Job In Anderson's Winterset

Abstract

MAXWELL ANDERSON'S Winterset has a certain unity which has often been denied the play. Once we view this drama through its most pervasive parallel, the Book of job, the unity becomes apparent. Job, the hitherto unnoticed element, is an aid toward a grasp of the playas a unified totality, providing a dominant theme and resulting in a new perspective. This unity will be found by viewing the theme not as "justice" or "love," but as the overpowering of vengeance by love, as the rejection of a lesser for a greater good. At any rate there is an interplay, and a movement from one to the other, of the two themes, justice and love. The Sacco-Vanzetti parallel points up this relationship. Scene iii of Act I moves from the puerile romanticism of an anonymous girl's seduction to an equally youthful, particularized verbal battle of cops and radicals to the ethereal first love of Mio and Miriamne and finally to the horrible, mysterious murder of Shadow. Here we have love-justice-Iove-justice developed in one scene, but the two kinds of love and the two kinds of justice are antipodal: the first two are common, worldly, particular; the last two are universal. So in this scene there is almost the admission that the play sets out to universalize the contemporary themes of romantic love and social injustice. The theme of justice has already been established in Act I: Trock has been released from prison after serving the sentence of justice, and Garth is struggling with himself to overcome his personal defeat which arose from injustice. In Scene iii the themes of love and justice are juxtaposed, and Mio reveals that the bitterness of his search for justice precludes love: he cries, "Enduring love, oh gods and worms, what mockery!" And the plot becomes twisted up in the conflict of love against justice, until it is untangled by the conquest of love.