Analysis of Naturalism in Death of a Salesman
Abstract: One of the themes of the play of Arthur Miller is naturalism in its portrayal of humans subject to economic and ideological forces. At the same time, the naturalism of the play is complicated for its almost post-modern treatment of such distinctions as present and past, action and “talk”, technology and nature, signs and the real. Based on the viewpoint of Walter Benn Michaels in The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism, this essay will mainly analyze these distinctions in Death of a Salesman, so that we can have a better understanding of this famous playwright’s plays and thoughts at that time.
Key words: Theme; Distinctions; Naturalism; Death of a Salesman
《推销员之死》中的自然主义分析
摘要: 米勒戏剧的主题之一是在描写受经济和意识形态力量的牵制的人们的过程中所体现的自然主义。同时，自然主义戏剧的复杂性在于他对一些区分，如现在和过去，行动和言语，技术和天然，符号和所指所做的后现代化的处理.参照瓦尔特·本·迈克尔在《金钱的标准和自然主义逻辑》中的观点，本文通旨在分析在《推销员之死》剧本中的这些区分的内在意义，以便更好的了解这位有名的剧作家的作品和在当时的思想。
关键词: 亚瑟·米勒; 《推销员之死》; 自然主义
Contents
1. Introduction …………………….……………………………………………...………1 2. Logic of Naturalism…………………………………………………………………….1 2.1 An Overview of Walter Benn Michaels’s Logic of Naturalism………………… .1 2.2 Logic of Naturalism and Death of a Salesman……………………………………2 3. The Reflection of Naturalism in the play…………………………………....................3 3.1 The Distinction between Talk and Action................................................................3 3.2 The Distinction between Abstraction and Reality………………………………..5 3.3 The Distinction between Technology and Nature...................................................8 4. Conclusion……………………...…....……………………………………………..……10
1. Introduction
Affected both by the highly naturalistic theatre in 1930s and by the Great Depression milieu that gave birth to those plays, Arthur Miller’s watershed play is naturalistic in its portrayal of humans subject to economic and ideological forces; at the same time, the naturalism of the play is complicated by its almost post-modem treatment of distinctions such as present and past, action and “talk,” hard value and soft currency, a treatment that resists naturalism’s “hard” distinction between signs and the real. In Death of a Salesman, Miller elaborates his own vision of the relation of economic to psychic life by dramatizing the attempted “escape” from the money economy Benn Michaels locates as the obsession of naturalism to “stage the disappearance of money” (Miller, 1977: 144).1 The distinctions that obsess the characters of the play—between saying and doing, seeming and being, technology and nature—are themselves rooted in money and the commodification of life in America.
2. Logic of Naturalism
2.1 An Overview of Walter Benn Michaels’s Logic of Naturalism
In The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism, Walter Benn Michaels locates in American literary naturalism this anxiety over issues of material reality and representation. The “logic”of naturalism Benn Michaels elaborates is based on the repression of money as free-floating signifier, which expresses itself in various and unsuccessful strategies of “escape” from the money economy. An aesthetic expression of both the desire for and the impossibility of this escape, naturalism obsesses over the ontological and epistemological questions raised by money, becoming “the working out of a set of conflicts between pretty things and curious ones, material and representation, hard money and soft, beast and soul”(Miller, 173).
2.2 Logic of Naturalism and Death of a Salesman
When Ben, Willy Loman’s brother, in the second act of Death of a Salesman, contrasts the present and substantial value of a diamond with the continually deferred value of Willy's sales “appointments,” we may notice that this advice comes from a character who is himself not quite present or substantial. As a phantom or a delusion or a memory that holds out the promise of “natural” money as well as an essential, natural self, Ben manifests precisely the characteristics of money that both tantalize and terrify the Lomans.
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See Arthur, Miller. Death of a Salesman. New York: Penguin, 1977.
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Historically, the increasingly arbitrary relationship between money’s physical material and its “face value” has made money function as a symbol of a more general disjunction between appearance and reality, seeming and being, “material” and “intellectual currency”(Miller, 1). As Ben’s diamonds do for Willy, so does gold or silver promise to eliminate the troubling gulf between substance and sign, or between the often-unreliable signs we must use to navigate the world and what we perceive to be the “reality” of that world.
