Materialism In Death Of A Salesman Essay

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Materialism in Death of a Salesman Arthur Miller uses Death of a Salesman to expose America’s preoccupation withmaterialism after World War II. This preoccupation is the main cause of Willy’s mentalstress. Willy had a lot riding on him being successful. His family’s survival depended on hissuccess. Miller’s depiction of the Loman family is an example which shows that America islargely a second and third generation country. The first generation in this play, Willy’sfather, was forced in order to make a living, to break up the family. But while Willy’sfather achieved and was creative, he left behind him a wife, a young son who is nowfatherless, and an older son who was driven to find success and letting nothing get in hisway. Willy, the second generation, is his father’s victim. While he wants to love and “doright” by his sons, he is driven to use them as heirs to the kingdom that he believes mustbe built. Thus, he must pass on to them not only love but the doomed dream that he has.Biff and Happy represent the third generation in this play. Happy values only materialthings. He looks for some kind of consolation in his relationship with women and thoughvaguely conscious of some insufficiency, measures himself solely by reference to hissuccess in business. Biff, on the other hand, is aware of other values than the purelymaterial and is capable finally of the kind of genuine humanity which Willy onlyapproaches in moments of rare sensitivity. Some have interpreted Death of a Salesman as an attack upon the “AmericanDream” which according to R.H. Gardner means the idea that ours is a land of unlimitedopportunity in which only a ragamuffin can attain riches and any mother’s son becomepresident. Others have chosen to regard it as a contemporary “King Lear” which is thetragedy of the common old man of today, as opposed to that of the extraordinary old manof shakespeare’s time. (Gardner 123) One set of values that exists in Willy’s character, and defeated by the circumstancesin which he finds himself, are his impulses toward two of the original American virtues:Self-reliance and Individualism of spirit. These virtues are perhaps the pure formsunderlying the corrupt and destructive societal imperatives of success and gettingahead.(Foster 84) Willy has the self-reliant skills of the artisan. He is “good at things,”from polishing a car to building a front porch. But self-reliance has collapsed, the toolsrust, and Willy has become a victim of a machine culture. The play implies that Willymight have been happier in a pre-capitalistic society. In simple terms, it suggests that Willywould have been happier working with his hands.(Brustein 46) Willy was meant to represent a Lear of the modern middle classes. His hero is notso much a “low man” as the lowest man one could conceive.(Gardner 124) He is just plaindumb and a big bore. Willy never changes throughout the play. At the end he is still thesame old Willy, babbling maniacally about how magnificent Biff is going to be with the$20,000 insurance money. Happy, the younger son, less favored by both nature and his father, perhaps asWilly was in comparison with Ben, has escaped the closeness with his father that destroysBiff in social terms. Thus worshipping his father from afar, Hap has never fully come torealize the phony parts of his father and his father’s dreams. Happy is not a social rebel andhe will carry on with the life of a salesman, and one suspects, go on to the death of asalesman. (Gordon 279) He will violate the boss’ wife out of some lonely desperation, asWIlly sought support from his Boston woman. He will also try to prove his manliness withthe fast cars and fancy talk, but again like willy, he will never really believe in his ownmanliness in a mature way.(Gordon 280) Just as Willy is called a kid throughout, andreferred to as the diminutive Willy by everyone except Ben, Happy has been trapped bythe infantile American Playboy Magazine vision of the male. (Gordon 279) In Death of a Salesman, Willy is portrayed as a social victim. He is given his elegyin the last scene by his friend Charley, who, ironically, by a kind of indifference and lack ofdream, ha succeeded within the Amercan system. Charley points out that a salesman mustdream of great things if he is to travel the territory “way out there in the blue,” but that heis also a man who really has no trade like the carpenter, lawyer, or doctor, and when thebrilliant smile that has brought his success begins to pale, he must fall, though “there is norock bottom.” Because this portrait rings true, the play seems to indict a system thatpromises and indeed demands total commitment to success without regard to humanvalues, a system that, as Willy says to Howard, will “eat the orange and throw the peelaway.”(Gordon 276) It is a system symbolized in the play by the car, that strange, uniquelyAmerican obsession, which Willy and his sons polish, love and cherish as a manifestationof their manly glory. (Gordon 277) But the car is something that wears out and breaks

down, and soon enough, unless one can afford an even-shinier one, he is driving an oldStudebaker, smashed up many times, with a broken carburetor. He is driving the symbol ofan outlived usefulness. Willy Loman’s catastrophe is one of the poignant and inevitable misfortunes of oursociety an our time. The various formulations of the idea of success have contributed tothe state of mind that makes failure a crime. Su