Anxious Masculinity in the Drama of Arthur Miller and Beyond

This study examines the figure of 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 day. It offers a compelling analysis of gender dynamics - staunchly homosocial, vaguely or overtly misogynistic, anxiously homophobic - and of the legacy of this often sexually troubled figure in the works of other American dramatists right up to the present day. The book then proceeds to examine this same figure as he appears in the plays of Tennessee Williams, and then in the later 20th century writers Lorraine Hansberry, David Mamet, August Wilson and Sam Shepard, who reposition him in more racially and economically marginalized settings. From there it turns to the work of Tony Kushner, Paula Vogel, and the collaborators Lisa Kron and Jeanine Tesori, who shift their focus to the children who seek to free themselves from his clutches and forge their own, gleefully queer identities. Finally, the last chapter concerns the 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. Threaded throughout the book is the argument that the gendered anxieties exhibited by the anxious male breadwinner are the very ones invoked with such success by Donald Trump--