Some Kind of Love Story: Arthur Miller

Arthur Miller’s theatre essays seem to suggest that relationships are at the centre of his oeuvre. ‘The fish is in the sea and the sea inside the fish’, 1 he writes. Man and society are inextricable and man can only be seen as part of a social unit: a community, a family, a marriage, a fraternity, a friendship. But Miller’s practice seems to run counter to his theory. The most striking scenes tend to be those which poignantly isolate the individual; the characteristic conclusion that of Death of a Salesman (1949) when Linda Loman demonstrates that she’s never understood her husband and Willy’s sons perceive their father in diametrically opposed ways and where the most understanding figure is a fatalistic and helpless friend who sees Willy in quintessentially American terms as a loner and a never-satisfied entrepreneur. ‘Nobody dast blame this man’, says Charley. ‘You [the family] don’t understand: Willy was a salesman. ... A salesman is got to dream, boy. It comes with the territory. 2 Dreams came, self-reliance was attempted; generations of actual wanderers and literary isolatos walked the American continent. The play focuses not on society but on an American Everyman figure. For, to paraphrase Melville, who ain’t a salesman? Willy’s all-American funeral is a parodic social act, in which the mourners signally fail to comply with social tradition. They do not suspend their differences to eulogise the dead man. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.