Review: Postmodern Culture’s Impact on Arthur Miller’s View of Humanity

Ciarán Leinster's exquisite, broadly researched, and well-reasoned study is significant not only because of the attention it gives to Miller's oftenneglected later plays, but primarily because of its wide-ranging analysis of postmodern culture, its elements, sources, and effect on the ways people conceive of the world and their place in it.Arthur Miller had an exceptionally long career.His first Broadway play, The Man Who Had All the Luck, was produced in November 1944.Miller had just turned twenty-nine years old.His last published play, Finishing the Picture, was released in September 2004, less than five months before his death at the age of eightynine.His best-known plays are from the late 1940s and early 1950s: All My Sons, Death of a Salesman, The Crucible, and A View from the Bridge.Critics often treat Miller as if he never moved beyond the aesthetic approach and moral concerns of this period.But, as Leinster points out, more than two-thirds of Miller's career took place after this, in the last four decades of the twentieth century, the period that coincides with the emergence of postmodernist culture."My contention," Leinster writes, "is that Miller was heavily influenced by postmodernist styles of thought and writing from the 1970s to the end of his career . ... I do not assert that he surrendered entirely to a postmodernist viewpoint or aesthetic . . .but that much of what he wrote in these years is best understood through the lens of postmodernism" (3).Leinster shows how social changes in the late twentieth century influenced the settings of Miller's plays and his dramatic style.The question is how much these developments changed the central themes of his plays.Leinster divides his book into five major sections.The first and longest is his analysis of the concept of postmodernism, where his discussion is most prominently influenced by ideas from Jean Baudrillard and Linda Hutcheon.This is followed by four chapters in which he situates individual Miller plays written after 1970 in the postmodern context.The Archbishop 's Ceiling (1977) concerns people who believe they are constantly