Académique Documents
Professionnel Documents
Culture Documents
DIALOGUE
3
Edited by
Michael J. Meyer
Edited by
Eric J. Sterling
Cover illustration: Actor Stuart Margolin playing the part of Willy Loman
at Auburn University Montgomery (2004). Photo courtesy of Frank C.
Williams/Auburn University Montgomery
Cover Design: Aart Jan Bergshoeff
The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of ISO
9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence.
ISBN-13: 978-90-420-2450-2
Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2008
Printed in the Netherlands
Contents
Acknowledgments
ix
xi
xiii
1
11
21
33
47
61
81
95
105
Contents
viii
10
11
12
121
137
149
163
171
Abstracts
175
Index
181
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Dialogue Series Editor Michael Meyer for choosing me to edit this volume; I thank him for his advice and encouragement. I also thank the Rodopi editorial staff, particularly Fred van der
Zee and Marieke Schilling, for their assistance. I thank the talented,
industrious, and patient thirteen contributors of this volume.
I wish to thank my outstanding and supportive department head,
Alan Gribben, and my dear friends and colleagues Bob Evans, Jeff
Melton, and Mollie Folmar. Alex Kaufman, my esteemed friend and
colleague who is a former student of contributor Steven Centola, provided invaluable computer assistance. I also thank computer specialists
Carl Simpson and Florian Weber for their help.
Mitchell Levenberg (Queens College in New York City) and the
late Albert Wertheim (Indiana University), two great professors,
inspired me with their teaching of this play.
I also thank my wonderful wife (Jill), my parents (Robert and
Marianne), and my two children (Scott and Sarah).
With deep sadness I mention the death of renowned Arthur Miller
scholar, Dr. Steven Centola. I met Steve at the Arthur Miller Society
conference in Millersville, Pennsylvania in 1995. He served as
President of the International Arthur Miller Society while I was the
secretary and treasurer. He was delighted when I asked him in 2005
to contribute an essay to the book and to nd a protg to write the
accompanying essay. Steve selected the American Dream topic for
himself and Michelle Nass. Although he wrote the essay in 2005,
I regret that because of some problems, such as two contributors dropping out, Steves essay is being published after his death on January 9,
2008. He will be missed.
xii
At Frank's Chop House, Biff attempts to tell his father about his visit to Bill
Oliver's office. From left to right, Joel Altherr as Happy, Stuart Margolin as
Willy, and Jason Huffman as Biff. Photo courtesy of Frank C.
Williams/Auburn University Montgomery
Happy tries to restrain Biff during Biff's confrontation with Willy in the
climactic scene. From left to right, Stuart Margolin as Willy, Wendy
Phillips as Linda, Jason Huffman as Biff, and Joel Altherr as Happy. Photo
courtesy of Frank C. Williams/Auburn University Montgomery
Introduction
By providing insightful and thought-provoking essays by renowned
Arthur Miller specialists Steven Centola and Terry Otten, as well
as work by four other accomplished literature professors and by six
talented emerging scholars, Dialogue: Arthur Millers Death of a
Salesman hopes to contribute significantly to Miller scholarship; this
book will also examine several themes and interests of the play that have
engendered controversy in the past. I strongly support General Editor
Michael Meyers desire to provide young scholarswhether they are
applying to doctoral programs, seeking tenure-track positions, or working toward tenurewith an opportunity to publish their work; they are
indeed grateful for the opportunity to share their ideas in print and to
contribute to Miller scholarship. I am also intrigued by Meyers wonderful idea of the pairing of essaysan experienced professor and an
emerging scholar both writing on the same topic but exploring the issue
from their own unique perspective and in many cases using a different
critical methodology. Because it might be too constraining and inhibiting to have the writers respond to specific aspects and passages from the
essay with which theirs is paired, the authors instead enjoy the freedom
to explore the topic as they see fit, an approach which leads to thoughtprovoking and unique perspectives and to more productive chapters. The
essay topic concerning the role of women in Death of a Salesman provides a sound example. Terry Otten, Professor Emeritus of Wittenberg
University, and L. Bailey McDaniel, who wrote her essay as a doctoral
student at Indiana University and who is about to begin her career at
the University of HoustonDowntown, wrote on this topic. Although
both essays are superb, Ottens essay illustrates the strengths of traditional criticism by interpreting Millers text closely, while McDaniels
is far more theoretical and focuses more on a cultural context. Both are
fine contributions to the book, yet the distinctions between them manifest changes that have occurred in the literary profession over the past
few decades: the shift toward literary theory, feminist criticism, and cultural contexts rather than an emphasis on New Critical close readings.
Eric J. Sterling
Both approaches are valuable and are well represented in this volume.
Readers will be intrigued when observing how scholars from different
stages in their careers approach integral questions concerning Millers
poignant and powerful American classic that is as relevant to twentyfirst century audiences as it was to initial audiences in 1949. The topics confront integral themes in the play and discuss the following issues:
the role of women, the attainability of the American Dream, the possible
defects of capitalism and the business world, the problems posed by
technology and progress, the legacy that Willy has bequeathed to Biff,
and the strength and significance of Millers symbolism.
1.
The aforementioned six topics focus on essential and controversial issues in Death of a Salesman, thus allowing this Rodopi volume
to cover major themes in the drama. Women play a significant role in
the work as the audience witnesses Lindas struggle to keep the family together. Willy calls her his foundation and my support (18). Yet
some scholars consider Linda an enabler who blames Willys emotional
and psychological decline on his glasses, Angelo (the car mechanic),
and the lack of a vacation that would rest his mind. It is disturbing, perhaps, that Linda realizes that Willy is thinking about committing suicide
with the aid of the rubber pipe, yet she chooses to return it to the cellar
where he can find it. And although Willy considers Linda his foundation, he cheats on her with Miss Francis, whom he callously discards
when Biff finds her in the hotel room in Boston. Willy manifests his disregard for women not only by committing adultery but also by throwing
Miss Francis out of his hotel room, leaving her to walk naked through
the hallway. He tosses her around as if she is a football: Thats [a football is] me, too (126). This (mis)conduct toward women is, not surprisingly, passed on to Willys children, as Happy treats Miss Forsythe
and Letta as sexual objects and even asks the former if she sells (herself)
(101). Happy also refers to the first woman he slept with, Betty, as a
pig (21), and it is clear that he uses women as weapons for revenge.
Because he is unable to succeed in the business world, Happy compensates by exploiting women sexually in order to exact vengeance on men
who climb ahead of him on the corporate ladder. To Happy, women are
not human beings; instead, they are merely a series of challenges that he
hopes to subdue, a sport he can win at. In fact, he says that his time with
Introduction
2.
Eric J. Sterling
Dream. Loman tries to use his charm to succeed, yet he fails to earn
enough money on his own to complete one aspect of the American
Dreamthe paying off of his mortgage so that the house will fully
belong to him and Linda; thus, Charley has to lend him the money
in order for Willy to meet his financial obligations. Willys failure in monetary matters also demonstrates his inability to achieve
the American Dreamas he interprets it. Willy perceives success in
America as owning a tennis court, as Bernards friend does, and building a pair of guest houses (72). The fact that Loman, while contemplating the building of two guest houses, cannot even pay his own
mortgage manifests how unattainable the American Dream is for him
and how out of touch Willy is with reality. For Willy, the American
Dream takes a bifurcated roadadventurous good fortune and charm.
As Loman reminisces about his lost opportunity with his brother
Ben and wishes he could have gone with him to Alaska or Africa
and become wealthy, audiences can observe the prevalence of this
get-rich-quick theme in Willys conception of the American Dream.
Yet also important is Willys fascination with charm and personality, traits clearly demonstrated by Willys role model, the pleasant
Dave Singleman, who made a living at the age of eighty-four. Perhaps
Willys funeral, particularly the number of mourners and the amount of
grief, demonstrates how well the salesman has succeeded in his quest
to attain the American Dream. The success of a modern hero, like that
of a tragic hero such as Beowulf, can be determined by the magnitude
of the funeral. Thus, when Singleman dies, hundreds of salesmen and
buyers were at his funeral. Things were sad on a lotta trains for months
after that (81). Similarly, when Willy contemplates his funeral, he
expects his sons to discern that he has achieved the American Dream:
he optimistically predicts to Ben that his funeral
will be massive! Theyll come from Maine, Massachusetts, Vermont, New
Hampshire! All the old-timers with the strange license platesthat boy will be
thunder-struck, Ben, because he never realizedI am known! . . . I am known,
Ben, and hell see it with his eyes once and for all. Hell see what I am,
Ben! (126)
Introduction
not even Willys own boss. Only the next door neighbors, Charley and
Bernard, come, leaving Linda to ponder, But where are all the people he
knew? (137). And in contrast to Singlemans funeral, at Willys burial, no
one cries, not even Linda. Surely, the absence of mourners at his funeral,
when juxtaposed with Lomans expectations, manifests the salesmans
failure to attain the American Dream.
3.
The dilemmas posed by capitalism and business clearly exist as integral thematic concerns in Death of a Salesman. The impersonal nature
of capitalism is expressed in various parts of the drama. Willy laments
to Howard that in contemporary business, its all cut and dried, and
theres no chance for bringing friendship to bearor personality
(81). In his effort to fire Willy after his long service to the Wagner
Company, Howard issues a meaningless clich meant to assuage his
own guilt, telling Willy, you gotta admit, business is business (80).
Howards comment suggests that moral decency and ethics are irrelevant, for profit margins are what counts. Because Willy cannot make
profits for the firm, he is fired, and his allegiance to the company and
his future well-being are insignificant to Howard and the firm. When
Willy argues to no avail that Howard cant eat the orange and throw
the peel awaya man is not a piece of fruit (82), Miller convincingly
shows in this scene the impersonal and inhumane nature of capitalism.
Howards callous indifference to Willy is also readily apparent when
the business owner, who has recently taken away Willys salary and
left the incompetent salesman to work for a non-existing commission, tells Willy to buy something he does not need and clearly cannot afford. Although it should be obvious to Howard that Willy is in
dire financial straits because he has no salary and is making no commissions, his wife does not work, and he is a traveling salesman who
cannot drive anymore, the business owner encourages Willy to purchase a wire recordertheyre only a hundred and a half. You cant
do without it (78)and to let Willys maid turn it on for him.
Howards disregard for Willys financial plight and longtime service
to the company illustrates the business worlds indifference toward the
individual and suggests that this attitude is commonplace in a capitalistic system. Nonetheless, Willy Loman cannot pull his own weight,
for he has become a salesman who cannot sell. The playwright never
Eric J. Sterling
Time, however, proves Willy wrong, thus suggesting, perhaps, that the
capitalist system does work. Bernards diligence leads to his successful
career, while the emphasis on charm and personality gets Willys sons
nowhere in the business world.
Introduction
4.
Technology
Eric J. Sterling
Helping his son try a career in radio, to be attained through the mail and
complete with its lack of interpersonal skills because it is not done in person, manifests Willys desperation for Biffs future. Rather than allowing Biff to start at the bottom at a radio station and work his way up the
ladder, Willy encourages Biff to learn about radio through a correspondence course in a clear manifestation that starting at the top is possible and
that people need not work diligently and pay their dues in order to attain
success.
5.
Although Biff has been unable to attain the success that his father has
coveted for him, Willys death sets his son free. The confusing report of
Biffs day, told in Franks Chop House, with Biff claiming to Willy that
he waited all day to see Bill Oliver, that he has an appointment yet does
not have one, that Oliver needs to meet with his partner and it is just a
question of the amount (112) but that he failed to see Oliver and stole
his fountain pen, demonstrates why Biff cannot succeed while his father
is alive. Whenever he attempts to tell the truth, his efforts are derailed
by Willy and Happy. However, when Biff decides to state once and for
all that he was never a salesman for Oliver and that he cannot succeed
in business, he is forced to deny his accurate insights when Willy confesses that he has been fired and is looking for a little good news to
tell your mother, because the woman has waited and the woman has
suffered . . . So dont give me a lecture about facts and aspects. I am
not interested (107). Willy is indeed not interested in facts, a truth
indicated when he strategically mentions his firing after he realizes that
Biff is about to tell him some bad news. Optimism supersedes reality,
which Biff begins to understand when he declares, We never told the
truth for ten minutes in this house (131). When Willy commits suicide,
he expects that Biff will have a bright future with $20,000, but most
probably the insurance company will not pay because the death is selfinflicted and not accidental. Ironically, it is Willys death, not the insurance money, that frees Biff to succeed. No longer burdened with his
fathers expectations of working in business and starting at the top, Biff
will go his own way and seek his own future. Miller demonstrates this
to the audience during the Requiem when the men in the business or
corporate world stand in one place while Biff stands apart from them.
Unlike Happy, who will fight in vain to achieve Willys misguided
Introduction
dream, Biff will seek a future that is appropriate for him and will ignore
his fathers expectations of achieving success in the business world by
starting at the top and using charm rather than diligence.
6.
Symbolism
Death of a Salesman contains much symbolism that affects the meaning of the play and the portrayal of the characters. The plays setting
provides a major symbol in the tall apartment buildings that tower over
the Loman house. These tall buildings, in juxtaposition with the small
Loman house, symbolize Willys lack of success. The Loman residence
is, according to the stage directions, also transparent (11), indicating
the hollowness of the American Dream and the failure of Willy, who
falsely claims that his house is well built and that [t]here aint a crack
to be found in it any more (74). The house can be seen through, just as
Biff eventually sees through Willy, and the salesmans plumbing does
not function well (66). The refrigerator also breaks down frequently.
The apartments dwarf Willys house, making Loman the low man in
the neighborhood, someone who has seen others rise while he has not.
Willys lack of stature in society is also reiterated throughout the play,
such as when a salesman calls him a shrimp. In his essay, Luc Gilleman
cleverly analyzes Millers references to Lomans small size in regard
to sexuality. The claustrophobic effect of the large apartments suggests
Willys insignificance and the idea that progress and business seem to
have passed him by. Because the apartments stand so tall and so close,
the sun never shines through into the Loman house; there is no light, or
enlightenment, for Willy or his family, which is why the characters do
not seem to know who they truly are (131). With no sun, (or son who
is successful), Willy feels barren and thus attempts to compensate with
another significant symbolseeds. Having seen his sonshis seeds
fail in the business world, Willy attempts to replant, to try again. It is no
coincidence that Willy goes to the hardware store for seeds immediately
upon reliving his experience in the hotel room in Boston when he loses
Biffs respect, never to regain it, and upon learning that Biff will not be
staked by Bill Oliver. The desire to plant new seeds manifests Willys
disappointment in his favorite son, the one upon whom he has planted
all his hopes. Furthermore, the symbol of the stockings is important,
for it reflects Willys infidelity and guilt. Biff becomes enraged at his
fathers adultery in part because Willy gives stockings to Miss Francis
10
Eric J. Sterling
while Linda must darn her own stockings to save money. The darning of
the stockings also symbolizes Willys failure in business because Linda
cannot afford to buy new pairs and because the salesman sleeps with
Miss Francis partly in order to go right through to the buyers (39). The
stockings also demonstrate the salesmans guilt because he becomes irritated whenever he sees Linda darning her stockings; when Willy orders
Linda to throw out her stockings, his demand symbolizes his desire
to shed his sin and his guilt, although Willy perhaps feels terrible not
because he has committed adultery but rather because Biff caught him.
Conclusion
These six topics (and thus twelve essays that comprise this book)
cover many of the essential issues that Miller confronts in his play.
I hope that as readers revisit each issue, they will discover in the dialogues some useful tools that will open the text to even more scholarly
discussion and will encourage still other critics and students to delve
deeply into the complexities of Millers classic play.
Eric J. Sterling
Auburn University Montgomery
Bibliography
Miller, Arthur. Death of a Salesman: Certain Private Conversations in Two Acts and a
Requiem. New York, Penguin, 1977.
12
Terry Otten
to think that a woman could simply engineer the whole situation, but
she cant. And neither could a man (Responses to an Audience
821). Millers defense hardly answers the charges leveled by much of
the criticism, however, and Linda remains a controversial figure for
many. Even separate from the issue of whether or not Miller exposes
his own sexism in projecting her character, Linda has been described
as a flawed, even sinister, character in her own right. Guerin Bliquez,
for example, calls her the source of the cash-payment fixation, whose
acquiescence in all Willys weaknesses makes her a failure as a wife
and mother, and then adds that she emasculates Willy in the presence
of Ben and makes him victim to her ambition as well as his own
(384, 386). For Brian Parker, she represents a moral sloppiness projected onto Happy one degree farther. . . . Hap is his mothers son
because she proposes no higher ideal than Willys own spurious dream
(54). Karl Harshbarger judges her even more harshly, claiming that she
coerces Willy to react to her as a small boy . . . by not allowing him to
communicate his deeper needs to her, by siding with Biff against him,
and by blaming him for his own feelings. He concludes, She offers
him his reward, love and support, only when he becomes dependent on
her (14). For Charlotte F. Otten, Linda is a mousy twentieth-century
Brooklyn housewife, who, like Jocasta in Oedipus Rex, prevents her
husband from asking the fateful question, Who am I? (87).
For most critics, however, the fault lies at Millers feet, not just
with Linda Loman. Linda is the embodiment of societys perception
of women and Millers own conception, according to Linda Ben-Zvi
(224), a view shared by Gayle Austin, who sees Miller as reducing all
the women in his play, including Linda, to objects to be exchanged
and denying them as active subjects (61, 63). Still other critics group
Linda with other female characters in other works and arrive at similar
conclusions. Rhoda Koenig complains that Miller makes all women
either the wicked slut or a combination of good waitress and slipperbearing retriever, Linda being an especially dumb and useful doormat (10). And Kay Stanton asserts that the playwright conflates his
female characters in the idea of Woman: all share . . . in their knowing; and possessing the potential to reveal masculine inadequacy,
they must be opposed by man (82). These and other feminist readings, including those offered by Carol Billman, Charlotte Canning,
Beverly Hume, Carla McDonough, and Nada Zeineddine (see Works
Cited), offer a provocative range of insights, a few of which present
Linda Loman
13
more positive responses to the play. Janet N. Balakian, for one, contends that Death is accurately depicting a post-war American culture that subordinates women. . . . [I]t cries out for a renewed image
of American women, she argues, and she sensibly concludes that
the play does not condone the locker-room treatment of women any
more than it approves of dehumanizing capitalism, any more than
A Streetcar Named Desire approves Stanley Kowalskis brash chauvinism or David Mamets Glengarry Glen Ross approves of sleazy realestate salesmen (115, 124).
Linda has been the target of other gender-based criticism as well. In
Communists, Cowboys, and Queers: The Politics of Masculinity in the
Work of Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams, David Savran insists
that the play presents a romantization of self-reliant and staunchly
homosocial masculinity and projects a corroborative and profound
disparagement of women (36). Critics have even linked Millers
characterization of women with his failure to write a genuine tragedy.
Jeffrey D. Mason declares that Millers sexual perspective borrows
the methods and espouses the sexual policies of melodrama. . . . If
Miller writes tragedy . . . he makes it a male preserve (113). If Miller
did understand tragedy, suggests Kay Stanton, he would know that
Linda as a common woman . . . possesses more tragic nobility than
Willy (96). Eugene August offers the similar view that the play is a
profoundly male tragedy, depicting a man destroyed by a debilitating
concept of masculinity (qtd. in Terry Otten 45, n. 38).
At best, for many of these critics, Linda Loman represents Millers
failure to create progressive and helpful female characters; at worst,
she reflects the dramatists sexist attitude, ironically, given the plays
intent, in corroboration with the corrosive, masculine-driven, materialistic ethos of American culture. Both contentions are open to question.
According to Miller, Willy Loman was in part a reflection of his
Uncle Manny Newman, who, like Willy, had a wife and two sons.
Annie Newman resembles Linda as a most moving woman who bore
the cross of reality for them all. She supported her husband with a
mild enthusiastic smile lest he feel he was not being appreciated
(Timebends 123). Miller recalls how Annie would reassure Manny when
with no audience to confirm his existence, his agonizing uncertainty
of identification flooded him with despair (125). According to Miller,
Annie, similar to Linda, lived in perpetual fear and dread. The more
14
Terry Otten
Linda Loman
15
It is she, after all, who maintains the financial accounts that measure
success in the warped vision of the Loman household, who knows
precisely how much commission Willy might make in a given sale,
who pesters Willy about securing an advance to pay the mortgage,
who knows exactly how short they are at any given moment. She is
even complicit in urging Willy to compete in his job. She tells Ben
that Willys got a beautiful job here (85). Again imitating Willys
very language, she declares to Willy that Youre well liked, and the
boys love you. Turning to Ben, she continues, why, old man Wagner
told him just the other day that if he keeps it up hell be a member
of the firm, didnt he, Willy? (85). She even ends the conversation
by holding up Willys eighty-four year old idol, the salesman Dave
Singleman, who, according to Willy, only has to go into any city, pick
up the phone, and hes making his living . . . (86).
So while Linda expresses unending faith in Willy, she simultaneously measures success in the materialistic terms of the commercially
driven culture. One might conclude that Linda is indeed an enabler,
even perhaps a purveyor of lies, in defense of Willy. She not only
assures him of his value, she makes constant excuses for his failures.
In the opening section of the play, she blames Angelos lack of knowledge about Studebakers for Willys erratic driving. She then claims
that its your glasses and, later, Your mind is overactive (13).
When Willy complains about the way he is treated by others at the
office, she tells him, Youre too accommodating, dear (14). When he
confuses the Studebaker with the Chevvy [sic], she manufactures an
excuse: Well, thats nothing. Something mustve reminded you (19).
When he laments how little he sold on the weeks business trip, she
tells him Well, next week youll do better, and insists, youre doing
wonderful, dear. Youre making seventy to a hundred dollars a week
(37), which she knows to be a lie. When he fears himself unworthy and
worries about how he appears to customers on the road, she repeatedly
offers excuses and praise: You dont talk too much, youre just lively
(37); Willy, darling, youre the handsomest man in the world . . . To
me you are. The handsomest (37). Such examples surface throughout
the text.
Doubtlessly, then, one can compile a case against Linda. Even granting that she is essentially unconscious of her own participation and
complicity in the tragic movement of the play, she cannot be declared
free of responsibility any more than any other Miller character. True,
16
Terry Otten
like other Miller female characters, she bears the consequences for a
dominant males stubborn moral blindness or a debilitating capitalism. One thinks of Kate Keller, Elizabeth Proctor, Beatrice Carbone,
Esther Franz, Quentins wives, Theo and Leah Felt, Patricia Hamilton,
and Sylvia Gellburg. As Miller acknowledges, Linda contributes, however unwittingly, to Willys tragic end. According to Bigsby, failing to
understand the true nature and depth of his illusions or to acknowledge
the extent of her own implication in his human feeling, she is flawed,
baffled by the conflicting demands of a society which speaks of spiritual satisfaction but celebrates the material (Death of a Salesman xx).
Yet, on the other hand, for all her limitations, Linda Loman provides
the moral focus in the play, she lifts it beyond simple melodrama, and,
ironically, she announces the transcendent victory at the end.
Although critics have often ignored or undervalued Lindas extraordinary strength, it is a serious misreading of the text to do so. It is no
accident that Miller recalls receiving letters from women who made it
clear that the central character of the play was Linda (Theater Essays
141). She sustains Willy, fully aware of his desperation. She knows that
he borrows fifty dollars a week from Charley to pretend that he can
still bring home a salary. She knows that he lives in a world of illusions,
and she herself struggles to maintain them in order to protect him from
a reality too harsh to bear. Her love is ruthless and absolute. She understands that she has to support him emotionally, and she is willing to make
any sacrifice, even that of her sons, to guard him. It is no wonder that her
boys respect her unwavering strength even while they abandon Willy. As
Biff tells Happy, he would like to find a girla steady, somebody with
substance (25). Happy claims that he also desires [s]omebody with
character, with resistance! Like Mom, yknow? (25). As Biff tries vainly
to defend her from Willys dominance and corruptive influence, he, like
Willy, Happy, even Charley, pays honor to Lindas rock-hard resolve.