3. The Reflection of Naturalism in the Play
3.1 The Distinction between Talk and Action
One of the most salient aspects of Death of a Salesman is the play’s exploration of the tricky distinction between saying and doing, talk and action. Often taken as evidence of what Richard Hofstadter famously delineated as the business world’s general hostility toward intellectuals and almost religious dedication to “practicality,” the American businessman, at least in the twentieth century, appears on the literary and cultural scene as a self-described “man of action” with no time for “idle talk.” While this strictly instrumentalist conception of language has long been associated with businessmen generally, the salesman, in particular, has reason to possess a somewhat more complicated attitude toward language. The fact that the salesman, more than perhaps any other businessman, makes his living by talking leads to a profound ambivalence toward language that complicates the distinction between discourse and action. The salesman, in Miller's play, represents at once heightened understanding of the dialectical inseparability of “talk” and “action” and a deep anxiety caused by this knowledge.
The very insistence on a hard distinction between talk and action reveals an anxiety over the unavoidable ambiguity and misdirection of language. It has become axiomatic that Willy Lowman mistakes saying for doing; a look at the attitudes toward the spoken word of the major characters in the play, however, reveals something more complex. Linda clearly sees Willy’s excessive “saying” as indicative of a lack of doing: as she explains to Biff and Happy, “Instead of walking he talks now” (Miller, 352). In Linda’s formulation, language (Willy’s “talking”) denotes the absence of reality—it takes the place of action. It is true that at times Willy seems to possess an almost boundless faith in the ability of one’s words to have a real impact on the world, merely through their utterance. At the same time, however, Willy recognizes his profuse talking as a liability. Searching for reasons for his failure at sales, Willy tells Linda, “I don’t know why—I can’t stop myself—I talk too much” (Miller, 346). In
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fact at other times in the play Willy tries his best to limit or outright prevent the talk of other characters in the play. After the first memory-scene involving the woman with whom Willy has a sexual affair in Boston, the stage directions tell us that Willy attempts to silence Linda by “put[ting his]hand gently over her mouth” (Miller, 28). A moment later, unwilling to face unpleasant truths about Biff, he tells first Bernard and then Linda to “Shut up!” (Miller, 28). Later in the first act, he again commands Bernard to “Shut up!” (Miller, 36). The situation is clearly more complicated than Willy's simply mistaking “talk” for “action”. Rather, Willy seems to glean something about the slipperiness of this very distinction, and tries to control reality through controlling speech.
Willy’s complicated attitude toward “talk” and its relation to “action” is intimately related to his profession. The salesman by definition complicates any easy distinction between saying and doing. He engages in speech that is what philosopher John L. Austin has called “performative”—he performs actions through the uttering of words, thus complicating the distinction between signification and the real (Austin, 1975: 5). Furthermore, Willy’s anxiety about the slipperiness of the talk/ action distinction is a manifestation of his anxiety concerning money as it both symbolizes and exacerbates a troubling disparity between signs and the real (or between “talking” and “walking”). As a commission salesman Willy would understandably possess a heightened anxiety concerning this aspect of money. As we learn late in the first act, Willy has recently been denied a salary and put on “straight commission,” as Linda tells Biff and Happy, “like a beginner, an unknown” (Miller, 351). In fact, in an important sense a salesman is a kind of perpetual beginner, and perpetual unknown. For the salesman working for commission, neither past nor future matters. He is worth exactly what he is making in commission in the present, and neither past glories nor promises of future potential matter at all. Willy’s loss of salary thus amounts to a kind of negating of his past and future. Working for straight commission, Willy is worth only what he is earning in sales now—which, we learn, is nothing. Given the denial of his past with the company and lack of faith in his future potential that the taking of his salary symbolizes, it is not surprising that Willy feels “kind of temporary” about himself (Miller, 63). His only escape from the painful, commodified present is to reconstruct memories and project into the future—two processes that become impossible when Biff arrives, thus exacerbating the threat Biff poses to Willy’s sense of identity. Willy would value himself and Biff—either by what he imagines they once were or by what he imagines they could potentially be in the future. In doing so, he belies an anxiety concerning his (and Biff’s) valuelessness in the present.
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