Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman (Dialogue)

Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman

DIALOGUE 3

Edited by

Michael J. Meyer

Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman

Edited by

Eric J. Sterling

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2008

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

I dedicate this book, concerning an American classic regarding a father-son relationship, to my beloved son, Scott.

Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Preface from the General Editor

xi

Essay Topics for Dialogue: Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman Introduction Eric J. Sterling 1

Linda Loman: “Attention must be paid” Terry Otten

2

Domestic Tragedies: The Feminist Dilemma in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman L. Bailey McDaniel

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21

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Arthur Miller: Guardian of the Dream of America Steven Centola

33

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Refocusing America’s Dream Michelle Nass

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Capitalist America in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman: A Re-consideration Juan Ignacio Guijarro-González and Ramón Espejo

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Willy Loman and the Legacy of Capitalism Linda Uranga

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7

The Dynamo, the Salesman, and the Playwright Paula Marantz Cohen

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Mystifying the Machine: Staged and Unstaged Technologies in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman Craig N. Owens

105

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10

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In His Father’s Image: Biff Loman’s Struggle with Inherited Traits in Death of a Salesman Michael J. Meyer

121

The Emergence of Hope in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman Deborah Cosier Solomon

137

“A little boat looking for a harbor”: Sexual Symbolism in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman Luc Gilleman

149

Compensatory Symbolism in Miller’s Death of a Salesman Samantha Batten

163

About the authors

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 (Queen’s 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 find a protégé 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, Steve’s essay is being published after his death on January 9, 2008. He will be missed.

Preface from the General Editor The original concept for Rodopi’s new series entitled Dialogue grew out of two very personal experiences of the general editor. In 1985, having just finished my dissertation on John Steinbeck and attained my doctoral degree, I was surprised to receive an invitation from Steinbeck biographer, Jackson J. Benson, to submit an essay for a book he was working on. I was unpublished at the time and was unsure and hesitant about my writing talent, but I realized that I had nothing to lose. It was truly the “opportunity of a lifetime.” I revised and shortened a chapter of my dissertation on Steinbeck’s The Pearl and sent it off to California. Two months later, I was pleasantly surprised to find out that my essay had been accepted and would appear in Duke University Press’s The Short Novels of John Steinbeck (1990). Surprisingly, my good fortune continued when several months after the book appeared, Tetsumaro Hayashi, a renowned Steinbeck scholar, asked me to serve as one of the three assistant editors of The Steinbeck Quarterly, then being published at Ball State University. Quite naïve at the time about publishing, I did not realize how fortunate I had been to have such opportunities present themselves without any struggle on my part to attain them. After finding my writing voice and editing several volumes on my own, I discovered in 2002 that despite my positive experiences, there was a real prejudice against newer, “emerging” scholars when it came to inclusion in collections or acceptance in journals. As the designated editor of a Steinbeck centenary collection, I found myself roundly questioned about the essays I had chosen for inclusion in the book. Specifically, I was asked why I had not selected several prestigious names whose recognition power would have spurred the book’s success on the market. My choices of quality essays by lesser known authors seemed unacceptable. New voices were unwelcome; it was the tried and true that were greeted with open arms. Yet these scholars had no need for further publications and often offered few original insights into the Steinbeck canon. Sadly,

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the originality of the lesser-known essayists met with hostility; the doors were closed, perhaps even locked tight, against their innovative approaches and readings that took issue with scholars whose authority and expertise had long been unquestioned. Angered, I withdrew as editor of the volume and began to think of ways to rectify what I considered a serious flaw in academe. My goal was to open discussions between experienced scholars and those who were just beginning their academic careers and had not yet broken through the publication barriers. Dialogue would be fostered rather than discouraged. Having previously served as an editor for several volumes in Rodopi’s Perspective of Modern Literature series under the general editorship of David Bevan, I sent a proposal to Fred Van der Zee advocating a new series that would be entitled Dialogue, one that would examine the controversies within classic canonical texts and would emphasize an interchange between established voices and those whose ideas had never reached the academic community because their names were unknown. Happily, the press was willing to give the concept a try and gave me a wide scope in determining not only the texts to be covered but also in deciding who would edit the individual volumes. The Death of a Salesman volume that appears here is the third attempt at this unique approach to criticism. It features several well-known Miller experts and several other essayists whose reputation is not so widespread but whose keen insights skillfully inform the text. It will soon be followed by a volume on Welty’s Delta Wedding. It is my hope that as each title appears, the Dialogue series will foster not only renewed interest in each of the chosen works but that each will bring forth new ideas as well as fresh interpretations from heretofore silenced voices. In this atmosphere, a healthy interchange of criticism can develop, one that will allow even dissent and opposite viewpoints to be expressed without fear that such stances may be seen as negative or counter-productive. My thanks to Rodopi and its editorial board for its support of this “radical” concept. May you, the reader, discover much to value in these new approaches to issues that have fascinated readers for decades and to books that have long stimulated our imaginations and our critical discourse. Michael J. Meyer 2008

Essay Topics for Dialogue: Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman 1) Does Arthur Miller portray the women in Death of a Salesman in an anti-feminist manner (such as Linda as an enabler) and, as Gayle Rubin claims, as non-active “objects to be exchanged”? Or does Miller make a statement about gender by portraying his male characters as anti-feminist? 2) The so-called “American Dream”—industriousness by an individual leading to wealth and happiness—is obviously central to this play. Does Miller depict the American Dream as desirable yet essentially unattainable? Or does Willy Loman simply misunderstand how to achieve his goals? 3) Are capitalism, business, and the pursuit of the material portrayed as negative endeavors with serious ramifications in Death of a Salesman? Is business dramatized as a cutthroat enterprise, as in the scene with Howard, or does Miller suggest that Willy’s undependable character and growing incompetence are the problems. 4) Is technology, such as tape recorders and radios, dramatized as threats to Willy in the play? Is this looming shift, like the encroaching large buildings in Willy’s neighborhood, a sign of the human costs of inexorable progress in American society? 5) Does Miller suggest that there is some hope for Biff to succeed in life or is he likely to become, as C.W.E. Bigsby has suggested, a misguided Huck Finn who makes the same mistake again, heading out alone and putting his faith in movement rather than in human relationships? 6) In Death of a Salesman, Miller employs various symbols, such as diamonds, stockings, sneakers, seeds, flutes, ceilings, front stoops, the West, Africa, Alaska, education, whistling, pens, wire recorders, football, and so forth. Do the playwright’s images work well together to create a cohesive drama or rather do the symbols fail to function in a compatible way, thus creating a chaotic or flawed play?

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 Miller’s 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 Meyer’s desire to provide young scholars—whether they are applying to doctoral programs, seeking tenure-track positions, or working toward tenure—with 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 Meyer’s wonderful idea of the pairing of essays—an 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 Houston—Downtown, wrote on this topic. Although both essays are superb, Otten’s essay illustrates the strengths of traditional criticism by interpreting Miller’s text closely, while McDaniel’s 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

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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 Miller’s 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 Miller’s symbolism.

1.

The Role of Women

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 Linda’s struggle to keep the family together. Willy calls her his “foundation and my support” (18). Yet some scholars consider Linda an enabler who blames Willy’s 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: “That’s [a football is] me, too” (126). This (mis)conduct toward women is, not surprisingly, passed on to Willy’s 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

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women is “like bowling or something. I just keep knockin’ them over and it doesn’t mean anything” (25). Similarly, Biff thinks of women as objects for personal gain, wanting to marry a woman not for love or companionship but rather in order to force himself to mature: “Maybe I oughta get married. Maybe I oughta get stuck into something. Maybe that’s my trouble. I’m like a boy. I’m not married” (23). The next day he tries to date a woman simply in order to gain an opportunity to meet her boss (Bill Oliver), following the pattern set by his father, who sleeps with Miss Francis so that he can garner easy access to her boss. Miller thus demonstrates how the Loman males, like many men in American society in that era, treat women, while his portrayal of Linda manifests the role that many women played in the middle of the twentieth century. Perhaps Miller also intentionally makes a statement about the feminine by portraying the only major female character in the play as the most rational and loving person in the Loman family.

2.

The American Dream

The American Dream pervades Miller’s seminal drama. Willy Loman covets all the trappings of success that define the American Dream, just as George F. Babbitt does in Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt, a novel that probably influenced Miller. Loman follows advice regarding the attainment of societal success derived through charm, style, and popularity— advice popular in that era and perhaps attributable to the publication of Dale Carnegie’s bestseller, How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936). Loman informs his sons that Bernard will not succeed in a career because high grades and diligence do not carry as much weight in America as appearance and charm: “Because the man who makes an appearance in the business world, the man who creates personal interest, is the man who gets ahead. Be liked and you will never want” (33). But Willy’s strong relationship with Biff disintegrates because of the father’s obsession with being well liked. After Willy successfully coerces Biff to leave the Boston hotel room and tell the desk clerk that the salesman is checking out, the father capriciously and foolishly prolongs the conversation in the room so that Biff can demonstrate that he is well regarded by his classmates for mocking his teacher, Mr. Birnbaum: “laughing: You did? The kids like it?” (118). Through this incident, with its devastating ramifications, Miller shows that charm does not necessarily lead to the achievement of the American

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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 Dream—the 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. Willy’s failure in monetary matters also demonstrates his inability to achieve the American Dream—as he interprets it. Willy perceives success in America as owning a tennis court, as Bernard’s 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 road—adventurous 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 Willy’s conception of the American Dream. Yet also important is Willy’s fascination with charm and personality, traits clearly demonstrated by Willy’s role model, the pleasant Dave Singleman, who made a living at the age of eighty-four. Perhaps Willy’s 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! They’ll come from Maine, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire! All the old-timers with the strange license plates—that boy will be thunder-struck, Ben, because he never realized—I am known! . . . I am known, Ben, and he’ll see it with his eyes once and for all. He’ll see what I am, Ben! (126)

The audience, however, might remember Willy’s lament to Howard that he is not known, which contradicts his fantasy of being popular and serves as an admission of stark reality: “They [buyers, salesmen, and other businessmen] don’t know me any more” (81). The audience must confront this truth in the Requiem when virtually no one comes to Willy’s funeral,

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not even Willy’s 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 Singleman’s funeral, at Willy’s burial, no one cries, not even Linda. Surely, the absence of mourners at his funeral, when juxtaposed with Loman’s expectations, manifests the salesman’s failure to attain the American Dream.

3.

Capitalism and Business

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, “it’s all cut and dried, and there’s no chance for bringing friendship to bear—or personality” (81). In his effort to fire Willy after his long service to the Wagner Company, Howard issues a meaningless cliché meant to assuage his own guilt, telling Willy, “you gotta admit, business is business” (80). Howard’s 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 “can’t eat the orange and throw the peel away—a man is not a piece of fruit” (82), Miller convincingly shows in this scene the impersonal and inhumane nature of capitalism. Howard’s callous indifference to Willy is also readily apparent when the business owner, who has recently taken away Willy’s 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 recorder—“they’re only a hundred and a half. You can’t do without it” (78)—and to let Willy’s “maid” turn it on for him. Howard’s disregard for Willy’s financial plight and longtime service to the company illustrates the business world’s 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

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shows what Willy sells, perhaps because a salesman sells himself—his personality and charm. Yet Willy is not well liked and does not know how to charm others. When attempting to sell himself to Howard as an office (as opposed to a traveling) salesman, he rudely and repeatedly interrupts his boss, who is enthralled with his new wire recorder. He then foolishly suggests to Howard that during his long career on the road, he has forgotten to turn on his car radio. And he ineffectually attempts to acquire his desired office job through playing on nostalgia and lying to Howard by claiming that he was in the office when Old Man Wagner announced that his newborn son would be named Howard. Surely the boss realizes that this assertion about Howard’s name is a lie because he is thirty-six years old (76), yet Willy informs Howard that he has worked for the firm for thirty-four years (82). Thus, Howard would have been two years old, not a newborn, when Willy joined the company. In addition to risking his position by telling this lie, Willy is subsequently chastised by Charley for claiming to have named Howard himself: when’re you gonna realize that them things don’t mean anything? You named him Howard, but you can’t sell that. The only thing you got in this world is what you can sell. And the funny thing is that you’re a salesman, and you don’t know that. (97)

Miller’s play is perhaps not an indictment of capitalism because Willy does not deserve to succeed if he is incompetent. Moreover, if Miller sincerely intended to write a play that attacks capitalism, he most probably would not have portrayed the failure of an incompetent worker, but rather the failure of a skillful and talented salesman who deserves great success. Willy’s unprofessional behavior clearly manifests his incompetence. For instance, Willy insists that Bernard will not succeed in business because he lacks charm: Bernard can get the best marks in school, y’understand, but when he gets out into the business world, y’understand, you are going to be five times ahead of him. That’s why I thank Almighty God you’re both built like Adonises. Because the man who makes an appearance in the business world, the man who creates personal interest, is the man who gets ahead. (33)

Time, however, proves Willy wrong, thus suggesting, perhaps, that the capitalist system does work. Bernard’s diligence leads to his successful career, while the emphasis on charm and personality gets Willy’s sons nowhere in the business world.

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Technology

Technology is a thought-provoking topic in that it shows how time has passed Willy by. Willy is an unsuccessful businessman partly because salesmen must have a vision of the future, yet Loman, as the flashbacks and his subjective recollections indicate, dwells on the past and is unable to adapt to the changes that life brings. One example of Willy’s inability to adapt and his preoccupation with the past involves his trouble with his new Studebaker car; he confuses it with the old red Chevvy [sic] that has the windshields that open. His mind drifts to the old car as he daydreams and thus almost runs over a boy in Yonkers. Although Willy drives in the present, his mind remains in the past. Technology represents the future. In Howard’s office, the boss plays with his brand new gadget, a wire recorder. Willy is nonplussed by the new technology and becomes flustered and scared when he accidentally turns it on: “leaping away with fright, shouting: Ha! Howard! Howard! Howard! . . . Shut it off! Shut it off!” (83). He is embarrassed when Howard must return to his office and turn off the wire recorder for him. The fact that technology confuses Willy and manifests his inability to adapt to the present and the future indicates his occupational dilemma: accepting the harsh truth that salespeople and marketers must always adapt and look to the future in order to be successful. One current example involves the restaurant chain, formerly named Kentucky Fried Chicken. When doctors and nutritionists made it clear to the American public that fried food contains high levels of artery-clogging cholesterol and thus is unhealthy because it can cause heart attacks, Kentucky Fried Chicken started to lose business. The chain reacted by changing its name to KFC, enticing customers back into their restaurants. The chicken is no longer “Fried”; it is now “F’ed.” Intellectually, customers know that the product is the same, but psychologically, they do not feel guilty or that they are hurting their bodies, for they no longer see the word “Fried” on the restaurant building. Thus, sales have improved, even though the marketing, but not the product, has been modified. The company has improved sales because it has adapted to new societal developments, which Willy, as his fear of the wire recorder indicates, cannot. Consequently, when he goes on his New England route, none of the buyers know him (81). Furthermore, technology is important in Death of a Salesman when Willy mentions Ben’s watch fob that he has sold in order to pay for Biff’s radio correspondence course. Willy believes, perhaps, that Biff can combine technology with his charming personality, but this plan, like so many others, fails.

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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 Willy’s desperation for Biff’s 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.

Willy’s Legacy to Biff

Although Biff has been unable to attain the success that his father has coveted for him, Willy’s death sets his son free. The confusing report of Biff’s day, told in Frank’s 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 don’t 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 Willy’s death, not the insurance money, that frees Biff to succeed. No longer burdened with his father’s 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 Willy’s misguided

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dream, Biff will seek a future that is appropriate for him and will ignore his father’s 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 play’s 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 Willy’s 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 ain’t 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 salesman’s plumbing does not function well (66). The refrigerator also breaks down frequently. The apartments dwarf Willy’s house, making Loman the “low man” in the neighborhood, someone who has seen others rise while he has not. Willy’s 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 Miller’s references to Loman’s small size in regard to sexuality. The claustrophobic effect of the large apartments suggests Willy’s 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 symbol—seeds. Having seen his sons—his 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 Biff’s respect, never to regain it, and upon learning that Biff will not be staked by Bill Oliver. The desire to plant new seeds manifests Willy’s 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 Willy’s infidelity and guilt. Biff becomes enraged at his father’s adultery in part because Willy gives stockings to Miss Francis

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while Linda must darn her own stockings to save money. The darning of the stockings also symbolizes Willy’s 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 salesman’s 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 Miller’s 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.

Linda Loman: “Attention must be paid”

It might surprise some readers to find this bit of dialogue spoken by the central character, Amelia Earhart, in Arthur Miller’s 1940s radio play Toward a Farther Star: “Isn’t it time to unlock the kitchen and let women out into fresh air? . . . Women must have the right to lead the way once in a while, to search for new things instead of sitting home waiting for men to do the work of the world” (qtd. in Bigsby Arthur Miller: A Critical Study 43–44). For many feminist and other genderbased critics, Miller is guilty of creating sexist texts, which demean or reduce female characters. Although many of Miller’s dramas have been attacked on such grounds, sometimes intensely, as when some accused him of unfairly portraying Marilyn Monroe as Maggie in After the Fall, Death of a Salesman is probably the most discussed of his plays in relation to female characters. As Happy tells Biff, “There’s not a good woman in a thousand” (103). Other than Charley’s briefly seen secretary Jenny and Linda Loman, the women are described as sexual objects: Miss Francis, the “buyer” in Willy’s Boston hotel room, referred to as “The Woman”; Miss Forsythe, whom Happy assures Biff is “on call,” referred to as “Girl”; and her friend “Letta,” also obviously “on call” (102). If Miss Francis is a buyer, Miss Forsythe and Letta are sellers in this masculine world of capital and exchange. Matthew Roudané aptly summarizes much feminist criticism, noting that it argues that “the play stages a grammar of space that marginalizes Linda Loman and, by extension all women, who seem Othered, banished to the periphery of a paternal world” (“Celebrating Salesman” 24). Of course, Miller is under no obligation to make these women threedimensional characters, given their limited roles. Given her importance, Linda, however, is another matter. Although he claimed to regard Linda as “a very admirable character,” the playwright was sensitive to the criticism directed toward her. He excused her as “a woman of that particular era,” and added, “I think there’s currently a certain amount of standardized thinking in relation to the character. People would like

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to think that a woman could simply engineer the whole situation, but she can’t. And neither could a man” (“Responses to an Audience” 821). Miller’s 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 Willy’s 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 mother’s son” because she proposes no higher ideal than Willy’s 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 Miller’s feet, not just with Linda Loman. Linda “is the embodiment of society’s perception of women” and Miller’s 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

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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 Kowalski’s brash chauvinism or David Mamet’s 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 Miller’s characterization of women with his failure to write a genuine tragedy. Jeffrey D. Mason declares that Miller’s 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 Miller’s failure to create progressive and helpful female characters; at worst, she reflects the dramatist’s sexist attitude, ironically, given the play’s 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

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Manny acted “absurd[ly] . . . completely isolated from the ordinary laws of gravity,” the more she attempted to protect him. Linda, of course, more than slightly imitates Annie’s flaws and her goodness. On one hand, Linda expresses an unalterable devotion to Willy and seems as much caught up in his childlike faith in the American Dream as he is. She buys “American-type cheese” as though expressing her faith in the American way. Committed to the consumer culture, she defends the purchase of the often-broken Hastings refrigerator because “[t]hey got the biggest ads of any of them!” (35). She acts effusively when Biff talks about seeing Oliver to help start a new life in the commercial world. “Isn’t that wonderful?”, she exudes, both encouraging Willy and expressing her own naïve hope. As innocently as Willy, she believes that “[m]aybe things are beginning to” look up and declares, as self-deceivingly as Willy might, that “Oliver always thought the highest” of Biff (62, 64, 65). Linda similarly participates in Willy’s other reconstructions of the past, as when she remembers glowingly how Biff appeared “in gold” at Ebbets Field (68). She plays cheerleader when Willy announces he is going to demand an advance and a New York-based assignment. “Oh, that’s the spirit, Willy!” (74), she childishly proclaims, assuring herself as well as him that “It’s changing, Willy, I can feel it changing!” (74). She sometimes even echoes Willy’s very language, as when she tells Biff to “make a nice impression on him [Oliver], darling. Just don’t perspire too much before you see him” (76). Though not immune from the American Dream of success, Linda appears to possess limited vision, locked in the domestic role of efficient housewife and loyal supporter of the dominant culture. As Miller puts it, she has a “co-dependency” along with Willy (Kullman 629). The dramatist also remarks in another interview that Linda “is also sucked into the same mechanism; she’s not apart from it. If she were apart from it, she couldn’t very well have remained [Willy’s] wife for this long” (Conversations with Arthur Miller 265). As Matthew Roudané observes, she is an enabler who “contributes to the truth-illusion matrix” by supporting Willy’s “vital lie” (“Death of a Salesman and the Poetics of Arthur Miller” 70). Though it may be difficult at times to determine whether or not she is touting the American Dream or only trying to encourage Willy in his desperate attempts to succeed, to believe in himself, there is little doubt that Linda is tainted by the same debunked value system.

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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 Willy’s “got a beautiful job here” (85). Again imitating Willy’s very language, she declares to Willy that “You’re 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 he’ll be a member of the firm, didn’t he, Willy?” (85). She even ends the conversation by holding up Willy’s 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 he’s 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 Angelo’s lack of knowledge about Studebakers for Willy’s erratic driving. She then claims that “it’s 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, “You’re too accommodating, dear” (14). When he confuses the Studebaker with the Chevvy [sic], she manufactures an excuse: “Well, that’s nothing. Something must’ve reminded you” (19). When he laments how little he sold on the week’s business trip, she tells him “Well, next week you’ll do better,” and insists, “you’re doing wonderful, dear. You’re 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 don’t talk too much, you’re just lively” (37); “Willy, darling, you’re 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,

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like other Miller female characters, she bears the consequences for a dominant male’s stubborn moral blindness or a debilitating capitalism. One thinks of Kate Keller, Elizabeth Proctor, Beatrice Carbone, Esther Franz, Quentin’s wives, Theo and Leah Felt, Patricia Hamilton, and Sylvia Gellburg. As Miller acknowledges, Linda contributes, however unwittingly, to Willy’s 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 Linda’s 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 girl—a steady, somebody with substance” (25). Happy claims that he also desires “[s]omebody with character, with resistance! Like Mom, y’know?” (25). As Biff tries vainly to defend her from Willy’s dominance and corruptive influence, he, like Willy, Happy, even Charley, pays honor to Linda’s rock-hard resolve. Miller’s 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 46–47). He and director Elia Kazan told her she was not suited for the part, but Dunnock came back to re-audition again and

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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 Linda’s 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 Willy’s 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 Kazan’s 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 Dunnock’s 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 Willy’s 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 Willy’s failure and his attempts to commit suicide, she is much more than a mere victim. Far from the naïve, 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

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which, according to the playwright himself, must be done if our theater is to recover the spirit of tragedy” (74). In no uncertain terms, she lays down the ultimatum to Biff: “[T]here’s no leeway any more. Either he’s your father and you pay him that respect, or else you’re not to come here” (55). And later, when Biff and Happy return from the restaurant after abandoning their father, she repeatedly demands that they “Get out of my sight! Get out of here! . . . Get out of here, both of you, and don’t come back! . . . Get out of here! . . . Get out of this house!” (123–125). As Linda educates Biff about Willy’s state, she replaces despair with outrage, sentiment with steel-ribbed conviction. Ronald Hayman labels her “I don’t say he’s a great man” speech “quite unnecessary” and “insufficiently related to . . . action” (50); but this misses the point altogether. No one else in the play could possibly argue Willy’s case. No one has invested so much in him or given him such uncompromising devotion. It is worth noting that Miller certainly did not intend her rigorous defense of Willy in the famous “Attention must be paid” speech as sentimentality. In fact, he took out of the original dialogue all references to Biff or Happy as “darling” or “dear” to avoid any hint of mere sentimentality (Murphy 45). It is no surprise that he delighted in Elizabeth Franz’s 1999 Tony Award-winning portrayal of Linda as she vigorously slammed her fist on the table when delivering the oft-quoted lines. Finally, one might note that Linda delivers the first and last words of the play—“Willy! . . . free . . .” (12, 139). She offers a benediction, however ironic, for she is indeed freed at last from Willy’s spurious, destructive dream. Christopher Bigsby comments on the image of Elizabeth Franz as Linda outstretched on Willy’s grave in the Requiem, “like a nun prostrating herself before a mystery, and the truth is that, for all her everyday common sense, life does remain a mystery to her” (Arthur Miller: A Critical Study 113). Yet even granting that she is “before a mystery” (she repeats the phrase “I can’t understand” four times in the last three pages of the text), she gives us the transcendent wisdom of the play. Finally uttering a sob after saying four times in one speech that “I can’t cry,” Linda releases the emotion that allows her unwittingly to define “the state of grace,” transforming the language of commerce into metaphysical truth— “We’re free and clear. We’re free. We’re free . . . We’re free” (139). Terry Otten Wittenberg University

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Bibliography August, Eugene R. “Death of a Salesman: A Men’s Study Approach” in Western Ohio Journal 7.1 (1986): 53–71. Austin, Gayle. “The Exchange of Women and Male Homosexual Desire in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman and Lillian Hellman’s Another Part of the Forest” in Feminist Rereadings of Modern American Drama. June Schlueter, ed. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1989. (59–66) Balakian, Janet N. “Beyond the Male Locker Room: Death of a Salesman from a Feminist Approach” in Approaches to Teaching Miller’s Death of a Salesman. Matthew Roudané, ed. New York: Modern Language Association, 1995. (115–124) 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. (217–225) 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. (vii–xxvii) Billman, Carol. “Women and the Family in American Drama” in Arizona Quarterly 36 (1980): 35–49. Bliquez, Guerin. “Linda’s Role in Death of a Salesman” in Modern Drama 10 (1968): 383–386. 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. (69–76) Couchman, Gordon W. “Arthur Miller’s Tragedy of Babbitt” in The Merrill Studies on Death of a Salesman. Walter J. Meserve, comp. Columbus, OH: Charles E. Merrill, 1972. (68–75) Harshbarger, Karl. The Burning Jungle: An Analysis of Arthur Miller’s 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 Miller’s Death of a Salesman” in NMAL: Notes on Modern American Literature 9.3 (1985), item 4. Koenig, Rhoda. “Seduced by Salesman’s 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): 817–827. Mason, Jeffrey D. “Paper Dolls: Melodrama and Sexual Politics in Arthur Miller’s Early Plays” in Feminist Rereadings of Modern American Drama. June Schlueter, ed. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1989. (103–115) McDonough, Carla J. Staging Masculinity: Male Identity in Contemporary American Drama. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1997. Miller, Arthur. Conversations with Arthur Miller. Matthew C. Roudané, 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): 817–827. —. 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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—. Timebends: A Life. New York: Penguin, 1995. Murphy, Brenda. Miller: Death of a Salesman. Plays in Production Series. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. Otten, Charlotte F. “ ‘Who am I?’: Re-investigation of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman” in Twentieth Century Interpretations of Death of a Salesman. Helene Wickham Koon, ed. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1983. (85–91) Otten, Terry. The Temptation of Innocence in the Dramas of Arthur Miller. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 2002. Parker, Brian. “Point of View in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman” in Twentieth Century Interpretations of Death of a Salesman. Helene Wickham Koon, ed. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1983. (41–55) Roudané, Matthew. “Celebrating Salesman” in “The Salesman Has a Birthday”: Essays Celebrating the Fiftieth Anniversary of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. Stephen A. Marino, ed. Lanham, MD: UP of America, 2000. (19–27) —. “Death of a Salesman and the Poetics of Arthur Miller” in The Cambridge Companion to Arthur Miller. Christopher Bigsby, ed. New York: Cambridge UP, 1997. (60–85) Rowe, Kenneth Thorpe. A Theater in Your Head. New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1960. Savran, David. Communists, Cowboys, and Queers: The Politics of Masculinity in the Work of Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1992. Stanton, Kay. “Women and the American Dream of Death of a Salesman” in Feminist Rereadings of Modern American Drama. June Schlueter, ed. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1989. (67–102) Zeineddine, Nada. Because it Is My Name: Problems of Identity Experienced by Women, Artists, and Breadwinners in Plays of Henrik Ibsen, Tennessee Williams, and Arthur Miller. Brauton Devon, Eng.: Merlin Books, 1991.

