Anxious Masculinity in the Drama of Arthur Miller and Beyond: Salesmen, Sluggers and Big Daddies

This study examines the anxious male breadwinner as he is incarnated in Arthur Miller’s most celebrated plays and as he resurfaces in different guises throughout American drama, from the 1950s to the present. It offers a compelling analysis of gender dynamics - staunchly homosocial, vaguely or overtly misogynistic, anxiously homophobic - and the legacy of this figure in the works of other American dramatists. Throughout, the book argues that the gendered anxieties exhibited by the anxious male breadwinner are the very ones invoked with such success by Donald Trump.

Gleitman examines this figure in the plays of Tennessee Williams, later 20th century writers Lorraine Hansberry, David Mamet, August Wilson, and Sam Shepard (who reposition him in more racially and economically marginalized settings), and in the more recent work of Tony Kushner, Paula Vogel, and Lisa Kron and Jeanine Tesori, who shift their focus to the next generation, which seeks to escape his clutches and forge new, often gleefully queer identities. The final chapter concerns contemporary Black dramatists Suzan-Lori Parks, Jackie Sibblies Drury, and Jeremy O. Harris, whose plays move us from anxious masculinity to anxious whiteness and speak directly to the current moment.

Claire Gleitman is a professor of dramatic literature in the English department at Ithaca College, USA, where she also coordinates the Women’s and Gender Studies program. She has published work in a range of journals, including The Arthur Miller Journal, Comparative Drama and Modern Drama.