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.

words and in deep emotional shock, Leroy draws attention to another aspect of his sense of failure: "111 never win if I have to compete against your brothers!" (26) In spite of having married a Yankee, Patricia has retained a subconscious resentment against his kind, because of old hostilities: "We were treated like animals, some Yankee doctors wouldn't come out to a Swedish home to deliver a baby ..." (28) It is at this point of the play that the reference of the title receives an explanation as Leroy, in answer to the above, expresses his hope to be the last Yankee "so people can start living today instead of a hundred years ago." (28) This attempt to rid themselves of the chains of the past is interestingly parallelled in Brian Friel's Translations

; a contemporary Irish play at the end of which schoolmaster Hugh says, "To remember everything is a form of madness."

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5 Finally, leading up to what can be considered the intellectual message of the play, Patricia and Leroy unravel the meaning of the word "spiritual." For the woman it refers to what is inside. For her husband, it carries a more general, life-sustaining sense: "To me spiritual is whatever makes me forget myself and feel happy to be alive. Like even a well-sharpened saw, or a perfect compound joint." (32) Overlooking Leroy's earlier quoted wish to embody the last Yankee, Helen McNeil's brief analysis of the play stresses that opposed to the "hard-bargaining New Englander ... Miller is proposing another essential Yankee, coming forward from the line of Puritanism which saw even the most ordinary objects and acts in the material world as gifts from God." Developing her argument further, she contends that Leroy, as that other kind of Yankee, proves an inheritor of Jonathan Edward's spiritualism.

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6 At the emotional peak of their encounter, while Patricia's eyes "are filling with tears", his philosophy runs with relieving power: "IH say it again, because it's the only thing that's kept me from going crazy

— you just have to love this world." (32) Hereby, completing his refusal to continue to carry the paralyzing load of the past, Leroy, the builder rises to the status of a latter-day Transcendentalist Though in a different context, 1

5 Brian Friel, Translations

, in: Selected Plays of Brian Friel (Washington, D. C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1986) 445. 1

6 Helen McNeil, op. cit 71