Steven Lukes’s Discourse of Power in Arthur Miller’s Plays With Emphasis on “All my Sons

Arthur Miller (1915-2005) is one of the famous American playwrights whose most plays reflect political issues in his era. Arthur Miller’s plays reflect challenge of dramatically power discourses and show social inequality, which derivative in unequal power in society rules. This play represents people who prefer surviving to values, themselves to society, realism to idealism, being loyal to family to being responsible to the community. All My Sons is a modern tragedy with an archetypal theme of child murder. The most important feature of modern tragedies is that, they introduce autonomous rational human of the present age as the only responsible for his own failure and victory by depriving the mythical gods of deifying. Joe Keller, the hero of Miller’s tragedy, is the victim of social force caused by economic crisis of 1930’s and 1940’s in the United States, instead of being a failure of mythical gods providence. This article reveals that how using the power of the Capitalism system affects the play characters by components of power relations that Steven Lukes has mentioned.