ARTHUR MILLER
The playwright was born in 1915, and grew up during the American Dep-
ression, the economic crisis of the 1930s when many enterprises were
bankrupted. Arthur Miller also records that many men called at the door
during this period asking to wash the windows and some fainted from
hunger. This left a deep impression on him and a sense of responsibility
and guilt. 'The Depression', wrote Arthur Miller, 'is my book.' (Harper's
CCXVII, August 1958). The economic climate affected his own family
when his father's clothing business experienced-financial difficulties. Arthur
I\1iller's father employed nearly a thousand workers to make women's coats.
Arthur l\1iller himself worked briefly as a salesman, and his experience as a
schoolboy of working in a car parts warehouse for a miserly sum is one
which is clearly echoed in his plays. He was also keen to learn about
building and he, like Willy, bought wood and built a porch as he recalls in
his autobiography. Many of A rthur Miller's plays focus on aspects of the
Jewish experience, although Arthur M iller's own Jewish background does
not seem to feature greatly in this play. The economic crash of the
Depression put great strain on relationships in the Miller family.
On graduating from university having studied journalism, Arthur
Miller began to write plays and win awards. Eventually he transferred to
creative writing classes. All My Sons was produced in 1947 and ran for 328
performances. Death of a Salesman was performed in 1949, ran for much
longer and won the Pulitzer prize. With this success, Arthur Miller was
established as a playwright. In 1953 he wrote The Crucible, a story of the
persecution of witches in the early America of 1692. The plot is a thinly-
disguised treatment of contemporary events. Senator Joseph !vlcCarthy was
the leading force in a carnpaign during the l 950s to bring to light any
Communists who existed in America. The unfairness of the interrogations
i~ cleverly revealed. In 1957 Arthur Miller was brought before the Congres-
~1?nal Com rnittee which investigated 't1nan1eric!1n astivities' or Commu-
nism, a~d he refused to name anyone who has expressed left-wing
sympathies. He was convicted of contempt of Congress. I--Ic admitted to
having flirted with Communist ideas, but he did not believe that these ideas
threatened the integrity of creative artists. The press respected him for his
cool and dignified manner under interrogation. The conviction for
contempt was reversed the following year by the Supreme Court.
It was at this point that Arthur Miller married Marilyn Monroe,
vvhom he was to divorce four years later. In 1962 Arthur Miller married his
present wife Ingeborg Morath, a photographer. Arthur Miller's career has
continued and his stature as one of America's greatest playwrights has been
consolidated, but Death of a Salesman is still for many his most memorable
\vork.
His OTHER WORKS
Arthur Miller is a prolific writer, best known for his plays, which include
All My Sons (1947), The Crucible (1953), A Memory of Two Mondays (1955),
A View fro1lJ thr Bridge (1955), After the Fall (1964), Incident at Vfchy (1964),
1
The Price (1968), The Archbishop s Ceiling (1977), The American Clock
(1980), Playingfor Time (1981) which won the Peabody Award, Two-Way
Mirror (1985), Danger: Memory! (1987), Ride Down Mount Morgan (1990),
The Last Yankee (1992), and Broken Glass (1994).
'
Other works include a novel, Focus (1945), a film screenplay, The
Misfits (1961), a collection of short stories, I Don't Need You Anymore
(1967), and his autobiography, Timebends (1987).
HISTORICA L BACKGR.OUND
When it was first performed on Broadway, Death ofa Salesman ran for 742
performances, and was a striking success. It made Arthur Miller's
reputation and some thought it set the standard for American drama in
general. Some critics were even moved to call this the An1erican King L ear.
Arthur Miller recalls that people were stunned after the first performance
and then moved to lengthy, rapturous applause. Some people openly wept.
One elderly man whom Arthur Miller saw being led from the theatre
turned out to be a wealthy shop-owne~, who gave orders that none of his
staff were ever to be fired for being old. The corresponding performances in
London and Paris were less ecstatic: much of the American style of the play
would not be so familiar to international audiences in 1949 who did not
know as much about An1erica from the media as we do today.
