Death of A Salesman PDF

Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman
DIALOGUE
3
Edited by
Michael J. Meyer
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 xiii
Introduction 1
Eric J. Sterling
1 Linda Loman: “Attention must be paid” 11
Terry Otten
2 Domestic Tragedies: The Feminist Dilemma in
Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman 21
L. Bailey McDaniel
3 Arthur Miller: Guardian of the Dream of America 33
Steven Centola
4 Refocusing America’s Dream 47
Michelle Nass
5 Capitalist America in Arthur Miller’s Death of a
Salesman: A Re-consideration 61
Juan Ignacio Guijarro-González
and Ramón Espejo
6 Willy Loman and the Legacy of Capitalism 81
Linda Uranga
7 The Dynamo, the Salesman, and the Playwright 95
Paula Marantz Cohen
8 Mystifying the Machine: Staged and Unstaged
Technologies in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman 105
Craig N. Owens
viii Contents
9 In His Father’s Image: Biff Loman’s Struggle with

Inherited Traits in Death of a Salesman 121
Michael J. Meyer
10 The Emergence of Hope in Arthur Miller’s
Death of a Salesman 137
Deborah Cosier Solomon
11 “A little boat looking for a harbor”: Sexual
Symbolism in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman 149
Luc Gilleman
12 Compensatory Symbolism in Miller’s
Death of a Salesman 163
Samantha Batten
About the authors 171
Abstracts 175
Index 181
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Dialogue Series Editor Michael Meyer for choos-
ing me to edit this volume; I thank him for his advice and encourage-
ment. 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, pro-
vided 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 drop-
ping 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 hesi-
tant 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 expe-
riences, 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 qual-
ity 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,
xii Preface from the General Editor
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 advo-
cating 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 cov-
ered 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 fol-
lowed 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 atmos-
phere, 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 dec-
ades 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 indi-
vidual leading to wealth and happiness—is obviously central to this
play. Does Miller depict the American Dream as desirable yet essen-
tially unattainable? Or does Willy Loman simply misunderstand how
to achieve his goals?
3) Are capitalism, business, and the pursuit of the material por-
trayed 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, head-
ing 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, foot-
ball, 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 work-
ing 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 won-
derful 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 inhibit-
ing 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 thought-
provoking and unique perspectives and to more productive chapters. The
essay topic concerning the role of women in Death of a Salesman pro-
vides 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 tradi-
tional 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 mani-
fest changes that have occurred in the literary profession over the past
few decades: the shift toward literary theory, feminist criticism, and cul-
tural contexts rather than an emphasis on New Critical close readings.
2 Eric J. Sterling
Both approaches are valuable and are well represented in this volume.
Readers will be intrigued when observing how scholars from different
stages in their careers approach integral questions concerning Miller’s
poignant and powerful American classic that is as relevant to twenty-
first century audiences as it was to initial audiences in 1949. The top-
ics 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 controver-

sial 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 fam-
ily 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, per-
haps, 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 founda-
tion, he cheats on her with Miss Francis, whom he callously discards
when Biff finds her in the hotel room in Boston. Willy manifests his dis-
regard 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 foot-
ball is] me, too” (126). This (mis)conduct toward women is, not sur-
prisingly, 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 compen-
sates by exploiting women sexually in order to exact vengeance on men
who climb ahead of him on the corporate ladder. To Happy, women are
not human beings; instead, they are merely a series of challenges that he
hopes to subdue, a sport he can win at. In fact, he says that his time with
Introduction 3
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 attain-
ment 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
4 Eric J. Sterling
Dream. Loman tries to use his charm to succeed, yet he fails to earn
enough money on his own to complete one aspect of the American
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 fail-
ure 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 build-
ing a pair of guest houses (72). The fact that Loman, while contem-
plating 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 personal-
ity, 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 busi-
nessmen] 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,
Introduction 5
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 inte-

gral 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 irrel-
evant, 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 commis-
sion, tells Willy to buy something he does not need and clearly can-
not afford. Although it should be obvious to Howard that Willy is in
dire financial straits because he has no salary and is making no com-
missions, his wife does not work, and he is a traveling salesman who
cannot drive anymore, the business owner encourages Willy to pur-
chase 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 capital-
istic system. Nonetheless, Willy Loman cannot pull his own weight,
for he has become a salesman who cannot sell. The playwright never
6 Eric J. Sterling
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 nostal-
gia 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 tell-
ing 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 prob-
ably 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.
Introduction 7
4. 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 inabil-
ity 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 repre-
sents 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 technol-
ogy 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 restau-
rant 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 busi-
ness. The chain reacted by changing its name to KFC, enticing custom-
ers 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 build-
ing. 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, technol-
ogy 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 correspond-
ence course. Willy believes, perhaps, that Biff can combine technology
with his charming personality, but this plan, like so many others, fails.
8 Eric J. Sterling
Helping his son try a career in radio, to be attained through the mail and
complete with its lack of interpersonal skills because it is not done in per-
son, manifests Willy’s desperation for Biff’s future. Rather than allow-
ing 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 correspond-
ence 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 con-
fesses 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 self-
inflicted and not accidental. Ironically, it is Willy’s death, not the insur-
ance 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
Introduction 9
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 mean-

ing 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
10 Eric J. Sterling
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 irri-
tated 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 dia-
logues 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 gender-
based 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 three-
dimensional characters, given their limited roles. Given her impor-
tance, 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
12 Terry Otten
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” pro-
jected 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 slipper-
bearing retriever,” Linda being an especially “dumb and useful door-
mat” (10). And Kay Stanton asserts that the playwright conflates his
female characters “in the idea of Woman: all share . . . in their know-
ing”; and possessing “the potential to reveal masculine inadequacy,”
they “must be opposed by man” (82). These and other feminist read-
ings, including those offered by Carol Billman, Charlotte Canning,
Beverly Hume, Carla McDonough, and Nada Zeineddine (see “Works
Cited”), offer a provocative range of insights, a few of which present
Linda Loman 13
more positive responses to the play. Janet N. Balakian, for one, con-
tends that Death is “accurately depicting a post-war American cul-
ture 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 chauvin-
ism or David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross approves of sleazy real-
estate 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, material-
istic ethos of American culture. Both contentions are open to question.
According to Miller, Willy Loman was in part a reflection of his
Uncle Manny Newman, who, like Willy, had a wife and two sons.
Annie Newman resembles Linda as “a most moving woman who bore
the cross of reality for them all.” She supported her husband with a
“mild enthusiastic smile lest he feel he was not being appreciated”
(Timebends 123). Miller recalls how Annie would reassure Manny “when
with no audience to confirm his existence, his agonizing uncertainty
of identification flooded him with despair” (125). According to Miller,
Annie, similar to Linda, lived in perpetual fear and dread. The more
14 Terry Otten
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 her-
self 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 pos-
sess 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 dram-
atist 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 lit-
tle doubt that Linda is tainted by the same debunked value system.
Linda Loman 15
It is she, after all, who maintains the financial accounts that measure
success in the warped vision of the Loman household, who knows
precisely how much commission Willy might make in a given sale,
who pesters Willy about securing an advance to pay the mortgage,
who knows exactly how short they are at any given moment. She is
even complicit in urging Willy to compete in his job. She tells Ben
that 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 simultane-
ously 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 knowl-
edge 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 grant-
ing that she is essentially unconscious of her own participation and
complicity in the tragic movement of the play, she cannot be declared
free of responsibility any more than any other Miller character. True,
16 Terry Otten
like other Miller female characters, she bears the consequences for a
dominant male’s stubborn moral blindness or a debilitating capital-
ism. 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, how-
ever 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 spir-
itual 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 extra-
ordinary 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 under-
stands 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 culti-
vated 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
Linda Loman 17
again, transforming her looks to match the assumed character until she
finally secured the part. As it turned out, Dunnock apparently overcom-
pensated 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
18 Terry Otten
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 alto-
gether. 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 rigor-
ous 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 senti-
mentality (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, how-
ever ironic, for she is indeed freed at last from Willy’s spurious, destruc-
tive 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 every-
day 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 utter-
ing 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
Linda Loman 19
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.
20 Terry Otten
—. 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
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 intel-
lectuals 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 mid-
century 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 right-
wing 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
22 L. Bailey McDaniel
and some of his most famous plays safely place him within the broader
context of the leftist ideologies that critique dehumanizing hegemonies—
hegemonies often common to Western, capitalist, and often imperialist
cultural paradigms.2 Gayle Rubin’s criticism of Marxist thought and activ-
ism during the anti-war 1970s, specifically Marxism’s inability to suffi-
ciently 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 accumula-
tion over societal concerns and equality, is central here. As most critics
easily agree, capitalist models of greed and externally validating material-
ism 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 neocolo-
nial presence in African diamond mines.) Yet Miller’s treatise on the men-
ace 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 fre-
quently 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 signifi-
cance 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 three-
dimensional, 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 con-
tinued 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,
Domestic Tragedies 23
Willy Loman’s demise as a victim of capitalism was nearly unani-

