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abstract: Arthur Miller has often been criticized for creating an androcentric environment onstage, but if Kate Keller and Linda Loman were victims in the male world, the female condition seems to only have worsened in his later stage plays of the 1990s and early 2000s. However, despite the voluminous feminist criticism hurled at the playwright, it is essential to recognize Miller as a truthful chronicler of his times for he efficaciously uses the dramatic stage as a mirror image of his society. This article investigates the curious case of Sylvia Gellburg, the paralyzed Jewish American housewife of Miller's Broken Glass (1994), by connecting her "hysteria" to her subjugation as a woman of the 1930s, and justifying Miller's portrayal of women as realistic instead of demeaning. In simpler terms, the article is a defense of Miller's art of characterization.
Keywords: Arthur Miller's later plays, realistic characterization, Broken Glass, hysteria, gender roles, Jewish American society
There is certainly no dearth of feminist discourse on Arthur Miller's relatively more well-known plays, which are invariably his earlier works: All My Sons (1947), Death of a Salesman (1949), The Crucible (1953), and A View From the Bridge (1956). In the past few years, scholars and academic writers such as June Schlueter, Jeffery D. Mason, Kay Stanton, Janet Balakian, and Terry Otten have significantly contributed to this discourse. Enough "attention" has been paid to Linda Loman, Kate Keller, Sue Bayliss, Ann Deever, Beatrice Carbone, and Abigail Williams, whereas very little feminist dialogue is available on Miller's later plays written in the 1990s and early 2000s.
Sangeeta Sharma's 2012 book, In the Shadows: Women in Arthur Miller's Plays, offers a feminist critique of three of his later plays, the "damaged wives' series" (Scanlan 86), and as most other feminist critics of Miller, Sharma also feels that "women" and "marginality" go hand in hand in his artistic sphere (181) and that his works portray females as mere "caricatures of a sexist ideology" (183) and not as "three dimensional persons" (183). She believes that "despite his credentials as a traditional humanist and moralist" (183), the American playwright has failed in raising the stature of women onstage, marginalizing them absolutely even in his later works. Katherine E. Egerton's comments on Miller's later plays, even...