CAPITALISM
On the opening night, Arthur Miller recalls that a woman angrily described
the play as a 'time bomb under American capitalism' (quoted in Timebends).
Communist sympathisers, on the other hand, denounced it as failing to
condemn American society. Arthur Miller rejects the view that this is a play
explicitly designed to overthrow the social system of America. It aims
rather to destroy the 'bullshit' of capitalism, 'this pseudo life that thought
to touch the clouds by standing on top of a refrigerator' (Timebends, p . 184).
In this expression, Arthur Miller describes the kind of social climate that
was prevalent at the time. Capitalism as a political system depends on the
continual encouragemeqt of wants. People must want more and buy more
in order to fuel the economy and enable people to work to produce these
goods. Arthur Miller is disparaging about the capitalist system which
encourages people to want more and more goods, such as refrigerators,
as if this is the ultimate point of existence. Willy attacks consumer society
with vigour in a way that is still relevant to our lives: he argues that
machines are timed to collapse just as you finish paying for them . Linda,
when questioned about the repairs to the washing machine by Willy says,
'They [the washing machine company] got the biggest ads of any of them'
(p. 27). The fact that Willy can complain that the street is lined with cars
indicates that he lives in a reasonably affluent neighbourhood. Willy can
pride himself on the fact that the Chevrolet is 'the greatest car ever built'
(p. 26) and treat it as a status symbol when it is working, and attack it when
it needs repair: 'That goddam Chevrolet, they ought to prohibit the manu-
facture of that car' (p. 28) . The play describes the econon1ic boom and
increasing desire for material goods that followed the war. For anyone who
had lived through the Great Depression of the 1930s when it became clear
that American society could not provide opportunities fi>r all, and some
might starve, this consumerism must have seemed a troubling develop-
ment. The consequence is a spiritual vacuum and, to his credit, Willy
· notices this. , ·
THE AMERICAN DREAM .
Willy is sensitive enough to notice how the neighbourhood has been
changed for the worse by encroaching industrial society. He yearns for a
more rural existence and condemns the claustrophobic atmosphere created
by the increased building. Willy misses the elm trees and the flowers. On
stage the set helps to establish this claustrophobic atmosphere. The social
attitudes that Willy displays are those which were common at the time of
writing. The American Dream offers the chance of riches even to those
who start with n_o thing; it harks back to the early history of America, in
which pioneers conquered the wilderness of the frontier. Ben represents
this to Willy: 'There was a man started with the clothes on his back and
ended up with diamond mines' (p. 32). The characteristics for success are
thought to be masculinity, competitiveness and popularity. The myth was
that becoming rich was a simple matter of using your personal qualities as
an ipdividual. The other great myth that prompted peoplc..to work hard was
that America was the land of opportunity. The logic of these myths is that
failure to achieve the American dream must indicate a failure of personality.
Arthur Miller notes in his autobiography:
It has often been said that what kept the United States from revolution in the depths
of the Great Depression was the readiness of Americans to blame themselves rather
than the system for their downfall. (Timebends, p. 113)
There are clear echoes of this attitude in Willy and Biff, who both blame
themselves for their lack of economic success and its repercussions for the
family.
Something of the pioneer spirit of the early days of America survives
in the form of a great love for the outdoors. The ideal of the 'back-
woodsman' who could build a cabin like Willy and live in harmony with the
land like Biff: was a popular one, and this ideal seems to be welcome in the
pl~y,. although it does not satisfy Willy. Willy talks of competitiveness, and
this 1s also an essential element of the masculine attitude that underlies
capitalism . It is necessary to beat the opposition at all costs if you are to
succeed, and Happy sh ows he is capable of this, even though he acknow-
ledges that it makes him inhuman. Happy competes sexually because he
cannot compete on a work basis with the executives.
McCARTHYJSM
The anti-Communist hysteria of the McCarthyitc period wa~ inescapable
since Communism was seen as a threat to the American Way of Life'.