Domestic Tragedies: The Feminist Dilemma in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman The dominant political context at that time [of early Second Wave Feminism] was the New Left, particularly the anti-war movement and the opposition to militarized U.S. imperialism. The dominant paradigm among progressive intellectuals was Marxism, in various forms . . . Marxism, no matter how modified, seemed unable to fully grasp the issues of gender difference and the oppression of women. Gayle Rubin, 1994 interview with Judith Butler (63)

Although Gayle Rubin’s 1994 interview with Judith Butler addresses the second-wave feminism that post-dates Death of a Salesman’s 1949 debut by some twenty years, Rubin’s comments muster relevance when we consider Arthur Miller’s seminal work, one often described as his “American Masterpiece,” which explores the perils of unchecked capitalism. Labeling Miller as a Marxist might be a stretch toward the left. But the socialist-imbued messages that emerge throughout Willy Loman’s despair—a despair arising out of his repeated failure to achieve the midcentury middle class articulation of an “American Dream”—certainly point to an aggressive critique of Western materialism and the frequent, painful side-effects for those in its wake. More than just a cautionary tale opposing American ideologies of wealth and self-value, Miller’s Pulitzer Prize- and New York Drama Critics Circle Award-winning play helped garner him a 1956 subpoena to testify before the U.S. Senate during the infamous House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) hearings— an experience which left the playwright cited for contempt of Congress, assigned one year’s suspended sentence, and fined $500 for refusing to name names.1 Indeed, Arthur Miller’s increasing disgust with the rightwing paranoia seizing the Cold War culture of mid-century America also prompted him to write The Crucible (1953), which, aside from his classic work, Death of a Salesman, is his most frequently produced play. Thus, while Miller’s views might not seem synonymous with Marxist or even Communist doctrine, the left-minded politics of his public actions

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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 Rubin’s criticism of Marxist thought and activism during the anti-war 1970s, specifically Marxism’s inability to sufficiently address gender inequality and its role in economic oppression, becomes relevant in a broader discussion of Miller and Willy Loman’s dilemma. The play’s 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 Miller’s play. (For example, in addition to Willy’s 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 Miller’s 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 women’s agency as it does (not) reside within broader critiques of hegemony. Generated out of second-wave feminism, Rubin’s “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 women’s 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 roles—dramatic constructs existing merely for the support of more threedimensional, complex male protagonists. That Arthur Miller’s Cold War family drama is still conceived by many scholars as an ultimately human, universal, and cross-culturally relevant text—one that meets with the continued commercial as well as critical success that characterized it from its initial 1949 production—would 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,

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Willy Loman’s demise as a victim of capitalism was nearly unanimously received as a triumph, specifically as a powerful hybrid of dramatic realism.3 Miller’s predecessor and inspiration, Henrik Ibsen, parallels the former beyond the theme of using drama-as-critique of society’s dehumanizing ills. Undoubtedly, the late nineteenth-century dramatic realism Ibsen is credited as establishing—realism of set, dialogue, character, and plot—in large part describes Miller’s 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 object—a gendered binary with no complications offered. And in regard to the role of wife-mother, as with Linda Loman, a woman’s 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 husband’s needs over those of her children, a noteworthy deviation from the more typical maternal patterns to be sure, her sacrifice of her children’s interests to serve her husband’s 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 Willy’s infamous gift of stockings, also occupies a role based exclusively on her function as (sexual) object and one who provides service/assistance to the play’s male protagonist. How is the American Dream defined for women such as Linda Loman, or, for that matter, Happy’s 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 Miller’s “message”) rely on the consistent powerlessness of the play’s female characters; or is the construct of

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masculinity Willy presents meant to generate a statement critical of an anti-feminist dinosaur of days gone by? Most obviously, Linda emerges as a kind of two-dimensional service station, existing to aid or support the needs of her richer, more complicated dramatic partner and the play’s protagonist, her husband. Tellingly, the critical discourse regarding whether or not Willy’s story is in fact “tragic,” or about the play’s debatable status as a true “tragedy,” all interrogates Willy’s position as a (non)tragic hero and the potential inevitability of Willy’s fate.5 Linda’s presence within broader criticism of the play occupies a space similar to that which she occupies on stage: peripheral and unimportant, with the exception of (and relative to) her interactions with the more important male protagonist. As theatre historian Ric Knowles points out, analysis of a play text and its performance can be usefully understood as a “negotiation at the intersection of three shifting and mutually constitutive poles: performance, conditions of production and conditions of reception” (3). While it might be shortsighted to place the critical reception and analysis of a written text and its production(s) as the sole criteria of investigation regarding textually generated meaning, along with audience reception (in this case the overwhelming commercial success of the play), the critical discourses surrounding a play inarguably comprise one of the primary components of meaning that a play generates. Knowles describes this overall critical “context within which the play operates” as the “spatial and discursive conditions of receptions within and through which audiences perform those readings and negotiate what works mean for them” (20). That (still) relatively little critical attention is devoted to Linda Loman specifically (or to feminist concerns in the play broadly, relative to the critical attention regarding Willy in particular or conceptually broader issues, as well) would seem to be an undeniable indicator of the peripheral status that women or a feminist agenda might occupy in Miller’s “social critique.” Among the very few exceptions, Guerin Bliquez’s 1968 essay “Linda’s Role in Death of a Salesman” and Beverly Hume’s 1985 publication “Linda Loman as ‘the Woman’ in Miller’s Death of a Salesman” consider Arthur Miller’s play with gender and/or Linda’s presence as the primary issue of the criticism. Most typically, however, Linda is described by critics as “profoundly unsatisfactory” and “not in the least sexually interesting” as a dramatic character (see, for instance, Bigsby and Popkin, qtd. in Jacobson 11).

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Looking at the more recent critical reception of Miller’s 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 Miller’s Death of a Salesman, Marsha Norman’s ’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 play’s 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 character’s, 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 actor’s/character’s weight (30). Rather than explain Jessie’s 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 Jessie’s 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 Norman’s 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 Miller’s drama as a classic American domestic or family drama. Dolan importantly notes how Miller’s protagonist was being played by Dustin Hoffman just down the street from Norman’s production. Hoffman, falling short of the physical model set by Lee J. Cobb’s 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” (32–33). Furthermore, while Jessie Cates and

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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 “women’s” sphere (Dolan 31–33). 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 Miller’s 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 2–3). The centrality of “home” and sanguineous family, not to mention the predominance of a male’s 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 Linda’s 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 audience’s 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 Willy’s 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 I’m sitting here and waiting for? And you tell me he has no character?” (57). Tellingly, before the play’s conclusion and Willy’s suicide, Linda even encourages her own offspring to break all contact with the family in order to, at best, help preserve Willy’s 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

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more altruistic constructs of mid-century gender and family ideologies; yet her seemingly automatic preference of meeting Willy’s needs over those of her sons still places her agency as forgotten or nonexistent. In other words, she might complicate Cold War middle-class maternity via “bad mothering,” but her invariable commitment to Willy’s “maintenance,” as it were, still locates her as some kind of gendered service station. Admittedly, the options for a middle-aged woman of her assumed experience and education would not be encouraging should she desire to explore the potential of a Willy-less life. But her consistent refusal to ponder, even momentarily, the possibility of leaving or standing up to Willy—indeed, even to consider ceasing her enabling of Willy’s mendacities (mendacities that leave her disadvantaged as well)—goes beyond the economic dependency an unemployable wife might face in contemplating any future independence. Furthermore, Linda’s resistance to altruistic maternity seems less revolutionary when we consider how her digression from selfless nurturance toward Biff and Happy is replaced by an attitude toward Willy that is easily coded as maternal. The aging and unsuccessful salesman who is unable to grow up is protected and cared for by his seemingly selfless, if not desire-less, wife, a character who seems to exist solely to satisfy, cope with, and counsel her boyish, impulsive, and misinformed male counterpart. Willy can be read in many ways as her dependent, a vulnerable and childish character for whom audiences are supposed to feel pity. And with Willy’s sexual needs conspicuously met by a woman other than Linda, perhaps even Linda’s dramatic opposite, audiences can discern in Willy’s wife a female character who completes the conservative maternal construct that places selflessness and nurturance first and foremost, and sexuality as nonexistent. Thus, Linda Loman as “bad mother” to her sons Biff and Happy is replaced by Linda as “saint-like mother” to her husband Willy. Among his many delusions, Willy often convinces himself of the presence of (usually nonexistent) external validation. Indeed, an obsession with being “liked,” as opposed to having some sense of self-worth or internally-generated validation, is one of the primary “American” qualities Miller puts on trial. That these misperceptions are often supported, at times generated, by Linda could arguably put her in a more significant dramatic light. For example, as Willy excitedly exclaims that Biff does “like” his father, we see that it is up to Linda to immediately, fervently echo and validate the (false) sentiment, that he actually “loves”

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Willy (133). Similarly, in her verbal supplements to Biff’s comments concerning Bill Oliver’s high regard for him, Linda replies, “He loved you!” (64). Obviously, as Oliver does not even remember Biff later in the play, and this episode/failure then leads to the play’s climactic confrontation between Biff and Willy, this earlier lie (and Linda’s eager assistance in its support) can be read as one of the several significant moments in the plot that require Linda’s participation. Perhaps more than any other character except for Willy, it is Linda who helps supply, or at the very least helps confirm, the lies and delusions at the center of the play, at the center of Miller’s argument. Linda is important to the plot’s development because she is the character who provides near constant exposition. To be sure, Linda does have a significant narrative “job” in Miller’s play. In addition to delivering the first and final words that the audience hears, her character is one of the major sources to explain the meaning of Willy’s life. As a non-active object, she does manage to provide important discoveries and share relevant information to the audience, information that is key to the rest of the characters and the overall plot. But unlike other characters who may provide expository information, Linda does not exist as a plausible aid to the play’s protagonist. Her assistance comes consistently in the form of enabler and powerless nursemaid. Jacobson contends: Linda remain[s] loyal, but her constancy cannot help [Willy]. She can play no significant role in her husband’s dreams; and although she proves occasionally capable of dramatic outbursts, she lacks the imagination and strength to hold her family together or to help [Willy] define a new life without grandiose hopes for Biff. (11)

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 Linda’s 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 Linda’s 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 Linda’s apparent insignificance as a sad-but-inevitable result of increasingly traditional and inflexible

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mid-century, Cold War gender roles. Certainly by 1949 the relative progress made by women’s participation in the war effort was increasingly eroded as the conservative gender culture that would define most of the 1950s encroached on both the public and private domains of the American family. But writing off Linda’s lack of depth/importance as a consequence of Cold War gender ideologies holds less merit when we consider other prominent constructs of working- and middle-class white mothers of the same period. Perhaps equaled only by Willy Loman himself among mid-century theatrical prominence on the American stage, Tennessee Williams’s Amanda Wingfield gave 1945 audiences a middle-aged wife-mother construct that was anything but passive and uninteresting. In his largely autobiographical and multiple awardwinning drama The Glass Menagerie, Williams and the original, infamous Amanda, Laurette Taylor, proposed a maternal icon and feminine construct that evoked audience hatred, pity, and even awe with a seemingly effortless ability to make those around her miserable. Not coincidentally, Amanda Wingfield also presents a monolithic parental figure who looms over her unhappy children, wielding her inconsistent power through personal force and a steady stream of self-delusion. Unlike Death of a Salesman, however, Tennessee Williams’s memory play of gauzy realism (also frequently described as an “American Masterpiece”) depicts a family dealing with their quickening failure to achieve the American Dream but by way of a monster matriarch. And initially on the New York stage (and later in a successful film), William Inge’s and Shirley Booth’s self-consciously infantilized, heartbreaking Lola Delaney of Come Back, Little Sheba (1950) also peppered the Broadway stage with a more three-dimensional “middle-class housewife” female protagonist. Off the stage as well, powerful constructs of middle-class white maternity can be located without much difficulty. While American popular culture and television provided more than a few plastic and passive June Cleavers, it also generated Paddy Chayefsky’s successful 1954 television drama The Mother, from “The Philco Television Playhouse.” With Maureen Stapleton performing the lead character (Mrs. Fanning), audiences were exposed to a widow-mother who struggles to maintain her own identity and financial independence with explicit courage and integrity but without sufficient economic or cultural capital. In other words, it is shortsighted to disregard Linda as one of several cold-war mothers victimized by gender ideologies that disallow them anything beyond passive foils to

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their male counterparts. If we do read Linda as an inactive object of exchange, an expository trope that exists merely to inform the audience of the more important character’s back story, blaming a broader conservative Cold War culture seems insufficient, since more than a few critically and commercially successful constructs managed to surface. An alternative reading of what seems to be Miller’s anti-feminist stance among broader social critique is certainly possible. Might the play be employing a critical stance against traditional Cold War gender ideologies since the less sympathetic, unsuccessful male characters are the frequent sources of these values and behaviors? For example, lacking the emotional complexity or inner conflict that clearly defines his more prominent brother Biff, Happy is possibly the least likable male character in the play. While we can potentially attribute much of Biff’s and even Willy’s words and actions to the oppressive and materialist culture that Miller is trying to censure, Happy is portrayed as a less complicated but much more consistent voice of misogyny and greed, thereby making sympathy for him as a potential “victim of his culture” less likely. Bearing this in mind, Happy’s comments and thoughts toward women emerge as especially important, for the audience is not geared to receive him with the qualified compassion or conditional understanding that his father and brother earn. Thus, his objectification of, and overall callousness toward, women—and the virgin-whore binary he assigns them— seems difficult to read as a more “abstract criticism,” as is performed by Miller. If we do not consider Happy a conflicted character, as we do his brother and father, we are not encouraged to consider his dilemmas in the way that Miller wants us to interrogate those of Biff and Willy. A new generation of American man, Happy is a given. When he indicates to Biff that women are either “pig[s]” (21) to be had and consumed, mere bowling balls that make him feel good when he is “knockin’ them over” (25), or alternatively the mysterious sounding, undefined woman “with character, with resistance” (25) who we can assume is not sexually available but unflinchingly dutiful, Happy constructs all women as agents who are either asexual servicers who one marries (like his mother) or sexual objects to be had and discarded (like Miss Forsythe). Happy’s construction surfaces as a mere fact, the status quo, and not as a pointed or self-conscious value to be questioned or critiqued. In other words, when Willy denounces passionately and climactically, “I am not a dime a dozen!” (132), we are meant to consider and critique his state, his sentiments, and what led up to them because he is a complicated,

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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 Rubin’s 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 Loman’s 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 Houston—Downtown

Notes 1

With the release of the film adaptation of Death of a Salesman in 1951, Columbia Pictures asked Miller to sign “an anti-Communist declaration to ward off picket lines,” which he refused to do. The studio responded by making a ten-minute short, which was to be shown in movie theatres alongside Death of a Salesman, entitled Career of a Salesman (Miller, Guardian). In an attempt to ward off anticipated criticism of Miller’s drama as an attack on capitalism or as a statement in any way favorable to Communism, the short featured a City College of New York (CCNY) business professor and a business executive promoting sales as a joy-filled and lucrative profession (Kerrane). 2 For a fuller discussion of Miller’s work and its varying conversation with Marxist and Socialist influences, see his autobiography Timebends (1987) or Nilsen’s “From Honors at Dawn to Death of a Salesman: Marxism and the Early Days of Arthur Miller” in English Studies (1994). 3 While the play certainly invokes expressionistic techniques and receives critical attention because of its blend of realism and expressionism, my discussion here relies on the importance of Miller’s employment of realism.

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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 Miller’s The Crucible), recent major productions have been staged in China, Finland, and Iran, further attesting to the play’s 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, Miller’s often cited “Tragedy and the Common Man” (1949), Harold Bloom’s Arthur Miller and Death of a Salesman (1988) and Terry Otten’s The Temptation of Innocence in the Dramas of Arthur Miller (2002).

Bibliography Bigsby, C.W.E. Modern American Drama, 1945–2000. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. Bliquez, Guerin. “Linda’s Role in Death of a Salesman” in Modern Drama 10 (Fall 1968): 383–386. 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): 247–259. Kerrane, Kevin. “Arthur Miller vs. Columbia Pictures: The Strange Case of Career of a Salesman” in Journal of American Culture 3.27 (2004): 280–289. 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. . —. 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): 36–37. —. 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. (3–7) 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): 146–156. Otten, Terry. The Temptation of Innocence in the Drama of Arthur Miller. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 2002. Rubin, Gayle. “The Traffic 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. (157–210) —. Interview with Judith Butler: “Sexual Traffic” in Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 6.2–3 (Summer/Fall 1994): 62–99.

Arthur Miller: Guardian of the Dream of America

One of the most fascinating images I remember having seen in the newspaper a few years ago appeared in a series of photographic stills published in the February 19, 2003, issue of The New York Times. These pictures showed what at first glance appeared to be an incongruous juxtaposition: the young black rapper named Mos Def positioned beside then-eighty-seven-year-old playwright Arthur Miller. At first glance, I found myself wondering what these two artists could possibly have in common. Practitioners of radically different art forms and inheritors of widely differing cultural and racial heritages, they seemed to stand on opposite poles of the artistic spectrum. But as I noticed the caption underneath the photograph, it immediately became clear that my first impression—that here was some weird, incongruous juxtaposition—was completely inaccurate. The young black rapper and the elderly white playwright, on that particular evening, actually had a great deal in common. They had participated in an anti-war protest at a poetry reading at the Avery Fisher Hall in New York City. The young black man and the elderly white man joined others—men and women, old and young, black and white, people from various cultural, racial, ethnic, and religious backgrounds—and faced the cold winter weather and gathered together for a common cause: to protest the War with Iraq and the cancellation of a poetry reading at the White House prompted by First Lady Laura Bush’s fear that anti-war readings there would embarrass her husband at the time of his military incursion into Iraq. This event, and the prominence of Arthur Miller at it, served as a vivid reminder of a simple fact about the role of the literary artist in American society—a role that Arthur Miller has certainly relished and frequently discussed in eloquent and passionate terms throughout his long and distinguished career in the theater. Not even a week after this anti-war protest in New York City had occurred, Miller was ruminating on this special role of the serious

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literary artist in American society in an essay published in The New York Times, tellingly entitled “Looking for a Conscience.” Here, Miller, while musing unhappily about the lack of seriousness of the Broadway theatre, and by raising poignant questions about “Broadway’s relevance to the life of this world now” (“Conscience” 1), revealed and implicitly defined, with the carefully selected questions he asked, what the role of the literary artist must be, and has always been, in American society. Sounding a little like a weary, fiery Biblical prophet exhorting the masses who have continuously failed to heed his warnings, Miller lamented the absence of “acerbic social commentary . . . on the Broadway stage” and challengingly asked whether “a lively, contentious, reflective theater [is] beyond our reach, our imaginations?” (“Conscience” 13). Even more to the heart of the matter, and vividly exemplifying his personal commitment to the role of the writer that he addresses so vigorously in his essay, Miller adeptly linked his critique of the Broadway theatre to an indictment of officials in the United States government who label critics of the current administration as unpatriotic. It is precisely this all-too-familiar situation, one involving the use of scare tactics and intimidation to silence detractors of the government, one eerily and ominously reminiscent of those two other dark periods of American history pilloried by Miller in The Crucible, that irked the playwright and spurred him to ask: “Has the essence of America, its very nature, changed from benign democracy to imperium?” (“Conscience” 13). With this single question, Miller implicitly addresses the central roles—the crucial, inevitable, and pivotal roles— of the literary artist in a free society: to serve as the voice of the people who are silenced by fear and intolerance; to ask the challenging and difficult questions of a government, a society, a people that prefers self-congratulatory praise to unflinching moral self-scrutiny; to be the conscience of a nation that finds it uncomfortable to undergo the rigorous examination of the dark recesses of the national psyche and individual soul that earnest and honest self-evaluation necessitates. With his protest against the War in Iraq, and in his continued effort to use literary art to prick the conscience of a nation too easily cowed by the politics of intimidation and a blind obedience to corrupt authority, Miller once again confirmed his persistent commitment to social justice, human decency, and the rights of all people to live with dignity and in peace. This example of the playwright’s advocacy for civil liberties and freedom of speech unveils the moral backbone not only of his plays,

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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 Miller’s 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 Miller’s 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. Miller’s 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

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met opposition from the reality of indigenous people whose foreign customs and unfamiliar religious practices located them appropriately, and irrevocably, in the mental landscape of the Puritans, with the frightening, and all-inspiring, wilderness in which the native inhabitants resided. Wrestling with their own consciences and warring with their strange new neighbors, these self-declared custodians of the golden dream found themselves inveigled in violent power struggles antithetical to their orthodox Christian principles. Ultimately, they handed down to succeeding generations a legacy built on contradictions, a fiercely held conviction that redemption was possible, that happiness could be attained in the New World through hard work and individual human enterprise, that the self could be perfected, that the sacred and the secular could be wed in the promise, the hope, the dream that was America—and all of this was possible, they believed, despite the fact that many indigenous people were slaughtered and un-Christian violence permeated the way of life in this new frontier. By the nineteenth century, following the tumultuous birth and expansion of a nation and the development of laws and regulations that would guide the masses searching for a free and democratic existence in an oftentimes inhospitable environment, practitioners of an ignoble selfreliance and rugged individualism became the robber barons whose avarice and cupidity tarnished the agrarian dream and turned it into an urban nightmare. Disillusioned by slavery, the incessant forced relocation of indigenous peoples following a series of broken treaties, the progressive devastation of the natural landscape as the transcontinental railroad brought with it endless development, and the systematic dismantling of the Jeffersonian ideal with the steady movement toward the incorporation of America, writers such as Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, Whitman, Twain, Crane, Dreiser, and others found themselves inevitably gravitating toward their role as guardians of the dream. Delivering scathing indictments against those corrosive forces in business, industry, the military, and the government obsessed with the accumulation of wealth and power, these writers shared a fervent desire to investigate honestly their own lives as well as the problems of their society. They possessed inordinate courage and tremendous moral strength as they created a body of literature that held a mirror up to themselves and their society and looked unblinkingly at the uncovered social deformities and personal failings that resided there. By debunking dominant myths, and by aggressively and honestly

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addressing real challenges to national ideals, these guardians of the dream of America simultaneously provided a means for taking corrective action that would lead to a better and improved society and a path to moral self-improvement for the denizens of the young nation. In succeeding generations, deep into the twentieth century and even now at the start of the twenty-first century, various intellectuals— literary writers and cultural historians alike—would wrestle with their own confusion about what it meant to be an American, what burden and obligation, what privileges and benefits, what traditions and inheritances, what myths and contradictions awaited them in their own personal exploration of the society and culture that surrounded and enveloped them. Writers such as Fitzgerald, Ellison, Wright, Morrison, Ginsberg, Pynchon, Williams, Albee, Mamet, Shepard, and others would also weigh in with their own brand of social criticism, exposing the hidden lies and underlying illusions fostered in a society built upon public myths and nationalistic pride. Examining various challenges to the sense of personal identity inherent in a pluralistic society and exploring questions related to the possibility of an authentic existence in a chaotic, disordered, and fragmented society, these writers gave voice to the marginalized and alienated while infusing a spirit of protest in writings that continued to advocate and uphold the principles of human decency in human affairs even in the midst of cultural and historical entropy. Like these other guardians of the dream of America, Arthur Miller simultaneously preserves the dream even while attacking and revealing the gross deficiencies of the materialistic values and cultural myths that have traditionally defined and limited American society’s understanding of the American Dream. For like Emerson, Twain, Fitzgerald, and other great writers in the American procession, Miller recognized that the dream of America is more than just an American Dream. The American ethos that served as the ideological foundation for a nation essentially existed more as an idea than as an actuality. It essentially had little to do with affluence and the consumer culture but rather represented the possibility for hope and the opportunity to live freely. Miller articulates this notion well when he writes that “the values this country has stood for in the past . . . have helped to keep alive a promise of a democratic future for the world” (“1956 and All This” 87–88). The promise of such a future is one for the entire world, and not just for American society. The hope that is America, its promise of a better life, its inherent sense of possibility, is a universal dream that transcends

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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 Miller’s role as a social dramatist because it shows how he can ultimately examine the whole of society—and the world—through his focus on a particular family’s, or a single individual’s, 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 play’s greatness. Critical discussions of this play over the years have centered mostly on Miller’s 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 Willy’s demise as a failure on his, and often Miller’s 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

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assembled in Echoes Down the Corridor (2000), Miller comments insightfully on the vagaries of historical events and shows a particularly sound grasp of the incidents in American history that affected his writing of such plays as Death of a Salesman, The Crucible (1953), The American Clock (1980), and Broken Glass (1994). Throughout his career, Miller definitely proved over and over again that he did indeed understand American history and values. In one memorable essay after another, he captured the frenzied spirit of a schizophrenic society and recorded poignant observations on the political unrest and moral decline ravaging his country. In such plays as Death of a Salesman and The Crucible, as well as in his memoirs and essays, Miller’s historical vision is enlarged by his remarkable ability to synthesize past and present circumstances and to find in the immediate event a corresponding analogue whose example is instructive and perhaps even curative to a national psyche fractured by its own internal contradictions. In Death of a Salesman, in particular, Miller succeeds in showing that everything is interrelated, and time is but a flimsy veil that sometimes masks the underlying connective tissue that binds all of human experience together. But it is not just the past and the present, or the world and America, which are united in Death of a Salesman and the rest of Miller’s work. Miller also interweaves his criticism of American cultural myths with his individual reading of the workings and failures of history. The end result, says Robert A. Martin, is that “the twin concepts of truth and morality” loom large “as the highest priority in his work” (xxi). These principles motivated everything Miller wrote and also inspired his life work for human rights and the protection of people’s civil liberties. Christopher Bigsby identifies this “moral imperative” as the matrix behind Miller’s aesthetics and artistic vision. Bigsby writes: “For Miller, beyond the fantasies, the self-deceptions, the distortions of private and public myths are certain obligations which cannot be denied. The present cannot be severed from the past or the individual from his social context; that, after all, is the basis of his dramatic method and of his moral faith” (Modern American Drama 124). When an individual such as Willy Loman violates this basic law of human nature, he unintentionally sets into motion a chain of circumstances that cannot be controlled and that inevitably will force a reckoning. “The structure of a play is always the story of how birds came home to roost,” Miller is fond of saying in interviews and essays, and in his portrayal of Willy’s demise in Death

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of a Salesman, as the “hidden” is “unveiled” and “the inner laws of reality. . . announce themselves. . .” (“Shadows of the Gods” 179), text, subtext, and cultural context come together in a brilliantly organic fusion to produce a modern-day masterpiece. Underlying and embedded throughout the text is a rich and dense subtext that raises unresolved questions and endless speculation about the characters, their relationships, their motivation and behavior, their dreams and failures, their incongruous speech and action, and the problematic nature of the society that witnesses their collapse. Undeniably, on one level, the subtext calls into question the whole system of capitalist enterprise in a material society that equates individual worth with success. The opening stage directions of Death of a Salesman, for example, resonate with powerful symbolic suggestiveness and speak to the overwhelming force of society crashing down on the individual. Thomas Adler effectively describes how this scenery and the play’s setting embed “theatrical and social meaning in the play” (Roudané 24). Adler also comments on the way that music provides an “ironic counterpoint” to the stage image. This important device is instrumental in establishing in the audience’s mind important subtextual meaning linking Willy’s dream of success to Jeffersonian idealism and the nineteenth-century romantic belief in “freedom and expansiveness and possibility” (Roudané 47). Through Miller’s effective orchestration of lighting, music, movement, speech, and action, the stage—and the stage apron in particular—becomes the mind of Willy Loman, and as Miller unravels this complex and disorderly mind before us, we see not only the irresolvable tensions and contradictory values that live in perpetual conflict inside Willy Loman, but also find echoes and remnants of the paradoxical and oftentimes clashing ideological, political, economic, and social concepts and principles upon which the nation, its cultural myths, and its values have been constructed, tested, adjusted, altered, and transformed. The use of expressionistic dislocations, especially in the temporal and spatial progression in the play, also shows the effect of social pressure on individual psychology—an issue not overtly discussed but clearly a central thematic concern in this play and in most of Miller’s drama. This theme has been discussed repeatedly as the central point of intersection in Miller’s plays between private tensions and public issues, which in Death of a Salesman is evident everywhere—from the characterization, action, form, language, scenery, and dramatic strategy to its beautifully crafted and highly innovative style of representation.

