Arthur Miller's A View From the Bridge

Arthur Miller's A View From the Bridge

Manliness, Hostility and Aggression are all important in "A view from

the bridge" where Eddie Carbone plays the main character he is a

longshoreman working on the Brooklyn docks in New York.

He tries to keep his status as "the man" in his household. He is very

hostile towards Rodolfo because he thinks he is a homosexual. Marco

knows Eddie feels this way about Rodolfo and is unhappy that Eddie

feels this way about a member of his family. This creates aggression

from Marco throughout the play and results in various conflicts

between himself and Eddie in which Marco demonstrates his masculinity

over Eddie this makes Eddie feel threatened and insecure.

Eddie has many different things that he considers to be manly e.g. "to

be a breadwinner". He feels that Rodolfo does not conform to his idea

of masculinity because of the way he cooks, cleans, sings and makes

dresses. Which at the time of the play would not be considered to be

things done by a man.

Eddie also has strong views about the way that Catherine behaves. He

shows this by criticizing the way she dresses and the way she behaves

when he says "your walkin wavy" and "you're still a baby". He feels

like she is still his little girl and he is unhappy that she is

growing up so quickly. He is also unhappy with her job because of the

neighbourhood it is in and he thinks she should stay at school for

longer. I think he disapproves of this not because of the

neighbourhood, or the fact she should still be at school, but because

he thinks she is still a baby and he should still be looking after her

when she is perfectly capable of doing it herself.

Eddie behaves peculiarly when he asks Rodolfo if he can box which

lea...

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...ead the drama "A view from the bridge" it was initially

intended to be performed on the stage this would have made the play

more dramatic because the audience would feel like they are a part of

it. The setting would cause problems because it is constantly changing

so the stage set-up would have to be skilfully done so as little time

was wasted as possible changing the set.

We acted a small part of the play in groups which helped us to

understand why Arthur Miller had so many stage directions in the

script. It is because every little detail needed to be shown to reveal

the authenticity of the play and to give it a feeling of what it was

actually like to be there.

When we acted our scene from the play it was difficult to keep up with

all the different stage directions but once we practiced it became

easier and it made the scene look much more realistic.