Welcome to UNIT 6.

This unit introduces the second part of the course, which covers units 6-10
and focuses on the literature produced in the United States from the end of World War II until
the first decades of the 21st century. In this second part we will read short stories (Pynchon,
Morrison, Cisneros, Saunders), poetry (Allen, Rich), part of a novel (Vonnegut-only chapter 1)
and a play (Miller). The second part of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century
is a period of many changes in society which were reflected in the literature. The U.S. emerged
as a world power after the war in a very good economic shape. America’s strong economy
affected the lifestyle of the people who saw themselves empowered after a long period of
depression. From the late 1940s through the 1950s and 1960s, the American lifestyle became
increasingly materialistic and individualist.
Unit 6 is devoted to the study of Arthur Miller’s play Death of a Salesman (1949), a play which
captured America’s financial and existential turmoil.

UNIT SIX
«SICK WITH APPEARANCES»: MODERN AMERICAN DRAMA
1. PRESENTATION: BETWEEN REALISM AND EXPRESSIONISM

1916 was the year when American drama reaches

maturity and artistic importance. The American
experience had not found a suitable way of expression in
the dramatic form prior to this moment due to several
causes. The Puritan antagonism to leisure and its fear
of the misinterpretation of reality resulted in the
American colonies waiting till the 18 th century for
stage performances; 17th England enjoyed a most
productive dramatic literature. European works were
prevalent : British patterns and themes dominated
American theatres, even when the authors were
American. Americans grew accustomed to dramatic plays
as forms of entertainment, while theatre producers sought
commercial success in their productions. The view of the
drama as leisure activity nurtured genres such as the
vaudeville and the musical comedy. Cinema and TV made
them widespread recognition.

Early in the 20th century, a number of provincial

theatres attempted to provide the American stage with
some depth and artistic ambition. They promoted
classical as well as serious European plays,
additionally, they encouraged the work of local
authors who strove to break through in the literary
panorama. Susan Glaspell and her husband organized a
group to experiment plays. Eugene O’Neill is claimed to
have inaugurated modern American drama as we know it
today. During the 20s and 30s he and his followers
would liberate it from unwelcome European
influences and from commercial impositions and
would transform Broadway into the world centre of
dramatic art.

American drama explored new modes of representing

human experience: realism, symbolism, naturalism
and expressionism.

The dramatic genre is a form whose essence consists in

offering a representation of appearances of whatever
appears visible to the audience. Hence, the
dramatists of the age tried to convey occult
processes, beyond the usual gestures and situations on
stage. O’Neill himself proposed the use of masks for
stage performance to achieve that aim. Tennessee
Williams suggested that the theatre had made a great
advance through the unlocking and ventilation of the
closets, attics and basements of human behaviour
and experience.

Playwrights made diverse strategies to show the

characters’ hidden conflicts and inner drives. O’Neill
is one of the American writers who is remembered as
playwright and whose plays are still frequently staged. His
plays evidenced his effort to experiment with
language and structure in order to bring to life the
unseen operations of the human minds: masks,
spoken thoughts, a dreamlike atmosphere with
lighting effects, episodic plot consisting of a
cinematic cutting of scenes which created a
sensation of disjointedness and lyrical and delirious
monologues and dialogues.
Most of his work was inspired by suggestive devices as
well as by Freudian and Jungian theories on the
unconscious and the tragic nature of the human
being as in Greek drama. In the Emperor Jones, O’Neill
dealt with the psychological ordeal underwent by Brutus
Jones, the dictator of a West Indies island. He loses his way
in the forest and is forced to face his physical and emotional
isolation, his humanity and his guilt. His expressionistic
strategies and his emphasis on common people and
situations inaugurated a path of American drama
that lingered through the first half of the 20 th
century and is still evident in contemporary drama.
Conjunction of the realistic and the expressionistic styles.

1.1 THE EXTRAORDINARY IN THE ORDINARY

The pioneers of American modern drama would bring the “common man”
onto the stage, figures that are far from nobility of birth or destiny and
whose passions and failures were recognizable and generally shared.
Drama revealed the nation’s self-consciousness at the moment, after FWW
and harsh Depression years. O’Neill and his contemporaries shaped their
plays with 2 main features: exploration of the unconscious and the
incorporation of the common man. The self struggling with oneself.
They integrated realistic elements such as an American setting with
American characters. Susan Glaspell offers a similar instance of the
innovative use of localism. Her play Trifles tells about women’s
confinement and harsh life in rural Iowa and about the reasons behind the
murder of a man. She separates male and female spheres. Common
language and common lives were complemented with expressionistic
resources. Common and local characters and events enlarge the scope of
significance of the play. Susan Glaspell (1876-1948): Trifles explores the
motives behind a brutal crime committed in a small Iowa town. Glaspell
depicts women’s life with harsh and grim accuracy, but experiments with
form (it is a one-act play) and action (the main characters are off-
stage).
O’Neill-The Emperor Jones (1921) falls in the category of
expressionistic play for its use of sound, color and light, its portrayal of
psychological states of mind, and its appeal to intense emotions.
Tennessee Williams (1911-1983): His play The Glass Menagerie (1944-45)
explores, as usual with this author, the ineffectual and oppressive middle-
class Protestant standards, along with the lives of sordid characters
who struggle to survive in a hostile environment. It is a «memory play»
that tells about a former Southern belle who now lives in emotional and
financial decadence, and destroys any of her children’s prospects of
happiness.

