The audience are also inclined to dislike Eddie due to his love for his adopted daughter Catherine and his overprotection of her. He is jealous of her and Rodolfo being in love. Eddie knows he is wrong, but cannot accept this. He does not want her to go to work, but stay at home to finish school, ‘You can’t take no job. Why didn’t you ask me before you take a job?’ He gives Catherine no freedom, despite her being old enough to make her own decisions, and this makes the audience feel that Catherine is like a caged animal, and can’t do the things that she wants. Eddie also has a variety of insults for Rodolfo, including ‘son-of-a-bitch’ and ‘thief.’ He has no respect for Rodolfo, and wants a way to get rid of him. Because of his inability to put his emotions into words, he has to be physical. For instance, to expose Rodolfo as a ‘girl,’ Eddie challenges Rodolfo to a boxing bout, even though he knows Rodolfo has never boxed before. He wins and everyone becomes angry with him as he hurts Rodolfo – ‘he feints with his left hand and lands with his right. He mildly staggers Rodolfo...’ Marco feels obliged to gain revenge for his brother, so challenges Eddie at his own game. He beats him at the ‘chair challenge’ and undermines Eddie’s victory in his attempts to win Catherine over. The audience feels that a little justice has been done, and Eddie deserves his defeat and humiliation, and Marco has done a good thing in getting revenge for his brother.
Throughout the play, Eddie does not seem to value his wife Beatrice. She always sticks by his side, and even after losing her temper with Eddie; she is there to support him in his final hours. When Eddie has his eyes on Catherine, she tells him ‘you can never have her!’ If it had not been clear already, Eddie’s love for Catherine is revealed, and Beatrice stands up to Eddie as he has treated her badly and she knows that she doesn’t deserve it. However, when Eddie is stabbed, she is by his side at the very end, protecting and smothering him with her own body during his final seconds – ‘he dies in her arms, and Beatrice covers him with her body.’ He never realised what he had, he wanted something that he could not have, although at the end, we find out that no matter what happened, Eddie always loved Beatrice, as his last words were ‘My B.!’
Another factor in the audience’s response to Eddie is his pride and arrogance. When Marco is released on bail, they both face each other, because neither of them can back down, so when Eddie is killed, the viewers are led to believe that Eddie has brought death on himself. Also, Eddie brings the knife that he eventually dies on – ‘Eddie springs a knife into his hand,’ so again, it was his own fault. Also, Eddie cannot expect to love his daughter and insult people freely, so he always had it coming from when Marco and Rodolfo arrived. Eddie’s pride also makes him go confront Marco because of Marco’s comment ‘this man has stolen from my family,’ when immigration come to arrest Marco and Rodolfo. The neighbourhood is disgusted at what Eddie has done, and Marco knows that Eddie will have to fight him because he is not man enough to swallow it, so he will try to regain his name and power through violence.
The audience are also expected to respond to Eddie in a sickened manner when they side with Catherine when Eddie has admitted he loves Catherine, as this is horrible for Beatrice, and Eddie is disgusting. She loses all respect for Eddie when she finds out about his feelings for her, and after he has told her he will not attend her wedding. She feels that he is immature, and cannot accept that she is in love with someone else and is angry that he cannot let go, and let her go live with Rodolfo. ‘He’s a rat! He belongs in the sewer!’ and ‘he bites people when they sleep.’ This is could animal imagery, he doesn’t deserve anything, and should be living in the sewers because he has stooped that low. Catherine is appalled that after all these years, Eddie does not want to congratulate her, and he doesn’t care any more.
To try and make Catherine and the audience dislike Rodolfo, Eddie claims that Rodolfo just wants citizenship, but Rodolfo truthfully tells that he just wants to work and earn money that he couldn’t at home, Eddie’s claims are less valid, and his plan fails yet again. Secondly, Eddie tries to assert his authority over Beatrice. He believes that Beatrice should always believe him when he says ‘a wife is supposed to believe the husband,’ and he thinks that Beatrice is not doing this, but Beatrice thinks that Eddie is not giving her what she wants in the bedroom – ‘What I fell like doin’ in the bed and what I don’t feel like doin’. I don’t want no -.’ Also, after Eddie has turned to drink to drown his sorrows, he wants control, to ease his jealousy, so for some reason, he shows Rodolfo to be helpless by kissing Rodolfo, ‘Eddie pins his arms, laughing, and suddenly kisses him. This is the only way he can show Catherine and other people that he is still in charge, and he also kisses Catherine and this is awful. Alfieri is a good dramatic device; he provides a link between audience and Eddie, and almost forces Eddie to do what he does in informing immigration because he refuses to help him in his dilemma with Rodolfo and Catherine.
Although there could be different interpretations, Miller’s intention of creating a negative response to Eddie, although at some point, people do feel sympathy for Eddie, as inside he just loved and protected to die, and his pride results in him dying undeservedly. Eddie is just a typical man of the time because of his devotion to the cause, and his unwillingness to back down over a cause that he believed in. However, people are bound to have an off-putting response to Eddie because he has brought death upon himself, he has fallen in love with his surrogate daughter, has neglected his loving wife, and earned the disgust of his neighbourhood. Personally, I thought that Eddie was not necessarily a bad man, he just made the wrong decisions that led to worse situations for him, Underneath his skin, he adored his family, but things didn’t go his way, and he was mainly to blame. In my opinion, Miller is very successful at creating a strong response from the audience. He produces many emotions including sadness at Eddie’s death, anger at his love for Catherine, and disappointment at him telling immigration about Marco and Rodolfo. Overall, Arthur Miller knew what he was doing, and did very well in producing an emotional audience response to Eddie Carbone.