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Miller: Death of a Salesman
In this nineteen-part course, Professor John McRae (University of Nottingham) explores Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. We begin with a broad introduction to the historical, literary and cultural context, before going through the play scene-by-scene, providing close reading and detailed analysis, with commentary on character, plot, themes and motifs, language, symbolism, and more.
Note: Page numbers are based on the Penguin edition of the play (1998, ed. Christopher Bigsby). Students using a different version of the play may encounter slight differences in both text and page numbers.
Introduction
In this module, we provide a broad introduction to the historical, literary and cultural context to Death of a Salesman, focusing in particular on: (i) the kind of plays that were being produced in America in the years following the end of the Second World War – including Arthur Miller’s ‘All My Sons’ (1947) and Death of a Salesman (1949), and Tennessee Williams’ ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’ (1947); (ii) the concept of the American Dream, especially the importance of money and wealth; (iii) race politics in post-war, pre-Civil Rights America; (iv) the interrelationship between ‘All My Sons’ (1947), A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) and ‘Death of a Salesman’ (1949), all of which were directed by the same person – Elia Kazan; (v) the extent to which the fragmented set design in ‘Death of a Salesman’ echoes some of the central concerns of the play; (vi) the importance of family to the genre of tragedy; (vii) the extent to which ‘Death of a Salesman’ is fragmented temporally (i.e. with flashbacks to various points in time) as well as spatially; (viii) the character of Willy Loman, including the implication of his name ‘Loman’ and his status (announced in the play’s title) as a ‘Salesman’; (ix) the history of the ‘ordinary’ person on the American stage, page and screen – Charlie Chaplin’s ‘The Tramp’ (1915), Eugene O’Neill’s ‘The Hairy Ape’ (1922), Thornton Wilder’s ‘Our Town’ (1942) and ‘The Skin of our Teeth’ (1942), Mark Twain’s ‘Huckleberry Finn’ (1884) and ‘The Adventures of Tom Sawyer’ (1876); (x) the history of the ‘ordinary’ hero in Western literature more generally – the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-80), Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) and Albert Camus (1913-60), and the modernism of Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), James Joyce (1882-1942), D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930) and Franz Kafka (1883-1924); (xi) the Loman family – Willy, Linda, Biff and Happy; (xii) the extent to which the members of the Loman family know themselves and each other; (xiii) the importance of nature and the natural world in the play, especially the theme of the loss of nature; and (xiv) the importance of money in the play, and the extent the play stands as a critique of untrammelled capitalism.
death of a salesman.
00:00:06It was a very big hit play
00:00:08in New York. It opened in 1949
00:00:11a couple of years before Arthur Miller had had another
00:00:15huge hit with a play called All My Sons.
00:00:17All My Sons is a very naturalistic play
00:00:21about the corruption of American capitalism
00:00:25during wartime
00:00:29and the guilt
00:00:31of someone who was, in effect, a corporate criminal.
00:00:33Now that's a very modern idea. The corporate criminality that we have seen
00:00:38in the 19 eighties nineties and two thousands
00:00:44has become almost an everyday feature
00:00:47of our perception of capitalist society and
00:00:50possibly even more so of American society,
00:00:54especially perhaps
00:00:59under President Trump.
00:01:00It was an unusual take on capitalism for the time,
00:01:04because
00:01:09in the 19 forties
00:01:10America had won the war.
00:01:12Any movie that you ever see about the Second World War
00:01:14will show you it was America that won it hands down.
00:01:17And by contributing to the Allied victory in the Second World War,
00:01:22America did certainly become,
00:01:27even if it wasn't completely before the number one industrial commercial
00:01:29capitalist power
00:01:37in the world,
00:01:39it was set against the communist regimes of Eastern Europe,
00:01:41Russia in particular remember Japan and Germany.
00:01:45The two economies, which are now
00:01:49leading world economies, had been destroyed
00:01:51by the Second World War.
00:01:55So you might expect that the artistic production coming out of America
00:01:58after the Second World War would be a bit more gung ho.
00:02:05A bit more patriotic, a bit more. We are the champions.
