Stylistic Semasiology

Arthur Asher Miller (1915 –2005) was an American playwright, essayist. He was a prominent figure in American literature and cinema for over 61 years, writing a wide variety of plays, including The Crucible, A View from the Bridge, All My Sons, and Death of a Salesman, which are still studied and performed worldwide. Miller was often in the public eye, most famously for refusing to give evidence before the House Un-American Activities Committee, being the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama among other awards, and because of his marriage to Marilyn Monroe. At the time of his death, Miller was considered one of the greatest American playwrights.

Arthur Miller'sbest work, Death of a Salesman, is one of the most successful in fusing the realistic and the imaginative; in all of his other plays, however, Miller is the master of realism. He is a true disciple of Henrik Ibsen, not only in his realistic technique, but in his concern about society's impact on his characters' lives.

Arthur Miller created more directly social plays based on an ambiguity of images, whether defined in a family or"broader cultural sense. Death of a Salesman (1949), the account of Willy Loman's tragic struggle with "the law of success," became an-other classic. The Crucible (1953), in which the Salem witch-hunts are used as a parable (witchcraft trials of the 17^th century in which Puritan settlers were wrongly executed as supposed witches), and A View from the Bridge (1955) enhanced his reputation.

In Miller's plays, the course of the action and the development of character depend not only on the characters' psychological make-up, but also on the social, philosophical, and economic atmosphere of their times.

Miller's most notable character, Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman, is a self-deluded man; but he is also a product of the American dream of success and a victim of the American business machine, which disposes of him when he has outlived his usefulness. Loman has worked for Howard Wagner's company for thirty-six years. He has opened new markets for their trademark. Wagner's father promised him a job in New York, but Howard does not need him in town and fires him altogether. Willy realizes the futility of his dreams. He has been squeezed out and when he is unable to bring in a large profit he is dismissed. “I put thirty-six years into this firm. You can't eat the orange and throw the peel away - a man is not a piece of fruit," he says bitterly. Having lost the sense of personal dignity, Willy decides to make a sacrifice for those he loves - he commits suicide in order that his sons, Biff and Happy, should get the insurance money and start a business.

Miller is a writer of high moral seriousness, whether he is dealing with personal versus social responsibility, as - in All My Sons (1947), or with witch hunts past and present, as in The Crucible. Both are political - one contemporary, and the other set in colonial times. The first deals with a manufacturer who knowingly allows defective parts to be shipped to airplane firms during World War II, resulting in the death of his son and others.

Miller writes a plain arid muscular prose that under the force of emotion often becomes eloquent, as in Linda Loman's famous speech in Death of a Salesman, where she talks to her two sons about their father: "I don't say he's a great man. Willy Loman never made a lot of money. His name was never in the paper. He is not the finest character that ever lived. But he's a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid. He's not to be allowed to fall into his grave like an old dog. Attention, attention must finally be paid to such a person."

Thomas Lanier Williams III (1911 –1983), better known by the pseudonym Tennessee Williams, was a major American playwright and one of the prominent playwrights of the twentieth century. The name "Tennessee" was a name given to him by college friends because of his southern accent and his father's background in Tennessee. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for A Streetcar Named Desire in 1948 and for Cat On a Hot Tin Roof in 1955. In addition to those two plays, The Glass Menagerie in 1945 and The Night of the Iguana in 1961 received the New York Drama Critics' Circle Awards. His 1952 play The Rose Tattoo (dedicated to his boyfriend, Frank Merlo), received the Tony Award for best play. Genre critics maintain that Williams writes in the Southern Gothic style.

Tennessee Williams' family was a very troubled one that provided inspiration for much of his writings. Tennessee was close to his sister Rose who had perhaps the greatest influence on him. She was a slim beauty who was diagnosed with schizophrenia and spent most of her adult life in mental hospitals. The common "mad heroine" theme that appears in many of his plays may have been influenced by his sister.

Tennessee Williams showed his mastery of dialogue and movement on the stage in a series of plays. They treat the emotional involvements and frustrations with which Williams chiefly concerned himself. Although Tennessee Williams was Miller's contemporary, his concern was not with social matters, but wifh personal ones. If Miller is often the playwright of social conscience, then Williams was the playwright of our souls.

His earlier works were in production around the world. He dominated the American theatre for twenty years, beginning with Battle of Angels (1940). It was the first play to bring him public attention, and it evolved into Orpheus Descending (1957). He won national acclaim with The Glass Menagerie (1945) and A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Summer and Smoke (1948), The Rose Tattoo (1950), Camino Real (1953), Cat on a Hot Roof (1955), Garden District (1958), Suddenly Last Summer (1958), Sweet Bird of Youth (1959), Period of Adjustment (1960), The Night of the Iguana (1962). All these plays were made into films, and he wrote an original film script for Baby Doll (1956). In the mid-sixties, he started writing the darker plays of his late phase, beginning with Slapstick Tragedy (1965).

In contrast to Miller's spare, plain language, Williams's writing is delicate and sensuous; it is often colored with lush imagery and evocative rhythms. Miller's characters are, by and large, ordinary people with whom we identify because they are caught up in the social tensions of our times. Williams's characters are often women who are "Lost ladies," drowning in their own neuroses, but somehow mirroring a part of our own complex psychological selves.

The actual scenes in Williams's plays are usually purely realistic, even though these scenes may deal with colorful and "extreme" characters. But Williams usually theatricalized the realism with "music in the wings" or symbolic props, such as Laura's unicorn in The Glass Menagerie or the looming statue of Eternity in Summer and Smoke (1948). He always conceived his plays in visually arresting, colorful, theatrical environments.

The Glass Menagerie has become an American classic. When it was shown on Broadway in the spring of 1945, Mississippi-born Tennessee Williams was practically unknown; almost over-night, he became an international success.

The Glass Menagerie is a mixture of straightforward, realistic play construction and "poetic", highly imaginative conception and language. Williams used this combination for most of his works. The structure of his plays is basically conventional; his vision, his "voice," is imaginative and sensitive.

In play after play, Tennessee Williaing probed the psychological complexities of his characters. Though Williams became known principally for his colorful women characters - Amanda and Laura in The Glass Menagerie, Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire, Alma in Summer and Smoke, and Maggie in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof - he also created some great male characters, among them Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire. Marlon Brando's portrayal of Stanley in the original production, and in the movie, established a kind of mumbling, torn-Tee-shirt technique of acting that was to become popular with many of the younger male actors of the next decade.

Tennessee Williams' characters are fugitives from a world of reality, whose fantasies are sometimes pitiful, sometimes obscene, violations of normal living.

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