Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman is a groundbreaking play for many reasons. This article explores the play's structure, in particular its embrace of elements popularized by the interwar European avant-gardes which are then expertly blended with realistic modes of dialogue. In amalgamating a new form of drama that is one-part Naturalism, many parts various other avant-gardes, Miller highlights the complexity of the American experience: it cannot be held with one mode of storytelling. In the same way as it is a new kind of tragedy-that of the common man-it is also a new kind of dramaturgy. This is because to tell the story of being an American in the late-1940s is too multifaceted to be easily contained and represented with one style alone.
In Death of a Salesman, Charley and Bernard do not suffer under capitalism the way Willy does. The particular way Willy engages with the social system of achievement and display engendered by capitalism leads Willy to a tragic undermining of his self-respect. This is a theme Miller also explores in The Price and The Last Yankee. It can be elucidated by considering Aristotle's discussion of eudaimonia and a distinction psychologists draw between accomplishment and achievement. Ernest Hemingway's story "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" helps us understand Miller's theme: the way self-respect must be grounded in accomplishment rather than achievement and display.
Dr Stockmann's endeavor to straddle truth and rhetoric summons up the long-age Platonic division between rational and truth-seeking debate, and manipulative and power-oriented oratory. Identifying the doctor's speech as a case of tentative deliberative rhetoric, this article speculates over its shortcomings and eventual victory in defeat. It purports to demonstrate how this speech sits uneasily between mass public discourse and morality-framed oratory, and how it fails in either earning the doctor absolute and effective followership, or ushering in a democratic deliberation that could defuse mob violence. This takes the article a step further as it considers how the genre of the play itself steers it in a direction that offers not a reconciliation between truth and power, but rather a polarization thereof. While it draws upon classical philosophy and modern deliberation theory, this article is equally grounded in the playwright's own socialist outlook on drama as well as in Girardian anthropological explanations of the mechanism of the tragic. The latter is activated in An Enemy of the People by the tragic hero's parrhesia and the scapegoating he incurs at the hands of the majority, both being the obverse or the tragic pattern of the people's will in participatory democracy.
Willy Loman’s double-mindedness in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman is a major cause of failure for him as a salesman, husband, and father. In all three roles, double-mindedness underlies Loman’s false sense of self and deceptive speech that cause him to act ineffectively and even self-defeatingly in securing prosperity for himself and his family. This article examines the definition of double-mindedness according to the Danish philosopher, Søren Kierkegaard, in his work, Purity of the Heart Is to Will One Thing (1846), in order to illuminate instances of double-mindedness and its deleterious impact on Loman in the play. The discordant, variable mental state that double-mindedness causes predisposes Loman to self-sabotaging and destructive tendencies in both his career and family life. In the end, Loman’s suicide cannot be ruled tragic but should be seen as a forced error for its self-mutilation and escapism.
This article examines moments in twentieth-century American history when appeals for justice were made in letters between the politically conscious writers Eugene O’Neill, Arthur Miller, and Langston Hughes. Their communications were attempts to protest the “Scottsboro Boys” trial in the 1930s and the “Hollywood Ten” case during the “Red Scare” in the 1950s.
