Arthur Miller’s stated intention for Death of a Salesman was to create a “tragedy of the common man.”¹ Although commentators argue over the meaning of “tragedy” in this phrase,² the word “man” has been taken as sexually specific rather than as generic in most responses to the play. Undoubtedly, the play is heavily masculine. Willy Loman is the tragic protagonist, and the effects of his tragic flaws are clearly engraved upon his sons. The roots of Willy’s tragedy seem to be in his lack of attention from his father and his perceived inadequacy to his brother, Ben. All conflicts seem to be male-male—Willy versus Biff, Willy versus Howard, Willy versus Charley—so it has been easy for productions, audiences, and commentators to overlook, patronize, or devalue the significance of women in the play.³ The tragedy of Willy Loman, however, is also the tragedy of American society’s pursuit of the American Dream, which the play both defines and criticizes. Careful analysis reveals that the American Dream as presented in Death of a Salesman is male-oriented, but it requires unacknowledged dependence upon women as well as women’s subjugation and exploitation.

The masculine mythos of the American Dream as personified in Willy Loman has three competing dimensions: the Green World, the Business World, and the Home. All three have ascendant male figure heads and submerged female presences. The Green World is the “outdoors” realm of trees, animals, handcrafting, planting, and hunting, and it takes both pastoral and savage forms. The pastoral aspect is associated with ancestral flute music and Willy’s yearnings for his father and, in the next generation, with Biff’s enjoyment of farm and ranch work, that which provokes Happy to call Biff “a poet,” “an idealist.”⁴ The savage element is seen in Willy’s beliefs about Ben.⁵ Whereas Father Loman was a creative figure, moving in harmony with nature by making and disseminating music, Ben is an exploiter and despoiler of nature. In both pastoral and savage aspects, the Green World represents freedom and self-reliance and is a place to test and demonstrate one’s masculinity. To Willy, “A man who can’t handle tools is not a man” (44), and Biff tells Happy that “Men built like we are should be working out in the open” (23). As Ben is said to have walked into the jungle when he was seventeen and walked out when he was twenty-one, rich, the Green World was the means through which he entered manhood. What is submerged in both aspects is the femininity of nature and the dependence of the masculine on it. Biff states, “There’s nothing more inspiring or—beautiful than the sight of a mare and a new colt” (22), and the jungle of Ben is a feminine symbol (“One must go in to fetch a diamond out” [134]), but the feminine is the raw material upon which the male asserts himself. Biff tells Happy that they should “Raise cattle, use our muscles” (23), and the jungle must yield its riches to Ben’s mastery. Ben’s superior masculinity is also proved by his having seven sons, but his wife is only mentioned as the communicant of the news of his death. Yet she is both producer—sustainer and survivor of life. Thus the female is the necessary element in the production of masculinity, but her role must be severely circumscribed.

The Loman family history can be pieced together through Willy’s flashback conversation with Ben⁶ (partly conflated with his conversation with Charley) and his present conversation with Howard. Apparently, Father Loman was a travelling maker and seller of flutes who went off to seek adventure in Alaska and deserted Mother, leaving her with two boys to raise alone. Then Ben ran off when he was seventeen and Willy was not quite four years old. Thus Willy and Mother were left alone together. The desertion by his father left Willy feeling “kind of temporary” (51) about himself and provoked Ben to imitate and surpass what his father had done. Both sons mythologize the father: to Willy he was “an adventurous man” with “quite a little streak of self-reliance” (81); to Ben he was “a very great and a very wild-hearted man” who with “one gadget” (the flute) supposedly “made more in a week” than a man like Willy “could make in a lifetime” (49). Both trivialize the role of their mother. Ben calls her a “Fine specimen of a lady” and the “old girl” (46) and assumes she would be living with lesser son Willy. But she is the woman who bore and raised Ben, whom he deserted and made no attempt to contact, not even knowing that she had “died a long time ago” (46). Willy’s only other stated information about Mother Loman is his memory of being “in Mamma’s lap” listening to “some kind of high music” coming from “a man with a big beard” (48). The mother thus provided the position of comfort from which to attend to the father. Mother is never mentioned again, although hers would be an interesting story. How did she support and raise the four-year-old Willy? Willy seems to have had no further communication from his father, which implies that Father Loman never sent money.⁷ Mother must have had “quite a little streak of self-reliance” also.

Willy entreats Ben to tell his boys about their grandfather, so they can learn “the kind of stock they spring from” (48).⁸ Mother Loman and her stock and Linda and hers seem to have had no bearing on the production of the boys. An Edenic birth myth is implied, with all Loman men springing directly from their father’s side, with no commingling with a female.

