A View from the Bridge – Arthur Miller (Viking Press 1955)

Sometimes you talk like I was a crazy man or sump’m.

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This is an excellent play which I recommend reading (as well as watching) because so much is offered by Miller’s stage directions. Its success depends, in large part, on our sympathy for protagnoist Eddie Carbone, despite his increasingly wayward behaviour; and Miller’s skill is demonstrated by his keeping alive that possibility of sympathy in an audience/reader.

The life of Eddie, his family and his co-workers is ‘hard and even’. Living on the seaward side of the eponymous Brooklyn Bridge, the men work loading and unloading the ships, and the women stay indoors. As Miller has written in an introduction to the play, ‘Eddie was living out his horror in the midst of a certain normality’, and his context is crucial to our understanding of what motivates his character. He is a patriarch – king of his tenement apartment – with a powerful sense of what makes a man. He has a submissive but insightful wife, Beatrice, and a ward, Catherine, who is his wife’s 17-year-old niece. Catherine is about to complete school; however, at the start of the play she’s been offered a relatively well-paying stenographer job in a nearby company that she is keen to start straight away. Eddie raises many objections – ‘you gonna finish school’, ‘I want you to be in a nice office’ – but it seems the truest is ‘That ain’t what I wanted’.

However, the question of his permission is forgotten on the arrival of two ‘submarines’ – Beatrice’s Italian cousins, Marco and Rodolpho – who have landed illegally and are to be accommodated secretly in Eddie’s apartment. This risky but common arrangement establishes another opposition: the immigrant community against the Immigration Bureau. Stories about what happens to ‘stool pigeons’ circulate in shocked whispers – never betraying your family is central to the immigrant code. And a further conflict develops following the cousins’ arrival, because of Catherine’s interest in the younger of the submarines, Rodolpho. Eddie again raises objections but her interest is reciprocated, and the two young characters begin to fall in love.

Miller dramatizes the rising tension in the apartment brilliantly, channeling (as he himself says) ‘the clear, clean line’ of Greek tragic drama. He uses Aristotle’s unities of place and action to intensify the audience/reader’s sense of impending doom and, although all the clues are there, we are still shocked by the steps Eddie takes towards disaster. Miller’s other nod to Ancient Greece is the inclusion of the Italian immigrant lawyer, Alfieri, as the chorus. He intermittently interacts with Eddie in the present tense during the unfolding drama, before turning to the audience to describe in the past tense how ‘powerless’ he felt as he watched Eddie’s case ‘run its bloody course’. Thus the dramatic irony enhances our sense of fate or destiny at work; and yet there are enough moments we feel the ‘bloody course’ could be diverted ‘to relate [Eddie’s] actions to our own and thus understand ourselves a little better.’ This is Miller’s ultimate hope.