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A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF T.S ELIOT’S THE

COCKTAIL PARTY AND ARTHUR MILLER’S ALL MY

SONS AS PROBLEM PLAYS.

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

CHAPTER TITLE PAGE NUMBER

NUMBER

1 TWENTIETH CENTURY AND ITS DRAMA 3

2 T.S. ELIOT 5

3 A RTHUR MILLER 6

4 SYNOPSIS OF THE PLAY:

• THE COCKTAIL PARTY

• ALL MY SONS

5 WHAT IS A PROBLEM PLAY? 10

6 COMPARISON BETWEEN THE COCKTAIL

PARTY AND ALL MY SONS

7 CONTRAST BETWEEN THE COCKTAIL PARTY

AND ALL MY SONS

8 CONCLUSION 24

BIBLIOGRAPHY

CHAPTER 1:

Many American writers have directly experienced World War 1, and used its experience to frame their writings. F. Scott Fitzgerald expresses the disillusionment faced by the youth during the 1920s in his masterpiece The Great Gatsby. John Dos Passos wrote about the war and also the USA trilogy which extended into the Depression. Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound and T.S Eliot, along with Henry James before them, demonstrate the growth of an international perspective in American literature, and not simply because they spend long periods of time overseas. American writers had long looked to European models for inspiration, but whereas the literary breakthroughs of the mid-19th^ century came from finding distinctly American styles and themes, writers from this period were finding ways of contributing to a flourishing international literary scene, not as imitators but as equals. Depression era literature was blunt and direct in its social criticism. John Steinbeck often wrote about poor, working-class people and their struggle to lead a decent and honest life, as seen in The Grapes of Wrath. After World War 2, a literary explosion was observed, as there were several works which became some of the most popular in American literature, one of them being Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird. One of the key developments in late-20 th-century American literature was the rise to prominence of literature written by and about ethnic minorities beyond African Americans and Jewish Americans, who had already established their literary inheritances. This development came alongside the growth of the Civil Rights movements and its corollary, the Ethnic Pride movement.

Although the United States’ theatrical tradition can be traced back to the arrival of Lewis Hallam’s troupe in the mid-18th^ century and was very active in the 19th^ century, as seen by the

popularity of minstrel shows and of adaptations of Uncle Tom’s Cabin , American drama attained international status only in the 1920s and 1930s, with the works of Eugene O’Neill, who won four Pulitzer Prizes and the Nobel Prize. The early years of the 20th^ century, before World War I, continued to see realism as the main development in drama. But starting around 1900, there was a revival of poetic drama in the States, corresponding to a similar revival in Europe. In the middle of the 20th^ century, American drama was dominated by the work of playwrights Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, as well as by the maturation of the American musical, which had found a way to integrate script, music and dance in such works as Oklahoma! and West Side Story. The period beginning in the mid-1960s, with the passing of Civil Rights legislation and its repercussions, came the rise of an “agenda” theatre comparable to that of the 1930s. The growth of ethnic pride movements led to more success by dramatists from racial minorities such as blacks, Latinos and Asians.

CHAPTER 2

T.S. ELIOT

Thomas Stearns Eliot was a British essayist, publisher, playwright, literary and social critic, and one of the twentieth century’s major poets. He moved from his native United States to England in 1914 at the age of 25, settling, working, and marrying there. He became a British citizen in 1927 at the age of 39, giving up his American citizenship.

Eliot attracted widespread attention for his poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915), which was seen as a masterpiece of the Modernist movement. It was followed by some of the best-known poems in the English language, including The Waste Land (1922), The Hollow Men (1925), Ash Wednesday (1930), and Four Quartets (1943). He was also known for his seven plays, particularly Murder in the Cathedral (1935) and The Cocktail Party (1949). He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948, for his outstanding, pioneer contribution to present-day poetry.

