging Franklin Roosevelt’s ideal of America as the “great arsenal of democracy,” had turned his factory to manufacturing war materials, Chris had enlisted in the military as part of Dwight Eisenhower’s “great crusade.” In combat, he had seen friends maimed and killed. All that could justify such suffering was that it had been necessary to preserve an ideal, the “American way of life.” But when Chris returns home after the war, he has trouble finding that ideal in the society that surrounds him. He hopes he might find it in building a family with Ann Deever, but even that seems more like grasping after an idealized dream than a solidly conceived plan. The “American way of life,” the ideal for which he had seen so much sacrificed in the war, seems to have been reduced to crass consumerism. Had his friends fought and died merely to make the world safe for people to have “new and better refrigerators” (xi)? Gleitman helps us to see how both Joe and Chris are caught in a culture that provides a set of ideals and then makes it difficult for those ideals to be acted on. The ideals always are overwhelmed by crasser demands. Chris’s rage at his father for shipping defective engine parts and failing to be his son’s idealized image of him—“You can be better! Once and for all you can know there’s a universe of people outside and you’re responsible to it” (90)—is in a broader sense rage at America for failing to provide paths to his idealized visions of noble manhood in a worthy society. Joe is just the emblem of Chris’s despair at what he—like Miller—believes America has become. Gleitman writes,As she does in Anxious Masculinity, Gleitman here connects these views of masculinity to their corresponding views of the feminine. If men driven by these national myths become anxious in their pursuit of idealizations, women traditionally are constrained to the pragmatic maintenance of the mundane, realizing that no one can effectively pursue any ideals unless they can feed, clothe, and house themselves. As such, women in Miller’s world can become a force for the materialistic undermining of ideals, an undermining that Chris despises, despite his idealization of his mother and Ann. Sometimes the women do this overtly, as Sue Bayliss does to her husband’s ideal of pursuing medical research. Other times, it requires a veil of denial to protect us all from confronting the hypocrisy and hierarchy of values that may be driving our actions. Consider the conversation between Joe and Kate in act 3 after Joe’s role in shipping the defective engine parts has been revealed and Kate suggests that Joe should seek Chris’s forgiveness (81–82): The play ends with Joe’s suicide, Chris’s tearful shock of remorse as he recognizes his role in his father’s death, and Kate’s attempt to comfort her son by taking them all back into the comfort of denial: “Don’t dear. Don’t take it on yourself. Forget now. Live” (90). This leads Gleitman to consider a moral dichotomy that is typically Milleresque: Are we all living in a “state of moral oblivion that Miller suggests is at once unconscionable and perhaps necessary for survival in a fallen world” (xvi)? Certainly, Miller encourages us to continually pay attention to our actions and their consequences for other people, but like Eugene O’Neill in The Iceman Cometh, he also acknowledges the psychological need we all have for the comforting pipe dreams we use to excuse ourselves and smoothly continue our lives. The only way forward toward enlightenment about ethical issues is to consider responsibility and forgiveness together in the context of a particular action, allowing each to enlighten our views of the other.There are many excellent insights in Claire Gleitman’s introduction that will be useful to anyone teaching the play or considering it in depth. Perhaps the best come from the perspective about morality she shares with Miller: moral questions never are simple; there always are mitigating circumstances to consider; actions can be understood only in the context of the cultural myths and the particular moments in which they occur. It is a mistake to take All My Sons simply as a moralistic condemnation of Joe, although Joe certainly cannot be exonerated for shipping the faulty engine parts, despite the rationales he presents. He took an unpardonable risk with other people’s lives. But by showing us how Joe’s action needs to be considered in the context of American capitalism and cultural mores in the 1940s, Gleitman encourages us to consider the play as a broader social critique—and certainly that is the way Miller intended for us to take this and all his other plays.