mously 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, dia-
logue, 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 gen-
der 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 fulfill-
ment 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 wom-
an’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 pri-
oritizing her husband’s needs over those of her children, a noteworthy
deviation from the more typical maternal patterns to be sure, her sacri-
fice 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 name-
less Woman who receives Willy’s infamous gift of stockings, also occu-
pies 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 consist-
ent powerlessness of the play’s female characters; or is the construct of
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 serv-
ice 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 “trag-
edy,” 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 occu-
pies 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: perform-
ance, 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 recep-
tion (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 atten-
tion 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 femi-
nist 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 interest-
ing” as a dramatic character (see, for instance, Bigsby and Popkin, qtd.
in Jacobson 11).
Looking at the more recent critical reception of Miller’s play, espe-

cially 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 femi-
nist 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 substan-
tially 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 pro-
duction of Death of a Salesman was revived on Broadway and met with
mostly positive critical praise. As is often the case, focusing on sales-
man 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 col-
lapsed 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 mat-
ters 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
Willy Loman tell stories centered around family life (stories of the indi-
vidual “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-sec-
ond 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 fam-
ily 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
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 “main-
tenance,” 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 men-
dacities (mendacities that leave her disadvantaged as well)—goes beyond
the economic dependency an unemployable wife might face in contem-
plating any future independence.
Furthermore, Linda’s resistance to altruistic maternity seems less
revolutionary when we consider how her digression from selfless nur-
turance 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 con-
servative 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 obses-
sion 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 sup-
ported, 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”
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 con-
frontation 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 char-
acter 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 rel-
evant 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 occasion-
ally 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 support-

ive wife might have shocked Willy Loman into a state that resembles
reality. But Linda’s unyielding relief comes in the form of selfless syco-
phancy 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
mid-century, Cold War gender roles. Certainly by 1949 the relative

progress made by women’s participation in the war effort was increas-
ingly 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 award-
winning drama The Glass Menagerie, Williams and the original, infamous
Amanda, Laurette Taylor, proposed a maternal icon and feminine con-
struct 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 real-
ism (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 mater-
nity 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 perform-
ing the lead character (Mrs. Fanning), audiences were exposed to a
widow-mother who struggles to maintain her own identity and finan-
cial independence with explicit courage and integrity but without suf-
ficient 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
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 con-
servative 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 char-
acter 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 mak-
ing 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 callous-
ness 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 sexu-
ally 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,
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 mar-
ket 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, enti-
tled 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 lucra-
tive 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.
4
Since its 1949 debut, Death of a Salesman continues to be one of the most con-
sistently 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. <http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/50s/miller-
mccarthyism.html. 1 Dec 2005>.
—. Death of a Salesman: Certain Private Conversations in Two Acts and a Requiem.
New York: Penguin, 1977.
—. “The Family in Modern Drama” in Atlantic Monthly (April 1956): 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:
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 incongru-
ous 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 possi-
bly 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 jux-
taposition—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
34 Steven Centola
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 rel-
evance 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 exhort-
ing 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, con-
tentious, 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 cri-
tique 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 imper-
ium?” (“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 peo-
ple 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 rigor-
ous examination of the dark recesses of the national psyche and indi-
vidual 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,
Arthur Miller: Guardian of the Dream of America 35
stories, and essays, but also of his lifetime work to free dissident writers
abroad and champion the human rights of the oppressed at home. For
Arthur Miller, art was always deeply connected to life. Art, he believed,
not only derives from life experience, but it must also respond to life
and improve the conditions of life and living for humanity. For this
reason, Miller frequently described all great drama as inherently social
in nature. Like Miller, Edward Albee acknowledges the necessity for
important art to be socially relevant, and he identifies this shared con-
viction with Miller as the basis for his celebration of Miller’s achieve-
ment 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 stere-
otypes, 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 ear-
liest 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 con-
fronted 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 wayfar-
ers 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 vacil-
lated between hope and despair, as their dream of spiritual salvation
36 Steven Centola
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 inhabit-
ants 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 expan-
sion 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 self-
reliance 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 pro-
gressive devastation of the natural landscape as the transcontinental
railroad brought with it endless development, and the systematic dis-
mantling 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 them-
selves 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
addressing real challenges to national ideals, these guardians of the

dream of America simultaneously provided a means for taking correc-
tive 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 inher-
itances, 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 explor-
ing questions related to the possibility of an authentic existence in a cha-
otic, 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 reveal-
ing the gross deficiencies of the materialistic values and cultural myths
that have traditionally defined and limited American society’s under-
standing 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
38 Steven Centola
culture, ideology, and geography, and that speaks to all people of all
societies and all ages. In essence, as Miller told me in an interview in
August 2001, the dream is a “more-than-American Dream.” Therefore,
in articulating this global view of the dream of America, Miller estab-
lishes an important correlation between the treatment of American
society in his drama and the development of thematic material that tran-
scends the local and particular subject matter in his plays while speak-
ing 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 exam-
ine the whole of society—and the world—through his focus on a par-
ticular 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 partic-
ular 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 inter-
preting 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 com-
mentary 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 col-
lected Theater Essays (1996), and in the more overtly political pieces
assembled in Echoes Down the Corridor (2000), Miller comments

insightfully on the vagaries of historical events and shows a particu-
larly 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 particu-
lar, 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 inter-
weaves 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
40 Steven Centola
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 prob-
lematic nature of the society that witnesses their collapse. Undeniably,
on one level, the subtext calls into question the whole system of capi-
talist 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 instrumen-
tal in establishing in the audience’s mind important subtextual mean-
ing 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.
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 correla-
tion between this central thematic issue in the play and Miller’s own per-
sonal 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 transforma-
tion. 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 urbaniza-
tion 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 self-
deceiving 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 care-
ful consideration of the cultural context underlying the play’s compo-
sition, 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—partic-
ularly in its display of American linguistic cadence, focus on the fam-
ily (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
42 Steven Centola
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 dev-
astating 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 artis-
tic 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 work-
place. 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 associ-
ated 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 tra-
ditional 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 war-
rants 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
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 rela-
tive 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 find-
ing 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 concomi-
tant 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 organi-
zation 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 com-
plex vision of a playwright who simultaneously memorializes and
subverts the animating cultural myths of our society? Can the audi-
ences who lack direct experience with the historical context or the cul-
tural 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 con-
fronting 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 imper-
sonal society threatening to destroy them. Like the Lomans, audiences
44 Steven Centola
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 cho-
sen image of themselves, and these alienated and dispossessed dreamers
of the golden dream understand the difficulty, and maybe even the futil-
ity, 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, particu-
larly 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 devo-
tees 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 pos-
sibility permeates the playwright’s work. In this respect, Miller’s com-
ments 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 cul-
tural 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).
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 aliena-
tion 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 play-
wright 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 politi-
cal 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-ques-
tioning 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 life-
time” (qtd. in Company 3). For this reason, Arthur Miller stands tall in the
procession of great American writers who have wrestled with the shift-
ing 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
46 Steven Centola
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 tur-
bulent 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 differ-
ences, Nancy Gibbs finds that in 1953 (just four years after the inau-
gural 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 dis-
tractions 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 overwhelm-
ing questions, information, and choices, today’s students must strug-
gle 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,
48 Michelle Nass
I frame many of my units around the central issue of growing into

adulthood in American society. This topic becomes the primary vehi-
cle 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 read-
ers 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 ques-
tions 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 discus-
sion of Death of a Salesman around this central question. Because it is
Refocusing America’s Dream 49
important for students to find their own truths in what they read, I encour-
age 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 gener-
ates endless opportunities for creative and diverse interpretations” (64).
Through their direct engagement with Miller’s play, my students formu-
late 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 expe-
rience 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 tradi-
tional 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 articu-
lated 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
50 Michelle Nass
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 identi-
fied 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 politi-
cians 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 tradi-
tional 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 push-
ing 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 unobtain-
able 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.
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 dis-
cussion 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 expres-
sionism, the students began to understand the mood and tone created
by the dreamlike atmosphere. Miller’s reliance on apparent contradic-
tion to convey a sense of the possibilities inherent within the situa-
tion 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 hap-
pened on his drive to and from Yonkers (12–14), the paid off mort-
gage 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 play-
ing 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 sepa-
rate 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.
52 Michelle Nass
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 obliga-
tion 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 hon-
est 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 stu-
dents 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 corpo-
rations 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
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 sup-
posed 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 irrel-
evant, 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.
54 Michelle Nass
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 mate-
rial 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 vic-