Steeped in Eliot’s contemporary study of Dante and the late Shakespeare, poems such as Journey of the Magi (1927), A Song for Simeon (1928), Animula (1929), Marina (1930), and Triumphal March (1931) meditate on spiritual growth. The first two poems are also exercises in Browningesque dramatic monologues, and speak to Eliot’s desire to exchange the symbolist fluidity of the psychological lyric for a more traditional dramatic form. He spent much of the last half of his career writing one kind of drama or another, and attempting to reach and bring together a larger and more varied audience. As early as 1923 he had written parts of an experimental and striking jazz play, Sweeney Agonistes. In early 1934 he composed a church pageant with accompanying choruses entitled The Rock. Almost immediately following these performances, Bishop Bell commissioned a church drama having to do with Canterbury Cathedral, which, as Murder in the Cathedral, was performed in the Chapter House at Canterbury in June 1935 and was moved to the Mercury Theatre at Notting Hill Gate in November and eventually to the Old Vic. In the late 1930s, Eliot attempted to conflate a drama of spiritual crisis with a Noël Coward-inspired contemporary theatre of social manners. Though Eliot based The Family Reunion on the plot of Aeschylus’s Eumenides, he designed it to tell a story of Christian redemption. The Cocktail Party, modernizing Euripides’s Alcestis with some of the impudence of Noël Coward, opened to a warm critical reception at the Edinburgh Festival in August 1949 and enjoyed popular success starting on Broadway in January 1950. The Confidential Clerk had a respectable run at the Lyric Theatre in London in September 1953, and The Elder Statesman premiered at the Edinburgh Festival in August 1958 and closed after a lukewarm run in London in the fall.

He was long a critic and admirer of Elizabethan and Jacobean verse drama. Regarding his method of playwriting, Eliot explained, “If I set out to write a play, I start by an act of choice. I settle upon a particular emotional situation, out of which characters and a plot will emerge. And then lines of poetry may come into being: not from the original impulse but from a secondary stimulation of the unconscious mind.”

Eliot died of emphysema at his home in Kensington in London, on 4 January 1965, and was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium.

CHAPTER 3

ARTHUR MILLER

Arthur Asher Miller was an American playwright, essayist, and a prominent figure in twentieth-century American theatre. Among his most popular plays are All My

The story opens in the drawing room of the Chamberlaynes’ apartment, where Edward is entertaining a group of friends. Lavinia is absent, and he explains that she is away tending a sick aunt. As the guests leave, one man named Peter remains behind to ask Edward to intervene for him with a woman named Celia, for whom he has feelings. Edward agrees. He asks one man—the “unidentified guest”— to remain behind, and reveals to the stranger that his wife has left him. The stranger says that he can bring Lavinia back to Edward if the latter will promise that he will ask her no questions and expect no explanations. He agrees and the unidentified guest leaves. The doorbell rings again, and it is Celia. Through her conversation with Edward, it is clear that she is his mistress, and that she believes that now that Edward is free, he will want to be with her. Edward tells her that he wants his wife back, and this confession and his explanation for it leads her to see him differently. She leaves, saying that she wishes him well, but adds that her feelings for him are gone. The next day, Lavinia arrives at the flat and she and Edward speak about their marriage. For the first time, they are honest with each other about their feelings for each other and their thoughts about their marriage. After a rather intense and somewhat brutal exchange, Edward begins to speak as if he is having a nervous breakdown. Lavinia suggests that he see a doctor, though no clear plans are made and she, in an abrupt return to normal routine, suggests they go out for dinner.

Act 2 opens in the office of Sir Henry Harcourt-Reilly, the “unidentified guest” from the Chamberlaynes’ cocktail party. Throughout the act, he sees and consults with Edward, Lavinia and Celia. Edward asks to be sent to a sanatorium, though Reilly refuses, suggesting that as another treatment, he bring in another patient to speak to Edward. The patient turns out to be Lavinia. Reilly then chastises them both for lying about the causes of their upset. He reveals that Edward has been having an affair with Celia, but that he has realized he didn’t love her, making him worry that he is incapable of love and so will be alone forever. Reilly then reveals that Lavinia has been having an affair with Peter. He goes on to say that it was not discovering Edward’s affair that upset Lavinia, as she proclaimed, but instead it was the end of her own affair with Peter due to his falling in love with Celia. This made her feel that perhaps she was unlovable, and it was that fear that sent her into her own dilemma. He suggests that Lavinia and Edward are more suited for each other than they thought, and after some further discussion, the couple leaves. Celia then enters, saying that something is wrong with her because she suddenly feels more aware of her solitude and a sense of sin for her failures than she has ever felt before. Reilly tells her that she can go back to her old life and learn to forget these realizations, or she can engage on a challenging, terrifying journey and face and engage with these realizations. She chooses the latter, and Reilly agrees to help her. Finally, the conversations Reilly has with Julia and Alex before and after these consultations show that the three of them have been manipulating the actions of the other characters for some unclear purpose.

