Tennessee Williams’s sense of an oppressive social world, of the diminishing space available to the embattled self, was a product partly of conscience and partly of paranoid vision, but it was shared by his fellow writers. O’Neill’s Yank, trying to embrace the animal when his body is bent to adjust to the mechanical; Miller’s Willy Loman, scattering his seed — literal and symbolic — on the stony ground of his backyard; and Laura Wingfield, defeated by the typewriter and retreating to the cold purity of her glass animals, are all examples of the human defeated by the mechanical. It is a matter, too, of space: the cage and the stokehold of O’Neill, the enclosed backyard of Miller, and the cellular living units of Williams all embody a drastic shrinking, a radical diminution of possibilities that lies at the heart of the work of all these writers. American rhetoric is one of expanding frontiers, proliferating possibilities, unformed selves, economically and politically free individuals. American reality, as portrayed in their work, is constrictive, disillusioning, and deforming.

America is a failed Utopia, an impossible project, built on a Puritan rhetoric of recoverable innocence and an enlightenment polemic of perfectability. It is the grandiloquent nature of America’s promise to itself, and to a world to which it offered itself as a great experiment, that provoked a literature of disillusionment and betrayal. That strain is strong in a drama characterized by its oppositional stance. Thus, O’Neill suggests that his plays have in essence been concerned with the sacrifice of individual to material values; Williams, that his characters are romantics in an unromantic world.