tim 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, unques-
tionably 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 via-
ble 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 pos-
sibility. 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 obvi-
ous as Willy angrily exclaims: “You can’t eat the orange and throw the
peel away—a man is not a piece of fruit!” (82).
Willy’s fight reaches beyond himself and his family, and essen-
tially 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 hap-
pen.” 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 strik-
ing 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 prog-
ress, 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 charac-
ters 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 them-
selves 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.
56 Michelle Nass
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 sug-
gest 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 pay-
ing. 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 god-
dam 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 them-
selves, 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 famil-
ial 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 dem-
onstrate his ability to choose and face the consequences of that choice.
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 situ-
ation 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 suc-
ceed 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
58 Michelle Nass
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 vir-
tually confesses that he loves his father. Willy can be said to have real-
ized 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 mis-
construed 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 can-
dle—shedding light on the individual characters as they take their indi-
vidual 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 penetrat-
ing light. Perhaps, as future generations continue to discuss Miller’s
thought-inspiring drama, they will find themselves free of the illu-
sions 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
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 stu-
dents 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. <http://www.time.
com/time/archive/preview/0,10987,1088663,00.html>.
Grossman, Lev. “Meet the Twixters” in Time 16 Jan. 2005, 5 Mar. 2006. <http://www.
time.com/time/archive/printout/0x23657,1018089,00.html>.
Herb, Jake. Personal Interview. 10 June 2005, 13 June 2005, 20 June 2005, 24 June
2005, and 27 June 2005.
Lightcap, Jessica. Personal Interview. 10 June 2005, 13 June 2005, 20 June 2005, 24
June 2005, and 27 June 2005.
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. <http://pro-
quest.umi.com>.
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 con-
sider 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 con-
demned 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 every-
thing 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 exam-
ple 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
62 J. I. Guijarro-González and R. Espejo
such a play as Death of a Salesman. The point is, simply, that capital-
ism’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 stand-
point 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 ethi-
cal 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 diffi-
culty, 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,
Capitalist America in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman 63
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 moneymak-
ing 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 through-
out 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 coinciden-
tal 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.”
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 carpen-
try. 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 inferior-
ity 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 jux-
taposition that he himself is not.
In the highly consumerist society depicted in the play, there is prob-
ably no better manifestation of the envy Willy feels than when he bit-
terly 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
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 insensi-
tive 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 suc-
ceeded in it. Like Bernard does during his encounter with Willy in his
father’s office, Charley shatters the illusions about success when speak-
ing to an incredulous Willy, admitting that the only key to his achieve-
ments 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 ever-
pragmatic 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 mid-
dle 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 com-
pany enterprise. Therefore, one of the functions of his mental conversa-
tions 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
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 pre-
vious 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 ethi-
cal 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 per-
sonal 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
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 gener-
ated by the meeting at Howard’s office, which has just taken place,
given that these two similar scenes are only separated by Willy’s recol-
lection of the day of the Ebbets Field game. If, as it will be later argued,
Howard’s conduct epitomizes rather cold and impersonal business eth-
ics, 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 direc-
tion 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 study-
ing, 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
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 admi-
ration for the local sports hero: Bernard’s admiration becomes mani-
fest 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 real-
ize how wrong he has been in both his simplistic credo of being “well-
liked” (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 pro-
fessional triumph makes Biff’s and Happy’s failures more painfully
obvious to Willy, thus contributing to his movement toward self-anni-
hilation. Moreover, Bernard has also triumphed at a personal level, at
least according to normative social expectations, because he is mar-
ried and has two sons (like Willy Loman and so many of Miller’s pro-
tagonists), 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 com-
ment 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 unbelieva-
bly, 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
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 fortu-
nate. 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 sys-
tem 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 con-
trast to them as the only scene in which he appears forcefully demon-
strates. 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 consid-
erations 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 eco-
nomic 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
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 con-
ducted 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 comrade-
ship, 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 hus-
band, 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
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, how-
ever, the fact that he can get so emotional about his own family also
serves to underscore his lack of sensitivity when dealing with a des-
perate 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 dis-
torted 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 capi-
talism: 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 fol-
lower of the American Dream, and, though from time to time he seems
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 alien-
ation. 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 envis-
age 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 frus-
tration 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 coun-
terpart 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 capi-
talism 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 swal-
lowed by it.
Of the rebellious impulses that Willy tries to keep at bay by trans-

forming 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 pas-
sionate 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 inclina-
tions 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 wind-
shield 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 pat-
tern 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 lean-
ings, 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 read-
ing, would indeed look like a savage indictment of the system that
victimizes Willy Loman, the more one thinks about it, the less plau-
sible 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,
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 dol-
lars 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
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 envisag-
ing 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 con-
clude 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 ban-
ners 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 compro-
mise 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
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 enthusi-
asm 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
earnest about the embarrassing encounter. Willy’s insecurity in this

sense proves fatal. If he had not felt guilty at all or afraid of discover-
ing in Biff the very rebellious impulses he has so earnestly endeavored
to fight in himself, he would probably not have demanded Biff’s com-
plete 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 rela-
tionship 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 sub-
sequent failures; yet he then kills himself because he still holds him-
self 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 expe-
riences. 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 empha-
sizes at the end of the play when Linda stresses that they are finally
“free and clear” (139). Miller thus absolves that most telling character-
istic of the tokens of capitalism: mortgages and the high cost of own-
ing 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 bet-
ter 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
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 some-
thing 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 whis-
tle 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 claustropho-
bic 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 mas-
culine 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 play-
wright 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).
15
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 increas-
ingly 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 sum-
marized 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 inclina-
tions 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 capi-
talism—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.
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 for-
tune 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.
—. “Introduction” in Arthur Miller’s Collected Plays: With an Introduction. New
York: Viking, 1957. (3–55)
Otten, Terry. The Temptation of Innocence in the Dramas of Arthur Miller. Columbia:
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 under-
lying 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 accept-
ance 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 under-
stand 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 dif-
ficult decisions while choosing the easier path of co-opting other peo-
ple’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
82 Linda Uranga
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 des-
perate 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 capital-
ism would be a dynamic system that could adjust for its mistakes with
the help of government-imposed controls and safeguards. In an inter-
view 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 down-
fall. 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
Willy Loman and the Legacy of Capitalism 83
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 con-
dition.” 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 com-
paring 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 fol-
lows 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 jus-
tify 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 thunder-
ing 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).
84 Linda Uranga
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 suc-
cess, 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
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 rem-
edy 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 posi-
tion 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 confi-
dence in his own worth. In addition, Willy never develops the aptitude
to analyze people, business situations, or the intricacies of office poli-
tics, although he sometimes recognizes that Charley possesses a busi-
ness sense that he lacks. Because Charley started and currently runs his
own successful company, we can surmise that Charley excels in busi-
ness 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 neigh-
bor; Willy cannot afford a secretary or even his insurance premiums.
86 Linda Uranga
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 busi-
ness 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 man-
ager 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 accom-
plishment 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 accept-
ance 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
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 sales-
man does not belong in the city but rather out on the open plains, mixing
cement or being carpenters, Willy, overhearing the comment, angrily rep-
rimands 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’ car-
pentry 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 cit-
ies, 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
88 Linda Uranga
believe he is worthy of Linda (Hayman 51). The insecurities that com-

pel 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 prod-
ucts. As he exaggerates his commissions to Linda and Howard, we real-
ize 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 capi-
talism, 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 abandon-
ment 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 prob-
lems. 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 self-
ish, 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 involv-
ing their capitalistic endeavors, stemming from their troubled relationship
with their father. Biff is a kleptomaniac who cannot succeed in business
because he steals from his bosses, and Happy sleeps with his bosses’ fian-
cées 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 busi-
ness 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 unhap-
piness (and his own unhappiness) derived from attempting to acquire other
people’s business dreams and financial success. Willy never acknowl-
edges 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 success-
ful 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 cap-
italistic hopes solely on his oldest son. Willy continues to make allow-
ances for him because he perceives that Biff has a chance at greatness.
When Happy scolds Biff for stealing a football, Willy defends Biff,
90 Linda Uranga
thus negating the seriousness of the theft by joking that “Coach’ll prob-
ably 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 suc-
ceeds 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 charac-
ters,” 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 unethi-
cal behavior is justified if one gains wealth and popularity. Even today,
the bad behavior of athletes is often excused because they make mil-
lions 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 emo-
tional 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 moth-
er’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
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 decipher-
ing 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 will-

