Hysterical Fantasies: Hysteria, loss, and Social Status in The Crucible by Arthur Miller and A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams

Abstract

The modern American dramatic tradition has encompassed an engagement with a wide variety of themes to define and illustrate the peculiar lived realities of American society, fuelled by the American dream and its aftermath. Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams, both emerge as exemplars of this incisive engagement as their work articulates an elegiac kaleidoscope of decaying institutions and the debris of ambition. Drawing from the experiences of people in the Great Depression of the 1920s and 1930s, their work reveals the gross loopholes that existed within a system that institutions tried to call perfect. Growing up during these times, the playwrights were acutely aware of the imperfections of the status quo, and so their plays subvert the dichotomies established by social, political, and moral institutions to undertake a deep examination of personal or community dynamics beyond them. While The Crucible seeks to examine the social hysteria that emerges from a dismantling of logic that permits people to believe that their neighbours are engaged in absurd and unbelievable crimes like communing with the devil, slaughtering babies, etc. Through an examination of these hysterical routines, the play draws attention to the gendered disparities in power and patriarchal violence that seek to erase female subjectivities. Similarly, A Streetcar Named Desire allegorizes the varied issues confronting American society, especially the asymmetrical gender power structures and traumatic familial histories. The plays, therefore, are conjoined in examining the importance and biases of social positioning in forging normative thought processes that form the bedrock of decaying capitalist societies