In the final act, the scene once again occurs in the Chamberlaynes’ drawing room again as they prepare for another cocktail party. The couple is noticeably different, being congenial and even tender with each other. The same guests from the first cocktail party stop in, with the exception of Celia. When Peter says he would like to have her in a movie he is working on, Alex says that Celia has died. She had gone to Africa to work as a nurse for a plague- ridden village of “heathen natives,” and in the midst of social and political unrest, she was abducted and killed. Edward, Lavinia, and the others help Peter put her death in perspective and he soon takes his leave. Reilly says that he isn’t surprised by the news of her death because he has seen a “shadow” of the dead Celia at the first cocktail party, and that this was inevitable. The guests all leave to go to a party thrown by another couple that same evening and the action ends as Lavinia and Edward prepare to receive their guests.

• ALL MY SONS:

Joe Keller, a self-made businessman, and his wife Kate are visited by a neighbour, Frank. At Kate’s request, Frank is trying to figure out the horoscope of the Kellers’ missing son Larry, who disappeared three years earlier. While Kate still believes Larry is coming back, the Kellers’ other son, Chris, believes differently. Furthermore, Chris wishes to propose to Ann Deever, who was Larry’s girlfriend at the time he went missing and who has been corresponding with Chris for two years. Joe and Kate react to this news with shock but are interrupted by Bert, the boy next door. In a game, Bert brings up the word “jail”, making Kate react sharply. When Ann arrives, it is revealed that her father, Steve Deever, is in prison for selling cracked cylinder heads to the Air Force, causing the deaths of twenty one pilots in plane crashes. Joe was his partner but was exonerated of the crime. Ann admits that neither she nor her brother keep in touch with their father anymore and wonders aloud whether a faulty engine was responsible for Larry’s death. After a heated argument, Chris breaks in and later proposes to Ann, who accepts. Chris also reveals that, while leading a company, he lost all his men and is experiencing survivor’s guilt. Meanwhile, Joe receives a phone call from George Deever, Ann’s brother, who is coming there to settle something.

Although Chris and Ann have become engaged, Chris avoids telling his mother. Their next door neighbour Sue emerges, revealing that everyone on the block thinks Joe is equally guilty of the crime of supplying faulty aircraft engines. Shortly afterwards, George Deever arrives and reveals that he has just visited the prison to see his father Steve. The latter has confirmed that Joe told him by phone to cover up the cracked cylinders and to send them out, and later gave a false promise to Steve that he would account for the shipment on the day of arrest. George insists his sister Ann cannot marry Chris Keller, son of the man who destroyed their family. Meanwhile, Frank announces his horoscope, implying that Larry is alive, which is just what Kate wants to hear. Joe maintains that on the fateful day of dispatch, the flu laid him up, but Kate reveals that Joe hasn’t been sick in fifteen years. Despite George’s protests, Ann sends him away. When Kate dismally claims to Chris, who is still intent on marrying Ann, that moving on from Larry will be forsaking Joe as a murderer, Chris concludes that George was right. Joe, out of excuses, explains that he sent out the cracked airheads to avoid closure, intending to notify the base later that they needed repairs. However, when the fleet crashed and made headlines, he lied to Steve and left him at the shop for arrest. Chris can’t accept this, and roars despairingly that he is torn about what to do with his father now.

Chris has gone missing. Reluctantly accepting the ubiquitous accusations, Kate says that, should Chris return, Joe must express willingness to go to prison in hopes that Chris will relent. As he only sought to make money at the insistence of his family, Joe is adamant that their relationship is above the law. Soon after, Ann emerges and expresses intent to leave with Chris regardless of Kate’s disdain. When Kate angrily refuses again, Ann reveals to Kate a letter from Larry. She hadn’t wanted to share it, but knows that Kate must face reality. Chris returns, and is torn about whether to bring Joe in himself, knowing it doesn’t erase the death of his fellow soldiers or forgive the world of its natural merciless state. When Joe returns and refutes his guilt on account of his life’s accomplishments, his son wearily responds, “ I know you’re no worse than other men, but I thought you were better. I never saw you as a man...I saw you as my father. ” Finally, the letter, read by Chris, reveals that because of his father’s guilt, Larry planned to commit suicide. With this final blow, Joe finally agrees to turn himself in, goes inside to get his coat but then kills himself with a gunshot. At the end, when Chris expresses remorse in spite of his resolve, Kate tells him to not blame himself and to live onward.