ing 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
92 Linda Uranga
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 hap-
pens?” (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 val-
ues 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
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
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)
—. “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 techno-
logical 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
96 Paula Marantz Cohen
(who traversed the country more arduously and then chose to aban-
don 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 dis-
cuss 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 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).
A trivial but telling example of Willy’s wonder in the face of tech-
nology 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 dis-
missive (“I don’t want a change! I want Swiss cheese”), but a few sec-
onds later, he pauses in his complaining to ask: “How can they whip
cheese?” (16–17). Discontentment is momentarily eclipsed by curios-
ity, 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 improve-
ment 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 his-
tory, the questions seem to be the same: Where does the agrarian ideal
balance with technological innovation? How are the principles of self-
reliance 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
The Dynamo, the Salesman, and the Playwright 97
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 com-
merce to me is its enterprise and bravery” (370). For both of these writ-
ers, 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 him-
self 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 feel-
ing impelled to make sense of this new technology: “the historian’s busi-
ness 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 dyna-
mos, which exert power on their own, i.e. to assimilate these past sym-
bols of transformative energy to the literal energy of these powerful, new
machines: “Clearly, if he was bound to reduce all these forces to a com-
mon 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 impo-
tence of “Adams” rivals in its way the befuddlement and impotence of
Willy. If Willy is described as a little man: “exhausted” (56), “a dime
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 crea-
tors 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 tech-
nological 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 observa-
tion 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 play-
wright 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 con-
fesses 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 perfunc-
tory remarks, he launches into a speech about himself, trying to convince
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 technol-
ogy—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 technol-
ogies to Willy, the wire recorder is a sterile and even malevolent tech-
nology (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 liter-
ally. 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 capi-
talist 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 over-
hearing the Lomans as they cycle through predictable patterns of behav-
ior 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
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 uni-
versal 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 frighten-
ingly 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 intel-
lectual 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 gain-
ing rather than losing strength through conflict and contradiction. He
does what Willy aspires to do—what Adams aspires to do—he trans-
lates “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 invis-
ible 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 autobiog-
raphy, one is struck by a shift in the author’s self-representation as he
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 antici-
pating 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 coun-
try’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 sexual-
ity 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 posi-
tion 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 immi-
grant 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 contin-
ues, he cannot keep up with the modern any more than Adams, who
managed, only briefly, to impose meaning on the dynamo before fall-
ing back into a sense of futility and confusion, and who ultimately
laments: “one controlled no more force in 1900 than in 1850, although
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 resourceful-
ness 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 indi-
vidual’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 lit-
erary 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,
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.
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, domi-

nates 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 experimen-
tal theatre that overcame realism as the dominant idiom of twentieth-
century drama. Edward Albee, hailed by Martin Esslin as America’s
“absurdist” playwright, Eugene O’Neill, with his frequently surreal-
ist 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 appar-
ently 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
106 Craig N. Owens
theatrical representation by reorganizing it as a failed repression of mod-

ernism’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 machin-
eries 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 paint-
ings 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 disrupt-
ing 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 ele-
ments function either as icons, visual look-alikes representing real-
world 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 usu-
ally 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 mov-
ing. 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
Mystifying the Machine 107
as much as he is a human being whose organic systems actually work:

whose heart beats, whose lungs respire, whose brain regulates the vari-
ous 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 direc-
tor 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 ridicu-
lous 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 coun-
terpoises dream sequences and a funeral scene against Willy’s reality
and against the reality of Willy, the disembodied Willy of this pro-
duction 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
108 Craig N. Owens
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 demon-
strated 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 daugh-
ter’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 sig-
nificance 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 embod-
ies 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 comment-
ing on the daughter’s skill at whistling, he confines his remarks to the
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 criti-
cal 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 rehears-
als 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 funda-
mentally 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
110 Craig N. Owens
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 thea-
tre 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 seem-
ingly 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 pre-
tends 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 menda-
ciously 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.
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 “reali-
ties.” 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.
112 Craig N. Owens
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 circum-
stances” 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 thea-
tre that Howard’s recorder, because it works differently in its staged
context, does not. For instance, Krapp’s tape recorder splits the char-
acter because Krapp listens to his own voice often as if it were unfa-
miliar 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
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 gen-
eralize, 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 real-
ism. 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 mecha-
nized modernity more broadly. To enable both interpretive possibili-
ties 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 work-
ing 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 per-
sonalize 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
114 Craig N. Owens
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 illu-
sions 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 com-
plex, even as realism. Willy’s perspective, by comparison, is quite lim-
ited. 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, humanis-
tic position, one that resists social mechanization and the disempower-
ment 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 con-
sumes 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 incompe-
tent 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
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 dol-
lars 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 appro-
priation 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 pro-
duced 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 humanity-
effects. 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 deac-
tivate 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.
116 Craig N. Owens
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 produc-
tion 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, fur-
naces, air conditioners, sound systems, fire safety devices, and so on
but also of actors, directors, stage managers, costumers, ushers, book-
ing 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 con-
stituted 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, with-
out committing an imaginative extravagance, we can fairly easily see
that the theatre, as machine, also consists of the jobs its patrons do dur-
ing 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 busi-
ness climates in undeveloped or developing countries. The theatre
is a machine that, to use Deleuze and Guattari’s formulation in Anti-
Oedipus, 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.
Lots of it. And that money, advanced by, for instance, textbook pub-
lishers, 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 jun-
ior-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 pay-
ing 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 indus-
try 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.
118 Craig N. Owens
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 neighbor-
hood. 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 beau-
tiful 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 daf-
fodils. 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 accu-
racy 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 ena-
bled 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 dou-
ble 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,
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
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 lim-
ited 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 sug-
gested 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 even-
tually 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
122 Michael J. Meyer
he tries to prevent his children from plotting his overthrow by attempt-

ing 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 sym-
bolically 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 sta-
tus of their own.
As Freud posited in his explanation of the Oedipus complex, destruc-
tion 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 conform-
ity. 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 exam-
ines the dilemma that faces all sons who simultaneously find them-
selves imitating their fathers while also questioning the very traits they
are learning because they are unsure whether embracing them fully sug-
gests 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 nega-
tive and detract from his character. Nevertheless, when motivated by an
event that compromises his father’s integrity, Biff suddenly rejects his
In His Father’s Image 123
former worshipful and respectful attitude toward his parent and eventu-
ally 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 assump-
tions, 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 re-
embrace a lifestyle he thought he had successfully left behind. Biff’s
return to a deteriorating suburb in New York suggests he is still con-
fused, 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 flow-
ers, 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 sug-
gest 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
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 audi-
ence. His life is a falsehood” (123). Indeed, Willy is an accomplished
liar, making up details that he knows will never come true. For exam-
ple, 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 repu-
tation, one minute asserting his popularity and the fact that he is well-
known (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 satis-
faction. 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
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 achieve-
ments 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 untruth-
ful 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 short-
comings 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 busi-
ness 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 regard-
ing 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.
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 even-
tually 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 use-
lessness (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 dev-
astated, for his perception of his father as perfect is shattered. The dis-
covery convinces him that his father has no moral center, which causes
him severe depression, perhaps because he is now forced to recog-
nize 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 exag-
gerated 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 imme-
diately 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
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 reprehen-
sible 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 par-
alleled 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, compliment-
ing 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.
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 immatu-
rity verbally, preferring to demonstrate it through the character’s childish
actions, he allows Willy to berate Biff frequently for what he consid-
ers adolescent behavior. For example, although Willy has little justifi-
cation 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 fre-
quently 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 sen-
tences 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, choos-
ing 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 imma-
turity; 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 appro-
priate action for a high school senior. Sensitive audience members
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 car-
ing 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 sta-
tus, 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 provid-
ing 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 laughable-
ness” (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
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 him-
self 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 singu-
lar 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 gener-
ally 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
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 out-
come 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 inse-
curity 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 can-
not 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;
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 attrac-
tion, 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 ambi-
guity over a deliberate absolute in Biff’s decision-making process.
For example, Brian Parker sees this experience as less than success-
ful: “Biff at least comes out of the experience with enhanced self-
knowledge. . . . [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 father-
hood, 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 stum-
bling, indecisive moments of self-awareness and self-condemnation
early in the play. These moments instill mistrust in the audience
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 com-
ments about Willy—“He had the wrong dreams. All, all wrong” and “He
never knew who he was” (138)—suggest that his earlier vacillation is fin-
ished 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 possi-
bility 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 dis-
torted 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 with-
out 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
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? . . . I am not a leader of men, Willy, and neither are
you. You were never anything but a hard-working drummer who landed in the
ash can like all the rest of them! I’m one dollar an hour, [W]illy [sic]! I tried
seven states and couldn’t raise it. A buck an hour! Do you gather my meaning?
I’m not bringing home any prizes any more, and you’re going to stop waiting
for me to bring them home! . . . 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)
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 par-
ents: 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 pros-
per 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
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 psycho-
logical interpretation of theft.
2
Parker says that “the play balances the failure of Willy and his sons with the suc-
cess 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, unpreten-
tious, 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 pos-
sesses 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 state-
ment that he knows himself is the truth or is the play’s central irony becomes aca-
demic. 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.
9
See Bigsby’s comments on pages 119 and 125.
10
Ironically, this revival requires the death of Willy and the sprouting of new seeds
of renewal motivated by re-evaluation.
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
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
Hoeveler, D.L. “Death of a Salesman as Psychomachia” in Modern Critical Interpretations
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
—. “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 consum-
ing materialism and pathetic delusions of grandeur. What hope can
one glean from the life and death of a man with such apparently hol-
low values and such an obsessive desire for recognition and financial
success? Furthermore, if Willy Loman, as some critics suggest, sym-
bolizes 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 tri-
umph of honesty. It does far more than portray financial failure; it cel-
ebrates 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 dis-
pute 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
138 Deborah Cosier Solomon
are missing” (“Death of a Salesman: A Symposium” 47). This fundamen-

