Guilt and Responsibility in Arthur Miller's Plays

Seminar paper from the year 2007 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 1,3, University of Freiburg (Englisches Seminar), course: 20th Century American Drama: Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, language: English, abstract: The purpose of this term paper is to examine how the characters in Arthur

Miller¿s plays are confronted with guilt and responsibility and how they deal

with it. Furthermore, I want to demonstrate how personal, individual guilt

and responsibility not only become a matter for the individual but also

have an important impact on the community and the society. According to

Miller, there is a really strong mutual relationship between the individual

and society. He states: ¿Society is inside man and man is inside society,

the water is in the fish, the fish is in the water.¿ Miller¿s main protagonists

always try to defend themselves against an accusation, to deny their

responsibility and guilt, and to believe in their innocence. Bigsby mentions

what all of the characters concerning innocence and guilt have in

common: ¿¿ [They] spend much of their time rebutting charges whose

justice they acknowledge even as they are rejected. They are people who

try to escape the consequences of their actions, who try to declare their

innocence even when that involves implying the guilt of others.¿ This truly

applies for the plays and characters I will observe in the following. I

decided to focus on two plays published in the 1940s and 1950s: All My

Sons (1947) and The Crucible (1953). Their main protagonists experience

confrontation with themselves which finally leads to death. Most emphasis

will be laid on All My Sons as there we have a number of characters

dealing with guilt and responsibility, namely Chris, Larry, Kate, and Joe

Keller. In addition, I will discuss the character of Proctor in The Crucible.

The dominant question in these characters becomes this one: ¿How

can a human being work out the interconnections among the everwidening

circles of responsibility: self, family, society, the universe?

According to Miller, ¿to violate the codes of any circle is to sin.¿