After The Fall
After the Fall Arthur Miller has written many great plays in his life, such
as A View from the Bridge ,Death of a Salesman ,The Misfits, The Crucible, and
After the Fall. Out of all his plays it is said that After the Fall is the
darkest plays he has written. I believe that this is a true statement, and that
the reasons this is his darkest play is because it deals with his inner feelings
on thing that he had to deal with in his life. The certain aspects that he
touched in this play are his marriage with Marilyn Monroe , who was a great
actress in her time. Marilyn is portrayed though the character Maggie who is a
very innocent girl who, like Marilyn, was looked at mainly as a sex symbol.
After the Fall also deals with Millers brush with authorities over communism in
the 50’s. To describe this concept Miller describes himself as a lawyer who is
defending an old friend who is being threaded as being a communist or portraying
communistic ideas in his latest book. Though out the play the main character,
Quentin deals with his relationships with women.
Two of the women who play very
important roles are his wife Louise, and his mother ,Rose. Lousie tries to break
out of the traditional idea that the wife is there to just cook, clean, take
care of both the children and the husband, and be what is portrayed to me as a
robot, where she does not have any thoughts of her own. Rose is what every
Jewish mother is described as. She is seen as a strong woman, has a lot of say
in what is going on, seems to have an icy touch when dealing with certain
people, but is always trying to look on the good side of things. His mother is
the ideal woman who Quentin holds every other woman in his life up to. The back
round of most of the play is set in the early 1950 during the McCarthy trials.
By 1950 the senate was in an era of anti-Communist hysteria. Senator Joseph
McCarthy launched a series of highly publicized investigations in the State
Department, Hollywood, and even the U.S. Army. This was intend to root out
Communism. The aggressive attacks that McCarthy launched lead to a wide spread
fear and suspicion though many sectors of American society. Since McCarthy had
little evidence to back his claims up McCarthy fell into disfavor. In 1954 he
was censured by the Senate for abusing his authority.
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