00:02:08But in effect, all my sons
00:02:13and a Tennessee Williams play that you may
00:02:17very well known called The Streetcar Named Desire,
00:02:19were very much probing
00:02:23the sadness, the tragedy
00:02:25at the heart
00:02:27of the American dream.
00:02:29Now, this concept, the American dream,
00:02:31it goes back as far as the idea that in America you could be born in a log cabin
00:02:34and reached the White House and become president of the United States.
00:02:43Abraham Lincoln is the template for that.
00:02:47And fortunately for his history, he
00:02:51helped end the American Civil War, which, remember, was only 80 years ahead
00:02:56of the time we're talking about The wounds of the Civil War still run deep,
00:03:031947. They were even closer.
00:03:10America was a white dominated nation
00:03:15that is fundamentally important.
00:03:18Segregation was everywhere, especially in the deep South.
00:03:20The America of 19 forties was not the America we know today.
00:03:25Hollywood was the big Dream factory and the big influence worldwide,
00:03:29which took American culture worldwide.
00:03:34But in 1949 when Death of a Salesman was first staged,
00:03:38there wasn't yet any rock and roll.
00:03:42There wasn't any black music for white audiences.
00:03:45America was very much the white capitalist dream.
00:03:50Now that dream,
00:03:56which perhaps began in the mid
00:03:5819th century, when
00:04:01Go West young man,
00:04:03was the instruction to everybody who wanted to go and make their fortune.
00:04:05America was the place you could
00:04:09from nothing
00:04:12make a fortune become a millionaire
00:04:13and money is the class system over there.
00:04:17Old money,
00:04:22New Money
00:04:23and
00:04:25in Tennessee Williams
00:04:26loss of Money.
00:04:27Now when we come to Death of a Salesman,
00:04:30it was staged in 1949
00:04:35and not many people seem to have made a really important connection
00:04:37with
00:04:43the play. I just mentioned
00:04:44Tennessee Williams Streetcar Named Desire, which was staged in 1947.
00:04:46The to place could not be more different,
00:04:52in fact, has has suggested
00:04:55Death of a Salesman is quite different from all my sons
00:04:57and death of a salesman.
00:05:00To my mind,
00:05:01contains a lot of influences from Tennessee Williams.
00:05:02Let me explain.
00:05:06The director and designer
00:05:08of both productions were the same.
00:05:11The great great great director Elia Kazan,
00:05:13the casts
00:05:18of
00:05:20Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller. Plays and movies
00:05:20were very often the same big stars
00:05:24all the way through
00:05:27there.
00:05:29Contemporary history.
00:05:30What we see when the curtain goes up
00:05:35in Death of a Salesman
00:05:39is
00:05:41a fragmented set,
00:05:43a set that represents
00:05:45house
00:05:48rooms
00:05:50outside,
00:05:51inside
00:05:53a very small pocket
00:05:55of land
00:05:57that hasn't been overtaken
00:05:58by the high rise buildings all around it.
00:06:00A plot of land where the trees that they used to enjoy have been cut down,
00:06:04that
00:06:12this plot of natural land
00:06:13is being encroached upon almost physically by all the other buildings in the city.
00:06:17Now that set is a reflection of the set
00:06:24for A Streetcar Named Desire, which again is multiple occupancy housing.
00:06:28Again, it has noises, street sounds, music.
00:06:34It has smells. Tennessee Williams brought smells to the American stage.
00:06:37Williams has a thread running through this play
00:06:43of
00:06:47the smell, in particular of after shave lotion.
00:06:48What these
00:06:54two writers,
00:06:56I would say equally great writers Tennessee
00:06:57Williams and Arthur Miller are trying to do
00:07:00is bringing a new kind of realism
00:07:03to the American stage.
00:07:08All my Sons is a naturalistic
00:07:10exploration of a family.
00:07:13It's set around their house largely in the garden,
00:07:15with the neighbours dropping in,
00:07:19but it's largely naturalistic.
00:07:22Two years later, when he writes
00:07:26a death of a salesman, he's moved into a slightly more expressionistic mode.