In both Ben and Willy, the first desire of manhood is reunion with the father. When Ben ran off, it was “to find father in Alaska.” Willy’s questions about whether Ben found him and where he is are not answered directly. Ben states that he had had a “very faulty view of geography”; discovering that he was headed due south, he ended up in Africa rather than Alaska. Thus Ben avoids saying whether he knows anything about Father by returning attention to himself. But what he does reveal inadvertently is that, in trying to run toward his father, he actually ran further away in the opposite direction. He discovered his mistake “after a few days” (48), so he could have changed direction but did not. Instead of joining his father, he obviously decided to beat him.

Whereas Ben follows his father’s path by running off for adventure, Willy follows it by becoming a travelling salesman. When Willy was “eighteen, nineteen,” only slightly older than Ben had been at his departure, he was “already on the road” as a salesman. Yet, unsure “whether selling had a future” for him, Willy at that age “had a yearning to go to Alaska,” to “settle in the North with the old man” (80–81) and to be with his older brother. Mother was most likely still alive at this point, and Willy felt that he must break from her to establish his manhood, as he believes his father and brother had done. But, less independent than they were, Willy wishes for a family connection that includes only the three male members, a rebuilding of the family without Mother. Willy continually attempts to find or build an all-male realm of patriarchal-fraternal community.⁹ This yearning provides the basis for his refrain of the “liked” and “well liked,” which are set apart from the “loved.” Willy probably had decided that Ben, as first son, had been “well liked” by their father, and he was only “liked,” if regarded with affection at all. Willy would have been loved by his mother, but because that love had not been earned or seized but given freely, it did not have the same value as being “well liked” by his father. Linda, as Willy’s wife, seems to have picked up where Mother left off, replacing her. Linda sings Willy to sleep with lullabies and “mothers” him in countless ways—and she is made to seem responsible for Willy’s rejection of Ben’s proposition to go with him to Alaska.¹⁰ But Linda is obviously being made the scapegoat in this episode. Ben’s offer is not for the two brothers to work together: Ben merely proposes a job in Alaska, where he had “bought timberland” and needs “a man to look after things” for him because he is heading back to Africa. Even without Ben, Willy finds the offer tempting in terms of pastoral male community: “God, timberland! Me and my boys in those grand outdoors!” (85). Ben interprets it more aggressively: “Screw on your fists and you can fight for a fortune up there.”¹¹ Linda’s strongest objection is “why must everybody conquer the world?” (85)—she sees no value in cut-throat competition—but her supporting points are Willy’s own statements about his career fed back to him. Willy refuses the offer after Linda makes reference to Dave Singleman.

When the adolescent Willy had “almost decided to go” to find his father in Alaska, he met Dave Singleman, an eighty-four-year-old salesman who had “drummed merchandise in thirty-one states” and who could now simply go into his hotel room, call the buyers, and make his living in his green velvet slippers. Willy saw that and “realized that selling was the greatest career a man could want” (81). Obviously, Willy found in Dave Singleman a substitute father figure. Singleman had explored and imposed his will (through selling) upon a vast territory, as Father Loman had, but Dave Singleman had managed it in a civilized and comfortable way: in a train rather than a wagon, a hotel room rather than around a fire, and with the Green World transformed into the ease of the green velvet slippers, which he wore even in his death in the smoker of a train. The myth of Dave Singleman is equally as strong for Willy as the myth of his father, imaging as it does for him the perfect life and death, as Dave Singleman died the “death of a salesman,” with “hundreds of salesmen and buyers” at his funeral and sadness “on a lotta trains for months after that” (81). Singleman’s name implies his lack of dependence on women, and he demonstrates to Willy that a life of material comfort without pioneer ruggedness can still be manly. The realm of comfort had probably been associated in Willy’s mind with his mother. Through Dave Singleman’s model, Willy realizes that it is possible to establish himself as “well liked” in an all-male community outside of and larger than the male immediate family. This community is the Business World, which provides more stability and comfort and more variety of and competition among consumer goods than those handcrafted in the vast outdoors. In the face of both temptations to choose the Green World, Willy chooses the Business World, the realm of his surrogate father, Dave Singleman.