Public figures were arraigned by Senator Joseph McCarthy and asked to
prove tha~ they had not been Communi$t sympathisers. This was a hyste-
rical reaction to the Cold War between America and Russia when America
feared any left-wing ideology. Many write rs took advertisements in the
theatrical trade press attacking the Communists, and Arthur Miller was
asked by Columbi a. Pictures to do this before Stanley Kramer's film of
Death of Saltsman was released. Arthur MiUer refused. Columbia resorted
to making a short film at a university business school which consisted of
interviews with business professors, who patiently explained that Willy
Loman was not a typical salesman and that selling was an honourable
profession. Arthur Miller was forced to accept this indignity. This
surprising fact s!.ows how deeply Arthur Miller's play had penetrate.; the
American mind. Nowadays, of ccurse, attacking consumerism is not at all
unusual. Arthur Miller, however, has sa.id that 'the social drama is to me
only incidentally an arraignment of society' (original edition of A View
From tht Bridge). It would be wrong to think that the purpose of the play
was to blame society alone. The point of the play is not that the economic
system does not work, but that its ideology distorts man's true nature. In
the America of 1949, this was seen by many as a dangerous slur on the
ordinary American.
L ITERARY BACKGROUND
In his early work, Arthur Miller adopted the realist mocle and, in keeping
with naruralism, also specifi ed exactly which props were to be on stage.
The early love for realism was bred at university where he encountered
nineteenth-cent\Jry writers such as Henrik Ibsen. All My Sons, for example,
was a piece of convi;:ntional realism. lo Death of a Sa/,-sman, the historical
details arc accurate, and the language is taken directly from American life.
Arthur Mi\\~r has said, in his introd\1Clion . to his Cf>lluud T'!ayr, 1 have
stood squarely in conventional realism; I have tried to expand it with an
imposition of vuious forms in order tn speak more directly, evt:n more
abruptly and nakedly of what has moved me behind the visible fac;ades of
life.' Arthur Miller feels that realism as a style can become confining and
inhibit the playwright from giving us the real.'forces and values' which lie
behind appearances. If the play has to be realistic throughout, then we can
never, for example, see into the mind of the main character, since this is not
possible in our usual lives. In Death ofa Salesman, therefore, Arthur Miller
adds Expressionism to social realism to overcome this difficulty. Bertolt
Brecht argued that realism was drama which revealed 'society's causal
network', the interplay of forces that actually drive us to act in certain ways.
The ultimate meaning of theatrical realism is not that what happens on
stage is what happens in real life, but that we believe that we have seen the
characters driven by credible motives and pressures.
A classic American Expressionist play is Elmer Rice's The Adding
lv!achine (1923) in which a revolving stage was used to create a 'flashback'
effect as in films . In this play, realism is abandoned in order to make
visible on stage the kinds of mental events which can only be reproduced
• through symbols. The play attempts to express the• dehumanising effect of
a mass society where individuals feel as if they are no more than parts of a
machine. It is about a man who) after working as a bookkeeper for many
years, is replaced by an adding-machine. In response to the sacking, the
stage revolves and the music grows louder until there is only a massive din.
We are made to experience dehumanisation as if we too were suffering it.
It is also generally recognised that Clifford Odet's play Awake and Sing
(1935), which includes a suicide by an old man to enable insurance to be
passed on, was an inspiration for Arthur Miller. Eugene O'Neill's The
Iceman Cometh (1947), which also concerns a salesman, is another source of
inspiration.
Arthur Miller has had a great influence on contemporary American
playwrights of a younger generation such as David Mamet, whose play
Glengarry Glen Ross (1984), about salesmen in an estate agency, acknow-
ledges a debt to Arthur Miller and this particular play.