Millers own conception of Linda apparently evolved from his first
sense of her as a woman who looked as though she had lived in a
house dress all her life, even somewhat coarse and certainly less than
brilliant. When Mildred Dunnock first auditioned for the original cast,
he considered her to be opposite of his preconceived notion. She looked
frail, delicate, not long ago a teacher in a girls college[,]. . . a cultivated citizen who probably would not be out of place in a cabinet post
(Theater Essays 4647). He and director Elia Kazan told her she was
not suited for the part, but Dunnock came back to re-audition again and
Linda Loman
17
again, transforming her looks to match the assumed character until she
finally secured the part. As it turned out, Dunnock apparently overcompensated by making Linda a weaker character than Miller envisioned. It
was Kazan who initially noticed Lindas potential power and strength.
He recognized that although she was [h]ard working, sweet, always
true, admiring[,] . . . [d]umb, slaving, tender, innocent, as constructed
out of Willys childish male ego, in fact she is much tougher. . . . [S]he
has chosen Willy! To hell with everyone else. She is terrifyingly tough
(Rowe 47). Miller obviously concurred with Kazans reading of her. He
recalls in Timebends how Kazan forced Dunnock to deliver her long
first-act speeches to the boys in double her normal speed, then doubled
that, and finally she . . . was standing there drumming out words as fast
as her very capable tongue could manage. Even when she slackened
the pace, the drill straightened her spine, and her Linda filled up with
outrage and protest rather than self-pity and mere perplexity (184).
Ever since Dunnocks initial characterization of Linda as a woman
of extraordinary toughness, Miller has embraced the interpretation.
When Death was first performed in China in 1983, he was at first
distraught with the actress playing Linda, Zhu Lin. She seemed to be
exploiting . . . the sentiments, he lamented, that will sink them all
in a morass of brainless feeling that finally is not feeling at all but
an unspecific bath of self-love. He went on to compare the Chinese
actress first attempts to Yiddish productions in New York in which
the Mother has a lachrymose fount like mothers performed by
actors of Irish backgrounds in early film, always on the verge of
tears, too (Salesman in Beijing 43). Clearly, again perhaps partially
owing to Kazan, Miller wanted an assertive Linda, fully able to express
outrage as surely as she could extend her compassion.
Even if we can agree with many that Linda never truly understands
Willys dilemma or the incompatibility of her commitment to family and
the dehumanizing demands of the consumer culture, she owns another
kind of wisdom and an imposing authority. Carrying the full knowledge
of Willys failure and his attempts to commit suicide, she is much more
than a mere victim. Far from the nave, even stupid, character that some
have seen, she acts with unbending courage and fierceness in defense
of her lost husband. She instinctively fears Ben and, however futilely,
protects Willy from his threatening presence. Most importantly, she
becomes, as Gordon W. Couchman rightly proposes, conscience itself
to Happy and Biff. [S]he fixes responsibility for actions, something
18
Terry Otten
Linda Loman
19
Bibliography
August, Eugene R. Death of a Salesman: A Mens Study Approach in Western Ohio
Journal 7.1 (1986): 5371.
Austin, Gayle. The Exchange of Women and Male Homosexual Desire in Arthur
Millers Death of a Salesman and Lillian Hellmans Another Part of the Forest in
Feminist Rereadings of Modern American Drama. June Schlueter, ed. Rutherford,
NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1989. (5966)
Balakian, Janet N. Beyond the Male Locker Room: Death of a Salesman from a
Feminist Approach in Approaches to Teaching Millers Death of a Salesman.
Matthew Roudan, ed. New York: Modern Language Association, 1995. (115124)
Ben-Zvi, Linda. Home Sweet Home: Deconstructing the Masculine Myth of
the Frontier in Modern American Drama in The Frontier Experience and the
American Drama. David Mogen, Mark Busby, and Paul Bryant, eds. College
Station: Texas A & M UP, 1989. (217225)
Bigsby, Christopher. Arthur Miller: A Critical Study. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005.
. Introduction in Death of a Salesman. Certain Private Conversations in Two Acts
and a Requiem. By Arthur Miller. New York: Viking, 2000. (viixxvii)
Billman, Carol. Women and the Family in American Drama in Arizona Quarterly
36 (1980): 3549.
Bliquez, Guerin. Lindas Role in Death of a Salesman in Modern Drama 10 (1968):
383386.
Canning, Charlotte. Is This Play about Woman? A Feminist Reading of Death of a
Salesman in The Achievement of Arthur Miller: New Essays. Steven R. Centola,
ed. Dallas: Contemporary Research P, 1995. (6976)
Couchman, Gordon W. Arthur Millers Tragedy of Babbitt in The Merrill Studies
on Death of a Salesman. Walter J. Meserve, comp. Columbus, OH: Charles E.
Merrill, 1972. (6875)
Harshbarger, Karl. The Burning Jungle: An Analysis of Arthur Millers Death of a
Salesman. Washington, DC: UP of America, 1979.
Hayman, Ronald. Arthur Miller. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1972.
Hume, Beverly. Linda Loman as The Woman in Millers Death of a Salesman in
NMAL: Notes on Modern American Literature 9.3 (1985), item 4.
Koenig, Rhoda. Seduced by Salesmans Patter in London Sunday Times, October
20, 1996. 10.4.
Kullman, Colby H. Death of a Salesman at Fifty: An Interview with Arthur Miller in
Michigan Quarterly Review (A Special Issue: Arthur Miller) 37 (1998): 817827.
Mason, Jeffrey D. Paper Dolls: Melodrama and Sexual Politics in Arthur Millers
Early Plays in Feminist Rereadings of Modern American Drama. June Schlueter,
ed. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1989. (103115)
McDonough, Carla J. Staging Masculinity: Male Identity in Contemporary American
Drama. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1997.
Miller, Arthur. Conversations with Arthur Miller. Matthew C. Roudan, ed. Jackson:
UP of Mississippi, 1987.
. Death of a Salesman: Certain Private Conversations in Two Acts and a Requiem.
With an introduction by Christopher Bigsby. New York: Viking, 2000.
. Responses to an Audience Question and Answer Session in Michigan Quarterly
Review (A Special Issue: Arthur Miller) 37 (1998): 817827.
. Salesman in Beijing. New York: Viking, 1984.
. The Theater Essays of Arthur Miller. Rev. ed. Robert A. Martin and Steven R.
Centola, eds. New York: Da Capo, 1996.
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Terry Otten
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L. Bailey McDaniel
and some of his most famous plays safely place him within the broader
context of the leftist ideologies that critique dehumanizing hegemonies
hegemonies often common to Western, capitalist, and often imperialist
cultural paradigms.2 Gayle Rubins criticism of Marxist thought and activism during the anti-war 1970s, specifically Marxisms inability to sufficiently address gender inequality and its role in economic oppression,
becomes relevant in a broader discussion of Miller and Willy Lomans
dilemma. The plays condemnation of the oppression and inequality
intrinsic to the Western, materialistic, free market culture of a so-called
American Dream, one that places the individual and material accumulation over societal concerns and equality, is central here. As most critics
easily agree, capitalist models of greed and externally validating materialism are under attack in Millers play. (For example, in addition to Willys
downward progression, we learn of a successful Ben who makes his
fortune by depleting Alaskan natural resources and occupying a neocolonial presence in African diamond mines.) Yet Millers treatise on the menace of Western greed and the esteem of the self-interested individual over
society also proves an interesting test case to explore womens agency as
it does (not) reside within broader critiques of hegemony.
Generated out of second-wave feminism, Rubins The Traffic in
Women: Notes on the Political Economy of Sex (1975) offers, among
other things, the contention that women exist as objects of exchange, and,
further, as a culturally constructed institution, heterosexual marriage frequently facilitates this paradigm. As an anthropologist, feminist critic, and
queer theorist, Rubin has since updated, problematized, and augmented
her claims significantly. But her initial exploration of womens function
as commodity, not to mention the (im)possibility of agency via their role
as wife-mother subjects in and out of the private domain, retains significance when we consider the vast number of canonical texts, such as Death
of a Salesman, which construct women in what appear to be powerless
rolesdramatic constructs existing merely for the support of more threedimensional, complex male protagonists. That Arthur Millers Cold War
family drama is still conceived by many scholars as an ultimately human,
universal, and cross-culturally relevant textone that meets with the continued commercial as well as critical success that characterized it from its
initial 1949 productionwould seem to make its constructions of gender,
family, and individual power all the more relevant.
Heralded as one of the more successful examples of mid-century
dramatic realism that a still-emerging American drama had produced,
Domestic Tragedies
23
Willy Lomans demise as a victim of capitalism was nearly unanimously received as a triumph, specifically as a powerful hybrid of
dramatic realism.3 Millers predecessor and inspiration, Henrik Ibsen,
parallels the former beyond the theme of using drama-as-critique of
societys dehumanizing ills. Undoubtedly, the late nineteenth-century
dramatic realism Ibsen is credited as establishingrealism of set, dialogue, character, and plotin large part describes Millers canon as
well. And since Death of a Salesman was and is so stubbornly treated
by critics as a truthful, if not universal, narrative of (1) family drama,
(2) problematic articulations of personal success, and (3) the search
for/attempt to define a so-called American Dream, it provides a
uniquely rich sample to scrutinize in terms of its constructions of gender within and without paradigms of the Western nuclear family.
How does the so-called Woman Question get answered in the
(arguably) tragic realism besetting the Lomans? In the world created by
the playwright and within this particular play, one touted repeatedly for
its universal properties,4 women fit into narratives of personal fulfillment and American success as some version of either selfless nurturer
or sexual objecta gendered binary with no complications offered.
And in regard to the role of wife-mother, as with Linda Loman, a womans responsibilities and any varying potential for success reflect
masculinized and patriarchal models of rewards.
To some degree, Linda does problematize the mid-century trope of
the altruistic middle-class wife-mother construct, one which places
motherhood as paramount, even with regard to marriage. Yet despite prioritizing her husbands needs over those of her children, a noteworthy
deviation from the more typical maternal patterns to be sure, her sacrifice of her childrens interests to serve her husbands does not make her
an anomaly; she still surfaces as a two-dimensional pseudomasochist
who rarely if ever acts out of any interest that does not benefit Willy first
and foremost. The only other significant female character, the nameless Woman who receives Willys infamous gift of stockings, also occupies a role based exclusively on her function as (sexual) object and one
who provides service/assistance to the plays male protagonist. How is
the American Dream defined for women such as Linda Loman, or, for
that matter, Happys conquest, Miss Forsythe? As the protagonist and
arguably tragic hero of the text, does Willy Loman (including the man,
his fall, and his importance to Millers message) rely on the consistent powerlessness of the plays female characters; or is the construct of
24
L. Bailey McDaniel
Domestic Tragedies
25
Looking at the more recent critical reception of Millers play, especially in context with other productions by other playwrights who are
credited as speaking universally for American family drama, suggests
that not a lot has changed. A frequent dramatic comparison to Millers
Death of a Salesman, Marsha Normans night, Mother (1983) centers
around the realistic portrayal of a life unfulfilled, an American family (in
this case a mother and a daughter rather than a father and his two sons),
and the eventual suicide of the plays protagonist. Part of the reason
why the play night, Mother falls short of the post second-wave feminist success story that some would label it has to do with many of the
reviewers discussions of the original Broadway cast, specifically Kathy
Bates as daughter Jessie. As Jill Dolan points out, a disturbing pattern
transpired in which the male critics responses to Jessie were based
almost uniformly on her physical appearance onstage, which substantially altered their reception of the play; consequently, by collaps[ing]
performer Kathy Bates appearance into the characters, these critics
proceeded to construct their own list of reasons for why Jessie decided
to commit suicide, and always foremost among these reasons was the
actors/characters weight (30). Rather than explain Jessies suicide
as a result of a patriarchal, oppressive culture that disallows her any
authentic fulfillment, critics such as John Simon and even a review in
Ms. Magazine cited Jessies suicide as a product of her body size. This
shortsightedness on behalf of New York critics becomes important when
we further contextualize it with the 1984 revival of Death of a Salesman.
One year after Normans play opened, a successful Broadway production of Death of a Salesman was revived on Broadway and met with
mostly positive critical praise. As is often the case, focusing on salesman Willy Loman and the strained relationship he shares with his two
sons, most critics hailed Millers drama as a classic American domestic
or family drama. Dolan importantly notes how Millers protagonist was
being played by Dustin Hoffman just down the street from Normans
production. Hoffman, falling short of the physical model set by Lee J.
Cobbs sizeable Willy in the original 1949 performance, was not collapsed into the character because of his marked physical appearance.
Dolan writes, Since the culture is not as prescriptive about how men
should look in certain social or performance roles, Willy Loman cannot
be considered a failure because he is short or heavy set. The man matters more than the body. This is the opposite of the reception to Kathy
Bates in the role of Jessie (3233). Furthermore, while Jessie Cates and
26
L. Bailey McDaniel
Willy Loman tell stories centered around family life (stories of the individual denied the promise of the mythic American Dream) and while
both resort to suicide as a final effort to shape their lives, Death of a
Salesman is coded as classic American drama, while night, Mother is
usually relegated to a separate womens sphere (Dolan 3133).
Among other things, Miller contends in The Family in Modern
Drama that great drama services the interrogation of one single and
all-important question: how a man might make a home of the outside
world. Or as Irving Jacobson points out in his discussion of Millers above
treatise, the playwright needs to ask, How may a man make of the outside
world a home? (Miller, qtd. in Jacobson 2). Jacobson continues, What
does he need to do, to change within himself or in the external world,
if he is to find the safety, the surroundings of love, the ease of soul, the
sense of identity and honor which, evidently, all men have connected in
their memories with the idea of family? (Jacobson 23). The centrality
of home and sanguineous family, not to mention the predominance of a
males search for safety, and the surroundings of love are what seem
crucial here. Both maternally-coded, safety and surroundings of love
surface as a kind of ultimate duty on Lindas part throughout the entire
play. Even with regard to her all-important role as mother, surely one of
the most primally-coded duties to be possessed by any woman in pre-second wave 1949, Linda is represented as a mother who, without hesitation,
puts the needs of her husband before her sons and always before her own.
She can function as a bad mother without earning the audiences wrath but
only as a result of her hypernurturance toward Willy.
During a rare moment of anger and passion, as Linda recounts a
situation of unpaid bills, failing appliances, and Willys illusions, she
still manages to conclude her tirade toward Biff in complete defense
of Willy while being conspicuously critical (if not hostile) toward
her sons. Describing Biff as ungrateful and Happy as a philandering
bum, she concludes her tirade not with any disparagement of Willy as
an inadequate breadwinner but a passionate defense of her husband as
a wronged, valiant victim of many, including her sons: You see what
Im sitting here and waiting for? And you tell me he has no character?
(57). Tellingly, before the plays conclusion and Willys suicide, Linda
even encourages her own offspring to break all contact with the family in order to, at best, help preserve Willys quickly dwindling peace
of mind, or, at worst, help him sustain his delusions. This defiance of
an often naturalized maternal duty is peculiar in its resistance to the
Domestic Tragedies
27
28
L. Bailey McDaniel
We might speculate that a stern wake up call from an otherwise supportive wife might have shocked Willy Loman into a state that resembles
reality. But Lindas unyielding relief comes in the form of selfless sycophancy and never in the anomalous honesty or tough love that some
audience members discern in a character such as Charley. Finally, even
the potential wisdom that she might or might not espouse during her
concluding, semi-analytical speech in the Requiem has only to do with
Willy and his life, his mistakes, and his ill-gotten dreams for the future.
Any interior life or complexity on Lindas part, aside from her remorse
and her loss, remains a non-issue for the audience and for the reader.
It might be tempting to disregard Lindas apparent insignificance as
a sad-but-inevitable result of increasingly traditional and inflexible
Domestic Tragedies
29
30
L. Bailey McDaniel
Domestic Tragedies
31
conflicted character. Yet when Happy denounces and mocks the women
he has known sexually, he is a less important and less complex character
who, as an anti-feminist presence, merely portrays, if not supports, an
unquestioned status quo.
Gayle Rubins work toward providing methodological frameworks
for feminism and, later, queer studies shaped the emergence of both
fields of study. Although her earlier, second-wave-infused inquiry and
arguments regarding women, family, and commodification have since
been expanded and complicated by many, including Rubin herself, the
paradigms of powerlessness that she initially interrogated certainly
remain stubbornly current in reality and in the countless dramatic texts
and productions aiming to represent them. In 1994, Rubin told Judith
Butler that one could only go so far within a Marxist paradigm and
that while it was useful, it had limitations with regard to gender and
sex (63). While most would agree that Miller disparages free market capitalism and the dehumanization symptomatic of imperialism
throughout Willy Lomans flight toward destruction, the sexism and
patriarchy that also go hand-in-hand with these hegemonic paradigms
still manage to, for the most part, cruise somewhere under the radar.
L. Bailey McDaniel
University of HoustonDowntown
Notes
1
L. Bailey McDaniel
32
4
Since its 1949 debut, Death of a Salesman continues to be one of the most consistently revived dramatic texts to emerge from the American stage. Cited by some
as the most frequently, internationally produced American drama (along with Millers
The Crucible), recent major productions have been staged in China, Finland, and Iran,
further attesting to the plays so-called power to speak universally and cross-culturally
for the tragedy of the common man.
5
Among the ample criticism to engage this question, see, for example, Millers
often cited Tragedy and the Common Man (1949), Harold Blooms Arthur Miller
and Death of a Salesman (1988) and Terry Ottens The Temptation of Innocence in
the Dramas of Arthur Miller (2002).
Bibliography
Bigsby, C.W.E. Modern American Drama, 19452000. Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
2000.
Bliquez, Guerin. Lindas Role in Death of a Salesman in Modern Drama 10
(Fall 1968): 383386.
Bloom, Harold. Arthur Miller and Death of a Salesman. New York: Chelsea House,
1988.
Dolan, Jill. The Feminist Spectator as Critic. Ann Arbor: UMI Research P, 1988.
Jacobson, Irving. Family Dreams in Death of a Salesman in American Literature
47.2 (May 1975): 247259.
Kerrane, Kevin. Arthur Miller vs. Columbia Pictures: The Strange Case of Career of
a Salesman in Journal of American Culture 3.27 (2004): 280289.
Knowles, Ric. Reading the Material Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004.
Miller, Arthur. Are You Now or Were You Ever? in The Guardian/ The Observer
(online). Sat., June 17, 2000. <http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~alreis/50s/millermccarthyism.html. 1 Dec 2005>.
. Death of a Salesman: Certain Private Conversations in Two Acts and a Requiem.
New York: Penguin, 1977.
. The Family in Modern Drama in Atlantic Monthly (April 1956): 3637.
. Timebends. New York: Grove P, 1987.
. Tragedy and the Common Man in The Theatre Essays of Arthur Miller. Robert
A. Martin, ed. New York: Viking, 1978. (37)
Nilsen, Helge Normann. From Honors at Dawn to Death of a Salesman: Marxism
and the Early Plays of Arthur Miller in English Studies: A Journal of the English
Language and Literature 75.2 (1994): 146156.
Otten, Terry. The Temptation of Innocence in the Drama of Arthur Miller. Columbia:
U of Missouri P, 2002.
Rubin, Gayle. The Trafc in Women: Notes on the Political Economy of Sex
in Toward an Anthropology of Women. Raya R. Reiter, ed. New York: Monthly
Review P, 1975. (157210)
. Interview with Judith Butler: Sexual Trafc in Differences: A Journal of
Feminist Cultural Studies 6.23 (Summer/Fall 1994): 6299.
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Steven Centola
35
stories, and essays, but also of his lifetime work to free dissident writers
abroad and champion the human rights of the oppressed at home. For
Arthur Miller, art was always deeply connected to life. Art, he believed,
not only derives from life experience, but it must also respond to life
and improve the conditions of life and living for humanity. For this
reason, Miller frequently described all great drama as inherently social
in nature. Like Miller, Edward Albee acknowledges the necessity for
important art to be socially relevant, and he identifies this shared conviction with Miller as the basis for his celebration of Millers achievement as a writer: Arthur Miller understands that serious writing is a
social act as well as an aesthetic one, that political involvement comes
with the territory. . . . His plays and his conscience are a cold burning
force (qtd. in Bigsby, Company 1). Indeed, the intertwined moral and
aesthetic imperative that inspired and animated Millers art resulted in
his creation of a body of work that speaks below the surface of the
overt drama with a resonance, a highly charged subtext and equally
rich cultural context, about the possibility and failure of America
America as a concept, an ideal, a cluster of myths and cultural stereotypes, a nation, a government and governance system, a people, a
character, and an impossible, forever elusive, but always inspiring,
dream. Millers critique and celebration of America underlies and
informs every facet of his dramas and places this great playwright in
a long procession of significant American writers who have responded
similarly to the challenge and the glory of this dream called America.
Driven by a belief in the conception of providential history, the earliest record-keepers of the search for a new order in the New World,
the Puritans, left a legacy that would strongly affect perspectives of
America for hundreds of years. These cultural custodians of the dream of
America strove to create a perfect moral order in the wilderness that confronted them. Undaunted by its contradictions and complexities, they
steadfastly pursued their dream of America as a New Eden, a New
Jerusalem, a City upon a Hill that promised the possibility of moral
perfection and personal redemption. Undeterred from promulgating
their own propaganda about the dream of America, these early wayfarers who chronicled and grappled with their own dark voyages into the
private corners of the human soul forged for posterity a vision of the
dream of America that would tantalize, beguile, frustrate, and inspire
writers for many years to come. In their own day, the Puritans vacillated between hope and despair, as their dream of spiritual salvation
36
Steven Centola
37
38
Steven Centola
culture, ideology, and geography, and that speaks to all people of all
societies and all ages. In essence, as Miller told me in an interview in
August 2001, the dream is a more-than-American Dream. Therefore,
in articulating this global view of the dream of America, Miller establishes an important correlation between the treatment of American
society in his drama and the development of thematic material that transcends the local and particular subject matter in his plays while speaking universally about issues affecting all of humanity. This is certainly
nothing new and is consistent with the achievement of all great writers:
the universal can only be achieved through the particular. However, this
explanation helps to clarify the fundamental significance of Millers
role as a social dramatist because it shows how he can ultimately examine the whole of societyand the worldthrough his focus on a particular familys, or a single individuals, conflict in his plays.
Of all the powerful drama Miller has created, it is Death of a
Salesman (1949) that most completely illustrates his remarkable ability
to comment on a timelessly and universally significant issue through
his isolation of, and concentration on, the crisis that occurs in a particular family in American society, and most notably the patriarch in that
family. And unquestionably this extraordinary achievement at least
partially accounts for this plays greatness. Critical discussions of this
play over the years have centered mostly on Millers handling of the
success myth. As Brenda Murphy and Susan Abbotson have pointed
out, While there has been some effort to defend Miller as an upholder
of the American Dream, most critics who have written on this subject
have attempted to explain Willys demise as a failure on his, and often
Millers part, to comprehend American history and values (Murphy 5).