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In Christopher Bigsby’s view, this remarkable fusion of form and theme in Death of a Salesman not only captures “the structure of experience and thought,” but also shows “how private and public history cohere” (Modern American Drama 85). For as Bigsby reminds us, in Salesman in Beijing, Miller describes Death of a Salesman to his Chinese cast as “a love story between a man and his son, and in a crazy way between both of them and America” (qtd. in Modern American Drama 86), and Bigsby rightly adds that what “is true of the play . . . [is] true, too, of Miller, for whom America has proven a wayward mistress worthy of redemption” (Modern American Drama 86). Bigsby explains the correlation between this central thematic issue in the play and Miller’s own personal love/hate affair with American society in the following statement: Believing, as he does, that the artist is by nature a dissident, committed to the necessity of challenging the given, he is equally compelled by a country which, despite its conservatism, is paradoxically committed to transformation. An immigrant society, what else could it propose? Its animating myths all cohere around the proposition that change is a central imperative. The true American is protean. The problem is that the imagination—the seat of personal and social change—is too easily usurped by the facile fantasy, that urbanization and the brittle satisfactions of the material world breed spiritual inertia and a failure of will. It is for this reason that Miller finds in his most selfdeceiving and marginalized characters a dignity that derives from their refusal to settle for simple accommodation. (Modern American Drama 86)

In this respect, then, it becomes clear why discussion of any play by Arthur Miller, and particularly of Death of a Salesman, requires careful consideration of the cultural context underlying the play’s composition, construction, productions, and reception. As Matthew Roudané and others have convincingly argued, Death of a Salesman may be, despite its many universal themes and strong international appeal, “the quintessential American drama” (Roudané 23), for “the play captures something truthful about contemporary American experience—particularly in its display of American linguistic cadence, focus on the family (dis)unity, versions of the American dream myth, [perspective on] the relation between business and one’s self-validation, [and] questions of representation and gender” (Roudané 23). The main challenge for audiences today, particularly the younger readers and members of the audience experiencing Death of a Salesman for the first time, might be the absence of a frame of reference for understanding even the most basic historical references in Miller’s

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play. For example, audiences not familiar with the era of the Great Depression might fail to immediately grasp the significance of Willy’s 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 Willy’s 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 naïvely 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 Miller’s 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 America—the place, the society, the values as well as the promises and failings— imbues the play with tremendous ambiguity, which Roudané says creates the play’s “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

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such as Elizabeth Franz in her 1999 Broadway performance and Zhu Lin in the 1983 Beijing production of the play. The cultural myth that relegates men to a position of dominance and women to a role of relative submission in the family in American society is indisputably called into question by the remarkable performances of these two actresses. Hence, in this intriguing fusion of performance issues and cultural critique in Miller’s drama, we happily discover a powerful contextual linkage for audiences in today’s society who seek some means of finding their own personal connection to the play and its characters. Maybe even more significant, ultimately, is the attention Miller’s play gives to questions pertaining to work alienation and the concomitant identity crisis it fosters for those in American society like Willy Loman, who are trained to believe that their self-worth rests entirely on their profit margin or net worth. Indoctrinated with the success-formula platitudes and get-rich-quick schemes popularized by Dale Carnegie, Russell Conwell, and others in the early twentieth century, Willy Loman becomes the ultimate embodiment of the outer-directed organization man who sacrifices personal integrity and any shred of human dignity in his relentless quest to achieve the forever-elusive American Dream of material success. By embracing the fraudulent values of his venal society in his fanatical pursuit of his impossible dream, Willy relinquishes control over his life and unwittingly sets in motion the chain of circumstances that eventually brings about his demise. So how can audiences today appreciate and understand the complex vision of a playwright who simultaneously memorializes and subverts the animating cultural myths of our society? Can the audiences who lack direct experience with the historical context or the cultural heritage that is part of the intellectual framework underpinning Miller’s play access its codes of meaning and derive from the reading or stage experience a full and deep appreciation of the dilemma confronting the Loman family? I definitely believe the answer is yes, if they discover for themselves the relevance of Miller’s exploration of these cultural issues, in particular, to their own personal lives. Just as the Chinese audiences in Beijing in 1983 discovered the Lomans in themselves, when they reacted enthusiastically to Miller’s unfamiliar Western drama with thunderous ovations, so too can audiences today recognize their own likeness in the disturbing stage images depicting the collapse of the Lomans and the menacing detachment of the impersonal society threatening to destroy them. Like the Lomans, audiences

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in American society today have inevitably struggled uneasily within the love/hate battleground of family relations, have questioned whether their identity is restricted exclusively to the kind of personal achievement often associated with job performance reviews or academic success, and have adopted the cultural expectation that the success myth is supposed to drive their educational opportunities and work experiences, and even to regulate a good part of their marital lives. Like Willy, some members of the audience in American society today almost certainly know from direct personal experience what it means to feel displaced from their chosen image of themselves, and these alienated and dispossessed dreamers of the golden dream understand the difficulty, and maybe even the futility, of standing up to a system that denies them the right to express their unique personalities. Maybe the unfortunate circumstances of their lives make them predisposed to understand how Willy, like Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, actually speaks for them, and for all the disenfranchised and socially displaced, on some lower frequency than they are ordinarily accustomed to hearing. And in this respect so too does the play, particularly in its exposé and implicit critique of the cultural myths that limit choices and constantly threaten to divide and dehumanize society. Death of a Salesman, like all of Arthur Miller’s drama, offers its audiences a searing indictment not only of those who substitute lies for reality and illusions for truth, but also of the society that manufactures and markets those lies and illusions to a nation of dreamers and devotees of the ever-receding future where hope for success and personal salvation lies. Yet even though this play, as well as the rest of Miller’s drama, critically addresses the moral bankruptcy concealed beneath the façade of American material success, there simultaneously exists an opposing tendency in Miller’s work to romanticize the mythology of the American West and the agrarian ideal deeply embedded in American thought and permanently shaping and transforming American values. This twin vision of America as both sordid reality and sublime possibility permeates the playwright’s work. In this respect, Miller’s comments about Mark Twain could also aptly be used to describe his own ambivalent position toward his country: “He seems to have seen his role, and probably the role of literature in general, differently than most cultural observers presently see theirs. He is not using his alienation from the public illusions of his hour in order to reject his country implicitly as though he could live without it, but manifestly in order to correct it. . . . [H]e is very much part of what needs changing” (Echoes 256).

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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 one’s 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 America—a 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 Miller’s 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

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you provide perception to all those who have the heart and courage to see. In other words, you’ve been an eloquent explorer of America’s turbulent and ever-shifting social hierarchy, and by reducing its chaos to artistic form you’ve 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, 1945–1990. 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. (xix–xliii) 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. (86–109) —. “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. (175–194) —. Timebends: A Life. New York: Grove P, 1987. —. “ ‘What We’re 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 Miller’s Death of a Salesman. Matthew Roudané, ed. New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 1995.

Refocusing America’s Dream

Arthur Miller wrote Death of a Salesman in 1948, in a society with significant cultural experiences that differed from the ones teenage students encounter today. In an article discussing some of these differences, Nancy Gibbs finds that in 1953 (just four years after the inaugural production of Salesman in 1949), “the median household income was $3,733 (about $27,000 in today’s dollars), the average family home contained a modest 1,100 square feet, and only 22% of married women worked outside the home. The new toys of choice were Slinkys and Silly Putty” (43). This world of the late 1940s undoubtedly seems foreign to many in today’s society, as do the images found in re-runs of television shows from the era. In a society besieged with the distractions provided by camera phones, iPods, Play Station Portables, and the Internet, one has to wonder where the dream of Willy Loman fits into the busy lives of today’s American youth. A little more than a year since the playwright’s death, one has to wonder whether Miller’s powerful play still has resonance with today’s young people as they embark on their journey in pursuit of their American Dreams. Miller’s portrait of American life in Death of a Salesman addresses questions that are central to human experience in today’s world. First and foremost, Miller’s play asks the timelessly significant question: what does it mean to be human? Although existential in nature, this is fundamentally a pragmatic question for any teenager in the American school system today. Faced with what seems at times to be overwhelming questions, information, and choices, today’s students must struggle with the same dilemma that Biff and Happy face in Miller’s play. Inherent in such a struggle are questions about one’s responsibilities and place in the world. As happens in every generation, students today ask themselves: “What are my dreams, and how do I achieve them?” Many of my students are looking for outlets through which to probe, discuss, and discover the nuances of being a youth, an American, and, finally, a member of the human race. As a young high school teacher,

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I frame many of my units around the central issue of growing into adulthood in American society. This topic becomes the primary vehicle through which my students explore essential questions generated by the literature they study and addressed predominantly in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. Miller’s Death of a Salesman becomes an ideal work to use as a foundation for these discussions primarily because of the positioning of Willy Loman as the common man and hero of the drama. Many of my students are raised in a middle-class socioeconomic background that is quite similar to that of the Lomans. Most of the students will be the first in their family to attend college, and some the first to graduate high school. Their parents struggle to provide a lifestyle for their children that is better than the one to which they were accustomed. These factors help them to identify closely with the Loman family and allow them to examine their own lives, personal choices, and embraced values as they read about Biff and Happy engaged in the same self-evaluation process. Miller’s foregrounding of the common man as hero allows his readers to identify more closely with Willy Loman’s plight. As my students explore the predicaments that the Loman family faces, they approach the same questions that scholars have addressed ever since the play was first produced. My students ask: “Is Willy a good person?” “Is the American Dream a myth not to be trusted, or is it something we should strive for as the quintessential American way?” “How could the Loman family tragedy have been avoided?” They almost instinctively recognize that Miller’s play forces his audiences to examine these and other questions that Miller believed the common man in American society inevitably faced as a cultural inheritance. The common people in his audiences, as well as in my classes, therefore, would experience and digest these questions as they observe the familiar, yet constantly changing, world that Miller describes in his play. For this reason, I challenge my students to determine what the notion of the common man brings to the story and to their understanding of Miller’s perspective of the American Dream. The question that we ultimately address is the following: “Does Arthur Miller present an achievable American Dream in his play?” Working closely with four tenth-grade students at Twin Valley High School, Alex Cruz, Jess Lightcap (Jess is listed as “Jessica” in the Bibliography below and in the Index), Jake Herb, and Amanda Cardo, I structured our discussion of Death of a Salesman around this central question. Because it is

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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 Miller’s 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 Miller’s drama. Commenting on this aspect of Miller’s 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 Miller’s 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 Miller’s 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 today’s 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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Interactive in December of 2004: “Nearly half of teens surveyed (47%) defined the American Dream as ‘Simply Being Happy, No Matter What You Do,’ far outpacing ‘Being Rich and/or Famous,’ which was identified by 1 in 5 teens (20%)” (“Teens Believe”). This dichotomy between the individual dream and the common dream not only exists for these four students but also seems to describe the national sentiment as well. It has been the practice of many politicians and business leaders to laud the values inherent in the traditional common dream in speeches to the public. Yet, as recognized by former United States Secretary of State General Colin Powell, in a speech given in April of 1997 to volunteers in Philadelphia, not everyone in American society sees the opportunity anymore to pursue the traditional American Dream: Despite more than two centuries of moral and material progress, despite all our efforts to achieve a more perfect union, there are still Americans who are not sharing in the American Dream. . . . There are still Americans who wonder: is the journey for them, is the dream there for them, or, whether it is, at best, a dream deferred.

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 Hughes’s “Dream Deferred,” say: “for too many young Americans, that dream deferred does sag like a heavy load that’s 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 society’s 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. Today’s 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 Miller’s 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 America’s search for only wealth and material success.

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I believe that as with any study of Miller, it is important for the students to approach the play with an open mind. We began our discussion of Death of a Salesman by looking at the opening musical sounds and stage directions. The students were asked to hear the flute in their minds and visualize the scenery that is described in the stage directions. Soon they began to see the possibilities inherent in Miller’s form. As we discussed Miller’s combination of realism and expressionism, the students began to understand the mood and tone created by the dreamlike atmosphere. Miller’s reliance on apparent contradiction to convey a sense of the possibilities inherent within the situation in the play helped guide the students’ journey through his drama. Within the first twenty pages of Miller’s play, the contradictions were strikingly evident to the students: Willy’s confusion over what happened on his drive to and from Yonkers (12–14), the paid off mortgage and the house’s subsequent emptiness (15), Biff’s confusion over his role in life (16), and the contrast established between the imagery of bricks and the garden (17). The students immediately picked up on Miller’s emphasis on contradiction in the Lomans’s lives and had no difficulty relating it to their own. It was clear at the outset that the students disliked Willy’s character. Perhaps it is the contradictions in Willy’s nature that account for these negative responses. Amanda complained that “he seems like he’s playing the victim all the time” and noted that “his children don’t seem like they have the right kind of foundation.” Alex supported her remarks by adding that “they don’t seem to know what they want.” Through our discussions, it became clear that this problem—not knowing what they want—is a fairly significant one for students their age. Alex told us a story of a relative who had taken a job after graduating from high school but was never satisfied with his life. He could not figure out what he wanted in life or determine what he was supposed to be. He said that there were simply too many choices in our world for people of his generation. Their assessment of the problem echoes what Lev Grossman of Time magazine labels in his 2005 article as the “Twixters.” He states: The years from 18 until 25 and even beyond have become a distinct and separate life stage, a strange, transitional, never-never land between adolescence and adulthood in which people stall for a few extra years, putting off the iron cage of adult responsibility that constantly threatens to crash down on them.

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Grossman’s description of this phase in young people’s lives calls to mind Miller’s depiction of Happy and Biff Loman as lost souls. Yet, in Miller’s play, perhaps the situation is even worse because Biff and Happy experience this intense sense of dislocation and alienation at the ages of 34 and 32, respectively. Grossman continues: Twixters expect to jump laterally from job to job and place to place until they find what they’re looking for. The stable, quasi-parental bond between employer and employee is a thing of the past, and neither feels much obligation to make the relationship permanent. “They’re well aware of the fact that they will not work for the same company for the rest of their life [sic],” says Bill Frey, a demographer with the Brookings Institution, a think tank based in Washington. “They don’t think long-term about health care or Social Security. They’re concerned about their careers and immediate gratification.”

A nearly identical perspective is prophetically evident throughout Miller’s play. As Happy and Biff discuss their lives in a strikingly honest and open manner, Biff discloses that he has had twenty or thirty different kinds of jobs since I left home before the war, and it always turns out the same. I just realized it lately. In Nebraska when I herded cattle, and the Dakotas, and Arizona, and now in Texas. It’s why I came home now, I guess, because I realized it . . . I suddenly get the feeling, my God, I’m not gettin’ anywhere! What the hell am I doing, playing around with horses, twenty-eight dollars a week! I’m thirty-four years old, I oughta be makin’ my future. That’s when I come running home. And now, I get here, and I don’t know what to do with myself. (22)

In the years following Salesman’s original production, the future increasingly seemed to loom more menacingly before people of this age group, faced with a paralyzing array of choices. High school students were expected to make their future, to succeed, and to reach the elusive dream. Nothing, however, was guaranteed, and many, like Biff, found themselves floundering, feeling bewildered and unsure what to do with themselves. This disquietude intensified as successive generations watched their parents falter at finding that single path to the dream. Major corporations failed, jobs were sent overseas, and our economy was rapidly changing. The corporate loyalty that Willy Loman displays became nothing more than a nostalgic, and perhaps tragic, relic from a bygone era. Willy’s distorted remembrance of his past work relationship with Frank Wagner is offered in the play as evidence of the expectation of

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the “stable, quasi-parental bond between employer and employee” (Grossman) that possibly existed in the past. Now students are told in many guidance counselor offices that the average American changes careers (note: not jobs, but careers) five times in his/her lifetime. The reality of such instability is presented in Miller’s play through Biff’s inability to hold a job. Biff’s frustration that he doesn’t “know what the future is” (22) is a dilemma that has powerful resonance with today’s American teenagers. When he says, “I don’t know—what I’m supposed to want” (22), my students all nodded their heads in agreement. Willy’s unrealistic view of the dynamics in the workplace is clear when he approaches Howard Wagner to request a change in his work assignment: WILLY: 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. HOWARD: I know that, Willy, but— WILLY: Your father came to me the day you were born and asked me what I thought of the name of Howard, may he rest in peace. HOWARD: I appreciate that, Willy, but there just is no spot here for you. If I had a spot I’d slam you right in, but I just don’t have a single solitary spot. (80)

Willy tries to actualize in his present life the strongly-held beliefs of an idealized American Dream and the American workforce from an irrecoverable past society. He embraces the notion that a salesman can be recognized and revered for his hard work and his personable nature. His past relationships with the company and those workers in it are no longer relevant in his present life. The modern American business world, evidently represented in the play by Howard, and not Frank, Wagner, rests upon productivity and the dollar. Everything else is irrelevant, and everyone is expendable—especially the Willy Lomans of the world. Inherent in this new paradigm is a significant cultural shift. Instead of taking pride in the company, people begin to try to find their pride in themselves, in their purpose, and in what they do. As Grossman points out, young people start looking for a career through which they can find fulfillment by developing a “sense of purpose and importance in their work, something that will add meaning to their lives, and many don’t want to rest until they find it.” Grossman could be describing Biff. Biff’s search for meaning and importance is directly connected to his desire to find such satisfaction through the use of his own passions and talents. However, his society, and his father specifically, becomes the obstacle that prevents Biff from actually pursuing his dream.

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Willy clings to an outdated definition of the American Dream. His unfaltering dependence on a past system of American capitalism, and his insistence that his boys join him in his fanatical pursuit of the material dream, stands in direct opposition to the students’ (and perhaps Biff’s) desire to break away from the limited and narrowly-focused American Dream into something that is much more diverse and that is independently fashioned in accordance with one’s own personal vision and values. This vision of Willy Loman’s deficiencies is evident in Centola’s comments on Willy’s basic path toward disillusionment and possibly even self-destruction: He adopts a counterfeit innocence and embraces the illusion that he is a victim of society, of the competitive business world, of the culture that makes it imperative for a man in American society to feel driven by the need to prosper, provide for the family, and succeed in attaining the forever elusive, unquestionably mythic American Dream. (74)

Living with such illusions about the American experience is, to many American students, no longer acceptable. They simply don’t 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, it’s all different dreams: Biff’s dream is different from Happy’s dream, and both of theirs are different from Willy’s dream. I don’t think that Willy gets it. Biff’s dream is to own a ranch, but I don’t 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 Willy’s 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 can’t eat the orange and throw the peel away—a man is not a piece of fruit!” (82).

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Willy’s 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. Willy’s fight for the dream and for his children struck a definite chord with my students. They recognized the “unfairness” of Willy’s situation. Amanda said that “Willy’s 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 isn’t 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 Miller’s own terminology, in Willy’s 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, doesn’t 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 Willy’s struggle. Maybe it comes from his refusal ever to relent, to give up. (Miller, Salesman in Beijing 392)

However noble Willy’s fight may be, it is still a losing battle. But there is hope. As in all of Miller’s 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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In a piece of reflective writing by Jess, entitled “Settling,” she explores this fear of making the wrong choice that affects young people, as well as many others, in our society: You have an average job. It is one that is beneath your abilities, but then again, you crave normalcy, not exceptionality. The job is simple, and you could quickly rise in rank if you wished, but you do not. Your coworkers know your name and your face, but they know little more than that. You keep pictures and mementos of your children and spouse on your desk as trophies, but you do not look at them; they are for others to see. Whenever one of your colleagues passes you, you speak with civility. Your conversations are clichéd. If they ask you how you are, you reply that you are great. Any other answer might suggest that something is wrong and would require your coworker to further the conversation by asking you to reveal something personal or private. You know that such politeness is a hassle for the other person. You have realized that there are few people in the world who truthfully care about others and their feelings. You can bet that your coworker is not one of these people. You might just lie back and allow the world to bring that life to reality. But then again, you think, you might not.

This fear of anonymity, of loneliness in a world of others, of loss of self, echoes Happy’s remarks to Biff in their bedroom: Sometimes I sit in my apartment—all alone. And I think of the rent I’m paying. And it’s crazy. But then, it’s what I always wanted. My own apartment, a car, and plenty of women. And still, goddammit, I’m lonely . . . Sometimes I want to just rip my clothes off in the middle of the store and outbox that goddam merchandise manager. I mean I can outbox, outrun, and outlift anybody in that store, and I have to take orders from those common, petty, sons-of-bitches till I can’t stand it any more. . . . [E]verybody around me is so false that I’m constantly lowering my ideals. (23–24)

Happy yearns to break the monotony of the reality he has constructed for himself. His reality has been constructed around what he has “always wanted”: success on a material level. Jake recognized the accuracy of Happy’s lament and applied it to what he sees in his world: “a lot of the jobs that people have are just for the paycheck. They don’t work for themselves, or even the job itself, just for the money, and they don’t care about what they do. If they cared about what they do, then they would be a lot happier with themselves.” Biff has broken the pattern set by Happy and Willy by moving out west to live his dream, but he still has felt the familial and societal pull back to a world of money, competition, and success. He wonders if he is wasting his life. But for my students, his actions demonstrate his ability to choose and face the consequences of that choice.

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Choice is an inevitable consequence of pursuing the American Dream, suggests Arthur Miller, and the cost of the choices that come with the dream is something that resonated with my students as they read the play. If we see the dream the way they do, as a fractured, diverse dream that is as individualistic as it is communal, then the dream becomes a matter of choice—one that Biff has made, one that keeps Happy paralyzed, and one that Willy has made but denies making. The importance of the awareness of the choices and their consequences is something that Miller helps his audience discover through his characters. The inevitability of choice is even apparent in Act Two, when Charley says: “The only thing you got in this world is what you can sell. And the funny thing is that you’re a salesman, and you don’t know that” (97). Amanda responded to this scene by observing that “Willy is refusing to let himself see the reality of the situation. For example, with the money thing, he knows he has a problem with the money, but he can’t admit it to his wife. He can’t make it known as a real problem. He’s trying to keep it a secret. He’s not aware of the choices he’s made and how they affect him now.” When asked to link this dilemma to a more universal situation, she added: “The ‘Everyman,’ the American person, isn’t really in touch with what is going on with the world.” Jess explained the situation by saying: “Sometimes you just need the truth. I mean you’re not going to grow from something if you don’t have the truth. I think that that is what Miller is trying to show, that this is how life is, and to succeed in life, to attain the dream, you have to realize how life is.” In the end, the dream is not debunked, as some have seen it. In the end, the dream is refocused or redefined. Willy states that after all his life and all his work, he doesn’t have anything in the ground. But he does. In his fight to maintain the dream of a past America, he leaves a legacy of choices and consequences for his children. In his life, he chooses a clear path and works hard to obtain his dream. Through much of his life, Willy tries to live the American Dream as it was presented to him in his society. He strives to be self-sufficient, to earn a good wage, to have a nice house, to have his children grow to accomplish more in life than he did, particularly in monetary terms. However, toward the end of his life, he arrives at a new definition of the dream, one that is ultimately associated not with money but with dignity, respect, and love. Witnessing the explosive climactic scene, the audience listens to Miller’s characters express what they (the characters) already knew but denied: that much of the Loman household is built on a foundation

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of lies. The mendacity of the Lomans is primarily what my students abhorred from the first moments of the play. However, the dishonesty, evasion, and blindness of the household are dismantled when Biff finally breaks down, and a moment of clear, pure truth shines through, as he virtually confesses that he loves his father. Willy can be said to have realized his ultimate dream. This defining moment of truth in the play also serves as the culminating moment in my discussion with my students. Jess summarized the lesson learned in the play’s harrowing climax: Everyone, in some respect in his own life, is a leader. Biff is saying that “I’m a dime a dozen” (132), and Willy is contradicting him, saying: “I am not a dime a dozen! I am Willy Loman, and you are Biff Loman!” (132). I think that sometimes if you are talking about everyday people, they could be misconstrued into thinking that they are not going to be leaders because they are in the middle of the pile, but you can see that Willy is a leader because he took the initiative, albeit not a good one, to kill himself, to give Biff the chance to have the dream, and I think that is a very noble thing to do. I saw a quotation that goes really well with this play. I don’t know who said it, but it says: “there are two ways of spreading light; you can either be the candle or the mirror that reflects it,” and I think this works really well with Willy, for all his life he is the mirror. He was just struggling to find himself. He loved his kids; you can see that he did, but he was always trying to find his dream. But in the end, he takes the step to be bold and give someone else the dream, and I think that is his chance, his opportunity, to be the candle.

We all agreed that, by the play’s conclusion, Willy is, indeed, the candle—shedding light on the individual characters as they take their individual paths to their respective dreams. Happy will continue to chase his father’s 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 Miller’s 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, “We’re free . . . We’re 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 Miller’s 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): 63–86. 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. . Grossman, Lev. “Meet the Twixters” in Time 16 Jan. 2005, 5 Mar. 2006. . 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 President’s Summit for America’s Future—Monday’s Remarks.” The President’s Summit for America’s 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. .

Capitalist America in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman: A Re-consideration1

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 Willy’s same background, neighborhood, and social class, considerable happiness, which they well deserve even though they are, in Willy’s 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 Bernard—as 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 Loman’s words, in the system, “some people accomplish something” (15). In passing, we will also try to expose the real causes of Willy’s 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

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such a play as Death of a Salesman. The point is, simply, that capitalism’s 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, naïve 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 Howard’s 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 it’s broken! I’m always in a race with the junkyard! I just finished paying for the car and it’s 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, they’re used up. (73)

Although Miller complains about some facets of capitalism, it does not necessarily signify that he preaches its overthrow. Miller, for instance,

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suggests that Charley, unlike Willy, operates successfully within the capitalist system. Charley’s most distinctive feature is that he operates within the hegemonic economic system, while, paradoxically, not being obsessed either with capitalism or with the myth of the American Dream. In the Introduction to The Collected Plays, Charley is explicitly described by Miller both as “a capitalist” and as “the most decent man in Death of a Salesman” (37). In many respects, Charley functions as Willy’s double because—despite the physical proximity of their houses—these two men embody radically opposite approaches not only to moneymaking but to life in general. The antagonism that exists between them is made explicit several times in the text, such as when in one of his frequent attacks against his father, Biff compares him to Charley in a negative way;5 this remark brings about the immediate reaction of Happy and, especially, Linda, who angrily reminds Biff that his father is Willy Loman and not Charley, and that he has to put up with that fact, whether he likes it or not. As the events in the play suggest, had Charley been the head of the Loman household, such a heated family argument would probably not have taken place. The relationship between Charley and Willy is presented throughout the play as more of a confrontation than a real friendship. Miller creates an underlying feeling of rivalry and even competition between the two neighbors, which is symbolically enacted in the card games they play—a device Tennessee Williams had successfully used two years before in A Streetcar Named Desire. It seems hardly coincidental that the first time Charley appears on stage is when he comes to Willy’s house one night to play cards, so that from the very beginning their relationship is based on competition. Realizing that Charley is a more successful businessman and father, Willy resorts to insulting his manhood, castigating his neighbor for being unable to construct a ceiling. It is also worth recalling that already in that first game Willy seems to be cheating, thus reproducing his behavior in everyday life because he normally lies and distorts reality to suit his needs.6 His conduct during the card game echoes not only his conduct in life but also the behavior he has deeply inculcated in his two sons, ever since they started stealing at an early age with their father’s support. At one point, Willy even advises Biff to cheat on his exams, thus encouraging him to break that most elemental ethical rule in the U.S. educational system: the so-called “honor code.”

