Arthur Asher Miller: 

Death of a Salesman 

（思政融入点：美国梦的破灭）

The first play by Arthur Miller (1915–2005) to reach Broadway, The Man Who Had All the Luck (1944), closed after only four performances. His second, All My Sons (1947), however, achieved success and introduced themes that would dominate his work: the pursuit of success enshrined in the American dream, social and familial tension, and the conflict between competing moralities, the economic and political system as a final cause of the problems and misconceptions Miller’s characters have to endure. With Death of a Salesman (1949), his finest play, Miller endowed similar issues and problems with a tragic dimension. It relates the story of a representative American, Willy Loman: an ordinary man, as his surname punningly indicates, but one whose choices and their consequences spell out the darker side of the national dream. A salesman who, after thirty-five years on the road, has never achieved the rewards and recognition for which he had hoped, Willy is driven to despair by his failure in a system that seems to him to guarantee success. Measuring his worth by the volume of his sales – Miller never lets us know what Willy sells because, essentially, he is selling himself –Willy 314 The American Century: Literature since 1945 withdraws from the crises and disappointments of the present into memories of the past and into imaginary conversations with his brother Ben, his symbol of success. Death of a Salesman is, in a sense, a memory play: a working title for it was “The Inside of his Head.” And everything here is seen double, as Willy sees it and as it is: a point sounded in the initial stage description of Willy’s “fragile-seeming home.” “An air of the dream clings to the place,” we are told, “a dream rising out of reality.” This is also a tale of domestic realism in which Miller uses elements of expressionism and symbolism to transmute the story into a tragedy. The dialogue is realistic vernacular: the idiom of a society that pursues illusion rather than fact. But the “exploded house” in cross-section that appears in Act One and supplies the setting for most of the play prepares us for a revelatory intimacy. We, the audience, are drawn into the family combustion. We are drawn into the collapsing consciousness of Willy, in particular, into the past as an explanation of the present. And with the help of a rich tapestry of symbols (the symbols of success and successful father figures that haunt Willy, for instance), we are invited to see this drama as the tragic crisis of a society as well as one of one unremarkable but representative man. Good American that he is, Willy believes that success is his birthright. He can never give up this belief, or its corollary: that, in the land of opportunity that is America, failure can only be the fault of the individual. Despite his growing sense of separation from the success ethic, he still judges himself in its terms. His wife Linda watches helplessly as he tears himself apart. All she can do is care and ask others to care: “attention,” she declares, “attention must be finally paid to such a person.” His son, Happy, can only surrender to the same ethic. Willy’s other son, Biff, is different. Biff senses that he does not want what the world calls success. But, unfortunately, he cannot articulate, or properly know, what he does want. “I don’t know – what I’m supposed to want,” he confesses. All he can say to Willy, in a desperate declaration of personal love and social resistance, is “Pop! I’m a dime a dozen, and so are you!” Listening to Biff, Willy learns the value of love. Tragically, and typically, however, he then translates love into the only values he knows, the values of a salesman. What he gives Biff in return is the gift of himself, or rather his worth as an economic unit. Willy kills himself so that his family can have the insurance money and Biff, he hopes, can get a new start in life. “He had the wrong dreams, all, all, wrong,” Biff observes of his father, as he stands beside his graveside. The tragedy of Willy Loman was that, and that he was tremulously aware of that. And, Miller makes it clear, it is the tragedy of a society as well. The challenge that Willy Loman never quite meets, to know and name himself, is also the challenge that confronts John Proctor, the central character in The Crucible(1953), and Eddie Carbone, the protagonist in A View from the Bridge(1955; revised 1956). As in Death of a Salesman, too, that challenge is a personal one rooted in a social landscape: people in Miller’s plays, especially the earlier ones, are compelled to confront themselves, and make the choices that define their lives, in terms that are determined by their history and society. Eddie Carbone cannot meet the challenge. John Proctor does meet the challenge, however. Written at the height of the hysteria whipped up by the UnAmerican Activities Committee, The Crucible explores