Importance of Gender in Millers Death of a Salesman - Book Report/Review Example

?Discussion and Analysis of the Issue and Importance of Gender in Miller’s Death of a Salesman According to Kay Stanton, the “man” of Miller’s tragedy is sexually particular unlike his other plays; the play is highly masculine. The American dream in Death of a Salesman is male-centric; it moves further with the help of woman characters but without appreciating their contribution, and ignoring them in the process. Stanton remarks, “The American dream, as represented in Death of a Salesman is male-oriented …It requires unacknowledged dependence upon women as well as women’s subjugation and exploitation (156). These critics, it seems, have ignored the reality of Miller’s real-life characterization of housewife-mother personification in peculiar history, as the character of Linda Loman in Death of a Salesman. Linda Loman is very significant and complicated persona of the play. Critics like Stanton (1991), Balakian (1969), and Otten (2002) have given a number of readings to the play to search the foregrounding of Linda. Otherwise also, it is generally remarked about Miller’s works that their female figures are insignificant and passive, which denotes naturally that Miller’s plays are masculine. Carson states, “…his vision of the world reflects some curious anti-feminine biases” (qtd. in Yao 31). Miller’s portrayal of men is convincing. It has been one of the flaws of Miller’s works that his portrayal of women is far from individuality of their own, as they see themselves only in their relationship to the men. According to the literary critic, Christopher Bigsby, “women, in Miller’s plays, tend to be conservative forces and thereby … compound the distorting forces of social life,” (qtd. in Yao 31). Actually, Miller has successfully presented the frustration and bitterness of the conservative gender world by showing women as oppressed and oppressor in the man-dominated society. Miller’s Linda Loman is courageous enough to show her opposition to the patriarchal social structure and come out to feel the freedom of her awareness. Miller has been criticized for representing the society from his own perspective. Women characters are not given their due by not giving them enough action and importance by Miller. Stanton, in his famous article “Women and the American Dream of Death of a Salesman”, stresses the significance of Linda Loman in “more than she is credited to be.” A second reading of the play from a feminist outlook by Balakian is argues, “…it cries out for a renewed image of the American woman.” It reaches the conclusion that “Death of a Salesman does not condone the locker-room treatment of women. Instead, the play asks us to question whether the dichotomized image of woman as either mother or whore is a desirable cultural value” (qtd. in Yao 32). According to critics, Miller’s women characters, particularly Linda Loman, are relatively complicated than many critics proclaim. Otten further figures out that the female characters like Linda actually add to the tragic components of the play. A sort of counter-attack has been seen in literary circles for wrongly blaming Miller in portraying unconvincingly; actually it “has helped establish a new appreciation of Miller’s ability to create strong female characters despite occasional attacks in feminist criticism” (qtd. in Yao 32). Otten’s thinking actually provides new light on Miller’s females, particularly the wife and mother characters in his plays. Women the like of Linda Loman are realistic portrayals; they are complicated, strong, and at the same time tragic. Like their male characters, females are stated in the historical peculiarity of social importance of their sex-based identity, as they go through relatively more hardships by living both characters -- housewives and mothers (Yao 32). Miller has presented the actual life of American women during the 1930s and 1950s. He has showed the condition of women in society through his sharp insight into the undesired and artificialness of the patriarchal system and routinely typical gender roles. Miller throughout depicts his support to the housewife-mother victim limited to homely chores in the play Death of a Salesman. Miller has been able to highlight women’s experience and their own personal reactions to happenings, and therefore, treats them in total humanity. Death of a Salesman, observed from feminist angles, reveals and disagrees with the claim that Miller is a male chauvinist (Yao 32). He was quite conscious of the criticism from the very start regarding limits put up on female roles and desires in the early twentieth-century, which he has depicted in his early plays. Miller’s depiction of the sacrificing and rearing housewife-mothers ensnared in the patriarchal society is genuine. His women roles’ characterization is genuine in the sense that unlike most male writers, he does not show housewife-mothers wired in domestic chores as satisfied with their given roles. On the other hand, Miller exhibits his dissatisfaction with the male dominance and the situations female are in. He presents an exact picture of women’s lives and is equally sympathetic. He is worried about women fixed up in the known economic and moral wires surrounding them. Miller dethrones the conservative formula by projecting the housewife-mothers stronger than the male characters, and depicting them in relatively negative shades than the females, as