In Death of a Salesman we see an element of Expressionisn1 when
Willy goes to ask Howard for a non-travelling sales job. The machine that
Howard wheels on is an early sound-recording device, and it has captured
the sounds of Howard's children learning historical facts by rote. It is
clearly an echo of the Expressionist fo rm which attempted to project die
mind of the main character onto the stage using large, unusual symbols
rather than real things. The sound -rcc~rding machine brings back the past
truthfully and whe_n Willy bumps against tt accidentally, it makes an ugly
and unbearable notse that has to be stifled quickly. Willy does not want to
hear the sounds of a happy family or to feel that the past can be captured
for ever.
Expressionist theatre is a cry of despair on the part of an alienated
individual, and Arthur Miller merges this expertly with realism. Arthur
Miller had originally intended to call the play 'The Inside of H is H ead',
which would have clearly linked it with Expressionism . Some psycho-
analysts have linked Willy's scenes from the past with the brain's desire to
keep back memories that are too painful to consider again . This is known
in psychoanalytic terms as 'the return of the repressed', since psychoanalysts
believe that any repressed emotion will eventually reappear, albeit in
another form . Willy's forbid den thoughts, such as the memory of his affair,
recur at crucial moments and often show a contrasting side of his
personality.to that which he is presenting to the world.
Pagt rzutnbers rifer to the latest Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics edition
throughout.
SYNOPSIS
\Villy Loman, an ageing salesman with two grown-up sons, Biff and
Happy, has reached the point where he is so tired he can no longer travel
to sell his goods by car. The play follows the last twenty-four hours of his
life. H is sons are concerned about his mental state, but his wife is always
supportive. Willy's thoughts are shown to us in a number of dreamlike -l
scenes from the past which are enacted during the play's course. Willy has
always focused his hopes on Biff and he has coached him to be a sports star
and to follow in his father's footsteps by using his charm like a salesman.
He is very unhappy that Biff has a manual job on a farm and he argues with
Biff about his future career. Biff is insecure and anxious to improve himself
and to 'get on'. Act I ends on an optimistic note as Happy comes up with
the idea that he and Biff will sell sports goods and organise basketball
demonstrations to promote them. Willy and Linda also think this is a 'one-
million-dollar idea' (p. 50), and Biff promises to visit his former employer,
Bill O liver, to ask for a loan to start the business. Willy has always been very
proud of Biffs sporting skills and has despised other boys such as Bernard
who have been more academic. This scheme, if successful, will enable Biff
to m.ake something of himself and Willy to see his hopes for the family's
financial security come true at last. Willy decides at the same tim e to ask
his boss, Howard, to allow him to work in New York rather than travelling
by car to distant locations.
At the beginning of Act II , W illy is refused a non-travelling job and
H oward asks him to stop working altogether. T here are 1nore and more
. d~ydreams where W illy relives past glories with Biff on the sports field and
discusses the route to success with his now dead brother, Ben. Ben is held
up as an ideal by Willy since he fulfi lled the American Dream of starting
out with nothing _:m.d becoming rich by effort, Ch:iHlcy, a neighbour, offers
Willy a )oh, but n is refuse~. An ordina~ job would not fulfj] the great
expectations Willy has of h11nself and B1ff. Willy goes to meet Biff and
Happy in the rcstanra nt where thei r celebration is planned, but the boys are
trying to seduce rv.-o young women. Biff has faile"d to reach any kind of deal
with Bill Oliver and has, in fact, run out of the buildi ng having stolen his
founta in pen . Biff begins to realise that he is chasing a form of career
success which would not really make him happy. H e also realises that his
past has been made to seem more glamorous than it really was. Willy
demands to know how the meeting with Bill Oliver went and is furious
when he is told that no deal was concluded. He desperately needs good
news. Eventually the boys seek to rebuild his optimism as he becomes
increasingly distressed. \.Villy's mind then drifts back to incidents in the
past including the moment when Biff discovered him in a hotel room with
another woman
The boys k-.tve \Villy in the n:~taurnnt, and when they return home
their mother is outraged that they have abandoned their father. Willy,
meanwhile, has bought some seeds and is trying to sow them in the garden
at night. This is a bizarre attempt to fu lfil a long-held ambition to leave
something behind him that will grow. This leads to a family row. Biff has
decided that he is to blame for his own lack of success, and tries to leave the
family home for good, but Willy accuses him of attempting to hurt him. In
frustration, Biff declares that no-one in the house has ever told the truth for
ten minutes. He shows Willy the gas piping which his father had concealed
so that he could commit suicide . Biff also reveals that he has been in prison
for theft and informs Willy that his dream of having a son who will achieve
greatness is not going to happen . Bifl's love for his father becomes
apparent, however, and in a final gesture oflove for his son, \.Villy commits
suicide in order that the family can at least collect the twenty thousand
dollars insurance.