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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 neighbor’s manhood with a rude statement no guest ever deserves, least of all kind Charley: “A man who can’t handle tools is not a man. You’re 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 Willy’s inferiority complex has complicated their relationship; at the end of their last conversation—and once Willy has rejected his job offer—Charley 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 Charley’s 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 Charley’s life seems to be running smoothly, nothing in Willy’s 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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by Miller as extremely patient and generous with members of the Loman family. Charley’s behavior is the most evident proof in Death of a Salesman that capitalists do not necessarily have to be insensitive or dehumanized human beings. Although Charley functions well in the capitalistic system, despite his evident success, he has not lost his capacity to feel, help, and sympathize with those who have not succeeded in it. Like Bernard does during his encounter with Willy in his father’s office, Charley shatters the illusions about success when speaking to an incredulous Willy, admitting that the only key to his achievements is that he never took “any interest” (96) in them, that is, he never built his entire life around them, like Willy unfortunately has. “[A] man of few words” (37), according to Willy’s own formulation, the everpragmatic Charley is never possessed either by the pomposity or by the empty rhetoric that Willy has imposed on his family over the years. Charley makes a crucial contribution to the financial stability of the Loman household, giving Willy fifty dollars a week, but, in spite of that, there is never the slightest trace of arrogance in the way he treats his neighbors, and he hardly mentions that favor, not even when Willy insults him while they play cards. Later on, he even offers a job to Willy, who rejects it immediately, not only because of pride or envy but also in an effort to retain his dignity and his self-respect. As a result of all of this evidence, Thomas E. Porter refutes Bigsby’s negative assessment when he defines Charley in Biblical terms as “the good Samaritan” (37). In fact, one of Willy’s scattered moments of lucidity occurs at the end of the scene in Charley’s office when, soon after having rejected the job offer, he tearfully bares his soul to make a painful confession: “Charley, you’re the only friend I got. Isn’t that a remarkable thing?” (98). Rather remarkably for Willy Loman, this statement is painfully accurate because in the entire play no reference is ever made to any other friends of his; his loneliness is complete, for he is totally isolated in the middle of all those towering buildings that surround his little house and has been on the road as a solitary figure while engaged in the Wagner company enterprise. Therefore, one of the functions of his mental conversations with Ben could be to mitigate his profound solitude.9 A “remarkable thing” (98) is that this heartfelt confession—which serves to fully humanize Willy—involves the very last words Willy tells Charley in the play, for they never see each other any more after the office encounter. Thus, Willy’s confession is a farewell by means of which he wants Charley to know that to the Lomans, he has been a

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wonderful neighbor and a true friend, so Willy wishes to acknowledge that in person before taking his life. The next time Charley appears on stage is at the Requiem, when the fact that he and Bernard are the only people accompanying the Lomans to the cemetery proves that Willy is totally right for once—Charley is his “only friend” (98). It is probably as his “only friend” that Charley tries to justify Willy’s life—and to stop Biff’s attack on his dead father—uttering the much-debated “Nobody dast blame this man” speech (138). While it is true that the argument that “a salesman is got to dream” (138) seemingly contradicts his previous views on the subject, Charley’s last words extend his role as Willy’s benefactor until the very end of the play. However, if there is a scene in which Charley seems to mistreat his friend, apparently thus cracking the aura of excellence with which Miller has arguably endowed him, it is probably when he mocks Willy before Biff’s crucial Ebbets Field game. But, if on the one hand, it could be argued that he is playing with Willy’s illusions in a rather insensitive and even cruel way, on the other hand, it could be said that this ever-pragmatic neighbor minimizes the importance of what, after all, is nothing but a mere sports game for teenagers. If, as it has been suggested regarding his different attitudes toward money and capitalism, Charley functions in many respects as Willy’s antagonist, he can also be perceived as the counterpart to two other male characters in the play: Ben Loman and Howard Wagner. At a basic discursive level, the link between Ben and Charley requires no further explanation. There is widespread critical agreement that Willy’s brother stands for a “ruthless capitalism” (Porter 30) that follows no ethical rules and knows no boundaries, as the scene of the fight with Biff reveals: Ben sums up the credo of hardcore capitalism in Darwinian terms: “Never fight fair with a stranger, boy. You’ll never get out of the jungle that way” (49). It is impossible to picture Charley uttering these words or fighting that way—in fact, even fighting at all; he personifies the possibility of a kinder and nobler form of capitalism, in which personal success is not necessarily attained at the expense of others. Miller makes the connection between Ben and Charley explicit at a structural level; the first time in the play that Willy brings his brother to mind is during the card game with his neighbor, so that in his troubled mind, both men are unconsciously related, most likely as opposite versions of economic success. Willy maintains a simultaneous conversation with both men, which Charley cannot follow, and Willy even confuses the

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two: “That’s funny. For a second there you reminded me of my brother Ben” (45). However, soon afterwards, with his repeated insults, Willy forces Charley to leave the house, symbolically rejecting the honest values his neighbor stands for and embracing the amoral code of Ben, with whom he can now talk without any further disturbances. Furthermore, Charley also stands in opposition to the character of Howard Wagner because they represent two opposing versions of doing business within the capitalist system. The scene in Charley’s office (when Willy rejects the job) clearly lessens the negative effect generated by the meeting at Howard’s office, which has just taken place, given that these two similar scenes are only separated by Willy’s recollection of the day of the Ebbets Field game. If, as it will be later argued, Howard’s conduct epitomizes rather cold and impersonal business ethics, Charley, with his kindness and generosity, proves that there exists the possibility of a humane and sensitive way of handling business.10 Just as Matthew Roudané persuasively argues that “Biff and Happy are flawed extensions of Willy and Linda, the genetic lineage carried on with devastating efficiency and symmetry” (69), Bernard can also be regarded as the logical extension of his father’s values.11 Even though, as a lawyer, he does not strictly represent capitalism, throughout the play his attitude and his work ethic clearly function as a corrective against the excesses of the Lomans. Bernard is closer to the myth of the American Dream that so much preoccupies Willy than to the world of business, and he probably embodies the ideal of social success more than any other character in Death of a Salesman. In his first appearance, a stage direction describes him in unequivocally positive terms as “earnest and loyal” (32), as his serious concern about Biff’s failing Mr. Birnbaum’s exam clearly shows. Significantly, his first words in the play are about studying, that is, industry and sacrifice, two values that seem to mean little to Biff. He, on the contrary, focuses exclusively on sports, with his father’s passionate support. Meanwhile, the detail of Bernard’s wearing glasses singles him out among the three boys as the studious type, more inclined to intellectual than to physical endeavors.12 Miller sets up from the start an opposition between Bernard and Biff, who, at one point, literally asks his neighbor to box with him, thus setting up a symbolic confrontation like the one enacted by their respective fathers playing cards.13 Despite his constant and sincere warnings about Biff’s exams, thefts, and driving without a license, Bernard is systematically mocked

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and even insulted by the Lomans, especially by Willy, who in front of his sons refers to him as “anemic” (32), “a pest” (33), and “a worm” (40), which is similar to how he verbally abuses Bernard’s father. Like the other boys in the neighborhood, young Bernard feels great admiration for the local sports hero: Bernard’s admiration becomes manifest when he rushes to the Loman house before the Ebbets Field game, and, instead of the helmet, as he supposedly had been “promised” (87), he is “grandly” (88) allowed by a pompous Biff to carry the shoulder pads.14 Evidently, young Bernard’s interest in this game stands in sharp contrast to the mocking indifference of his own father. Ironically, in the very next scene, Willy is painfully forced to realize how wrong he has been in both his simplistic credo of being “wellliked” (97) as the key to social success and his expectations about Bernard’s future, given that Charley’s boy has become a respected lawyer, one of the several “figures associated with the law” that, as Christopher Bigsby points out, are so recurrent in Miller’s plays (240). It is undeniable that witnessing the extent of Bernard’s professional triumph makes Biff’s and Happy’s failures more painfully obvious to Willy, thus contributing to his movement toward self-annihilation. Moreover, Bernard has also triumphed at a personal level, at least according to normative social expectations, because he is married and has two sons (like Willy Loman and so many of Miller’s protagonists), while both Biff and Happy have turned into lonely outcasts unable to establish any sort of emotional and long-term relationships. This realization must also be quite painful for Willy, who previously had expressed to Linda his desire to be a grandfather in a brief comment about the future of their house: “Some stranger’ll come along, move in, and that’s that. If only Biff would take this house, and raise a family . . .” (74). Still described in a stage direction as “earnest” (32), implying that—as opposed to the Loman brothers—his maturation has been a more normal one and that essentially he remains the same person he once was, Bernard is no longer submissive because he has equally evolved into a “self-assured young man” (90, emphasis added). Despite his personal and professional success, he remains a nice and friendly individual who treats Willy with kindness and who—rather unbelievably, perhaps—shows no rancor whatsoever toward the Lomans (Porter 38), although he probably has not forgotten all the abuse and ridicule he had to take from them as a boy. Furthermore, he is still interested in

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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 Bernard—as opposed to Howard—Miller 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, Charley’s reply functions as a simple but irrefutable rebuttal to all of the boasting and pomposity that characterizes life in the Loman household: “He don’t have to—he’s gonna do it” (95). At the same time, Bernard’s modesty is also used by Miller to magnify the pitiful nonsense that initiates this conversation between the neighbors: Willy is still lying about Biff’s 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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relations because profits must be obtained at any cost. According to Bigsby, “Howard’s values are those of business. He is a man for whom time is money, who has no time for the man who served the company for most of his life and has little time left” (133–134). That is why Howard is blind or indifferent to Willy’s increasing despair during the interview, given that “the impersonal business world no longer has any room for personality” (Porter 34–35). If one is to believe Willy’s words, when Howard’s father ran the company, affairs were not conducted in such a cold and impersonal fashion, but in the new postwar society, “Willy’s memories no longer mean anything to his employer” (Bigsby 115); Howard shows no regrets whatsoever in firing an old man who entered the company at about the same time he himself was born thirty-six years ago.18 In Howard’s new business ethics, Willy’s desperate attempt to recall his friendship with Frank Wagner is doomed to fail. No wonder Willy looks back with nostalgia to that golden age when business supposedly had a different outlook: “In those days there was personality in it, Howard. There was respect, and comradeship, and gratitude in it. Today, it’s all cut and dried, and there’s no chance for bringing friendship to bear” (81). Willy has turned into a relic of a way of salesmanship long gone, and consequently, he must be discarded immediately, even though he is already sixty-three years old and about to retire, a personal fact that the new capitalist ethics no longer deems relevant. In his anger, Willy finds the courage—and the lucidity—to make a remark that might well function as Arthur Miller’s rebuttal to the principle that “business is business” (80): “You can’t eat the orange and throw the peel away—a man is not a piece of fruit!” (82).19 These words—which bear an echo of the youthful idealism of the 1930s—are a plea to treat employees as human beings and not as commodities or as mere figures in a monthly company chart. From the very beginning of their encounter, Howard shows far more interest in his new technological toy—his superb tape recorder—than in the troubled human being who is desperately trying to communicate with him in person. Again, this is a sign of a new era and a new way of doing business, when increasingly sophisticated electronic devices start doing the work of employees and render them less essential. Echoing the dismissive way that Linda is normally treated by her husband, Howard repeatedly interrupts Willy or openly tells him to shut up so that the recorder can be heard. Howard is more concerned with listening to absent voices uttering nonsense than to a present voice

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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 that—as Bernard Dukore points out—Willy’s 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 Wagner’s, 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 or—beautiful 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 Willy’s 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 Willy’s attitude is by no means common within capitalism. Concerning Charley, Willy’s 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 Willy’s 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 Biff’s 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 it’s 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 Willy’s immediately sobering up into more appropriate salesman’s talk: “I’m the New England man. I’m 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 Loman’s vital course. With each new lapse into his old ideals and leanings, Willy’s 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 Lomans’s 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: I’m talking about your father! There were promises made across this desk! You mustn’t tell me you’ve got people to see—I put thirty-four years into this firm, Howard, and now I can’t pay my insurance! You can’t eat the orange and throw the peel away—a man is not a piece of fruit! . . . Now pay attention. Your father—in 1928 I had a big year. I averaged a hundred and seventy dollars a week in commissions. (82)

But the statement that follows, Howard’s 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. Willy’s 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 Willy’s 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 don’t want you to think . . . It’s Brooklyn, I know, but we hunt too . . . there’s snakes and rabbits . . . Biff can fell any one of those trees in no time! . . . We’re 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) “can’t 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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products, as his father had apparently been, or a more self-reliant shark like his brother Ben, or simply an independent farmer out in the West. But whatever the dream is—and Willy is not much help in clarifying it for us—he lacks the courage or the naïveté to pursue it. It is also unclear whether the accomplishment of such a dream would make Willy happy. Be that as it may, he has a divided personality, feeling, as he himself confesses to Ben, “kind of temporary about myself” (51), a salesman who dreams of the rewards of successful salesmanship while having serious doubts as to whether he has chosen the right job; he is a dreamer who does not dare to follow his dream, probably envisaging that such a dream would not have made him happy either. Willy is at two places at the same time, but he is at none of them in reality, certainly not in the dream but not completely in the reality that he has chosen either. And in view of such a thing, it seems reasonable to conclude that if Willy had gone to the West25, he would have wondered if he would have been better off staying in New York. Willy’s divided mind seems to have been inherited by his two sons, as the following dialogue betrays: HAPPY: Wait! We form two basketball teams, see? Two water-polo teams. We play each other. It’s a million dollars’ worth of publicity. Two brothers, see? The Loman Brothers. Displays in the Royal Palms—all the hotels. And banners over the ring and the basketball court: “Loman Brothers.” Baby, we could sell sporting goods! WILLY: That is a one-million-dollar idea! LINDA: Marvelous! BIFF: I’m in great shape as far as that’s concerned. HAPPY: And the beauty of it is, Biff, it wouldn’t be like a business. We’d be out playin’ ball again . . . And you wouldn’t get fed up with it, Biff. It’d be the family again. There’d be the old honor, and comradeship, and if you wanted to go off for a swim or somethin’—well, you’d do it! (63–64)

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, Willy’s last sentence

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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 saw—the 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 don’t 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 Biff’s future in business, initiates with Willy’s 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 Willy’s 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 salesman’s lack of skill in his profession, Willy’s 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 son’s 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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earnest about the embarrassing encounter. Willy’s insecurity in this sense proves fatal. If he had not felt guilty at all or afraid of discovering in Biff the very rebellious impulses he has so earnestly endeavored to fight in himself, he would probably not have demanded Biff’s complete success. In a way, his son’s success would dispel Willy’s guilt, which is why he is so obsessed with Biff attaining it; then the relationship with his son would not have been so difficult. If he had felt guilty but had confronted his remorse, he would have tried to make his peace with Biff, and the latter would have probably agreed to it. But again, Willy’s divided consciousness wins the day. Toward the end of the play, after his emotional final talk with Biff, Willy seems convinced that the Boston episode is not responsible for his son’s subsequent failures; yet he then kills himself because he still holds himself responsible for them and tries to make it all up to his beloved son. After pocketing the money of his insurance policy—assuming that the company will agree to pay—Biff will surely start his long delayed social rise, the only thing that, in Willy’s poor assessment of his son’s personality, can bring him happiness. Capitalism has been proven free of guilt in Willy’s destruction, even if it could be responsible for part of the frustration that Willy experiences. Even after losing his job, Willy could have accepted the job that Charley (thanks to the rewards he has obtained from capitalism) has repeatedly offered him. Willy, through Charley, may receive from capitalism what another capitalist, Howard, has deprived him of, so the same capitalism that seems to have brought his downfall would strike a clean balance and rescue him. And the fact that Willy Loman finally kills himself (a death that the very title of the play invites us to think about) for his son and not for his mortgage is one that Miller emphasizes at the end of the play when Linda stresses that they are finally “free and clear” (139). Miller thus absolves that most telling characteristic of the tokens of capitalism: mortgages and the high cost of owning property. Willy’s conflict with his son can be ultimately traced, through a sinuous path, to the impossibility of being at two places at the same time, living a life and wishing all along to have lived another one. As Bernard tells Willy at one point, “sometimes, Willy, it’s better for a man just to walk away” (95). When Willy asks, “But if you can’t walk away?”, Bernard concludes: “I guess that’s when it’s tough” (95). Despite the invitation to suicide that Willy appears to detect in Bernard’s words, what is tough and might drive him to death is when

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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-González and Ramón Espejo University of Seville, Spain

Notes 1

The authors wish to express their gratitude to Matthew Roudané for his support and generosity. 2 For an extended analysis of Miller’s dramatic works while at Michigan, see Bigsby, 8–26, 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 Charley’s 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 Biff’s big game and briefly for a third time during their final encounter, thus indicating the troubled nature of Willy’s feelings for his neighbor. 8 Bigsby contends that Charley is so fully anchored in realism that he lacks Willy’s 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, Charley’s 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 that—as usual in Miller’s masculine cosmology—no reference is ever made in the play to Bernard’s 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 (120–131), 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 Biff’s “greatest day” (89). 14 Roudané 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).

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The truth is that Biff did train himself for one thing: sports. Willy’s 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 Bernard’s new social standing is that—although he still wears glasses—he 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 Howard’s motto echoes President Calvin Coolidge’s 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 Miller’s 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 Howard’s decision, Roudané states that “in a country where social security is more of a lie of the mind than political fact, Willy’s 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 fatherhood—and to life in general—can 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 latter’s 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 father’s funeral that his dreams might still come true, but throughout the play, he often toys with the idea of accompanying Biff to the latter’s Southwestern ranch utopia. 22 Happy has, however, also been infected by his father’s 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 capitalism—aggressive, pioneer capitalism—and thus fails to embrace a more sophisticated, technological, “big business” version, which Bernard has fully grasped and for which he has conscientiously prepared himself. Willy’s 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 man’s 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 Willy’s 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 don’t know the reason for it, but they just pass me by. I’m not noticed . . . I gotta be at it ten, twelve hours a day. Other men—I don’t know—they do it easier.

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I don’t know why—I can’t stop myself—I 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 (36–37). 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 Ben’s West is in fact an East that is not even American, all of it explained by, truly enough, Ben’s “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 Biff’s 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 people’s marriages. Another problem with Willy’s 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 Ramón Espejo, eds. Valencia: U de Valencia P, 2004. (45–56) 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 Miller’s Collected Plays: With an Introduction. New York: Viking, 1957. (3–55) —. 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. (24–43) Rodríguez Celada, Antonio. “Introducción general” in Death of a Salesman (La muerte de un viajante) by Arthur Miller. Salamanca: Almar, 1982. (9–58) Roudané, 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. (60–85)

Willy Loman and the Legacy of Capitalism

When Death of a Salesman debuted in 1949, America was still healing from the psychological wounds of the Great Depression. The financial devastation of the Crash of 1929 continued to overshadow the American Dream, and capitalism became suspect as a viable system to promote economic success. Some critics have interpreted Death of a Salesman as an insightful indictment of capitalism, but the avarice and callousness of capitalism are the backdrop, not the cause, of Willy Loman’s underlying psychological and emotional problems. Willy’s feelings of failure at the end of his career reflect not the ruthlessness of a free market or simply his incompetence, but rather Willy’s lack of insight when making choices as he pursues the American Dream. Willy’s decision to pursue capitalism’s materialistic values is based on what wealth represents to him—being respected and “well-liked,” which are merely exterior trappings that mask Willy’s deeper emotional needs. Willy seeks acceptance and love from his family and friends because as a child, he lacked the male validation he needed in order to risk creating and following his own dreams. In the play, Willy constantly seeks guidance from male father figures such as Dave Singleman when endeavoring to understand how to be successful in his career. Willy tries to find answers from others instead of looking within his own psyche, causing him to appropriate the business dreams of others instead of creating his own. The dreamlike quality of the play, such as the sudden appearances and departures of Ben, reinforces Willy’s internal confusion. Willy feels dissatisfied with his life because he has always avoided making difficult decisions while choosing the easier path of co-opting other people’s ideas of happiness. Instead of insightful self-creation, Willy buys into the media-propagated idea that playing by the generally accepted rules of capitalism brings material and emotional rewards. A free market holds few guarantees of financial security and no guarantees of emotional satisfaction. Brought on by his lack of introspection and ready acceptance of popular societal values, Willy mistakenly focuses

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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 (Willy’s) disappointments in business. In an interview in 1998, Miller admitted that Death of a Salesman was intended as a criticism of capitalism: “You wouldn’t be writing such straightforward critical work about America after 1950. Indeed, I don’t 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, we’re 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 today’s 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 Roosevelt’s presidency (Bigsby, Arthur Miller and Company 20). But during the debut of Miller’s Death of a Salesman, Miller and some critics, stuck in the Depression mentality, saw capitalism as integral to Willy’s 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 Willy’s 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 Willy’s defeat is still relevant because capitalism is merely the tableau of Willy’s life and not the source of Willy’s 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 Willy’s desire, but the protagonist is never

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able to articulate or understand that he must know himself before he can know what will make him happy. Like most people, Willy wants to be happy. But happiness in the human condition not only requires understanding one’s own abilities, desires, and needs but also the confidence to act upon that understanding. Willy never delves into his own psyche for the answers to the questions of who he is and how he can succeed in business; rather he is always looking to society and to successful capitalists (such as his brother Ben, Dave Singleman, Charley, and others) for answers. Willy’s emotional immaturity and his insecurities, in part results of the abandonment by his father at an early age, cause him to latch on to the American Dream that is so often propagated by advertising and the mass media: material success will bring happiness. Thomas Jefferson summarizes the American Dream in the Declaration of Independence as the right of every person to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Jefferson could have added, “given the restrictions of the human condition.” Notice that the last right listed is the “pursuit of happiness,” not “happiness.” That is the crux of the problem for Willy—how to define happiness and then how to pursue it. Willy’s naïveté makes him an easy target for the purveyors of the American Dream. He readily believes the popular rhetoric that everyone can achieve material success through personality and popularity. This one-dimensional dream is sold daily, even hourly, by radio, television, movies, and magazines; even our schools encourage our children into the competitive spirit of comparing themselves to others. Everyone believes that driving the right car, using the right deodorant, or smiling the whitest smile will bring happiness, so it is understandable that Willy accepts and blindly follows the materialistic dream. On the one-year anniversary of writing Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller eloquently summed up Willy’s tragedy: [T]he tragedy of Willy Loman is that he gave his life, or sold it, in order to justify the waste of it. It is the tragedy of a man who did believe that he alone was not meeting the qualifications laid down for mankind by those clean-shaven frontiersmen who inhabit the peaks of broadcasting and advertising offices. From those forests of canned goods high up near the sky, he heard the thundering command to succeed as it ricocheted down the newspaper-lined canyons of his city, heard not a human voice, but a wind of a voice to which no human can reply in kind, except to stare into the mirror at a failure” (Miller, “The ‘Salesman’ Has a Birthday” 150).

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The tragedy is that Willy never grows, questions, or develops beyond these adolescent concepts of happiness and success with which popular society continues to inundate people. Willy’s focus on the business world prevents him from appreciating the human connections in his life. After Willy chooses material achievement as his standard for success, he observes the popularity of an older salesman, Dave Singleman. Hearing of Singleman’s highly efficient people skills in working the phone from his hotel room, Willy comes to believe that if he continues as a salesman, he will eventually receive the same level of popularity and respect. Singleman’s business connections are such that the man is able to work into his eighties without even leaving his hotel room. Singleman’s popularity is verified by the huge turnout at his funeral, while Willy’s business failure is reflected in the turnout at his funeral of only his immediate family and his neighbors, Charley and Bernard. Willy fails to achieve success as a salesman because his career choice is based on his observation of Singleman’s popularity, not because the job reflects his own desires or natural inclinations. Singleman dies productive and happy, without regret, because he has chosen a job he loves and has accepted the course of his life. Willy’s career choice dooms him to failure because his selection is not his own or based on his own interests but rather is based on someone else’s business dream. The flashbacks in the play reinforce that Willy is more connected with his perceptions of people and conversations that he recalls from the past than he is with real people in the present. The flashbacks reveal that Willy’s perceptions of the past might have never been very accurate reconstructions but rather his own skewed version of reality. During his brief moments of clarity, Willy recognizes that he is not a good salesman. He confides to Linda that “people don’t seem to take to me” (36), and “[t]hey seem to laugh at me” (36). His inefficiency as a salesman is revealed by his working ten to twelve hours while “[o]ther men—I don’t know—they do it easier” (37). He believes that he jokes too much, talks too much, and looks foolish (37). Willy deludes himself into thinking that he actually “averaged a hundred and seventy dollars a week in commissions” (82), but Howard denies that Willy’s average was ever that high, and when Linda asks Willy how much he sold on one of his trips, he is forced to downgrade the amount of his gross sales from “five hundred gross in Providence and seven hundred gross in Boston” (35) to “roughly two hundred gross on the whole trip” (35). Willy is forced to be honest because Linda writes

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down the figures, which makes Willy’s announcement a permanent and checkable record. Willy vacillates between moments of forced honesty about himself as an unsuccessful businessman and of attempts to justify his lack of success to others, but he lacks the ability to examine and remedy his feelings of inadequacy. In contrast, Willy views Charley as a successful capitalist. Unlike Willy, Charley has excellent business sense, even owning his own thriving business. Willy is unable to understand why Charley succeeds while he feels exhausted and beaten down. Willy appears to envy Charley and even compete with him. Willy’s jealousy compels him to belittle Charley’s inability to perform household repairs, Willy’s area of expertise, in order to satisfy his own ego. In contrast, Charley’s self-assurance allows him to place no expectations on Willy, shown by Charley’s kind defense of Willy at his funeral that “[n]obody dast blame this man” (138). At times, Willy forces Charley into the position of a father figure, such as when Willy must ask Charley again for money because Howard has fired him. Paternally, Charley tries to explain the ways of capitalism to Willy: WILLY: That snotnose. Imagine that? I named him. I named him Howard. CHARLEY: Willy, when’re you gonna realize that them things don’t mean anything? You named him Howard, but you can’t sell that. The only thing you got in this world is what you can sell. And the funny thing is that you’re a salesman, and you don’t know that. WILLY: I’ve always tried to think otherwise, I guess. I always felt that if a man was impressive, and well liked, that nothing—(97)

Willy worries about impressing people, but he fails to impress Howard and his business colleagues (such as buyers) because he lacks confidence in his own worth. In addition, Willy never develops the aptitude to analyze people, business situations, or the intricacies of office politics, although he sometimes recognizes that Charley possesses a business sense that he lacks. Because Charley started and currently runs his own successful company, we can surmise that Charley excels in business acumen. His business accomplishments are not based on worrying about being liked but on knowing his business and how to treat others. Willy recognizes that Charley is probably his only friend, yet he resents him because Charley’s success reminds the salesman of his failure at business, such as when Charley, while standing near his secretary in his own office, takes out cash from his wallet to lend money to his neighbor; Willy cannot afford a secretary or even his insurance premiums.

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For the same reason, Willy adamantly refuses Charley’s 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 father’s imagined rejection. On the other hand, Charley believes Willy cannot accept the offered position out of petty jealousy, but Willy’s 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. Charley’s business success gnaws at Willy’s 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 Happy’s 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 father’s 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 Charley’s 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. Willy’s understanding and acceptance of his father’s abandonment could free him to develop his own goals, but throughout his life, Willy’s lack of intuitive abilities precludes this type of breakthrough. Before Willy decides to appropriate Singleman’s 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, Willy’s 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 difficult—only part of being a man—because he has no vision that his natural abilities could be turned into a successful business. Willy considers a career as a physical laborer

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to be demeaning. He thinks it is beneath his dignity to be a carpenter. When Biff tells his mother that people laugh at Willy because the salesman does not belong in the city but rather out on the open plains, mixing cement or being carpenters, Willy, overhearing the comment, angrily reprimands Biff, “Even your grandfather was better than a carpenter” (61). Willy remembers that his father was a salesman but forgets that his father also made the flutes he sold with his own hands. Willy and his sons’ carpentry expertise and physical strength could have enabled them to start a thriving business in the Alaskan wilderness or at least could have helped them earn a nice living on the side while they managed Ben’s timberland, but Willy rejects the offer. Ronald Hayman does not believe that Miller presents “Willy as a passive victim of society; he is given a choice and opts to stay where he is” (47). In one of Willy’s flashbacks in Act Two, Ben presents “William” with a risky but fulfilling opportunity: BEN: Now, look here, William. I’ve bought timberland in Alaska and I need a man to look after things for me. WILLY: God, timberland! Me and my boys in those grand outdoors! BEN: You’ve a new continent at your doorstep, William. Get out of these cities, they’re full of talk and time payments and courts of law. Screw on your fists and you can fight for a fortune up there. (85)

Ben proposes a great career break suited to Willy’s 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 Willy’s 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 Willy’s decision to go with the secure job, against his own natural desires and abilities, dooms him to disappointment. Willy’s 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 Willy’s flawed career choice spill over into his personal relationships. Ronald Hayman asserts, “[T]he failure of Willy’s 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 doesn’t

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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. Willy’s fear of people’s 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. Willy’s 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. Willy’s continuous rationalization that he is above society’s rules is fed by his capitalistic dream of success, but the root of Willy’s moral and emotional emptiness stems from childhood events. The abandonment by his father stunts Willy’s 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 forces—or else we’re doomed” (“Death of a Salesman: A Symposium” 33). Willy has no grip on the forces of life because he doesn’t understand himself—his own desires, values, and abilities; thus, he is powerless to internalize his own solutions to life’s problems. Willy continues to cling to the materialistic values of capitalism even in the face of mounting evidence of his failure because Willy’s 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 Ben’s material success without understanding the selfish, even immoral, actions Ben perhaps used to attain his great wealth. Willy’s relationship with his sons reflects his family’s 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

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because he steals from his bosses, and Happy sleeps with his bosses’ fiancées in a futile effort to prove his worth as a businessman. Psychologically, Happy ends up following in his father’s footsteps. At Willy’s funeral, Happy vows to Biff: “I’m gonna show you and everybody else that Willy Loman did not die in vain. He had a good dream. It’s the only dream you can have—to come out number-one man. He fought it out here, and this is where I’m gonna win it for him” (139). Happy is a young Willy seeking his father’s attention and approval, hoping to stop his internal demons by fulfilling his father’s capitalistic dream of being number one in the business world. In Willy’s flashbacks, we see Happy constantly seeking his father’s attention, “I’m losing weight, you notice, Pop?” (29). Happy’s name, in fact, is replete with irony because he symbolizes Willy’s unhappiness (and his own unhappiness) derived from attempting to acquire other people’s business dreams and financial success. Willy never acknowledges Happy’s 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 I’m gonna retire you for life” (41). Willy scoffs at Happy’s promise to be a successful capitalist capable of taking care of his father financially: “You’ll retire me for life on seventy goddam dollars a week? And your women and your car and your apartment, and you’ll 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 I’d like to know how he did it” (41). Happy begins to appropriate his father’s dream as his own because he continues to hope for his father’s affirmation. Happy chases the same delusions as his father when he confides to Biff, “But then, it’s what I always wanted. My own apartment, a car, and plenty of women. And still, goddammit, I’m lonely” (23). Emotionally abandoned like his father, Happy follows his father’s futile path of least resistance by continuing to accept another person’s materialistic goals of success and happiness. In contrast to Willy’s inattention to Happy, Willy showers Biff with excessive attention, causing Biff to think that he is above society’s rules. Willy shows his obvious favoritism by praising Biff’s physical exploits and rationalizing Biff’s stealing tendencies, proclivities that hinder his success as a businessman. Happy’s acceptance of Willy’s 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 “Coach’ll 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, y’understand, but when he gets out in the business world, y’understand, 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 Biff’s bad behavior escalates, Willy’s 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]e’s 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 Willy’s rationalizations for Biff’s 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 mother’s 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

