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Arthur Miller's Temptress Archetype

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Arthur Miller’s interest in the temptress archetype shows in his plays and reflects in his own personal life. Throughout Arthur Miller’s plays, there is always one character present, she is the young, beautiful, and carefree girl who through her naivetivity seduces older, distinguished men. She has appeared in works such as The Crucible playing Abigail Williams, A View from the Bridge playing Catherine, and many others, but more notably and most interestingly she appears as Miller’s real life second wife, Marilyn Monroe. Throughout this paper there will be different sources that can shed some light on Arthur Miller’s interest and possible obsession in the temptress archetype. Also, to see if Miller’s future second wife might have had any …show more content…

His father, Isidore, owned a successful coat manufacturing business, and his mother, Augusta, to whom he was closer, was an educator and an avid reader of novels.… The affluent Miller family lost almost everything in the Wall Street Crash of 1929, and had to move from Manhattan to Flatbush, Brooklyn. After graduating high school, Miller worked a few odd jobs to save enough money to attend the University of Michigan.” There is no research to show that Miller’s interest with the temptress archetype could have started with his mother. Miller’s Work Arthur Miller began writing when he was in college and while in college is when he wrote his first play No Villain (ibiblio) In 1953, Miller released his play The Crucible which features the young temptress Abigail Williams. In a column written by Arthur Miller in The New Yorker, he claims he wrote the play in a year so he would have written it in ‘52, just a year after his first encounter and affair with Marilyn Monroe (Miller, The New Yorker). There was also no real reason for there to be a love affair between the real John Proctor and Abigail Williams, other than to add extra drama to his …show more content…

Miller’s marriage to Monroe had a huge impact on his life and vision but should not overshadow the contributions that both of these other women made. Critics, however, have seen more characters who share characteristics with Monroe in Miller’s work than his other wives, from the youthful temptresses Abigail Williams in The Crucible and Catherine in A View from the Bridge to the troubled sex icons Maggie in After the Fall, Cathy-May in Mr. Peters’ Connections, and Kitty in Finishing the Picture. There are also echoes of her character in Angela in Some Kind of Love Story, and in Everybody Wins, in the unnamed wife in the story “Please Don’t Kill Anything,” in Roslyn in The Misfits, and in Florence in Fame. But these only convey aspects of her character, and none are wholly Monroe (433).” Even though Abbotson says that none of Miller’s characters are completely Marilyn, there could be some truth behind the fact that since Miller met Monroe before most of these plays and stories were written, it could be hypothesized that Monroe was the idea and/or motivation behind a few of these characters. In fact it is well know that Miller wrote

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