ACT I
The play is not divided into conventional sce nes, although there are reoog-
nised points at which th e action changes significant ly. These divisions are
not made explicit because th e play is intended to be as 'seamk ~< as possible
STRUCTURE
In his introduction to the Collected Plays, Arthur Miller ·states that the
structure of most of his plays is that a conflict is discovered and then
clarified. One way of looking at it is that the play spends the first Act in
building up the idea of success which is so dear to Willy and the second Act
showing it being destroyed. Whereas the first Act is full of dreams and
expectations, the second one is full of truths and reckonings. The
interpolated scenes from the past are sometimes called flashbacks as in film,
but they gradually become confused with the present in Willy's mind, and
confuse time zones. 'Daydreams' might be more appropriate a term. One
effect of the switching of time is to allow us to see Willy's statements in an
ironic light. Shortly after he has been dismissed by Howard, Willy returns
in his thoughts to a discussion with Ben when he decided quite firmly not
to go to Alaska. Then he says, 'I am building something with this firm'
(p . 6 7). The cruel irony, of course, is that vve have just seen all that he built
destroyed. • .. •
THEMES
CAPITALISM AND THE VALUE OF LIFE
Death ofa Salesman is the story of a man who comes to the conclusion that
he can only save his life by losing it: Willy Loman eventually has to commit
suicide to redeem himself in his own eyes and achieve something for his
family. In this sense, the play is concerned with what Aristotle called a
'serious' action, involving life and death. The early responses to the play
tried to assimilate it into the tradition of tragedy. The play suggests that
tragedy may befall the most ordinary life in contemporary society, and for
this reason, it raises issues about the way we all live and work and dream of
h appiness. As Arthur Miller has written, the play represents the need to
'face the fact of death to strengthen ourselves for life' (Introduction to :·
Collected Plays, p. 33). :,
D espite the setting in 1949, many of the features of American society ;.
which it depicts are still with us. A rtliur M iller's attack on the consumer
society's constant attempts to sell us goods which do not serve our needs, is
f
still as meaningful as it was in 1949, if not more so . The econcimic system
of capitalism, where we are encouraged to accumulate capital as a symbol of
success and a protection against disaster for our families, is familiar to
today's audiences. From Europe to China> theatregoers have seen aspects of
their own life enacted and voiced by Willy Loma.n. If this can be said to be
a truly great play, its appeal may lie in the incisive vision of the mentality
that capitalism can create in us. Willy finds that in purely financial terms
he is worth more dead than alive. This, of course, is not an uncommon
situation for some of us today. The insurance money he believes his family
will collect if he dies may enable them to survive in much better conditions
and realise the dreams he could not fulfil. On the face of it, therefore, to
come to such a conclusion is a terrible indictment of the world in which we
live. Arthur Miller writes in the introduction to his Collected Plays that
\Villy has broken the 'law of success'. Arthur Miller describes this as the law
that a man who has failed in business has no right to live. In the essay The
lvfyth of Sisyphus (1942), the Frerch writer Albert Camus began by posing
the fundamental philosophical question: why do we not kill ourselves?
What, in other words, is the force or rnotivation that convinces us that life
is better than death? Arthur I\1iller has said in his autobiography that he
welcomed thinkers such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus whose
political stance owed nothing to Moscow, yet who showed how to avoid
fascism in the post-war era. 'America was where you got rich but Europe
was where the thinking was going on, or so you tended to imagine.