Undeniably, Willy does indeed fail to understand the intricacy of the
workings of American history and the complexity and oftentimes
inherently contradictory aspects of American values. But the same
cannot be said of Miller. Over a span of more than sixty years, this
great playwright repeatedly demonstrated his incredible skill at interpreting and understanding American historical experience in his prose
nonfiction writings. From the start of his career until shortly before he
died, Miller used the essay form as a way of providing insightful commentary on the urgencies of social change affecting, and sometimes
transforming, not just American society, but also the world. In several
books of reportage, in his autobiography, Timebends (1987), in his collected Theater Essays (1996), and in the more overtly political pieces
39
40
Steven Centola
41
42
Steven Centola
play. For example, audiences not familiar with the era of the Great
Depression might fail to immediately grasp the significance of Willys
references to 1928 as the year of his greatest professional success.
Some historical perspective would undoubtedly demonstrate how devastating were the consequences of the economic crisis that threatened to
topple the entire society during this time period. In fact, new audiences
might greatly benefit from knowing that, in his essays and interviews,
Miller repeatedly points out how the Great Depression shaped his artistic vision and permanently affected his understanding of the intersection
between public and private acts of betrayal and cruelty. The social crisis
had a powerful impact on the family, and no one in American society at
that time could escape that predicament. 1928, therefore, the year before
the stock market crash, has special meaning inside Willys unreliable
memory because it serves for him as a vivid reminder of a time when
he still enjoyed the love and respect of his family and did not have to
deal with the intense financial hardship he all but certainly faced, along
with the rest of American society, during the Great Depression.
Equally significant in this drama is the periodic allusion to a time
when greater harmony existed in society, the family, and the workplace. This idyllic past is associated with an agrarian world view, one
resplendent with open vistas and endless possibilities, and this highly
romantic, perhaps even navely idealistic, view of an America removed
from the competition, commercialization, and dehumanization associated with the present action in the play stands in stark contrast to both
Millers formative experiences during the Great Depression and the
post World-War II time period in which the play is written and produced.
The conflation of these conflicting representations of Americathe
place, the society, the values as well as the promises and failings
imbues the play with tremendous ambiguity, which Roudan says
creates the plays multivalent textures that foster multivocal cultural
attitudes from teachers and students alike, who, in open and energetic
class discussions, can test the cultural essentialism implicit in a traditional reading of the play (23).
Likewise, the hegemony inherent both in the Loman family and the
society upon which the characters are based is also a subject that warrants critical examination and intense deconstruction. The patriarchal
order so prevalent at any age of the American historical progression
even finds itself almost directly deposed in the unorthodox and highly
innovative interpretations of the character of Linda Loman by actresses
43
44
Steven Centola
45
Miller has always recognized and accepted the need for the artist to
oppose and confound the sources of cruel and impersonal power that
threaten to destroy democracy in American society, and he has done
so even at his own personal risk and at the possibility of placing his
career and reputation in jeopardy. He risked imprisonment and alienation from his society when he courageously defied the directive from
the House Un-American Activities Committee to turn informant against
others, and he repeatedly placed his own liberty and life in danger by
working tirelessly to free dissident writers from imprisonment in foreign
countries that act without respect for the basic freedoms that the playwright so highly prized and associated with the best that is America.
His politics almost certainly cost him the Nobel Prize early in his
career and undeniably had a negative impact on the critical reception
his plays have received at various times in this country. Yet, despite
the undeniable injury his career would sustain as a result of his political activism and personal crusades, Miller never swerved from his
heartfelt conviction that to maintain his honor, he had to acknowledge
his personal responsibility for others and choose never to commit
[himself] to anything [he] did not consider somehow useful in living
ones life (Timebends 547). In his art, this form of social commitment
resulted in his deciding that writing had to try to save America. . .
(Timebends 547).
This custodian of the dream that is Americaa dream that Miller
quotes Archibald MacLeish as saying was promises (Timebends
114)possesses the moral strenuousness and strength, as Malcolm
Bradbury puts it, that are necessary to create a theatre of self-questioning democratic dissent (qtd. in Company 186). With his habitual
dedication to justice, mercy, dignity, and truth, writes Joseph Heller,
Miller puts his integrity and uncontrived ethical sensibility into his
plays, and thereby creates stage art that is unsurpassed in our lifetime (qtd. in Company 3). For this reason, Arthur Miller stands tall in the
procession of great American writers who have wrestled with the shifting and oftentimes contradictory meaning and reality of the American
experience. In a letter to the playwright in honor of his seventy-fifth
birthday, another important writer of the last century, Ralph Ellison,
writes one of the most eloquent and astute commentaries about Millers
artistic achievement. Ellison writes: through your art you affirm the
democratic vision by redeeming and making visible the marvelous
diversity of the human condition. And by giving voice to the voiceless
46
Steven Centola
you provide perception to all those who have the heart and courage to
see. In other words, youve been an eloquent explorer of Americas turbulent and ever-shifting social hierarchy, and by reducing its chaos to
artistic form youve given us a crucial gift of national self-consciousness
(qtd. in Company 1). This writer who has been characterized as the
conscience of a nation, of a historical time period, even of the entire
human race, has repeatedly given audiences of his drama a vision of
hope and possibility that is the true legacy of the dream, the promise,
the idea that is America. That extraordinary achievement is, indeed, the
lasting legacy of Arthur Miller: guardian of the dream of America.
Steven Centola
Millersville University
Bibliography
Bigsby, Christopher. Arthur Miller and Company. London: Methuen, 1990.
. Modern American Drama, 19451990. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992.
Martin, Robert A. Introduction to the Original Edition in The Theater Essays of
Arthur Miller. Robert A. Martin and Steven R. Centola, eds. 1978. Rev. ed. New
York: Da Capo P, 1996. (xixxliii)
Miller, Arthur. Echoes Down the Corridor. New York: Viking Penguin, 2000.
. Looking for a Conscience in The New York Times. February 23, 2003, Section 2:
1, 13.
. 1956 and All This in The Theater Essays of Arthur Miller. Robert A. Martin and
Steven R. Centola, eds. 1978. Rev. ed. New York: Da Capo P, 1996. (86109)
. The Shadows of the Gods in The Theater Essays of Arthur Miller. Robert A.
Martin and Steven R. Centola, eds. 1978. Rev. ed. New York: Da Capo P, 1996.
(175194)
. Timebends: A Life. New York: Grove P, 1987.
. What Were Looking for Is an Image of Ourselves: A Conversation with Arthur
Miller. Personal Interview. August 9, 2005.
Understanding Death of a Salesman. Brenda Murphy and Susan C. W. Abbotson, eds.
Westport, CT: Greenwood P, 1999.
Approaches to Teaching Millers Death of a Salesman. Matthew Roudan, ed. New
York: The Modern Language Association of America, 1995.
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Michelle Nass
49
important for students to find their own truths in what they read, I encourage their spontaneous reactions to the play. Reading densely constructed
plays like Millers Death of a Salesman can be a rewarding, fulfilling,
and cathartic experience for the prepared student, especially when one
considers the vast possibilities inherent in Millers drama. Commenting
on this aspect of Millers writing, Dr. Steven Centola writes: As Miller
recognizes, the possibilities inherent within the whole dramatic event are
limitless, for the fundamental indeterminacy of meaning . . . opens up the
possibility for rich[,] speculative[,] and imaginative discovery and generates endless opportunities for creative and diverse interpretations (64).
Through their direct engagement with Millers play, my students formulate their own personal interpretations and confront the possibilities that
Miller shows them in their world.
In order to achieve this outcome, however, the students have to experience some level of preparation for their initial encounter with Millers
play. We began our discussion by drawing from their experiences and
prior knowledge to establish the schema in which their reading would
fit. I asked them to consider their dreams and then the larger concept
of the American Dream. Immediately, a theme began to emerge. All four
students agreed that the American Dream is, as Alex put it, success . . .
[defined by] money, fame, and sex appeal. Jess added that the American
Dream also means the attainment of a second level of achievement: a
contentment that derives from the recognition that you, your spouse,
and your kids are accepted by the surrounding society. Amanda noted
that success, recognition, and acceptance come, in todays version of the
American Dream, without the hard work that was evident in the traditional dream from a past America. Though they were largely negative
about the possibility of ever truly attaining the traditional version of the
American Dream and the ability of the majority of Americans to ever
experience it, they were hopeful that they could enjoy their individual
dreams, which they believed differed widely from what they saw as the
accepted norm. What their dreams had in common was a hope that they
could in some meaningful way reach a level of happiness in their lives.
Some wished to find happiness in a spiritual realm while others wanted
to leave their mark on the world or exert a positive change on the lives of
others. They all expressed the same basic aspiration, which Jake articulated by saying: in the end, as long as I am satisfied with my life, I will
have attained my dream. Interestingly, my students comments echo
the results of a poll conducted by the Job Shadow Coalition and Harris
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Michelle Nass
Given the separation between the public and private conceptions of the
American Dream, it is not surprising to hear Powell, in his allusion
to Langston Hughess Dream Deferred, say: for too many young
Americans, that dream deferred does sag like a heavy load thats pushing them down into the ground, and they wonder if they can rise up
with that load . . . It does explode, and it has the potential to explode
our society. Perhaps the frustration that Powell describes results from
societys advancing and pushing the wrong kind of dream on a youth
that is already swamped by an overload of information and choices.
This challenge to the conventional notion of the American Dream
seems to be exactly what Miller explores in his play.
Todays students feel justifiably overwhelmed by the exaggerated
importance of an impossible dream and easily identify with the tragic
journey of Willy Loman and his sons in their almost mythical quest
for the elusive perfection and fulfillment associated with the unobtainable dream. In a close, guided reading of the play, the students can see
in Millers writing a more reachable, more meaningful dream, which
essentially helps to show Miller as the guardian of a dream that seems
to linger just beyond the history of Americas search for only wealth
and material success.
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52
Michelle Nass
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Michelle Nass
Living with such illusions about the American experience is, to many
American students, no longer acceptable. They simply dont see one viable path to the attainment of success, and even seem to abhor the idea of
having one prescribed view of success. Jess explained their position by
saying: In Death of a Salesman, its all different dreams: Biffs dream is
different from Happys dream, and both of theirs are different from Willys
dream. I dont think that Willy gets it. Biffs dream is to own a ranch, but
I dont think that Willy understands that Biff is trying to be what his father
wants him to be. But what Willy does get is that he needs to fight to
maintain his vision of himself in a world that threatens to deny that possibility. In this regard, then, his fight is designed to hold on to a reality that
is quickly slipping away. But he also fights for his children to be proud
of him, and he fights to convince them of the significance of the legacy
that he desperately wants to leave them. Willy says: No, Ben! Please tell
about Dad. I want my boys to hear. I want them to know the kind of stock
they spring from (48). Willy fights for respect in a career to which he
has devoted his life. His persistence is evident as he appeals to Howard
by saying: God knows, Howard, I never asked a favor of any man. But I
was with the firm when your father used to carry you in here in his arms
(80). As the conversation continues, it becomes clear that Willys fight for
respect develops into more than that; it becomes a fight for dignity. His
self-worth and self-image are irrevocably tied to his career. This is obvious as Willy angrily exclaims: You cant eat the orange and throw the
peel awaya man is not a piece of fruit! (82).
55
Willys fight reaches beyond himself and his family, and essentially becomes a larger, more communal struggle to revive the pastoral
dream of an America that is fading into the sunset. This fight becomes
a battle for the preservation of his version of the American Dream. He
fights for recognition, for attention, for respect, for dignity, for love,
and for immortality. Willy struggles to rebuild the dream that is no
longer available to his children. He longs to pass on a tradition that he
believes will offer them hope for the future.
Willys fight for the dream and for his children struck a definite
chord with my students. They recognized the unfairness of Willys
situation. Amanda said that Willys dream as a younger person was to
be successful, and he had the connections to do it, but as he got older,
things changed; his dream kind of shifted from knowing he wanted
to be successful to recognizing that that just isnt quite going to happen. Willy probably intuitively recognizes that success is not the true
end of his dream, but a lifetime of cultural conditioning blinds him to
other possibilities. The students, however, saw his situation with striking clarity. Their reading of his dilemma saw the inherent nobility, to
use Millers own terminology, in Willys struggle:
These lies and evasions of his are his little swords with which he wards off
the devils around him. But his activist nature is what leads mankind to progress, doesnt it? It can create disaster, to be sure, but progress also. People who
are able to accept their frustrated lives do not change conditions, do they? So
my point is that you must look behind his ludicrousness to what he is actually
confronting, and that is as serious a business as anyone can imagine. There is
a nobility, in fact, in Willys struggle. Maybe it comes from his refusal ever to
relent, to give up. (Miller, Salesman in Beijing 392)
However noble Willys fight may be, it is still a losing battle. But
there is hope. As in all of Millers plays, his characters live in a world
of choices. All of the characters in Salesman are faced with choices
that they have the free will to make. Just as Miller presents his characters with these choices, he does the same for his readers. In his plays,
Miller offers them diverse views on the dream and on ways to live, and
thus he reminds the readers that they, too, live in a world of choices.
Students identify with Biff and Happy because they, too, find themselves perplexed at the crossroad of choice that inevitably confronts
them. They, like Willy, feel torn between the burden of the past and
the promise of the future, and feel undecided about which path to take.
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Michelle Nass
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Michelle Nass
We all agreed that, by the plays conclusion, Willy is, indeed, the candleshedding light on the individual characters as they take their individual paths to their respective dreams. Happy will continue to chase
his fathers faulty and misguided dream of success, but Biff states to
his brother, I know who I am, kid (138). Although it is impossible for
Arthur Millers audiences to discern with any degree of surety, Biff might
begin to live a more truthful life as he faces with uncertainty, but also
with hope, the choices and possibilities awaiting him in the future. As
Linda reminds him as the play closes, Were free . . . Were free (139).
Arthur Miller, in Death of a Salesman, does not present a play that
negates the American Dream for which so many immigrants have
come to America and that so many continually strive to achieve. His
drama merely illuminates the dream with a clearer and more penetrating light. Perhaps, as future generations continue to discuss Millers
thought-inspiring drama, they will find themselves free of the illusions and cultural stereotypes of the past. Perhaps, as they navigate the
choices and paths that lie in front of them, they will try to hold on to
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the truth of who they truly are, just as Biff discovers he must do at the
end of Act II of the play and also in the Requiem. Ultimately, my students were able to realize that as they explored the text of Death of a
Salesman, the American Dream is actually what we find inside of us,
and the challenge is to learn how to use this knowledge wisely.
Michelle Nass
Kutztown University
Twin Valley High School
Bibliography
Cardo, Amanda. Personal Interview. 10 June 2005, 13 June 2005, 20 June 2005, 24
June 2005, and 27 June 2005.
Centola, Steven. Arthur Miller and the Art of the Possible in American Drama 14.1
(Winter 2005): 6386.
Cruz, Alex. Personal Interview. 10 June 2005, 13 June 2005, 20 June 2005, 24 June
2005, and 27 June 2005.
Gibbs, Nancy. Being Thirteen in Time 8 Aug. 2005, 5 Mar. 2006. <http://www.time.
com/time/archive/preview/0,10987,1088663,00.html>.
Grossman, Lev. Meet the Twixters in Time 16 Jan. 2005, 5 Mar. 2006. <http://www.
time.com/time/archive/printout/0x23657,1018089,00.html>.
Herb, Jake. Personal Interview. 10 June 2005, 13 June 2005, 20 June 2005, 24 June
2005, and 27 June 2005.
Lightcap, Jessica. Personal Interview. 10 June 2005, 13 June 2005, 20 June 2005, 24
June 2005, and 27 June 2005.
Miller, Arthur. Death of a Salesman: Certain Private Conversations in Two Acts and a
Requiem. New York: Penguin, 1977.
. Salesman in Beijing. New York: Viking, 1984.
Powell, Colin. The Presidents Summit for Americas FutureMondays Remarks.
The Presidents Summit for Americas Future. Office of the Press Secretary.
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. 28 Apr. 1997.
Teens Believe in the American Dream in Leadership for Student Activities. Apr.
2005: 39. Proquest. Twin Valley High School Library. 5 Mar. 2005. <http://proquest.umi.com>.
It would be a task well beyond the scope of the present piece to consider at length whether Arthur Miller is or is not against capitalism.
While it is true that he has never openly praised it, he has neither, with
the possible exception of his early Michigan plays,2 completely condemned it. Adhering to the popular view that Miller was always a
declared enemy of capitalism would amount to affirming that he never
moved beyond his youthful flirtation with Marxism, and he certainly
did, his insight gaining in complexity and losing in Manichaeism over
the years. He ended up feeling about it as he does about nearly everything else, that, as a human creation, it can be good or bad, depending
on who, where, how, and when. Death of a Salesman is a good example of such ambivalence.3 Devastating though capitalism might seem for
Willy Loman4 or his family, capitalism has given Charley and Bernard,
two good men from Willys same background, neighborhood, and social
class, considerable happiness, which they well deserve even though they
are, in Willys terminology, simply liked instead of well liked (33). If
a writer wishes to condemn a given system, he does not usually care to
show examples of nice, decent people living quite contentedly within
that system. We would like to demonstrate in this essay that although
Willy Loman seems destroyed by capitalism, in reality he is not. To
do that, we will consider the case of those two characters, Charley and
Bernardas well as that of Howard Wagner. We will examine how
these characters fare within the same capitalistic system that destroys
Willy Loman in order to better show that people can live and be happy
within it and that, using again Willy Lomans words, in the system,
some people accomplish something (15). In passing, we will also try
to expose the real causes of Willys destruction, only to further show
that capitalism is not among them. We do not mean that capitalism
contains no serious blemishes, that it is undeserving of criticism, or
that Miller himself neglects to criticize certain aspects of it, even in
62
such a play as Death of a Salesman. The point is, simply, that capitalisms police record does not include the murder of Willy Loman.
While it is true that the young Miller, while a student at Michigan,
felt considerable hostility towards capitalism and seemed convinced that
an alternative existed, in the form of Marxism, a very attractive ideology
for many young Americans in the 1930s, the more mature playwright
who managed to make his mark on Broadway with All My Sons and
many plays thereafter had already moved away from that early standpoint and was no longer a political pamphleteer: capitalism was neither
the absolute villain nor was Marxism that much of a savior, either. Any
reading of his insightful theoretical work immediately suggests that
he accepts or is resigned to capitalism as the best or least detrimental
system devised so far by humankind to regulate social and economic
relations. Even in All My Sons, Joe Keller is scolded not for owning
a factory but for being a selfish factory owner who failed to realize
until it was too late that all those whose lives were being jeopardized
by his fraudulent business practices were also his sons. This is already
the Miller who tells us what is wrong with capitalism but who does not
tell us all that is wrong with it, who argues in a word that a more ethical capitalism is possible, nave as some cynics would believe such a
position to be. For Miller, moneymaking is perfectly ethical (even as
part of that vague pursuit of happiness Americans were said by their
Declaration of Independence to be entitled to), but risking human lives
for it is certainly not. There is nothing wrong with being a salesman, but
old salesmen should have some kind of future to look forward to when
they get too old to go on selling. Howard tells Willy that the salesman
needs a rest (83), which is true, but perhaps Howards firm should pay
for this rest because it is working for such a firm that has exhausted
Willy. Old salesmen certainly should not have their salary taken away
and be left strictly on commission, or even have to go home carrying
two large sample cases, as we see Willy doing, with considerable difficulty, at the outset of the play (12). We could also detect a complaint of
mass production of poor quality items in the following speech by Willy:
Once in my life I would like to own something outright before its broken! Im
always in a race with the junkyard! I just finished paying for the car and its on its
last legs. The refrigerator consumes belts like a goddam maniac. They time those
things. They time them so when you finally paid for them, theyre used up. (73)
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64
During the card game, Willy becomes very upset with Charley
and starts insulting him repeatedly, calling him ignorant (42) and
an [i]gnoramus! (47) with no justification whatsoever and when
the insults should actually point in the opposite direction. Willy even
questions his neighbors manhood with a rude statement no guest ever
deserves, least of all kind Charley: A man who cant handle tools is
not a man. Youre disgusting (44).7 Willy brags about his talent as a
builder yet fails to realize that one will fail in the capitalist system if
one chooses the wrong profession, such as choosing sales over carpentry. Willy chooses manual work as the weapon to humiliate Charley
because he knows that it is one of the few areas in which he clearly
outdoes his neighbor and because he feels upset after failing, unlike
Charley, at the capitalist system.
Throughout the play, Willy suffers from a latent feeling of inferiority and envy regarding Charley, whose existence is portrayed by Miller
as balanced and harmonious (perhaps too much). The realistic Charley
is well aware that Willys inferiority complex has complicated their
relationship; at the end of their last conversationand once Willy has
rejected his job offerCharley insists that his neighbor has always
been jealous of him, a fact that Willy will not acknowledge, of course.
In fact, in one of his few open and honest conversations with Linda,
Willy even admits that Charley is a respected person, implying by juxtaposition that he himself is not.
In the highly consumerist society depicted in the play, there is probably no better manifestation of the envy Willy feels than when he bitterly complains to Linda that Charleys refrigerator has been working
fine for twenty years, while theirs keeps breaking down, even though
it is rather new and still being paid for on credit. This commodity from
everyday life metaphorically points at the existential gap that separates
both neighbors: while everything in Charleys life seems to be running
smoothly, nothing in Willys life is working any more; everything has
broken down and badly needs repairing. While Charley is at ease with
the capitalist society in which he lives, Willy cannot manage to find a
comfortable place in it.
In Arthur Miller: A Critical Study, Christopher Bigsby offers what
must arguably be the most negative interpretation of the character of
Charley, describing him as bland, limited, and prosaic.8 This critique
seems a rather severe view of an individual who is repeatedly represented
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66
67
68
69
Biff, and the several questions he asks Willy prove that after so many
years, he is sincerely concerned about the fate of his old friend.
With a character such as Bernardas opposed to HowardMiller
suggests that it was indeed possible to attain success in a postwar
American capitalistic economy while remaining an honest human
being who was deeply concerned about the lives of those less fortunate. It is, in fact, Bernard who reveals to an eager Willy that there is
no real secret to success, although he also adds that Biff never trained
himself for anything (92), implying that in a highly competitive system such as capitalism, being popular or lucky does not amount to
much when unaccompanied by sacrifice and hard work.15
Despite his professional achievements, Bernard remains humble;
for instance, in his conversation with Willy, he omits the impressive fact
that he will travel to Washington, D.C. to present a case before the
Supreme Court, unarguably the highest reward to which any American
lawyer can aspire; he even humbly protests when his father proudly
brings up the subject.16 When Willy expresses his surprise that Bernard
has declined to say anything about his forthcoming case before the
Supreme Court, Charleys reply functions as a simple but irrefutable
rebuttal to all of the boasting and pomposity that characterizes life in
the Loman household: He dont have tohes gonna do it (95). At
the same time, Bernards modesty is also used by Miller to magnify the
pitiful nonsense that initiates this conversation between the neighbors:
Willy is still lying about Biffs supposedly brilliant and promising job
opportunities.
But it is neither through Charley nor Bernard that Arthur Miller offers
his crudest view of capitalism; Howard Wagner stands in marked contrast to them as the only scene in which he appears forcefully demonstrates. It is Howard who utters in Death of a Salesman the ultimate
credo of capitalism, a tautological statement that requires no further
explanation: business is business (80); with these words he lets Willy
know that, whenever economic interests are at stake, no other considerations should be taken into account.17
As a young man of 36, Howard belongs to a new generation that
embodies an innovative way of doing business, the dawn of a new economic era after the Second World War in which the United States was
soon to emerge as a world superpower. In this new age, there is hardly
time to waste with empty sentimental expressions or with personal
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71
begging for help and understanding. At the same time, the fact that he
can be so moved by listening to the taped voices of his children further
complicates the character of Howard,20 who is not simply depicted by
Miller as a brutally dehumanized individual; at the same time, however, the fact that he can get so emotional about his own family also
serves to underscore his lack of sensitivity when dealing with a desperate old man such as Willy. One final detail which also differentiates
Howard from both Charley and Bernard is thatas Bernard Dukore
points outWillys employer is not present at the funeral (29). This
absence serves as the very last piece of evidence in the play that under
the new form of capitalist activity endorsed by the young Howard
Wagner, the personal and the professional have no relation whatsoever.
