680 The American Century: Literature since 1945to incorporate borrowings from other forms and styles, notably symbolism and
expressionism. They also mapped out the terrain that most subsequent American
dramatists have occupied. Apart from a brief period in the 1960s and just after, when
many playwrights struck out toward improvisation and more radical experiment, it
is the dramatic land of Miller or Williams that most continue to inhabit. The
domestic setting and some form of realistic speech – both of which, in Miller’s and
Williams’s hands, became rich and variable instruments – have continued to
dominate the American stage.
The first play by Arthur Miller (1915–2005) to reach Broadway, The Man Who
Had All the Luck (1944), closed after only four performances. His second, All My
Sons (1947), however, achieved success and introduced certain themes that would
dominate his work: the pursuit of success and public approbation enshrined in the
American dream, social and familial tension and the conflict between competing
moralities, the economic and political system as a final cause of the problems and
passionate misconceptions Miller’s characters have to endure. The central character,
Joe Keller, sold faulty airplane parts to the government during the war. Believing
that he did what was necessary to support his family, he does not recognize his
responsibility for the consequent death of several pilots – that is, until the discovery
that his son killed himself in shame prompts him to see the higher moral obligation
announced in the title of the play. Characteristically, Miller explores the past and its
impact on the present, and the fundamental issues of moral and social responsibility,
through a dramatization of family conflict. The story of the play is told entirely in
domestic terms; and at its fictional center is the question of whether Joe’s surviving
son, Chris, should marry the fiancée of his dead brother. Equally characteristically,
Miller encourages us to pity Joe rather than damn him for his misrecognition. All
My Sons may, finally, endorse the declaration made by Chris that “there’s a universe
outside and you’re responsible to it.” But it shows that Joe’s failure to recognize this
is a fault of society rather than his own. And it lays the fundamental blame squarely
on a system that would force a man to choose between competing imperatives of
family and society, his sons and all his sons.
With Death of a Salesman (1949), unquestionably his finest play, Miller endowed
similar issues and problems with a tragic dimension. It relates the story of a
representative American, Willy Loman: an ordinary man, as his surname punningly
indicates, but one whose choices and their consequences spell out the darker,
destructive side of the national dream. A salesman who, after 35 years on the road,
has never achieved the rewards and recognition for which he had hoped, Willy is
driven to despair by his failure in a system that seems to him to guarantee success.
Measuring his worth by the volume of his sales – Miller never lets us know what
Willy sells because, essentially, he is selling himself – Willy obsessively withdraws
from the crises and disappointments of the present into memories of the past and
into imaginary conversations with his brother Ben, his symbol of success. Death of a
Salesman is, in a sense, a memory play – a working title for it was “The Inside of his
Head.” And everything here is seen double, as Willy sees it and as it is: a point
sounded in the initial stage description of Willy’s “fragile-seeming home.” “An air ofGGray_c05.indd 680ray_c 05 .indd 680 8 8/1/2011 7:31:38 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 38 PM