THE JOINER PRIZE ESSAY

A Frontier Closes in Brooklyn: Death of a Salesman

and the Turner Thesis
[na Rae Hark
University of South Carolina
The "phony" twentieth-century American dream that destroys Death
of a Saleman's Willy Loman, that of making a fast buck by sellingoneselfu
being "well-liked," in the play's famous phrase--is set off by contrast with
an older dream, that of carving wealth from the frontier. Willy's failure
has often been attributed to his being a displaced pioneer, vainly trying to
recapture a "lost past. '" But the pioneer success that Willy is denied is,
as he conceives it, just as phony as the dream of ultimate salesmanship;
brother Ben, conqueror of the jungle, and Dave Singleman, the eternal
salesman, are equally mythic figures. Because Willy can define his goals
only according to past and present cultural myths, he does not recognize
the true appeal the frontier way of life holds for him. Therefore, he misses
an actual opportunity to enjoy that life that even crowded, mid-century
Brooklyn can offer him.
It is clear from his speeches throughout the play that Willy views his
country through the filter of myth. He completely buys into the idea of
America as the land of opportunity and proceeds with the tacit assumption
that patriotism garners success as its due. He cannot fathom how Biff has
become "lost" in the "greatest country in the world." After returning from
his sales trips to New England--"the cradle of the Revolution"uhe assures
his boys that" America is full of beautiful towns and fine, upstanding people" who know and do favors for him. He fantasizes about all the states
that will send representatives to his funeral.
But the unmythologized fact is that America no longer rewards nor
pays attention to men like Willy. His American cheese is whipped, and so
is he. No one from outside the Brooklyn neighborhood attends the funeral.
Biff has covered his share of states, from the Dakotas to Texas, only to
discover that he cannot raise his monetary worth above a dollar an hour
in any of them. The final irony comes when Willy is at his nadir, having
just been fired by Howard Wagner, and accidentally switches on the recording machine from which issues the voice of Howard's son with his rote
memorization of the names of the states and their capitals.
Willy's case is particularly hopeless because he not only counts on

preserving the pioneer ethos after it has become anachronistic, but also
wishes to conflate it with the world of hard-sell middlemen. That is, he
competes in the urban, mercantile arena for business success while extolling the pioneer virtues that led to financial independence in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries but leave one a mere hired hand in the twentieth.
From the perspective of the American myth he embraces, Willy is simply
a victim of history. This explanation of the collision between Willy's desires,
his strategies for fulfilling them, and the obdurate socio-economic realities
surrounding "a hardworking drummer who landed in the ash can like all
the rest of them" is that the country outgrew the inherited frontier ethic.
Acquiring one's own land to develop faded as a goal while making money
through commerce in order to accumulate material goods superseded it.
As George Wilson Pierson observes, "When cars, movies, and radios
become essentials of the accepted standard of living, subsistence farming
is repugnant even to the starving."z Or as Thomas Potter notes in Myth
and Modern American Drama: "But when Biff, the man who 'knows who
he is,' advocates a return to the farm, it becomes clear how meager are
the resources of the culture for coping with Willy's problem. The return
to a[n].. .agrarian way of life is an example of nostalgia for the garden;
turning back the clock is no solution for a million city-dwelling Willy
Lomans who left the farm to seek their fortunes."3
With the continental frontiers having been exhausted, Willy's father
set out as a lone pioneer to Alaska, and older brother Ben later conquered
an even more distant and untamed realm, the jungles of Africa. Willy, not
prepared to migrate like them to new territories in which the pioneer ethos
is still operable, must go under in trying to forge a parallel between the
pioneer past and the mercantile present. As Barclay W. Bates recognizes:
Public Willy is the modern gladhanded salesman, but private
Willy is four anachronisms: he is the archetypal cherisher of the
pastoral world, the pre-industrial-revolution artisan, the hamhanded outlaw frontiersman, and the dutiful patriarchal male
intent upon transmitting complex legacies from his forbears to
his progeny. Hence one may argue that in a sense it is Willy's
civilization, which cannot encourage or even tolerate these
anachronisms, that truly destroys him (p. 164).
Seen in these terms, Willy is born too late, and by implication America
has changed for the worse in rendering his manual and agricultural skills
anachronistic and productive of low status.
The operations of this ideology have their roots in the famous essays
of Frederick Jackson Turner on the frontier. Although Turner's ideas were
hotly debated during the decade following his death in 1932, the year
Arthur Miller graduated from high school,. despite challenges by other
historians, they had achieved the status of myth in the popular imagina-