Beyond the attack on such a selfish attitude as Howard Wagners,
the most powerful statement on capitalism contained in Death of a
Salesman concerns the vast alienation that the capitalist machinery
requires in order to run smoothly. We must deceive ourselves, should
not think too much, and, above all, should make do with an image of
ourselves that is not completely of our own making but rather that
has been impressed (or forced) upon us and is therefore slightly distorted in most cases. We must also tell ourselves that we need the very
things that others need to sell us. This does not cause much trouble for
most individuals. Sometimes we realize that we do not need all of the
things we nevertheless buy. Most of us realize that advertising does not
exactly brim with truths, but we still listen to it and act on its advice.
In other words, we are alienated and part of a show of deceit that goes
on all around us, but most of us can live with that and are even able to
see things for what they are worth. Charley and Bernard belong to this
group of people. There is, however, another way to cope with capitalism: to reject it altogether (at least to the extent that a rejection is
possible) and find alternative ways to reach happiness. That is exactly
what Biff and probably Happy21 as well would have done if only their
father had not been so successful (probably the only thing at which
Willy has been successful) in convincing them that there is nothing
outside, that one may not be happy if one does not abide by the terms
dictated by the capitalist society engulfing them all.
Concerning such alienation as living in the capitalist world implies,
there are often individuals who are incapable of telling the false from
the real. Willy actually has internalized the image of the successful follower of the American Dream, and, though from time to time he seems
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to see some truths, however dimly, he mostly tries to stay as far from
them as possible. He cannot conceive of the idea that well-advertised
machines might be worse than poorly-advertised ones, even though he
himself is in the sales profession. He has internalized all of the notions
with which America has always advertised itself and has accepted
them, yet Biff, in the Requiem, accusingly points to them as [a]ll, all,
wrong (138). Willy never questions an America that has never been,
for him, the land of success. But, sadly enough, Willy has not merely
become alienated but has significantly infected his sons with his alienation. Biff,22 for whom, in spite of it all, nothing is more inspiring
orbeautiful than the sight of a mare and a new colt (22), can envisage happiness outside the mainstream of a business-oriented America
and has actually headed west in search of it. But, on account of Willys
frantic insistence that this cannot be, Biff is ridden by a sense of frustration that he is not likely to have reached by himself.
The point in all of this is, however, that Willys attitude is by no
means common within capitalism. Concerning Charley, Willys counterpart in Death of a Salesman, Miller has stated in his Introduction to
his Collected Plays that the crucial difference between both men is
that Charley is not a fanatic. Equally, however, he has learned how to
live without that frenzy, that ecstasy of spirit which Willy chases to his
end (37). Charley would be a better representation of man under capitalism than Willy is, not because of his successful career but because of
his more detached way of assessing the reality that surrounds him.
We now want to examine the foundations of Willys hyperbolic
degree of alienation that makes him such a rare specimen. In our
view, Willy is so alienated because he has needed to counterbalance
his rebellious strains toward a simple, more pioneer-like kind of life.
In other words, he probably once had Biffs same inclinations but
then told himself so often that he should not have them that he ends
up becoming a mere caricature of what a salesman or a businessman
under capitalism actually is. He has been so afraid of falling short of
the mark that he has gone too far beyond it, and his alienation is such
that he can no longer find a way to get rid of it. He has so frantically
and repeatedly told himself that American business is great, afraid
as he is of those other leanings within himself, that he now lacks the
small distance necessary to live within the system and not be swallowed by it.
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Of the rebellious impulses that Willy tries to keep at bay by transforming into a fanatic of capitalist America, we have examples from the
very beginning of the play, such as when he claims to have been on the
brink of a fatal accident because he has decided to look at the natural
scenery. Oddly enough, for a salesman who should stick to the pursuit
of gain, Willy has never been a conventional salesman. Willy is passionate about manual work (evidenced by his efforts to keep his home
in decent condition), open-air living, and a self-reliant life in which one
produces what one needs without needing to buy or sell. Such passion
does not seem to fit the lifestyle he has chosen and will thus exact a
toll that Willy will pay by the end of the drama. The unusual inclinations evinced by his remark to his wife, But its so beautiful up there,
Linda, the trees are so thick, and the sun is warm. I opened the windshield and just let the warm air bathe over me, are counterbalanced by
Willys immediately sobering up into more appropriate salesmans talk:
Im the New England man. Im vital in New England (14). This pattern of alternative rebellion and its suppression continues throughout
the play. That has been in all likelihood the most usual manner in Willy
Lomans vital course. With each new lapse into his old ideals and leanings, Willys embrace of a capitalist ethos has been fiercer and fiercer,
the old Willy more and more chastised, with the protagonist living a
life that is little more than posturing. Every fleeting reappearance of his
old self only serves to make Willy a more wildly alienated man.
Although Death of a Salesman, after a superficial or cursory reading, would indeed look like a savage indictment of the system that
victimizes Willy Loman, the more one thinks about it, the less plausible does that initial reading seem granted by the text. It is true that
in a way, the system swallows Willy Loman, as the sharp focus on the
apartments surrounding the Lomanss place, symbolizing the modern
world, seems to suggest, but the system is not to blame for it. Willy is
on the brink of ruin. He is, moreover, exhausted but cannot take a day
off because he cannot afford it, besieged by bills that have to be paid.
But it is not capitalism that has placed him there but rather the fact,
put simply, that he is a bad salesman. We do not mean to suggest that
he is the kind of salesman that the new post-war American business
world needed. Those critics who hold this position23 seem to imply
that at least according to the standards of the old business practices,
Willy would be a good one. But he would not. Even in the old days, he
did not sell much; as Linda explains to Happy, in those old days,
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which were considerably less selfish, the old buyers . . . always found
some order to hand him in a pinch (57), which does not present Willy
as a first-rate salesman but rather as a man who fared just well enough
(often out of a certain pity on the part of customers) to get along. One
of the passages most often quoted by those who believe that the play
serves as an indictment of capitalism is the following:
Im talking about your father! There were promises made across this desk!
You mustnt tell me youve got people to seeI put thirty-four years into this
firm, Howard, and now I cant pay my insurance! You cant eat the orange and
throw the peel awaya man is not a piece of fruit! . . . Now pay attention.
Your fatherin 1928 I had a big year. I averaged a hundred and seventy dollars a week in commissions. (82)
But the statement that follows, Howards response, has often been
overlooked: Now, Willy, you never averaged. . . (82), a statement
interrupted by Willy, who does not want to be told how things truly
happened. Willys reaction clearly reinforces the view that he is not a
down-on-his-luck salesman but rather a man who never sold as much
as he should have, not even in the old days when things were different
and he was younger.
Both threads, that Willy suffers from an extreme form of alienation
and that he is not a good salesman, coalesce at this point. He is a bad
salesman24 in part because he must successfully convince himself that
he is a salesman, even though his talents lie elsewhere. The occasional
intrusions of Willys old self show that he has never fully embraced
his job with the conviction of someone such as Dave Singleman.
Otherwise, he would not say to Ben, shamefacedly: No, Ben, I dont
want you to think . . . Its Brooklyn, I know, but we hunt too . . .
theres snakes and rabbits . . . Biff can fell any one of those trees in no
time! . . . Were gonna rebuild the entire front stoop right now! Watch
this, Ben! (50). Unlike Singleman, Willy is a salesman who mocks
those in the professional world who are truly intent on selling or on
success because they (Charley and Bernard) cant hammer a nail!
(51) between the two of them. Actually, for Biff, there is more of Willy
in the front stoop, which he had made with his own hands, than in all
the sales he ever made (138).
Willy feels ashamed of his choices but actually dreams of being
something else, albeit never very clear what exactly, whether he is
thinking of becoming a travelling salesman who constructs his own
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Once they have finally settled down to talking business, they become
enthusiastic over the idea that it would not be like business at all! The
Lomans can never talk business in earnest because inadvertently the
other side creeps into their talk: freedom and open air. But compromise is not possible in this kind of world, and either one is completely
in it or completely out of it; one cannot be in the world of business and
every now and then take a day off to go swimming.
When Act One is about to finish and the Lomans are excited over the
prospect of Biff finally finding his path in business, Willys last sentence
76
is, Gee, look at the moon moving between the buildings! (69). It is
a striking combination of the happiness over their prospects of success
in business and the other impulse toward nature that will prevent such
prospects from ever materializing. It is such a natural inclination that
has prevented and will continue to prevent Biff from making headway in
business; as he tells Willy when they have their final encounter at home:
I ran down eleven flights with a pen in my hand today. And suddenly I
stopped, you hear me? And in the middle of that office building, do you hear
this? I stopped in the middle of that building and I sawthe sky. I saw the
things that I love in this world. The work and the food and time to sit and
smoke. And I looked at the pen and said to myself, what the hell am I grabbing
this for? Why am I trying to become what I dont want to be? What am I doing
in an office, making a contemptuous, begging fool of myself, when all I want
is out there, waiting for me the minute I say I know who I am! (132)
Curiously enough, Act Two, in which the characters feel great enthusiasm over Biffs future in business, initiates with Willys announcement
of his intention to buy seeds on his way back home that afternoon and
to start a farm! It seems that as soon as the Lomans believe that they
can achieve success in business, they are all ready to return guiltlessly
to the farm that they have never actually owned to begin with.
It could be argued that all of the above, while explaining Willys
frustration, does not explain his demise. In a different society, with
labor organized along different lines, a frustrated Willy would at least
have been able to look forward to a future in which he and his wife
could be free from starvation by a decent pension (whether from the
state or otherwise). That would have relieved him of the duty to fight
on until the very last of his days, which the play shows us. But even
with the hope of a future pension, let us not forget that Willy commits
suicide to set his son on the right track. Biff is, besides the salesmans
lack of skill in his profession, Willys other major problem, tormented
as the father is by his inability to get along with his beloved son.
Actually, Willy does not get along well with Happy, either, but this
strained relationship does not seem to trouble him so much because,
as seems obvious, he has always envisaged great possibilities only
for Biff but has been simultaneously afraid, consciously or not, that
he thwarted them all by the unfortunate episode in the Boston hotel.
Again, Willy here shows a divided mind, blaming himself for his
sons failure26 yet fighting hard against assuming such blame, which
explains why he has never apologized to his son or talked to him in
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he cannot walk away from a certain kind of life, yet he cannot stay
contentedly in it either.
Juan Ignacio Guijarro-Gonzlez and Ramn Espejo
University of Seville, Spain
Notes
1
The authors wish to express their gratitude to Matthew Roudan for his support
and generosity.
2
For an extended analysis of Millers dramatic works while at Michigan, see
Bigsby, 826, and Brater.
3
If Miller had been against capitalism, his plays would have clearly shown it. That
The Crucible is a condemnation of McCarthyism is explicit enough. That is, when
Miller is ambivalent, it tends to be because he has mixed feelings concerning something and not because he is afraid to betray what he actually thinks.
4
And it certainly was seen that way by those who boycotted the play in 1950
because of the attack on capitalism they thought it entailed (Griffin 5).
5
In a suggestive parallelism, Willy attacks Biff shortly afterwards, comparing him
to Charleys son, contending that Bernard is a mature young man who does not whistle in the elevator (61).
6
Of course, the most blatant manifestation of this habit is when Willy cheats on
his wife.
7
This comment has obvious sexual connotations, especially coming from an
adulterer like Willy. Later on, Willy insults Charley again before Biffs big game and
briefly for a third time during their final encounter, thus indicating the troubled nature
of Willys feelings for his neighbor.
8
Bigsby contends that Charley is so fully anchored in realism that he lacks Willys
capacity for dreaming and imagining (110, 113, 134).
9
The same can be said about the rest of his family, who do not seem to have any
friends at all. They are presented as social outcasts, even though they have been living
in the same place for many years. This loneliness underscores the strong claustrophobic component of the Loman family life.
10
It is worth pointing out that, even in his office, Charley speaks to Willy from a
personal and not a professional perspective, that is, as a friend and not as a prospective
employer. At the same time, Charleys behavior in this scene somewhat lessens his
tactlessness when mocking Willy about the Ebbets Field game in the previous scene.
11
A revealing detail often overlooked by critics is thatas usual in Millers masculine cosmologyno reference is ever made in the play to Bernards mother, who
has been symbolically erased from the neighborhood, thus depriving Linda of a chance
to mitigate her loneliness.
12
If, as Miller details in Timebends (120131), the Loman family is largely based
on relatives of the author, Bernard can also be understood as a projection of the playwright himself as a young man.
13
Actually, Willy also tells Charley to put up his hands and fight when the latter
makes fun of what is supposed to be Biffs greatest day (89).
14
Roudan notes the biting irony that in the biggest game of his life, Biff is the
leader of the New York City All-Scholastic Team (75, emphasis added).
79
The truth is that Biff did train himself for one thing: sports. Willys anguished
question to Bernard about the secret of achieving success can be read as analogous to
the one Charley asks him during their card game: To put up a ceiling is a mystery to
me. How do you do it? (44).
16
An additional sign of Bernards new social standing is thatalthough he still
wears glasseshe now plays sports, as opposed to when he was a rather clumsy boy.
Furthermore, the sport he now practices, tennis, is far more refined and gentlemanly
than either football or boxing, the two sports associated with the Loman brothers
throughout the play.
17
Howards motto echoes President Calvin Coolidges famous saying that The
business of America is business, a dictum that perfectly summarized the confidence
and optimism of the Roaring 1920s, a period abruptly brought to an end by the Great
Depression, an era that turned out to be crucial in Millers career.
18
In spite of this, when enacting the metaphorical killing of this paternal figure,
Howard repeatedly addresses Willy as kid (80), which in this context is not so much
a mark of familiarity as one of superiority and even disrespect. On the implications of
Howards decision, Roudan states that in a country where social security is more of a lie
of the mind than political fact, Willys being fired after working thirty-four years with the
firm annihilates Emersonian notions of self-reliance. Willy exists in a world that increasingly detaches itself from him, reminding him daily of his own insignificance (80).
19
However, we will go back to this quotation later and try to approach it from still
another angle.
20
Their different attitudes to fatherhoodand to life in generalcan be best summarized by the idea that, while Howard is proud of how much his children know,
Willy is proud of how popular his sons are.
21
Happy is a more conformist version of Biff, with many of the latters inclinations but too afraid to disappoint his father to act according to them. He is not happy
in his job, but he feels that he is closer than Biff to where his father would like his two
sons to be professionally. That is probably why he insists at his fathers funeral that
his dreams might still come true, but throughout the play, he often toys with the idea
of accompanying Biff to the latters Southwestern ranch utopia.
22
Happy has, however, also been infected by his fathers self-deceit. In that sense,
Happy and Biff have the same problem but have faced it in opposite ways. Biff does
(on the Texas ranch he is presently working at) what he likes, but he cannot enjoy his
job because he has always been told that such a life does not represent success. Happy
does what he has always been told is the right thing and thus is not happy with it
because he, like his brother, would have rather done something else.
23
We have often read that Willy acts on the assumption of an older form of capitalismaggressive, pioneer capitalismand thus fails to embrace a more sophisticated,
technological, big business version, which Bernard has fully grasped and for which
he has conscientiously prepared himself. Willys capitalism is untenable in the world in
which he lives. Probably in the days of the frontier, being well-liked would have been
sufficient to make a living. But in a growingly complex and dehumanized America, it
certainly is not. Not even a Dave Singleman, who died the true death of a salesman,
mourned over by hundreds of buyers and with a funeral clearly bespeaking the mans
popularity, and who never even had to walk out of his green velvet slippers (81) or out
of his hotel room to sell, would have been successful by the end of Willys career. But
still, after agreeing to all that, we are left with the fact that America is much less to blame
for having undergone a transformation than Willy is for having been unable to see it.
24
Even Willy, in one of his rare moments of self-awareness, acknowledges that
much: I dont know the reason for it, but they just pass me by. Im not noticed . . .
I gotta be at it ten, twelve hours a day. Other menI dont knowthey do it easier.
80
I dont know whyI cant stop myselfI talk too much. A man oughta come in with
a few words, adding right away that he jokes too much, that he looks ridiculously
pretentious, and that he has actually noticed that people have begun to laugh at him
behind his back (3637).
25
Another problem is that the West that Willy encountered would have been far
from that in American mythology. Actually, the West where Ben had to make his fortune was Alaska, which later turns out to have been Africa instead! So Bens West is
in fact an East that is not even American, all of it explained by, truly enough, Bens
very faulty view of geography (48).
26
Meanwhile, Willy overlooks the decisive part played by his completely mistaken
education of his sons in which he frequently recommends the fast lanes of capitalism,
cheers on Biff for how well he simonized their old car and stole balls from the locker
room or sand and lumber from a neighboring construction site, and laughs at Biffs
imitation of a teacher who found out and then failed him. All of this poor parenting
contributes to making Biff a kleptomaniac and Happy a dishonest man who enjoys
intruding upon other peoples marriages. Another problem with Willys education of
his sons, whose flaws reflect how imperfectly Willy himself has learned things, is that
he has convinced them that, although every individual cannot be on top and hence
chances are that they are not going to be there, they should not be content unless they
become number one. Moreover, as we have seen, those who get to be number one, like
Bernard, are precisely those who are not so set on achieving this goal. Probably Willy
should have also insisted much more on the work ethos, the importance of effort,
patience, and hard work, and a lot less on the importance of personal appearance and
cheerfulness. He certainly should not have told Biff that his theft of a ball is a great
initiative for which the coach is sure to congratulate him (30).
Bibliography
Bigsby, Christopher. Arthur Miller: A Critical Study. Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
2005.
Brater, Enoch. Early Days, Early Works: Arthur Miller at the University of Michigan
in Arthur Miller: Visiones desde el nuevo milenio. Juan I. Guijarro and Ramn
Espejo, eds. Valencia: U de Valencia P, 2004. (4556)
Dukore, Bernard. Death of a Salesman and The Crucible. Atlantic Highlands, NJ:
Humanities P, 1989.
Griffin, Alice. Understanding Arthur Miller. Columbia: South Carolina UP, 1996.
Miller, Arthur. Death of a Salesman: Certain Private Conversations in Two Acts and a
Requiem. New York: Penguin, 1977.
. Introduction in Arthur Millers Collected Plays: With an Introduction. New
York: Viking, 1957. (355)
. Timebends: A Life. New York: Grove P, 1987.
Otten, Terry. The Temptation of Innocence in the Dramas of Arthur Miller. Columbia:
U of Missouri P, 2002.
Porter, Thomas E. Acres of Diamonds: Death of a Salesman in Critical Essays on
Arthur Miller. James E. Martine, ed. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1979. (2443)
Rodrguez Celada, Antonio. Introduccin general in Death of a Salesman (La
muerte de un viajante) by Arthur Miller. Salamanca: Almar, 1982. (958)
Roudan, Matthew C. Death of a Salesman and the Poetics of Arthur Miller in The
Cambridge Companion to Arthur Miller. Christopher Bigsby, ed. Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 1997. (6085)
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on only one aspect of the human condition, the material; thus, when he
begins to lose his grip on his job, he has nothing to fill the void and is
confronted with his own emptiness. Under the guise of helping Biff to
realize his potential in business, Willy attempts to mold Biff into the
American success story, but at the end of his career, he becomes desperate for Biff to redeem his (Willys) disappointments in business.
In an interview in 1998, Miller admitted that Death of a Salesman
was intended as a criticism of capitalism: You wouldnt be writing
such straightforward critical work about America after 1950. Indeed,
I dont recall a single play that analyzed American capitalism as
severely (Kullman 71). Miller realized that after the Great Depression,
America enjoyed one of the largest boom periods in the history of the
United States, but while Miller wrote Death of a Salesman, the nation
was not sure of the success of a long-term recovery. In 1998, Miller
conceded that when considering the income of Willy Loman, were
talking about a world that already was disappearing (Kullman 70). At
the time of the Depression, people had no idea that American capitalism would be a dynamic system that could adjust for its mistakes with
the help of government-imposed controls and safeguards. In an interview with Christopher Bigsby, Miller recognized the changed nature
of todays capitalistic system by conceding that during the recession
in the 1980s, the stock market was able to make adjustments to avoid
a crash with the help of government safeguards implemented during
Franklin Roosevelts presidency (Bigsby, Arthur Miller and Company 20).
But during the debut of Millers Death of a Salesman, Miller and some
critics, stuck in the Depression mentality, saw capitalism as integral
to Willys failure. In examining Death of a Salesman fifty-eight years
later and from the perspective of a generation that never experienced
the Great Depression, it is not capitalism that defeats Willy; rather it
is Willys insecurities that feed his lack of trust in his own ability to
know and define himself.
The capitalism of today is not the system that caused the Great
Depression, but Willys defeat is still relevant because capitalism is
merely the tableau of Willys life and not the source of Willys downfall. Our thinking today has expanded beyond simply career choices to
life passions. Satisfaction of the whole person, not merely fulfilling
the material needs of a person, is the goal. Self-actualization is the
objective and is ultimately Willys desire, but the protagonist is never
83
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85
86
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For the same reason, Willy adamantly refuses Charleys job offer because
accepting a position offered out of pity would cause Willy to feel his
failure at business more acutely at the hands of another male figure,
reminding him of his fathers imagined rejection. On the other hand,
Charley believes Willy cannot accept the offered position out of petty
jealousy, but Willys feelings of inadequacy as a man go much deeper.
Charley asks Willy, When the hell are you going to grow up? (97).
Willy can never grow up until he can stop looking for validation as a
man from an absent father and stop transferring those feeling to every
man he feels is more materially successful than he is. Charleys business success gnaws at Willys sense of confidence as a man because
the latter man bases his worth on material success.
Ironically, even if Willy were a successful capitalist like Charley, he
would probably be like Happys boss, the successful merchandise manager who builds a large estate on Long Island but cannot enjoy it, so
he sells it in two months to build another one. No amount of accomplishment or wealth could rectify his fathers abandonment, which Willy
has never been able to confront and resolve. Perhaps Willy is already
successful in many respects, however, for he supports his family, buys a
house, and has a loving, supportive wife. But as long as Willy attempts
to impress an absent father, a self-made man, with his material success,
he misses the enjoyment of emotional connections. He could retire from
the Wagner business, take Charleys job offer, allow his sons to find
their own dreams, and have time to plant his garden but not without first
resolving his issues of abandonment. Willys understanding and acceptance of his fathers abandonment could free him to develop his own
goals, but throughout his life, Willys lack of intuitive abilities precludes
this type of breakthrough.
Before Willy decides to appropriate Singlemans business plan, Ben
offers Willy an opportunity for a job in the outdoors in Alaska. Because
the interests and talents of Willy, Biff, and Happy seem to reside in the
physical realm, this opportunity seems perfect for them. For instance,
during the play, Willys carpentry talents are applauded several times.
Linda, remembering Willy, recalls, He was so wonderful with his hands
(138). Noting that he has no idea how to do home improvements, Charley
compliments Willy on his expertise in installing his living room ceiling.
Willy indicates that the job was not too difficultonly part of being a
manbecause he has no vision that his natural abilities could be turned
into a successful business. Willy considers a career as a physical laborer
87
Ben proposes a great career break suited to Willys talents, but Willy
allows Linda to talk him out of taking the risk; instead he sticks with
his supposedly safe, respected sales position. Hayman argues that Ben
speaks in a tough and determined cadence, while Willys speech shows
the uncertainty of a man who is trying to sell ideas that have already
been sold to him (48). It is telling that as a salesman, he is Willy,
but as a manager of timberland, he would be William, as if he would
be growing up and becoming distinguished or mature. By going against
the standard societal path of success, Ben enjoys his life with gusto,
while Willys decision to go with the secure job, against his own natural
desires and abilities, dooms him to disappointment.
