Guilt and Responsibility in Arthur Miller's Plays

The purpose of this term paper is to examine how the characters in Arthur
Miller’s plays are confronted with guilt and responsibility and how they deal
with it. Furthermore, I want to demonstrate how personal, individual guilt
and responsibility not only become a matter for the individual but also
have an important impact on the community and the society. According to
Miller, there is a really strong mutual relationship between the individual
and society. He states: “Society is inside man and man is inside society,
the water is in the fish, the fish is in the water.” Miller’s main protagonists
always try to defend themselves against an accusation, to deny their
responsibility and guilt, and to believe in their innocence. Bigsby mentions
what all of the characters concerning innocence and guilt have in
common: “… [They] spend much of their time rebutting charges whose
justice they acknowledge even as they are rejected. They are people who
try to escape the consequences of their actions, who try to declare their
innocence even when that involves implying the guilt of others.” This truly
applies for the plays and characters I will observe in the following. I
decided to focus on two plays published in the 1940s and 1950s: All My
Sons (1947) and The Crucible (1953). Their main protagonists experience
confrontation with themselves which finally leads to death. Most emphasis
will be laid on All My Sons as there we have a number of characters
dealing with guilt and responsibility, namely Chris, Larry, Kate, and Joe
Keller. In addition, I will discuss the character of Proctor in The Crucible.
The dominant question in these characters becomes this one: “How
can a human being work out the interconnections among the everwidening
circles of responsibility: self, family, society, the universe?
According to Miller, “to violate the codes of any circle is to sin.”