we see in the self-killing and self-cheating of Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman; he is a failure, as Willy Loman is unaware of his own place in society (Yao 33). Linda Loman as a Torturer Linda Loman is a torturer in Death of a Salesman. She tortures her family. She is the epitome of love at both receiving and giving ends; she suffers for the family like mother earth, representing the play’s moral concerns, but at the same time, she is the destroyer of her husband and son, as she becomes a cause of the tragedy, as recognized in 1967 by William B. Dillingham, naming Linda as a “contributing cause” of the tragedy. Benjamin Nelson blames Linda for being “root figure in the catastrophe of her husband and sons” (Yao 34). Otten reinforces, “Linda’s supplications propel Willy and Biff toward their tragic destiny” (43). Linda is a portrayal of womanly virtues; she is caring, soft, submissive, and helping wife to Willy Loman but the paradox is that she becomes the cause of the tragedy. She does not stop Willy Loman from making false claims, exaggerate sales, and actual figures, thus, encourages his falsehood to the extent of creating illusion. “Linda is an unconscious accomplice in Willy’s grandiose self-deceptions” (qtd. in Yao 34). Death of a Salesman revolves around Willy Loman’s American Dream. Linda provides full support to the dream of Willy Loman that success is sure to the well-liked rather than questioning and finding faults with his over-confidence. She lets Willy Loman breed the unrealistic dreams and woo them. She is always over-optimistic that Willy Loman would succeed in attaining his sales targets. She is always full of encouragement but lacks understanding, stating, “…but you’re doing wonderful, dear. You’re making seventy to a hundred dollars a week” (qtd. in Yao 34). She crosses the limit in supporting Willy’s dream that he finds it impossible to get rid of it. Polster also finds the field of women to be a neglected one from the scholarship of Miller, as quoting Mason that Miller treats wives, brides, and mistresses for dramatizing purpose, creating dramatic gender politics just to show the issue at hand in a dramatic way, outlining gender acts as prescriptive (133). Mason states that the dramatist “fails to interrogate the operation of gender in both private and public relations … He defines Woman as Other, either a paper doll devoid of depth and true warmth, or a source of confusion and the locus of evil” (Mason 328). According to Mason, the dramatist evaluates the moral system, but mainly to study the male burden—expectation from man to fulfill responsibility—not gender bias. Otten compares Linda’s supplications leading Willy and Biff towards the tragic misfortune of both with the Greek group song expecting relief seriously, but leading to the tragedy of Oedipus. Linda tells her son, “Biff, his life is in your hands!” From the very start, Linda has aroused serious critical reactions. She is viewed as the one, according to Roudane, who “contributes to the truth-illusion matrix" by supporting Willy's "vital lie" (qtd. in Otten 292-293). Others such as Guerin Bliquez find Linda more sinful, pointing towards her as "the source of the cash-payment fixation" whose assent "in all Willy's weaknesses" labels her a "failure as a wife and mother." She sees a competitor in Ben and deprives all strength of Willy, making him a victim of her "ambition as well as his own (qtd. in Otten 293).” Brian Parker calls Linda “stupid and immoral” for promoting Willy's self-cheat, blaming Linda of nourishing no lofty aims than Willy's dream and sees her “moral sloppiness” visible in Hap “one degree farther” – “Hap is his mother's son” (qtd. in Otten 263). And Karl Harshbarger finds Linda to be a malign character who manipulates Willy “to relate to her as a small boy ... by not allowing him to communicate his deeper needs to her,” supports Biff against Willy, and finds him guilty “for his own feelings. She offers him his reward, love and support, only when he becomes dependent on her” (qtd. in Otten 263). Her “extreme defensiveness” against her own guilt must disguise the joy that she, not a man, has been victorious.” Linda, according to Weiland, is generally called as an emotional sop, a light character, or “a mouthpiece for Miller's earnestness” (qtd. in Otten 263). A critic has called her Jocasta, a “mousy twentieth- century Brooklyn housewife” who, similar to Oedipus's wife-mother, holds her husband “from asking the fatal question, 'Who am I?'” (qtd. in Otten 263). Latest feminist critics have used Linda as a tool for possible attacks on Miller. Benjamin Nelson sees feminism in Linda’s helping “build a doll's house around [Willy] and, consequently, [doing] to Willy what he has been doing to Biff and Happy,” turning him and the children “victims of her gingerbread house” (qtd. in Otten 263). Various researches conducted in the late 1980s reject Linda as an important actor in a tragic design, showing her as mirroring a male point-of-view, which “borrows the methods and espouses the sexual politics of melodrama. ... If Miller writes tragedy ... he makes it a male preserve” (Mason 109). Linda is the personification of society's outlook on women -- an idea of Miller. Using the feminist theory of Gayle Rubin, Austin feels sorrowed that Miller has degraded women as “objects to be exchanged” and snatching from them the credit of being “as active subjects in the play” (qtd. in Otten 263). Kay