Willys inability to synthesize ideas also leads him to assume
incorrectly that business success will flow over into his personal life;
rather, the negative effects of Willys flawed career choice spill over
into his personal relationships. Ronald Hayman asserts, [T]he failure
of Willys relationship with Linda is closely linked to his failure as a
salesman. He believes, wrongly, that he needs to sell himself to her,
to impress her by big talk (51). Willy bribes a secretary with gifts of
silk stockings and jokes to validate his manhood because he doesnt
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believe he is worthy of Linda (Hayman 51). The insecurities that compel Willy to feel that he must bribe secretaries with stockings to get in
to see the buyers are the same fears that taint his personal life. Willys
fear of peoples rejection unless he impresses them in business extends
to his sons. He excites his sons with his stories about the police officers
protecting his car like their own and buyers waving him right into their
offices, but we find out that he has to bribe secretaries to sell his products. As he exaggerates his commissions to Linda and Howard, we realize that Willy has no core values or goals that are his own; everything
he says and does revolves around impressing others as a businessman.
Willys lack of core values reflects one of the major criticisms of capitalism, that it encourages self-centered material success and power over
the importance of ethical and fair treatment in human relationships.
Willys continuous rationalization that he is above societys rules is
fed by his capitalistic dream of success, but the root of Willys moral
and emotional emptiness stems from childhood events. The abandonment by his father stunts Willys emotional growth, which impedes his
ability to understand himself. Willy reminds Ben, Dad left when I was
such a baby and I never had a chance to talk to him and I still feel
kind of temporary about myself (51). Willy feels temporary because
he never defines who he is; he merely copies others. Speaking in a
symposium, Miller illustrates this point: I was trying in Salesman, in
this respect to set forth what happens when a man does not have a grip
on the forces of life and has no sense of values which will lead him to
that kind of a grip; but the implication of it was that there must be such
a grasp of those forcesor else were doomed (Death of a Salesman:
A Symposium 33). Willy has no grip on the forces of life because
he doesnt understand himselfhis own desires, values, and abilities;
thus, he is powerless to internalize his own solutions to lifes problems. Willy continues to cling to the materialistic values of capitalism
even in the face of mounting evidence of his failure because Willys
father figure Ben went into the jungle and came out rich; for Willy,
Ben exemplifies the American Dream, the capitalistic success story.
Willy dwells on Bens material success without understanding the selfish, even immoral, actions Ben perhaps used to attain his great wealth.
Willys relationship with his sons reflects his familys heritage of moral
ambivalence. Both sons suffer from deep psychological problems involving their capitalistic endeavors, stemming from their troubled relationship
with their father. Biff is a kleptomaniac who cannot succeed in business
89
because he steals from his bosses, and Happy sleeps with his bosses fiances in a futile effort to prove his worth as a businessman. Psychologically,
Happy ends up following in his fathers footsteps. At Willys funeral,
Happy vows to Biff: Im gonna show you and everybody else that Willy
Loman did not die in vain. He had a good dream. Its the only dream you
can haveto come out number-one man. He fought it out here, and this is
where Im gonna win it for him (139). Happy is a young Willy seeking
his fathers attention and approval, hoping to stop his internal demons by
fulfilling his fathers capitalistic dream of being number one in the business world. In Willys flashbacks, we see Happy constantly seeking his
fathers attention, Im losing weight, you notice, Pop? (29). Happys
name, in fact, is replete with irony because he symbolizes Willys unhappiness (and his own unhappiness) derived from attempting to acquire other
peoples business dreams and financial success. Willy never acknowledges Happys efforts to gain his attention. In fact, Willy calls Biff, but
never Happy, by name. Seeking validation as a man, Happy assures his
father, Pop, I told you Im gonna retire you for life (41). Willy scoffs
at Happys promise to be a successful capitalist capable of taking care of
his father financially: Youll retire me for life on seventy goddam dollars
a week? And your women and your car and your apartment, and youll
retire me for life! (41). When Willy repeats the refrain about his successful brother Ben going into the jungle and coming out rich, Happy wishes,
Boy, someday Id like to know how he did it (41). Happy begins to
appropriate his fathers dream as his own because he continues to hope
for his fathers affirmation. Happy chases the same delusions as his father
when he confides to Biff, But then, its what I always wanted. My own
apartment, a car, and plenty of women. And still, goddammit, Im lonely
(23). Emotionally abandoned like his father, Happy follows his fathers
futile path of least resistance by continuing to accept another persons
materialistic goals of success and happiness.
In contrast to Willys inattention to Happy, Willy showers Biff with
excessive attention, causing Biff to think that he is above societys
rules. Willy shows his obvious favoritism by praising Biffs physical
exploits and rationalizing Biffs stealing tendencies, proclivities that
hinder his success as a businessman. Happys acceptance of Willys
business dreams can never satisfy the father because Willy pins his capitalistic hopes solely on his oldest son. Willy continues to make allowances for him because he perceives that Biff has a chance at greatness.
When Happy scolds Biff for stealing a football, Willy defends Biff,
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thus negating the seriousness of the theft by joking that Coachll probably congratulate you on your initiative! (30). When Bernard reports
that Biff is failing math, Willy defends Biff again by attacking Bernard
as smart but not well-liked. Willy tells his sons, Bernard can get the
best marks in school, yunderstand, but when he gets out in the business
world, yunderstand, you are going to be five times ahead of him . . . Be
liked and you will never want (33). Actually, it is Bernard who succeeds financially and Biff who fails in business. As Biffs bad behavior
escalates, Willys failure as a father becomes more apparent. Bernard
reports that Biff is not studying and is driving without a license, just as
Linda reminds Willy that Biff has not returned the football, and [h]es
too rough with the girls, Willy. All the mothers are afraid of him!
(40). When Charley warns Willy that Biff is stealing lumber and could
end up in jail if caught, Willy excuses himself by saying, I gave them
hell, understand. But I got a couple of fearless characters there (50).
When Charley warns Willy that the jails are full of fearless characters, Ben claps Willy on the back and, mocking Charley, replies, And
the stock exchange, friend! (51), associating the bastion of capitalism
with theft and dishonesty. Ben encourages Willys rationalizations
for Biffs dishonest antics because he has perhaps gained his wealth
through unscrupulous means. Willy fosters in Biff the idea that unethical behavior is justified if one gains wealth and popularity. Even today,
the bad behavior of athletes is often excused because they make millions of dollars and thus are financial successes who, in turn, make big
money for owners of professional sports teams.
Believing that material success is the answer to all problems, Willy
assumes that because Ben went into the jungle at seventeen and came out
rich at twenty-one, Ben can provide him with the answers to his emotional and psychological problems. Feeling overwhelmed, Willy tells Ben
that his boys would go into the jaws of hell for me (52), yet he wonders
if he is teaching them the right way. Ben reassures Willy that material
wealth will ensure successful children because Ben went into the jungle
and came out rich. Willy exudes, I was right! I was right! I was right!
(52), but he misses the point that healthy human relationships are
based not on material success but on honesty. When Biff discovers his
father with another woman, Biff accuses his father of giving his mothers stockings to the woman. Biff focuses on the material object, but
on an emotional level, Biff accuses Willy of stealing from his mother
through his marital infidelity. Willy, Ben, Biff, and Happy are tied to
91
the morality of the capitalistic material world; thus, they are unable to
express their humanity to themselves or to others. For instance, when
Willy asks Ben for advice on his sons problems, Ben reiterates the
mantra that material success will cure all evils. Willy fails to see the
fallacy of this logic because his emotional capacity extends only to
copying others who succeed in business.
Even when the boys become adults, Willy is no closer to deciphering why Bernard is rewarded as a prominent lawyer, while Biff and
Happy struggle to find lucrative or even decent-paying jobs. Charley
never pushes Bernard or directs him toward a particular career, yet
Bernard appears successful and content. When Willy finds out from
Charley that Bernard will be arguing a case before the Supreme Court,
he asks, And you never told him what to do, did you? You never took
any interest in him (95). Charley explains that his salvation is that
I never took any interest in anything (96). Although this exchange
appears to be contradictory, in an interview with Christopher Bigsby,
Miller explains the line about Charleys supposed disinterest:
BIGSBY: So many of your plays are about father/son relationships. How
would you characterize your own relationship with your father?
MILLER: Well, the actual relationship was quite good. My father was a
very ordinary kind of a businessman really and his attitude was very tolerant.
Whatever you wanted to do, you did. If not, he was uninterested, basically. He
just assumed you would come out all right.
BIGSBY: That reminds me of a line in Death of a Salesman where Charley
says his great virtue is . . .
MILLER: Yes, that he never had any interest in anything. Well, its like that.
BIGSBY: But I never understood that line because, in a sense, why would that
be a virtue?
MILLER: Its that he never leaned on his son. He never insisted that he
become something that he might not want to be. He never forced him to do
what the son might not have chosen to do. He was not living through his son as
much as Willy was living through his children. Thats what that means, really.
(Bigsby, Arthur Miller and Company 12)
Charley is, of course, interested in Bernards well-being, but he is willing to allow Bernard to live his own life rather than forcing him to
become a successful capitalist. The more Willy fails to find meaning in
his own life, the more he turns to Biff to justify his own life. If Willy
can push Biff to fulfill Willys business dream, Willy can finally feel
redeemed from his failure. American capitalistic society continues to
encourage the concept of members of one generation passing on their
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dreams, as well as their wealth, to the next generation; all too often it is
the guilt of failing materially and the burden of redeeming the fathers
failure in business that people pass on to their children.
Biffs final break with his father begins after Biff attempts in vain
to have a business meeting with Bill Oliver. When Oliver doesnt
even remember him, Biff begins to realize what a sham his life and
business dreams have been. Biffs delusions of grandeur are burst,
allowing him to honestly and ruthlessly examine his life. Biff tries to
explain his epiphany to Willy:
I ran down eleven flights with a pen in my hand today. And suddenly I stopped,
you hear me? And in the middle of that office building, do you hear this?
I stopped in the middle of that building and I sawthe sky. I saw the things that
I love in this world. The work and the food and time to sit and smoke. And I
looked at the pen and said to myself, what the hell am I grabbing this for? Why am
I trying to become what I dont want to be? What am I doing in an office, making
a contemptuous, begging fool of myself, when all I want is out there, waiting for
me the minute I say I know who I am! Why cant I say that, Willy? (132)
Biff sobs as he begs his father, Will you let me go, for Christs sake?
Will you take that phony dream and burn it before something happens? (133). Biff refers to Willy by his name, not by Dad, because
he is distancing himself from his father and his fathers capitalistic
dreams. Biff realizes that he cannot fulfill his fathers failed business
dream but still feels compelled to share his revelation with his father.
At his fathers graveside, Biff eloquently discusses his fathers
greatest flaw, upon which his failure truly rests, when he observes,
He never knew who he was (138). Biff then affirms, I know who
I am (138). Biff realizes that his father dies unfulfilled because he
has chosen the dreams and values of an amoral capitalistic system. It
is people, not an economic or political system, who determine the values they choose to adopt in their lives. Miller explains the dynamics of
personal accountability:
If there is anything that causes some change in a person, it is an accretion of
experiencesmore exactly, a repetition of conflicts, which finally seem to total
up to some kind of a new truth for him. Im speaking of emotional change now.
He comes to see the fruitlessness of certain repetitive conflicts. (Evans 34)
93
his father continually imposes upon him and create his own dreams if
he is ever to achieve personal satisfaction.
In the end, Death of a Salesman is a love story involving capitalism.
Willys true dream is about a parents love and hope that his son will
supersede his limited success in business. Biffs epiphany comes just
after the son accepts his father for who he is and acknowledges his love
for him as a good, decent man with failings. When Biff accepts and
loves his father for who he is, with all of Willys failings, he begins to
accept and know himself. This self-realization frees Biff to choose his
own dream of returning to the West, away from the capitalistic rat race.
Willy dies satisfied and redeemed, thinking he is leaving Biff a chance
at success as a business entrepreneur with insurance money, but Willys
true gift is releasing Biff to be his own man and to seek his own manner
of achieving financial stability.
Linda Uranga
Auburn University Montgomery
Bibliography
Bigsby, Christopher, ed. Arthur Miller and Company: Arthur Miller Talks about His
Work in the Company of Actors, Designers, Directors, Reviewers, and Writers.
London: Methuen Drama, 1990.
. Arthur Miller: A Critical Study. New York: Cambridge UP, 2005.
Death of a Salesman: A Symposium: Arthur Miller, Gore Vidal, Richard Watts,
John Beaufort, Martin Dworkin, David W. Thompson and Phillip Gelb
(Moderator)/1958 in Conversations with Arthur Miller. Matthew C. Roudan, ed.
Jackson: U of Mississippi P, 1987. (2734)
Evans, Richard I. Psychology and Arthur Miller. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1969.
Hayman, Ronald. Arthur Miller. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1972.
Kullman, Colby H. Death of a Salesman at Fifty: An Interview with Arthur Miller
in Blooms Modern Critical Interpretations: Arthur Millers Death of a Salesman.
Harold Bloom, ed. New York: Chelsea House, 2007. (6776)
Miller, Arthur. Death of a Salesman: Certain Private Conversations in Two Acts and a
Requiem. New York: Penguin, 1977.
. Producing Death of a Salesman in China in Blooms Guides: Arthur Millers Death
of a Salesman. Harold Bloom, ed. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2004. (8790)
. The Salesman Has a Birthday in Arthur Miller: Death of a Salesman: Text and
Criticism. Gerald Weales, ed. 1967. New York: Penguin, 1977. (147150)
. Tragedy and the Common Man in Arthur Miller: Death of a Salesman: Text and
Criticism. Gerald Weales, ed. 1967. New York: Penguin, 1977. (143147)
Schumach, Murray. Arthur Miller Grew in Brooklyn in Conversations with Arthur
Miller. Matthew C. Roudan, ed. Jackson, Mississippi: U of Mississippi P, 1987. (68)
The items here, instead of being the petty detritus that buries Willy,
are the small aids that prop him up and the signs of Lindas ongoing
care and affection. Similarly, when the boys simonize Willys car,
they are, metaphorically, ministering to him. The car itself, despite its
problems (the steering, the carburetor), and despite being the ultimate
means of his death, has made it possible over the years for him to travel
and return home, a luxury unavailable to his itinerant peddler father
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(who traversed the country more arduously and then chose to abandon his young family). If, at one moment, Willy curses that goddam
Chevrolet, they ought to prohibit the manufacture of that car! (36), at
another, he praises it extravagantly as the greatest car ever built (34).
Willys capacity for wonder in the face of technology is a leitmotif
of the play. When he tries to think positively of Biffs future, the heroes
he invokes are technological innovators: Thomas Edison and B.F.
Goodrich. Willys personal hero, Dave Singleman, whom I shall discuss further below, was also a man reliant on technology (the railroad
and the telephone)and recollecting Daves feats of communication
elicits one of the most lyrical paeans to technology in the play: what
could be more satisfying than to be able to go, at the age of eightyfour, into twenty or thirty different cities, and pick up a phone, and be
remembered and loved and helped by so many different people? (81).
A trivial but telling example of Willys wonder in the face of technology occurs in the opening scene when, weary from his failed trip
north, he is told by Linda that she got a new kind of American-type
cheese today. Its whipped. His initial reaction is irritable and dismissive (I dont want a change! I want Swiss cheese), but a few seconds later, he pauses in his complaining to ask: How can they whip
cheese? (1617). Discontentment is momentarily eclipsed by curiosity, revealing an attitude toward technology which is, as one critic put
it, livelier and more interesting (and perhaps truer to the American
character) than a simple dichotomy between farm and factory, past and
present (Brucher 326). The whipped cheese might not be an improvement over the more familiar Swiss cheese, but, as Linda says, it is a
surprisean ingenious intervention in the realm of nature that links
technological innovation to the power of art.
In placing Willy in an ambivalent relationship to technology, Miller
is interrogating what Leo Marx in The Machine and the Garden called
the place of the middle landscape in the evolution of an American myth.
Although Marx was dealing with an earlier moment in American history, the questions seem to be the same: Where does the agrarian ideal
balance with technological innovation? How are the principles of selfreliance and individualism that fueled the westward movement to be
maintained in the face of technological power, which reflects some of
the energetic and innovative elements attached to that expansive drive?
Where does the past need to be superseded and at what rate? Walt
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moves away from his early success. Though the writing of Death of a
Salesman took place some fifty years before the writing of Timebends
and is discussed in a relatively small portion of its narrative, it is the
central pivot of the autobiography. One begins reading the book anticipating the moment when Miller will begin to write the playand the
500 pages that come after the plays spectacularly successful debut seem
like a coda. Indeed, it seems fitting that after the success of Death of a
Salesman, Millers search for a greater triumpha new sort of energy,
in Adamss termstemporarily shifts away from the pen, and takes the
form of the lived experience of his marriage to Marilyn Monroe. That
marriage, in its way, trumped the success of Death of a Salesman; it
received even more publicity and with a wider audience. Miller became
a mass culture celebrity: the scrawny, bespectacled Jewish intellectual
who snuck Marilyn Monroe out from under Joltin Joe (Steyn 46), as
one critic coarsely put it. Monroe was that Venus (if not Virgin) that
Adams had posited as the greatest and most mysterious of all energies
(384)that of sex: the most primal source of spiritual myth-making.
The relationship ultimately became as much a part of Millers legacy for
posterity as Death of a Salesman (a fact he must have realized in using
it so transparently in After the Fall). Interestingly, Adams would observe
that an American Venus would never dare exist (385), given the countrys resistance to the mysterious power of sexuality, and Miller would
echo this same idea when he noted, by way of explaining the failure of
his marriage and Monroes tragic fate, that she was proof that sexuality and seriousness could not coexist in Americas psyche, were hostile,
mutually rejecting opposites, in fact (532).
After his discussion of his failed marriage to Monroe, the tone of
Millers autobiography changes, as he begins to recede from his position at the forefront of the new and known. Henry Adams wrote to
establish a place for himself in the shadow of illustrious ancestors who
had helped shape America through their political service; he hoped
to make his mark through his writing. Miller, sprung from an immigrant family with no special claim to importance in American history,
becomes his own illustrious ancestor through his early success, and he
must continue to live and write in his own shadow. As his life continues, he cannot keep up with the modern any more than Adams, who
managed, only briefly, to impose meaning on the dynamo before falling back into a sense of futility and confusion, and who ultimately
laments: one controlled no more force in 1900 than in 1850, although
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if only by the fact that they are fated to lose energy and die. As Henry
Adams, that elderly historian, put it with a directness and brutality
that rivals anything in Millers play: [Adams] found himself lying in
the Gallery of Machines at the Great Exposition of 1900, his historical
neck broken by the sudden irruption of forces totally new (382).
Paula Marantz Cohen
Drexel University
Bibliography
Adams, Henry. The Education of Henry Adams: An Autobiography. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1918.
Brucher, Richard T. Willy Loman and The Soul of the New Machine: Technology
and the Common Man in Journal of American Studies 17.3 (December 1983):
325336.
Castellitto, George P. Willy Loman: The Tension Between Marxism and Capitalism
in The Salesman Has a Birthday: Essays Celebrating the Fiftieth Anniversary of
Arthur Millers Death of a Salesman. Stephen A. Marino, ed. New York: UP of
America, 2000. (7986)
Cohen, Paula Marantz. Why Willy is Confused: The Effects of a Paradigm Shift in
Death of a Salesman in Approaches to Teaching Millers Death of a Salesman.
Matthew C. Roudan, ed. New York: The Modern Language Association of
America, 1995. (125133)
Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in
America. New York: Oxford UP, 1964.
Miller, Arthur. Death of a Salesman: Certain Private Conversations in Two Acts and a
Requiem. New York: Penguin, 1977.
. Timebends: A Life. New York: Grove P, 1987.
Steyn, Mark. The Revenge of Art in The New Criterion 17.7 (March 1999): 4650.
Thoreau, Henry David. The Portable Thoreau. Carl Bode, ed. New York: Viking,
1964.
Whitman, Walt. Democratic Vistas in Leaves of Grass and Selected Prose by Walt
Whitman. John Kouwenhoven, ed. New York: The Modern Library, 1950.
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theatrical representation by reorganizing it as a failed repression of modernisms rupture of humanistic realities. Often the titles of their plays
suggest the uncanny centrality of technological modernism: Machinal,
The Adding Machine, Krapps Last Tape, and Hamletmachine, to name
only four.
Death of a Salesman, on the contrary, fixated as it is on the machineries that constantly confront Willy Loman, still maintains its apparent
realism. The effect is not unlike that of those modernist trompe-loeil
collages which, when examined more closely, turn out to be just paintings of collages, until the viewer notices that a rail ticket or a scrap of
newspaper is, in fact, the real thing. The real thing, far from disrupting the realism of the painting, in these pieces, almost always strikes
the viewer as less real, more artificial, and thus uncannily reinforces the
reality-effect of the painted images. And this is precisely the effect a
realist semiotics strives for: to gesture toward reality so convincingly
that reality itself becomes a monstrous parody of itself when juxtaposed
against the representation. Realism wins; reality loses.
In this semiotics of realist production, stage properties and set elements function either as icons, visual look-alikes representing realworld objects, or as practicals, actual real-world objects that, on stage,
really do work as they would in the real world. A door through which
characters enter and exit, for instance, or an alarm clock set to actually
ring is a stage practical. However, the plastic greenery seen through a
window or a trompe-loeil bookcase painted onto a flat is a stage icon.
This distinction, like the painting/reality distinction in the modernist
collage, is troubled significantly by the introduction of technological
objects, such as the Lomanss refrigerator. In most productions, the
refrigerator really is a refrigerator. That is, the scene shop has usually not gone to the trouble to build a fake refrigerator out of wood
and plastic and metal. And yet, we presume that it is not actually
functioning on stage: that when Willy eats his whipped cheese, hes
eating it at stage-room temperature or, if its cooled, its been cooled
by another refrigerator backstage. We presume that the belt in the
on-stage refrigerator is in no danger of breaking because it isnt moving. The refrigerator occupies a semiotic middle zone that combines
iconic and practical dimensions.
The refrigerator, then, as a stage property, is semiotically more like
an actor. After all, the actor who plays Willy Loman is a practical in
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wire recorder is even more so. That is to say, it is more more like an
actor than the refrigerator is more like an actor; or at least more salient
in its resemblance.
For, though it is represented to us that the refrigerator works, by the
fact of Willy and Linda opening and closing it and the references they
make to having it repaired, the wire recorders operation is demonstrated to us; the actor who plays Howard turns it on, the spools spin,
and sound seems to come out of it (though the sound is likely coming
from a soundtrack and theatre-wide system controlled from the booth).
It seems to whistle:
HOWARD: I bought it for dictation, but you can do anything with it. Listen
to this. I had it home last night. Listen to what I picked up. The first one is
my daughter. Get this. He flicks the switch and Roll out the Barrel is heard
being whistled. Listen to that kid whistle.
WILLY: That is lifelike, isnt it?
HOWARD: Seven years old. Get that tone. (77)
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The layout and typography of this passage alerts us to the very critical issues Ive been discussing. On the one hand, the text signals the
voice of Howards son as if he were an on-stage character. The line
is labeled HIS SON. On the other hand, what his son says is set off
by quotation marks, as if to remind the reader that Howards sona
budding young capitalistis not saying these things but rather that
the machine is quoting him. Moreover, the italicized direction that the
machine/sons recitation of state capitals is meant to go on, and on
points out that the words will have been pre-recorded, that they need
not be scripted, because there will be no actor to say them in rehearsals or to memorize them at home.