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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 son’s 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 Charley’s 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, it’s like that. BIGSBY: But I never understood that line because, in a sense, why would that be a virtue? MILLER: It’s 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. That’s what that means, really. (Bigsby, Arthur Miller and Company 12)

Charley is, of course, interested in Bernard’s 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 Willy’s 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 father’s failure in business that people pass on to their children. Biff’s final break with his father begins after Biff attempts in vain to have a business meeting with Bill Oliver. When Oliver doesn’t even remember him, Biff begins to realize what a sham his life and business dreams have been. Biff’s 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 saw—the 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 don’t 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 can’t I say that, Willy? (132)

Biff sobs as he begs his father, “Will you let me go, for Christ’s 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 father’s capitalistic dreams. Biff realizes that he cannot fulfill his father’s failed business dream but still feels compelled to share his revelation with his father. At his father’s graveside, Biff eloquently discusses his father’s 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 experiences—more exactly, a repetition of conflicts, which finally seem to total up to some kind of a new truth for him. I’m speaking of emotional change now. He comes to see the fruitlessness of certain repetitive conflicts. (Evans 34)

Biff internalizes the consequences of his father’s decisions along with his own, leading him to the realization that he must discard the dreams

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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. Willy’s true dream is about a parent’s love and hope that his son will supersede his limited success in business. Biff’s 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 Willy’s 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 Willy’s 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. Roudané, ed. Jackson: U of Mississippi P, 1987. (27–34) 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 Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations: Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. Harold Bloom, ed. New York: Chelsea House, 2007. (67–76) 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 Bloom’s Guides: Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. Harold Bloom, ed. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2004. (87–90) —. “The ‘Salesman’ Has a Birthday” in Arthur Miller: Death of a Salesman: Text and Criticism. Gerald Weales, ed. 1967. New York: Penguin, 1977. (147–150) —. “Tragedy and the Common Man” in Arthur Miller: Death of a Salesman: Text and Criticism. Gerald Weales, ed. 1967. New York: Penguin, 1977. (143–147) Schumach, Murray. “Arthur Miller Grew in Brooklyn” in Conversations with Arthur Miller. Matthew C. Roudané, ed. Jackson, Mississippi: U of Mississippi P, 1987. (6–8)

The Dynamo, the Salesman, and the Playwright It is easy to blame technology for Willy’s dire condition in Death of a Salesman. There is the welter of appliances that plunge him into an escalating cycle of debt: “sixteen dollars on the refrigerator . . . [T]here’s nine-sixty for the washing machine. And for the vacuum cleaner there’s three and a half due on the fifteenth” (35–36). Even the simpler technology associated with his life seems to be continually breaking down. When he returns home in the opening scene of the play, having failed to get beyond Yonkers, Linda litanizes what might have gone wrong: “Maybe it was the steering again. I don’t think Angelo knows the Studebaker.” And “[m]aybe it’s your glasses. You never went for your new glasses.” Subsequently, Willy complains: “These goddam arch supports are killing me” (13). In such a context of oppressive and failing technology, one is inclined to see the character as both crushed by the machinery of modern life and reduced himself to an expendable cog in an indifferent machine. And yet such a reading misses a more positive facet of the technological imagery that scatters the play. In Act II, when Willy is setting out optimistically to ask his boss for a desk job, Linda queries him, in another litany, reminiscent of Act I, but now the tone is different: LINDA: You got your glasses? WILLY: Yeah, yeah, got my glasses. LINDA: And a handkerchief? WILLY: Yeah, handkerchief. LINDA: And your saccharine? WILLY: Yeah, my saccharine. (75)

The items here, instead of being the petty detritus that buries Willy, are the small aids that prop him up and the signs of Linda’s ongoing care and affection. Similarly, when the boys “simonize” Willy’s 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). Willy’s capacity for wonder in the face of technology is a leitmotif of the play. When he tries to think positively of Biff’s future, the heroes he invokes are technological innovators: Thomas Edison and B.F. Goodrich. Willy’s personal hero, Dave Singleman, whom I shall discuss further below, was also a man reliant on technology (the railroad and the telephone)—and recollecting Dave’s 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 Willy’s 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. It’s whipped.” His initial reaction is irritable and dismissive (“I don’t want a change! I want Swiss cheese”), but a few seconds later, he pauses in his complaining to ask: “How can they whip cheese?” (16–17). 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 “surprise”—an 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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Whitman, the great proponent of independent selfhood, nonetheless announced that poetry “must in no way ignore science or the modern, but inspire itself with science and the modern” (503). And Henry David Thoreau, even as he castigated the greed and dehumanization that was rampant in modern life, also maintained that “what recommends commerce to me is its enterprise and bravery” (370). For both of these writers, the question was how to keep the forces of modern technology under control so that they would be assimilated to human needs rather than destructive of the human spirit. A helpful way of grasping how this question can be understood for Willy Loman—and in a larger sense, for his creator, Arthur Miller—is to consult that idiosyncratic rumination on the American scene, The Education of Henry Adams. Written fifty years before Death of a Salesman and different as it is in style, Adams’s Education contains some striking affinities with Miller’s play. For one thing, by writing about himself in the third person, Adams seems to be writing not an autobiography but a kind of dramatization of the individual’s relationship to modernity. In the book’s most famous chapter, “The Dynamo and the Virgin,” Adams describes the character “Adams” standing awe-struck before the massive electrical dynamos on display at the 1900 Chicago Exposition and feeling impelled to make sense of this new technology: “the historian’s business was to follow the track of the energy; to find where it came from and where it went to: its complex source and shifting channels; its values, equivalents, conversions” (389). Specifically, Adams wants to connect the power, which the symbols associated with sexuality and spirituality, Venus and the Virgin, exerted on earlier civilizations, to the electric dynamos, which exert power on their own, i.e. to assimilate these past symbols of transformative energy to the literal energy of these powerful, new machines: “Clearly, if he was bound to reduce all these forces to a common value, this common value could have no measure but that of their attraction on his own mind. He must treat them as they had been felt; as convertible, reversible, interchangeable attraction on thought. He made up his mind to venture it; he would risk translating rays into faith” (383). Both the characters inside these works—the historian Adams and the salesman Willy Loman—struggle to inform their vocations with meaning. Both are represented as deluded—indeed, the befuddlement and impotence of “Adams” rivals in its way the befuddlement and impotence of Willy. If Willy is described as a little man: “exhausted” (56), “a dime

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a dozen” (132), Adams describes himself as “an elderly person” “who had toiled in vain to find out what he [himself] meant” (382) and for whom “[f]orty five years of study had proved to be quite futile for the pursuit of power” (389). Yet both characters are the products of creators who triumph where they fail—if only by giving the characters and their situations an enduring life in representation. Miller writes in his autobiography Timebends about how the stunning success of Death of a Salesman empowered him: “Success seemed to have deepened a sense of my own contradictions. . . . The beauty in the tension of opposites I saw everywhere—the pull of gravity actually strengthening the bridge’s steel arches by compression” (144). The very metaphor here is a technological one—of the artistic vision, like a steel bridge, gaining strength through contradiction and resistance. And Adams writes in a similar vein on how writing can produce a “line of force”: “The pen works for itself, and acts like a hand, modeling the plastic material over and over again to the form that suits it best. The form is never arbitrary, but is a sort of growth like crystallization, as any artist knows too well; for often the pencil or pen runs into the side-paths and shapelessness, loses its relations, stops or is bogged. Then it has to return on its trail, and recover, if it can, its line of force” (389). In keeping with this observation about the potential force inherent in writing, it seems significant that the object Miller has Biff, in his confusion, steal from Oliver’s office is the pen—that rudimentary technological implement by which the playwright portrays the ambivalence of Willy Loman and through which he transcends that ambivalence for himself: “Until I began to write plays my frustration with this doubleness of reality was terrible,” Miller confesses in his autobiography, “but once I could impersonate all conflicts on a third plane, the plane of art, I was able to enjoy my power” (148). One scene in Death of a Salesman dramatizes the point I want to make here regarding how the character diverges from his creator in his relationship to technology. This is the scene when Willy meets with Howard, his young boss and the son of his former employer, to ask for a desk job. Howard is oblivious to his employee’s desperate condition, and he spends the first part of their interview smugly demonstrating his new technological toy, the wire recorder, playing a tape on which his family takes turns recording their voices. Willy has no interest in the recorder— he cannot afford to buy one for himself and, unlike a car or a washing machine, would have no use for one if he could. After a few perfunctory remarks, he launches into a speech about himself, trying to convince

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Howard to acknowledge his worth and devotion to the company. As he struggles to make his case, he invokes the figure of his hero, the salesman Dave Singleman, who deployed what is, by now, conventional technology—the train and the telephone—to achieve the success that Willy so admires: “what could be more satisfying than to be able to go, at the age of eighty-four, into twenty or thirty different cities, and pick up a phone, and be remembered and loved and helped by so many different people?” (81). If the phone and the train are humanizing and supportive technologies to Willy, the wire recorder is a sterile and even malevolent technology (when, left alone in the office, he switches it on by mistake, it frightens him so completely that, like a child, he calls out for help). But the recorder occupies a different sort of position for Arthur Miller. For him, it is enormously useful—both metaphorically and literally. Metaphorically, he uses it to render inside the play a miniature play about Howard’s family. The snippet of recorded voices provides a wealth of information; we see from it that Howard’s family is no more unified or functional than Willy’s; as one critic puts it: “In Howard’s insistence that his wife speak into the machine, in her unwillingness to do so, and in the maid interrupting the process, the disassociation inherent in the capitalist family . . . becomes apparent” (Castellitto 82). Correcting for the doctrinaire political assumptions inherent in this analysis, one can still agree with the core observation: the recorder reveals the dysfunctional dynamics of an American family of another social class than Willy’s, asserting a structural kinship between them. It also provides insight into the underlying mechanism of the play. For just as we seem to be overhearing the Lomans as they cycle through predictable patterns of behavior and speech, we literally overhear Howard’s family and catch similar sorts of patterns. In both cases, we are given access to the domestic and trivial aspects of American family life—the underside, as it were, of the American myth. Howard’s son, mechanically reciting the capitals of the states of the union, paradoxically evokes Whitman’s testimonial to the vastness of the American continent, much as Willy, in his road trips across the country as a salesman, is a diminished facsimile of Whitman’s expansive wandering across that same country almost a century earlier. If one moves from inside the play to outside it, the recorder also becomes literally useful to Miller, for it is the palpable means by which he realized Whitman’s expansive vision. Death of a Salesman would be recorded for radio and eventually for film and television. It would be broadcast not just across the country but across the globe, and its

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message, in the spirit of Whitman’s, would reach out to a large and diverse audience. (It has become a familiar testimony to the play’s universal appeal to note its success with unlikely foreign audiences—the fact, for example, that Japanese businessmen have been able to identify with Willy Loman.) In this sense, the recorder is the most powerful and forward-looking technology in the play, a mechanism with a frighteningly vast but potentially creative power akin to Adams’s dynamo. The point here is that the power of the tape recorder, like that of Adams’s dynamo, is relative, depending upon how it is viewed. If viewed from the angle of the character Willy Loman, it is destructive; it reflects all the force of mechanical indifference, both human and machine, that crushes him. But from the angle of Arthur Miller, Willy’s creator, it represents the ability to shape the new into an original and salable form. Death of a Salesman made Arthur Miller’s reputation as a playwright. It catapulted him to a level of fame and influence that he had never dreamed of, and it established his place as a preeminent intellectual spokesman for mid-twentieth-century America. In reading Miller’s autobiography, one gets to look behind the scenes of this ascendancy as the playwright recounts the extraordinary response to the Broadway opening of the play: “[Kurt] Weill kept shaking his head and staring at me, and Mab [Maxwell Anderson’s wife] said, ‘It’s the best play ever written,’ which I dare repeat because it would be said often in the next months and would begin to change my life” (191). Could Willy Loman have aspired to a greater testimonial than to being someone who is “not a dime a dozen!” (132)? Notably, it is through writing that Miller is raised to these heights—to repeat the lines from his autobiography, quoted earlier: “Until I began to write plays my frustration with [the] doubleness of reality was terrible, but once I could impersonate all conflicts on a third plane, the plane of art, I was able to enjoy my power” (148). Miller, one might argue, is Willy Loman gaining rather than losing strength through conflict and contradiction. He does what Willy aspires to do—what Adams aspires to do—he translates “rays into faith”; he uses his pen to turn the confused power of the modern into a comprehensible form and makes a testament to the invisible forces of his culture that secured his reputation for posterity. But the analogy, I would suggest, doesn’t end here; it grows more complex and paradoxical. As one continues to read Miller’s autobiography, one is struck by a shift in the author’s self-representation as he

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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 play—and the 500 pages that come after the play’s spectacularly successful debut seem like a coda. Indeed, it seems fitting that after the success of Death of a Salesman, Miller’s search for a greater triumph—a “new sort of energy,” in Adams’s terms—temporarily 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 Miller’s 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 country’s 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 Monroe’s tragic fate, that “she was proof that sexuality and seriousness could not coexist in America’s psyche, were hostile, mutually rejecting opposites, in fact” (532). After his discussion of his failed marriage to Monroe, the tone of Miller’s 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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the amount of force controlled by society had enormously increased. The secret of education still hid itself somewhere between ignorance, and one fumbled over it as feebly as ever” (389). Only the pen, as Adams invokes it, is a source of hope: “it has to return on its trail, and recover, if it can, its line of force” (389). Miller certainly returned to the pen, again and again, writing many more plays over the course of his long life. But despite a generous amount of fame and fortune, he did not repeat his dazzling early success. In rationalizing this, he cited the following factors: that the American productions of his plays were wrong-headed; that reviewers were not supportive; that Broadway was either too commercial or too new-fangled to appreciate his work. Finally, he left New York for London, where he felt he was better understood, though he continued to complain from afar as a bitter onlooker to the American theatrical scene. I have argued elsewhere that the debate toward the end of Death of a Salesman on whether Willy had a “good dream” is not resolvable because the dream is only as good as the imagination and resourcefulness that is brought to bear in relation to it. Willy is suffocated by his inflexible adoption of a line that requires innovative, creative thinking and communication. His problem, one might argue, is that he is not an artist. But then again, perhaps he is simply an artist past his prime. There have certainly been lyrical aspects to his vision; they simply don’t encompass enough: he can laud the train and the telephone but not the wire recorder. Thus, the problem might not be that Willy lacks imagination and has had the wrong dream but that he is growing old and out of step with the new. The flashbacks in the play can be better understood in this context. For one can always see the seeds of an individual’s decline in earlier points of his life if one looks at those points in his life retrospectively. Some of the same querulousness and doubt that characterizes Willy Loman begins to penetrate Miller’s autobiography as he moves away from the moment of his greatest success that happened to coincide with his youth. In time, he ceases to “look like anybody’s idea of a late twentieth-century playwright” (Steyn 47). This is not the fault of capitalism or of technology but of human life in history. Even great literary figures who ride the crest of the new and assimilative are not, in the end, immune. The generations march on, just as technology does, and it is the nature of people as well as things to be rendered obsolete,

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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 Miller’s 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): 325–336. Castellitto, George P. “Willy Loman: The Tension Between Marxism and Capitalism” in The Salesman Has a Birthday: Essays Celebrating the Fiftieth Anniversary of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. Stephen A. Marino, ed. New York: UP of America, 2000. (79–86) Cohen, Paula Marantz. “Why Willy is Confused: The Effects of a Paradigm Shift in Death of a Salesman” in Approaches to Teaching Miller’s Death of a Salesman. Matthew C. Roudané, ed. New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 1995. (125–133) 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): 46–50. 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.

Mystifying the Machine: Staged and Unstaged Technologies in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, it hardly needs to be said, dominates the stage-scape of twentieth-century drama. Its dominance is so taken for granted that it seems almost impossible to imagine that it might not have: that it might not have been lost, along with All My Sons, The Crucible, and all the rest of them, in the dust of experimental theatre that overcame realism as the dominant idiom of twentiethcentury drama. Edward Albee, hailed by Martin Esslin as America’s “absurdist” playwright, Eugene O’Neill, with his frequently surrealist plays, Tennessee Williams’s gauziness, and the voices of the Black Arts Movement, agit-prop, environmental theatre, and performance art, along with absurdist and Brechtian imports, might easily have made Miller’s earnest social realism obsolete. But somehow it didn’t. The work of the Group Theatre, of course, and the introduction and elaboration of method acting into American theatres and workshops helped make realism viable as an approach not just to staging worlds but also to thinking about the world beyond the stage. Realist production works effectively against its own apparently outmoded conception of theatrical and narrative form, on the one hand, and of human identity, on the other. And these conceptions are not merely textual or theoretical: they are propped up by a complex and compelling deployment of staged semiotics that, perhaps paradoxically, reduces the potentially complex and disorienting play of meanings into a straightforward, stable, and imminently readable staged world. And, so adept is realism at containing singular meanings that it has withstood technical and technological advances in the theatre that have proved alarmingly traumatic in Brechtian and absurdist productions. In the plays of Elmer Rice and Sophie Treadwell at the beginning of the last century, of absurdists like Samuel Beckett and Eugéne Ionesco in mid-century, and of Heiner Müller and Don DeLillo more recently, the machine on stage has had the eerie effect of destabilizing the whole mechanism of

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theatrical representation by reorganizing it as a failed repression of modernism’s rupture of humanistic realities. Often the titles of their plays suggest the uncanny centrality of technological modernism: Machinal, The Adding Machine, Krapp’s 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-l’oeil 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-l’oeil 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 Lomans’s 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,” he’s eating it at stage-room temperature or, if it’s cooled, it’s been cooled by another refrigerator backstage. We presume that the belt in the on-stage refrigerator is in no danger of breaking because it isn’t 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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as much as he is a human being whose organic systems actually work: whose heart beats, whose lungs respire, whose brain regulates the various functions of the body. However, the actor is not Willy Loman, a particular case of the general truth about the relation between being and performing that Pirandello tried, and failed, to articulate in his 1925 play Six Characters in Search of an Author. The actor, in Death of a Salesman, visually—and verbally—represents Willy, to be sure, and is, one hopes, a convincing trompe-l’oeil and trompe-l’oreille. But the same distance that separates the refrigerator on stage from the Lomans’s refrigerator it represents is precisely the same distance that separates the actor on stage from Willy Loman. The refrigerator is positioned by the production as an impersonator of the Lomans’s refrigerator. If it is a particularly versatile refrigerator, it may make a cameo in a Lorraine Hansberry or Arnold Wesker play later in the season. And so might the actor playing Willy. I have heard of one unfortunate production of Death of a Salesman, during the last weeks of the rehearsals for which the actor playing Willy Loman proved incapable of remembering his lines. And so, the director made a bold—but by all accounts, disastrous—decision: to keep the actor playing Willy off stage throughout the play. Positioned in the wings with a microphone, the actor read Willy’s lines over the sound system, and Linda, Biff, Happy, and all the rest of them reacted to an invisible or already figuratively dead or imaginary Willy. Unsettling about the play produced in this way is not that it borders on the ridiculous or the hilarious, but that it borders on the real: it reveals too starkly the actual state of affairs on the stage. It attests to the fact that none of the characters is really there, that they are all just represented. In a play such as Death of a Salesman, whose development depends upon an ever-increasing sense of reality’s unbearable weight, and which counterpoises dream sequences and a funeral scene against Willy’s reality and against the reality of Willy, the disembodied Willy of this production gave the lie to stage representation in the first place. In other words, it made the production an absurdist production of a realist play. The refrigerator, I am told, did not forget its lines. Nor did Howard’s wire recorder. Indeed, the recorder, in Death of a Salesman, both clarifies the synthesis of the iconic with the practical in staged technology, and complicates that binary by highlighting the indexical register of that staging, particularly as it works in Death of a Salesman. If the staged refrigerator is more like an actor than it is like a prop, the

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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 recorder’s 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, isn’t it? HOWARD: Seven years old. Get that tone. (77)

In demonstrating his new machine, Howard commits several significant slippages of language. For instance, his proud remark, “Seven years old. Get that tone,” switches referent without signaling the switch. He apparently means that his daughter, not the machine, is seven years old. After all, he purchased it yesterday. But the “tone” that he exhorts Willy to “get”—admire, appreciate, notice—is the machine’s, not the daughter’s. This would, at least, be the everyday meaning of what Howard has said. But because this is staged speech, we are asked to consider its significance within the framework of the narrative already established. Howard’s unmarked segue from talking about a human to talking about a machine signals a sort of failure of the human to maintain its distinction from the machine. The seven-year-old daughter is presented on the stage by means of the machine, a machine that neither embodies her nor gives her voice (yet), but only reproduces the sound of her whistle. And the machine’s “tone” seems almost human; Howard’s remark would equally well apply if his daughter were standing before Willy whistling “Roll out the Barrel.” Willy, in this exchange, is the one whose remark seems to show his awareness of the distinction between the human and the mechanical reproduction of humanity-effects. Instead of commenting on the daughter’s skill at whistling, he confines his remarks to the

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quality of the machine’s reproduction of the sound of her whistling: it’s not life; it’s “lifelike.” The machine seems to speak as well, in the voice of Howard’s son: HOWARD: Sh! Get this now, this is my son. HIS SON: “The capital of Alabama is Montgomery; the capital of Arizona is Phoenix; the capital of Arkansas is Little Rock; the capital of California is Sacramento . . .” and on, and on. HOWARD, holding up five fingers. Five years old, Willy! WILLY: He’ll make an announcer some day! (77)

The layout and typography of this passage alerts us to the very critical issues I’ve been discussing. On the one hand, the text signals the voice of Howard’s 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 Howard’s son—a budding young “capitalist”—is not saying these things but rather that the machine is quoting him. Moreover, the italicized direction that the machine/son’s 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, Willy’s response to Howard’s pride about his son’s age— which, we imagine, is pride that a boy so young can memorize state capitals, not that he can speak into a microphone—demonstrates Willy’s refusal or inability to conflate the human with the machine. By focusing on his potential as an announcer, Willy’s 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 Willy’s desperate plea for more convenient working conditions and Howard’s 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 Willy’s 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 Helmers’s door in Ibsen’s Doll House. I’ve 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 he’s walking through the door. And no audience member ever leaves the theatre thinking, The doors were very lifelike. Doors don’t 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, I’d like to take a few seconds to theorize this door. On the one hand, it is a door. There’s 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. We’re not talking about the word “door.” We’re 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 Miller’s play, a shift in perspective makes all the difference. The Helmers’s 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 Helmers’s.” 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 Helmers’s” door, I submit that in doing so, we risk missing the more significant, if more invisible, aspect of this door. For, on stage, “Helmers’s” 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 else’s door. I’m 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 Norway—an icon—and it is a thing-in-itself, an actual door. It’s 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 Howard’s wire recorder? Among the three kinds of semiotic signs—symbol, icon, index—any 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 Doll’s House, a symbol-thing, metonymically representing the bourgeois home. What interests me here is the indexical aspect of Howard’s wire recorder. It is the thing-in-itself that indicates the veiled or past presence of another thing-in-itself. It’s a footprint. The footprint is, after all, a thing. But it’s 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 Howard’s 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 recorder—such as Krapp’s—organizes the entire onstage action; it thereby makes available insights into the practice of theatre that Howard’s recorder, because it works differently in its staged context, does not. For instance, Krapp’s tape recorder splits the character because Krapp listens to his own voice often as if it were unfamiliar to him. Moreover, the play highlights Krapp’s 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 cues—the initial long silence, the slapstick banana routine, and the apparently pointless repetition of gesture and action before a single word is spoken—draw the audience’s 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 Beckett’s stage. Under these circumstances, the recorder’s propness becomes as salient as its recorderness. Howard’s 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): it’s “[b]een driving [him] crazy” (76). Howard’s 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 Howard’s tape recorder is not just an object. Nor is it even merely an object-prop. It’s also an index, pointing to the economic and

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social forces beyond the stage. It enables us to understand the conflict in Willy’s scene with Howard not only as a conflict between two men but also as the conflict between humanity and modernity. It invites us to generalize, for the wire recorder indexes a vast socius, a webwork of power and money, that no longer understands the salesman as an agent but as a tool. As Howard’s failure or refusal to distinguish between the wonders of his machine and the wonders of his children attests, the humanity of the human has been usurped by the spectacle of machinery; after all, like ideal children, the machine “you can do anything with” (77). This invitation to generalize is issued within the semiotic of realism. In a Brechtian production, reality-effects would be eschewed in favor of a stark and theatrical indication that this machine represents “the machine,” that Howard, as a man, represents “the man.” Further, in Brechtian theatre, Howard’s representation of the man would exhaust his role in the play, just as the machine’s representation of the machine would exhaust its meanings. In Miller’s realism, Howard is both the particular man Howard and a representative of the man, just as the recorder is both Howard’s recorder and representative of mechanized modernity more broadly. To enable both interpretive possibilities in each case, Death of a Salesman takes up a great deal of time and energy: Linda and Willy discuss at length Willy’s difficulty working as he does. Their conversation touches on both Howard’s personal obligations to Willy as well as Willy’s continued viability as an agent of the company. Because Willy is presented in meaningful relation to both, Howard, upon his appearance, seems to represent both: the son of Willy’s first employer (whom Willy claims to have named) and his current employer. Similarly, the extent to which Howard goes to personalize his relationship to his recorder establishes that the recorder is a particular one: Howard’s. However, Willy’s fraught relationship with other machines—his car, refrigerator, and furnace—establish a pattern that allows us to read Howard’s recorder as one more element of an increasingly dominant machine-system. The difference, then, between absurdist and realist treatments of the machine on stage is the difference between polemics and dialectics. The polemical approach carves out for itself a place from which to speak about a phenomenon, a place unimplicated in that phenomenon, and proceeds to speak; this approach is, at best, ignorant of its own implication, and, at worst, mendacious. Dialectics, however, recognizes that speech about a phenomenon is, in part, also speech from within that

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phenomenon. So, whereas the actor’s method employed as a strategy for building and inhabiting characters is highly valued in productions of realist plays that present characters troubled, traumatized, or abused by a society that no longer recognizes humanistic values, dialectical drama tends to reveal realistic performance as always an accessory to the illusions of social injustice already, and therefore attempts to denaturalize the assumptions of realism. This is not to say that the approach Death of a Salesman takes in revealing the fundamental paradoxes of capitalism is not quite complex, even as realism. Willy’s perspective, by comparison, is quite limited. As responses to Howard’s proud demonstration, Willy’s remarks attempt to keep the machine mechanical, and the human, human. In doing so, he stakes out an attractive but tragically simplistic, humanistic position, one that resists social mechanization and the disempowerment of the human. His encounters with other machines, literal and metaphoric, throughout the play, underscore this claim. He feels victimized by the manufacturers of his refrigerator, the repairs for which leave Linda and him “a little short” of cash: Whoever heard of a Hastings refrigerator? Once in my life I would like to own something outright before it’s broken! I’m always in a race with the junkyard! I just finished paying for the car and it’s 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, they’re used up. (73)

As his speech begins, it seems as if Willy feels that it’s 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, it’s no longer the machines themselves that are to blame, it’s the people who make them: “They.” Moreover, it’s 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 it’s broken” (73). This is Willy’s 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, it’s still conceivable that Biff can walk right into Bill Oliver’s office and talk him into investing thousands of dollars in him; it’s still conceivable that there are two human children who recorded their voices into Howard’s wire recorder; it’s still conceivable that he might approach Howard, man-to-man, and successfully plead for more stable work; it’s still conceivable that engineers are timing the obsolescence of his refrigerator and his car. And, as a result, Willy doesn’t 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 Loman’s inability to cope with an increasingly mechanized, dehumanized modernity. That’s 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, I’m 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 Willy’s 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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What interests me much more than the audience’s willingness not to notice aspects of production that are immediately noticeable is the way the machinery of theatre works to keep some aspects of production out of sight altogether. In other words, I’m more compelled by questions of mendacity than of convention. Let me offer two examples of what I mean and demonstrate how, when we activate the meanings these examples suggest, we find ourselves troubled not by Death of a Salesman’s theatrical conventions but by its theatrical ethics. First, consider theatre as a machine. In one sense, a theatre is a very nearly literal machine. It consists of electric circuits, pulleys, gears, furnaces, air conditioners, sound systems, fire safety devices, and so on but also of actors, directors, stage managers, costumers, ushers, booking agents, and the countless other human beings involved in making the production and consumption of plays possible. It also consists of patrons—human beings who come to the theatre; and patrons are constituted not only by their interest in attending the theatre but by their ability to do so. That ability, in most cases, is financial. And so, without committing an imaginative extravagance, we can fairly easily see that the theatre, as machine, also consists of the jobs its patrons do during the day, the firms or companies or individuals who employ them, the environmental and social injustices done by those employers in the name of shareholder value, the increasing commercial imperialism of big business, and the availability of cheap labor and unregulated business climates in undeveloped or developing countries. The theatre is a machine that, to use Deleuze and Guattari’s formulation in AntiOedipus, is “plugged in” to numerous other machines: it’s a tiny little output device hooked up to an enormous processing unit. We may find it troubling, of course, that theatre is implicated so intimately into what some consider unjust and despicable activities. Or we may not; we may forgive the theatre as we forgive ourselves, understanding what Willy doesn’t: that there is no “outside,” no way of establishing an uncorrupted position from which to speak about social and economic injustice. Second, the theatre is not just a machine that produces plays; it’s a machine that produces other machines. One of those other machines is Arthur Miller, a machine that once wrote plays and a machine that not only abets but encourages the publication and production of those plays. What fuels this playwriting machine is money, of course.

