Death of a SalesmanTragedy Re-interpreted

Cliff Notes helps out

Or Spark-notes

And here’s more help

• Death of a Salesman Watch Mojo’s Top 10

Try to put these questions out of your mind

• As a student, am I just selling my teachers a line, trying to bring in high enough grades to stay alive? Is there a point to my life?

• Am I Biff, who would rather be outdoors than cooped up in a classroom?

• Am I Happy, who says that he wants to be outdoors, but really wants to score? And to score the women who are engaged to his bosses?

• What am I selling?

A Question for American Advertisers

Why can we see through walls?

Or like this?

Some notes about the set

• The house was significant for Miller because he was working with and against the Greek tradition. Remember that Antigone’s death was part of the fall of the “house” of Cadmus? As the family falls, so does the “house.”

• Original title was The Inside of His Head and Miller was going to have the stage be a giant skull, so everything would be happening inside Willy’s head. That still sort of is true but without the skull. Past and present, for example, jump back and forth as Willy remembers.

• Miller was trying to develop an “American style” of drama (whole page from Jacobus 1101-2).

The Hero

• Being “liked” is a huge issue for Willy: “Charley is not – liked. He’s liked, but he’s not – well liked” (30). YET, do you “like” Willy? Or Biff? Or Happy?

• Whom do you “like” in the play? Is this like an early version of Facebook?

• Jacobus says that for Willy, being “liked” is more important than “integrity, honesty, and fidelity” (1102).

• Willy is also a dreamer. After Death of a Salesman was first produced in China, “one commentator said . . . That China is filled with such dreamers as Willy” (1102).

What is the effect of the focus on Biff?

What are the keys to understanding Linda?

Why does Willy cheat?Effect on Biff?

Aristotle on Tragedy

• p. 1027-9 "a tragedy is a play that shows the change in the protagonist's fortunes from good to bad. The incidents must inspire fear and pity. . . We fear most deeply for characters who are like ourselves, when they are in danger. What threatens them may threaten us: sickness, old age, betrayal, fire. . .

Pity

• "Pity is the final proof of tragic drama. In order to feel pity, we must believe that the protagonist's suffering is undeserved, the punishment greater than the crime. Yet tragic heroes must not be totally guiltless. . . A flaw must contribute to their undoing if we are to feel pity as well as fear. . .

But what is Miller doing?

• "It is particularly fearful to watch someone fall from a position of high rank or power. The heroes of classical tragedy are always members of the nobility. Their fates are terrifying to us, for we sense that if these great, privileged figures are vulnerable, then none of us is safe.”

• Miller: “It is time, I think, that we who are without kings, took up this bright thread of our history and followed it to the only place it can possibly lead in our time – the heart and spirit of the average man” (qtd. in Jacobus 1111)

Northrop Frye on Tragedy

• p. 214 "Anyone accustomed to think archetypally of literature will recognize in tragedy a mimesis [imitation] of sacrifice. Tragedy is a paradoxical combination of a fearful sense of rightness (the hero must fall) and a pitying sense of wrongness (it is too bad that he falls). . . .

 

• p. 218 "In comedy a society forms around the hero: in tragedy the chorus, however faithful, usually represents the society from which the hero is gradually isolated. . . Comedy is much concerned with integrating the family and adjusting the family to society as a whole; tragedy is much concerned with breaking up the family and opposing it to the rest of society.

Some of the best lines

• The Dustin Hoffman-John Malkovich version• A longer clip

What Miller wrote when he saw actors doing the play

• “There is a certain immortality involved in theater, not created by monuments and books, but through the knowledge the actor keeps to his dying day that on a certain afternoon, in an empty and dusty theater, he cast a shadow of a being that was not himself but the distillation of all he had ever observed; all the unsingable heartsong the ordinary man may feel but never utter, he gave voice to. And by that he somehow joins the ages” (Miller qtd. in Jacobus 1163).