tal 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 integ-
rity. As Jeremy Hawthorn remarks, “although Death of a Salesman attacks
the American Dream through Willy, there is a certain amount of ideo-
logical 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 con-
stantly 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 will-
ingness 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 compari-
son 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 conversa-
tion 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 fif-
teen 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
The Emergence of Hope in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman 139
but for their potential riches, and he exaggerates the meager wildlife of
his small Brooklyn property in an absurd attempt to impress Ben (“but
we hunt too . . . 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 scram-
ble 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, accus-
ing 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).
Oddly enough, as Biff grows increasingly more insistent about artic-

ulating his desire to be out-of-doors working with his hands, his father
grows increasingly more fixated on planting a garden, thus deepen-
ing 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 com-
ments 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 near-
est 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 turn-
ing to the one occupation that he knows will please his son—gardening.
Biff, in turn, responds with a desperate attempt to make his father under-
stand 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, unpre-

tentious 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 coun-
teracts the ridicule (37) and indifference (57) that Willy endures from
his clients and acquaintances. Nevertheless, as Harold Bloom points
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 con-
fused 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 mov-
ing, 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 chok-
ing 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 dis-
covery, 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
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 notice-
able 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.
Like Willy’s interview with Howard, Biff’s appointment with Oliver

marks a critical moment of failure. All Biff’s hopes of redeeming him-
self in his father’s eyes, all his hopes of renewing familial harmony, col-
lapse 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 ini-
tial 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 unana-
lyzed feelings are his sole touchstone to existence” (11) could just as
truly be said of Biff. Biff has spent years running away from his fail-
ures 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 fail-
ures, 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
to allow Biff the relief of admitting failure suggests the underlying self-
ishness 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 ques-
tion 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 mov-

ing 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
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 paral-
lels between Willy and Biff do more than simply clarify Biff’s character
development; they allow the audience to discover hope in a more satis-
fying 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 abil-
ity 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 excep-
tion 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
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 mis-
erable 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 suc-
cess, 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.

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)
“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
Koon, Helene Wickham. “Introduction” in Twentieth Century Interpretations of Death
of a Salesman. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1983. (1–14)
—. “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
“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 struc-
ture 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 discon-
certing 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
150 Luc Gilleman
of the narrative only, but with their allusive power create the impres-
sion 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 cho-
sen, 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 after-
wards, 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 reap-
pears ominously, here fatally, in what is known as the “obligatory scene.”
That the play makes use of such a traditional device is itself remark-
able, 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 work-
ings 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 experi-
ence not only colors the present but also actually intrudes upon it. While
“A little boat looking for a harbor” 151
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 intensify-
ing 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 encap-
sulated “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 sud-
denly 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 logi-
cal “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 when-
ever 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
152 Luc Gilleman
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 obser-
vations 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 fash-
ion, 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 dif-
ferently, the play might not always be telling us the story it purports to
be telling—and nothing illustrates this point better than a brief analy-
sis 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?
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 awk-
wardly into view, Linda says she “knew it right away,” almost as if
she had seen it before—or something like it, perhaps. Yet that knowl-
edge renders her ashamed and powerless: she cannot “mention it to
him.” The rubber tube, in other words, is associated both with knowl-
edge and with shame. In the well-made play, the gradual revelation
of knowledge drives the action. In this play, that knowledge is sym-
bolized 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 sel-
lin’ thousands and thousands” (34), he cries, until Linda takes out pencil
and paper, forcing Willy to reduce his “accomplishment” to the miser-
able 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 append-
age with the “little attachment on the end of it” (59), she must turn her
154 Luc Gilleman
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 tum-
bles 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 pre-
fers 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 feminin-
ity. 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 sim-
ply are certain men that take longer to get—solidified” (72). The dash,
indicating a hesitation, draws attention to the inadvertent sexual charge
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 after-
wards 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 thou-
sand” (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 anatom-
ical completeness is needed to ensure that the symbolic relevance of
such petty theft not go unnoticed. Both Biff and Happy are symboli-
cally 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 occasion-
ally 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 adven-
ture can still create his own future. The flute associates the father, who
156 Luc Gilleman
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 fig-
ures have merged into one. That Ben confused Africa for Alaska sug-
gests 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 irresisti-
ble 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 masculin-
ity not with oppression but with nature and fertility, not with reality
but with imagination, and not with competition but with manly com-
radeship 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 “suf-
fer 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 sev-
enteen 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
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 dis-
covers 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 fan-
tasizes 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 con-
quered successfully only by a man of Ben’s stature. The play thus estab-
lishes 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 fan-
tasy 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 usu-
ally on a mattress that a man cracks an “oyster.” Inadvertently, the state-
ment 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
158 Luc Gilleman
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 domestic-
ity. To Willy, and now to Biff as well, the sight of Linda mending stock-
ings 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 obliter-
ate 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 hor-
ror of having “the son’s hard, public eye upon you, no longer swept by
your myth, no longer rousable from his separateness, no longer know-
ing 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 rep-
resent 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 sup-
posed to do, make a hero out of you? This supposed to make me sorry for you?
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 discov-
ered 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 hand-
shake 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 unu-
sually 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
160 Luc Gilleman
believed they would eventually become. Willy thinks that Biff has
refused his own greatness out of “spite” (131)—out of disgust for the
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 inha-
lation—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 com-
pany 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 perora-
tion 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 pet-
tiness 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 resurrec-
tion. 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
Bibliography
—. “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 declin-
ing 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 refrigera-
tor, and the physical appearance of his own two sons with their ability
to function productively in the business world shows that he associ-
ates 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 emo-
tional impotence.
164 Samantha Batten
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 play-
wright unless he can use things—in themselves—thematically, not simply as
properties to be touched then discarded on the way to discovery, but some-
how 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 surround-

ing Willy with various symbols that denote his physical and emotional
decomposition. For instance, Willy’s automobile—a symbol of his vital-
ity and his masculinity because he functions as a “road man” (80)—has
changed from a virile red Chevrolet to a decrepit Studebaker, parallel-
ing 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 advertise-
ments. By using these symbols, Miller both manifests Willy’s own declin-
ing masculinity and emphasizes the salesman’s compulsive need to
maintain his appearance of functionality.
Furthermore, Willy’s house itself, a traditional symbolic representa-
tion of the owner, lays transparent and infirm before the towering, intimi-
datingly 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 ceil-
ing, Willy reveals his profound need to “cover” himself: he backtracks
with Linda about the true amount of his commission after his initial gross
Compensatory Symbolism in Millers’s Death of a Salesman 165
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 masquer-
ade 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 cre-
ates a phallic image (i.e. Willy’s own “pipes” do not work anymore) refer-
ring 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 responsi-
bility for his actions.
In addition to the symbols that broadly represent Willy’s masculin-
ity, Miller employs more intricate, personal symbols that show Willy’s
struggle to maintain appearances. These items, such as Willy’s sac-
charine, not only elucidate his failing bodily functions but also com-
pensate 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”
166 Samantha Batten
(13). Foreshadowing his death, Willy—albeit unconsciously—recognizes