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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, let’s 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 student’s pocket. And that’s 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 overhead—labor costs, material costs, and so on—and maximizing its market exposure, the less the part-time or night-time student would have to pay for the privilege of reading Miller’s 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 Miller’s 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. It’s thanks to Arthur Miller that I can buy a house. These two examples of theatre’s 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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But Death of a Salesman does attempt to do so. It encourages us in our nostalgia for an organic, humanist, natural social order, in which human beings worked in harmony with one another and with nature. It invites us to share in Willy’s disgust with industrial modernity: The street is lined with cars. There’s not a breath of fresh air in the neighborhood. The grass don’t grow any more, you can’t raise a carrot in the back yard. They should’ve had a law against apartment houses. Remember those two beautiful elm trees out there? When I and Biff hung the swing between them? . . . They should’ve arrested the builder for cutting those down. They massacred the neighborhood. 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)

We might someday add to Willy’s 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. It’s 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 play’s 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, it’s that the arrangement and development of the play’s formal features are at odds with its social thesis, and that not only does that arrangement threaten to undermine the play’s 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. It’s the move every piece of socialist realism makes, whether it’s Arnold Wesker’s Trilogy or John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger or David Mamet’s American Buffalo. Because of its deep complicity with bourgeois capitalism,

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when bourgeois theatre decries the injustices of the very economic system whose so-called “injustices” make theatre possible, it does one worse than biting the hand that feeds it: it only pretends to. Craig N. Owens Drake University

Bibliography Miller, Arthur. Death of a Salesman: Certain Private Conversations in Two Acts and a Requiem. New York: Penguin, 1977.

In His Father’s Image: Biff Loman’s Struggle with Inherited Traits in Death of a Salesman Death is likely the single best invention of life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. [Remember that] your time is limited so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma— which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary. —Steve Jobs

While most parents are delighted to accept the compliment of a friend who says, “Your baby looks just like you,” they might be less likely to welcome comments about the attitudes, traits, and actions that children appear to have inherited by watching their parents deal with life. Despite parental unwillingness to accept responsibility, several clichés suggest an intimate connection between the parents and their offspring; thus, many children are “chips off the old block” and give evidence that “birds of a feather flock together.” Although at times some individuals wish it were not so, the phrase “Like father, like son” also is truly apropos as the young tend to take their cues from their first role models, their parents. Not only have scientific studies noted this tendency—witness the frequency of alcoholism and physical abuse recurring in the families of children of alcoholics or abusive parents—but literature has also suggested that the Biblical curse, “The sins of the father shall be visited on the children unto the third and fourth generations,” (Exodus 20:5) has generally proven a truism as well. The early Greek myths offer one example of this recurrence of parental traits in their children in the story of Ouranous. Ouranous, considered with Gaia as one of the earliest elements in the Universe, despises his children, the Hecatoncheires and the Cyclops, and eventually engenders rebellion from his Titan child, Cronus, as well. Cronus not only slays his father but also cuts off his genitals as well in an attempt to destroy any genetic link between them. After Cronus assumes power, he, too, soon meets with an unfortunate disaster when

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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 influences—to 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, Miller’s 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 father’s 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 father’s. As C.W. Bigsby notes: Here as elsewhere in Miller’s 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 son’s identity depends on creating a boundary between himself and the father, on perceiving himself outside the axial lines which had defined the father’s world. (117)

Thus, when the play opens, readers may be surprised to see that Biff’s 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. Biff’s 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 Willy’s 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. Willy’s 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 dragon’s teeth, Biff is unable to destroy

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Willy’s seeds of instability merely by throwing a stone into their midst and pitting the negative tendencies that have been planted against one another. Instead, Biff allows the seeds to mature, seeds that produce three character flaws: dishonesty, immaturity, and insecurity. Dishonesty is clearly a trait that Willy fosters in his own life, so Miller’s audience might well expect it to influence his son. Bigsby notes, “As a salesman he [Willy] has always to dissemble, to smile, to put up a front. He is an actor who has increasingly lost his audience. His life is a falsehood” (123). Indeed, Willy is an accomplished liar, making up details that he knows will never come true. For example, while talking to Happy and Biff, he says: “Tell you a secret, boys. Don’t breathe it to a soul. Someday I’ll have my own business, and I’ll never have to leave home any more” (30). He also lies about his reputation, one minute asserting his popularity and the fact that he is wellknown (31) and the next minute confessing that people “just pass me by. I’m not noticed” (36). Critic Brian Parker even attributes Willy’s failure to this single flaw: “his incorrigible inability to tell the truth even to himself, his emotional non-logical mode of thought, which allows him to contradict himself and of which schizophrenia is merely an intensification” (33). Later he exaggerates his sales success to Linda, beginning with five hundred gross in Providence and seven hundred gross in Boston but soon being forced to admit that he only produced two hundred gross during the whole trip. His commission shrinks from $212 to $70 (35). Although some of his lies are petty—witness his manipulation of facts about the performance of his car and his refrigerator—the major untruth he fosters involves his assessment of his son, Biff. Despite his inner conviction that Biff is a failure, he persists in pushing for a different Biff who has attained what Willy has failed to achieve—popularity, financial success, and personal satisfaction. As the play begins, Willy speaks many contradictions about Biff, calling him a lazy bum one minute and a hard worker the next (16), criticizing his lack of self discovery one minute and excusing his late start in that process the next (18). While Linda reminds Biff, “[Y]ou can’t look around all your life, can you?” (54), Willy lies to himself, refusing to accept Biff’s failure for what it is. Instead, he strives to convince himself of his own greatness and that Biff will become great as well (68). In his essay entitled “Tragic Form and

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the Possibility of Meaning,” William Aarnes states: “Accordingly, from his ‘overactive mind’ comes lie after lie, lies that are at once ineffective because they fail to alter reality and too effective because they are infectious” (97). In Willy’s eyes, Biff can do no wrong; Willy exalts his son’s achievements in sports while ignoring Biff’s lack of interest in academics. It is no wonder that, because Miller depicts Willy as a father who inflates his own ego and accomplishments by lying, Biff welcomes his dad’s untruthful exaggeration of his own abilities. Thus, when Miller depicts Biff as a practicing liar himself, audiences are far from surprised. As the cliché reminds us: “The acorn does not fall far from the tree.” Nevertheless, early in the play, audiences see Biff surprisingly acknowledge his shortcomings rather than deny them. He confesses to his brother, Happy, “I’ve always made a point of not wasting my life, and everytime I come back here I know that all I’ve done is to waste my life” (22–23). It seems as if he has discovered the truth about himself, but almost simultaneously, audiences discover that he accepts the impossible dream that his father’s fantasies have constructed about his abilities. Biff speaks about buying a ranch where he and Happy can become independent and self-employed, fully knowing that this is a non-attainable fantasy. He also exaggerates his relationship with Bill Oliver, his former boss, and, emboldened by his father’s urging, he decides to seek a loan from Oliver to start a sports-oriented business with Happy. Audiences, of course, recognize how unlikely this business venture is, and they realize that Biff’s tendency to lie about himself is closely connected to the childhood lessons given by a lying father. It is only occasionally that Biff breaks through and is honest about who he really is. For example, much later in the play, he says to Willy: “We never told the truth for ten minutes in this house!” (131). But at this earlier point in the play, Biff still finds it difficult not to keep up the façade his father has constructed. Miller provides a further parallel to father/son connections regarding lies when Happy “tells a whopper,” trying to convince Miss Forsythe that Biff is one of the greatest football players in America— the quarterback of the New York Giants (102). Clearly, both sons have been raised to see lies as merely exaggerations that can harm no one; instead, they are essential in fostering and enlarging reputations and egos and in keeping dreams alive.

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Another facet of this dishonesty is shown in the thievery and cheating practiced by both father and son.1 Biff’s thievery begins early in his life when he “borrows” a football from the locker room, and it soon escalates to the theft of neighborhood building materials. Because Willy does not personally confront his son about theft as a crime and even congratulates his son on his initiative (30), it becomes second nature to Biff and eventually results in his stealing a fountain pen from the desk of Bill Oliver, a key event that destroys his potential for attaining his father’s dream. Biff has no need for the pen but feels compelled to take it despite its uselessness (104). This petty crime is far more serious than it appears, for Oliver’s cooperation and help are essential to Willy’s dream of a fantasy redemption and a new career for Biff. Biff’s compulsion to steal might also be tied to another crime related to dishonesty: cheating. Audiences first see Willy cheat during the card game with his next-door neighbor Charley (46–47). But this cheating is minor when compared to Willy’s sexual infidelity. When Biff discovers his father’s infidelity during a visit to Boston, he is devastated, for his perception of his father as perfect is shattered. The discovery convinces him that his father has no moral center, which causes him severe depression, perhaps because he is now forced to recognize the other dishonest practices he generally excuses and refuses to confront despite their obvious nature. Specifically, Biff’s realization of Willy’s corruption informs his decision to change his mind about asking Willy to convince Mr. Birnbaum to raise the score on his math exam so that he can graduate from high school and attend college: Biff laments, “Never mind. . . . He [Birnbaum] wouldn’t listen to you” (120). Disillusioned, he gives up on life, deciding to reject the exaggerated image his father has created. He will be himself, and he will accept his inadequacies, for without Bernard’s help, Biff is a failure academically. He resigns himself to lose his college scholarship and education, burning his sneakers with the words “The University of Virginia” written on them (94). Biff’s decision, of course, derives largely from the fact that immediately after he fails the important math test, he discovers his father’s similar propensity for cheating—in this case, sexual, a propensity Biff immediately condemns because he envisions the pain it would cause his mother if she discovered that her husband had been unfaithful to her. Biff fails to see, however, the parallels in his own life, such as his own sexual manipulation of women. He treats them in a loose and

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rough manner and has to be warned by his father to be careful that none of them entrap him (27–28) because his sex appeal and popularity will inevitably lead to intercourse and a marriage of obligation, thus impeding his path to “success.” Miller thus demonstrates that Biff is unable to perceive that he treats his own cheating as acceptable and logical while he considers the cheating by other people to be reprehensible and negative. Biff’s second inherited trait from Willy is his immaturity. Critic Ruby Cohn in “The Articulate Victims of Arthur Miller” has noted in the play “over a hundred repetitions of the word ‘man’ which are paralleled by a hundred of ‘boy’ and ‘kid’ with its easy undiscriminating bisexual affection” (39). Because the first words of the play (embedded in the stage directions) are “oh, boy, oh, boy” (12), audiences should anticipate that childish behavior is part and parcel of Biff’s inheritance from Willy. In fact, William Aarnes has labeled Willy as “a pathetic man, a boyish man who will never be more than temporary. Audiences agree with Charley when he asks Willy, ‘When the hell are you going to grow up?’ ” (97). Similarly, Miller perhaps feels that a thirty-four-year-old man who returns home out of frustration with his present work status and his lack of success has never truly grown up. In fact, Biff and Happy both have been encouraged to adopt their father’s immaturity as a means to be waited on. Willy’s own immaturity is demonstrated in the first scene by his reliance on Linda’s mothering concern as she struggles to feed him and get him to bed (18–19) and in Act II as she makes sure that he has his glasses, his handkerchief, and his saccharine (74–75) before he leaves home to meet with Howard. This protective attitude of parent for child later transfers to Willy himself as he comments that Biff could be big in no time (63–64) and as he demonstrates that his interest in helping things (such as plants) grow is part of his role as father. But despite his oft-expressed wish for his “boys” to grow up and become men, Willy persists in treating them as children, complimenting their game playing and approving of their submissive traits such as carrying his bags and following his directions as good sons should (31). He even talks to Linda in Act II about building two guest houses so that Happy and Biff could still live close by (72), and their family could still “remain” the tight unit he fantasizes about.

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Supposedly a physically big man himself, Willy’s emotional skills have not enlarged proportionately; he is still immature, despite his grown up appearance. Neither stature nor size brings maturity, and Willy is often called “kid” even by his own son Biff and even by Howard, who was born while Willy was already employed by the Wagner Company. Conversely, Willy’s size results in ridicule rather than respect; he is labeled a “walrus” (37), laughed at for his obesity. Willy’s response—he slaps the man who makes the comment—indicates his immature manner of handling conflict. While Miller does not question Happy’s immaturity verbally, preferring to demonstrate it through the character’s childish actions, he allows Willy to berate Biff frequently for what he considers adolescent behavior. For example, although Willy has little justification for reproaching others because of his own defects, he criticizes the immaturity he perceives in Biff for whistling in the elevator (61) and chastises his son for using the word “Gee!” (65), yet he uses the word himself. Audiences notice, of course, that Willy also uses this word frequently but remains unaware of his own childish behavior and how it influences his son. Instead, unwilling to accept his own influence, he blames Biff, saying: “You never grew up” (61). Moments later, Willy (again contradicting himself) proclaims that Biff has a greatness in him (67) and that Biff is like a young god. “A star like that, magnificent, can never really fade away!,” he proclaims (68). Despite this alleged support for Biff, his forms of address for his son—“kid,” “boy,” and “pal”—suggest that Biff has remained an adolescent in Willy’s eyes rather than matriculating into manhood. Biff’s adolescent behavior is further emphasized by his use of tentative and fluctuating words and sentences in his conflict with his father at Frank’s Chop House. In this scene, he is caught, as a child might be, between confession and denial, choosing the latter rather than courageously standing up to and refusing to be ambiguous about his father’s shortcomings and how they have shaped his life. As Ruby Cohn assesses Biff, she states: “His idiom reflects his immaturity; even his name is a boy’s nickname” (42). Yet another immature action of Biff involves his boyish tendency to make fun of his teacher, mimicking his speech defect. Biff tells Willy: “[O]ne day he was late for class so I got up at the blackboard and imitated him. I crossed my eyes and talked with a lithp [sic]. . . . The thquare [sic] root of thixthy twee [sic] is . . .” (118). Willy’s reaction is hardly adult as he bursts out laughing, as if Biff’s behavior is an appropriate action for a high school senior. Sensitive audience members

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recognize that Biff’s mockery mirrors Willy’s cruel comments about their next door neighbor, Bernard, whom the salesman calls “a pest” (33), “an anemic” (33), and a “worm” (40), never suspecting or caring that Bernard’s feelings will be hurt. As William Aarnes states: “Nothing has grown to maturity on Loman’s ground. Willy’s failed sons are still boys, and Willy has remained a large kid” (100). Finally, Biff inherits Willy’s insecurity. Throughout the play, Miller shows that characters who suffer from this personality defect often require ego boosts from other supporting characters. Lacking this, they must create a false image of their own ability that somehow becomes not only plausible but also so deceptive that it becomes “truth” in their confused subconscious. Willy begins the play assuming that he is “vital in New England” (14) as a salesman, but, as he relates his present status, audiences can see that his claim of vitality is a fabrication and that Willy is desperate for support and love from his family in order to build himself up and compensate for his failure in his job. Of course, he finds this support in his wife, Linda, but he also yearns for the love and acceptance of his two sons, even trying to win these feelings by providing them with the very ego enhancement he himself requires. However, more often than not, Willy’s sons are the essential cogs in shoring up his own security and self-confidence. For example, Biff in particular offers Willy a feeling of vicarious personal accomplishment because he is an actual sports hero and because he is popular, especially with females. While Willy must invent his own reputation—being well known by the buyers and idolized by his family—these inventions are merely a ploy to hide his loneliness and his fear that he is not only inadequate as a provider and a father but also unloved. As Ruby Cohn notes: “Biff’s boyhood popularity is contrasted with Willy’s laughableness” (42). Willy even admits his fears while talking to Ben, saying, “[W]ell, 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). Just as Willy creates a more acceptable but fabricated image of himself, he exalts Biff’s talents far beyond the son’s abilities. As Biff confesses to Willy later in the play: “I never got anywhere because you blew me so full of hot air I could never stand taking orders from anybody! . . . I had to be boss big shot in two weeks . . .” (131). And a big shot Biff becomes as Willy looks the other way to avoid seeing his son’s flaws and, in his typical exaggeration, elevates his son just as

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turn-of-the-century writer Horatio Alger raised his character Ragged Dick from poverty to riches. But just as Willy’s own insufficiencies surface occasionally and cause him grief when he least expects them to, so Biff’s flaws prove to his father that the son is not the golden boy Willy has created in his mind. While Willy treasures the outdoors— such as flowers, vegetables, and trees—himself, he cannot bring himself to see any of these as indicative of success. Therefore, to Willy, Biff’s love of nature and the West is a defect rather than a positive trait. A similar irony exists when Willy praises his brother Ben’s trek into the wilderness of Africa and Alaska and his own father’s singular inventiveness but then declares that only money and diamonds, not happiness, contentment, or love, can truly measure a man’s worth. In Willy’s mind, capital and possessions become the only real signs of a self-assured and self-sufficient person. Unfortunately, Willy has not found happiness, contentment, and love, positive feelings that are clearly part of what Miller considers the real criteria for success. Because these three elements elude Willy, he becomes suicidal in an attempt to attain the popularity and monetary criteria that have helped to ruin both his and Biff’s lives. As audiences continually observe, Willy’s attempts to shore up his self image generally revolve around fabrications about finances and monetary gain while he relies on his wife Linda to make him feel secure about his physical appearance, an action she accomplishes by her constant reminders of how handsome he is (37) and how much his sons love him (133). She also supports her husband’s ego by affirming his exaggerated claims about his business ability and by echoing his exorbitant praise of Biff. Miller sets Bernard’s adult self-assuredness in direct contrast to the insecure feelings of the Lomans.2 After being denigrated as a teen, it is surprising that Bernard bears no ill will toward Willy or Biff. Instead, he is clearly content and happy with his present state. He is a successful lawyer, one who practices in front of the Supreme Court, no less. But Bernard’s clear triumph over the Loman boys only motivates Willy to manufacture still more fabrications about Biff (91–92) as he struggles to see his sons as Bernard’s equals rather than as unstable and insecure individuals. “They’re all fine boys,” he says to Charley, “and they’ll end up big—all of them. Someday they’ll all play tennis together” (98). In an attempt to burst the bubble of inflated accomplishments that Willy has created, Biff is determined to rebel, to assert his individuality

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rather than follow his father’s destructive pattern. As Cohn notes: “Miller dramatizes Biff’s recognition of the impossibility, if not the insubstantiality, of Willy’s dream” (44). When he meets his father at Frank’s Chop House, Biff tries to confess his inability to be what Willy desires. Couching his speech in a forgiving rather than a combative tone at first, Biff begins by admitting the difficulty he has always had with articulating his situation to Willy and his dejection when their conversations become antagonistic, prohibiting a true understanding of each other so necessary to acceptance. Unfortunately, in this scene, Willy consistently interrupts Biff’s attempts to explain the true outcome of his visit with Bill Oliver, trying to drown out his son’s denial of the exaggerations Willy has created to bolster both his and his son’s egos. The stage directions indicate that Biff delivers these lines gently: “Who was it, Pop? Who ever said I was a salesman with Oliver. . . . I was never a salesman for Bill Oliver. . . . Let’s hold on to the facts tonight, Pop. We’re not going to get anywhere bullin’ around. I was a shipping clerk” (106). Nevertheless, when Willy reveals his own firing, Biff hesitates once again. He is tempted to return to the dishonesty, immaturity, and insecurity that have marked his life so far, hoping that his conformity will somehow save his father and change his fate. Clearly, though Biff is initially determined to break Willy’s false depiction of his popularity and his talents, Miller is intent on demonstrating how difficult a task it is for any son to break away from the seeds his father has planted. Prodded by Willy’s exorbitant expectations, Biff eventually succumbs, buying into his father’s fake feelings of self-confidence, choosing to consider himself an individual who is seemingly godlike and who cannot fail to impress others; in his father’s eyes, Biff becomes Hercules and Adonis combined.3 It is quite relevant to an audience’s final assessment of Biff to examine these mythological referents, Hercules and Adonis.4 Aarnes, for example, develops three different interpretations of Miller’s use of Adonis, considering the reference an important allusion made by Miller. The most significant explanation he provides concerns the role of Adonis in mythology as a god who dies and then revives—a god of vegetation associated with springtime and growth, and thus intimately allied with Miller’s seed imagery.5 If Miller’s resurrection imagery has such depth in the play, audiences might well have to consider the possibility that the end of Death of a Salesman is not literally tragic;

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despite the sadness and despair evident in the plot, the tragedy of Willy’s death may also be said to lead to rebirth as well as to a recognition and repair of Biff’s 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 Willy’s literal death by suicide, and then he portrays Biff’s 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 Miller’s decision to choose ambiguity over a deliberate absolute in Biff’s 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 father’s belief, is also a fake. The climax of the play occurs in Bill Oliver’s 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 Willy’s dream of parental success. (79)

However, while Hoeveler contends that each of the character’s supposed freedom from Willy is questionable after his death and that each character continues to embody the values Willy has demanded of them while alive (80), the Adonis allusion as explained by Aarnes at least gives some hope that Biff will not allow himself to become the “saddest, self-centeredest soul I ever did see-saw” (116), as “The Woman” describes Willy. There is no doubt that because the play revolves around the defective personality traits passed on by father to son, it is difficult for audiences to maintain hope for a happy ending. Such an ending would, of course, not be in keeping with the complexity of Miller’s meaning in which audiences see a flawed hero engage their spirits and in which audiences empathize and identify with the dilemmas he faces: dilemmas of fatherhood, work, marriage, and value systems of a changing America. Wisely, then, Miller chooses an ambiguous route for Death of a Salesman, leaving the interpretation entirely up to his audience.6 Miller accomplishes this goal in part by providing Biff with stumbling, indecisive moments of self-awareness and self-condemnation early in the play. These moments instill mistrust in the audience

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concerning Biff’s supposed 180 degree turnaround as the play draws to a close. It is no wonder that his so-called “reform” is interpreted by some audience members as merely another phase that will be followed by another setback, a return to his attitude of “I’m no good, can’t you see what I am?” (113). Nevertheless, despite interpretations which suggest that relapse for Biff is more likely than his redemption, Biff’s speeches in the Requiem suggest a markedly different, no longer confused, character. His comments about Willy—“He had the wrong dreams. All, all wrong” and “He never knew who he was” (138)—suggest that his earlier vacillation is finished and that his wavering comments earlier regarding his self-intuition are superseded.7 This time he will not fluctuate in his determination to escape his inherited traits; his recognition of his own and Willy’s flaws is not only deliberate; it is lasting as well. He is not just a spiteful child intent on destroying impossible dreams of perfection held by an older generation; Willy’s death has ironically set him free, free to assert his individuality and to leave behind the seeds his father nurtured so intently. A major factor in deciding Biff’s potential for reform is the possibility that the title does not refer to Willy, that instead what dies is not a person but a mistaken concept that most Americans are sold on—the salesman’s concept of riches, possessions, and popularity as indicators of success. At the end of the play, Biff refuses to follow Willy’s distorted dream that the insurance money will not only redeem his sons but will also set his family on the straight path to even more wealth; through Biff’s rejection, the sales pitch for riches and possessions as indicators of success in America dies. It is revealed as specious or phony. Biff accepts instead the richness provided by things that please without costing money. One can envision him returning to the ranch in Texas and enjoying rather than regretting his choice: “[I]t’s spring there now, see? And they’ve got about fifteen new colts. There’s nothing more inspiring or—beautiful, than the sight of a mare and a new colt . . . Texas is cool now, and it’s spring (22). Success becomes the contentment and the joy attained through surrounding oneself with those things one loves; the monetary sales pitch expires as the controlling goal for America. In his last confrontation with Willy, Biff says: 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 . . . I saw—the

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Many critics agree that all the characters in Death of a Salesman mirror Willy in some way.8 But at the end of the play, Biff not only mirrors Willy but becomes his doppelgänger, thus stressing Miller’s hope that the next generation might understand what eludes their parents: that they will not only know who they really are but will also understand to what they give primary value, what they want from life. Miller’s description of the central idea of his work characterizes it best. It is “that moment of commitment when a man differentiates himself from every other man, that moment when out of a sky full of stars he fixes on one star” (qtd. in Jackson 8). Because the curtain closes without revealing what Biff does with his newfound knowledge, some critics argue that it is questionable whether Biff has found himself, has fixed on one star to pursue. Thus, while Aarnes agrees that Biff is the only character who seems to grow in Death of a Salesman, he argues that it is likely that he will do little to give his life meaning in the future. Citing Biff’s confusion and his apparent lack of insight, Aarnes believes this character will be content to be nothing, to be no good, rather than to strike out on a new path (105). What Aarnes’s conclusion fails to take into consideration is this: under whose value system does Biff call himself a bum, a nothing, a dime a dozen? At this point in the play, this assessment surely depends on what Willy believes and not on the new value system Biff is intent on establishing. If Biff’s epiphany has resulted in a revised and clearer set of values, in which the dream of success can consist of a simple sense of harmony with one’s surroundings and a belief that to prosper in America, one must first find one’s identity and uniqueness, then Biff will surely not regress again.9 Instead, he will finally break away

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from the cult of the father. Bigsby cites Miller’s 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.” Willy’s 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 Parker’s 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, 100–102. 6 Bigsby agrees, comparing the ironic ending to the ambiguous state of Nick Carraway at the conclusion of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece, The Great Gatsby. 7 William Heyen states: “The question, too, of whether or not Biff’s final statement that he knows himself is the truth or is the play’s 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.

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See Bigsby’s comments on pages 119 and 125. Ironically, this revival requires the death of Willy and the sprouting of new seeds of renewal motivated by re-evaluation. 10

Bibliography Aarnes, William. “Tragic Form and the Possibility of Meaning in Death of a Salesman” in Modern Critical Interpretations of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. Harold Bloom, ed. New York: Chelsea House, 1988. (95–111) Bigsby, C.W. “Death of a Salesman: In Memoriam” in Modern Critical Interpretations of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. Harold Bloom, ed. New York: Chelsea House, 1988. (113–128) Cohn, Ruby. “The Articulate Victims of Arthur Miller” in Modern Critical Interpretations of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. Harold Bloom, ed. New York: Chelsea House, 1988. (39–46) Herzberg, Max J. Myths and Their Meaning. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1984. Heyen, William. “Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman and the American Dream” in Modern Critical Interpretations of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. Harold Bloom, ed. New York: Chelsea House, 1988. (47–58) Hoeveler, D.L. “Death of a Salesman as Psychomachia” in Modern Critical Interpretations of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. Harold Bloom, ed. New York: Chelsea House, 1988. (77–82) Jackson, Esther Merle. “Death of a Salesman: Tragic Myth in the Modern Theater” in Modern Critical Interpretations of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. Harold Bloom, ed. New York: Chelsea House, 1988. (7–18) Miller, Arthur. Death of a Salesman: Certain Private Conversations in Two Acts and a Requiem. New York: Penguin, 1977. —. “Introduction” in Arthur Miller’s Collected Plays: With an Introduction. New York: Viking, 1957. (3–55) Parker, Brian. “Point of View in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman” in Modern Critical Interpretations: Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. Harold Bloom, ed. New York: Chelsea House, 1988. (25–38)

The Emergence of Hope in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman In a documented conversation with Mel Gussow, Arthur Miller describes Death of a Salesman as “suffused, oddly enough, with hope” (195). Such an optimistic description might cause some surprise, if not confusion, especially for those viewers who leave productions of the play knotted into depression or anxiety by Willy Loman’s consuming materialism and pathetic delusions of grandeur. What hope can one glean from the life and death of a man with such apparently hollow values and such an obsessive desire for recognition and financial success? Furthermore, if Willy Loman, as some critics suggest, symbolizes the “everyman” of a commercialized culture, what hope does his suicide offer to modern viewers? Perhaps none. Yet, Miller’s play explores far more than Willy Loman’s failures and losses; it explores the depths of filial love, the freedom of self-actualization, and the triumph of honesty. It does far more than portray financial failure; it celebrates spiritual success. In fact, to understand fully why Arthur Miller considered his play “suffused . . . with hope,” one must first be willing to view it as Miller does, through the eyes of a moralist. Gussow describes Miller as a playwright “aware of all sides of a dispute but clear about where he stands: for an essential moral truth” (8), and Miller himself readily admits to Gussow in another of their many recorded conversations that his plays “implicitly or explicitly . . . create a moral universe” (70). Even Harold Clurman, the acclaimed director of many of Miller’s plays, comments on Miller’s fundamental morality: “He is, as we shall see, sufficiently imbued with the skepticism of modern thought to shy away from the presumptions implicit in . . . [the word ‘sin’]. But that Miller is willy-nilly a moralist—one who believes he knows what sin and evil are—is inescapable” (xii–xiii). When discussing Death of a Salesman in particular, Miller admits that “by showing what happens where there are no values, I[,] at least, assume that the audience will be compelled and propelled toward a more intense quest for the values that

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are missing” (“Death of a Salesman: A Symposium” 47). This fundamental acknowledgement of the existence of right and wrong values is vital to one’s understanding of the play’s hopefulness primarily because it brings into focus the spiritual development of Willy’s oldest son, Biff, the only one in the Loman family who seems to feel the inadequacy of his father’s 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 Willy’s “law of success” (“Death” 42), and despite the often overwhelming anxiety generated by Willy’s 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 Willy’s sacrifice hints of cowardice, Biff’s sacrifice demonstrates a willingness to suffer for the sake of his father’s 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, Biff’s 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: . . . it’s 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, it’s spring there now, see? And they’ve got about fifteen new colts. There’s nothing more inspiring or—beautiful 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, Willy’s professed love of nature shows itself to be tainted by ulterior motives; he lauds the wilds of Alaska and Africa not for their beauty

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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 . . . there’s snakes and rabbits and—that’s 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. Biff’s reaction to his father’s 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 father’s mania for financial success: “whenever spring comes to where I am, I suddenly get the feeling, my God, I’m not gettin’ anywhere! What the hell am I doing, playing around with horses, twenty-eight dollars a week! I’m thirty-four years old, I oughta be makin’ my future” (22). Yet, as the drama unfolds, it becomes increasingly clear that Biff’s desire “to make a future” stems primarily from his desire to please his father—that in truth, he wants nothing more than to separate himself from the city’s 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 weren’t brought up to grub for money. I don’t know how to do it” (23–24). When Happy objects (“The only thing is—what 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 hasn’t 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. That’s fifty-two thousand dollars a year coming through the revolving door, and I got more in my pinky finger than he’s got in his head. BIFF: Yeah, but you just said— (24)

Several scenes later, when Happy criticizes Biff’s 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 don’t care what they think! They’ve laughed at Dad for years, and you know why? Because we don’t belong in this nuthouse of a city! We should be mixing cement on some open plain, or—or carpenters. A carpenter is allowed to whistle!” (61).

