Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Miller, Arthur (Vol. 10) - Irving Jacobson

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IRVING JACOBSON

Arthur Miller's short stories "Monte Sant' Angelo" and "I Don't Need You Any More" share a supplementary relationship to his essay on "The Family in Modern Drama." All develop themes that prove essential for an understanding of Miller's imagination, and all deal with man displaced from the enveloping context of the family. The meaning of this displacement includes the loss not only of mother, father or brother but also a psychological state of being, a cultural and religious inheritance, a position in the community and in human history. "I Don't Need You Any More" illustrates the process by which a child becomes isolated from his family, losing that state of equilibrium, identity and completeness that Miller defined in his essay as man's fundamental state of satisfaction. "Monte Sant' Angelo," however, presents a set of experiences by which an adult comes to feel himself at home in the larger world outside the family structure, reconstructing that...

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1. Introduction
2. C. W. E. Bigsby
3. Barry Gross
4. Stanley Kauffmann
5. Irving Jacobson
6. Robert A. Martin
7. June Schlueter
8. Copyright