that his deceit and effort at compensation will ultimately lead to his emo-
tional (and physical) demise.
Willy’s faulty eyesight and glasses represent the most notable per-
sonal symbol of his effort to compensate for his failings. Willy can-
not 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 errone-
ous 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 finan-
cial prowess, he simply conforms to the capitalistic society by procur-
ing 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 him-
self, 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 “pro-
vide glimpses of their shared childhood and an older Willy, vulnera-
ble and insecure, eager for advice and praise from Ben” (Bloom 33).
However, while Ben represents the virility associated with masculin-
ity, 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 inex-
haustible” (Bloom 40).
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 news-
paper denotes the masculine ideals of notoriety, fame, and renown.
Willy and Linda equate the newspaper’s ability to provide pres-
tige and acknowledgement with masculine worthiness and success.
Furthermore, Willy, shortly after being fired, finds Bernard, who rep-
resents 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 emo-
tional 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 physi-
cal virility in myriad liaisons, Happy overcompensates for his spiritual
impotence by exaggerating his physical, sexual prowess. He equates
sexual conquest with true manliness; however, this is merely a cover for
his unconscious fears of being seen as weak and ineffective. The women
he seduces, whom he aptly terms “cover girl[s],” are merely covers for
his own emotional feelings of inadequacy (101). He takes (or uses) the
women because he cannot compete with the men. In this false sense of
masculine power, Happy is not with an ordinary woman but one who is
special and beautiful, one whose beauty, and subsequent worth, validates
his masculinity.
Biff, like Happy, “inherits from his father an extremely fragile sense
of self-worth dependent on the perceptions of others,” most importantly
168 Samantha Batten
“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 mascu-
line ideals of aggression, competitiveness, and physical prowess, Biff
achieves the pinnacle of high school, masculine bravado. Biff enjoys box-
ing, 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 associ-
ated 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 cur-
rent expectations when he was never even prepared to do so in the past.
While Willy promotes the masculine aspects of sports, he lacks the fore-
sight 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
in an adolescent state throughout the play, grasps at masculinity, as rep-

resented 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 symbol-
ism. 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,” met-
aphorically, the stain of Willy’s defeats. When Ben offers Willy, who
has just confided to Linda his dissatisfaction with life, a better oppor-
tunity 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 inev-
itable 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 (associ-
ated 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 super-
ficial, 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 eve-
ryday life, but as Biff slowly recognizes, its self-inflation is eventually
fatal” (113). Willy kills himself because he lacks either a masculine role
model to emulate or the self-sufficiency to find his own inner masculinity
170 Samantha Batten
without outside help. Throughout the play, Arthur Miller not only utilizes
symbols to represent the decay of the Loman family but also transforms
Willy from a flesh and blood human being into inanimate objects: an
orange peel, a zero, and, ultimately, the prospect of a check for twenty
thousand dollars.
Samantha Batten
Auburn University
Bibliography
Bloom, Harold. Arthur 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).]
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 vari-
ous 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.
172 About the Authors
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 ses-
enta (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.
About the Authors 173
Since 1990 he has served as the bibliographer for John Steinbeck and
is the co-editor with Brian Railsback of A John Steinbeck Encyclopedia
(Greenwood, 2006). His articles on Steinbeck have appeared in numer-
ous 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 mem-
ber 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 con-
ference he organizes the Harold Pinter Society mini-conference and
sponsored performance. He has written and presented on performance
theory, modern drama, and vodka in contemporary American film. He
is currently at work on his book Staging the Machine, an examination
of technological innovation and its effects on, and representation in,
twentieth-century drama.
Deborah Cosier Solomon, the daughter of missionaries, spent the first
eighteen years of her life in the Gambia, West Africa, after which she
moved to the United States to further her education. Mrs. Solomon is
currently finishing a Master of Liberal Arts degree at Auburn University
Montgomery and plans to pursue her current interest in English
174 About the Authors
Renaissance literature at the doctoral level. Her work has been pub-
lished 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 sev-
eral 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 under-
graduate 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 gen-
eral and Linda Loman in particular, Willy’s wife is an extraordinar-
ily 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 desper-
ate 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 (particu-
larly 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 ani-
mated 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 highly-
charged subtext and equally rich cultural context, about the possibility
176 Abstracts
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 master-
piece, Death of a Salesman, and places this great playwright in a long
procession of significant American writers who have responded simi-
larly 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 illu-
sions 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 bank-
ruptcy 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 embed-
ded 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 discus-
sion and experience with Miller’s play in that the students can delve
into the play, and in it find themselves and their dreams while consid-
ering their futures in a world that has not left the true American Dream
behind.
Abstracts 177
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 crea-
tor, 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 casu-
alty of its relentless transformation into new forms.
178 Abstracts
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 produc-
tion 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 contra-
diction. The piece argues, finally, that the machineries of profit-driven
publication and performance practices work against the critique of capi-
talism 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 chil-
dren. 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 life-
style, 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
“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 sacri-
fice, and their analogous encounters with failure—not only emphasize
Abstracts 179
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 experi-
ence 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 require-
ments 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 mas-
culine 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, Ben-Zvi, Linda, 12

132, 134 Bernard, 3, 4, 6, 61, 66, 67–68, 69, 71,
Abandonment, 16, 18, 83, 86, 88, 84, 90, 91, 129, 130, 142, 167, 168
89, 156 Bible, 34, 35, 121
Abbotson, Susan, 38 Bigsby, Christopher (C.W.), 11, 16, 18, 24,
Acceptance, 49, 55, 62, 81, 86, 89, 35, 39, 41, 64, 65, 68, 70, 78, 82, 91,
93, 124, 125, 127, 129, 142, 157, 123, 124, 135
159–160 Billman, Carol, 12
Actor, 17, 25, 106–108, 109, 110, 114, Bliquez, Guerin, 12, 24
116, 124 Bloom, Harold, 32, 140–141, 145, 163,
Adams, Henry, 97–98, 100–103 166, 169
Adler, Thomas, 40 Bradbury, Malcolm, 45
Adonis, 6, 131, 132, 135 Brater, Enoch, 78
Africa, 4, 22, 80, 130, 138, 156 Brecht, Bertolt, 105, 113
After the Fall, 11, 101 Broadway Theatre, 25, 29, 34, 43, 62,
Alaska, 4, 22, 80, 86, 87, 118, 130, 100, 102, 151
138, 156 Broken Glass, 39
Albee, Edward, 35, 37, 105 Brucher, Richard T., 96
Alger, Horatio, 130 Bush, First Lady Laura, 33
Alienation, 37, 43, 44, 45, 52, 71, 72, Business, 2–10, 15, 31, 36, 41, 50, 53,
73, 74, 123 54, 55, 62, 63, 67, 69–70, 72, 73, 75,
The American Clock, 39 76, 79, 81–93, 97, 100, 112, 115,
American Dream, 2, 3–5, 9, 14, 21, 22, 116, 124, 130, 142, 163, 167, 168
23, 26, 29, 38, 48, 49, 50, 54, 57, 59,
67, 71, 81, 83, 88, 138, 156, 166, 167
Canning, Charlotte, 12
Anderson, Maxwell, 100
Capital, 11, 29, 130
Anti-feminism, 24, 30, 31
Capitalism, 2, 5–6, 13, 16, 21, 23,
Ares, 122
31, 54, 61–63, 66–67, 69, 71,
Aristotle, 112, 152
72–74, 77–80, 81–93, 102, 114,
August, Eugene R., 13
115, 117, 118
Austin, Gayle, 12
Carbone, Beatrice, 16
Avery Fisher Hall, 33
Cardo, Amanda, 48, 49, 51, 55, 57
Carnegie, Dale, 3, 43
Balakian, Janet N., 13 Castellitto, George P., 99
Bates, Barclay W., 140 Catharsis, 49, 152
Beijing, 17, 41, 43, 55, 141, 149 Centola, Steven, 1, 49, 54
182 Index
Charley, 4–6, 11, 16, 28, 57, 61, 63–69, 129, 134, 137, 140–146, 154, 158,
71–72, 74, 77, 78, 84–86, 90, 91, 126, 163, 165–167
130, 135, 142, 151, 154, 160, 164 Fantasy, 4, 39, 41, 118, 125–127, 132,
Chicago Exposition of 1900, 97 142, 151, 155, 157
Clurman, Harold, 137, 141 Fatherhood, 3, 8, 18, 53, 54, 63, 65–69,
Cohn, Ruby, 127, 128, 129 71, 75, 76, 79, 81, 83, 85–90, 121,
Cold War, 21, 22, 27, 29–30 122, 131–133, 135, 138–139, 143,
Communism, 13, 21, 31 145, 150, 155, 159, 166
Conwell, Russell, 43 Felt, Leah, 16
Couchman, Gordon W., 18 Felt, Theo, 16
Crane, Stephen, 36 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 37, 135
Cronus, 121, 122 Feminism (in Marxism), 21, 31
The Crucible, 21, 32, 34, 39, 78, 105 Forsythe, Miss, 2, 11, 23, 30, 125
Cruz, Alex, 48, 49, 51 Francis, Miss, 2, 3, 9–10, 11
Cyclops, 121 Franz, Elizabeth, 18, 43
Franz, Esther, 16
Freud, Sigmund, 122
Def, Mos, 33
Friendship, 3, 4, 5, 11, 63, 65–66,
Delusion, 27, 28, 89, 92, 137–138,
68–70, 78, 81, 85, 90, 121
141–145, 158
Despair, 13, 18, 21, 35, 70, 123, 132,
145, 150 Gaia, 121
Dialectics, 113, 114 Garden imagery, 51, 86, 96, 140–141,
Dishonesty, 58, 80, 90, 124, 126, 131, 149, 156, 166
144, 146 Gauzy realism, 29, 105, 115
Dolan, Jill, 25 Gellburg, Sylvia, 16
Dreams, 7, 9, 12, 18, 28, 36–38, 40–41, Gender, 11, 13, 21–31, 41
43–46, 47–59, 66, 74, 75, 79, 81, Gibbs, Nancy, 47
83–84, 86, 88–89, 91, 102, 125, Ginsberg, Alan, 37
131–134, 143, 145, 151, 154–156, Glengarry Glen Ross, 13
158–160, 169 Great Depression, 42, 79, 81, 82
Dreiser, Theodore, 36 Greek mythology, 121, 123, 131
Dukore, Bernard, 71 Griffin, Alice, 78
Dunnock, Mildred, 16, 17 Grossman, Lev, 51, 52, 53
“The Dynamo and the Virgin,” 97 Gussow, Mel, 137, 145, 146
Hadomi, Leah, 145

