Stone Tower: The Political Theater of Arthur Miller (review)

Reviewed by: Stone Tower: The Political Theater of Arthur Miller Art Redding Jeffrey D. Mason . Stone Tower: The Political Theater of Arthur Miller. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008. Pp. viii + 360. $49.50 (Hb). Initial critical responses to Arthur Miller's most interventionist play, The Crucible, targeted the sentimentalism and presumed "naïveté" of Miller, who, like other liberals and fellow-travellers, seemed temperamentally unable to countenance the genuine threat posed by Stalinism. Irrespective of Miller's dramatized genealogy of secular Jeffersonian republicanism or his common-sense contention that the state had no business judging "invisible" crimes of the heart, the play's overstated analogy between witchcraft and communism implied that the great red menace that underwrote and rationalized every aspect of Cold War society was entirely chimerical. Even Miller might not have fully realized how his work diminished the Bolshevik bogey and exposed the hysterical substratum of American life – there were witches in Salem, Miller protested, rather lamely. At any rate, such criticisms were part of a still-lingering McCarthyite tropic constellation mobilized to "un-man" the American left: "pinko" intellectuals were understood to be "soft" on communism, liable to seduction, overly emotional, explicitly effeminate, and implicitly homosexual. Under such conditions, it should come as no surprise that, contra the state's illegitimate claim to judge one's soul publicly, an internal interrogation of masculine anxiety formed the core of Miller's political vision, in The Crucible and elsewhere. The early Cold War was also the historical moment when Method acting (itself, ironically, a Russian import) was certified by Miller and his colleagues in film and theatre. The technique secured its popularity by deflecting the traditionally expansive mythic quest of the male hero/pioneer into an inner emotional journey: the landscape of duress in which the solitary adventurer tested, hardened, and so proved himself worthy was, in the 1950s, the unexplored frontier of his own psyche. The playwright's dramatic challenge, of course, was to expose the inner quest effectively on the public stage, and the structure, arguably, of every single play by Miller juxtaposes a fraudulent "public" inquest with a more tragic but ultimately honest and illuminating private one. Typically, the menaces of male sexuality (more dangerous to the hero and more populous in this new country than savages or wild beasts) are the hinge between private and public dramas. Consequently, if the great danger to human freedom was the incipient totalitarian state, the most proximate enemy was the temptress. Of course, there are always witches. Miller, in sum, was no run-of-the mill sexist; rather, his sexism was calibrated to his historical moment and essential to his theatrical project. The penultimate and most satisfying chapter of [End Page 502] Jeffrey Mason's The Stone Tower sizes up Miller's sexual politics flatly: "The women wait while the men shape events" (252). Women are the occasions of struggle but never its agents, and agon is a decidedly male privilege. "He defines Woman as Other, either a paper doll devoid of depth and true warmth, or a source of confusion and the locus of evil," Mason writes (258). Mason's book, nevertheless, is an effort to salvage and rejuvenate Miller's political theatre, heterosexist warts and all. As Mason observes, the drama in Miller involves the "struggle between the lonely individual and the society that rejects him" (6), and Mason's book works hard to situate the precise social landscape and more generalized political implications of that struggle. Mason's refreshing central claim locates Miller as a political dramatist primarily, and he notes that the term is double-edged: political or activist theatre "shapes information in order to raise consciousness and incite action; it is a means of activism" (2). "In a broader sense, political theater deals with issues of social power" where "politics becomes the topic, not the purpose" (3). If the latter description applies more aptly to Miller's work, it should be recognized that he nonetheless has a foot in the first camp as well, however traditional his means of delivery. It would be overstating the case to suggest that Miller's work has any direct bearing on the activist theatre of the...

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