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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 don’t grow any more, [and] you can’t 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, I’d better hurry. I’ve got to get some seeds . . . I’ve got to get some seeds, right away. Nothing’s planted. I don’t have a thing in the ground” (122). It is as though he is responding to Biff’s evident distaste for the city and its restless mercenaries by turning to the one occupation that he knows will please his son—gardening. 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 saw—the 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 don’t 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 Biff’s 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 honesty—all 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 Willy’s refusal or inability to understand Biff’s 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, Biff’s return to the city, which manifests his willingness to suffer for the sake of his father’s 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

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out, “Biff’s offer to stay home, get a job, and support his parents is a painful sacrifice of a dutiful son but it is a bizarre sacrifice—and almost doomed not to succeed—because Biff is an adult and has more appropriate tasks to perform” (Bloom’s 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 Biff’s 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 Biff’s successive sacrifices embody his maturing love, Willy’s 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, Willy’s sacrifice for Biff, rather than fulfilling any real need, denies his son the one thing Biff has been longing for: his father’s blessing to lead a simple life. However, despite the seeming futility of Willy’s 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 Willy’s most moving, most “elevated ” moment: “Isn’t that—isn’t that remarkable? Biff—he likes me! . . . Oh, Biff! Staring wildly: He cried! Cried to me. He is choking with his love, and now cries out his promise: That boy—that boy is going to be magnificent!” (133). Miller himself believes that Biff’s 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 Willy’s 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 father’s crowning degradation while acknowledging his love for his father and coming to respect him” (96). Nevertheless, the greatest source of hope remains in Biff’s comprehension of the true nature

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of sacrifice and his willingness to give his father what he so desperately wants for himself: acceptance and empathy. Certainly the most pervasive similarities between Willy and Biff involve their encounters with rejection and failure, the most noticeable of which occur at their respective business interviews in Act II. In fact, the interviews not only subject both men to a harsh denial of their hopes but also bring out some of their worst moral failings. Willy’s meeting with Howard, for example, one of the most agonizing scenes in the play, dramatizes in painful detail what Linda has already sought to convey in Act I: the humiliation of an old man terminated from his job of “thirty-six years” (56). In response to this degradation, Willy retreats further into his self-gratifying delusions of Biff’s grandeur, insulating himself in a hollow pride that prevents any comprehension of his real family and their love for him. He begins to fantasize about the prospect of Biff’s athletic success, Charley’s envy, and his personal financial gain: “When this game is over, Charley, you’ll be laughing out of the other side of your face. They’ll be calling [Biff] . . . another Red Grange. Twenty-five thousand a year” (89). Willy’s unwarranted pride also prevents him from accepting responsibility; he not only rejects Charley’s kind job offer but also begins projecting on others faults for which he himself is most guilty. In one of his trances, for instance, he accuses Charley of an all too familiar arrogance: “Who the hell do you think you are, better than everybody else?” (90). Later, when Bernard inquires about Biff’s sullen transformation after the fateful trip to Boston, Willy responds with petulance—“What are you trying to do, blame it on me? If a boy lays down is that my fault?” (94). Soon after that, he irrationally blames his son’s kleptomania on a single failed math exam: “You had to go and flunk math! . . . furiously . . . If you hadn’t flunked you’d’ve been set by now!” (109). Even in their last, frenzied argument, Willy persists in his refusal to acknowledge any part in Biff’s suffering: WILLY: Spite, spite, is the word of your undoing! And when you’re down and out, remember what did it. When you’re rotting somewhere beside the railroad tracks, remember, and don’t you dare blame it on me! BIFF: I’m not blaming it on you! WILLY: I won’t take the rap for this, you hear? (130)

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.

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Like Willy’s interview with Howard, Biff’s appointment with Oliver marks a critical moment of failure. All Biff’s hopes of redeeming himself in his father’s eyes, all his hopes of renewing familial harmony, collapse with one look of indifference and non-recognition from Oliver: “I saw him for one minute . . . [H]e gave me one look and—I realized what a ridiculous lie my whole life has been!” (104). Furthermore, Biff’s initial reaction to this disappointment reveals a two-fold connection with his father; not only does it similarly bring out his worst moral failings, but his failings themselves—immaturity and cowardly evasion—reveal a surprising likeness to those of his father. Sitting at Frank’s Chop House with his brother, Biff shamefacedly recounts first the immaturity of his rage and theft and then the cowardice of his flight: BIFF: I got so mad I could’ve torn the walls down! How the hell did I ever get the idea I was a salesman there? I even believed myself that I’d been a salesman for him! . . . We’ve been talking in a dream for fifteen years. I was a shipping clerk. HAPPY: What’d you do? BIFF: Well, he left, see. And the secretary went out. I was all alone in the waiting-room. I don’t know what came over me, Hap. The next thing I know I’m in his office—paneled walls, everything. I can’t explain it. I—Hap, I took his fountain pen. HAPPY: Geez, did he catch you? BIFF: I ran out. I ran down all eleven flights. I ran and ran and ran. (104)

Until this point in the play, Helene Wickham Koon’s description of Willy as “one who . . . reacts without thought, who substitutes dreams for knowledge, and who is necessarily self-centered because unanalyzed feelings are his sole touchstone to existence” (11) could just as truly be said of Biff. Biff has spent years running away from his failures just as Willy has spent years lying away his failures. The crucial difference, of course, is that while Willy remains unable or unwilling to break free from his delusions, Biff learns to stand and face his fears. In fact, the similarities between Biff’s flaws and those of his father, rather than contributing to the play’s hopelessness, only serve to accentuate the essential hopefulness of Biff’s slow separation from his father, his slow growth toward integrity and self-awareness. Moreover, as Biff assumes the responsibility of facing his own failures, he also assumes the responsibility of being honest with his family. At the restaurant, for instance, he tries to tell his father the truth, but both Willy and Happy continually interrupt his news in what soon becomes an exasperating round of miscommunication. Willy’s conscious refusal

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to allow Biff the relief of admitting failure suggests the underlying selfishness of his delusions: BIFF, with determination: Dad, I don’t know who said it first, but I was never a salesman for Bill Oliver. WILLY: What’re you talking about? BIFF: Let’s hold on to the facts tonight, Pop. We’re not going to get anywhere bullin’ around. I was a shipping clerk. WILLY: angrily: All right, now listen to me— BIFF: Why don’t you let me finish? WILLY: I’m not interested in stories about the past or any crap of that kind because the woods are burning, boys, you understand? . . . I was fired today. (106–107)

Willy can concede his own failure, but he cannot concede Biff’s failure; in fact, the mental effort required to hold his son’s 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! . . . I’m 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!” (111–112). 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: “I’ve got no appointment! . . . I’m no good, can’t you see what I am?” (113). Although Biff’s 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 Willy’s 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. I’m through with it . . . WILLY: I suppose that’s 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! That’s 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 don’t want to be? What am I doing in an office, making

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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). In the end, there remains no accusation in Biff’s words, only his exhausted self-acceptance: Pop, I’m nothing! I’m nothing, Pop. Can’t you understand that? There’s no spite in it any more. I’m just what I am, that’s all . . . Will you let me go, for Christ’s sake? Will you take that phony dream and burn it before something happens? (132–133)

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 father’s 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 Biff’s 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 Willy’s death is perhaps one of the most telling signs of its hopefulness. Biff’s words at his father’s grave—“He 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 Willy’s defeat from overshadowing the play is Biff’s 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 Willy’s mind where he was imprisoned by his father’s self-serving adoration, Biff has recovered his history and this must happen before he can recover his life” (Bloom’s 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 we’re 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 personality—that’s lollipop time. It has nothing to

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do with what’s real, as far as I can tell” (Gussow 96). Miller may leave Biff at his father’s 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 qualities—materialism, dishonesty, and an undue desire for approbation—unfortunately dominate his character. Yet, perhaps it is these very faults that ultimately free Biff from the control of his father and his father’s teachings, that allow him to pursue his own dream of happiness, a dream arguably more promising than his father’s 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, Willy’s miserable failures. If Miller indeed wanted Death of a Salesman to be didactic in some form, perhaps he hoped his viewers would turn from Willy’s “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 Willy’s 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. (60–69) Bloom, Harold, ed. Major Literary Characters: Willy Loman. New York: Chelsea House, 1991. —, ed. Bloom’s Guides: Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2004. Clurman, Harold, ed. “Introduction” in The Portable Arthur Miller. New York: Viking, 1977. (xi–xxv)

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“Death of a Salesman: A Symposium” in Harold Bloom, ed. Major Literary Characters: Willy Loman. (43–49) Gussow, Mel. Conversations with Miller. New York: Applause Theatre & Cinema Books, 2002. Hadomi, Leah. “Dramatic Rhythm in Death of a Salesman” in Harold Bloom, ed. Major Literary Characters: Willy Loman. (112–128) Hawthorn, Jeremy. “Sales and Solidarity” in Harold Bloom, ed. Major Literary Characters: Willy Loman. (90–98) Koon, Helene Wickham. “Introduction” in Twentieth Century Interpretations of Death of a Salesman. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1983. (1–14) 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. Ribkoff, Fred. “Fred Ribkoff on the Functions of Shame and Guilt in the Identity Crises of Willy and Biff ” in Harold Bloom, ed. Bloom’s Guides: Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. (96–99) Siegel, Paul N. “Willy Loman and King Lear” in Helene Wickham Koon, ed. Twentieth Century Interpretations of Death of a Salesman. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1983. (92–97) Von Szeliski, John. “Critical Extracts” in Harold Bloom, ed. Major Literary Characters: Willy Loman. (15–19)

“A little boat looking for a harbor”: Sexual Symbolism in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman “Death of a Salesman,” Arthur Miller once said, “really, is a love story between a man and his son, and in a crazy way between both of them and America” (“Salesman” in Beijing 49). That is probably how most people react to the play: as a story—a tragic love story, of course, for it ends with the protagonist’s death. Early reviews mention the audience’s stunned silence at the play’s curtain, the rapturous applause, and then, inevitably, the tears. So many tears, in fact, that Miller has complained that they drown the play’s “ironies” (Timebends 194). These ironies, the many contrasts between appearance and reality, between what the play is saying and what it is hinting at, are deep and troubling, and very much part of the play’s structure. Miller, however, managed that structure so expertly that it never stood in the way of the moving story he was telling of the man who tried to be a good father to his sons. The action in Death of a Salesman revolves around two levels that blend together seamlessly: we look at Willy’s world both from the outside and from the inside—in other words, both objectively and subjectively so that whatever value we ascribe to a scene will have to take into account these shifting perspectives. In a play that deals with the disconcerting conflict between appearance and reality, symbols have a crucial role to play. Symbols in drama are objects or people tangibly present on the stage or conjured up through dialogue that stand for more than just themselves. At once simple and complex, immediate and elusive, they are the ideal starting point of any interpretation that attempts to probe below the surface—and in this case even below the belt. Death of a Salesman contains tangible and intangible symbols. Among the tangible ones are props used for their symbolic meaning. The stockings that Linda is always mending, the rubber tube with which Willy attempts suicide through gas inhalation, and the seeds he plants in his garden are examples of props that appear at crucial moments in the play to help the action along. Others make no appearance, being part

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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 Willy’s 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 ways—sometimes even with a chuckle.

1.

The Making of a Story

The most conspicuous of the tangible symbols is the rubber tube. It is first mentioned by Linda, who tells her sons that she has discovered it in the basement, removed it, but felt compelled to put it back. It makes its first actual appearance at the end of Act I, when Biff takes it from behind the heater and wraps it around his hand. Biff keeps it in his pocket afterwards, whisking it dramatically into appearance on two occasions: the first time, when he puts it on the table in the restaurant to impress Happy with the seriousness of Willy’s condition; the second time, at home when he slaps it on the table, confronting Willy with it. The rubber tube, much like the pistols in Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler (1891), is one of those central props that is mentioned early on, accrues symbolic meaning, and reappears ominously, here fatally, in what is known as the “obligatory scene.” That the play makes use of such a traditional device is itself remarkable, as it demonstrates how far the play has moved away from Miller’s initial vision. Miller, as is well known, had intended to call the play The Inside of His Head (Introduction 155). A huge head would open up on the stage, and the audience would be made privy to the strange workings of Willy’s mind. In Miller’s view, the most striking feature of that mind is its ability to conceive of contradictory ideas simultaneously. To some extent, this insight made it into the play. For Willy, Biff is both lazy and not lazy (16). Both statements are equally true; which one Willy chooses depends on whether he feels despairing or hopeful about his son. In a similar way, the “Chevrolet . . . is the greatest car ever built” (34), yet a few moments later, his vision clouded over by anxiety, Willy can say with equal conviction that “they ought to prohibit the manufacture of that car!” (36). Miller also emphasizes the currency of the past: past experience not only colors the present but also actually intrudes upon it. While

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playing cards, Willy is talking both to Charley, who is present in reality, and to his dead brother Ben, who exists only in his fantasy, resulting, of course, in confusion. Memory and reality interact in a similarly confusing way in the restaurant scene, where Willy, overcome by guilt and feelings of inadequacy, responds both to Biff and Happy in the present and to Biff and his unnamed mistress in his memory of a traumatic past moment. If nowadays, such fluid transitions between past and present, and between fantasy and reality, are very much taken for granted, we have Miller to thank for it. But all this was still new and exciting for a contemporary Broadway audience when Death of a Salesman premiered. Initially, Miller fantasized about a new, even revolutionary way of writing plays: “I wished to create a form which, in itself as a form, would literally be the process of Willy Loman’s way of mind” (“Introduction” 156). The cause-and-effect logic of the well-made play could not articulate what was most striking about the structure of that mind, namely its simultaneity: “What was wanted now was not a mounting line of tension, nor a gradually narrowing cone of intensifying suspense, but a bloc, a single chord presented as such at the outset, within which all the strains and melodies would already be contained” (“Introduction” 156). He dreamt of a play that would be wholly encapsulated “in one unbroken speech or even one sentence or a single flash of light” (“Introduction” 156). Obviously Death of a Salesman is not that kind of a play. Miller claims he ended up with a play that follows the associative method of psychoanalysis or, as he prefers to call it, the confession: “As I look at the play now its form seems the form of a confession, for that is how it is told, now speaking of what happened yesterday, then suddenly following some connection to a time twenty years ago, then leaping even further back and then returning to the present and even speculating about the future” (“Introduction” 156). In other words, he wanted to avoid structural transitions, the kind of overly explicit logical “bridges” that are meant to enhance plausibility. But that did not quite happen either. Miller values clarity, and at times he felt he had to explain the action. Much of the expository dialogue between Ben and Willy, for instance, deals with Willy’s childhood in an obvious attempt to provide psychological motivation for Willy’s insecurity. But whenever possible, Miller works more subtly, using symbols to suggest rather than to expound on the rationale for action and approximating the kind of simultaneity of meaning that struck him in his initial vision

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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 Willy’s downfall.

2.

The Length of a Rubber Pipe

The traditional arc of storytelling is finally what predominates in Death of a Salesman. It ended up being structured in textbook fashion, much like a “well-made play,” containing an element of suspense (Willy’s suicide threat), rising and falling tension, and a confrontation scene that is at once an obligatory scene (scène à faire) where a crucial prop (the rubber tube) makes its reappearance. It even attempts to be a problem play about the American Dream, presenting a sociopolitical argument of sorts, and it possesses some of the traditional features of a tragedy, including “recognition” (anagnorisis, in Aristotle’s Poetics, a moment of truth and insight), “reversal” (peripeteia, when the truth that should set Willy free ends up killing him), and “catharsis” (as is obvious from the audience’s tearful response). This is all rather far removed from the giant, muddled head that Miller had envisaged. And yet, despite having caved in to the traditional requirements of story, argument, and pathos, the play still manages to trouble and perplex. In fact, one cannot help suspecting that, much like its hero, the play hides behind its respectable front a slightly disreputable reality. To put it differently, the play might not always be telling us the story it purports to be telling—and nothing illustrates this point better than a brief analysis of the function and symbolism of the rubber tube. The following passage contains the first mention of the tube by Linda, who explains to her sons the complexity of her feelings upon discovering that Willy is trying to end his life. It warrants a closer look because it is not only carefully but also curiously worded: LINDA: The lights blew out, and I went down the cellar. And behind the fuse box—it happened to fall out—was a length of rubber pipe—just short. . . . There’s a little attachment on the end of it. I knew right away. And sure enough, on the bottom of the water heater there’s a new little nipple on the gas pipe. HAPPY, angrily: That—jerk. BIFF: Did you have it taken off?

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LINDA: I’m—I’m 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? (59–60)

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 before—or 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 change—but 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 husband’s 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 Willy’s 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 people’s 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

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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 one’s awareness of the hapless association between the “little rubber pipe” (60) that so awkwardly tumbles into view and the salesman’s 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 husband—even though in doing so, she is endangering his life. It is Willy’s 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 father’s 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 get—solidified” (72). The dash, indicating a hesitation, draws attention to the inadvertent sexual charge

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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. That’s fifty-two thousand dollars a year coming through the revolving door, and I got more in my pinky finger than he’s 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 fiancées 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. “There’s not a good woman in a thousand” (103), according to Happy—his mom being the exception. Biff’s kleptomania is presented in a similar way, as a form of compensation. Biff steals not only Oliver’s “balls” but also his “pen”—as 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. Willy’s 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 Willy’s 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

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is described as “a very great and a very wild-hearted man” (49), with the nature god, Pan. Before leaving to go in search of the father, Ben offers Willy wildflowers, an indication that in Willy’s mind both figures have merged into one. That Ben confused Africa for Alaska suggests he was never serious about the search but followed the father only in the sense that he too abandoned the family. In the play, the success promised by the American Dream is equated with the myth of phallic power. The dark tower buildings that cast their shadow over the Lomans’s house illustrate its oppressive and cruel side; the radiant figures of Willy’s father and brother, its irresistible magic. Under their spell, Willy walks through Brooklyn, imagining it is not unlike Ben’s jungle: “Oh, sure, there’s snakes and rabbits” and “we hunt too” (50). And off he goes, until Linda tries to call him back to domestic reality by mentioning the slippers on his feet (53). When we find Willy at the end of the play preoccupied with planting seeds in his garden, he is responding to that idyllic view that equates masculinity not with oppression but with nature and fertility, not with reality but with imagination, and not with competition but with manly comradeship and adventure. The same vision is shared by Willy’s sons. It causes Biff to whistle boisterously and defiantly in the elevator. It makes him dream of adventure and recoil from a life where you “suffer fifty weeks of the year for the sake of a two-week vacation, when all you really desire is to be outdoors, with your shirt off ” (22).

4.

The Threat of the Feminine

In such a view, successful masculinity is equated with a soaring expansiveness that triumphs over everything that risks pulling it down, figuratively as well as literally. The feminine, therefore, represents a disturbing knowledge, the threat of reality, and the end of illusion. Ben has re-emerged from death as triumphantly as when in the years of young manhood he returned from the dark jungle: “when I was seventeen I walked into the jungle, and when I was twenty-one I walked out. . . And by God I was rich” (48). “[D]ark but full of diamonds” (134), the jungle in the end indeed comes to represent death, as Willy rushes off into the darkness to kill himself in the hope that his family will get his diamonds—the life insurance payout that will help Biff on his way. But the jungle and its darkness are also equated with women

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and sexuality. The play repeatedly emphasizes Ben’s age upon his descent into and re-emergence from the jungle: Ben is seventeen when he enters the jungle—exactly the age at which Biff unexpectedly discovers his father’s 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 Willy’s mistress who remains nameless. As “The Woman,” she is the archetype of all sexually compliant women, the kind who fills Happy with disgust (25), who—in another instance of Miller’s tongue-in-cheek audacity—carries names like “Letta” (who’s going to “let ya’ ”) (113), and who Linda simply refers to as “lousy rotten whores!” (124). “The Woman” is Willy’s 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 returns—the kind of darkness that can be conquered successfully only by a man of Ben’s 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 don’t 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 Willy’s feminization of the world that the successful male has to conquer and the dangers of shortchanging one’s long-term goals for the deceptive pleasures of instant sexual gratification. It is a pleasure that Willy himself is not able to withstand. Willy’s unfaithfulness disproves the myth of masculine sovereignty, of proud independence and self-fashioning—the fantasy of a masculine ideal

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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. “You—you gave her Mama’s stockings!” (121) is Biff’s stunned reaction upon discovering his father’s adultery. The stockings associate the woman with the mother and thus the father’s sexuality with the mother’s humiliation. While they eroticize the mistress, the stockings become the emblem of the mother’s 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 husband’s dreams. Deception and self-delusion, it dawns on Biff, are at the heart of his father’s 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 Biff’s 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 son’s 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 son’s 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.

The Obscenity of Truth

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 let’s 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! Don’t 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 didn’t 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?

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WILLY: Never heard of it. BIFF: There’ll be no pity for you, you hear it? No pity! WILLY [to Linda]: You hear the spite! BIFF: No, you’re going to hear the truth—what you are and what I am! (130)

Willy’s denials are pathetic—not those of a man in charge but rather of a boy confronted with a shameful act. Not remembering seeing the tube (“I never saw that”) makes more sense than not remembering hearing it (“Never heard of it”)—except if the tube, as must be the case here, brings to Willy’s mind sexual shame, the laughter of the woman in the dark. The tube represents the secret side of Willy that his son discovered on that fateful night in a Boston hotel. Unlike Linda, who tries to wrest the tube away, Biff is no longer willing to protect Willy from self-knowledge: “The man don’t know who we are! The man is gonna know!” (131). The play does not spell out why Biff cannot go about his own life without destroying his father’s illusions and thus the basis of his authority in this household. But it offers enough information to support some speculation. Biff has spent the past seventeen years trying to free himself from his father’s dream. Whenever spring comes along, reminding him of the passing of time and of the distance that separates him from his father’s ideals, he returns to Willy in order to attempt one more time to live up to his father’s expectations. Without Willy’s handshake and blessing, the outward signs of the father’s acceptance of the son’s self-determination, Biff knows that in the coming spring he will experience once again the unrest that will send him back home. So it is not enough that Biff knows who he is. The false father must die for the real son to live. The truth will set him free. For Willy, however, this is a struggle to the death: “You’re trying to put a knife in me—don’t think I don’t know what you’re doing!” (130). The peripeteia that leads to Willy’s final and deadly attempt at greatness could only have been conceived by someone with an unusually acute psychological intuition. Willy matches anger with anger, standing up to his son when he thinks he is being insulted. Biff’s spite would have kept Willy alive; it is his love that finally kills his father. Unlike Happy, Biff senses his father’s distress, calling him “[a] fine, troubled prince. A hard-working, unappreciated prince” (114). When Biff cries in front of Willy, his tears express pity for the humble man who did not dare to be himself because he wanted to be worthy of his own sons—sons who mirrored themselves not in the real father but in the man he pretended to be in order to live up to what he firmly

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believed they would eventually become. Willy thinks that Biff has refused his own greatness out of “spite” (131)—out of disgust for the father’s weakness. Biff’s tears, in conjunction with the rubber tube, which serves as a visible reminder of the father’s smallness, convince Willy of the magnanimity of his son. Willy’s dreams flare up again: “That boy—that boy is going to be magnificent!” (133). For some time now, Willy had been playing with the idea of suicide through gas inhalation—a 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 diamonds—the 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 Willy’s car crash. Instead, the “Requiem” scene that follows resurrects Willy’s dream and reaffirms the striking contrast between two visions of masculinity, the idyllic flute music associated with Willy’s dreams and the shadow of the “hard towers of the apartment buildings” (139). Charley’s 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 Biff’s newly acquired self-knowledge, revealed in the smug, “Charley, the man didn’t know who he was” (138). Finally, the torch of Willy’s 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: “I’m just what I am, that’s all” (133). It is a truth that the play—itself a dream, intimating through its symbolism far more than it can say—cannot 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

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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. (155–171) —. “The ‘Salesman’ Has a Birthday” in The New York Times 5 February 1950, sec.2: 1, 3. Rpt. in Weales. (147–150) —. “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.

Compensatory Symbolism in Miller’s Death of a Salesman

“We never told the truth for ten minutes in this house!” (131), Biff erupts in the emotional climax of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. Deception plays a pivotal role in Miller’s drama—the 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.” Willy’s 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 well—as 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.

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In her article “Miller and Things,” Marianne Boruch notes that In speaking of drama, one could . . . venture that a playwright is not a good playwright unless he can take the hard, physical extension of our ideas— things, objects—and use them dramatically, as pivots of human action and revelation. But more than that, one could say a playwright is not a great playwright unless he can use things—in themselves—thematically, not simply as properties to be touched then discarded on the way to discovery, but somehow as the discovery itself. At this point, drama extends itself into poetry, and metaphor swells with movement to a broader, historical reality. Arthur Miller operates in this vision with reserve and intelligence and surprise. (103–104)

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, Willy’s automobile—a 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 Willy’s own transformation from a young salesman into an old man. The Lomans’s refrigerator—the family’s 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 machinery—the Chevvy [sic] for its impressive physical appearance and the refrigerator for its striking and ubiquitous advertisements. By using these symbols, Miller both manifests Willy’s own declining masculinity and emphasizes the salesman’s compulsive need to maintain his appearance of functionality. Furthermore, Willy’s house itself, a traditional symbolic representation of the owner, lays transparent and infirm before the towering, intimidatingly phallic apartments that dwarf the house’s 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 façade 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 superficial—curb appeal. Instead of maintaining the interior of the house—or even the relationships of the inhabitants therein—Willy 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

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embellishment, he glosses over his sons’ thievery to hide their criminal actions, and he pushes Biff away to hide his affair. The repaired ceiling symbolizes Willy’s deceitful nature and his need to maintain his masquerade as a good family man and salesman. Additionally, Willy replaces the plumbing within his home. Plumbing not only represents a functional necessity, which Willy cannot maintain without outside help, but also creates a phallic image (i.e. Willy’s own “pipes” do not work anymore) referring to his own declining state of physical and emotional health. Willy complains to Linda about the failure of his pipes to work, yet he neglects to make the connection between their failure and his work on them, one of many indications in the play of his denial and refusal to accept responsibility for his actions. In addition to the symbols that broadly represent Willy’s masculinity, Miller employs more intricate, personal symbols that show Willy’s struggle to maintain appearances. These items, such as Willy’s saccharine, not only elucidate his failing bodily functions but also compensate for his defects. However, just as Willy repairs the exterior of his house, while allowing the inside of the house and the inhabitants’ relationships to decay, his personal symbols representing his desire to hide his defects do not solve his problems; they merely camouflage his negative aspects so that he will not appear feeble to others. Willy’s mercurial temperament manifests itself at many stages of the play: he continuously degrades Linda through his interruptions although he also states that she is his only support, he calls Biff a “lazy bum” only to add almost immediately that Biff is “not lazy” (16), and he punches a fellow salesman when he believes that the man calls him a “walrus” (37). Knowing this, Linda, at the commencement of Act Two, reminds Willy to take his saccharine. This artificial sweetener is, perhaps, just what he needs to control his temper. However, he is not truly an amiable salesman; as in the other aspects in his life, he merely conforms to the status quo by implementing a synthetic enhancer to change his faulty nature. By being an ineffective salesman who is forced to work solely on commission and, consequently, to borrow money from Charley, Willy can no longer support either himself or his family. However, just as he fails to tell Linda of his inadequacy as a provider, he maintains his outward masculine, provisional appearance by wearing arch supports. Tellingly, Willy informs Linda that “[t]hese goddam arch supports are killing me”

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(13). Foreshadowing his death, Willy—albeit unconsciously—recognizes that his deceit and effort at compensation will ultimately lead to his emotional (and physical) demise. Willy’s faulty eyesight and glasses represent the most notable personal symbol of his effort to compensate for his failings. Willy cannot see properly; this represents not only his physical eyesight but his perspective on life as well. He admits that he is not content with his current mode of life, but he does not change his illusion that, one day, he will attain the prestige and honor inherent to a successful salesman and alpha male. However, the glasses never actually rectify his erroneous vision; they merely act as a temporary and superficial aid. Instead of changing his impaired vision of the intangible (at least to him) American Dream, while placing health and happiness ahead of financial prowess, he simply conforms to the capitalistic society by procuring glasses that will aid him in his flawed ideology. Willy’s inability to remain successfully in the masculine sphere and his consequent faulty relationship with his sons perhaps stem from the fact that he never had a positive masculine role model in his life. Like his faulty vegetable garden, Willy cannot produce successful heirs (his seeds). He erroneously equates his father with salesmanship, which causes him to enter into the realm of sales in the first place. But his father not only sold flutes; he created them and produced music with them as well. However, Willy only sees the sales aspect and has, therefore, never had a male role model who taught him how to produce properly and how to become self-reliant. As a replacement for a father, Willy looks to his older brother, Ben, for the recognition he never received from his father: “Fatherless himself, Willy looks to his older brother for advice and confirmation while he ardently tries to impress him with his boys’ manliness and half-true references to his own success” (Bloom 40). The scenes with Ben “provide glimpses of their shared childhood and an older Willy, vulnerable and insecure, eager for advice and praise from Ben” (Bloom 33). However, while Ben represents the virility associated with masculinity, he is also dangerous and crafty, and his masculinity, as espoused by his phallic umbrella, defeats even the most masculine and athletic Loman, Biff. Consequently, “Ben’s visit is fundamentally unsatisfying and unproductive yet Willy’s need for him is both tenacious and inexhaustible” (Bloom 40).