The Business World has the potential to swallow up the achievements of the Green World: Willy tells Ben that “The whole wealth of Alaska passes over the lunch table at the Commodore Hotel, and that’s the wonder, the wonder of this country, that a man can end with diamonds here on the basis of being liked!” (86). The myth of the American Business World provides Willy with the fantasy means of beating his father and his brother. But the complexity of the Business World also defeats the simplicity of the Green World. Ben proudly claims to have had many enterprises and never kept books, but such practices are impossible in the Business World. Decision-making and increased competition take the place of handcrafting and manual exploitation of resources. Yet women are the submerged element in this realm, too. As the male realm moves indoors, it brings in the female to attend to the details of daily maintenance considered too trivial for male attention—typing letters, keeping records, collecting evidence, and, perhaps the most important function, screening out lesser men. Instead of testing himself directly on feminine nature, a man in the Business World must test himself by making an important impression on the female secretary-receptionist before meeting with the male decision-maker. Thus the female provides access to the patriarchal male authority. This element is seen clearly in Biff’s attempt to make a date with Bill Oliver’s secretary to gain access to him, after waiting five hours unsuccessfully, and in The Woman’s statement that Willy has “ruined” her because, after their sexual liaison, she now sends him directly to the buyers, without waiting at her desk. Woman as trivialized Earth Mother in the Green World becomes Woman as trivialized Bitch-Goddess Success in the Business World.

Women in the Business World are marked as whores simply because they are there, perhaps because of their function as access givers, although the reconstitution of the submerged shows them to be otherwise. As Willy, deeply and loudly involved in one of his flashbacks, approaches Charley’s office to borrow money, Jenny, Charley’s secretary, tells Bernard that Willy is arguing with nobody and that she has a lot of typing to do and cannot deal with Willy any more. She is an insightful, kind, put-upon, hard-working woman. When Willy sees her, he says, “How’re ya? Workin’? Or still honest?”, implying that her income is made through prostitution. To her polite reply, “Fine. How’ve you been feeling?”, Willy again turns to sexual innuendo: “Not much any more, Jenny. Ha, ha!” (90–91).

Assertion of success for Biff, and especially for Happy, is also bound up with sexual exploitation of women. In their first appearance, they alternate between discussing their father and their own past and current lives, always coming to an association with women. When they recall their “dreams and plans” of the past, an immediate connection is made with “About five hundred women” who “would like to know what was said in this room.” They hark back crudely to Happy’s “first time,” with “big Betsy something,” a woman “on Bushwick Avenue,” “With the collie dog!”: “there was a pig!”¹² Happy states that he “got less bashful” with women and Biff “got more so”; when he questions what happened to Biff’s “old confidence” (20–21), Biff returns the discussion to their father. Biff’s self-confidence rests on sexual confidence; its diminishment is tied to his father.¹³ For Happy, success is measured using women as markers, as he moves up from the initial “pig” with a dog to “gorgeous creatures” that he can get “any time I want” (24–25)—but to him they are still “creatures,” not human beings like himself. Although Biff and Happy agree that they each should marry, find “a girl—steady, somebody with substance,” “Somebody … with resistance! Like Mom” (25), Happy delights in turning other men’s “Lindas” into his private objects of sport. He attributes his “overdeveloped sense of competition” (25) to his habit of “ruining,” deflowering, the fiancées of the executives at the store where he works, then attending their weddings to savor his secret triumph publicly. Because he cannot accept his low status in the Business World, he must take what he interprets to be the possessions of his superiors—their women—robbing them of their supposed only value, the gold of their virtue and jewels of their chastity, and delivering the damaged goods for his superiors to pay for over a lifetime of financial support.

Happy uses women as Ben used the jungle and timberlands, and he carves out this territory for himself as Ben had. Just as Ben sought adventure like his father but found it in another direction, Happy sought the self-confidence of the older brother Biff and found sexual confidence, and it is now where he has superiority over his brother. Although they both hope to have a fraternal life together—male bonding with limited, sex-defined participation of women—they have competing versions. Biff, more attracted to the Green World, wants to buy a ranch that they both can work, and Happy plans for them to go into business together, share an apartment, and for himself to oversee Biff’s having “any babe you want” (26). Later, in the restaurant, when Biff tries to tell Happy about his attempted meeting with Bill Oliver, to put forth Happy’s own plan for going into business together, Happy turns Biff’s attention to the “strudel” he has been attempting to pick up,¹⁴ insisting that Biff demonstrate his “old confidence” (21) before he speaks of the Oliver meeting. Happy wishes to establish a safety net of sexual confidence to protect them against news of failure that he may anticipate and fear, and he perhaps wants unconsciously to show off his “success” to contrast Biff’s probable failure. Magnanimous Happy will give this choice female morsel to Biff if he will only say he wants her—assuming in advance that she has no choice but to acquiesce.