America was becoming suspiciously unreal' (Timebends, p. 155).
Willy Loman presents the ultimate challenge to an 'unreal' society
which is based on capitalism, since he concludes that twenty thousand
dollars is worth more than his life. Can a man really be valued at the
amount of money which he is worth? If so, then capitalist societies such as
America, have reduced human beings to commodities, and dehumanisation
is inevitable.
The play may expose weaknesses and contradictions in Willy's
reasoning, but it is essential that we detect them. To accept Willy's logic
that sacrifice is the price of his self-respect, would be to ac cept a terrible
truth . Audiences and readers feel the need to identify where Willy goes
::r~ng and decide how this defeatist logic can be refuted. If the play is an
ind~ct~ent of our way of life then it has profound 'implications for all
societies which now embrace the ethos of capitalism. Arthur .Miller's early
flirtation with Marxism is often suspected to be an influence here but he
has.explicitly rejected the idea that the play is overtly political. Whilst he
obviously had sympathies with aspects of Communist thinking, he
maintains that his work is much more than the sum total of its political
implications.
AN ORDINARY MAN
For some critics, the play shows a central character who makes a number of
rather obvious errors. Rather than being fascinated by his similarity with
the majority of us, they see him as a particularly foolish man. Yet Arthur
Miller has a cautionary note about this: 'the path is opened for those who
wish to call Willy merely a foolish man, even as they themselves are living
in obedience to the same law that killed him' (Introduction to Collected
Plays, p. 36). If Willy were merely a foolish character, he would be unlikely
to h1ve earned the respect that has been paid to him. OQ the other hand,
he is not clear-sighted and does labour under delusions. He might be said
to represent humanity, with all its virtues and vices.
The play's appeal, however, seerns to lie in its ability to characterise
the ordinary man (the 'low man') and to ennoble him. It is almost because
he is ordinary and recognisably subject to the same temptations as the rest
of us, that he becomes dignified. Willy may be making ordinary mistakes,
but he is also fighting back against his fate in an unusual way. Willy Loman
is sometimes full of contradictions, overly ambitious, blind to his vanities
and unsympathetic towards those who love him. At other times, however,
he is courageous, determined to the point of fanaticism, and almost a
martyr to his family. It is this combination of seemingly incompatible
qualities that makes Willy Loman a realistic and fascinating character.
Arthur Miller himself laughed at the contradictions he built into Willy's
character. Willy the salesman is the person who is most outraged about the
way in which shoddy goods are designed to fall apart just as you have
finished paying for them. As a salesman he has one set of values, and as a
consumer he has another. Willy simultaneously provokes outrage at his
behaviour while moving audiences to tears. The contradictions in Willy's
~harac~er perhaps seem less strange now than they did in 1949, as
inconsistency of character has aTmost become a hallmark of literature in the
latter part of the century. The view that we are pulled in different directions
by social forces which work against each other has becom c ·.1ncreas1ng
· y
. . . 1
accepted. Willy 1s not someone
. with a consistent core to ht
' s a1·
peraon 1ey
We should not mock this, as Arthur Miller warns us that it ma b ·
. . . d , . , y e a
general h uman ch aractenst1c 1n to ay s society. The playwright uses w ·n1
,5
words to describe himself in his autobiography: • y
'I still feel - kind of temporary about myself,' Willy Loman says to his brother Ben. I
smiled as I wrote the line in the spring of 1948, when it had not yet occurred to me
that it summed up my own condition then and throughout my life. The here and
now was always melting before the head of a dream coming toward me or its tail
going away. (Timebends, p. 69)
Nowadays it is generally recognised that the self is provisional: rather than
being a fixed and stable entity which we can examine scientifically, it is
ahvays in the process of becoming something new. Willy acknowledges that
he is discovering things about himself. The fact that Arthur Miller can
acknowledge this ~me trait is an indication that it is perhaps neith!r
unusual nor particularly foolish .
