A Pragmatic Stylistics Analysis of Social Critique in Arthur Miller's Political Plays: The Crucible and The American Clock

Abstract

This paper presents two plays by Arthur Miller, The Crucible (1953) and The American Clock (1980), as political plays that can be used as a source of social and political criticism. The Crucible is set during the Salem witch trials of 1692 and is allegorical of the atmosphere of fear, hysteria, and ideological persecution in the middle of the twentieth century, namely McCarthyism. The American Clock, on the contrary, is a satirical reflection on the system breakdown of capitalism and the disintegration of social order. The paper applies the speech act theory (Austin, 1962; Searle, 1975), as a complementary theory to the pragmatic stylistics, to analyze these plays. The themes of power, morality, and resistance are the themes where analysis will be conducted on how Miller employs assertives, directives, commissives, expressives, and declarations as negotiation measures. Findings show that such claims as the ones made about mass hysteria intensify it, and that directives epitomise a manifestation of hierarchical authority in The Crucible. Expressives are stressed in The American Clock to narrate the emotional responses of economic misery, commissives to narrate the unkept capitalist promises. Combining both the pragmatic and stylistic analysis, the paper shows how the language of Miller is not only a weapon of dramatic tension, but also of linguistic resistance and political comment. The mixed methodology is a contribution to the broader stylistic analysis in that it will show how literary conversation can be socially active and that it is also parodic of repressive structures simultaneously