During his assault on the “strudel,” the “Girl” in the restaurant (later named Miss Forsythe), Happy quickly defines himself as a salesman and asks, “You don’t happen to sell, do you?”, with a double entendre on prostitution. Her answer is “No, I don’t sell”; she is a model whose picture has been on several magazine covers. But Happy continues to insist to Biff that “She’s on call” (101–2). At Happy’s entreaty, she rounds up a friend, Letta, who is not a prostitute either.¹⁵ Letta is to begin jury duty the next day, so we may assume that she is a responsible citizen without an arrest record, one qualified to hear evidence and evaluate testimony. When she asks whether Biff or Happy has ever been on a jury, Biff answers, “No, but I have been in front of them!” (114). This is supposedly a joke, but it later proves to be true when we learn that Biff had served three months in jail for theft. Woman as nurturer and care-giver was the submerged element in the Green World; Woman as judge and determiner of truth and value is the submerged element in the Business World.

Yet men in the Business World both need and despise the presence and participation of women, who are continually regarded as whores. Stanley, the waiter in the restaurant, calls the two women, whom he had never seen before, “chippies,” presumably because they left with Biff and Happy. The double standard in full force, women are allowed no sexual adventurism: one real or supposed sexual experience and they are “ruined” forever by male standards.¹⁶ Happy makes women like Miss Forsythe and Letta the scapegoats for his inability to marry: it is a “shame” that “a beautiful girl like that” (Miss Forsythe) can be “had” by him. He cannot marry because “There’s not a good woman in a thousand” (103). This slander covers Happy’s submerged fear that if he tries to marry a woman, another man might do as he does and “ruin” her. He cannot invest himself in one woman because he fears competing men who might rob him of his woman’s supposed only value, the chastity of virginity and sexual fidelity.

In his initial conversation with Biff in the play, Happy himself makes a connection between his taking of women and taking of money: “Manufacturers offer me a hundred-dollar bill now and then to throw an order their way. You know how honest I am, but it’s like this girl, see. I hate myself for it. Because I don’t want the girl, and, still, I take it and—I love it!” (25). It is Happy, not any woman in the play, who is a prostitute. He is not only more sexually promiscuous than any of the women, but he also takes money under unsavory circumstances. Thus he projects his own whorishness onto women in the play’s clearest character depiction of male-female Business World dealings. As Woman is present in the public world of business, her ultimate function is to absorb the projection of what the men cannot acknowledge in themselves.

Just as the Green World overlaps with and is transformed into the Business World, so the Business World overlaps with and transforms the Home, which also maintains remnants of the Green World. The Home is the only realm where Willy can be the father, the patriarchal authority, so he invests it with sanctity.¹⁷ Much is made of the physical details of the Loman home in the opening stage directions. The home is “small, fragile seeming,” against a “solid vault of apartment houses.” The house is symbolic of Willy, the apartment houses representative of the big uncaring society that has “boxed in” the little man. An “air of the dream” is said to cling to the Loman home, “a dream arising out of reality.” We are given a few particulars of the reality: “The kitchen at center seems actual enough,” with its table, chairs, and the refrigerator, the palpability of which is underlined later through discussion of its repair needs. Other “real” elements are the brass bedstead and straight bedroom chair and “a silver athletic trophy” (11). The set reflects Willy’s mind, and these elements are most real in life to him. The kitchen and bedroom are the traditional areas of Woman and Linda, and the trophy is the one tangible piece of evidence of Willy’s son Biff’s “success.”

The house evidently also represents the myth of the man’s Home being his castle—or here, castle in the air, the “air of the dream” (11) clinging to the Home. Willy’s failure to get love from his father and brother in the Green World and his failures in the Business World can be obfuscated in the Home, where he is what he defines himself to be. In his interaction with his wife, Linda, Willy habitually patronizes, demeans, and expresses irritation at her; anything he says, no matter how trivial or self-contradictory, is made to seem more important than anything she says. Yet in one of his very few compliments to her, he says, “You’re my foundation and my support, Linda” (18). His praise of her is not only placed wholly in the context of himself, but it also partakes of architectural imagery, defining Linda’s place in the Home. She is the foundation and support of the Home, the “real” element that Willy can extrapolate from and return to as he constructs his fantasy life.¹⁸

The Loman men are all less than they hold themselves to be, but Linda is more than she is credited to be.¹⁹ She is indeed the foundation that has allowed the Loman men to build themselves up, if only in dreams, and she is the support that enables them to continue despite their failures. Linda is the one element holding the façade of the family together. Yet even Miller, her creator, seems not to have fully understood her character.²⁰ Linda is described in the opening stage directions as follows: “Most often jovial, she has developed an iron repression of her exceptions to Willy’s behavior—she more than loves him, she admires him, as though his mercurial nature, his temper, his massive dreams and little cruelties, served her only as sharp reminders of the turbulent longings … which she shares but lacks the temperament to utter and follow to their end” (12). She thus seems inferior to Willy; yet she demonstrates a level of education superior to his in terms of grammatical and mathematical ability, and she is definitely more gifted in diplomatic and psychological acumen. In her management of Willy, she embodies the American Dream ideal of the model post-World War II wife, infinitely supportive of her man. She makes no mistakes, has no flaws in wifely perfection. But the perfect American wife is not enough for American Dreamers like Willy. He has been unfaithful to her, and he rudely interrupts and silences her, even when she is merely expressing support for him. She can be the foundation of the house; he must rebuild the façade.

