The scene that I am going to study is when the Carbone family and their to guests from Sicily have just eaten their evening meal and are having a pleasant conversation at first, but underlying tensions soon begin to build up.
The beginning of the scene originally suggests a happy family atmosphere, though we wonder if Eddie is over-protective of Catherine. But recently Beatrice’s cousins are coming to stay illegally in America over from Sicily. The two cousins arrive, Marco and Rodolfo. Marco simply speaks of the poverty back home and Rodolfo not a typical Italian by his appearance or personality talks about how he can sing and plans to buy a motorbike. Rodolfo’s singing of Paper Doll’s delights Catherine, who obviously is attracted to him. But soon this relationship develops, much to the distress of Eddie who himself is in love with Catherine. He can not express or admit his love as keeps them repressed.
The scene starts with a nice after dinner conversation but tension is beginning to build up. The argument starts when Eddie raises the point about submarines, slang name for illegal immigrants.
“I betcha there’s plenty of surprises when those guys get back there, heh?’”
He said this to provoke Rodolfo because he knows that Catherine has her eye on him and to bring up the issues of American values and how wearing a “shawl” doesn’t mean that a girl is strict. But to Eddie’s disapproval the comment failed to offend Rodolfo.
Eddie continues to make remarks about Catherine’s and Rodolfo’s relationship. Catherine can’t take this crap anymore so she stands up and asks Rodolfo’ You want to dance Rodolfo?’ (Eddie freezes). At first Rodolfo refuses not to anger Eddie any further but Beatrice convinces Rodolfo to dance ‘Go ahead, dance Rodolfo’. By doing this Beatrice shows immense disobedience to her husband, causing his frustration to increase and therefore the tensions of the play to go sky-high. Later on Rodolfo takes Catherine to the paramount to watch the movies. When they come back they find that Eddie is waiting for them. Eddie is really angry and says to Rodolfo that why he took Catherine out to watch the movies, because he could’ve had an accident and when the bureau asks him for the papers he could’ve been caught or that there are many tramps out there in the night. This is not the real reason that Eddie is furious; it is a cover for his deep love for Catherine. You can clearly see that Eddie is real jealous of Rodolfo and doesn’t want him to mix with Catherine... Then he insists to speak to Catherine alone, trying to persuade her that Rodolfo is just “bowin’ to his passport”. Though her instincts tell her to trust Rodolfo her respect for Eddie makes this hard. Eddie leaves Beatrice to “straighten her out”. Beatrice just does that but not in the way that Eddie hoped for. Beatrice explains to Catherine there, the need to become independent of Eddie and ‘...not to go into the bathroom when he is in his underwear shaving...’ etc.
As the play carries on Eddies anger over Rodolfo starts to fume up. Now Eddie tries to convince everyone that Rodolfo isn’t a real man. As he speaks he starts to slowly twist the newspaper in his hand and at one point he rips it up in half. On the stage this would be an effective Dramatic device because the newspaper shows Eddie’s anger on Rodolfo and each twist represents the anger growing until it just bursts when the newspaper rips in half.
At the end of the scene Eddie’s authorities are significantly compressed and no one except Beatrice likes him.
Eddie’s character is so very alike to the character of Macbeth and has a very similar storyline. Both Macbeth and Eddie are tragic heroes and both were good to start with but due to the outside influences the slowly turn evil. As we can see from contrasting these play’s the main difference is age and what I think Arthur Miller is trying to say is that Tragedy is ageless and has been roaming Earth since the beginning of humanity and has been sinful to us no matter who we are. In “Macbeth”, Macbeth is influenced by the witches and Eddie in “A View From The Bridge” is spoilt by the jealousy of Rodolfo’s relationship with Catherine.
