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영어

This paper examines Arthur Miller’s 1953 The Crucible as a work reflective of the contemporary cold war liberal consensus. The playwright expresses a sense of disorientation that he often felt what was apparently “real” as “surreal,” indicating the overwhelming irrationality of the collective hysteria under the cold war regime. Miller’s sense of distorted reality is consonant with the general bewilderment in America at the unfolding of McCarthyism. In particular, the intimation that his play seeks the real as an alternative to perverse social reality is reminiscent of the cold war “psychological” turn of realism—so-called postwar “new realism” that elevated the imaginary realm of art as the site of the “truly real” over the totalitarian social order of realpolitik, which was seen by many as “irrational” and “surreal.” Miller seems well aware that the ideological coordinates of the Salemite and McCarthyite Real are determined by the regimes of religious/political authoritarianism. Nevertheless, he ends up colluding with the existing structure of power, thus wittingly or unwittingly, appropriating rather than demystifying its mechanisms of empowerment. Specifically, The Crucible illustrates how Miller, by seizing upon the rationale of cold war liberalism, attempts to claim power for white male liberal subjectivity, while displacing his sense of guilt onto gendered and racialized others. In the final analysis, it may be Miller’s masculinist desire for power that has obfuscated his critical clairvoyance, leading him to sublimate the raw Real into his fantasmatic Real and join the cold war liberal flight into the psychologized registers of American mythology.