Structure In After The Fall: The Relevance of the Maggie Episodes to the Main Themes and the Christian Symbolism

Abstract

CRITICAL OPINION DOES NOT SEEM ABOUT TO CRYSTALLIZE ITSELF very soon on After the Fall, a play which provoked even initially a deeply divergent cleft among our literary and dramatic critics. Reaction to the play is now distinctly weighted on the negative side, with the major charge levelled against Miller being that he has failed to transmute, satisfactorily, autobiographical material into art. The charge is a serious and legitimate one, but it is one which has not yet, as far as I know, been thoroughly substantiated. Critics have pointed accusing fingers at Miller for dropping whole episodes of his own life into the play without giving them proper aesthetic distance; they simply cite as proof the well-known facts of his own biography. But the matter of taste seems too often to be inextricably confused with all this, and questionable taste should not necessarily be identified with bad art. Does the play seem to lack aesthetic distance to someone who knows nothing of Miller's biography, or—as we should rather have to phrase it in this case—does the play seem structurally inchoate, weak, or confusing? This is the basic question which will have to be answered before any definitive critical opinion of the play can be formed.