1.2. Review of dramatic elements

Every play is written for its performance on the stage. Form

has a major role in the development of action.
Particular attention should be paid to the division in acts
and scenes and to whatever situation originates the break
between them. Acts are intended to indicate changes
of time, setting, characters onstage or mood.
Plot is not the same as story: story is what happens, the
array of events that constitute the play, while plot is the
way the narrator presents the story to the reader. The
dramatic plot is formed by:
1. Conflict between the self against another self or
universe or self against itself. The conflict creates the
complications, originates the unfolding of events and
the tension until the arrival of climax.
2. Exposition is the introduction of characters and
setting and the basic situation or point of departure of
the action.
3. The rising action presents the central conflict, the
complications, the suspense.
4. A crisis is a minor climax at the end of an act or
scene.
5. Climax is the point of greatest dramatic tension and
when the conflict is resolved.
6. Falling action…subsiding intensity
7. The denouement is the resolution and concluded the
action.

Dramatic characterization uses visual and verbal strategies

to make the characters’ personalities known to the
audience. They can be presented directly through their
words and actions, indirectly through other characters’
comments or through stage directions.
The verbal acts: monologue (extended speech by one
character), soliloquy (extended speech by one character
who is alone on stage used to express private thoughts)
aside (direct address to the audience, unheard by others)
these techniques replace the narrator or the chorus.
Regarding the interrelation of characters and conflict, 2
techniques: dramatic irony, to let the audience know
more than the character about a specific situation and
anagnorisis, the central discovery made by the tragic
hero.

2.1. APPROACHING Miller’s Death of a Salesman

Death of a Salesman proved to be innovative in formal
matters as rich in ideological issues. Arthur Miller
acknowledged the influence of several authors on his work:
Ibsen, O’Neill, Sherwood Anderson –Winesburg, Ohio is seen
in the theme of death in life or emotional paralysis,
Tennessee Williams.
His literary concern with the theme of moral responsibility
had its real-life counterpart in the McCarthy era. He was
sympathizer of the American communist party and in The
Crucible he dramatizes his persecution in a parallel
historical moment, the witch-hunt in Salem.

In his works we can find basic preoccupations concerning

family ties, responsibility and self’s frustrations.
Death of a salesman –story of an unsuccessful salesman
who undergoes a tragic end. This play stemmed from
personal experiences. It exhibits a realist and naturalist
approach to life. Tennessee Williams would redefined and
complemented the notion of reality by exploring
psychological depths and personal drives uncovered
by a more generalized view of existence. As a naturalist, he
explored the frustrations caused by the limitations that
social conditions cast upon the self. The social determinism
that would be expected from this Naturalist approach was
overshadowed by the self’s capacity to make individual
choices.
The ibsenesque technique consisted of a series of
allusions and foreshadowings that led to the
disclosure of hidden sins. This gradual revelation
contributes to the rising tension of the play until the climax
certifies the horror lurking behind apparently quiet domestic
scenes. He also used the memory play or dramatization
of mnemonic workings pionnered by Tennesse Williams
The Glass Menagerie. The threat on the common and the
ordinary, and the responses to the threat is one of miller’s
repeated motifs.
Realistic and expressionistic, temporal dislocations of the
plot,
Use of a common man as dramatic hero.
The retelling of the American dream from the perspective of
those who fail and the reversal of the myths of the
American family and the open road.
The family as the ideological core of the conflict.
The vernacular speech.