tion. Franklin Roosevelt had used the loss of the frontier to explain why
his New Deal policies were necessary to help the country recover from the
Depression, that central trauma of Miller's adolescence: "Our last frontier
has long since been reached, and there is practically no more free
land There is no safety valve in the form of a Western prairie to which
those thrown out of work by the Eastern economic machines can go for
a new start.'" Miller may not have had Turner consciously in mind when
he created Willy's futile struggle to inculcate pioneer self-reliance into his
sons on an imagined Brooklyn frontier, but a review of the Turner thesis
certainly illuminates many of the codes Willy is operating under, codes that
are totally inappropriate to the time and place in which he lives and the
goals he seeks for himself and his children.
Turner believedthat the American character and social institutions had
been formed by the existence of free land to the West, so that as one frontier was transformed by urbanization, a further one offered virgin land on
which the process could begin anew. His famous address to the American
Historical Association in Chicago on July 12, 1893, "The Significance of
the Frontier in American History," announced that a radical change in
American culture could be expected now that, as the 1890 census had
demonstrated, the available land was so scattered that a frontier line, as
such, no longer existed. If we assume that the present of Death of a Salesman
is synonymous with the time of its composition and first performances, the
late 1940's, then Willy, who is sixty-three, was born just as the frontier
was disappearing. The date of the departure of Willy's father for the further Alaskan frontier, when Willy was "three years, eleven months" old,
would coincide almost exactly with that of the census report.
Turner described the frontier-bred American character as "strong in
selfishness and individualism, intolerant of administrative experience and
education, and pressing individual liberty beyond its proper bounds,"
possessing:

That coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness;that practical, inventiveturn of mind, quick to find
expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in
the artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless, nervous energy; that dominant individualism, working for good and
for evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which comes

with freedom.6

Looking at these characteristics, we can easily discern the personality of

a Biff Loman, who cannot stand to take orders from anyone, is athletic
but a poor scholar, has the "initiative" to take whatever he wants without
asking, and loves the out-of-doors and working the land. Furthermore, the
kleptomania that symbolizes the failure of Biff's frontier-style upbringing

to make him a:success in the urban business world demonstrates that in

a twentieth-century setting, with forests replaced by apartment buildings
and once sparsely-populated settlements crowded with new immigrants, the
frontier characteristicsare not only inappropriate or unproductive but often
in conflict with the law.
But Willy wants to pretend that all these changes are more apparent
than real, that the frontier values can triumph any time and in any place.
In his typical manner of repressing the unpleasant half of the truth, he endorses the American character as described by Turner but ignores the difficulties faced by such men in an America profoundly altered by the frontier's closing. He envisions himself as the oldtime explorer/trader, opening up unheard of territories for his company. In the early days in Brooklyn,
he tells Ben, there were wide-open spaces where he hunted with the boys;
he grew his own vegetables. All that has happened, however, is that this
reconstituted micro-frontier has recapitulated the history of the old in an
accelerated fashion. The apartment houses close in on all sides, and Willy
can get no seeds to grow.
Turner saw the forest as a central symbol of the frontier, asserting that
"the forest clearings have been the seed plots of American character" and
"[t]his forest philosophy is the philosophy of American democracy" (p.
207). And for Willy the disappearance of trees also symbolizes the "great
times" that he cannot get back to. His father's flute, often heard under
the reminiscences of the past, speaks of "grass and trees and the horizon."
The cutting down of the "two beautiful elms" from which he and Biff had
hung a swing marked the point of no return in the "massacre" of his
neighborhood, its transformation into part of the "nuthouse of a city."
Ben's tempting offer to abandon that city and make a fortune in Alaska
begins with a post as supervisor of a tract of timberland. And when Willy
has lost his job, and everythingis coming apart, he cries out that "the woods
are burning!"
Death of a Salesman suggests that there is a way out of this conflagration, but it can only be founded on a true understanding of one's desires
and a concomitant freeing of the psyche from the domination of myth. But
Willy, like King Lear, "has ever but slenderly known himself" ("The man
didn't know who he was" is Biff's translation.) Psychologically the cause
is not hard to diagnose, and it also dictates the kind of myth that will come
to dominate him. Pleading with Ben to stay in Brooklyn for a few days,
Willy confesses, "--well, Dad left when I was such a baby and I never had

a chanceto talk to him and I still feel--kindof temporaryabout myself."7

Abandoned by his father but idolizing the vanished image of "a man with
a big beard.. .and some kind of high music," he seeks to emulate men like
Ben and Dave Singleman. It is true that Ben and Dave appear to represent

