This text is a word version of a power point presentation that used images of the original publicity posters for the 1962 film, from the internet. They seem to have disappeared, apart from this one.
What views are available for the Brooklyn Bridge? There’s Manhattan, skyscrapers, wealth, wheeling and dealing, the hub of New York (and the world?) But the view we are looking at is not in that direction.
A View From the Bridge is about a community in Red Hook, a tenement area near the docks. It’s a slum, Alfieri says. People here live hard lives, these are immigrant families, people who have left Europe to make new lives in America and pursue the American dream… (happening over there in Manhattan) but there’s not a lot of work, or money, around. One of the things you need to look for as you revise the play is evidence in the print text for the conditions in which these people live.
In posters publicizing the film, the Brooklyn bridge is often featured -as though it dominates the action of the play or film. Have a look at some of the image above. What is suggested by poster about the sort of story that it will be? Are there other views from the bridge, other ways of living?? Often the posters suggest that these lives happen beneath the bridge. They seem dominated by the bridge and what the bridge represents? An industrial area? Rough? Primitive? Dangerous? Overshadowed by?? Appalled by? Blackened by?
Here’s a different sort of visual image, used to publicize the film. (sorry! can't find it!) No bridge this time, but still a bleak space and frightening, violent action. This is a picture of the writer, Arthur Miller, I think. But it reminds me of the way Alfieri is presented in the film, which is rather more naturalistic than it is perhaps when we see a theatrical production. (Think about the word ‘naturalistic” What ideas does it let you talk about? What contrasts with this idea?)
In the film, Alfieri is a middle-aged man who walks through the streets in an overcoat and hat. He is dressed differently from the other men, more professionally, more expensively, more middle class. He comes forward and speaks directly into the camera on a number of occasions. Take careful note of how he is presented in the theatrical production. Sometimes the words he says as a narrator in the play become part of his dialogue with Eddie, in the film.
It is vital that you pay careful attention to Alfieri. You should look at
both of his functions and think about what difference it would have made had Alfieri not had a narrator’s role; if instead he had simply been one of the characters in the play.
How does the text give Alfieri credibility as a narrator? Collect the evidence.
This idea is very important because it’s through Alfieri that the tragic significance of the story is suggested.
How has Miller constructed the Alfieri character and why?
The stage directions tell us that Alfieri is “in his fifties, portly, good humored and thoughtful”. (You might think about why the stage directions specify ‘portly’. What sort of physicality do other men in the play have?) Alfieri speaks directly to us at the beginning of the play. The stage directions suggest that he grins as he does this, amused by the treatment that he receives from Louis and Mike and wanting to explain their behaviour to us, or to interpret for us. This is the first indication that he is going to be a sort of interface or liaison- spell it properly!- between the Red Hook community and us, the audience.
He is engaged by these people. He likes and respects them. He has spent 25 years in this neighborhood, working in his practice that he says is ‘entirely unromantic’. He appreciates the comfortable life and the fact, he says wryly, that he “no longer keeps a pistol in [his] filing cabinet”. He knows about and accepts the corruption on the wharves where “a case of Scotch whiskey slip[s] from the net’ every so often and illegal immigrants arrive and are smuggled ashore.
He has known generations of Red Hook families in his professional life, so that we recognize his depth of knowledge about relationships between individuals and families, the lore of the community – spell it properly- and the disputes that need resolution in the courts or at least some sort of mediation through a lawyer: ‘compensation cases, evictions, family squabbles- the petty troubles of the poor’. Alfieri helps people ‘settle for half’. This means that they don’t take the law into their own hands. Instead they go through the legal processes. Because they do this- because the Mafia no longer control the streets- the Sicilian traditions and codes of behaviour have been supplanted by legal processes and compromise through mediation which characterises the American legal system.
Alfieri's credibility as a commentator increases because of his identification with these people. He shares their ethnic/ cultural background. He is not an outsider looking in. He does not patronize, or judge harshly. In fact, maybe we would want to say that he romanticizes the situation. (This is a really significant idea, and one that you should think about.)
He says that there is no romance in his work. It is pretty mundane. It is work in a slum community and Alfieri’s wife and friends point out to him the lack of elegance and glamour involved in it. However, the play’s story concerns one of those situations that make him feel, in a quite visceral way, his connection with ancient lawyers in Greece and Italy, he says. Perhaps this is a way of romanticizing and glamorizing what he has to deal with?
