The Self-effacing Woman: A Study of Kate Keller in Arthur Miller’s All My Sons

Abstract

Abstract

Arthur Miller’s All My Sons was first staged in New York in 1947, two years before the publication of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex with the famous opening sentence of its Book Two: ?One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman?. Beauvoir only foregrounded the fact that the prevailing ideas about women are socially and culturally constructed, not naturally created. Summing up Beauvoir’s argument , Margaret Walters says : ?All through history woman has been denied full humanity, denied the human right to create, to invent, to go beyond mere living to find a meaning for life in projects of everwidening scope ? ?She is seen by and for men, always the object and never the subject?? (98). Miller’s idolization of Kate Keller in the play written before Beauvoir’s sensational uncovering of the subordination of women throughout human history, only serves to confirm the feminist attack on male white literature produced by male white authors as being complicit in ?othering? women.