Rejecting the frivolity of intricately plotted romantic intrigues in the nineteenth-century French tradition of the ‘well-made play’, it favoured instead the form of the ‘problem play’, which would bring to life some contemporary controversy of public importance—women’s rights, unemployment, penal reform, class privilege—in a vivid but responsibly accurate presentation.

The critic F. S. Boas adapted the term to characterise certain plays by William Shakespeare that he considered to have characteristics similar to Ibsen’s 19 th-century problem

plays. As a result, the term is also used more broadly and retrospectively to describe any tragicomic dramas that do not fit easily into the classical generic distinction between comedy and tragedy.

The problem play is supposed to have arisen out of the sentimental drama of the 18 th^ century

and often been identified with” serious drama”. The problem drama essentially differs from tragedy, even though it deals with serious issues it normally exhibits ideas, situations and feeling that lack tragic dimensions. It was a new experiment in form and technique, and dispensed with the conventional devices and expedients of the Victorian era, was closely related to the growth of the realistic movement in the field of English drama.

The genre had its beginnings in the work of the French dramatists Alexandre Dumas and Émile Augier, who adapted the formula of Eugène Scribe’s “well-made play” to serious subjects, creating somewhat simplistic, didactic thesis plays on subjects such as prostitution, business ethics, illegitimacy, and female emancipation. The problem play reached its maturity in the works of the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, whose works had artistic merit as well as topical relevance. His first experiment in the genre was Love’s Comedy, a critical study of contemporary marriage. He went on to expose the hypocrisy, greed, and hidden corruption of his society in a number of masterly plays: A Doll’s House portrays a woman’s escape from her childish, subservient role as a bourgeois wife; Ghosts attacks the convention that even loveless and unhappy marriages are sacred; The Wild Duck shows the consequences of an egotistical idealism; An Enemy of the People reveals the expedient morality of respectable provincial townspeople.

Towards the end of the Victorian age the drama of social problems came into prominence in England. It was especially influential in the early 20th^ century. In Britain plays such as

Stanley Houghton’s Hindle Wakes , developed the genre to shift the nature of the ‘problem’. This “resolutely realistic problem play set in domestic interiors of the mill town Hindle” starts with the ‘problem’ of an apparently seduced woman, but ends with the woman herself rejected her status as a victim of seduction “the ‘problem’ is not, after all, the redemption of a betrayed maiden’s tarnished honour, but the readiness of her respectable elders to determine a young woman’s future for her without regard to her rights—including here her right to erotic holiday enjoyment.”

George Bernard Shaw had the longest career in the history of English dramatics. He was a moralist and a propagandist, whose first play, Windower’s Houses , was “an economic tract in dramatic form”, but it failed on stage. His collection of seven plays –both pleasant and unpleasant plays – appeared in 1898 in which he voiced his idea on many social problems. Arms and the Man , a satire on the military, professes to be an “anti – romantic play”. The exposition scene with its surprise, its suspense, and touches of fancy is enough to show the skill of Shaw.

John Galsworthy occupies a distinctive place in modern English drama. His naturalism reminds us of Ibsen. He is a critic and interpreter of contemporary English life in his dramas. Like Shaw, he handles definite problems – these of marriage, sexual relationships, labour disputes, the law, solitary confinement, caste feeling or class prejudice. His play The Silver Box deals with the inequality of justice, in which the audiences see how the majesty of the law may end in a horrible human mistake. Justice is a stern condemnation of the contemporary legal system, which attacks the evil of prison system especially the solitary confinement. It is a powerful plea for sympathetic treatment of law – breakers.