2.2. REVISITING Death of a Salesman

Contemporary critics of the play were attracted to the formal innovations
presented. The formal strategies employed by the author aimed at the
exhibition of mental processes as memory, conflict or self-delusion. The
temporal and spatial dislocations maintained a continuous action and
tension through which the protagonist recalled the past. Interruptions and
fragmentariness were avoided as the different temporal and spatial
segments smoothly integrated into the main action. He also used repetitions
of motifs that function as linguistic hinges between the action and each
analepsis. Readers, spectators perceive a growing tension as the characters’
lives deeply affected by a secret that is progressively disclosed since biff’s
discovery at the boston hotel illuminates past and present moments in the
play.
The stage set contributes to the expressionistic structure that sustains the
play. The fluidity of time harmonizes with the dissolving walls of the
lomans’ house. Also, memories of actual events can coexist with dreams
and with present situations onstage. The light effects that accentuate
specific spots or situations are expressionistic strategies. The light games
plays a part in the hallucinatory atmosphere that surrounds Willy. The
setting contributes to his characterization as an unbalanced person.
Ben’s character is another expressionistic strategy. He lacks an operative
personality in the play, thus, his part is rather functional and symbolic. He
emerges onstage conjured by Willy’s imagination, accompanied by the
sound of the flute, with the sole purpose to evoke or reinforce the
salesman’s aspirations.
Another strategy was to present a common man as a tragic figure. Miller
seemed to suggest that great falls are within the scope of ordinary people.
He stated that tragedy reside in the realm of the domestic. some critics
disagree on Willy Loman’s tragic stature and label the protagonist of this
play a pathetic figure Although some critics claim that Willy’s character
lacks the introspective solitude of traditional tragic heroes. Whether
highborn or common, tragic heroes are flawed and make errors of
judgement. The Greek term for this tragic flaw is hamartia, “missing the
mark”. Willy’s main hamartia is his belief in a sort of indisputable
birthright to prosper, on account of his American nationhood.
Responsibility and moral conscience are core themes in his plays.
In Death of a salesman the protagonist’s personality is exhibited in dual
terms: his social and psychological life, theme of alienation.
It inspects the nature of the myth and provides dramatic representations of
its facts and fallacies. Willy Loman stands for all those whose ambitions
have resulted in failure, thus embodying the falseness of the idea that
success is achievable for anyone. His characterization is built upon
contradictions, disparity between his firm belief in the American myth of
success and his own actual life. The opening scene begins with an old,
fatigued man even his children worn out and frustrated. The jungle of
modern urban life embodied in the brick density that surrounds the Loman
place, seems to have a Darwinian implication: only the fittest survive.
Willy is represented as unfit, while the successful but mysterious Ben is
described as a predator.
It was advertised as manifestation of capitalism. Miller stated that he never
intended a criticism of a specific ideological or political system.
Nevertheless, the play expresses the country’s ambivalence towards its
capital system and the main character’s alienation in a social context. Willy
never seems to need affection or respect, he wants to be well-liked with a
promotion or recognition. Sociologists recognized this as a symptom of the
era. The play deals with the decay, perversion or destruction of social
relationships at family level, as well. Willy seeks a home outside his home
in the face of familial dissolution The family stands out as one of the
recurrent motifs that Miller explores in his work. In an article he accounted
for his characters’ frustrations as the difficulty to find comfort and warmth
in the outside world. By expanding his naturalistic interests to the domestic
domain, Miller surpassed the institutional and economic forces that had
occupied previous moments of American naturalist writers. Revelations of
the deficiencies of the capitalist system run parallel to those pertaining to
the personal and the familial in the awareness that both domains of actions
are interrelated. This is evident in his treatment of his sons, sharing his
distorted value system with them. Wrong examples. How is he encouraging
misconduct. He wishes to pass the salesman vocabulary and behaviour
down to this sons, transforming his own profession into an epitome of the
suitable way to the American Dream. Biff’s anagorisis about his position in
the world and about his father’s fallacy foreshadows the tragic denouement,
Open road is undermined. In American literature, the image of the road has
entailed a promise of escape, improvement, self-finding and return to
nature. It has meant power and control over one’s destiny. Here it’s not an
actual physical space bc it’s never displayed onstage. Characters speak of it
and it casts and elusive, intangible air on the road. It seems that the road
has taken control over Willy and not vice versa, in an ironic reversal of the
myth.
Willy’s car is an instrument of death and destruction.
The play has been often analyzed in the context of miller’s own family
background. Critics have found the family as the fundamental structural
and ideological element, and its focus on the common man. The defence of
the ordinary, weak man in the face of adversity.
The names of the Lomans are meaningful in themselves. Loman per se
evokes the family’s social class and reinforces the idea that the protagonist
is not prominent or influential. Although miller stated that the name was
not intended as a pun for Willy’s social status.
Willy’s schizophrenic nature —so pivotal to the play’s set,
conflict and development— is staged, as mentioned above, on two levels:
the psychological and the social. His frequent inconsistencies and his
deceits indicate the disparity between both. Linda Loman, on the contrary,
is the one character who seems to stand aside from deception. Her
pragmatic personality, however, functions less as a contrast to her
husband’s illusions than as an operative image of the fallible institution of
the family. The play makes use of imagery to convey the atmosphere and
ideas that impregnate it. The Loman’s home, for instance, functions as a
metaphor for Willy’s ambitions as well as for his failures. The modern
appliances he wants for his house stand for Willy’s idea of success and
happiness, while the decay occasionally observed accounts for his
disregard of family and emotional matters. Delicate and expensive, the
stockings constitute an apt element in Willy’s stock, since they symbolize
what he thinks money can buy. They also present a harsh contrast with
those old garments that Linda mends to make them last longer. Feminine
garments as they are, the stockings can be understood as an objectification
of the two women in Willy’s life. The sport shoes that Biff destroys
symbolize his rejection of his father’s authority over him, and his loss of
faith in Willy’s values. It should be noted that they are part of his athletic
equipment, a symbol for the young and energetic type expectable in an
American hero. The seeds that Willy insistently plants unsuccessfully stand
for infertility, i.e. the failure in his life despite his efforts. For instance,
verbal irony suggests a disparity between what is being uttered and what is
being implied. The play’s thematic line is built along a number of ironies,
among which dramatic irony stands out as a recurrent device that evokes
the disagreement between Willy’s objective and subjective worlds.
Dramatic irony occurs whenever the readers or spectators know or
understand more about the action than some of the characters do. For
instance, the audience can see Linda painfully mending stocks, while in
another scene a pair of precious silk stockings is given to the nameless
character of «the woman.»
However insightful Linda is concerning Willy’s physical and mental
decline, she is unable to perceive the existence of Willy’s lover. In Act One,
Linda speaks a rather formal statement about her husband.
It is ironical in the sense that it is not expected, and offers a contrast to her
usual informal discourse: Linda’s last speech reveals the irony of what she
calls «freedom.» A house free of a mortgage seems to express the modern
version of freedom, while the play suggests that in such consumerist
scenario that kind of release is never possible. Arthur Miller’s literary
production was concerned with the moral condition of ordinary human
beings. He usually articulated this preoccupation in plots that explore
family relations or life in small communities. Although Death of a
Salesman presents a realistic account of the capitalist system and its
implications, Miller pays also insistent attention to personal and familial
circumstances as contributors to the self’s frustration and unhappiness