Again, Willys response to Howards pride about his sons age
which, we imagine, is pride that a boy so young can memorize state
capitals, not that he can speak into a microphonedemonstrates
Willys refusal or inability to conflate the human with the machine. By
focusing on his potential as an announcer, Willys comment reminds
us that the voice is coming out of a machine, that it has been subjected
to mechanical processes, and that the human remains behind, still
developing along the trajectory of his potential, of which the machine
presents only a trace.
So, while, as the scene between Howard and Willy progresses, the
immediate and local tension is between Willys desperate plea for more
convenient working conditions and Howards increasing determination
to fire Willy, the larger thematic tension emerges between two fundamentally different worldviews. Willy wishes to understand the world as
a place where the American humanist values of hard work, ingenuity,
and personal magnetism assert themselves against the encroachment
of a mechanized, routinized, urbanized anti-individualism. Howard is
permitted his worldview largely because of his own status as an owner;
thus, he has no difficulty conceiving of a collapse of the human into the
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machine. His verbal slippage, the pride with which he speaks both of
his children and his machine, and his ability to shrug off Willys pleas
when capital demands that he do so, attest to the ease with which he
bears the increasing imbrication of humanist and mechanistic worlds.
This imbrication is not unlike the double ontology that realist theatre insists its audience unproblematically synthesize and consume. To
return to the stage practical, for a moment: consider, for example, the
Helmerss door in Ibsens Doll House. Ive already made the seemingly unproblematic claim that it is an actual, real-world object that
on stage really do[es] work as [it] would work in the real world.
Nothing would appear more obvious. The stage directions never say,
He enters through the simulacrum of the UC door. No director ever
says, Now, enter through that quote-unquote door. No actor ever pretends hes walking through the door. And no audience member ever
leaves the theatre thinking, The doors were very lifelike. Doors dont
act. They are. And for this bit of simplicity, Lord, we thank you.
But what the Lord giveth, theatre taketh away. And, at the risk of
moving from the improbable to the ridiculous, Id like to take a few
seconds to theorize this door. On the one hand, it is a door. Theres no
question. To argue that the word door can never capture the doorness
of this particular door would be to introduce an irrelevancy, to mendaciously undermine what, for our purposes, is a sensible and self-evident
claim: this is a door. Were not talking about the word door. Were
talking about the thing itself. And this thing is certainly the thing we
call door. Let anyone who denies it enter through the wall.
Still, this thing is not this thing on stage; and here, as in Millers
play, a shift in perspective makes all the difference. The Helmerss
door is a door, but its being a door does not exhaust its being on stage.
On stage, it is a door: its ontos as door gives way, in some measure,
to its seeming to be this door. And by this, I mean the Helmerss.
How can this thing, which is a door, belong to the Helmers, who do
not, in fact, exist? How can a thing that is be implicated in a context
that is not? Only when we understand that the door, like the wire
recorder, is a sign-thing. And, while it is palliative and convenient to
call this door the Helmerss door, I submit that in doing so, we risk
missing the more significant, if more invisible, aspect of this door. For,
on stage, Helmerss is not just an adjective describing a particular
door; it is also constitutive, making this door a thing of significance.
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If Nora had gone next door, entered the door next door, and then,
in leaving, slammed the door next door, it would not have been the
door-slam heard round the world. Instead, it would have been Nora
slamming someone elses door.
Im trying to suggest here that staged objects, like Willy and the
actor who plays him, are caught between two incommensurable realities. One is the reality that would exist if, in some future, theatre
ceased to be a thinkable cultural practice. The door would remain a
door. A householder could hang it between an undivided dining room
and living room. A person could knock at it. A caller could turn away
from it unadmitted to the house. The other is the reality constructed
on stage. In the context of this reality, inoperative in our imaginary
future, the door would cease to be.
And this fact reveals that a staged object is both an object and
staged, and neither aspect of the object can be divorced from its ontos.
A staged door is not just another door, just as the door to my house
(red, wooden) is not staged. This door is a hybrid object: it is both a
visual representation of an (imaginary) door in Norwayan iconand
it is a thing-in-itself, an actual door. Its a sign-thing. And this is the
essence of theatre. Unlike every other literary genre, drama is a system
of sign-things. And to talk about sign-things, one must not fail to talk
about both things and signs.
What, then, is the sign-thing we recognize as Howards wire
recorder? Among the three kinds of semiotic signssymbol, icon,
indexany can be a sign-thing if its thingness is activated along with its
meaning. Just as the door can be an icon-thing, it can be an index-thing,
too, testifying to the work of stagecraft, or, in the case of A Dolls House,
a symbol-thing, metonymically representing the bourgeois home. What
interests me here is the indexical aspect of Howards wire recorder. It is
the thing-in-itself that indicates the veiled or past presence of another
thing-in-itself. Its a footprint. The footprint is, after all, a thing. But its
a failed thing, an incomplete thing. It depends on other things, such as
the foot, and in some cases, the shoe. And it indicates an action: walking
or running or jogging. And it indicates a time: before. And it indicates
a place: here. Of course, it has its own materiality: it is made of sand
or mud or cement. But if someone points to a footprint in the earth and
asks you, What is this?, under only very special circumstances would an
acceptable answer be earth. The answer is footprint. Which is earth.
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And when a theatre critic points to Howards wire recorder and asks
you, What is this?, under only very special circumstances would an
acceptable answer be a prop. The answer is wire recorder. Which
is a prop.
A question worth asking here is under what very special circumstances would such understandings be acceptable? And related, or
perhaps more fundamental, is the question how do those circumstances
activate that understanding? Earlier, I claimed that, on the absurdist
stage, a tape recordersuch as Krappsorganizes the entire onstage
action; it thereby makes available insights into the practice of theatre that Howards recorder, because it works differently in its staged
context, does not. For instance, Krapps tape recorder splits the character because Krapp listens to his own voice often as if it were unfamiliar to him. Moreover, the play highlights Krapps ambivalence
toward his machine: on the one hand, he obsessively listens to and
fidgets with it; on the other hand, he finds himself disgusted by the
amount of time, energy, and tape he has committed to it. Finally, the
formal cuesthe initial long silence, the slapstick banana routine, and
the apparently pointless repetition of gesture and action before a single
word is spokendraw the audiences attention to the theatricality of the
play as much as to its character development. Similarly, the absence of
Aristotelian plot structure allows what would be peripheral props that
contribute, in realist theatre, to a sense of verisimilitude to appear more
starkly significant on Becketts stage. Under these circumstances, the
recorders propness becomes as salient as its recorderness.
Howards machine functions quite differently. The play takes pains to
establish that his owning such a machine in the first place is quite natural:
I bought it for dictation (77). Because Howard is a businessman, we
assume that by dictation, he means the dictation of correspondence for
his secretary to type. Moreover, its novelty explains why he had it home
last night (77): its [b]een driving [him] crazy (76). Howards words
signal a fascination with his new machine that is recognizable to most
audience members who have found themselves consumed by this or that
new gadget. Realism, then, operates, in part, according to this necessity:
to provide each object with a context so compelling, so familiar, that the
object seems natural, that it remains an object, and not a prop.
But Howards tape recorder is not just an object. Nor is it even
merely an object-prop. Its also an index, pointing to the economic and
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As his speech begins, it seems as if Willy feels that its him against
the refrigerator or the car. The goddam Studebaker! (73) he curses
earlier in the scene and now the Hastings refrigerator (73) seem out
to break Willy. But, as the speech continues, the refrigerator becomes
almost human, a maniac. And then, as he concludes his screed, its
no longer the machines themselves that are to blame, its the people
who make them: They. Moreover, its not that They are incompetent and therefore produce faulty appliances and cars. They are very
clever indeed: They time mechanical failure in order to keep Willy
and other homeowners paying, to forestall anyone ever own[ing]
something outright before its broken (73).
This is Willys tragic flaw: though he understands that things have
changed, he still perceives that humans are the fully responsible agents
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of that change. For Willy, its still conceivable that Biff can walk right
into Bill Olivers office and talk him into investing thousands of dollars in him; its still conceivable that there are two human children who
recorded their voices into Howards wire recorder; its still conceivable
that he might approach Howard, man-to-man, and successfully plead
for more stable work; its still conceivable that engineers are timing
the obsolescence of his refrigerator and his car. And, as a result, Willy
doesnt realize what Biff understands: that in business, in sales, and in
the city, humanity has been appropriated by the social machine itself,
and that the discourse of humanity has been used to mask that appropriation from the little guys like Willy.
This reading of Death of a Salesman does not, in my view, offer
much in the way of new insight about what the play is about and
where the weight of its politics settles. But I would like to take the last
third of this essay to expand on my claim that staged objects characters
are caught between two realities; the same goes for the whole staged
event. On the one hand, we have watched or read Death of a Salesman,
a play about Willy Lomans inability to cope with an increasingly
mechanized, dehumanized modernity. Thats the reality we see when
we read the play sympathetically, as a unified and ordered piece of
realism. But at the essence of realism is, paradoxically, its legerdemain
in concealing the quite real means by which reality-effects are produced and cogently deployed.
In practicing this concealment upon an audience, realist theatre
operates according to precisely the same principle by which modern
capitalism operates: it effaces the machine and creates humanityeffects. Or, to put this idea in a different way, Willy is to the capitalist
machine what Death of a Salesman is to the theatrical machine. When,
as sympathetic audience members, we activate, and allow ourselves
to be activated by, the realist slight-of-hand, we simultaneously deactivate our capacity to think critically about the mechanisms by which
theatrical production is made possible in the first place. To some
extent, Im talking about how we willfully refuse to notice the clever
use of lighting and music to create shifts in mood and time, or our
willingness to make believe that Willys house is not, in fact, made
of gauze. But this suspension of disbelief is by and large an aesthetic
choice; our experience of the play is more pleasant when we make
believe than if we scoff at the degree to which the set design, lighting,
and music tax our credulity.
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Lots of it. And that money, advanced by, for instance, textbook publishers, comes out of the pockets of students taking courses called
Introduction to Drama or American Realist Theatre.
The amount of money it demands from those students depends,
naturally, on the number of students buying the textbook to begin with.
So, a 15,000 dollar royalty for Death of a Salesman, paid by, lets say,
Houghton-Mifflin, for inclusion in a textbook called Understanding
Literature, marketed primarily to understaffed community and junior-college English departments, might take only three or four dollars
out of each students pocket. And thats certainly one of the least
expensive ways to legally obtain the text of a play-commodity called
Death of a Salesman. Except, of course, that the students are paying the royalties for every other piece of copyrighted material in the
book. And that means the cost can be quite high, after all: something
in the neighborhood of $67.00, not counting university bookstore
mark-ups.
Ironically, the more successful a publisher is in minimizing its own
overheadlabor costs, material costs, and so onand maximizing its
market exposure, the less the part-time or night-time student would have
to pay for the privilege of reading Millers indictment of big-business
capitalism. In other words, the more successfully the publishing industry can cut costs in production, the less it will have to burden its buyers
economically.
The Arthur Miller playwriting machine also makes possible
another little machine called Dialogue: Arthur Millers Death of a
Salesman, edited by Eric Sterling, and an even smaller machine called
Mystifying the Machine, both of which contribute to the machine
called criticism, academia, the university, and tenure. Its thanks to
Arthur Miller that I can buy a house.
These two examples of theatres implication in global capitalism are
not, in and of themselves, necessarily troubling. There are a number of
very fine, ethically ambitious, philosophically thought-out arguments for
allowing capitalist markets to regulate themselves, to a greater or lesser
degree, and for trusting that, in making those allowances, a society or a
group of societies will more fully and quickly advance toward economic
and social justice; this essay, in other words, is not attempting to agitate
against capitalism or to argue for a view of capitalism as a perpetrator of
injustices.
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We might someday add to Willys list of things lost: the polar ice
caps, the ozone layer, the rain forests, the Alaskan wildlife refuge,
the availability of medicines compounded while you wait, and many
of the other aspects of local and global life that seem to flee before
the advance of capitalism. Indeed, that kind of melancholic reflection
is exactly what the entire play encourages. Its the fantasy-ideal of
Marxism: before all this bullshit, there must have been a bull.
The point, here, is not that the indictments Death of a Salesman
levels at modern capitalism are poorly reasoned. Indeed, much of the
plays lasting appeal results from its uncanny prescience, the accuracy with which it diagnoses, and even predicts, the shortcomings of
increasingly mechanized conceptions of social order. Rather, its that
the arrangement and development of the plays formal features are at
odds with its social thesis, and that not only does that arrangement
threaten to undermine the plays social thesis but also that it has enabled the very exploitative capitalist practices it critiques. Whereas
absurdism and capitalism might, at times, make strange bedfellows,
socialist realism sleeps with the enemy.
In other words, for Death of a Salesman to make its point in the
way it does, it must play the same game that capitalism does, the game
for which it indicts the modernist ethic all along: create a machine
that will hide the machine behind the fantasy of the human. This double move is not just that of Death of a Salesman. Its the move every
piece of socialist realism makes, whether its Arnold Weskers Trilogy
or John Osbornes Look Back in Anger or David Mamets American
Buffalo. Because of its deep complicity with bourgeois capitalism,
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Bibliography
Miller, Arthur. Death of a Salesman: Certain Private Conversations in Two Acts and a
Requiem. New York: Penguin, 1977.
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Michael J. Meyer
he tries to prevent his children from plotting his overthrow by attempting to devour them as soon as they are born. Ultimately tricked by his
wife Rhea into swallowing a stone rather than his youngest son, Zeus,
Cronus also fails to maintain his power and, like his father before him,
meets a violent end, in this instance at Zeus hand. And, although
Zeus is not deposed in a similar manner, he, too, begets a violent son,
named Ares, the God of War, who, in turn, becomes the progenitor of
four fearsome sons; the names of these four sons of Ares are Terror,
Trembling, Panic, and Fear (Parker 24).
Although these similarities suggest that history does repeat itself
when it comes to inherited emotional traits as well as to inherited
physical traits handed down to children from parents, it is also clear
that there is a concerted effort by members of the younger generation
to break away from major parental influencesto kill the father symbolically and thus escape their perennial childhood in which they feel
the obligation to follow parental rules and to mimic their parents rather
than to develop a unique selfhood and attain an independent adult status of their own.
As Freud posited in his explanation of the Oedipus complex, destruction of the father is necessary to attain true maturity, and this event
occurs regularly, though at times subconsciously, as children struggle
to assert individuality and to cultivate uniqueness rather than conformity. At times, however, parental separation is not as easily attained,
and, rather than risk moving away from the staid and comfortable into
the unknown and challenging, children are satisfied with cultivating
the traits of their fathers, retaining an infantile and childish attitude
that allows them to escape responsibility and accountability by merely
claiming they are trapped in a genetic rut.
In his most famous play, Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller examines the dilemma that faces all sons who simultaneously find themselves imitating their fathers while also questioning the very traits they
are learning because they are unsure whether embracing them fully suggests personal weakness. Biff Loman, the son of Willy Loman, Millers
protagonist, is caught in such a dilemma. He has clearly inherited a
number of traits from his father, traits he has been content to live with
in his teens and twenties. Unfortunately, many of these traits are negative and detract from his character. Nevertheless, when motivated by an
event that compromises his fathers integrity, Biff suddenly rejects his
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former worshipful and respectful attitude toward his parent and eventually moves to the West to seek a life that is separate from his fathers.
As C.W. Bigsby notes:
Here as elsewhere in Millers work, the relationship between a father and a son
is crucial because it focuses on the question of inherited values and assumptions, it dramatizes deferred hopes and ideals, it becomes a microcosm of the
debate between the generations, of the shift from a world still rooted in a simple
rural past to one in which that past exists simply as myth. . . . The sons identity
depends on creating a boundary between himself and the father, on perceiving
himself outside the axial lines which had defined the fathers world. (117)
Thus, when the play opens, readers may be surprised to see that Biffs
determination to leave his genetic inheritance behind is waning. After
ten years of seeking a new identity in the West, he has returned home,
enabling Miller to show his audience how difficult it is for a child,
even at age thirty-four, to sever the bonds and reject his tendency to reembrace a lifestyle he thought he had successfully left behind. Biffs
return to a deteriorating suburb in New York suggests he is still confused, unable to understand how his personality traits continue to be
impacted by his heritage from his father although he has struggled to
distance himself from it.
There is no doubt that Willys own defects have been handed down
to his son. He has passed on his deficiencies largely because he refuses
to recognize that his flaws are indeed flaws. Esther Merle Jackson
calls Willy a moral ignorant and describes his sickness as a disease
of un-relatedness in which he experiences a sense of alienation, of loss
of meaning, and of gnawing despair (15). Earlier, readers can see that
his defects are contagious as Miller uses the image of a seed planting
to describe the futility Willy experiences as he attempts to grow flowers, vegetables, and trees in an increasingly sterile environment where
cement has replaced grass and where the sun is blocked by apartment
buildings. Willys failure to find fertile ground for real seeds might suggest there is little chance of Biff growing to be like his father. However,
ironically, while his physical planting fails, the emotional seeds Willy
nurtures in his sons are seen to flourish, producing corrupt values and
character traits that can only bring defeat to the next generation.
Unlike the heroic Jason in mythology, who destroys hostile armed
warriors who rise from sown dragons teeth, Biff is unable to destroy
124
Michael J. Meyer
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Michael J. Meyer
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Michael J. Meyer
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Michael J. Meyer
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Michael J. Meyer
despite the sadness and despair evident in the plot, the tragedy of Willys
death may also be said to lead to rebirth as well as to a recognition and
repair of Biffs flawed nature. Thus, if death is paradoxically required
for resurrection and renewal, Miller provides two deaths at the end of
his play: first, he gives to his audience Willys literal death by suicide,
and then he portrays Biffs symbolic destruction of his childish attraction, and his submission, to a value system he recognizes as worthless
and deceptive at best.
Here the audience must confront Millers decision to choose ambiguity over a deliberate absolute in Biffs decision-making process.
For example, Brian Parker sees this experience as less than successful: Biff at least comes out of the experience with enhanced selfknowledge. . . . [But] it is not a proud knowledge, rather an admission
of limitations and weakness (37). D. L. Hoeveler seems to agree:
Although Biff recognizes his father as a fake, he also needs to recognize that
he too, in embracing his fathers belief, is also a fake. The climax of the play
occurs in Bill Olivers office for it is there that Biff is forced to recognize that
he has lived and believed the fantasy that Willy has created of and for him.
Biff has let Willy shape him so that he became the embodiment of Willys
dream of parental success. (79)
133
134
Michael J. Meyer
sky. I saw the things that I love in this world. The work and the food and time
to sit and smoke. And I looked at the pen and said to myself, what the hell am
I grabbing this for? Why am I trying to become what I dont want to be? What
am I doing in an office, making a contemptuous, begging fool of myself, when
all I want is out there, waiting for me the minute I say I know who I am! Why
cant I say that, Willy? . . . I am not a leader of men, Willy, and neither are
you. You were never anything but a hard-working drummer who landed in the
ash can like all the rest of them! Im one dollar an hour, [W]illy [sic]! I tried
seven states and couldnt raise it. A buck an hour! Do you gather my meaning?
Im not bringing home any prizes any more, and youre going to stop waiting
for me to bring them home! . . . Im just what I am, thats all . . . Will you let
me go, for Christs sake? Will you take that phony dream and burn it before
something happens? (132133)
135
from the cult of the father. Bigsby cites Millers earlier draft of Death
of a Salesman as an indication of how fathers try to control their sons
instead of letting them go. According to the early draft, Biff only
wants one thing. The excised line reads: I want to be happy. Willys
reply (also excised from the published version) is: To enjoy yourself
is not ambition. Ambition is things. A man must want things, things!!
(qtd. in Bigsby 120).
The Biff of The Requiem does not desire possessions and can do
without things; instead, he retains his childlike passion for wonder and
nature, for animals and weather changes. As the play closes, Biff has
discovered that to be an adult means only one thing: refusing inherited
traits that are imposed from without and redefining the word success in
terms of self- knowledge. Doing this allows Biff Loman to come to terms
with the mechanisms that cause him suffering and to refuse to remain a
primary agent in his own destruction. It is indeed a Herculean task that
faces him but one that a revived Adonis is capable of accomplishing.10
Michael J. Meyer
DePaul University
Northeastern Illinois University
Notes
1
See Brian Parkers essay, Point of View in Death of a Salesman, for a psychological interpretation of theft.
2
Parker says that the play balances the failure of Willy and his sons with the success of Charley and his son Bernard, who thrive in the very same system. Charley and
his son do not cheat; they merely work hard; they prosper yet remain kindly, unpretentious, sensitive, and helpful (33).
3
See the Hercules reference on page 68 of Death of a Salesman and the Adonis
reference on page 33.
4
The two are actually opposites. Hercules stands for the macho man who possesses physical abilities and works with his hands. He accomplishes great things
through his physical strength and manual labor, yet Adonis is all outward beauty,
impressing by his looks and personality rather than by his strength.
5
See Aarnes, 100102.
6
Bigsby agrees, comparing the ironic ending to the ambiguous state of Nick
Carraway at the conclusion of F. Scott Fitzgeralds masterpiece, The Great Gatsby.
7
William Heyen states: The question, too, of whether or not Biffs final statement that he knows himself is the truth or is the plays central irony becomes academic. At least he can live, at least he has some garment of even dull glory to wear
during the meaningless passage of his days (50).
8
See Hoeveler, 78 and 81.
Michael J. Meyer
136
9
Bibliography
Aarnes, William. Tragic Form and the Possibility of Meaning in Death of a Salesman
in Modern Critical Interpretations of Arthur Millers Death of a Salesman. Harold
Bloom, ed. New York: Chelsea House, 1988. (95111)
Bigsby, C.W. Death of a Salesman: In Memoriam in Modern Critical Interpretations
of Arthur Millers Death of a Salesman. Harold Bloom, ed. New York: Chelsea
House, 1988. (113128)
Cohn, Ruby. The Articulate Victims of Arthur Miller in Modern Critical Interpretations
of Arthur Millers Death of a Salesman. Harold Bloom, ed. New York: Chelsea
House, 1988. (3946)
Herzberg, Max J. Myths and Their Meaning. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1984.
Heyen, William. Arthur Millers Death of a Salesman and the American Dream in
Modern Critical Interpretations of Arthur Millers Death of a Salesman. Harold
Bloom, ed. New York: Chelsea House, 1988. (4758)
Hoeveler, D.L. Death of a Salesman as Psychomachia in Modern Critical Interpretations
of Arthur Millers Death of a Salesman. Harold Bloom, ed. New York: Chelsea
House, 1988. (7782)
Jackson, Esther Merle. Death of a Salesman: Tragic Myth in the Modern Theater in
Modern Critical Interpretations of Arthur Millers Death of a Salesman. Harold
Bloom, ed. New York: Chelsea House, 1988. (718)
Miller, Arthur. Death of a Salesman: Certain Private Conversations in Two Acts and a
Requiem. New York: Penguin, 1977.
. Introduction in Arthur Millers Collected Plays: With an Introduction. New York:
Viking, 1957. (355)
Parker, Brian. Point of View in Arthur Millers Death of a Salesman in Modern
Critical Interpretations: Arthur Millers Death of a Salesman. Harold Bloom, ed.
