Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1994. [Vol. 2.] Eger Journal of American Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 22)

STUDIES - Mária Kurdi: "You just have to love this world." Arthur Miller's The Last Yankee.

considering external factors: the illness must be due to the presence of too many Negroes, crime, the lack of brothers and sisters to talk to, etc. His nononsense attitude makes him take Karen's problem even as a kind of insult to his own business-based well-being. It is an "awful sensation" (4) for him not to have around the partner who had been such a good listener before her decline into depression began. "Whatever deal I was in, couldn't wait till I got home to talk about it Real estate, stock market, always interested." (5) In contradiction, Leroy's probings into the implications of Patricia's depression betray an interest in seeing it in terms of their relationship and his own responsibility. Unlike the superficial, routine approach of Frick, his instinctively hits upon something vitally important from the point of view of the disease: "They're usually sick a long time before you realize it you know. I just never realized." (3) The wives's disorders, however, do not form the sole theme of their conversation. As the above quotation hints, the women's problems are fundamentally rooted in the marital relationships, therefore the men's side becomes equally important in the play. When it comes to light that Leroy is just a carpenter and not, for instance, a contractor, Frick responds in a disturbingly mixed fashion. On the one hand he displays a genuinely human admiration for the art-like craft of the other, who has recently renovated a Presbyterian Church and in addition built a first-class altar to be its pride. On the other hand, Frick's instinctively praising attitude is soon replaced by his assessment of Leroy's achievement from the point of view of social positions and expectations, according to which the younger man fails to have made a career, in spite of descending from one of the Founding Fathers. The mention of Alexander Hamilton brings to mind the American constitution and the myth of happiness attainable through material success, declared everybody's right Here, however, neither of the two men is happy. Frick appears hardly more than a clockwork automaton whose latent psychic problem manifests itself in compulsive talking and the overabundant use of clichés in lack of original thoughts. Leroy claims to be driven crazy by the other's and, by extension, the society's ambiguity about his job: 67