If the Loman house represents the Loman family, with Linda as the steady foundation and support, the façade is constructed with stolen goods. The enemy apartment buildings that so anger Willy have provided the materials that he and his sons used in such projects as rebuilding the front stoop. Linda knows that they need not have been “boxed in” by the apartment buildings; she says, “We should’ve bought the land next door” (17). Possibly she had suggested the idea at the appropriate time but was ignored. But Willy prefers to transfer the blame for the diminishment of his Green World: “They should’ve had a law against apartment houses. Remember those two beautiful elm trees out there? … They should’ve arrested the builder for cutting those down” (17). Of course, there is a law against stealing property, which Willy thought nothing of disobeying when he encouraged the boys to steal from the construction site, calling them “fearless characters” (50). Laws are for lesser men to follow, not the Loman men. In the realm of the Home, Willy and his sons are associated with rebuilding through theft, and Linda is associated with cleaning, mending, and repair.

In Willy’s flashback sequences, Linda habitually appears with the laundry, suggesting that it is her responsibility to clean up the males’ dirtiness, on all levels. In both past and present, she is shown mending, not only her own stockings but also Willy’s jacket. Often when Linda speaks, she discusses repairs, which she oversees; she must mend the male machinery. Willy is “sold” by other salesmen or advertisements on the quality of products and fails to recognize that even the “best” breaks down from daily wear and tear—including Willy himself. Although Linda’s functions of cleaning, mending, and overseeing repairs are traditionally “feminine,” they are significant because they are the ones maintained when other traditionally “feminine” elements are appropriated by Willy. It is not Linda but Willy who asserts the importance of physical attractiveness, who prefers a fantasy life of glamour to the reality of daily toil, who suffers from the “empty nest syndrome,” and who insists on having the most significant role in child-rearing.

Willy works hard at preventing Linda from having any substantive impact on shaping the boys’ characters; he tries continually to make them his alone, just as he had implied that they had sprung from his “stock” alone. After thanking God for Adonis-like looks in his sons, Willy confesses to Linda that he himself is “not noticed,” “fat,” “foolish to look at,” and had been called a “walrus” (37).²¹ Evidently, the physical attractiveness, strength, and resilience of the boys derive from Linda rather than Willy, but “God,” not she, is given credit. Although Linda is the continual presence in the boys’ lives at home, as Mother Loman had been for Willy, Willy undermines Linda’s authority when he returns from the road. In a flashback sequence, Linda disapproves of various manifestations of Biff’s bad behavior and runs from the scene almost in tears after Willy refuses to support her. She represents human dignity and values: cooperative, moral, humane behavior as opposed to lawless assertion of self over all others through assumed superiority. Just as Woman was unacknowledged creator-sustainer of life in the Green World and determiner of value in the Business World, in the Home, Woman, through Linda as submerged element, is the measure of human dignity and the accountant of worth.

Linda is the foundation and support not only of the Loman Home and Willy himself but also of the plea for sympathy for Willy of the play itself. She is used to establish Willy’s significance as a human being to the boys and to the audience. In her most famous speech, she asserts that, although not a “great man,” not rich or famous, and “not the finest character that ever lived,” Willy is “a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid… . Attention, attention must be finally paid to such a person” (56). Linda thus articulates his value and notes the real worth beneath the sham presentation. But the boys have been taught too well by Willy to disregard her message. When she reveals that the company had taken Willy’s salary away five weeks before, and Biff calls those responsible “ungrateful bastards” (57), she states that they are no worse than his sons. The male world is ungrateful, unappreciative of such contributions as Willy made; only Linda understands and values them. Whenever she attempts to bring Biff and Happy to consideration for their father, they habitually shift blame away from themselves, pretend there is no problem, and/or change the subject and start bickering between themselves on their competing ideas and ideals. Just as Willy leaves the repair of household appliances to Linda, the boys leave the repair of their broken-down father to her.