New York: Chelsea House, 1988. (2538)
138
are missing (Death of a Salesman: A Symposium 47). This fundamental acknowledgement of the existence of right and wrong values is vital to
ones understanding of the plays hopefulness primarily because it brings
into focus the spiritual development of Willys oldest son, Biff, the only
one in the Loman family who seems to feel the inadequacy of his fathers
values. If Willy represents the emptiness of materialism, Biff represents
the struggle against it, the struggle for a sense of self-awareness and integrity. As Jeremy Hawthorn remarks, although Death of a Salesman attacks
the American Dream through Willy, there is a certain amount of ideological recuperation through Biff (95). Biff embodies, as Miller argues,
the system of love that gradually counteracts Willys law of success
(Death 42), and despite the often overwhelming anxiety generated by
Willys sense of failure, Miller maintains a steady thread of hope by constantly drawing parallels between father and son. Both, for instance, feel
a deep attraction to the beauty of nature, but while Willy chooses to lead
a life bound by materialism, Biff chooses a life of simplicity in the open
reaches of the West. Both encounter the opportunity to sacrifice, but while
Willys sacrifice hints of cowardice, Biffs sacrifice demonstrates a willingness to suffer for the sake of his fathers happiness. Both face rejection,
but while Willy refuses to acknowledge his failure and struggles to sustain
his delusions, Biff strives for the courage to see himself as he is and thus
struggles toward the truth. Thus, as the narrative progresses and comparison between the two becomes increasingly more inevitable, Biffs struggle
toward self-actualization grows ever more promising.
The first similarity between father and son appears in their lyric
praise of nature. In the very first scene of the play, Willy recounts
with wonder: . . . its so beautiful up there, Linda, the trees are so
thick, and the sun is warm. I opened the windshield and just let the
warm air bathe over me . . . (14). A little further on in the conversation he continues, Lost: More and more I think of those days, Linda.
This time of year it was lilac and wisteria. And then the peonies would
come out, and the daffodils. What fragrance in this room! (17). Biff,
in his first conversation, also eulogizes the beauty of nature: This
farm I work on, its spring there now, see? And theyve got about fifteen new colts. Theres nothing more inspiring orbeautiful than the
sight of a mare and a new colt (22). As the play continues, however,
and Miller begins his deft fluctuation between the present and the past,
Willys professed love of nature shows itself to be tainted by ulterior
motives; he lauds the wilds of Alaska and Africa not for their beauty
139
but for their potential riches, and he exaggerates the meager wildlife of
his small Brooklyn property in an absurd attempt to impress Ben (but
we hunt too . . . theres snakes and rabbits andthats why I moved
out here. Why Biff can fell any one of these trees in no time! [50]).
In hindsight, even his description of the flowers in their yard seems
an indication not of a simple delight in the blooms themselves but of
a nostalgia for a better time, a more affluent time before the value of
their house was lowered by encroaching apartment buildings.
Biffs reaction to his fathers artificiality is hardly one of defiance;
in fact, his love for his parents and his desire for their approval make
him dangerously susceptible to his fathers mania for financial success:
whenever spring comes to where I am, I suddenly get the feeling,
my God, Im not gettin anywhere! What the hell am I doing, playing
around with horses, twenty-eight dollars a week! Im thirty-four years
old, I oughta be makin my future (22). Yet, as the drama unfolds, it
becomes increasingly clear that Biffs desire to make a future stems
primarily from his desire to please his fatherthat in truth, he wants
nothing more than to separate himself from the citys incessant scramble for money. Thus, he invites Happy out West and proposes buy[ing]
a ranch . . . rais[ing] cattle, us[ing] our muscles. Men built like we are
should be working out in the open . . . [W]e werent brought up to grub
for money. I dont know how to do it (2324). When Happy objects
(The only thing iswhat can you make out there? [24]), Biff makes
his first stab at articulating the futility of materialism:
BIFF: But look at your friend. Builds an estate and then hasnt the peace of
mind to live in it.
HAPPY: Yeah, but when he walks in to the store the waves part in front of
him. Thats fty-two thousand dollars a year coming through the revolving
door, and I got more in my pinky nger than hes got in his head.
BIFF: Yeah, but you just said (24)
Several scenes later, when Happy criticizes Biffs business sense, accusing him of never tr[ying] to please people (60) and remarking on
his damn fool tendencies to whistle . . . whole songs in the elevator
like a comedian and swim in the middle of the day instead of taking
the line around (60), Biff responds much more passionately: I dont
care what they think! Theyve laughed at Dad for years, and you know
why? Because we dont belong in this nuthouse of a city! We should be
mixing cement on some open plain, oror carpenters. A carpenter is
allowed to whistle! (61).
140
Oddly enough, as Biff grows increasingly more insistent about articulating his desire to be out-of-doors working with his hands, his father
grows increasingly more fixated on planting a garden, thus deepening the father-son parallel begun in the first Act. For instance, as Willy
dresses for his interview with Howard, he looks out to the back yard
which he had earlier condemned as barren (the grass dont grow any
more, [and] you cant raise a carrot in the back yard [17]) and comments somewhat incongruously, Maybe beets would grow out there
(75). Later on, after the disastrous dinner at which Biff makes his first
anguished attempt to be honest with his father, Willy asks for the nearest seed store, mumbling anxiously: Oh, Id better hurry. Ive got to get
some seeds . . . Ive got to get some seeds, right away. Nothings planted.
I dont have a thing in the ground (122). It is as though he is responding
to Biffs evident distaste for the city and its restless mercenaries by turning to the one occupation that he knows will please his songardening.
Biff, in turn, responds with a desperate attempt to make his father understand the magnitude of his first liberating step toward self-actualization:
I ran down eleven flights with a pen in my hand today. And suddenly I
stopped, you hear me? And in the middle of that office building, do you hear
this? I stopped in the middle of that building and I sawthe sky. I saw the
things that I love in this world. The work and the food and time to sit and
smoke. And I looked at the pen and said to myself, what the hell am I grabbing
this for? Why am I trying to become what I dont want to be? What am I doing
in an office, making a contemptuous, begging fool of myself, when all I want
is out there, waiting for me the minute I say I know who I am! (132)
This impassioned speech, signifying Biffs choice to lead a simple, unpretentious life close to nature, might be the most hopeful moment in the play,
for it affirms the possibility of freedom, contentment, and honestyall the
things Willy strives for and fails to attain. Barclay W. Bates suggests that
Biff embraces one part of his heritage and rejects another; choosing the
pastoral life, he denies those social forces which lure American men into
the marathon pursuit of wealth [and] . . . becomes a more conscious and
a more human man (64). Even Willys refusal or inability to understand
Biffs decision cannot wholly undermine the escalation of this hope.
Other significant father-son parallels linking Biff with hope involve
the sacrifices Willy and Biff make for each other. For example, Biffs
return to the city, which manifests his willingness to suffer for the sake
of his fathers happiness, demonstrates a filial love that plainly counteracts the ridicule (37) and indifference (57) that Willy endures from
his clients and acquaintances. Nevertheless, as Harold Bloom points
141
out, Biffs offer to stay home, get a job, and support his parents is
a painful sacrifice of a dutiful son but it is a bizarre sacrificeand
almost doomed not to succeedbecause Biff is an adult and has more
appropriate tasks to perform (Blooms Guides 43). Thus, as Biff gains
insight through the more appropriate task of self-scrutiny, he sees
his father sink deeper into incoherence and delusion. The pain of this
sight compels Biff into making another sacrifice, one that, according
to Fred Ribkoff, suggests a new level of responsibility in Biffs love:
Biff demonstrates that he does in fact love his father, but, at the same
time, this love is balanced by the recognition that if there is any chance
of saving himself and his father he must leave home for good (98).
Yet, while Biffs successive sacrifices embody his maturing love,
Willys one extreme sacrifice embodies the culmination of his confused mind and misplaced values. As Clurman notes, [u]naware of
what warped his mind and behavior . . . [Willy] commits suicide in the
conviction that a legacy of twenty thousand dollars is all that is needed
to save his beloved but almost equally damaged offspring (xv). Willy
is, according to John von Szeliski, a man destroyed by his values,
and they are not moral or ethical values, but situational and material
codes (19). Ironically, Willys sacrifice for Biff, rather than fulfilling
any real need, denies his son the one thing Biff has been longing for:
his fathers blessing to lead a simple life.
However, despite the seeming futility of Willys suicide, hope remains
in the knowledge that Biff has at last succeeded in expressing his love to
his father; where fierce words fail, violent sobs evoke Willys most moving, most elevated moment: Isnt thatisnt that remarkable? Biffhe
likes me! . . . Oh, Biff! Staring wildly: He cried! Cried to me. He is choking with his love, and now cries out his promise: That boythat boy is
going to be magnificent! (133). Miller himself believes that Biffs gift of
love symbolizes an important moment of hope: Willy is a lover forsaken
and seeking a lost state of grace, and the great lift of the play is his discovery, in the unlikeliest moments of threats and conflict, that he is loved
by his boy, his heart of hearts (Salesman in Beijing 247). According
to Paul N. Siegel, even Willys suicide becomes, through Biff, a strange
source of hope: in a sense the seed which . . . [Willy] plants in his garden
as he plans his suicide comes to fruition. For Biff has learned who he is as
a result of seeing his fathers crowning degradation while acknowledging
his love for his father and coming to respect him (96). Nevertheless, the
greatest source of hope remains in Biffs comprehension of the true nature
142
To his last moments, Willy continues in this denial; in fact, one could
argue that his suicide represents the inevitable culmination of his
habitual self-delusion and evasion.
143
144
to allow Biff the relief of admitting failure suggests the underlying selfishness of his delusions:
BIFF, with determination: Dad, I dont know who said it rst, but I was never
a salesman for Bill Oliver.
WILLY: Whatre you talking about?
BIFF: Lets hold on to the facts tonight, Pop. Were not going to get anywhere
bullin around. I was a shipping clerk.
WILLY: angrily: All right, now listen to me
BIFF: Why dont you let me nish?
WILLY: Im not interested in stories about the past or any crap of that kind
because the woods are burning, boys, you understand? . . . I was red today.
(106107)
Willy can concede his own failure, but he cannot concede Biffs
failure; in fact, the mental effort required to hold his sons failings at
bay sends Willy into another trance, one that ironically causes Biff
to mirror what he most hates in his father: dishonesty. In a desperate
effort to snap Willy out of his delusional ramblings, Biff lies: Pop,
listen! . . . Im telling you something good. Oliver talked to his partner
about the Florida idea . . . Dad, listen to me, he said it was just a question of the amount! (111112). This desperate lapse into falsehood
in order to appease his father, however, is only momentary. Before
leaving the restaurant, Biff again reaches for the truth: Ive got no
appointment! . . . Im no good, cant you see what I am? (113).
Although Biffs honesty seems cruel at times, his willingness
to accept blame and his readiness to sacrifice his own desires for
the well-being of his father offset the severity of his candor with an
unmistakable stirring of hope. In his last altercation with his father,
for example, he ruthlessly exposes both his own failure as a son and
Willys failure as a father:
BIFF: You know why I had no address for three months? I stole a suit in
Kansas City and I was in jail. To Linda, who is sobbing: Stop crying. Im
through with it . . .
WILLY: I suppose thats my fault!
BIFF: I stole myself out of every good job since high school!
WILLY: And whose fault is that?
BIFF: And I never got anywhere because you blew me so full of hot air
I could never stand taking orders from anybody! Thats whose fault it is! (131)
Yet, the severity of this speech is quickly counteracted by his moving confession of newfound self-awareness: Why am I trying to
become what I dont want to be? What am I doing in an office, making
145
Although both father and son have always been tormented by the
knowledge of personal failure (Hadomi 116), Biff at least finds the
strength to reject his fathers destructive self-delusions and accept instead
the harsh but liberating truth about his life and his family; although
both fail in conveying the desirability of their respective dreams, Biff
at least succeeds in giving his father love and acceptance. Such parallels between Willy and Biff do more than simply clarify Biffs character
development; they allow the audience to discover hope in a more satisfying kind of success than that measured by wealth or fame.
That Miller does not end the play with Willys death is perhaps one
of the most telling signs of its hopefulness. Biffs words at his fathers
graveHe had the wrong dreams . . . He never knew who he was
(138)reiterate both his newfound insight and his acceptance of what
love his father had to give. Nevertheless, what ultimately prevents the
despair of Willys defeat from overshadowing the play is Biffs ability to makes the right choice, his ability to disentangle himself from
the web of falsehood that warped his early years and destroyed his
father (Koon 11). Harold Bloom describes the Biff of the Requiem as
different. Released now, by the truth-telling encounter with his father,
to accept himself, Biff can remember and speak about what was good
in his past. Released also from the frozen moment in Willys mind
where he was imprisoned by his fathers self-serving adoration, Biff
has recovered his history and this must happen before he can recover
his life (Blooms Guides 67). Yet, the hope Miller offers is tenuous
at best; he remarks, You see what hope there is in my plays is left in
the lap of the audience (Gussow 72). In fact, when asked about the
potentially didactic nature of his plays, Miller responds: the amount
of change that were capable of is vital, but small. Nobody is an exception to this. This ameliorative philosophy where everybody is going to
be capable of absolutely transforming his character, his nature, into a
positive, wonderful personalitythats lollipop time. It has nothing to
146
do with whats real, as far as I can tell (Gussow 96). Miller may leave
Biff at his fathers graveside with a hopeful future, but he also leaves
him with decisions to make and a dream to which he may or may not
be loyal. Hope is real, but hope is also elusive; it involves things not
yet confirmed, sometimes things not even likely.
Although Willy possesses some redeeming qualities, his
worst qualitiesmaterialism, dishonesty, and an undue desire for
approbationunfortunately dominate his character. Yet, perhaps it is
these very faults that ultimately free Biff from the control of his father
and his fathers teachings, that allow him to pursue his own dream of
happiness, a dream arguably more promising than his fathers because
it is less dependent on the approval of others. In his growth toward
self-acceptance and self-actualization, Biff symbolizes a renewed hope
in humanity, a hope that challenges, maybe even eclipses, Willys miserable failures. If Miller indeed wanted Death of a Salesman to be
didactic in some form, perhaps he hoped his viewers would turn from
Willys wrong dreams (138) and journey instead toward a clearer
understanding of their own values. Perhaps he hoped they would walk
away from Willy, as Biff does, with a better knowledge of what will
not make them happy and a renewed sense of hope to pursue their
own search for happiness with more honesty than Willy Loman could.
Indeed, if self-actualization and personal integrity are the signs of success, then not only is Biff well on his way to being far more successful
than his father could have hoped, but Willys praises also echo with
an ironically prophetic ring. Biff may, in fact, become magnificent
(133) but magnificent in ways that Willy has never imagined.
Deborah Cosier Solomon
Auburn University Montgomery
Bibliography
Bates, Barclay W. The Lost Path in Death of a Salesman in Helene Wickham Koon,
ed. Twentieth Century Interpretations of Death of a Salesman. Englewood Cliffs,
NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1983. (6069)
Bloom, Harold, ed. Major Literary Characters: Willy Loman. New York: Chelsea
House, 1991.
, ed. Blooms Guides: Arthur Millers Death of a Salesman. Philadelphia: Chelsea
House, 2004.
Clurman, Harold, ed. Introduction in The Portable Arthur Miller. New York: Viking,
1977. (xixxv)
147
Luc Gilleman
150
of the narrative only, but with their allusive power create the impression that there is perhaps more to the play than it is actually telling us.
Examples of these are the diamonds that Ben retrieves from the jungle,
the flutes that Willys father is said to have manufactured and peddled
all over the United States, and the pen and basketballs that Biff steals
from his boss, Bill Oliver. All these symbols have been carefully chosen, hang together meaningfully, and, when examined, make the play
resonate in unsuspecting wayssometimes even with a chuckle.
1.
151
Luc Gilleman
152
of the play. That Miller finally called the play Death of a Salesman
rather than The Inside of His Head suggests he remained first and
foremost a storyteller who chose to subordinate his interesting observations about the workings of the mind to the narrative requirements
of the tragic story of Willys downfall.
2.
153
LINDA: ImIm ashamed to. How can I mention it to him? Every day I go
down and take away that little rubber pipe. But, when he comes home, I put it
back where it was. How can I insult him that way? (5960)
Whenever Linda takes the tube away, she feels compelled to put
it back before Willy returns. When the rubber pipe tumbles so awkwardly into view, Linda says she knew it right away, almost as if
she had seen it beforeor something like it, perhaps. Yet that knowledge renders her ashamed and powerless: she cannot mention it to
him. The rubber tube, in other words, is associated both with knowledge and with shame. In the well-made play, the gradual revelation
of knowledge drives the action. In this play, that knowledge is symbolized by the rubber tube. Knowledge leads to confrontation and
changebut here the subtext connoted by the rubber tube produces
the shame that functions as retardation of the action: for some time,
it prevents knowledge from being revealed. Linda is ashamed at the
thought of her husbands shame and would let him kill himself rather
than confronting him about the tube. She cannot bear the idea that he
will know that she knows. Every day I go down and take away that
little rubber pipe. But, when he comes home, I put it back where it
was (60). It is an oscillating movement, typical for Linda: she takes
something away only to put it back afterwards.
This is also what she does to Willy after each sales trip. I was sellin thousands and thousands (34), he cries, until Linda takes out pencil
and paper, forcing Willy to reduce his accomplishment to the miserable reality of seventy dollars and some pennies (35). In this exposure
of the gap between idea and reality lies Willys shame. This is rather
like realizing that the balding, middle-aged man you see in the clothing
store is you, reflected from an unusual angle in the mirror. Deflated by
his wife, who knows how to take the true measure of his masculinity,
he sees himself objectively, that is, through other peoples eyes. In such
moments, he realizes he is fat and foolish to look at (37). People
laugh at him and call him walrus (37) behind his back. But once Willy
is thus exposed, Linda hurries to build him up again, and a few lines
later she fondly calls him the handsomest man in the world (37).
No wonder Willy calls Linda my foundation and my support (18).
There is no future for a salesman who cannot think big. But now the
same mechanism prevents Linda from interfering when her husband
shows signs of wanting to end his life. When she sees the short appendage with the little attachment on the end of it (59), she must turn her
Luc Gilleman
154
eyes away, as if she has seen something that she, as a woman, recognizes
(I knew right away [59]) but is not supposed to see: How can I insult
him that way (60). It is not uncommon in this play that a passage filled
with so much pathos suddenly inverts, striking one with unexpected
humor. I confess, Miller says, that I laughed more during the writing
of this play than I have ever done, when alone, in my life (Birthday
148). We too may sometimes feel like laughing through our respectful
tears. It becomes impossible to repress ones awareness of the hapless
association between the little rubber pipe (60) that so awkwardly tumbles into view and the salesmans own name, Willy. Feelings of guilt
and shame betray the potentially sexual nature of what Linda believes
would be an insult. Knowledge does not empower Linda; it only renders
her uncomfortably aware of her own castrating power: she could indeed
have it taken off (59) but is, as she says, ashamed to (59). She prefers to turn her eyes away so as not to humiliate her husbandeven
though in doing so, she is endangering his life.
It is Willys fate to be what his name (Loman) punningly and yet so
innocently intimates: despite his big dreams, he is just a small man
(56). The obscenity of this truth is acutely symbolized by that little
rubber pipe (75), just short (59). Wilting and withering (40,
43), Willy is, as Linda, the universal mother, puts it, just a little boat
looking for a harbor (76)the ample harbor of her maternal femininity. No wonder she anticipates his every need, singing lullabies to help
him fall asleep, protecting him against anything or anyone who might
hurt him, including his own sons. He is her little boy, who in moments
of self-doubt confesses to feeling still temporary (51) about himself.
Charley keeps asking him when he will grow up (89), and his mistress
sleeps with him because he makes her laugh (38). Their relationship
is a mercantile one too: she can give him access to buyers; he can give
her stockings. In some respects, it is not a bad arrangement.
3.
Masculinity as Myth
Biff and Happy share in their fathers condition in that they have also
failed to grow into mature men. Biff is thirty-four years old but feels
still like a boy (23). Willy defends Biff with the claim that there simply are certain men that take longer to getsolidified (72). The dash,
indicating a hesitation, draws attention to the inadvertent sexual charge
155
of that last word. Yet the boys do not fall short in physical virility. In
fact, Biff and Happy are sexual predators of sorts. It is rather that the
kind of masculinity they are striving for is measured in worldly success
and social recognition. Happy talks enviously about his boss: when
he walks into the store the waves part in front of him. Thats fifty-two
thousand dollars a year coming through the revolving door, and I got
more in my pinky finger than hes got in his head (24). Where Happy
locates his pinky finger for the time being becomes clear when we
hear that he compulsively beds the fiances of his superiors and afterwards attends their weddings (25). Sex is his way of compensating for
feelings of inferiority in regard to his social status and career. Happy
claims that he is not proud of his sex romps with his superiors women;
he compares his actions to the taking of bribes, a surrender to instant
gratification; the women who are its object are despised for turning
men away from loftier goals. Theres not a good woman in a thousand (103), according to Happyhis mom being the exception. Biffs
kleptomania is presented in a similar way, as a form of compensation.
Biff steals not only Olivers balls but also his penas if anatomical completeness is needed to ensure that the symbolic relevance of
such petty theft not go unnoticed. Both Biff and Happy are symbolically appropriating not what the world is denying them, but rather what
they believe they are entitled to, not by virtue of who others think they
are, but rather of who they know themselves to be.
The play invites us to revel in youthful masculinity very much
the way Linda revels in the scent of shaving lotion. Both are equally
elusive. Whenever Willy is overcome by his own inadequacies, he
fantasizes about his dead father and older brother who struck out on
their own, leaving Willy, who was then barely four years old, with his
mother. Instead of blaming them for their irresponsibility, Willy envies
them for the ease with which they shook off the chains of domesticity.
His fantasy adorns them with obvious attributes of masculine potency.
Ben always appears with an umbrella he uses as a cane and occasionally as a weapon. There is something deceptive and dangerous about
Ben that Linda instinctively dislikes. Willys father is said to have been
a successful flute maker and peddler who, with this phallic gadget,
made more in a week than Willy would make in a lifetime (49). Flute
music accompanies Willys dream of an idyllic America of open vistas
and endless possibilities where a man with wits and a sense of adventure can still create his own future. The flute associates the father, who
Luc Gilleman
156
4.
157
and sexuality. The play repeatedly emphasizes Bens age upon his
descent into and re-emergence from the jungle: Ben is seventeen when
he enters the jungleexactly the age at which Biff unexpectedly discovers his fathers adultery, an event that arrests his development for
the next seventeen years so that at thirty-four he still feels very much
like a boy (23). In other words, through the figure of Ben, Willy fantasizes about a boy who, unlike Biff, was able to conquer the threat of
sexuality and thus truly become a man, the diamonds being a symbol
of his masculine potency as well as his worldly success.
The threat of sexuality is represented by Willys mistress who
remains nameless. As The Woman, she is the archetype of all sexually
compliant women, the kind who fills Happy with disgust (25), whoin
another instance of Millers tongue-in-cheek audacitycarries names
like Letta (whos going to let ya ) (113), and who Linda simply
refers to as lousy rotten whores! (124). The Woman is Willys dirty
sexual secret; in his fantasy he associates her with the bathroom where
he attempts to hide her from Biff or with the lavatory in the restaurant
where he remembers the scene of his shameful exposure to his son.
Once liberating and accepting, her laughter is now relentless, mocking,
and sinister. It first appears from the darkness, out of which the woman
emerges and to which she returnsthe kind of darkness that can be conquered successfully only by a man of Bens stature. The play thus establishes a chain of associations, from the jungle, to darkness, death, and
sexuality, so that the descent into the jungle comes to symbolize a rite
of passage that turns a boy into a successful man. For Willy, it is a fantasy of phallic potency, sovereign and undiminished because not subject
to the castrating reality principle that keeps pulling him down and that
is represented by the knowing laughter of the woman. As Ben says, it
does take a great kind of a man to crack the jungle (133). Or as Willy
puts it in yet another sexually loaded phrase, The world is an oyster, but
you dont crack it open on a mattress! (41). Indeed, you need to get off
your back to fetch a pearl. In a sexual sense, though, it is of course usually on a mattress that a man cracks an oyster. Inadvertently, the statement reveals both Willys feminization of the world that the successful
male has to conquer and the dangers of shortchanging ones long-term
goals for the deceptive pleasures of instant sexual gratification.
