All My Sons (Criticism)

Criticism

John W. Fiero

Fiero is a Ph.D., now retired, who formerly taught drama and playwriting at the University of Southwestern Louisiana and is now a freelance writer and consultant. In this essay he considers All My Sons as Miller’s first attempt to write what he would call a tragedy of the common man, comparing it with Sophocles’s great tragedy, Oedipus Rex.

Writing in 1929, almost two full decades before All My Sons opened on Broadway, critic Joseph Wood Krutch wrote a celebrated essay entitled “The Tragic Fallacy.” His thesis was that modern audiences could not fully participate in the experience of tragedy because the tragic spirit, so vital and alive in the past, had simply stopped haunting the human landscape. Modern man no longer had tragedy’s requisite belief, if not in God or some other power greater than man, then at least in man.

Tragedy, opined Krutch, depended on what he termed the “tragic fallacy,” the “assumption which man so readily makes that something outside his own being, some ‘spirit not himself’ — be it God, Nature, or that still vaguer thing called a Moral Order — joins him in the emphasis which he places upon this or that and confirms him in his feelings that his passions and his opinions are important.” Because of the “universally modern incapacity to conceive man as noble,” Krutch maintained that dramatists could no longer create tragedies, only “those distressing modern works sometimes called by its [tragedy’s] name,” works that, rather than celebrate a “triumph over despair” while exhibiting a “confidence in the value of human life,” simply depicted man’s haplessness and insignificance.

For Krutch, modern man’s diminished stature makes a character like Oswald Alving of Ibsen’s Ghosts a far more “relevant” character than Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Krutch essentially indicts his contemporaries for allowing the tragic light to fade from the universe.

Arthur Miller, as he makes clear in his early plays All My Sons, Death of a Salesman, The Crucible, and A View from the Bridge, was unwilling to admit that the light was gone. For him, a tragic consciousness still existed, even in the most ordinary sort of people. As he wrote in his piece called “Tragedy and the Common Man,” he believed that “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.”

Moreover, Miller claimed, “the common man is as apt a subject for tragedy in its highest sense as kings were,” a heretical view for those critics whose definition of tragedy was largely delimited by Aristotle’s Poetics.

Orrin Klapp, pondering what he called Americans’ “armor against tragic experience,” found a partial explanation for it in the “actual shrinkage in the stature of the heroes being presented,” a reduction in human significance that made it almost impossible “to see them as having the dignity necessary to be tragic.”

For Miller, nobility of soul is not contingent upon rank at all; it rather rests on an individual’s moral integrity and, at the last, a willingness to face the consequence of a fateful decision and shoulder its attendant guilt.

All My Sons was Miller’s first attempt to write such a tragedy of the common man, and although with Death of a Salesman, his next play, he made almost a quantum leap forward in technique, in the former work he created a prototype for all his common-man, familial tragedies, including the latter. In it he welded features of classical tragedy to the realistic thesis play in the tradition of Ibsen, maintaining a surface verisimilitude while advancing a plot designed in accordance with the logic of causality and plausible human motives.

Academically at least, Sophocles seems to haunt All My Sons. As more than one critic has noted, the parallels between Miller’s play and the Greek tragedian’s masterpiece, Oedipus Rex, are readily apparent. W. Arthur Boggs maintains, for example, that like Oedipus Rex, Miller’s play is a “tragedy of recognition.”

There is, of course, one major and obvious difference: the works do not share a commensurate tragic scope. The hamartia of Oedipus, the killing of his father, has consequences not just for his family but for the entire city state of Thebes; Keller’s hamartia, his transgression against a clear moral imperative, has primary consequences, at least among the living, only for his family and close associates.

However, both Oedipus and Joe Keller are patriarchs. Both are asked to solve a problem, which, unknowingly or unconsciously, they have themselves created. And both must confront the truth, shoulder their terrible guilt, and respond by inflicting punishment upon themselves — Oedipus by blinding himself and exiling himself from Thebes, and Joe Keller by taking his own life.

Oedipus Rex and All My Sons share a similar pattern and structure, a common tragic rhythm. As Robert Hogan notes, both works involve “the revelation of a criminal whose crimes has occurred years earlier” and which has become “the crux of the present action.” In other words, both plays deal with untying the knot of a devastating and destructive truth that has been the source of a sickness that cannot be cured until it is recognized and faced by the protagonist. The sickness in Oedipus Rex, a plague, afflicts the entire community of Thebes; in All My Sons, it takes the form of a family’s failure to deal with the death of a son.

Furthermore, both Oedipus Rex and All My Sons deal with the transgression of one or more universal taboos and thus have strong moral focus. In the former, Oedipus violates taboos against incest and parricide; in the later, Joe Keller “kills” his son, Larry, and his spiritual sons, the twenty-one fighter pilots who die as a result of his actions.

Oedipus must first discover the truth of what he has done, while Joe must own up to the consequences of what he knows he has done and accept responsibility and guilt. Both protagonists in some sense lack knowledge, sharing a blindness to truth that is only cured when their ignorance, in a tragic recognition or epiphany, is sloughed off and they finally see clearly for the first time — even as their understanding destroys them. Ironically, their insight is the necessary recompense without which tragedy has no positive meaning and no power to elate rather than simply depress an audience.