5
opposing ideologies, in that Ben gains his fortune by seizing the valuable
natural resources directly from the jungle or forest, while Dave serves as
a conduit between manufacturer and consumer. But both make their fortunes by wandering from place to place as latter-day pathfinders. Between
them Ben and Davecombine the attributes of that peripatetic flute salesman,
Willy's father. They resemble each other more than either resembles the
despised Bernard or Charley. Willy's subsequent embrace of the Turnerian
myth follows quite logically, since one of its main components is the ability for the frontiersman to move on again and again to the virgin land to
the West.
All these role models embody the pioneer myth transformed to suit
the modern age. Willy wants to believe that his own career will represent
a further link in the mythic chain: "The whole wealth of Alaska passes
over the lunch table at the Commodore Hotel, and that's the wonder, the
wonder of this country, that a man can end with diamonds here on the basis
of being liked! (p. 160).And for men of a certain temperament this analogy
is not as far-fetched as it sounds coming from Willy. Many of the robber
barons survived the closing of the frontier by simply adapting the techniques of the frontiersman in the forest to the environment of the
businessman in the city. Here is Turner on the subject:
At the same time the masters of industry, who control interests
which represent billions of dollars, do not admit that they have
broken with pioneer ideals. They regard themselves as pioneers
under changed conditions, carrying on the old work of developing the natural resources of the nation, compelled by the constructive fever in their veins, even in ill-health and old age and
after the accumulation of wealth beyond their power to enjoy,
to seek new avenues of action and of power...(p. 319).
The pioneer myth thus convinces Willy that his wanderings should make
him feel free and happy, and the careers of his father, Ben, and Dave
Singleman that they should make him rich. They do neither. Willy only
attains one essential quality his heroes share: Even dying in his car, he never
gets to come in off the road.
Willy cannot acknowledge that in his inmost nature he is nothing like
his father, Ben, or Dave Singleman. The evidence suggests that the abandoned boy desired not the freedom to roam but the security and rootedness
of a settled home. His choice not to leave his family, as his father had,
to accompany Ben to Alaska clearly shows his preference. Willy is happiest "with a bunch of cement," making home improvements, or planting
seeds in the ground; he would probably have liked nothing better than to
come home for supper every night, tend his garden, work out with the boys,
and putter around the house. But his ideology has already pledged him to
the emulation of Dave Singleman, a man who lived on trains and in hotel

6
rooms and whose very name should have told Willy, were he attuned to
symbolic language, that he would provide a most inadequate paradigm for
a man who prizes his home and family above all.
For it is as a homesteader rather than as a trailblazer that Willy would
have fit into pioneer culture. In other words, he truly values all the activities
that the transformed pioneer/businessman no longer engages in, and by
his choice of career discards all hope of exercising his legitimate talents.
Even worse, the life of the road so limits his time, that he cannot very often
indulge those talents even as hobbies. The right dream for Willy, who clings
to those that are "wrong, all wrong," is the dream of home, but he never
acknowledges it, thus the irony of Linda's final speech which informs us
that Willy's home is now wholly his, yet there is no one to come home to it.
By the time Death of a Salesman premiered in 1949, the Turner thesis
was lesspowerful as an academic axiom than as a cultural myth, an emblem
of freedom, and paradise, lost. Because Willy's mind refuses to embrace
any fact that it has not mythologized, he can only follow out his frontier
affinities to the tragic consequences the myth grants them in mid-twentieth
century society. Had Willy known who he was, he might have realized that
much of what he truly valued of the vanished frontier could be maintained
in a little house in Brooklyn. Striving to become the latter-day Daniel Boone
he subconsciously scorns, he forfeits the opportunity to become the latterday Charles Ingalls he subconsciouslyyearns for his own father to have been.
'See Barclay Bates, "The Lost Past in Death of a Salesman,"
164-72.

Modem Drama,

II (1968),

'''The Frontier and American Institutions: a Criticism of the Turner Theory," in Turner
and the Sociology of the Frontier, ed. Richard Hofstadter and Seymour Martin Upset (New
York: Basic Books, 1968), p. 27.
'Myth and Modem American Drama (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1969), p. 151.
'According to Robert Martin, (Letter to the author, May 29, 1983) Miller took two
American history courses covering the years 1783-1920 while he attended the University of
Michigan in 1935-36. While Martin rightly cautions that "Miller did not conscIously relate
the Willy-Biff values as a reflection of Turner's thesis...He doesn't write from theories," it
is improbable that Miller was not at least introduced to Turner's writings while in college.
, Quoted in Everett S. Lee, "The Turner Thesis Re-Examined." Turner and the Sociology
of the Frontier, p. 65.
'The Frontier in American History (New York: Holt, 1920), pp. 32; 37.
'Death of a Salesman. in Arthur Miller: Eight Plays (New York: Doubleday, 1981), p.
130. All subsequent references to the play are to this edition.