The Loman men do see Linda as a validator of value, but they objectify virtue in her and assume that, if they have a woman like her, they will possess virtue and not need to develop it on their own. Both Biff and Happy wish to marry a girl just like the girl who married dear old Dad, and they believe such possession will immediately transform their lives and bring them to maturity. They, like their father, want to subtract value from a woman to add to their own; none of the Loman men is able to keep an accurate account of himself. In the Loman Home, only Linda understands what has value, what things cost, and how much must be paid to maintain and repair the Home life. Her other function, therefore, is computing the family finances, doing the family math. She must tactfully bring Willy to face the truth of his commissions from his inflated exaggerations of success to maximize such resources as there are, and Willy resents her for returning him to the foundation of himself as lesser money-earner from his dreams of wealth. As representative and accountant of worth, she must be trivialized and devalued, as must math.

As noted above, besides Linda and her spheres, the only other real element to Willy in the Loman Home is Biff’s athletic trophy. Linda’s significance in the Home is suppressed largely through the elevation of sports. The Loman men’s idolatry of aggressive male-male competition relegates women into being the devalued objects and instruments of sports. Happy states that the “only trouble” with his promiscuity with women is that “it gets like bowling or something. I just keep knockin’ them over and it doesn’t mean anything” (25). Similarly, The Woman in the Boston hotel room, disabused of the idea that she means anything to Willy, interprets herself as his football. As instruments of sports, women are the means for starting the competitive game, the object they fight over, and the possession that marks the winners and assures them of being “well liked.”

The worst mistake that Willy makes with his sons is in his foisting upon them the notion that sports success guarantees financial success. The adult Happy feels superior because he can “outbox, outrun, and outlift anybody in that store,” so he cannot bear to “take orders from those common, petty sons-of-bitches” (24). He believes that the strength of his masculinity should overcome all competitors, although selling merchandise has little to do with displays of physical prowess. The adult Biff also finds holding a job difficult because of his self-image of athletic superiority. This is the “spirit” that Willy successfully manages to “imbue them with” (52), the spirit that he associates with Ben. Not only does Ben assert that making a fortune depends on screwing on one’s fists, but he also provides a demonstration by challenging Biff, tripping him, and aiming an umbrella’s point at his eyes in phallic threat, saying “Never fight fair with a stranger, boy. You’ll never get out of the jungle that way” (49). Biff and Ben are family members, not “strangers,” but Ben’s aura is partly maintained by establishing distance between himself and other men: no man is allowed to seem his peer or comrade. This “overdeveloped sense of competition” that Willy cultivates in his boys, which can only be satisfied by being “number-one man,” puts the boys in competition with each other (seen most clearly in their dream of selling sporting goods by heading competing teams) and ultimately in competition with their father.

Sports in the play partakes of Green World elements by providing an arena in which to test and demonstrate masculinity in its most elemental form. When Charley appears in his golf pants in one of Willy’s flashbacks of Ben, Willy says, “Great athlete! Between him and his son Bernard they can’t hammer a nail!” (51). Charley had been “man enough” to father Bernard, so he can still be a sports participant; similarly, the adult Bernard, father of two boys, is shown with tennis rackets. But golf and tennis are genteel, civilized sports; real men shine in boxing (shown in Willy’s gift to the boys of a punching bag) and, especially, football. Because football is played outdoors on a green field and involves seizing territory in pursuit and manipulation of a valued object, it recaptures the savage Green World of Ben in the jungle with the diamonds. Because football is a male team sport that provides opportunity for an individual to “make an impression,” “create personal interest,” and be “well liked” (33), it epitomizes the Business World. The football star, Biff in high school, brings to the Home a trophy as validation of value, and feminine support comes in having “a crowd of girls behind him” (32) and in having “the girls pay for you” (28). For Willy, therefore, football becomes the ideal means of synthesizing the realms of Green World, Business World, and Home into his desired male community. As such a synthesis, football assumes mythic proportions; on the day of the Ebbets Field game, Biff appears “Like a young god. Hercules—something like that… . A star like that, magnificent, can never really fade away!” (68).

This fantasy synthesis, however, does not pass the test of reality. The values of sports fail to overcome the combined challenge of the feminine and math. Just as the Loman house is partly constructed with stolen materials, so Biff’s success in high school is partly established through theft of knowledge, especially of math, from Bernard. Like Linda and the suppressed feminine elements of the Green World and Business World, Bernard in the sports synthesis is a demeaned and exploited presence. Because he “loves” Biff, without feeling a need to compete with him, Bernard is “anemic” (32), emasculated, made feminine by the hypermasculine standards of sports.