Harley Granville-Barker made a vital contribution to the problem play. He was one of the first of this age to study spiritual aimlessness for its own sake. His themes include the marriage conventions, sex, and the position of women. His significant problem plays are the Odyssey Inheritance , Waste , and The Madras House, which is an expounded of suburban and commercial life, both domestic and professional.

Although the British repertory dominated the American stage for so long, American drama had begun to diverge from British drama by the time of Andrew Jackson’s presidency, from 1828 to 1836. British plays, which typically reflected the attitudes and manners of the upper classes, were by then in conflict with more egalitarian American values. Despite this growing divergence, British actors, theatre managers, and plays continued to cross the Atlantic Ocean with regularity, and most American plays copied British models until the early 20 th^ century. For this reason some critics claim that American drama was not born until the end of World War I.

By the end of the 19th^ century American drama was moving steadily toward realism, illuminating the rough or seamy side of life and creating more believable characters. Realism remained the dominant trend of the 20th^ century in both comedies and tragedies. American drama achieved international recognition with the psychological realism of plays by Eugene O Neill and their searing investigation of characters inner lives. As the century advanced, the number of topics considered suitable for drama broadened to encompass race, gender, sexuality, and death. Renowned American playwrights as Eugene O Neill, Tennessee Williams, and Arthur Miller reached profound new levels of psychological realism, commenting through individual characters and their situations on the state of American society in general. Also, the most powerful drama spoke to broad social issues, such as civil rights and the AIDS crisis, and the individual’s position in relation to those issues.

During World War II little drama of note appeared that was neither escapist fare nor wartime propaganda. With the end of hostilities, however, Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams emerged who would dominate dramatic activity for the next 15 years or so. Miller combined realistic characters and a social agenda while also writing modern tragedy, most notably in Death of a Salesman , a tale of the life and death of the ordinary working man Willy Loman. Miller’s The Crucible , a story about the 17 th-century Salem witch trials, was a parable for a

hunt for Communists in the 1950s led by Senator Joseph R. McCarthy.

Tennessee Williams, one of America s most lyrical dramatists, contributed many plays about social misfits and outsiders. In A Streetcar Named Desire , a neurotic, impoverished Southern woman fights to maintain her illusions of gentility when forced to confront the truth about her life by her sister s working-class husband. Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof , which won the Pulitzer Prize for drama, similarly focused on pretence and its destructiveness and destruction in an unhappy family.

Racial issues were also tackled in plays such as Angelina Weld Grimké’s play Rachel. It was a tool of the socialist theatre in the 1920s and 30s, and overlapped with forms of

real sense of the word. He realizes this when the Unidentified Guest or Sir Henry- Harcourt Reilly tells him that human nature is such that a man is constantly changing and becoming different from what he is:

We die to each other daily,

What we know of other people,

Is only our memory of the moments,

During which we knew them.

In order to get back with Lavinia, Edward ends his relationship with Celia, who is disillusioned about herself and her way of life at this decision, as she has been trying to find the divine in Edward. She also realized that she has been living in a world of illusion and fantasy, as she said:

The man I saw before, he was only a projection,

I see that now – of something that I wanted

No, not wanted – something that I aspired to,

Something that I desperately wanted to exist.

Arthur Miller deals with only one main issue of a social nature in All My Sons , which is the issue of business ethics, something that Joe Keller did not follow. Before the play starts, he has cheated the American Air Force authorities by supplying defected cylinders heads to them, and also cheated his business partner Steve Deever by holding him responsible, in front of the court, for having dispatched those cracked cylinders, whereas the former has assured the latter that he would take the responsibility for this unethical action. As a result, Joe Keller has been acquitted, and Steve Deever has been punished with imprisonment. This breaks up the Deever family, as Steve’s children Ann and George claim to not have anything to do with their father. Also, due to this, it has been revealed in a letter meant for Ann, which is read by his younger son Chris that his elder brother Larry is disgusted at what his father did and has decided to commit suicide:

“How could he have done that? Every day three or four men never come back and he sits back there doing business…I don’t know how to tell you what I feel…I can’t face anybody…I’m going out on a mission in a few minutes. They’ll probably report me missing. If they do, I want you to know that you mustn’t wait for me. I tell you, Ann, if I had him here now I could kill him –”

