39 pages • 1 hour read
Arthur MillerA View from the Bridge
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1955A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Act I, Pages 378-397Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Act I, Pages 378-390 Summary
The play opens in the office of Alfieri, a middle-aged lawyer, in 1950s New York. Alfieri speaks about the Italian-American neighborhood of Red Hook. When he first arrived there from Italy in the 1920s, Alfieri says, Red Hook was dominated by violence and by people taking the law into their own hands. But things have changed since then: “[N]ow we are quite civilized, quite American” (379). Most of the cases he deals with these days are unglamorous, involving mundane domestic issues or work compensation claims. Yet, he says, every few years he encounters a case that bucks that trend, and which has about it the air of something tragic, bloody, and ancient. One such case is that of Eddie Carbone, a 40-year-old longshoreman who works on the docks around the Brooklyn Bridge.
The action shifts to the living room of Eddie Carbone’s apartment, where he lives with his wife, Beatrice, and her 17-year-old niece, Catherine. Eddie comes in from work in the evening and notices that Catherine, who is waiting for him, is “all dressed up” (380), with a new skirt and hairstyle. Eddie expresses concern that the way she is dressed will attract unwanted attention from the neighborhood men. Eddie then reveals that Beatrice’s cousins from Italy, immigrants who are coming to stay with them, have just arrived in New York. They have arrived early and Beatrice, who has just in from the kitchen, worries about getting the house ready in time.
When they sit down to eat, Catherine tells Eddie about an offer she has received to work as a stenographer for a nearby company. Eddie is unhappy about this news at first because he believes it will put Catherine in contact with the wrong kind of people. However, Eddie agrees that Catherine can take the job when Beatrice reminds him that he said that she could take a job after she graduated from high school. Catherine asks Eddie what she should say if anyone questions her about Beatrice’s cousins, who are immigrating without legal paperwork. Eddie tells her and Beatrice that “you don’t see nothin’ and you don’t know nothin’” (388), and that they should always deny any knowledge of them. To illustrate the importance of this point, Eddie tells Beatrice to tell Catherine the story of a local teenager, Vinny, who informed immigration services about an uncle staying with his family. As Beatrice emphasizes, Vinny was thrown down the stairs by his own brothers and ostracized.
Act I, Pages 391-397 Summary
Later that evening, Beatrice’s cousins, Marco and Rodolpho, arrive and introduce themselves to Eddie and Beatrice. Catherine remarks on how different they look, with the older brother Marco “so dark” (392) and the younger Rodolpho “so light” (392), with blonde hair. Marco and Rodolpho explain that they have come to America because there is no work in Italy. In their hometown, they would sometimes push a taxi up a hill just to make some money. Marco goes on to say that he has a family and three children in Italy who are starving and that he plans to stay in the US for four to six years so that he can send money back to them. Marco is ecstatic when Eddie tells him how much money they can earn in New York.
In contrast to Marco, Rodolpho is not married and wants to stay in America so that he can go back to Italy one day and buy a motorbike so that he can get a job as a message carrier for important people in the hotels there. He tells them that he is a singer and that gave a performance in a hotel the previous year when the main baritone got sick. He claims that people were throwing thousand-lire notes onto the stage. When Catherine asks Rodolpho if he can sing jazz, he says yes and starts a rendition of the jazz song “Paper Doll.” Catherine is enchanted by his singing, but Eddie interrupts Rodolpho halfway through on the pretext of not arousing suspicion in the nearby flats with the noise. Eddie then tells Catherine to go and take off the high heels which he notices she is wearing. Catherine angrily goes to her bedroom to remove the shoes, and when she returns to pour the coffee, Rodolpho comments on how beautiful she is.
Act I, Pages 378-397 Analysis
Just before the arrival of Marco and Rodolpho, Alfieri says about Eddie that “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” (390). This comment suggests a particular definition of “good” that emphasizes his masculine role as a breadwinner. By working hard and saving his pay, rather than drinking or gambling, Eddie supports Beatrice and Catherine and provides the latter with the foundations to graduate from high school and pursue a better life. He is also “good” in the sense that he helps others outside of his immediate family. We learn in Act I that Eddie gave up his bed when Beatrice’s father’s house burned down. Likewise, he took Catherine into his home when Beatrice’s sister died. He is also willing to have Beatrice’s cousins from Italy stay in his house while they settle and find work in America. These core aspects of Eddie’s goodness set up two of the play’s key themes, The Role of Work and Performance in Constituting Masculinity and Immigration and the Dynamics of Hospitality. For Eddie—and for Alfieri—part of what makes Eddie good specifically as a man is the fact that he engages in hard, physical labor in service of his extended family and broader community. Furthermore, his emphasis on the code of secrecy surrounding the legal status of fellow immigrants points to the theme of The Conflict Between Official and Natural Law. By harboring undocumented immigrants and helping them get work, Eddie’s family breaks US immigration laws. However, federal laws are not the laws that are most important to Eddie or his community. Rather, they are bound by the mores of their community, which demand mutual support and protection.
However, while Eddie extends hospitality to those in his extended community, he also feels ambivalent about it. For example, Eddie exhorts Beatrice not to be too hospitable with her cousins. As he says, half-joking, “all I’m worried about is you got such a heart that I’ll end up on the floor with you, and they’ll be in our bed” (383). Referencing the time when he gave up his bed for his father-in-law, Eddie suggests that being too kind can result in being taken advantage of. So too, in a similar vein, does Eddie warn Catherine when she tells him that she wants to take up a job as a stenographer? As he says in response to Beatrice’s observation that Catherine likes people, “most people ain’t people […] they’ll chew her to pieces if she don’t watch out” (387). Eddie seeks to protect Catherine by encouraging her to be cynical as well as trusting, and for her to see that those outside of their family do not always have her best interests at heart. This is especially the case now that she has reached sexual maturity, and that some men are willing to deceive or manipulate her to get sex. As true as his suspicions might be, however, they also foreshadow the coming catastrophes. Though Eddie fulfills the demands hospitality places on him, he reveals that he privately resents them, hinting at the breach of hospitality that he will commit at the end of the play.
The delicate balance of duty and resentment is upset by Marco and Rodolpho’s arrival. If Eddie can be “good” by balancing hospitality with self-interest, and his family’s needs with those of the wider community, then their arrival confuses Eddie’s sense of what it means to be good. In particular, it disturbs the fragile equilibrium of his relationship with Catherine and his slowly dawning awareness that he needs to let her go. As shown by his reaction to Catherine’s new dress and his description of it as both “beautiful” and “too short” (380), Eddie is conflicted in his attitude toward Catherine. He acknowledges that she is no longer a child, yet he still struggles against an opposite feeling that she is still “a baby” needing protection (381), and a still deeper sexual attraction which makes him long to hold onto her. Rodolpho’s symbolic seduction of Catherine when he sings “Paper Doll” is painful for Eddie to witness in his own front room. And it is particularly hard given that the song is about a man trying to cope with losing a love object to another man.
Eddie responds by snapping back to his old, defensive posture with Catherine. He shuts down Rodolpho’s song on the pretext of not attracting the neighbors’ attention, and orders Catherine to remove her high heels. With the latter gesture, he symbolically covers up Catherine’s newfound womanhood and returns her to the status of a child. Eddie has been cast into a situation of deeper, more intractable, conflict due to the arrivals in his house. He has found himself in a state where his own needs and those of the broader community, represented by the cousins, are directly opposed. Unable either to acknowledge or directly confront this new reality, Eddie is set on a course for catastrophe. His feelings of romantic rivalry and resentment about the demands of hospitality become the catalysts for the tragic outcome of the play.
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