Echoes Down the Corridor, 39, 44 Hamilton, Patricia, 16
The Education of Henry Adams, 97 Happiness, 2, 36, 49, 56, 61, 71, 76–77,
Ellison, Ralph, 37, 44, 45 79, 81, 83, 89, 130, 132, 138, 140,
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 36, 37, 79 146, 151, 169
Empathy, 132, 142 Harshbarger, Karl, 12
Evans, Richard I., 92 Hawthorn, Jeremy, 138
Hayman, Ronald, 18, 87, 88
Failure, 4–10, 12–13, 17, 21, 25–26, Hecatoncheires, 121
28–29, 35–36, 38–42, 62, 64, 67–68, Hedda Gabler, 150
70, 76–77, 79–80, 81–88, 90–93, 95, Heller, Joseph, 45
98, 101, 108, 111, 114, 122–126, Herb, Jake, 48, 56
Index 183
Hercules, 131, 135 Krapp’s Last Tape, 106, 112

Heyen, William, 135 Kullman, Colby H., 14, 82
Hoeveler, D.L., 132, 135
Honesty, 28, 34, 36, 52, 64, 67, 69, 84, Laughter, 3, 80, 84, 87, 128, 129, 139, 142
90, 92, 125, 137, 140, 143, 146 Letta, 2, 11, 157
Hope, 1, 2, 9, 14, 28, 35–37, 44, 46, 49, Lightcap, Jessica, 48, 54, 56, 57–58
55, 58, 76, 89, 93, 101, 102, 132, Lin, Zhu, 17, 43
134, 137, 140–146, 150, 156 Loman, Ben, 4, 7, 12, 15, 17, 22, 54,
House Un-American Activities 65, 66, 67, 74, 75, 80, 81, 83, 86–91,
Committee, 21, 45 129, 130, 139, 150, 151, 155–157,
Hughes, Langston, 50 160, 166, 169
Human, 2, 16, 22, 34, 35, 36, 37, 39, 43, Loman, Biff, 2, 3, 8–18, 26–30, 47, 48,
45, 46, 47, 61, 62, 65, 69–70, 81, 83, 51–59, 63, 66–69, 71–80, 82, 86–93,
88, 90, 97, 100, 102, 105, 107–109, 96, 98, 107, 115, 118, 121–135,
113–116, 140, 164, 170 138–146, 150–160, 163–169
Humanity, 35, 38, 91, 108, 113, 115, 146 Loman, Happy, 2, 8, 11, 12, 16, 18, 23,
Humanity-effect, 108, 115 26–31, 47, 48, 52–58, 63, 67, 68,
Hume, Beverly, 12, 24 71–80, 86–91, 107, 124–128, 139,
Humor, 154 143, 150–160, 167, 168
Loman, Linda, 2–5, 10, 11–18, 23–30,
Ibsen, Henrik, 23, 110, 150 42, 58, 63–70, 73–78, 84–90, 95, 96,
Icon, 29, 106, 107, 111 107, 108, 113, 114, 118, 124–130,
Identity, 26, 29, 37, 43, 44, 105, 123, 134 138, 142, 144, 149, 150, 152–160,
Immaturity, 83, 124, 127, 128, 131, 143 163–169
Infidelity, 9, 90, 126 Loman, Willy, 2–18, 21–31, 38–44,
Insecurity, 77, 82, 83, 88, 124, 129, 131, 47–58, 61–80, 81–93, 95–102,
151, 166 106–118, 122–135, 137–146,
Inside of His Head, The, 150, 152 149–160, 163–170
Invisible Man, The, 44 Love, 3, 12, 15, 16, 26–28, 42–44,
Irony, 8, 13, 16, 18, 40, 68, 78, 86, 89, 55–58, 76, 77, 81, 84, 92, 93, 96,
117, 123, 130, 133, 135, 136, 141, 129, 130, 134, 137–142, 145, 149,
144, 146, 149, 160 159, 160
Jackson, Esther Merle, 123, 134 Machine, 72, 95–103, 105, 109–119
Jacobson, Irving, 24, 26, 28 Machine-system, 113
Jason and The Argonauts, 123 Machinery, 71, 95, 113, 116, 164, 178
Jefferson, Thomas, 36, 40, 83 The Machine in the Garden, 68
Jobs, Steve, 121 MacLeish, Archibald, 45
Mamet, David, 13, 37, 118
Kazan, Elia, 16, 17 Martin, Robert A., 39
Keller, Joe, 62 Marx, Leo, 96
Keller, Kate, 16 Marxism, 21, 22, 61, 62, 118
Kerrane, Kevin, 31 Mason, Jeffrey D., 13
Kleptomania, 62, 80, 88, 114, 142, 155 Materialism, 21, 37–38, 81, 83, 88,
Knowles, Ric, 24 89–90, 91, 137, 138, 146
Koenig, Rhoda, 12 McDonough, Carla J., 12
Koon, Helene Wickham, 143, 145 Mechanical imagery, 99, 100, 108
184 Index
Melville, Herman, 36 Porter, Thomas E., 65