00:07:28So it's that we see through. If you like the bare bones of the house
00:07:34we're seeing beneath the skin, we're going deeper into what shapes our home,
00:07:40a family.
00:07:49And like all the greatest tragedies, this is a tragedy of our family.
00:07:50The Loman family,
00:07:55father,
00:07:57mother,
00:07:58two sons
00:07:59and, of course, the
00:08:00outside cousin Ben
00:08:02and the neighbours who drop in
00:08:05and other people who appear
00:08:07in flashbacks.
00:08:09What is new here is the flashbacks.
00:08:13Flashbacks have become totally familiar concept,
00:08:17especially in cinema and TV.
00:08:20But he incorporates them
00:08:23into
00:08:25the memories of Willie
00:08:27as he struggles through the last days of his life
00:08:29so that within one house
00:08:35in one plot
00:08:39in one area of the city
00:08:41that's three levels already.
00:08:44We've also got the different levels of time
00:08:46the time of Now,
00:08:50the time of wills, Willy Loman's memories,
00:08:52the time of
00:08:57the kids at school,
00:08:58the time when he was in Boston or elsewhere selling things,
00:08:59the other characters he met
00:09:04Outside We have the inside and the outside of the house
00:09:06as if we have the inside and the outside of the memory.
00:09:10So in many ways, this is a memory play.
00:09:14It's a play about the inside of a man
00:09:19and the heart of a man,
00:09:23and that man's name is Willy
00:09:26Loman.
00:09:28Now the story goes that Arthur Miller took the name
00:09:31from the 19 thirties movie,
00:09:35and he was just enchanted by the name being called on the phone.
00:09:37Low Man, Low Man
00:09:40because, as I hinted earlier,
00:09:43tragedy is normally about some kind of hero,
00:09:47a high
00:09:52man.
00:09:53This
00:09:56is one of the first modern tragedies of the low
00:09:56man,
00:10:00low
00:10:02in the sense of
00:10:03no great aspirations, no great social status, no great wealth.
00:10:05It's not like Great Gatsby,
00:10:10which is a tragedy of somebody who flew too near to the sun.
00:10:12It's not the tragedy of Blanche Dubois,
00:10:15who
00:10:18lived in a world of her own delusions and memories and losses.
00:10:19This is a man
00:10:25who never had high
00:10:27to go to
00:10:29and not having high to go to
00:10:31what occupies and has always occupied Willy's
00:10:34mind and soul.
00:10:39His dreams,
00:10:41aspirations.
00:10:43What might in anyone else be called
00:10:45ambitions?
00:10:47But the title tells us straight from the word Go death of a salesman. That's all he is.
00:10:50He's a salesman
00:10:56and a salesman is fairly low down the scale
00:11:00of
00:11:03ambitious characters,
00:11:05very deliberately a salesman.
00:11:07This recalls Robert Louis Stevenson's very famous dictum.
00:11:10We all live by selling something.
00:11:14We never learn what it is
00:11:19that Willie Cells. He has his cases of samples, but we don't know what he sells.
00:11:21I think that's
00:11:26significant
00:11:27because Loman,
00:11:30it's not no man,
00:11:33but this figure of the ordinary guy goes back to an American culture.
00:11:36Charlie Chaplin,
00:11:44The Little Tramp In all these movies,
00:11:46The ordinary guy,
00:11:50The Hairy Ape There's a Wonderful Play by Eugene O.
00:11:52Neill from 1923 called The Hairy Ape,
00:11:55which which looks at
00:12:00the life of
00:12:03ordinary working people working in manual labour.
00:12:04And I've always liked to think that the hairy ape ape A P e stands for American
00:12:09proletarian,
00:12:16every man,
00:12:18and that is a character who comes more and more into literature
00:12:21novels through Sinkler Lewis drama through Thornton Wilder,
00:12:25up to and beyond
00:12:30display by Arthur Miller,
00:12:35he's looking, therefore
00:12:37at
00:12:40much more ordinary
00:12:41invented commas. Normal people.
00:12:44The great play that changed American Theatre history was Thornton Wilder's Our
00:12:48Town in 1942 which is still staged all the time in America.