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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 newspaper’s 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 father’s 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 Willy’s 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 feel—and appear—masculine: 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, Happy’s 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

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“on his father’s conception of success and manhood” (Ribkoff 49). In Willy’s flashbacks, Miller portrays Biff as a carbon copy of Willy’s desire for masculine recognition. Through sports, which represent the masculine ideals of aggression, competitiveness, and physical prowess, Biff achieves the pinnacle of high school, masculine bravado. Biff enjoys boxing, and while sparring sharpens his physical ability, Willy also believes that it will prepare him for the cutthroat business world. However, instead of using his competitive nature to advance in the business world, Biff uses his physicality to intimidate the weak. Boxing is only a true sport when the competitors are physically well-matched; however, Linda notes that the girls are scared of Biff’s aggressive nature, and Biff also fights underhandedly by battling the “anemic” Bernard. Happy, too, distorts the positive, masculine aspects of boxing by “knockin’ them [women] over” (25), as well as desiring to “outbox” (24) the other members of his firm. Other than the one-on-one nature of boxing, the other sports associated with the text—football, baseball, basketball, polo—are all of a team nature. Willy remembers Biff as the breakout star of his football team; however, even though Biff was the quarterback—theoretically the most valuable member of the team—he was, nonetheless, only one member of the team, neither more nor less important than any other member. While this might be true, Willy instills in Biff an “inflated” sense of self worth, which causes him to disregard other members of his team, leading to the destruction of his own Loman team—his family. The family relies too prevalently on Biff: Linda tells Biff that only he can save his father from death. This irrational demand, which takes advantage of Biff’s guilt, shows that the Lomans do not know how to act as a larger “team” unit, working together to meet a common goal; they prefer, rather, to rely on one person—either Willy or Biff. Furthermore, in the introductory stage directions, Miller makes reference to a silver football trophy which stands “on a shelf over [Willy’s] bed” (11). The fact that the trophy is silver, not gold, refers to the fact that even Biff’s idealized past was not as good as they remember. And certainly he cannot live up to their current expectations when he was never even prepared to do so in the past. While Willy promotes the masculine aspects of sports, he lacks the foresight to teach his sons how to hone their skills properly to productive ends. Instead, he ignores Biff’s refusal to focus on school and condones Biff’s theft of a football and building supplies. The most prominent image that Miller associates with Biff is the fountain pen, constituting yet another phallic symbol. Biff, who remains

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in an adolescent state throughout the play, grasps at masculinity, as represented by the pen. Like Willy’s 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 Miller’s 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, “Willy’s implausible excuse for his abnormal behavior—an odd cup of coffee—reveals how far he has strayed from his own senses,” notes Harold Bloom; however, “[a]s we watch Linda’s response to Willy in this first scene, we see she has joined him in his disordered thinking as well—maybe it’s his glasses or the steering mechanism of the car—but she has done so to keep the appearance of normality when she knows otherwise” (26). Miller illuminates Linda’s passive role as a contributor of the Lomans’s discord through symbolism. In Willy’s 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 Willy’s 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 Willy’s 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” Willy’s blatant lies. However, by the end of the play, Linda stops dyeing her hair, perhaps showing her resolution to the inevitable effects of aging—both 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, “Willy’s 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

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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 Miller’s Death of a Salesman. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2004. Boruch, Marianne. “Miller and Things” in Harold Bloom, ed. Bloom’s BioCritiques: Arthur Miller. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2003. (103–115) [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 Miller’s Use of Dramatic Form” in Harold Bloom, ed. Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2004. (82–84) Ribkoff, Fred. “Shame, Guilt, Empathy, and the Search for Identity in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman” in Modern Drama 43.1 (Spring 2000): 48–55.

About the Authors

Samantha Batten is a doctoral student in English at Auburn University. She has served as the assistant editor of the scholarly journal The Scriblerian. Steven Centola is Professor of English at Millersville University. The founding President of the Arthur Miller Society, he has edited five books, including two that he collaborated on with Arthur Miller: The Theater Essays of Arthur Miller (Revised and Expanded), published by Da Capo Press in 1996, and Echoes Down the Corridor, published by Viking Press in 2000. He has also published three interviews with Arthur Miller, as well as numerous articles on the playwright in various books and scholarly journals. His fourth interview with Arthur Miller, from August 2001, will be published in the winter 2008 issue of the Michigan Quarterly Review, and his most recent book, The Critical Response to Arthur Miller, co-edited with Michelle Cirulli Nass, was published by Greenwood Press in the summer of 2006. Dr. Centola appeared in, and was special consultant to Michael Epstein for, the PBS documentary entitled None Without Sin: Arthur Miller, Elia Kazan, and the Blacklists. Paula Marantz Cohen, Distinguished Professor of English at Drexel University, is the author of four nonfiction books and three novels, including Silent Film and the Triumph of the American Myth (Oxford University Press) and Jane Austen in Scarsdale or Love, Death, and the SATs (St. Martin’s Press). She is the host of The Drexel InterView, a cable TV show out of Philadelphia, and a co-editor of jml: the Journal of Modern Literature. Her essays, stories, and reviews have appeared in The Yale Review, Raritan, The American Scholar, The Hudson Review, the Times Literary Supplement, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The New York Times, and other publications.

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Ramón Espejo has a Ph.D. in English and works in the Department of English and American Literature at the University of Seville, where he mostly teaches courses on American literature. Together with Professor Guijarro-González, he co-edited several collective volumes and co-organized conferences on American literature and culture. His individual research has taken him to publish on a wide variety of American writers, including Anne Bradstreet, Edith Wharton, Eugene O’Neill, Edward Albee, Paul Auster, Tom Wolfe, and Arthur Miller. The focus of his research on Miller has been the significant presence of Miller’s plays in mid-20th century Spain, the playwright being one of the few foreign dramatists tolerated by the censorship of Franco’s regime and thereby instrumental in acquainting Spaniards with a kind of theatre that, for the most part, they had been forced to overlook. Luc Gilleman teaches drama in the English Department and the Comparative Literature program at Smith College. He is the author of John Osborne: Vituperative Artist (Routledge, 2002) and articles mainly about drama. Juan Ignacio Guijarro-González is Associate Professor at the University of Seville (Spain), where he teaches mostly courses on American Literature and American Studies. He holds an M.A. from Northwestern University. He has extensively researched the social and cultural impact of the anti-Communist witch-hunts, and has published works on 20th-century authors such as Zelda Fitzgerald, Vladimir Nabokov, Sherman Alexie, and Arthur Miller. He has co-edited Visiones contemporáneas de la cultura y la literatura norteamericana en los sesenta (2003) and Arthur Miller: Visiones desde el nuevo milenio (2004). L. Bailey McDaniel is an Assistant Professor with the English department at the University of Houston—Downtown. She received her Ph.D. from Indiana University, where she also taught courses on American literature, world drama, film, and gender. Her most recent article, on Tennessee Williams’s The Rose Tattoo, appears in Literature/Film Quarterly. She is currently working on her manuscript, Nurturing Fallacies: Constructing the Maternal in Twentieth-Century American Drama and Performance. Michael J. Meyer is adjunct professor at DePaul University and Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago where he teaches composition, Modern Poetry, Modern Novel, and Children’s Literature.

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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 author’s 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

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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 Chopin’s 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 Miller’s Incident at Vichy and other modern plays. Linda Uranga is a high school English teacher with a master’s 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

Linda Loman: “Attention must be paid” Terry Otten Despite numerous critical attacks on Miller’s female characters in general and Linda Loman in particular, Willy’s wife is an extraordinarily strong and essential character in Death of a Salesman. She sustains Willy through her unwavering strength, even if ironically reinforcing the same American Dream that destroys him; but she also provides the moral perspective of the play, educating Biff about Willy’s desperate plight and ultimately transforming the language of commerce into metaphysical truth at the end of the play—“We’re free and clear.” Domestic Tragedies: The Feminist Dilemma in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman L. Bailey McDaniel “Domestic Tragedies: The Feminist Dilemma in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman” explores the gendered implications of understanding Miller’s play as both “universal” and as a socialist critique of a Cold War American Dream. Although Linda Loman’s “bad mothering” does complicate naturalized notions of mid-century motherhood (particularly amid the inflexible rubrics of white, middle-class domesticity), when compared to her more three-dimensional spouse and the play’s protagonist, as well as other mid-century performances of maternity, Linda’s blissful masochism points to a broader failure of class-based critiques to also account for gender oppression. Arthur Miller: Guardian of the Dream of America Steven Centola The intertwined moral and aesthetic imperative that inspired and animated Arthur Miller’s art resulted in his creation of a body of work that speaks below the surface of the overt drama with a resonance, a highlycharged subtext and equally rich cultural context, about the possibility

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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. Miller’s critique and celebration of America underlies and informs every facet of his plays, particularly his masterpiece, Death of a Salesman, 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. Death of a Salesman, in particular, offers its audiences a searing indictment not only of those who substitute lies for reality and illusions for truth, but also of the society that manufactures and markets those lies and illusions to a nation of dreamers and devotees of the ever-receding future, where hope for success and personal salvation lies. Yet even though this play critically addresses the moral bankruptcy concealed beneath the façade of American material success, there simultaneously exists an opposing tendency to romanticize the mythology of the American West and the agrarian ideal deeply embedded in American thought and permanently shaping and transforming American values. This twin vision of America as both sordid reality and sublime possibility is the source of dramatic tension in Death of a Salesman and contributes powerfully to the lasting legacy of Arthur Miller as a guardian of the dream of America. Refocusing America’s Dream Michelle Nass Arthur Miller’s widely read and studied work, Death of a Salesman, has become a staple in American high school classrooms. One driving force of its continued popularity can be found in its treatment of the American Dream, not as a dream that is unattainable or clichéd, but as a dream that signifies possibilities and gains meaning through each individual. For students growing in an increasingly chaotic, complex world, this seemingly simple concept grows more elusive with each passing day. Through a case-study with four students in a small high school setting, this paper demonstrates the value of an intense discussion and experience with Miller’s play in that the students can delve into the play, and in it find themselves and their dreams while considering their futures in a world that has not left the true American Dream behind.

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Capitalist America in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman: A Re-consideration Juan Ignacio Guijarro-González and Ramón Espejo This essay explores whether Arthur Miller inscribes a condemnation of capitalistic practices and capitalism itself in Death of a Salesman. The piece has been often, and, in our view, uncritically, regarded as Miller’s indictment of his own (capitalistic) society, a judgment often grounded on such a flimsy basis as the victimization and subsequent destruction of its protagonist, Willy Loman, the old salesman who has known more productive and successful times. This essay serves as an attempt to unearth evidence with which to refute the above and help problematize Miller’s vision of capitalism, which is as richly nuanced, complex, and essentially ambiguous as are his views on nearly everything else. Willy Loman and the Legacy of Capitalism Linda Uranga “Willy Loman and the Legacy of Capitalism” concerns Willy Loman’s obsession with capitalism and his desire to manifest his self-worth to his family while passing on his business dreams to Biff. Willy’s quest for wealth and for the material reflect his obsession with appearances (financial security equals success) and being well liked, while masking the protagonist’s psychological needs. The Dynamo, the Salesman, and the Playwright Paula Marantz Cohen “The Dynamo, the Salesman, and the Playwright” discusses the role of technology in the life of the character Willy Loman and of his creator, Arthur Miller. The essay discusses how technology is oppressive or innovative depending on one’s position with respect to the passage of time. Willy stands at an earlier point in the evolution of a technological society, Miller at a later one; yet their fates are the same insofar as they both can be understood as creative agents eventually rendered obsolete by their mortality. The essay also draws a comparison between Miller’s play and The Education of Henry Adams, particularly the chapter, “The Dynamo and the Virgin.” Adams grapples with a similar dichotomy between himself as author and his character “Henry Adams,” relaying a desire to master technology while also acknowledging that he is a casualty of its relentless transformation into new forms.

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Mystifying the Machine: Staged and Unstaged Technologies in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman Craig N. Owens Craig N. Owens’s essay “Mystifying the Machine: Staged and Unstaged Technologies in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman” examines the relationship of technologies of reproduction as represented in Miller’s Death of a Salesman in relation to the technologies of theatre production and the machinery of drama publication. Exploring the implicit anti-capitalist thesis of Miller’s work, Owens’s essay questions whether the production and marketing of Miller’s plays, as well as the market for printed versions of his works, present an ethical and economical contradiction. The piece argues, finally, that the machineries of profit-driven publication and performance practices work against the critique of capitalism and capitalist identity propounded by Miller’s most famous play. In His Father’s Image: Biff Loman’s Struggle with Inherited Traits in Death of a Salesman Michael J. Meyer “In His Father’s Image” examines the controversies surrounding the character of Biff Loman and whether Arthur Miller wishes to suggest to his audience that the sins of the fathers are visited upon their children. Considering the major flaws in Willy Loman’s character to be dishonesty, immaturity, and insecurity, the essay examines how Miller employs repetitious imagery and symbols to depict Biff Loman as often unable to escape the objectionable traits he observes in his father’s lifestyle, despite his desire to be a different kind of man. Nevertheless, despite interpretations which suggest that relapse for Biff is far more likely than his redemption, the character’s speeches in the Requiem of Death of a Salesman suggest a markedly different, no longer confused character, a character who will eventually come to terms with the false values that cause his suffering, and who will refuse to remain a primary agent in his own destruction. The Emergence of Hope in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman Deborah Cosier Solomon “The Emergence of Hope in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman” explores how the various parallels between Willy and Biff—parallels such as their mutual praise of nature, their reciprocal willingness to sacrifice, and their analogous encounters with failure—not only emphasize

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Biff’s progression toward self-acceptance and self-actualization but also add an element of hope to an otherwise depressing play. Supported by Miller’s own analyses, the essay suggests that Biff’s hesitant moral insights, placed as they are in direct opposition to Willy’s misplaced values, gain a didactic quality which, in turn, allows viewers to experience hope for Biff’s future as well as for their own. “A little boat looking for a harbor”: Sexual Symbolism in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman Luc Gilleman Miller uses symbolism in Death of a Salesman to negotiate between the parallel workings of the mind (his initial subject) and the serial requirements of narrative (his concession to convention). Much of the tangible and intangible symbolism of the play relates to sexuality and gender. The feminine, present in the obscene laughter of “The Woman” and in the maternal concern of the complicit mother, threatens with shameful knowledge of the difference between dream and reality, which the masculine seeks to transcend. In the Requiem, with its implicit rejection of Biff’s tautological realism, the play sides with the world of dreams. Compensatory Symbolism in Miller’s Death of a Salesman Samantha Batten This essay concerns compensatory symbolism that Arthur Miller employs to demonstrate Willy Loman’s inadequacies and failures. Symbols such as Willy’s car, his house, his refrigerator, and his saccharine manifest the salesman’s physical and emotional decline. Miller’s symbolism denotes Willy’s declining masculinity and diminished ability to sell, as well as his obsession with appearances that conform to societal standards.

Index

Aarnes, William, 125, 127, 129, 131, 132, 134 Abandonment, 16, 18, 83, 86, 88, 89, 156 Abbotson, Susan, 38 Acceptance, 49, 55, 62, 81, 86, 89, 93, 124, 125, 127, 129, 142, 157, 159–160 Actor, 17, 25, 106–108, 109, 110, 114, 116, 124 Adams, Henry, 97–98, 100–103 Adler, Thomas, 40 Adonis, 6, 131, 132, 135 Africa, 4, 22, 80, 130, 138, 156 After the Fall, 11, 101 Alaska, 4, 22, 80, 86, 87, 118, 130, 138, 156 Albee, Edward, 35, 37, 105 Alger, Horatio, 130 Alienation, 37, 43, 44, 45, 52, 71, 72, 73, 74, 123 The American Clock, 39 American Dream, 2, 3–5, 9, 14, 21, 22, 23, 26, 29, 38, 48, 49, 50, 54, 57, 59, 67, 71, 81, 83, 88, 138, 156, 166, 167 Anderson, Maxwell, 100 Anti-feminism, 24, 30, 31 Ares, 122 Aristotle, 112, 152 August, Eugene R., 13 Austin, Gayle, 12 Avery Fisher Hall, 33 Balakian, Janet N., 13 Bates, Barclay W., 140 Beijing, 17, 41, 43, 55, 141, 149

Ben-Zvi, Linda, 12 Bernard, 3, 4, 6, 61, 66, 67–68, 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, 140–141, 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, 2–10, 15, 31, 36, 41, 50, 53, 54, 55, 62, 63, 67, 69–70, 72, 73, 75, 76, 79, 81–93, 97, 100, 112, 115, 116, 124, 130, 142, 163, 167, 168 Canning, Charlotte, 12 Capital, 11, 29, 130 Capitalism, 2, 5–6, 13, 16, 21, 23, 31, 54, 61–63, 66–67, 69, 71, 72–74, 77–80, 81–93, 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

Charley, 4–6, 11, 16, 28, 57, 61, 63–69, 71–72, 74, 77, 78, 84–86, 90, 91, 126, 130, 135, 142, 151, 154, 160, 164 Chicago Exposition of 1900, 97 Clurman, Harold, 137, 141 Cohn, Ruby, 127, 128, 129 Cold War, 21, 22, 27, 29–30 Communism, 13, 21, 31 Conwell, Russell, 43 Couchman, Gordon W., 18 Crane, Stephen, 36 Cronus, 121, 122 The Crucible, 21, 32, 34, 39, 78, 105 Cruz, Alex, 48, 49, 51 Cyclops, 121 Def, Mos, 33 Delusion, 27, 28, 89, 92, 137–138, 141–145, 158 Despair, 13, 18, 21, 35, 70, 123, 132, 145, 150 Dialectics, 113, 114 Dishonesty, 58, 80, 90, 124, 126, 131, 144, 146 Dolan, Jill, 25 Dreams, 7, 9, 12, 18, 28, 36–38, 40–41, 43–46, 47–59, 66, 74, 75, 79, 81, 83–84, 86, 88–89, 91, 102, 125, 131–134, 143, 145, 151, 154–156, 158–160, 169 Dreiser, Theodore, 36 Dukore, Bernard, 71 Dunnock, Mildred, 16, 17 “The Dynamo and the Virgin,” 97 Echoes Down the Corridor, 39, 44 The Education of Henry Adams, 97 Ellison, Ralph, 37, 44, 45 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 36, 37, 79 Empathy, 132, 142 Evans, Richard I., 92 Failure, 4–10, 12–13, 17, 21, 25–26, 28–29, 35–36, 38–42, 62, 64, 67–68, 70, 76–77, 79–80, 81–88, 90–93, 95, 98, 101, 108, 111, 114, 122–126,

129, 134, 137, 140–146, 154, 158, 163, 165–167 Fantasy, 4, 39, 41, 118, 125–127, 132, 142, 151, 155, 157 Fatherhood, 3, 8, 18, 53, 54, 63, 65–69, 71, 75, 76, 79, 81, 83, 85–90, 121, 122, 131–133, 135, 138–139, 143, 145, 150, 155, 159, 166 Felt, Leah, 16 Felt, Theo, 16 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 37, 135 Feminism (in Marxism), 21, 31 Forsythe, Miss, 2, 11, 23, 30, 125 Francis, Miss, 2, 3, 9–10, 11 Franz, Elizabeth, 18, 43 Franz, Esther, 16 Freud, Sigmund, 122 Friendship, 3, 4, 5, 11, 63, 65–66, 68–70, 78, 81, 85, 90, 121 Gaia, 121 Garden imagery, 51, 86, 96, 140–141, 149, 156, 166 Gauzy realism, 29, 105, 115 Gellburg, Sylvia, 16 Gender, 11, 13, 21–31, 41 Gibbs, Nancy, 47 Ginsberg, Alan, 37 Glengarry Glen Ross, 13 Great Depression, 42, 79, 81, 82 Greek mythology, 121, 123, 131 Griffin, Alice, 78 Grossman, Lev, 51, 52, 53 Gussow, Mel, 137, 145, 146 Hadomi, Leah, 145 Hamilton, Patricia, 16 Happiness, 2, 36, 49, 56, 61, 71, 76–77, 79, 81, 83, 89, 130, 132, 138, 140, 146, 151, 169 Harshbarger, Karl, 12 Hawthorn, Jeremy, 138 Hayman, Ronald, 18, 87, 88 Hecatoncheires, 121 Hedda Gabler, 150 Heller, Joseph, 45 Herb, Jake, 48, 56

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, 35–37, 44, 46, 49, 55, 58, 76, 89, 93, 101, 102, 132, 134, 137, 140–146, 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, 69–70, 81, 83, 88, 90, 97, 100, 102, 105, 107–109, 113–116, 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

Krapp’s Last Tape, 106, 112 Kullman, Colby H., 14, 82 Laughter, 3, 80, 84, 87, 128, 129, 139, 142 Letta, 2, 11, 157 Lightcap, Jessica, 48, 54, 56, 57–58 Lin, Zhu, 17, 43 Loman, Ben, 4, 7, 12, 15, 17, 22, 54, 65, 66, 67, 74, 75, 80, 81, 83, 86–91, 129, 130, 139, 150, 151, 155–157, 160, 166, 169 Loman, Biff, 2, 3, 8–18, 26–30, 47, 48, 51–59, 63, 66–69, 71–80, 82, 86–93, 96, 98, 107, 115, 118, 121–135, 138–146, 150–160, 163–169 Loman, Happy, 2, 8, 11, 12, 16, 18, 23, 26–31, 47, 48, 52–58, 63, 67, 68, 71–80, 86–91, 107, 124–128, 139, 143, 150–160, 167, 168 Loman, Linda, 2–5, 10, 11–18, 23–30, 42, 58, 63–70, 73–78, 84–90, 95, 96, 107, 108, 113, 114, 118, 124–130, 138, 142, 144, 149, 150, 152–160, 163–169 Loman, Willy, 2–18, 21–31, 38–44, 47–58, 61–80, 81–93, 95–102, 106–118, 122–135, 137–146, 149–160, 163–170 Love, 3, 12, 15, 16, 26–28, 42–44, 55–58, 76, 77, 81, 84, 92, 93, 96, 129, 130, 134, 137–142, 145, 149, 159, 160 Machine, 72, 95–103, 105, 109–119 Machine-system, 113 Machinery, 71, 95, 113, 116, 164, 178 The Machine in the Garden, 68 MacLeish, Archibald, 45 Mamet, David, 13, 37, 118 Martin, Robert A., 39 Marx, Leo, 96 Marxism, 21, 22, 61, 62, 118 Mason, Jeffrey D., 13 Materialism, 21, 37–38, 81, 83, 88, 89–90, 91, 137, 138, 146 McDonough, Carla J., 12 Mechanical imagery, 99, 100, 108

184

Index

Melville, Herman, 36 Method, 39, 105, 114, 151 Miller, Arthur, 1–6, 8–10, 11–18, 21–32, 33–35, 37–46, 47–53, 55, 57–58, 61–72, 77, 78, 82, 83, 87–92, 96–103, 105, 110, 113, 116, 117, 122–135, 137–141, 145, 146, 149–154, 157, 158, 163–170 Modernity, 53, 73, 97, 113, 115, 118, 137 Monroe, Marilyn, 11, 101 Morality, 5, 12, 16, 35, 36, 39, 45, 50, 67, 88, 90–91, 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 (scène à 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, 164–170 Poetics, 152 Polemics, 113 Powell, Colin, 50

Porter, Thomas E., 65 Practical (stage practical), 106, 107, 110 Problem play, 152 Proctor, Elizabeth, 16 Pynchon, Thomas, 37 Ragged Dick, 130 Realism, 22–23, 29, 31, 51, 78, 105, 106, 110–119 Reality, 4, 8, 13, 16, 28, 31, 36, 40, 44, 46, 53–58, 61, 63, 72, 75, 84, 98, 100, 106, 107, 111, 114, 115, 125, 146, 149, 151, 153, 156, 157, 159, 164 Reality-effect, 106, 113, 115 Reality Principle, 157 Recognition, 84, 123, 126, 131–133, 155, 166, 168 Recognition (Anagnorisis), 152 Rejection, 44, 65, 67, 71, 86, 87, 88, 133, 138, 142 Requiem, 4, 8, 18, 28, 59, 66, 72, 133, 135, 145, 160 Responsibility, 15, 18, 45, 47, 51, 77, 121, 122, 141–143, 155, 165 Resurrection/renewal, 131, 136, 143, 146, 160 Retardation, 153 Reversal (Peripeteia), 152, 159 Rhea, 122 Ribkoff, Fred, 141, 163, 168 Roudané, Matthew, 11, 14, 41, 67, 78 Rowe, Kenneth Thorpe, 17 Rubin, Gayle, 21, 31 Sacrifice, 16, 23, 43, 67, 69, 138, 140–142 Salesmanship, 6, 7, 53, 57, 62, 66, 70, 72, 73, 84, 113, 133, 153–154, 160, 165, 166 Savran, David, 13 Schizophrenia, 39, 124 Seeds (see Garden imagery) Self-actualization, 82–83, 137, 138, 140, 146 Self-awareness, 30, 79, 132, 138, 141, 143, 154, 159, 167 Self-condemnation, 132

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, 3–4, 6–9, 14, 15, 22–25, 29, 30, 38, 40, 42–44, 49, 54–56, 63, 65–68, 71, 72, 74–77, 81–91, 98–102, 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, 149–160, 163–170

185

Theatricality, 29, 40, 102, 105–106, 112, 115 Thoreau, Henry David, 36, 97 Timebends, 13, 17, 31, 45, 78, 98, 101, 149 Toward a Farther Star, 11 Tragedy, 4, 13, 15, 16, 18, 23, 24, 48, 50, 52, 83, 84, 101, 114, 124, 131–132, 149 Tragic flaw, 114 Twain, Mark, 36, 37, 44 Values, 30, 37–40, 42–48, 50, 54, 67, 70, 81, 88, 92, 97, 109, 114, 123, 132, 134, 137, 141, 146 Von Szeliski, John, 141 Wagner, Howard, 4–7, 53, 54, 61, 62, 66, 67, 69, 70, 71, 74, 77, 79, 84, 85, 98, 99, 107, 108, 109, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 128 War with Iraq, 33, 34 Well-made play, 151, 152, 153 Weill, Kurt, 100 White House, 33 Whitman, Walt, 36, 97, 99–100 Williams, Tennessee, 13, 29, 37, 63, 105 Wingfield, Amanda, 29 Wright, Richard, 37 Zeineddine, Nada, 12 Zeus, 122