This very act of crime is interlinked with the sub-plots or other minor problems. Kate, Joe Keller’s wife, has hopes that Larry would one day return to her, despite of knowing about

his suicide. This is quite similar to Celia from The Cocktail Party , as Kate’s behavior is a proof that she is living in a world of illusion and that she has not yet come to the terms of this sad truth. In the expository act, the audience sees how she has asked her neighbour Frank Lubey to get Larry’s horoscope made, and how she asks him for the horoscope frequently throughout the play. Due to her blind hopes of Larry’s return, she prevents Chris and Ann from getting married because Ann is “Larry’s girl”. Also, similar to Celia from Eliot’s play, Chris is also devastated when he comes to know about his father’s grave crime. This is because he has always idolized him and thought of him as a good man. Joe Keller justified his act by calling it as something he did for the survival of his family, which Chris dismisses:

For me! – I was dying every day and you were killing my boys and you did it for me? What the hell do you think I was thinking of, the Goddamn business? Is that as far as your mind can see, the business? What is that, the world – the business? What the hell do you mean, you did it for me? Don’t you have a country? Don’t you live in the world? What the hell are you? You’re not even an animal, no animal kills his own, what are you?

These lines highlight the importance of business ethics, one of which is to think of the people, to whom the business serves. Miller conveys the message that society and the citizens of the country must be put first before the individual himself, thus attacking the capitalist society of the United States that time.

2. Guilt:

Celia experienced this feeling when she visits Reilly’s clinic in Act 2 after her disillusionment from the end of her affair with Edward and because she was a part of a socially unacceptable human relationship, that is, an extra-marital affair. She tells Reilly that she feels “a sense of sin” despite of being “taught to disbelieve in sin”. She feels guilty because she is a part of a sinful humanity where all human relationships are mere illusions, as she says:

It would really be dishonest,

For me, now, to try to make a life with anybody.

Reilly then gives her two choices: one, to continue to go through the daily routine of life, like he advised Edward and Lavinia; two, to go on a long journey to an unknown destination, with faith, courage and determination. She chooses the second option and decides to live the life of a saint, which is full of isolation, by serving as a nurse in Kinkanja. She is killed there as a part of a sacrifice for the plague-stricken natives there. This shocking news of her martyrdom received by the characters of the play in the final Act inflicts guilt in both Edward and Lavinia, who regrets her earlier spitefulness towards Celia and her failure to understand her.

All My Sons contains a comparatively more instances of a sense of guilt in its characters. After Chris confronts him for his actions, Joe Keller realizes the gravity of his deed as he is read a letter written by his deceased son Larry written to Ann Deever by Chris in which

Alex and Sir Reilly. Also, Sir Reilly already knew about the Chamberlaynes’ extra- marital affairs, which he reveals to each other in front of each other’s spouses when they come to consult him. The act of pretence is also put up by Edward and Lavinia in their own marriage, their life just drifting along together based on habit and familiarity, which is evident in the following conversation:

Lavinia: I’m prepared to take you as you are.

Edward: You mean, you are prepared to take me

As I was or as you think I am.

But what do you think I am?

Lavinia: Oh what you always were.

As for me, I’m rather a different person.

Whom you must get to know.....

Edward: I’ve often wondered why you married me.

Lavinia: Well, you really were rather attractive you know;

And you kept on saying that you were in love with me –

I believe you were trying to persuade yourself you were.

Individual characters are also faced by internal conflicts. Edward was living a life where he believed he was in a satisfying, if boring, marriage, and that he was in love with Celia. However, he soon realizes that he doesn’t love Celia, and that although he doesn’t love Lavinia either, he wants her back because without her, he feels helpless, oppressed with a sense of his own unreality. He tells Sir Reilly that he is suffering from a nervous breakdown and is constantly haunted by a sense of his own insignificance. He is incapable of taking any decision or of taking any action. He has ceased to believe in his own personality. He wants to be alone but he cannot live in the same world any longer, and so, wants to be put into a sanatorium. Reilly, in order to understand his case, calls in another patient, who turns out to be Lavinia – also complaining of a similar problem off- stage, and the former tactfully makes the couple discuss their problems and difficulties.

