Abstract
Mainly based on textual analysis, the present article attempts to offer a relatively comprehensive and detailed look into Miller’s depiction of dramatic housewife-mother figures in a gendered world in his early plays especially in All My Sons and Death of a Salesman and elaborate his female awareness from a feminist point of view and via employing the historical-biographical approach. In his early plays, by depicting his major housewife-mother figures—Kate Keller and Linda Loman as both wives and mothers according to the social condition and dominant cultural value, Miller is still possible to expose their bitterness and frustration in the traditional gender world by depicting them as both victims and victimizers under the patriarchal society. And he also endows them with courage and strength to express their resentment against the male-dominance and release their confined consciousness. So, the portrayal of these housewife-mother images has demonstrated that Miller can represent confined housewife-mothers sympathetically, authentically and admirably in his early plays.
Highlights
It is generally agreed that the plays written prior to the screenplay The Misfits (1961) belong to Miller’s early plays
Miller exposes the fact that the housewife-mothers are exploited and subjugated in the phallocentric society and that they are the victims of the patriarchal system
Miller creates a gallery of housewife-mothers in his plays
Summary
It is generally agreed that the plays written prior to the screenplay The Misfits (1961) belong to Miller’s early plays. Critics have attacked the stereotyping of the women in Miller’s early plays; but the male characters in Miller’s early plays are presented more negatively than the females, whether that be the moral failing of Joe Keller in All My Sons, the self-destructive self-deceit of Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman, the adultery of John Proctor in The Crucible, or the abnormal incestuous love of Eddie Carbone in A View from the Bridge. In his early plays, Miller portrays a gallery of male failures. In the following part, focusing on Kate Keller in All My Sons and Linda Loman in Death of a Salesman and combining the historical context, the writer will elaborate the different images and roles Miller’s housewife-mothers in his early plays represent so as to prove that Miller is capable of the authentic portrayal of the social reality of women’s life and that he begins to show his awareness of women’s frustration, predicament and strength in the patriarchal society
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