The American Dream

Willy believes wholeheartedly in what he considers the promise of the
American Dream—that a “well liked” and “personally attractive” man in
business will indubitably and deservedly acquire the material comforts
offered by modern American life. Oddly, his fixation with the superficial
qualities of attractiveness and likeability is at odds with a more gritty,
more rewarding understanding of the American Dream that identifies
hard work without complaint as the key to success. Willy’s
interpretation of likeability is superficial—he childishly dislikes Bernard
because he considers Bernard a nerd. Willy’s blind faith in his stunted
version of the American Dream leads to his rapid psychological decline
when he is unable to accept the disparity between the Dream and his
own life

Abandonment
Willy’s life charts a course from one abandonment to the next, leaving
him in greater despair each time. Willy’s father leaves him and Ben
when Willy is very young, leaving Willy neither a tangible (money) nor
an intangible (history) legacy. Ben eventually departs for Alaska,
leaving Willy to lose himself in a warped vision of the American Dream.
Likely a result of these early experiences, Willy develops a fear of
abandonment, which makes him want his family to conform to the
American Dream. His efforts to raise perfect sons, however, reflect his
inability to understand reality. The young Biff, whom Willy considers the
embodiment of promise, drops Willy and Willy’s zealous ambitions for
him when he finds out about Willy’s adultery. Biff’s ongoing inability to
succeed in business furthers his estrangement from Willy. When, at
Frank’s Chop House, Willy finally believes that Biff is on the cusp of
greatness, Biff shatters Willy’s illusions and, along with Happy,
abandons the deluded, babbling Willy in the washroom.

Betrayal
Willy’s primary obsession throughout the play is what he considers to
be Biff’s betrayal of his ambitions for him. Willy believes that he has
every right to expect Biff to fulfill the promise inherent in him. When Biff
walks out on Willy’s ambitions for him, Willy takes this rejection as a
personal affront (he associates it with “insult” and “spite”). Willy, after
all, is a salesman, and Biff’s ego-crushing rebuff ultimately reflects
Willy’s inability to sell him on the American Dream—the product in
which Willy himself believes most faithfully. Willy assumes that Biff’s
betrayal stems from Biff’s discovery of Willy’s affair with The Woman—
a betrayal of Linda’s love. Whereas Willy feels that Biff has betrayed
him, Biff feels that Willy, a “phony little fake,” has betrayed him with his
unending stream of ego-stroking lies.

1.