After The Fall

Section: History Essays

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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