Stanton provides the outcome that Miller merges all female actors in the drama "in the idea of Woman: all share ... in their knowing"; and having “the potential to reveal masculine inadequacy,” they “must be opposed by man” (qtd. in Otten 263). Off late, Linda Kintz has researched Miller's “grammar of space,” which exhibits “a nostalgic view of the universalized masculine protagonist of the Poetics/' in which conception women like Linda “wait at home, to console and civilize both husband and children, roles that provide a structural, narrative guarantee of masculine agency even in very different historical periods” (Otten 263). Linda Kintz finds anti-female feelings entrenched in the tragedy itself. She voices a serious criticism not only of Linda's act but of the sex-based discrimination in the tragedy as genre. Linda Kintz and other feminists find flaws in the portrayal of Linda and the other women in the play; the issue is critical in relevance to looking at the drama as tragedy, as Miller thinks of Linda as a necessary add-on to the tragic meaning; Linda's sheer desire and love for Willy cannot save him. Christopher Bigsby had commented, “This does not make her a 'useful doormat'” as some feminists have objected. In his directing notes, Elia Kazan writes on the play that Linda most of the time seems to be suitably “fashioned out of Willy's guilt” and male pride as “Hard-working, sweet, always true, admiring . . . dumb, slaving, tender, innocent.” In actuality, “in life she is much tougher. . . . she has chosen Willy! To hell with everyone else. She is terrifyingly tough” (qtd. in Otten 294). Kay Stanton has indicated that Miller “seems not to have fully understood” her prowess as a “common woman who possesses more tragic nobility than Willy” (qtd. in Otten 294), but at different times Miller has raised his voice that Linda not be emotionalized, starting with Mildred Dunnock's earliest dramatization of the role. He remembered how Kazan compelled Dunnock to render her long blaming speech to Bill and Happy in Act II in double time and then doubled the speed of the rendering to gain her composure “…out her spine, and has Linda filled up with outrage and protest rather than self-pity and mere perplexity” (qtd. in Otten 294). He also commented how the Linda in the Beijing production, Zhu Lin, from the very start humbled Linda's character by “exploiting ... the sentiments” that “will sink them all in a morass of brainless 'feeling' that finally is not feeling at all but an unspecific bath of self-love.” Zhu Lin's translation brought back the memory of a Yiddish production in New York in which “the Mother was a lachrymose fount” like mothers “performed by actors of Irish back- grounds” in starting film, “always on the verge of tears, too” (qtd. in Otten 294). Linda's character was never just supportive, according to Miller. He affirms the role of Linda in the resultant death of Willy by acknowledging that “When somebody is destroyed, everybody finally contributes to it” (qtd. in Otten 295), he thought of Linda as “sucked into the same mechanism” as Willy. Linda adds greatly to the tragic vision of the drama although she is not a "tragic hero”. She is not just passive victim although she is not empowered to stop Willy's end, but Linda is majorly accountable for arranging the tragic meeting of Willy and Biff. She can only react, not hold the fatal meeting she seriously predicts when she tells Biff, with satirist perfection, that he has control over Willy's fate; and it is she who tells Biff about the rubber hose, thus capacitating him with the information he requires to face Willy at the finish of the play (Otten 295). Death of a Salesman definitely is a tragedy of the common man. This common man is also sexually specific. Blaming the play as masculine by a number of critics can not be denied but all literary works are mirror of the society. The social structure of the 1950s is truly represented through the play. Linda Loman is central to the happenings in the play. Her character represents the frailties of the women of that time. At the same time, Miller can not be discharged of the blame that he projected the female characters in dim lights. Opinion remains equally divided over the stereo-typicality of the female portrayal of Miller, as per the social condition and ruling cultural environment. Women characters of Miller, such as Linda are both victims and victimizers; they possess courage, strength, and show their dissatisfaction against the male-dominated society as well. Works Cited Mason, Jeffrey D. “Paper Dolls: Melodrama and Sexual Politics in Arthur Miller's Early Plays.” Modern American Drama: The Female Canon. Ed. Tune Schlueter. Rutherford, N.T.: Fairleigh Dickinson Universitv Press, 1990:103-15. Otten, Terry. “Death of a Salesman at Fifty—Still "Coming Home to Roost."” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 41. 3 (1999): 280-310. University of Texas Press. Web. 8 December 2012. . Polster, Joshua E. Rev. of Stone Tower: The Political Theater of Arthur Miller. Theatre Journal 62.1 (2010): 132-133. Project MUSE. Web. 8 Dec. 2012. . Stanton, Kay. “Women and the American Dream of Death of a Salesman.” Harold Bloom. Ed. Willy Loman. 1991. 67-102. New York: Chelsea House. Yao, Xiaojuan., Zhou1, Tiannan., & Long, Yufei. “Confined Spirits’ Struggle: Housewife-mother Figures in Arthur Miller’s Early Plays.” English Language and Literature Studies 2. 3 (2012). We. 8 December 2012. . Read More