issues of personal conscience and social suppression through the dramatic analogy of the 1692 Salem witchcraft trials. With the help of this analogy, Miller, who was himself a victim of the Committee, touches on all the consequences of McCarthyism: the exploitation of legitimate cultural The American Century: Literature since 1945 315 fears, conspiracy theories, and social hysteria, the oppression of the innocent and the manipulation of power, the complicity of ordinary citizens and public officials in a paranoid social process that appears to take on an irresistible life of its own. When John Proctor’s wife is named as a witch by a young woman, Abigail, with whom he has had an adulterous liaison, he attempts to expose the accuser. This, however, leads to his own arrest. Tempted to save his skin by confessing, he decides that honor requires his death. He has been drawn into examining his life by the accusations leveled at him; and he recognizes that, while innocent of witchcraft, he has other responsibilities to answer for. His confession of adultery with Abigail initiates an intense spiritual revaluation of himself. This leads, in turn, to the belief that even his execution for witchcraft would be unearned, since he is guilty while those he would be dying with are truly innocent. John confesses because he believes himself too ridden with guilt to die with honor. He recants, however, out of a sense of responsibility to the innocents he is to die with, and to himself. The demand that his signed confession be displayed in public is one that he feels compelled, ultimately, to resist. It would steal innocence from the truly innocent: “How may I live without my name,” John asks his accusers. “I’ve given you my soul; leave me my name!’ After an absence of eight years from the New York stage, Miller returned in 1964 with After the Fall and Incident at Vichy. This was followed by The Price, in 1968, and The Creation of the World and Other Business, in 1972. The plays of this period are very different in terms of subject matter. After the Fall is a semi-autobiographical drama, based on Miller’s marriage to Marilyn Monroe; Incident at Vichy deals with Nazi persecution of the Jews. In The Price, two brothers meet after the death of their father to arrange the sale of his furniture. In The Creation of the World, a serio-comic rewriting of the story of Adam and Eve, Adam must struggle to find a capacity for goodness, and moral responsibility in himself, to guide Eve towards forgiveness and Cain towards repentance. All of them, however, are marked by a shift from the social to the personal. Whatever the subject, the focus is on individual experience and the problem of individual guilt. The personal resonance of plays like After the Fall was sustained in some of Miller’s later works. Elegy for a Lady (1982), for example, is an elegant and ambiguous exploration of love. Some Kind of Love Story (1982), in a similarly intimate way, investigates the strange relationship between a private detective and a prostitute he has been questioning about a murder over the years. I Can’ t Remember Anything (1987) again concentrates on a couple, this time an elderly one, to dramatize the pleasures and the pains of old age. Mr Peters’ Connection (2000) focuses on the title character, as he struggles to forge a connection between his past and present. A few other later dramas return, however, to the social emphasis of Death of a Salesman and The Crucible. The Archbishop’s Ceiling (1977) uses the setting of an unnamed East European country to consider the responsibilities of the artist. Even more memorably, The American Clock (1986) returns to Miller’s earlier dramatic explorations of the national democratic experiment. An epic history of the Depression of the 1930s, in both personal and public terms, the play focuses on the memories of two survivors. One, Les Baum, dwells on the domestic: the decline of his middle-class Jewish family into poverty. The other, a financier named Arthur Robertson, concentrates on the social: his survival, thanks to his ability to anticipate the economic crash. Together, though, the recollections of the two 316 The American Century: Literature since 1945 men register an abiding faith in the ability of the American nation to repair and redefine itself. What the Depression did ultimately, Miller suggests, was strengthen and affirm democracy, to give Americans back their belief in themselves – together with a renewed conviction that, as one character puts it, “the world was meant to be better.” 

Preview questions:

1. What are the writing features of Arthur Miller's plays?

2. Make a brief analysis of the major character Willy.

3. Miller's plays give a reality check to the American dream that not everything is golden. His writings give a realistic quality to characters acknowledging they are people and not perfect. Appreciatethe play, Death of a Salesman in your own words.