It is a pleasure that Willy himself is not able to withstand. Willys
unfaithfulness disproves the myth of masculine sovereignty, of proud
independence and self-fashioningthe fantasy of a masculine ideal
Luc Gilleman
158
that would depend on no one but would erect itself solely by virtue of
the strength of its own longing. Instead, it stands revealed as a form
of petty theft. Youyou gave her Mamas stockings! (121) is Biffs
stunned reaction upon discovering his fathers adultery. The stockings
associate the woman with the mother and thus the fathers sexuality
with the mothers humiliation. While they eroticize the mistress, the
stockings become the emblem of the mothers entrapment in domesticity. To Willy, and now to Biff as well, the sight of Linda mending stockings is a visible reminder of the price she is paying day by day for her
husbands dreams. Deception and self-delusion, it dawns on Biff, are at
the heart of his fathers claims to greatness. Willy pleads for his son to
see this as a temporary setback. He has been telling himself that he is
going to make it all up to Linda (39). Ultimate success will obliterate all traces of momentary failure along the way. But Biffs judgment
is pitiless because, in his eyes, Willy has committed the unpardonable
sin of tarnishing the saintly image of the mother. If his father is not a
hero, he can only be a phony little fake! (121). The knowledge of
his sons disdain adds heavily to the burden of the suitcases that an
aging Willy carries back home after every unsuccessful sales trip. In his
Introduction to the Collected Plays, Miller movingly talks of the horror of having the sons hard, public eye upon you, no longer swept by
your myth, no longer rousable from his separateness, no longer knowing you have lived for him and have wept for him (162).
5.
When the rubber tube makes its final appearance, it has come to represent the obscenity of truth: Linda tries to grab it; Biff holds it down;
Willy averts his eyes in shame:
BIFF: All right, phony! Then lets lay it on the line. [He whips the rubber tube
out of his pocket and puts it on the table.]
HAPPY: You crazy
LINDA: Biff! [She moves to grab the hose, but Biff holds it down with his
hand.]
BIFF: Leave it there! Dont move it!
WILLY [not looking at it]: What is that?
BIFF: You know goddam well what that is.
WILLY [caged, wanting to escape]: I never saw that.
BIFF: You saw it. The mice didnt bring it into the cellar! What is this supposed to do, make a hero out of you? This supposed to make me sorry for you?
159
160
Luc Gilleman
believed they would eventually become. Willy thinks that Biff has
refused his own greatness out of spite (131)out of disgust for the
fathers weakness. Biffs tears, in conjunction with the rubber tube,
which serves as a visible reminder of the fathers smallness, convince
Willy of the magnanimity of his son. Willys dreams flare up again:
That boythat boy is going to be magnificent! (133). For some time
now, Willy had been playing with the idea of suicide through gas inhalationa sterile death that would have benefited no one. Inspired by
admiration for Biff, Willy now finds the courage to go into that dark
jungle and fetch the diamondsthe money that the insurance company would not have paid out for a deliberate suicide but might pay
for a death caused by a car accident.
And yet the play does not end with the sound of Willys car crash.
Instead, the Requiem scene that follows resurrects Willys dream and
reaffirms the striking contrast between two visions of masculinity, the
idyllic flute music associated with Willys dreams and the shadow of
the hard towers of the apartment buildings (139). Charleys peroration absolves if not redeems Willy: Charley remarks to Biff, Nobody
dast blame this man. A salesman is got to dream, boy. It comes with the
territory (138). It also, by way of contrast, draws attention to the pettiness of Biffs newly acquired self-knowledge, revealed in the smug,
Charley, the man didnt know who he was (138). Finally, the torch
of Willys dream is not passed on to Biff, who refuses it as phony,
but to the less beloved son, Happy, who promises to devote his life to
proving that Willy Loman did not die in vain (139). This play, then,
is not so much about the death of the salesman as about his resurrection. For Biff, the truth is a tautology: Im just what I am, thats all
(133). It is a truth that the playitself a dream, intimating through
its symbolism far more than it can saycannot possibly accept. In
the end, Death of a Salesman leaves us with the ironical reminder
that we may well be least ourselves when we think to be most true
to ourselves. Forging ahead into the future, intoxicated by what appears
to them as hard-won insights, the Lomans are unaware that they are
repeating the past: Biff, like Ben, will strike out on his own; Happy, like
Willy, will remain behind and dream. And lost in between these two
visions of masculinity is Linda, uncomprehending, seeking her tears.
Luc Gilleman
Smith College
161
Bibliography
Miller, Arthur. Death of a Salesman: Certain Private Conversations in Two Acts and a
Requiem. New York: Penguin, 1977.
. Introduction in Collected Plays. New York: Viking, 1957. Rpt. in Weales.
(155171)
. The Salesman Has a Birthday in The New York Times 5 February 1950, sec.2:
1, 3. Rpt. in Weales. (147150)
. Salesman in Beijing. New York: Viking, 1984.
. Timebends: A Life. New York: Grove, 1987.
Weales, Gerald, ed. Arthur Miller: Death of a Salesman: Text and Criticism. New
York: Viking, 1967.
We never told the truth for ten minutes in this house! (131), Biff
erupts in the emotional climax of Arthur Millers Death of a Salesman.
Deception plays a pivotal role in Millers dramathe Lomans lie not
only to the outside world but to themselves as well. Willy Loman,
despite his whole-hearted efforts, fails to function in the stereotypical
role of a male-provider that his American society demands of him and,
therefore, feebly attempts to cover up or compensate for his declining masculinity. He is driven by feelings of inadequacy and failure to
seek himself outside himself, in the eyes of others (Ribkoff 51)in
other words, he looks for himself in things. Willys prevalent focus
on superficial aspects, such as equating a tennis court with people of
merit, the size of an advertisement with the efficiency of a refrigerator, and the physical appearance of his own two sons with their ability
to function productively in the business world shows that he associates quality solely in terms of appearance. This applies to himself as
wellas long as others perceive him as a man, Willy believes he is a
man. Therefore, [u]sing the only resources they can summon, Willy
and Linda create a kind of false consciousness about the turmoil at the
center of their lives (Bloom 27). Willy feels that it suffices merely
to cover up his negative or inadequate qualities, rather than actively
ameliorating the internal problem. This, claims Benjamin Nelson,
causes Willy to be caught in an irresolvable dichotomy between fact
and fancy (84). By ignoring the pervading problems in his life, Willy
merely foments his inadequacy, which festers under the surface like
molten lava until it ultimately erupts, causing the breakdown of his
family. Miller creates a cohesive drama by employing physical props
and symbols to represent either the blatantly declining masculinity
of the Loman men or their feeble attempts to mask their deficiencies,
thereby paralleling the overriding theme of both physical and emotional impotence.
164
Samantha Batten
Miller creates a sense of fusion in Death of a Salesman by surrounding Willy with various symbols that denote his physical and emotional
decomposition. For instance, Willys automobilea symbol of his vitality and his masculinity because he functions as a road man (80)has
changed from a virile red Chevrolet to a decrepit Studebaker, paralleling Willys own transformation from a young salesman into an old man.
The Lomanss refrigeratorthe familys source of nourishment
continuously breaks down, draining the family for whom it is meant to
provide. However, as Willy himself notes, neither the Chevrolet nor the
refrigerator has ever performed well; he simply idealizes the superficial
aspects of his machinerythe Chevvy [sic] for its impressive physical
appearance and the refrigerator for its striking and ubiquitous advertisements. By using these symbols, Miller both manifests Willys own declining masculinity and emphasizes the salesmans compulsive need to
maintain his appearance of functionality.
Furthermore, Willys house itself, a traditional symbolic representation of the owner, lays transparent and infirm before the towering, intimidatingly phallic apartments that dwarf the houses diminishing form.
To keep up appearances, Willy constantly repairs his house to meet
social standards. Just as he lies to Charley about having a job when he
has, in fact, been fired, Willy maintains the faade of domestic harmony
by updating the exterior appearance of his house. When viewing a house
from the street, passersby initially see the front stoop. By installing this
addition, Willy reveals his focus on the superficialcurb appeal. Instead
of maintaining the interior of the houseor even the relationships of
the inhabitants thereinWilly merely adds to the outward beauty of his
house, showing his obsession with exterior splendor. By repairing the ceiling, Willy reveals his profound need to cover himself: he backtracks
with Linda about the true amount of his commission after his initial gross
165
166
Samantha Batten
167
In one of her most memorable lines in the play, Linda refers to the
fact that Willy has never been profiled in the newspaper; the newspaper denotes the masculine ideals of notoriety, fame, and renown.
Willy and Linda equate the newspapers ability to provide prestige and acknowledgement with masculine worthiness and success.
Furthermore, Willy, shortly after being fired, finds Bernard, who represents the ideal of masculine accomplishment, reading the newspaper
in his fathers office. In this sense, Miller links the newspaper with the
male sphere of business. However, in his initial flashback in Act One,
Willy orders Happy to clean the windows of the car with a newspaper.
As Happy uses the newspaper to clean windows, Miller informs the
audience of the disposability even of famous men, emphasizing that
Willys view of the American Dream is not completely accurate. The
audience might also wonder if Willy would give such an order if his
name had ever been in the newspaper.
Happy, like his father, undergoes a crisis of self-awareness during the
play. Like Willy, Happy compensates for his fear of failure and emotional impotence by looking to outward sources (symbols) to make him
feeland appearmasculine: namely, women. Paradoxically, instead
of withdrawing from the company of women, who might discover his
lack of masculinity, Happy compensates for his inability to function
emotionally as a man by exerting his physical power over females in
misogynistic and superficial relationships. Miller gives to Happy the
role of exuding the sexuality that is otherwise a hidden and problematic
theme in the play (Bloom 19); however, Happys sexuality, like that of
Willy and Biff, poses a problem, especially because he turns to women
[w]henever [he] feel[s] disgusted (Miller 25). By expressing his physical virility in myriad liaisons, Happy overcompensates for his spiritual
impotence by exaggerating his physical, sexual prowess. He equates
sexual conquest with true manliness; however, this is merely a cover for
his unconscious fears of being seen as weak and ineffective. The women
he seduces, whom he aptly terms cover girl[s], are merely covers for
his own emotional feelings of inadequacy (101). He takes (or uses) the
women because he cannot compete with the men. In this false sense of
masculine power, Happy is not with an ordinary woman but one who is
special and beautiful, one whose beauty, and subsequent worth, validates
his masculinity.
Biff, like Happy, inherits from his father an extremely fragile sense
of self-worth dependent on the perceptions of others, most importantly
168
Samantha Batten
169
in an adolescent state throughout the play, grasps at masculinity, as represented by the pen. Like Willys relationship with his father, Biff also
must look outside the family for masculine mentorship because there
are no productive, masculine symbols within the Loman house.
Being a woman, Linda has no need to search for masculinity in the
play, as her husband and sons do. However, she is perhaps Millers most
notorious character in respect to compensatory symbols. Linda enables
her husband and sons to maintain the false bravado, leading to their
destruction. In Act One, Willys implausible excuse for his abnormal
behavioran odd cup of coffeereveals how far he has strayed from
his own senses, notes Harold Bloom; however, [a]s we watch Lindas
response to Willy in this first scene, we see she has joined him in his
disordered thinking as wellmaybe its his glasses or the steering
mechanism of the carbut she has done so to keep the appearance of
normality when she knows otherwise (26). Miller illuminates Lindas
passive role as a contributor of the Lomanss discord through symbolism. In Willys flashbacks, Miller always shows Linda with a basket
of laundry. While laundry was a customary duty of a wife in this time
period, it also shows Linda as a person who washes out stains, metaphorically, the stain of Willys defeats. When Ben offers Willy, who
has just confided to Linda his dissatisfaction with life, a better opportunity out West, Linda replies that Willy is doing well enough (85),
showing that she is fostering Willys illness, such as refusing to remove
the rubber hose from the basement. Additionally, Willy refers to Linda
waxing the floors, yet another menial, uxorial duty representing that
she glosses over Willys blatant lies. However, by the end of the play,
Linda stops dyeing her hair, perhaps showing her resolution to the inevitable effects of agingboth in herself and in her husband.
Death of a Salesman shows the conflict between two American
ideals: the pursuit of happiness through connection to the land (associated with homesteading and frontier life) and the pursuit of happiness
associated with the acquisition of material wealth (Bloom 29). Willy
obviously subscribes to the second viewpoint, and his emphasis on superficial, abstract objects and dreams leads to his downfall. According to
Marianne Boruch, Willys dream land of big games and diamond mines
and assistant buyer positions might be more beautiful than his actual everyday life, but as Biff slowly recognizes, its self-inflation is eventually
fatal (113). Willy kills himself because he lacks either a masculine role
model to emulate or the self-sufficiency to find his own inner masculinity
170
Samantha Batten
without outside help. Throughout the play, Arthur Miller not only utilizes
symbols to represent the decay of the Loman family but also transforms
Willy from a flesh and blood human being into inanimate objects: an
orange peel, a zero, and, ultimately, the prospect of a check for twenty
thousand dollars.
Samantha Batten
Auburn University
Bibliography
Bloom, Harold. Arthur Millers Death of a Salesman. Philadelphia: Chelsea House,
2004.
Boruch, Marianne. Miller and Things in Harold Bloom, ed. Blooms BioCritiques:
Arthur Miller. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2003. (103115) [Taken from The
Literary Review 24.4 (1981).]
Miller, Arthur. Death of a Salesman: Certain Private Conversations in Two Acts and a
Requiem. Penguin: New York, 1977.
Nelson, Benjamin. Benjamin Nelson on Millers Use of Dramatic Form in Harold
Bloom, ed. Arthur Millers Death of a Salesman. Philadelphia: Chelsea House,
2004. (8284)
Ribkoff, Fred. Shame, Guilt, Empathy, and the Search for Identity in Arthur Millers
Death of a Salesman in Modern Drama 43.1 (Spring 2000): 4855.
172
173
Since 1990 he has served as the bibliographer for John Steinbeck and
is the co-editor with Brian Railsback of A John Steinbeck Encyclopedia
(Greenwood, 2006). His articles on Steinbeck have appeared in numerous books and journals, and his book Cain Sign: The Betrayal of
Brotherhood in the Work of John Steinbeck (Mellen, 2000) discusses
the use of the Biblical myth throughout the authors canon. He has
also published studies on Harriet Beecher Stowe, Stephen King, and
Robert Penn Warren, and his most recent work will appear in Illness in
the Academy, edited by Kimberley Myers (Purdue, 2007).
Michelle Nass is a graduate of Millersville University and is currently
pursuing graduate work at Kutztown University in Pennsylvania. As
an English teacher at Twin Valley High School, also in Pennsylvania,
Michelle served as co-editor with Dr. Steven Centola on The Critical
Response to Arthur Miller, published by Greenwood Press. She
has also contributed to Strategies to Inspire Learning: Voices from
Experience, by Lisa Duncan and Colette Eckert.
Terry Otten is Emeritus Professor of English and former Kenneth
Wray Chair in the Humanities at Wittenberg University. He is the
author of four books, including Arthur Miller and the Temptation of
Innocence (University of Missouri Press, 2002). His essays appear in
fifteen different volumes of critical studies and in numerous learned
journals. He now resides in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Craig N. Owens teaches drama, playwriting, and British Literature
at Drake University, in Des Moines, Iowa. He is a founding member of SteinSemble, a Midwest-based theatre troupe specializing in
experimental performance. He also sits on the executive committee
of the Midwest Modern Language Association, at whose annual conference he organizes the Harold Pinter Society mini-conference and
sponsored performance. He has written and presented on performance
theory, modern drama, and vodka in contemporary American film. He
is currently at work on his book Staging the Machine, an examination
of technological innovation and its effects on, and representation in,
twentieth-century drama.
Deborah Cosier Solomon, the daughter of missionaries, spent the first
eighteen years of her life in the Gambia, West Africa, after which she
moved to the United States to further her education. Mrs. Solomon is
currently finishing a Master of Liberal Arts degree at Auburn University
Montgomery and plans to pursue her current interest in English
174
Renaissance literature at the doctoral level. Her work has been published in The Ben Jonson Journal as well as in several books, including
Close Readings: Analyses of Short Fiction from Multiple Perspectives
by Students of Auburn University Montgomery; Kate Chopins Short
Fiction: A Critical Companion; and A Companion to Brian Friel.
Eric J. Sterling, editor of this volume and author of the Introduction,
is Distinguished Research Professor of English at Auburn University
Montgomery. He earned his Ph.D. in English, with a minor in theatre,
from Indiana University in 1992 and has taught at Auburn University
Montgomery since 1994. He has published two other books and several dozen essays in refereed publications, including an essay on
Arthur Millers Incident at Vichy and other modern plays.
Linda Uranga is a high school English teacher with a masters degree
in Education. She is currently enrolled in the Master of Liberal Arts
program at Auburn University Montgomery. She earned her undergraduate degree in Political Science from the University of California,
Los Angeles. She is a member of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe and was
raised on the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota. She currently
teaches and resides in Alabama, with her husband and four children.
Abstracts
176
Abstracts
Abstracts
177
178
Abstracts
Abstracts
179
Index
Ben-Zvi, Linda, 12
Bernard, 3, 4, 6, 61, 66, 6768, 69, 71,
84, 90, 91, 129, 130, 142, 167, 168
Bible, 34, 35, 121
Bigsby, Christopher (C.W.), 11, 16, 18, 24,
35, 39, 41, 64, 65, 68, 70, 78, 82, 91,
123, 124, 135
Billman, Carol, 12
Bliquez, Guerin, 12, 24
Bloom, Harold, 32, 140141, 145, 163,
166, 169
Bradbury, Malcolm, 45
Brater, Enoch, 78
Brecht, Bertolt, 105, 113
Broadway Theatre, 25, 29, 34, 43, 62,
100, 102, 151
Broken Glass, 39
Brucher, Richard T., 96
Bush, First Lady Laura, 33
Business, 210, 15, 31, 36, 41, 50, 53,
54, 55, 62, 63, 67, 6970, 72, 73, 75,
76, 79, 8193, 97, 100, 112, 115,
116, 124, 130, 142, 163, 167, 168
Canning, Charlotte, 12
Capital, 11, 29, 130
Capitalism, 2, 56, 13, 16, 21, 23,
31, 54, 6163, 6667, 69, 71,
7274, 7780, 8193, 102, 114,
115, 117, 118
Carbone, Beatrice, 16
Cardo, Amanda, 48, 49, 51, 55, 57
Carnegie, Dale, 3, 43
Castellitto, George P., 99
Catharsis, 49, 152
Centola, Steven, 1, 49, 54
182
Index
Index
Hercules, 131, 135
Heyen, William, 135
Hoeveler, D.L., 132, 135
Honesty, 28, 34, 36, 52, 64, 67, 69, 84,
90, 92, 125, 137, 140, 143, 146
Hope, 1, 2, 9, 14, 28, 3537, 44, 46, 49,
55, 58, 76, 89, 93, 101, 102, 132,
134, 137, 140146, 150, 156
House Un-American Activities
Committee, 21, 45
Hughes, Langston, 50
Human, 2, 16, 22, 34, 35, 36, 37, 39, 43,
45, 46, 47, 61, 62, 65, 6970, 81, 83,
88, 90, 97, 100, 102, 105, 107109,
113116, 140, 164, 170
Humanity, 35, 38, 91, 108, 113, 115, 146
Humanity-effect, 108, 115
Hume, Beverly, 12, 24
Humor, 154
Ibsen, Henrik, 23, 110, 150
Icon, 29, 106, 107, 111
Identity, 26, 29, 37, 43, 44, 105, 123, 134
Immaturity, 83, 124, 127, 128, 131, 143
Infidelity, 9, 90, 126
Insecurity, 77, 82, 83, 88, 124, 129, 131,
151, 166
Inside of His Head, The, 150, 152
Invisible Man, The, 44
Irony, 8, 13, 16, 18, 40, 68, 78, 86, 89,
117, 123, 130, 133, 135, 136, 141,
144, 146, 149, 160
Jackson, Esther Merle, 123, 134
Jacobson, Irving, 24, 26, 28
Jason and The Argonauts, 123
Jefferson, Thomas, 36, 40, 83
Jobs, Steve, 121
Kazan, Elia, 16, 17
Keller, Joe, 62
Keller, Kate, 16
Kerrane, Kevin, 31
Kleptomania, 62, 80, 88, 114, 142, 155
Knowles, Ric, 24
Koenig, Rhoda, 12
Koon, Helene Wickham, 143, 145
183
184
Index
Melville, Herman, 36
Method, 39, 105, 114, 151
Miller, Arthur, 16, 810, 1118, 2132,
3335, 3746, 4753, 55, 5758,
6172, 77, 78, 82, 83, 8792, 96103,
105, 110, 113, 116, 117, 122135,
137141, 145, 146, 149154, 157,
158, 163170
Modernity, 53, 73, 97, 113, 115, 118, 137
Monroe, Marilyn, 11, 101
Morality, 5, 12, 16, 35, 36, 39, 45, 50,
67, 88, 9091, 123, 126, 137, 141,
142, 143
Morrison, Toni, 37
Murphy, Brenda, 18, 38
Myth of the West, 18
Nature, 76, 118, 130, 135, 138, 140, 156
Nature imagery, 156
Nelson, Benjamin, 163
Newman, Annie, 13
Newman, Manny, 13
New York City, 14, 17, 25, 29, 31, 33,
75, 78, 102, 123
New York Times, 33, 34
night, Mother, 25, 26
Nilsen, Helge Normann, 32
Norman, Marsha, 25
Obligatory scene (scne faire), 150, 152
Oedipus, 12, 116
Oedipus complex, 122
Oliver, Bill, 3, 8, 9, 14, 28, 92, 98,
115, 125, 126, 131, 132, 143,
144, 150, 155
Ontos, 110, 111
Otten, Charlotte F., 12
Otten, Terry, 1, 13, 32
Ouranous, 121
Pan, 156
Parker, Brian, 12, 122, 124, 132, 135
Pathos, 152, 154
Phallic Power, 156, 157, 164170
Poetics, 152
Polemics, 113
Powell, Colin, 50
Index
Self-deceit, 14, 39, 41, 79, 157, 158
Self-realization, 93
Selfishness, 21, 62, 71, 74, 88, 144
Selfless, 23, 27, 28
Semiotics, 105, 106, 111, 113
Shareholder value, 116
Shepard, Sam, 37
Siegel, Paul N., 141
Sign, 70, 108, 110, 145, 153, 159
Sign-thing, 110, 111
Simplicity, 56, 68, 72, 95, 110, 123, 138
Singleman, Dave, 4, 5, 15, 74, 79, 81,
83, 84, 86, 96, 99
Social realism, 105
Sports imagery, 79, 168
Stanton, Kay, 12, 13
Steyn, Mark, 101, 102
Subtext, 35, 40, 153
Success, 34, 69, 14, 15, 2225, 29, 30,
38, 40, 4244, 49, 5456, 63, 6568,
71, 72, 7477, 8191, 98102, 115,
117, 124, 127, 130, 132, 133, 134,
135, 139, 145, 146, 155, 156, 157,
166, 168
Suicide, 2, 8, 17, 25, 26, 76, 77, 130,
132, 137, 141, 142, 149, 152, 160
Sterling, Eric, 117
Symbol, 40, 63, 67, 73, 78, 89, 97, 111,
122, 132, 137, 141, 146, 149160,
163170
185