In All My Sons , there is a conflict between self-interest and the wider responsibility that people owe to the society in which they live. This is the central theme, mostly enacted through Joe Keller and his sons Chris and the deceased Larry. Joe has put all his energies into making money and building up his business. He was determined to keep his factory production line running, even when it caused the deaths of twenty-one pilots through faulty airplane parts. At the end of Act Two, when Chris realizes that Joe is responsible for the pilots’ deaths, Joe says he did it for the business:

....what could I do! I’m in business, a man in business; a hundred and twenty cracked, you’re out of business; you got a process, the process don’t work you’re out of business; you don’t know how to operate, your stuff is no good; they close you up, they tear up your contracts, what the hell’s it to them? You lay forty years into a business and they knock you out in five minutes, what could I do, let them take forty years, let them take my life away?

In Joe’s mind, this is not selfish, as he did everything for his family, especially Chris. But in Chris’s view, people have a wider responsibility to mankind in general, and to society. The latter said in Act 3 that he suspected all along that the former was guilty of the crime, but adopted a “practical” attitude by choosing to not to confront him.

This major conflict forms the basis of the conflict between the ideas of ambition and morality, represented by Joe Keller and Chris. The blue-collar industrialist, a self-made man motivated by an extreme sense of loyalty to his family, Joe Keller allowed the defective airline parts to leave his plant, an action that killed twenty-one pilots and led to the arrest and imprisonment of his partner and friend, Steve Deever. Joe seeks to escape the past, to deny the fateful series of events that threatened his business, his family, and his freedom. On the other hand, Chris finds it impossible to escape the past. During the war, he discovered a unique brotherhood among the men who sacrificed their lives for each other. On his return home, he finds “no meaning” in the shallow upper middle-class concerns or in the consumerism of post-war America. He even thinks the past to be a liberating agent; he judges the lives of his friends and family and, more important, “truth” against the standard of his combat experience.

4. Significance of choice:

The characters of The Cocktail Party are offered a choice which determines their future. Sir Reilly, when Edward and Lavinia visit him to share their woes, gives them two options: either continue with the same routine of life with each other or give into martyrdom. The Chamberlaynes choose the former, and are advised to be tolerant and sympathetic, and instead of blaming and finding faults with each other, they must cultivate an awareness of their own faults. Later, Celia is also offered the same alternatives by Sir Reilly, but she chooses the way of martyrdom. This is important because it indicates a higher spiritual level and it has the power to affect others’ lives. Peter Quilpe has to choose between staying in England and shifting to Hollywood in the United States, and chooses the latter. This indicates that he has to accept that Celia has died and so, his imaginary relationship with her must “die” along with the fact too, as Julia tells him:

You must have learned how to look at people, Peter,

When you looked at them with an eye for the films:

That is, when you’re not concerned with yourself

But just being an eye. You will come to think of Celia

Like that, one day. And then you’ll understand her

And be reconciled, and be happy in the thought of her.

In All My Sons , Joe Keller is faced with a choice between an aesthetic life in pursuit of heteronomous pleasure and an ethical life, which is attained by a self-determined acceptance of guilt and duty. He chose the way of profit by choosing the first option. He admits that wartime productions was so stressful, and he wanted his business to succeed

The Cocktail Party is based on Euripides’ play Alcestis, which is actually a tragicomic play, making Alcestis a problem play as well. This fact was unknown, until Eliot himself had to state the source of this play. In that case, his efforts to keep the source conspicuous were very successful, as he learnt from the mistake committed while writing The Family Reunion.

The plot of The Cocktail Party is based on the mythical story of King Admetus, who is granted a boon by the Fates to live past the allotted time of his death. This is allowed by the god Apollo, who was impressed by the hospitality provided by Admetus when the former stayed at his palace after his exile. But this deal came with one condition: somebody has to take his and die, the responsibility of which Admetus’ wife Alcestis took, and this is when the play begins. Hercules visits Admetus’s palace on the day when Alcestis has agreed to go to death in place of her husband, after Admetus has failed to convince anyone else to die in his stead. Hercules, unconscious of the situation, indulges in drinking and is rebuked by a servant for behaving like this in a house of mourning. Hercules comes to know the truth and fights Death successfully, bringing Alcestis back. In Eliot’s play, the indecisive Edward is the counterpart of King Admetus, whose goodwill has earned him a prolonged life. Lavinia is equivalent to Alcestis, as they both die spiritually and physically respectively. Sir Reilly plays the part of both Hercules and the servant who tells the truth of mourning in Admetus’ palace to Hercules because he is the one who brings Alcestis back from the clutches of Death and also the one who reveals the clandestine love affairs the Chamberlaynes had. The plots of both the plays are parallel to each other. Lavinia “dies” or disappears to make Edward realize that he needs to know not just himself but also about her. Edward gives into Sir Reilly’s words and asks him to bring his wife back, and the latter assures him that he would bring her back but Edward must not ask her any questions. While Alcestis dies due to her love for her husband as she wants to save his life. Touched by Admetus’ hospitality towards him despite of a deep loss, Hercules strove to bring Alcestis back from Death. He is successful in doing so, and he tells Admetus that he is allowed to speak to her as much as he can but she will not be able to speak for three days as her soul is undergoing purification at the hands of the gods.