00:12:53Very, very little known overseas,
00:12:59and our town looks at ordinary people
00:13:03in an ordinary town.
00:13:07Another Thornton Wilder play,
00:13:09The Skin of Our Teeth is about how ordinary humanity has always just made it through.
00:13:10So there's a focus away from the heroics on. Very often these are failed heroics.
00:13:18If you think of something like Moby Dick
00:13:27to the ordinary people, this is a tradition that's not new.
00:13:29It goes back to Mark Twain,
00:13:33where Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn are very ordinary guys.
00:13:34But the ordinary person as tragic hero is a new idea,
00:13:38and it parallels in Europe the growth of existentialism
00:13:48Jean Paul Sartre through into the place of Samuel Beckett
00:13:53and
00:13:57Albert Camus, the novel literature
00:13:58where we are looking at ordinary people
00:14:01now. Virginia Woolf had thought of that. James Joyce had thought of that. D. H.
00:14:06Lawrence had thought of that. CAFTA had thought of that.
00:14:12People hadn't made it into drama yet,
00:14:17And that is where Arthur Miller
00:14:21becomes one of the very greats of modern drama. All his plays
00:14:23look at ordinary people in crisis situations.
00:14:29They are normally white Jewish families. In Arthur Miller's work,
00:14:36recently, a production in London of Death of a Salesman had an all
00:14:41not at all a largely black American
00:14:47cast,
00:14:51which works perfectly well. It made no difference to the nature of the drama.
00:14:52Not nowadays,
00:14:57in
00:14:581949 that would have been unthinkable.
00:15:00I thought, That's a
00:15:03bit of a sign of the progress that we've made,
00:15:05and it's also a sign of the
00:15:08lasting quality of this play. It seems to speak from the character of every man
00:15:09to
00:15:17the every man in the audience.
00:15:18People identify with this character, Willy Low Man.
00:15:22As I said, it's a family tragedy.
00:15:31So
00:15:34Willie and Linda have two sons, Biff and happy,
00:15:36great names,
00:15:42beef sounding a bit like a punch. He's the sporty one, Happy Who is the unhappy one?
00:15:44These are
00:15:55early representatives of what would now be called a dysfunctional family.
00:15:57The tragedy, in some ways,
00:16:03is that Willie had two great expectations of his Children, especially of Beef,
00:16:05and Beth is a failure.
00:16:14That's the trouble.
00:16:18Willy Loman is a failure.
00:16:20We are invited
00:16:24to
00:16:27empathise
00:16:28with someone who has no heroic qualities.
00:16:29Apart from the quality of keeping on keeping on.
00:16:34We will look at questions as to how
00:16:41much he is deceiving himself throughout this play.
00:16:43I think it's pretty clear that his wife
00:16:48knows a lot
00:16:51about the self deceit
00:16:53that Willie practises to keep him going.
00:16:55She doesn't know about his Infidelities.
00:17:00The turning point of the tragedy
00:17:04is when beef
00:17:06Meats
00:17:08the mistress
00:17:09that Willie has
00:17:11in Boston
00:17:12and realises that the whole construction
00:17:14is a sham,
00:17:18which is why it is so good to have a set that is not a solid construction.
00:17:20The set is see through its skeletal. They can actually walk through the walls.
00:17:25There are stage directions to say, walk through the walls from time to time.
00:17:30It is something that is falling apart,
00:17:35but it's also
00:17:37there's a thread throughout the play, a play of nature being lost,
00:17:39the trees being cut down,
00:17:44the wish of Willie to plant, to grow, vegetables to grow flowers. The wish.
00:17:47The harking back to nature
00:17:56to some kind of Arcadia when everything was possibly perfect.
00:17:59Just as happens at the end of The Great Gatsby,
00:18:06there is a loss of that natural world, which is represented very much by planting
00:18:09and growing,
00:18:17and beef goes off to Texas. He goes around a lot of the West. And of course,
00:18:20the stories that come back are exaggerated.
00:18:25He's not making any money.