Through their belief in the justified predominance of male-male competition over feminine measurement of value, the Loman men can rationalize, even sanctify, theft. Willy steals from Linda the respect of parenting and steals through The Woman a higher place in the Business World than he deserves. Happy steals the women of his superiors to avoid competition in the prescribed arena and to inflate his sense of self-worth. Thus both younger sons, Willy and Happy, compete primarily through Woman as object, but older son Biff, like older son Ben, competes more directly with the male, making defeated men like women through emasculation.

Biff’s theft of answers from Bernard, who loves him, is of a piece with his theft of a football from the locker room (indirectly from the coach) and the carton of basketballs and gold fountain pen from Bill Oliver. All involve theft of masculinity from a trusting and approving male authority figure. The confused Loman male sense of mathematics is such that one can only be something if everyone else is nothing. One must add to himself by seizing from others and never subtract from himself through giving to others; giving is what women and lesser men must do. Therefore, one becomes the most valuable by taking that which signifies value from all others, male and female. Female value in this system is relegated to support and sexual functions, and male value resides in the phallus. But one cannot have all and be number-one man unless one ultimately castrates the father. Each of Biff’s thefts is a preparation for and rehearsal of the theft of his father’s phallus.²²

Sports, then, only seems to be the perfect synthesis of the three realms and thus of the patriarchal-fraternal community that Willy seeks continually. Pushed to its inevitable conclusion, the sports mythos demonstrates that a paternal-fraternal community cannot exist in its forum. Willy wants to celebrate an ideal of brotherhood for lesser men (who are actually like himself) to follow, while he would be the patriarchal authority, idolized by all, especially Biff. Yet when Willy is rational, he believes that although Biff has the potential to be number-one man he himself does not. Biff cannot be both more than Willy and less than Willy: there is a glaring contradiction in logic—it does not add up. In fulfilling his expected potential, Biff would have to grow up, to surpass Willy, to recognize that his father is less than himself. For the “young god” to become an adult god, he would have to dethrone, “castrate,” the “fake” god, Willy.

Even before the Boston incident, Willy was dangerously close to being “found out” as less than his stolen, self-constructed image in the boys’ eyes.²³ He had promised to take the boys on a business trip; if he had done so, they would have seen that he was a “fake,” that the waves did not part for him. If he had not taken them, he would have been a “liar.” If Biff had not learned of The Woman, Willy would have had to confront the math teacher and probably fail to get the extra points for Biff. But these crises of faith in the father are forestalled because Biff witnesses him with The Woman.

When Willy and Biff meet in Boston, both have failed: Biff has failed math, and Willy has failed marital fidelity. These failures are accompanied by masculine dream-value system failures: Willy has failed to uphold the family as the sacred cornerstone of success, and Biff has failed to be universally well liked by lesser men. In present time, each blames the other for his failure, but The Woman is made the foundation of the failed relationship between father and son.²⁴ Although the Loman men contrast Linda as “somebody with resistance” with the women of the Business World, who can be “had,”²⁵ The Woman epitomizes those women, and she overlaps with and parallels Linda.

Willy continually links Linda and The Woman unconsciously. Linda’s attempted ego-inflating praise of Willy in a flashback as the “handsomest man in the world” (37) to her (after he had confessed feeling foolish to look at) brings on a flashback within a flashback in the laughter and then the first appearance of The Woman. Although in context the laughter signifies The Woman’s enjoyment of Willy’s company, the dramatic effect is that she is laughing at him rather than with him. As he comes out of the flashback within flashback to the flashback, Linda’s laughter blends with that of The Woman. The Woman’s laugh returns when evidence of Biff’s bad behavior, provided by Linda and Bernard, haunts Willy’s flashback, testifying that Willy raised Biff by the wrong standards—his rather than Linda’s.

The Woman is not even dignified by a name in the list of characters and speech headings, although her name may be Miss Francis. By being simply The Woman, she figures as a temptress, a femme fatale, and this impression is reinforced by her laughter, the music accompanying her appearances, and her appearance in a black slip. Yet her description in the stage directions is at odds with this impression. She is “quite proper-looking Willy’s age” (38). Furthermore, she is far from being a prostitute—she is a business contact of Willy’s, someone (probably a secretary-receptionist) with the power to choose whom the buyers will see—and she lives with her sisters. Her payment for sex with Willy is silk stockings. She needs silk stockings to wear to work and can probably ill afford them on her salary. Yet the stockings also become an important symbol. When she mentions the promised stockings, Biff understands his father’s relationship with her, and when Linda mends her own stockings, it reminds Willy of his guilt. Thus Linda and The Woman are bound together by the stockings, which reinforce their other connections: they are good-humored women of about the same age who both genuinely like Willy.²⁶ The essential difference between them is that one has chosen to marry and work inside the Home, and the other has chosen not to marry and to work in the Business World. Linda herself is like a mended stocking, torn and tattered by Willy but still serviceable through the strengthening of her own moral fiber. The Woman is a “new” silk stocking, new territory on which Willy can test himself. Both are made to be objects, but both also witness the failures of masculine values.