Arthur Miller’s writing in All My Sons often shows great respect for the great Grecian tragedies of the likes of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, although there is no specific Greek play as a source like The Cocktail Party.

In these plays the tragic hero or protagonist will commit an offence, often unknowingly, which will return to haunt him, sometimes many years later. The play encapsulates all the fallout from the offense into a 24-hour time span. During that day, the protagonist must learn his fault and suffer as a result, and perhaps even die. In this way the gods are shown to be just and moral order is restored. These elements are all present in the play; it takes place within a 24-hour period, has a protagonist suffering from a previous offense, and punishment for that offense. Additionally, it explores the father-son relationship, also a common theme in Grecian tragedies. Ann Deever could also be seen to parallel a messenger as her letter is proof of Larry’s death. In Joe Keller, Miller creates just a representative type. Joe is a very ordinary man, decent, hard-working and charitable, a man no one could dislike. But, like the protagonist of the ancient drama, he has a flaw or weakness. This, in turn, causes him to act wrongly. He is forced to accept responsibility – his suicide is necessary to restore the moral order of the universe, and allows his son, Chris, to live free from guilt and persecution.

2. Psychotherapy:

Psychotherapy is the use of psychological methods, particularly when based on regular personal interaction, to help a person change and overcome problems in desired ways. It aims to improve an individual’s well-being and mental health, to resolve or ease troublesome behaviours, beliefs, compulsions, thoughts, or emotions, and to improve relationships and social skills. It is one of the elements in Modern works, and is seen prominently in The Cocktail Party, but not in All My Sons.

Sir Henry-Harcourt Reilly is an eccentric psychotherapist in Eliot’s play, who guides Edward, Lavinia and Celia in resolving their dilemmas. In the first Act, his identity is not revealed to the audience which creates an air of mystery about him. He stays back when the guests leave in the first cocktail party, and Edward confides to him about Lavinia’s disappearance. Sir Reilly first tries to persuade the latter that perhaps it is best that his wife has gone away, and he may even hope that she would not come back, and thus he would be rid of her for good. This reply initially irritates Edward, who feels that a stranger is trying to insult him, but on second thoughts, he admits that he did felt relieved in the beginning, but has since discovered that he wants his wife back. The scene in which Edward and Lavinia discuss their problems in front of him is a parody of this psychological method that was so fashionable in the upper classes of the society. He smartly brings the couple face to face and tells them that they both have a good deal in common, as both of them think that their spouses are unlovable and to prove each other wrong, they took the path of extra-marital affairs but it only made things worse for them. This results in reconciliation between the husband and the wife as they “work out your (their) salvation with diligence”.

3. Religion and spirituality:

This is another element which differentiates The Cocktail Party from All My Sons. Religion and spirituality lies underneath the play, and especially under Sir Reilly’s dialogues. There are some influences of the Bhagavad Gita in this play and also one of his previous works, namely Four Quartets , as Eliot had described it as the second most important religious book next to Dante’s Divine Comedy. Also, it has been said that he was quite influenced by the Eastern philosophies, especially the Hindu and Buddhist philosophies, evident from the concept of salvation introduced in the middle of the play. In Act 2, when Celia is given two paths to choose by Sir Reilly, she asks him which path is better when she is told what lies in these two paths. To which Sir Reilly replies:

Neither way is better

Both ways are necessary. It is also necessary

To make a choice between them.