Oedipus Rex comes from an age that accepted one premise alien to the modern mind: the victimization of “innocent” offspring used against their parents as instruments of divine justice. It is Oedipus’s unavoidable destiny that he should murder his father and marry his mother, atoning for their affront to the gods. A raw deal, perhaps, but Oedipus, who learns of his fate from the Oracle at Delphi as a young man, tries to defy the will of the gods by averting his fate. Not knowing that he is only the foster child of the king and queen of Corinth, he flees that city and, ironically, runs headlong into his fate. His defiance and resulting conviction that he has escaped his fate are evidence of his tragic flaw, his hubris, which, paradoxically, is also the source of his greatness.

Although Miller could hardly incorporate such a view of divine justice into All My Sons, he employs a modern parallel of sorts. Joe’s actions victimize his innocent sons, Larry and Chris, both of whom have ethical principles that could never condone what their father has done.

Joe also shares some of Oedipus’s pride and arrogance. After leaving Corinth, Oedipus had struggled to regain the princely stature he sacrificed in his attempt to escape his divinely-ordained fate. By virtue of his strength, he survives a fateful encounter on the road, unwittingly committing parricide, and, through his intelligence, he solves the riddle of the Sphinx, becoming king of Thebes and unwittingly marrying Joscasta, his own mother.

As depicted by Sophocles, he repeatedly displays pride in his accomplishments, his rise to the throne of Thebes by merit rather than influence, and displays almost paranoid suspicions towards his uncle and brother-in-law, Creon, who, he believes, is jealous and resents him. In his mocking of the blind prophet, Tiresias, who, he suspects, is part of Creon’s conspiracy to usurp the throne, he is nearly blasphemous in his arrogance.

Joe Keller is also a proud man. Through hard work, he has made his way up in the world, from semi-skilled laborer to factory owner and become one of the richest men in town. He is confident in Chris’s faith and trust in him and cares little about what neighbors like Sue Bayliss believe about his culpability in the matter of the cracked cylinder heads.

However, his equanimity and affability dissolve with the arrival of Ann Deever, and then her brother, George. Like Oedipus, Joe suspects the motives of others. He mistrusts Ann, daughter to a man he left in prison to pay for what was his own crime. The Deevers, ghosts from the past, are a threat to Joe, not just because of what their father might have told them but because they can and do force a familial showdown, something that Joe has assiduously avoided. Ann and Chris want to marry, but they will not as long as Kate Keller clings to her hope that Larry Keller is still alive. If she must accept Larry’s death, then she will hold Joe responsible for it, something that neither Kate nor Joe can face.

The Deevers are like the Sophoclean messengers who bear fateful information. They confirm that Joe ordered the welding of the cracked cylinder heads and that he was the cause of his son’s death. Ann even bears a letter from Larry, in which, shamed by his father, Larry confides that he is setting out on a suicidal mission.

George, on the other hand, is an interesting parallel to the messenger from Corinth in Oedipus

Rex, the one who comes to announce the deaths of the king and queen of that city, temporarily allaying Oedipus’s fears and, thereby, briefly turning the tide against the tragic direction of the play. There is a similar reversal in All My Sons, when George, disarmed by the amiability of Kate Keller, begins to accept Joe’s account of his father as a weak man, the one who made the sole decision to send on the defective airplane parts. Only when Kate inadvertently lets slip the fact that Joe was not sick on the fateful day does George begin to confront Joe again.

The influence of classical tragedy on All My Sons also resonates in other ways. For example, the idea of destiny or fate is introduced by Frank Lubey, the amateur and inept astrologer. He tries to convince Kate that there is hope that Larry is still alive because the day he was lost in action was, according to his horoscope, a propitious and fortunate day for him. There is also the virtual observance of the unities of time, place, and, to a degree, action, and a set that suggests the standard skene of Greek tragedy.

For some of the critics of the play, Miller seemed to be crowding such devices of tragedy into the somewhat unreceptive frame of realistic drama, jamming them into a confused situation made more confused by their inclusion or, as in the case of the letter in Ann’s possession, making them a bit too convenient and coincidental to pass muster as a device suited to the probability demanded by realism. To Boggs, for example, All My Sons lacks the precision and simple and direct focus of Oedipus Rex and, therefore, fails.

Still, All My Sons is the first effort by one of America’s major post-World War II dramatists, albeit unconsciously, to contest Krutch’s thesis of the impossibility of modern tragedy. Although in All My Sons he may not have succeeded according to critics, he at least succeeded in raising expectations. In fact, many commentators came to believe that the playwright was just one work shy of a masterpiece, which, two years later, graced the American theater in the guise of Death of a Salesman.

Source: John W. Fiero, for Drama for Students, Gale, 2000.

What Do I Read Next?

• Aristotle’s Poetics offers a descriptive definition of ancient Greek tragedy. For some theorists, it is the ultimate critical authority on the nature of tragedy.
• Eugene O’Neill, in Long Day’s Journey into Night (1956), comes as close as Miller does to writing a modern, family tragedy.
• An important sociological study, The Lonely Crowd (1969), by David Reisman, suggests that modern America has lost the capacity for guilt (necessary to tragedy).
• Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (1991, revised edition), by Christopher Lasch, a more recent look at American culture, examines the changing cultural landscape.
• Stuart D. Brandes’s study, Warhogs: A History of War Profits in America (1997), is a thorough history of wartime profiteering in the United States, both before and since World War II.