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Theme Of Love In A View From The Bridge

Decent Essays

Love is a powerful motivator that most writers will touch upon in plays and novels. Miller uses the many kinds of love to drive the major events of the plot of A View from the Bridge, and the different kinds intertwine as the characters change and the play develops. The play opens with a family scene, showing the love between Eddie, his wife Beatrice, and Catherine. Eddie is the proud head of the household and is determined to keep the vow he ‘promised [Catherine’s] mother on her death bed’; to keep Catherine safe, even though at times the others can see that they may be ‘too much love for the niece’. This original family dynamic shows the happy life that could have been lead, and Miller deliberately wrote this scene to let his audience see what has been lost by the end of the play; a tragic end is only tragic if there was something to lose. This family love is vital to the way of life that the people of Brooklyn lead, and it comes from the strong Italian family values and the ways they shape the justice system, and in America this form of justice mixes with the state law as the residents ‘settle for half’. It is this family love that brings Marco to America, as he is desperately searching for a way for his family to escape the incredible poverty back in Sicily that leaves them to ‘eat the sunshine’. Marco also brings his brother Rodolfo, who is ‘crazy about New York’. The brothers have an incredibly strong bond, and Marco is willing to defend his brother to the death.

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