00:18:29Money is constantly mentioned. The count money In this play,
00:18:31this goes back to Dickens, Charles Dickens, the novel David Copperfield.
00:18:36Think of the character of Mr Micawber, and he famously says,
00:18:40This is a dictum, which I think is the basis of all capitalist referring art, He says.
00:18:44Annual income, £20
00:18:53annual expenditure, £19.19 and six plans.
00:18:55A result.
00:19:00Happiness
00:19:01contrasted with annual income, £20
00:19:03annual expenditure, £20 and sixpence
00:19:07result
00:19:11misery.
00:19:13That counting up
00:19:14of the financial details
00:19:17becomes a distinct feature
00:19:19of what must be called capitalist art
00:19:22because
00:19:27we all live by selling something. But if we don't sell it for a decent price,
00:19:29misery were out on the streets were homeless. Dickens was constantly drawn
00:19:34to the homeless, the poor, the disadvantaged.
00:19:40Well, that only becomes more and more so
00:19:44in the 20th century. In the 21st,
00:19:47because there are more and more homeless, disadvantaged, unpaid zero hours.
00:19:50People
00:19:57in our society
00:19:58and it's Linda who adds up and says,
00:20:00We've got to get a new band for the fridge The car is costing.
00:20:04She's giving Willie simple,
00:20:10straightforward figures of how much he needs to bring in,
00:20:15and he is always coming in short.
00:20:20Now Biff is the same. He's coming up for 35
00:20:24he's never around very much in his life. But he is allowed to work with horses
00:20:27out there in Texas.
00:20:34And there's a wonderful moment when he says,
00:20:36the greatest thing is when you see a mayor with a new full,
00:20:38that is natural
00:20:43energy,
00:20:46the natural force,
00:20:47not
00:20:50the money capitalist force.
00:20:51Arthur Miller was the product
00:20:54of the 19 twenties
00:20:56and the greatest crisis of capitalism until that time,
00:20:58the crash of 1929
00:21:02in which his family lost everything
00:21:04just like Dickens,
00:21:09when his family was put in jail because his father
00:21:11was a debtor
00:21:15money is at the heart of this,
00:21:17and a salesman should be making money.
00:21:21When the salesman isn't making money,
00:21:24the company
00:21:27will get rid of him
00:21:28because human emotions
00:21:30don't work
00:21:33in business.
00:21:35This is a cruel and cynical world,
00:21:38and
00:21:41Death of a Salesman
00:21:43shows us the tragedy
00:21:45of a victim.
00:21:47A victim of
00:21:49society, Yes,
00:21:52but we have to ask ourselves, How much is he? A victim of his own
00:21:54self delusion, his own lack of self knowledge?
00:22:00It's a very familiar dictum to say no yourself
00:22:06from the Northeast Hamilton of Socrates.
00:22:11He doesn't know himself.
00:22:15His Children come to know him
00:22:17and
00:22:20possibly despise him.
00:22:21They abandoned him.
00:22:22His wife probably
00:22:24understands him pretty well,
00:22:26and she loves him
00:22:29right through to the end
00:22:30and notice that one of the major major achievements,
00:22:33because he does have achievements,
00:22:37is that they pay off the mortgage by the end of the play.
00:22:40And in the Requiem, Linda says,
00:22:46we're free and clear.
00:22:49That could have been the title of the play free and clear,
00:22:51but
00:22:56it's become also quite a famous saying
00:22:58that you work until you stop and then you die.
00:23:01Yep,
00:23:06that's maybe the tragedy of all of humanity.
00:23:08So let's read
00:23:12Death of a Salesman
00:23:14
Cite this Lecture
APA style
McRae, J. (2021, January 22). Miller: Death of a Salesman - Introduction [Video]. MASSOLIT. https://massolit.io/courses/miller-death-of-a-salesman-mcrae/act-ii-it-s-a-business-kid
MLA style
McRae, J. "Miller: Death of a Salesman – Introduction." MASSOLIT, uploaded by MASSOLIT, 22 Jan 2021, https://massolit.io/courses/miller-death-of-a-salesman-mcrae/act-ii-it-s-a-business-kid