Two critics on Willy

• “But the problem with Willy – aside from his self-delusion, his ineptness, his self-pity, his misplaced pride, and his fraudulent morality – is that he has dreamed the wrong dream” (June Schlueter and James K. Flanagan qtd. in Jacobus 1167).

Psychoanalytical Approach

• Perhaps one of the most complex defenses is regression, the temporary return to a former psychological state, which is not just imagined but relived. Regression can involve a return either to a painful or a pleasant experience. It is a defense because it carries our thoughts away from some present difficulty (as when DOAS’s Willy Loman flashes back to his past in order to avoid the unpleasant realities of his present life). However, it differs from other defenses in that it carries with it the opportunity for active reversal, the acknowledgment and working through of repressed experiences and emotions, because we can alter the effects of a wound only when we relive the wounding experience. This is why regression is such a useful therapeutic tool. (15)

Fears

• Fear of intimacy• Fear of abandonment• Fear of betrayal• Low self-esteem• Insecure or unstable sense of self• Oedipal fixation

• “I become hurt and angry with my friend without consciously knowing why. My unconscious knowledge of the reason why is what makes me anxious. In this way, anxiety always involves the return of the repressed: I am anxious because something I repressed – some painful or frightening or guilty experience – is resurfacing, and I want to keep it repressed.” (Tyson 17)

Fear of death

• “Fear of abandonment also plays a role when we fear the death of others. . . . How could you leave me? Don’t you love me? What did I do wrong? . . . the death of a loved one pushes our guilt buttons: somehow I must have been inadequate; I must have done something wrong or I wouldn’t be punished in this way. In fact, fear of such a loss, of such intense psychological pain, is probably the biggest reason why some of us are afraid to get too close to another person or are afraid to love too deeply. If I can hold something back, not give my whole self over to the loved one, then I will be better able to bear the loss when the beloved dies.” (Tyson 22)

Death of a Salesman

• A psychoanalytic reading of DOAS might examine the ways in which WL’s flashbacks to the past are really regressive episodes brought on by his present psychological trauma: his own and his sons’ lack of success in the business world, success Willy needed in order to assuage the massive insecurity he’s suffered since his abandonment in childhood by his father and older brother. The play is thus structured by the return of the repressed, for Willy has spent his life repressing, through denial and avoidance, his psychological insecurity and the social inadequacy and business failure that have resulted. . . . the psychological dynamics of the family, an exploration of the ways in which unresolved conflicts about our roles within the family are “played out” in the workplace and “passed down” to our children. (Tyson 34-35)

Marxist Reading

• Focus on the ways in which the psychological problems above are produced by the material/ historical realities within which the family operates: the ideology of the American dream that tells Willy his self-worth is earned only by economic success and that keeps him looking up to his predatory brother Ben; the rampant consumerism that keeps the Lomans buying on credit what they can’t afford; the competitiveness of the business world that puts Willy back on straight commission work after 30 years of employment with the same firm; the exploitative potential of a socioeconomic system that doesn’t require all companies to provide adequate pension coverage for their employees; and the ideology of “survival-of-the-fittest” capitalism that allows Howard to fire Willy with no concern for the latter’s deteriorating mental condition. The central scene for such an interpretation would be that in which Howard (after displaying signs of his own economic success) fires Willy, telling him to turn to his sons for financial help.

Critique Capitalism or Willy?

• The play shows us the contradictions inherent in capitalist ideology, which promotes the interests of big business at the expense of the “little man” who has “bought into” capitalist values.

• Critique of play might focus on Miller making it a tragedy for Willy instead of a critique of the entire system

Works Cited

• Jacobus, Lee A., Ed. The Bedford Introduction to Drama, • 7th Ed. Boston: Bedford/ St. Martin’s, 2013. Print.

• Miller, Arthur. Death of a Salesman. New York: Penguin,• 1949. Print.

• Tyson, Lois. Critical Theory Today, 3rd Ed. London: • Routledge, 2015. Print.