Arthur Miller's own position is that he is neither blaming society
alone, nor presenting a pathetic character who is the author of his own
misfortunes. The play, according to Arthur Miller offers something
between these two extremes -- it is a study of how man and society
interrelate. In China, the line where Willy defiantly announces, 'I am Willy
Loman and you are Biff Lor.nan' was seen as a counter to generations of a
Communism in which individuals had no right to express themselves.
However, this should not be seen as a triumphant assertion of victory
either. In Willy, Arthur Miller has created a character who compels his
audience to ask fundamental questions about human freedom and necessity
which we can all recognise as significant. As Arthur Miller put it, 'the
assumption was that everyone knew Willy Loman' .
LANGUAGE AND STYLE
The early Expressionist, August Strindberg discovered that his Dream Play
(1901), which contains scenes reminiscent of Arthur Miller's, could
function well with the minimum of scenery and props . The spoken word
alone could com municate the majority of information. This principle is
followed to an extent in the staging of Death of a Salesman, since only the
bare minimum of props needed to signify a kitchen is used, for example.
There are many occasions in the play where a character has to convey the
feel or mood of his or her emotions through language alone. Biff, for
example, has to give some indication of the appeal of a rural life for him.
The problem for the playwright is that he will be unable to make a
character like Biff speak particularly eloquently. The language used is
ordinary and it doesn't quite achieve the status of poetry, according to most
critics, but it does have a memorable quality. Much of Willy's appeal
derives from his concise expression of the inconveniences of modern life:
The street is lined with cars. There's not a breath of fresh air in the neighbourhood.
The grass don't grow any more, you can't raise a carrot in the backyard. They
should've had a law against apartment houses. (p. 12)
The language may not be poetic, but it rings with strong emotion and is just
as n1emorable at heightened n1oments. •
SIGNS AND SYMBOLS
Arthur Miller has stated in his introduction to his Collected Plays that he has
'stood squarely in conventional realism' but added to it, and one aspect of
realism is that elements of the play become highly symbolic. In this play,
for example, the stockings which Linda mends, but Willy gives to his lover,
acquire a symbolic significance. They imply more than mere garments, and
they begin to acquire the double meaning of self-indulgence or household
drudgery. Biff is particularly moved by the fact that Willy gives his mother's
stockings to his lover. Stockings were, at the time, highly prized and
difficult to obtain, hence they represent a genuine concern for a woman. To
give them to someone else implies a lack of regard for Linda. Some symbols
o ~ sta~e beco~e vi~id and extreme ways of illustrating the state of Willy's
mind, tn keeping with the Expressionism which influenced him. The best
exa~ple of.this ~ay be the tape recorder which Willy accidentally sets in
motion. In its shrieking, unpleasant tones of a child recounting meaningless
phrases, we, m ay see how awful it is for Willy to have to liv~ with an
accurate account· of th h h. Th·1s 1s. a vivid expression of
• his
. . e past sue as t 1s.
unconscious desire to repress the accurate facts.
Where language or even montage cannot convey meaning accurately
or economically, Arthur Miller uses signs. A sign is anything which conveys
meaning to the audience. Music is one obvious example, which acquires
increasing meaning as the play continues. The sound of the flute at the
beginning is of far less significance than at the end when it has picked up
all manner of associations.
Music is used more like a film score to underline the obvious emo-
tions. The flute is reminiscent of Willy's father and his relatively carefree
existence and the distant sound at one point, for example, prompts W illy to
begin to reminisce about Biffs childhood and the red Chevvy car which he
used to have. Other signs are created through gestures. At one point, as
Willy begins to move from contemplati ng the present to evoking the past,
his vision gradually becomes fixed on a point off-stage to indicate this.
Linda unbuttoning Willy's coat as he buttons it, suggests that he is
becoming helpless and in need of support. In studying the play it is vital to
rem~mber that all these elements contribute to the mcanfng in addition to
the spoken words.