Method, 39, 105, 114, 151 Practical (stage practical), 106, 107, 110
Miller, Arthur, 1–6, 8–10, 11–18, 21–32, Problem play, 152
33–35, 37–46, 47–53, 55, 57–58, Proctor, Elizabeth, 16
61–72, 77, 78, 82, 83, 87–92, 96–103, Pynchon, Thomas, 37
105, 110, 113, 116, 117, 122–135,
137–141, 145, 146, 149–154, 157, Ragged Dick, 130
158, 163–170 Realism, 22–23, 29, 31, 51, 78, 105,
Modernity, 53, 73, 97, 113, 115, 118, 137 106, 110–119
Monroe, Marilyn, 11, 101 Reality, 4, 8, 13, 16, 28, 31, 36, 40, 44,
Morality, 5, 12, 16, 35, 36, 39, 45, 50, 46, 53–58, 61, 63, 72, 75, 84, 98, 100,
67, 88, 90–91, 123, 126, 137, 141, 106, 107, 111, 114, 115, 125, 146,
142, 143 149, 151, 153, 156, 157, 159, 164
Morrison, Toni, 37 Reality-effect, 106, 113, 115
Murphy, Brenda, 18, 38 Reality Principle, 157
Myth of the West, 18 Recognition, 84, 123, 126, 131–133,
155, 166, 168
Nature, 76, 118, 130, 135, 138, 140, 156 Recognition (Anagnorisis), 152
Nature imagery, 156 Rejection, 44, 65, 67, 71, 86, 87, 88,
Nelson, Benjamin, 163 133, 138, 142
Newman, Annie, 13 Requiem, 4, 8, 18, 28, 59, 66, 72, 133,
Newman, Manny, 13 135, 145, 160
New York City, 14, 17, 25, 29, 31, 33, Responsibility, 15, 18, 45, 47, 51, 77, 121,
75, 78, 102, 123 122, 141–143, 155, 165
New York Times, 33, 34 Resurrection/renewal, 131, 136, 143,
’night, Mother, 25, 26 146, 160
Nilsen, Helge Normann, 32 Retardation, 153
Norman, Marsha, 25 Reversal (Peripeteia), 152, 159
Rhea, 122
Obligatory scene (scène à faire), 150, 152 Ribkoff, Fred, 141, 163, 168
Oedipus, 12, 116 Roudané, Matthew, 11, 14, 41, 67, 78
Oedipus complex, 122 Rowe, Kenneth Thorpe, 17
Oliver, Bill, 3, 8, 9, 14, 28, 92, 98, Rubin, Gayle, 21, 31
115, 125, 126, 131, 132, 143,
144, 150, 155 Sacrifice, 16, 23, 43, 67, 69, 138,
Ontos, 110, 111 140–142
Otten, Charlotte F., 12 Salesmanship, 6, 7, 53, 57, 62, 66, 70,
Otten, Terry, 1, 13, 32 72, 73, 84, 113, 133, 153–154, 160,
Ouranous, 121 165, 166
Savran, David, 13
Pan, 156 Schizophrenia, 39, 124
Parker, Brian, 12, 122, 124, 132, 135 Seeds (see Garden imagery)
Pathos, 152, 154 Self-actualization, 82–83, 137, 138,
Phallic Power, 156, 157, 164–170 140, 146
Poetics, 152 Self-awareness, 30, 79, 132, 138, 141,
Polemics, 113 143, 154, 159, 167
Powell, Colin, 50 Self-condemnation, 132
Index 185
Self-deceit, 14, 39, 41, 79, 157, 158 Theatricality, 29, 40, 102, 105–106,
Self-realization, 93 112, 115
Selfishness, 21, 62, 71, 74, 88, 144 Thoreau, Henry David, 36, 97
Selfless, 23, 27, 28 Timebends, 13, 17, 31, 45, 78, 98, 101, 149
Semiotics, 105, 106, 111, 113 Toward a Farther Star, 11
Shareholder value, 116 Tragedy, 4, 13, 15, 16, 18, 23, 24, 48, 50,
Shepard, Sam, 37 52, 83, 84, 101, 114, 124, 131–132, 149
Siegel, Paul N., 141 Tragic flaw, 114
Sign, 70, 108, 110, 145, 153, 159 Twain, Mark, 36, 37, 44
Sign-thing, 110, 111
Simplicity, 56, 68, 72, 95, 110, 123, 138 Values, 30, 37–40, 42–48, 50, 54, 67, 70,
Singleman, Dave, 4, 5, 15, 74, 79, 81, 81, 88, 92, 97, 109, 114, 123, 132,
83, 84, 86, 96, 99 134, 137, 141, 146
Social realism, 105 Von Szeliski, John, 141
Sports imagery, 79, 168
Stanton, Kay, 12, 13 Wagner, Howard, 4–7, 53, 54, 61, 62,
Steyn, Mark, 101, 102 66, 67, 69, 70, 71, 74, 77, 79, 84, 85,
Subtext, 35, 40, 153 98, 99, 107, 108, 109, 111, 112, 113,
Success, 3–4, 6–9, 14, 15, 22–25, 29, 30, 114, 115, 128
38, 40, 42–44, 49, 54–56, 63, 65–68, War with Iraq, 33, 34
71, 72, 74–77, 81–91, 98–102, 115, Well-made play, 151, 152, 153
117, 124, 127, 130, 132, 133, 134, Weill, Kurt, 100
135, 139, 145, 146, 155, 156, 157, White House, 33
166, 168 Whitman, Walt, 36, 97, 99–100
Suicide, 2, 8, 17, 25, 26, 76, 77, 130, Williams, Tennessee, 13, 29, 37, 63, 105
132, 137, 141, 142, 149, 152, 160 Wingfield, Amanda, 29
Sterling, Eric, 117 Wright, Richard, 37
Symbol, 40, 63, 67, 73, 78, 89, 97, 111,
122, 132, 137, 141, 146, 149–160, Zeineddine, Nada, 12
163–170 Zeus, 122

Death of A Salesman PDF

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Death of A Salesman PDF

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2008

Cover Design: Aart Jan Bergshoeff

9 In His Father’s Image: Biff Loman’s Struggle with

the originality of the lesser-known essayists met with hostility; the

1) Does Arthur Miller portray the women in Death of a Salesman in

By providing insightful and thought-provoking essays by renowned

1. The Role of Women

The aforementioned six topics focus on essential and controver-

women is “like bowling or something. I just keep knockin’ them over

2. The American Dream

The American Dream pervades Miller’s seminal drama. Willy Loman

will be massive! They’ll come from Maine, Massachusetts, Vermont, New

The audience, however, might remember Willy’s lament to Howard that

3. Capitalism and Business

The dilemmas posed by capitalism and business clearly exist as inte-

shows what Willy sells, perhaps because a salesman sells himself—his

Miller’s play is perhaps not an indictment of capitalism because Willy

Technology is a thought-provoking topic in that it shows how time has

5. Willy’s Legacy to Biff

Death of a Salesman contains much symbolism that affects the mean-

It might surprise some readers to find this bit of dialogue spoken by

Manny acted “absurd[ly] . . . completely isolated from the ordinary

which, according to the playwright himself, must be done if our theater

August, Eugene R. “Death of a Salesman: A Men’s Study Approach” in Western Ohio

—. Timebends: A Life. New York: Penguin, 1995.

Although Gayle Rubin’s 1994 interview with Judith Butler addresses

Willy Loman’s demise as a victim of capitalism was nearly unani-

masculinity Willy presents meant to generate a statement critical of an

Looking at the more recent critical reception of Miller’s play, espe-

more altruistic constructs of mid-century gender and family ideologies;

Willy (133). Similarly, in her verbal supplements to Biff’s comments

We might speculate that a stern wake up call from an otherwise support-

mid-century, Cold War gender roles. Certainly by 1949 the relative

their male counterparts. If we do read Linda as an inactive object of

Bigsby, C.W.E. Modern American Drama, 1945–2000. Cambridge: Cambridge UP,

One of the most fascinating images I remember having seen in the

literary artist in American society in an essay published in The New

met opposition from the reality of indigenous people whose foreign

addressing real challenges to national ideals, these guardians of the

assembled in Echoes Down the Corridor (2000), Miller comments

of a Salesman, as the “hidden” is “unveiled” and “the inner laws of

In Christopher Bigsby’s view, this remarkable fusion of form and theme

In this respect, then, it becomes clear why discussion of any play by

such as Elizabeth Franz in her 1999 Broadway performance and Zhu

in American society today have inevitably struggled uneasily within the

Bigsby, Christopher. Arthur Miller and Company. London: Methuen, 1990.

Arthur Miller wrote Death of a Salesman in 1948, in a society with

I frame many of my units around the central issue of growing into

Interactive in December of 2004: “Nearly half of teens surveyed (47%)

I believe that as with any study of Miller, it is important for the

Grossman’s description of this phase in young people’s lives calls to

A nearly identical perspective is prophetically evident throughout

In the years following Salesman’s original production, the future

the “stable, quasi-parental bond between employer and employee”

Willy tries to actualize in his present life the strongly-held beliefs of

Willy clings to an outdated definition of the American Dream. His

He adopts a counterfeit innocence and embraces the illusion that he is a vic-

In a piece of reflective writing by Jess, entitled “Settling,” she explores

This fear of anonymity, of loneliness in a world of others, of loss of

Happy yearns to break the monotony of the reality he has constructed

Choice is an inevitable consequence of pursuing the American

of lies. The mendacity of the Lomans is primarily what my students