Alfieri mentions that after Eddie’s death, Catherine had talked to him about being alone in the house with Rodolpho for the first time…this gives Alfieri more credibility as a narrator because it accounts for more of the information and understanding that he has…
Alfieri speaks differently from the rest of the members of the community. His English is much more standard and he sounds well- educated and cultivated. He knows that New York “is a gullet, swallowing the world’s tonnage.” He recognizes something greedy, rapacious, unscrupulous in this image, and it suggests that New York uses up the immigrant labor just as it ravens up other global resources. This insight indicates that Alfieri has an understanding of Red Hook’s place in New York and the world which its occupants probably do not have. (What is Red Hook’s place in New York? What does the play have to say about this, apart from this comment of Alfieri’s?)
In a similar way, he understands the community’s deep cultural connections with old Sicily, and Sicilian ways of understanding ‘justice’ and honour but he recognizes that living in America has made an impact on these ideas so that now “we are quite civilized…now we settle for half.” When he talks about the rare times when the scent of the ‘open sea’ washes the dust out of the flat air in his office he suggests how sometimes these more civilized assumptions are blown away and replaced by ancient, elemental passions. Only an eloquent, reflective person could offer the audience this understanding of the play’s concerns and set up the context for the story in this way and Alfieri has these qualities.
Alfieri’s work as a lawyer in the Red Hook community puts him in touch with Eddie and the burgeoning crisis. Eddie visits him, just as Eddie’s father had visited him, to seek legal advice…to try to use the law as a way of settling his outrage at Rodolpho’s behaviour. Alfieri organises bail for Marco, after getting Marco to promise that he will follow the law and not take the law into his own hands. Remember that Marco doesn’t want to do this because he sees it as losing face, or losing honor.
Right at the end of the play, Alrieri says that he feels ‘alarm’ because of the profound impact that Eddie has made on him because of Eddie’s ‘perverse purity’ in not “settling for half”. So, he dignifies Eddie and Eddie’s behaviour, even as he ‘know[s] how wrong he was’ and how ‘useless his death’. Alfieri’s alarm and disquiet suggest that he and the community have been reminded of primitive and elemental aspects of human nature and that this might disrupt those civilising influences that keep the community cohesive and stable.
Alfieri introduces the play and he concludes it. He also appears on a number of occasions within the play as a narrator, commenting to us on the story and telling us things about Eddie and the situation.
In each of these speeches he claims something profound about Eddie’s story and Eddie’s fate. Alfieri in these moments has the gravitas of one who has complete understanding of the significance of the lives and relationships that we witness during the play. The authority of his pronouncements are also signaled to the audience by the way the lighting fades out the action and then locates and lights up Alfieri for us on the stage.
For instance, as Eddie stands smoking the cigar that Catherine has lit for him, just after she has told him that she wants to take the job that has been offered to her, the lights go down on Eddie and then come up on Alfieri. Alfieri’s short comment is apparently simple but it has a weighty ambiguity about it: “He was as good a man as he had to be in a life that was hard and even. He worked on the piers when there was work, he brought home his pay, and he lived.” There is a portentousness about the final sentence that he utters in this section: “And towards ten o’clock of that night, after they had eaten, the cousins came.” This seems trivial, except that there is a sort of foreboding in the cadences of Alfieri’s voice and in the way the particular night, ‘that night’ is specified.
Part 1 question
“Alfieri’s commentary gives a depth and complexity to what might otherwise be a sordid, mundane story.” Discuss.
This question asks you to think about Alfieri both as a character- he is part of the story- and as a structural component of the play – as narrator. For these reasons, it is a part 1 question.
In your response, you must include a detailed discussion of Alfieri’s commentary. You must KNOW them. If you get a question like this in the exam and you don’t know them, you are history!
Of course, as well, you need to talk about the human relationships that you have watched and thought about and decide whether you think that there is more than a sordid and uninteresting story left if we remove Alfieri from it.
Alfieri tells us that there was an inevitability about the outcome, that ‘[he] could have finished the whole story that afternoon’ when Eddie first came to him and that he “knew where [Eddie] was heading for and where he was going to end.” He says several times in the play that he was powerless to stop what had begun to happen. No law had been broken and he tries to reason with Eddie and to neutralize Marco.
