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Miller: Death of a Salesman
In this course, Professor Grace Ioppolo (University of Reading) explores Arthur Miller’s masterpiece, ‘Death of a Salesman’. We begin by thinking about the historical context in which the play was written, focusing in particular on the development of American theatre between the 1930s and 1950s. After that, we think about the opening of the play, the character of Willy Loman and the themes of capitalism and the American Dream. In the third module, we explore the relationship between Willy and his two sons, Biff and Happy, before turning in the fourth module to the treatment of women in the play. In the fifth module, we focus on the climactic scene of the play – the scene in which Biff walks in on his father with another women – before moving on in the sixth module to consider the play’s ending. Who is to blame for everything that has happened? Has anyone learned anything?
Note: We use the Penguin Modern Classics edition of play (ISBN: 978-0-141-18274-2). Students using a different edition of the play may encounter slight differences in both the text and the page numbering.
Context
In this module, we think about the historical context in which ‘Death of a Salesman’ was written, focusing in particular on the development of American theatre between the 1930s and 1950s (especially the Group Theatre and the Actors’ Studio), as well as the changes in American politics, society and culture between the 1930s and the 1950s.
My name is Grace I A Polo.
00:00:05I am a professor of Shakespearean in early
00:00:07modern drama at the University of Reading.
00:00:10But I also specialise in modern American drama as well as drama in English today.
00:00:12I want to talk to you about, uh, Death of a Salesman
00:00:17by starting with in this section,
00:00:21it's context and how American drama came to be such a force.
00:00:23Where before, uh, there was not much of a tradition of drama,
00:00:27So I'm going to start with a Group Theatre,
00:00:31which was founded in the 19 thirties in America by Harold Clurman
00:00:33Crawford and Lee Strasberg.
00:00:38Now the purpose of this theatre was to treat
00:00:40drama as a kind of force for social justice.
00:00:44But it also flourished during the Depression during an age in which the
00:00:47government would get funding to particular organisations
00:00:51to get people back to work.
00:00:53Uh, the Group Theatre had a massive influence in the 19 thirties,
00:00:55particularly in reshaping American drama, and they introduced,
00:00:58particularly Clifford Odets as their great dramatist.
00:01:02Now, prior to the 19 thirties,
00:01:05American drama was basically made up of shows or vaudeville presentations.
00:01:07There wasn't a sense of a narrative in fact,
00:01:12they were barring mostly from the Europeans.
00:01:14But it's with the 19 thirties that we get this really strong, uh,
00:01:16objective of creating American drama
00:01:21after the war.
00:01:24In the 19 forties, the Group Theatre reformed as the actor studio,
00:01:26which some of you know from the television show in which they do interviews.
00:01:29And one of the prime FIG figures in the 19 forties,
00:01:33as he had been in the late 19 thirties, was the director.
00:01:38Elia Kazan
00:01:40later became a film director, very controversial for
00:01:41his views because he testified in front of the HUAC hearings,
00:01:44the House UN American Activities Committee.
00:01:48This feeds into the Arthur Miller because, uh,
00:01:50Kazan was the driving force in American Theatre
00:01:53in making American Theatre such a strong force.
00:01:56He was the first director of death of a salesman, and, um,
00:01:59he and Arthur Miller really were partners and collaborators in creating this play.
00:02:04It's something that Miller always acknowledged.
00:02:10Miller later fell out over the HUAC hearings. He refused to testify,
00:02:12and Kazan had and, uh, they worked together eventually later on The Crucible,
00:02:16which had failed in its first production in Broadway,
00:02:21directed by Jed Harris and then UM it was
00:02:24staged again directed by Kazan and was incredibly successful.
00:02:28So the Miller Kazan partnership is extremely important to
00:02:32remember in terms of Death of a Salesman,
00:02:36which we need to see is a collaborative production,
00:02:38not strictly a play written by Arthur Miller.
00:02:40Now the
00:02:43creation of um, Death of a Salesman was something that took Miller quite a long time.
00:02:45He's given lots of interviews you can YouTube him. He's been He's spoken to the BBC.
