682 The American Century: Literature since 1945compelled to confront themselves and make the choices that define their lives in
terms that are determined by their history and their society. Eddie Carbone cannot
meet the challenge. A Sicilian-American longshoreman, Eddie is consumed with a
love for his niece Catherine that approaches the incestuous. When Catherine falls in
love with a cousin smuggled into the country, Eddie is driven to violate one of the
taboos of his culture by reporting the illegal immigrant to the authorities. Equating
the loss of honor with loss of name, he dies denying his guilt: “I want my name!” he
cries out, as he tries to recover his self-respect by seizing it, by violence. John Proctor
does meet the challenge, however. Written at the height of the hysteria whipped up
by the Un-American Activities Committee, The Crucible explores issues of personal
conscience and social suppression through the dramatic analogy of the 1692 Salem
witchcraft trials. With the help of this analogy, Miller, who was himself a victim of
the committee, touches on all the consequences of McCarthyism: the exploitation
of legitimate cultural fears, conspiracy theories and social hysteria, the oppression
of the innocent and the manipulation of power, the complicity of ordinary citizens
and public officials in a pernicious, paranoid social process that appears to take on
an irresistible life of its own. When John Proctor’s wife is named as a witch by a
young woman, Abigail, with whom he has had an adulterous liaison, he attempts to
expose the accuser. This, however, leads to his own arrest. Tempted to save his skin
by confessing, he decides that honor requires his death. He has been drawn into
examining his life by the accusations leveled at him; and he recognises that, while
innocent of witchcraft, he has other responsibilities to answer for. His confession of
adultery with Abigail initiates an intense spiritual revaluation of himself. This leads,
in turn, to the belief that even his execution for witchcraft would be unearned, since
he is guilty while those he would be dying with are truly innocent. John confesses
because he believes himself too ridden with guilt to die with honor. He recants,
however, out of a sense of responsibility to the innocents he is to die with, and to
himself. The demand that his signed confession be displayed in public is one that he
feels compelled, ultimately, to resist. It would steal innocence from the truly
innocent: “I blacken all of them when this is nailed to the church the very day they
hang for silence!” John declares. And it would steal from him, however guilty, his
own core of being, his fundamental sense of his worth; or, as he sees and puts it, his
name. “How may I live without my name,” John asks his accusers. “I’ve given you
my soul; leave me my name!”
After an absence of eight years from the New York stage, Miller returned in 1964
with After the Fall and Incident at Vichy. This was followed by The Price, in 1968, and
The Creation of the World and Other Business, in 1972. The plays of this period are
very different in terms of subject matter. After the Fall is a semi-autobiographical
drama based on Miller’s marriage to Marilyn Monroe; Incident at Vichy deals with
Nazi persecution of the Jews. In The Price, two brothers meet after the death of their
father to arrange the sale of his furniture. In The Creation of the World, a seriocomic
rewriting of the story of Adam and Eve, Adam must struggle to find a capacity for
goodness and moral responsibility in himself, to guide Eve toward forgiveness and
Cain toward repentance. All of them, however, are marked by a shift from the socialGGray_c05.indd 682ray_c 05 .indd 682 8 8/1/2011 7:31:38 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 38 PM