Broken Glass concerns a woman, Sylvia Gellburg, who has suddenly lost the use of her legs. There is apparently no physical reason for this. Nonetheless, the effects are undeniable. If the cause is psychological, however, what can its source be? Admittedly, she is obsessed by the news from Germany. In particular, she is transfixed by a newspaper photograph of elderly Jews forced to scrub the sidewalks with toothbrushes. But these events are taking place thousands of miles away. She herself is, ostensibly, safe. Why, then, can she not get the images out of her head? And why is she curiously happy unless because, as Miller has said, ‘it is as though something has settled now. She is a cripple. There is nothing she can do.’

Sylvia is located at the point where the private and the psychological interleave with the public and the social. Her own life had been in a state of suspended animation long before the traumatic events of 1938. She is married to a man ill-at-ease with himself and others. He is proud to be the only Jew in a WASP company, seemingly unaware of the condescension that is the price to be paid for being transformed from a man into a symbol. His employer refers to him and his fellow Jews as ‘you people’. A prize-winning yachtsman, he ‘had me aboard twice … The only Jew ever set foot on that deck’ (11).