00:02:51He's given lots of interviews in America about how
00:02:57he came to write death of a salesman.
00:03:00It was not his first play. He'd had several plays already produced.
00:03:02It was something that he kept thinking about. It was partly based on family history
00:03:07of his cousin and his uncle and other family members.
00:03:11So it was something that he kept coming back to
00:03:15now, when he wrote, um,
00:03:18Death of a Salesman Theatre had already been quite shaken up by, uh,
00:03:20Streetcar Named Desire.
00:03:25Two years previously and again, this was a Kazan directed play.
00:03:26So the American Theatre going public.
00:03:29Mostly, we're talking about New York and Broadway.
00:03:32We're used to theatre, which was not like traditional theatre that is,
00:03:35if we think about tragedy and ideas of tragedy,
00:03:40which both streetcar and Death of a Salesman are,
00:03:43Aristotle tells us the tragedy should be the fall of a great person through
00:03:47a particular fatal flaw that it offers us catharsis and purging of the emotions.
00:03:51Now, Williams and particularly Miller, did not see tragedy that way.
00:03:57They saw a tragedy as a kind of form of domestic drama, very quiet, very small,
00:04:01ordinary people and in this sort of, uh,
00:04:08idea or objective, of course,
00:04:12Miller is drawing on Henrik Ibsen and his wonderful plays of the late 19th century,
00:04:14which really shaped for us modern drama.
00:04:18So we have Miller trying to set up a kind of American sense of domestic tragedy,
00:04:21taking on particularly for him ideas of social injustice.
00:04:28This was not really something Williams was concerned with.
00:04:32Williams wasn't trying to take on the establishment.
00:04:34He was not trying, in a sense, to
00:04:37be a moral voice,
00:04:39which Miller usually claimed that he was trying to be so with death of a salesman.
00:04:41He's particularly looking at, as he said,
00:04:46not just a kind of personal tragedy,
00:04:48but the way that the after the war experience in America.
00:04:50Soldiers come back. Um, they're facing a kind of New America.
00:04:54Capitalism is booming.
00:05:00Unlike in Britain, America recovered very quickly from World War Two.
00:05:02Uh, my own parents were able to buy up.
00:05:07They were newly married, but they were able to buy a house.
00:05:10Um, they were able to buy things on time. You'll see this in death of a salesman.
00:05:13So there was a kind of affluence in late 19 forties America that
00:05:17offered a lot of promise to Americans that they really didn't have before.
00:05:22Because remember the 19 thirties,
00:05:25they're living through the Depression.
00:05:27And when soldiers come back from the war in 1945 America's changed.
00:05:28So this is something that Miller is thinking about death of a salesman.
00:05:33The idea of
00:05:36dreams are no longer deferred.
00:05:37You can have what you want. You can have social mobility,
00:05:40particularly,
00:05:43you can attempt to have the American dream.
00:05:44This is particularly what Willie is trying to find
00:05:47in his play.
00:05:49Ironically,
00:05:51he achieved the American dream by cheating by committing
00:05:52suicide and letting his family collect the insurance money.
00:05:55And it's only on his day of his funeral that his wife says.
00:05:58We've paid off the mortgage, but there's nobody home.
00:06:01So it's a It's a play that,
00:06:04for Miller was both a kind of attempt to
00:06:07understand America and a larger sort of social,
00:06:10uh, moral.
00:06:13Um uh,
00:06:15look into what constitutes America.
00:06:17
Cite this Lecture
APA style
Ioppolo, G. (2019, March 08). Miller: Death of a Salesman - Context [Video]. MASSOLIT. https://massolit.io/courses/miller-death-of-a-salesman/context-694ae5a0-563d-4ea5-bb92-ee589b2e92b5
MLA style
Ioppolo, G. "Miller: Death of a Salesman – Context." MASSOLIT, uploaded by MASSOLIT, 08 Mar 2019, https://massolit.io/courses/miller-death-of-a-salesman/context-694ae5a0-563d-4ea5-bb92-ee589b2e92b5