Contrary to surface appearance, then, there are not two kinds of women in the play, good and bad. All of the women are conflated in the idea of Woman: all share more similarities than differences, particularly in their knowing, and having the potential to reveal, masculine inadequacy, although generally they have been socialized not to insult a man by revealing their knowledge to his face. The Loman men all agree that the truth of masculine inadequacy or failure must be kept from women, because if women do not know, men can maintain their pretenses among other men and to themselves. What most upsets Biff about his father’s flashback ravings is that “Mom’s hearing that!” (27), and Happy habitually lies about himself and other men to women. When Willy borrows money from Charley, it is to pretend to Linda that it is his salary—but Linda knows about the loans. Willy tries to force Biff into a fabricated version of the meeting with Bill Oliver, supposedly so he can have good news to bring to Linda—but it is he, not Linda, who craves good news from Biff. Linda also knows and tells her sons that Willy has been trying to commit suicide. Like Letta, she is associated with collection and evaluation of evidence. Not only does Linda find the rubber gas hose (during her repairs), but she knows of other suicide attempts that Willy has made with the car. As she begins to tell the story of the witness, she says, “It seems there’s a woman,” and Biff quickly responds, “What woman?” (58–59), obviously assuming that Linda means The Woman in Boston. Linda not only overlaps the function of Mother Loman, but she and the insurance company’s woman witness are alike in knowing about Willy’s suicide attempts; the woman witness is linked to The Woman in Biff’s mind; Willy treats Jenny as he probably had treated The Woman; and, in the restaurant, Miss Forsythe and Letta provoke Willy’s memory of The Woman, as had Linda. The synthesis that Willy seeks among the Green World, Business World, and Home is achieved not by male community but collectively through the women, who independently rise from their positions as submerged elements to join in a circle of femininity and summation of value that closes in, without acknowledgment, on the truth of the Loman men.

The emergence of suppressed Woman occurs in the midst of an intended paternal-fraternal celebration of triumph in the restaurant.²⁷ Linda was not invited; the savoring of success was for the men only. Willy was to have wrested a New York job for himself from his symbolic “son” Howard, and Biff was to have convinced his symbolic “father” Bill Oliver to invest in Happy’s idea of the Loman Brothers sporting goods teams. But the dreams of success for the day failed to become realized. Howard, delighting in being a “father” himself (evidenced by his pride over his son’s performance on the wire recorder)²⁸ is not impressed by Willy’s assertion of fatherhood (his supposed fraternal relationship with Howard’s father and his exaggerated claims to have “named” Howard) and in fact fires Willy for failing to “pull his own weight” (80). Biff fails also, not even making an impression on the secretary, let alone Bill Oliver, who sees him only momentarily and does not remember him. Enraged at being treated like a lesser man, Biff re-enters Oliver’s office and steals his gold fountain pen, completing the castration of the symbolic father from whom he had stolen basketballs years before. Thus, once again, as in Boston, Willy has failed as father and Biff has failed as son. The restaurant scene recapitulates as well as calls forth the Boston scene as the double failures unfold, but now a transfer of phallic power takes place. Willy seems unable to face his failure to his family until he sees his sons grow into the same action. As Willy “betrayed” the family with The Woman, so Biff and Happy “betray” him by deserting him in the restaurant and leaving with Miss Forsythe and Letta.

In an early line in Willy’s culminating flashback—“Willy, Willy, are you going to get up, get up, get up, get up?” (114)—The Woman’s iteration of “get up” implies not only getting up to answer the knocking at the door but also getting up the ladder of success and, perhaps, erection. Sexual performance is one realm where a man cannot be a fake—the woman knows if he fails. Woman is the means not only of phallic inflation but also of phallic deflation, both by satisfying his need of her and by her potential for intimidation to impotence. Yet The Woman, like Linda and the women in the restaurant, complies by providing the man with what he desires, the necessary boost in self-confidence. Although her baby-talk manner of speech is meant to make her seem otherwise, The Woman has a sense of responsibility about her job and the intelligence to sense masculine feelings of inadequacy and say the “proper” things to dispel them, even if her own humiliation results. But she also grants herself the freedom of taking sexual initiative: “You didn’t make me, Willy. I picked you” (38). And she unabashedly enjoys sex: “Come on inside, drummer boy. It’s silly to be dressing in the middle of the night” (116). This implies that she has not yet been satisfied by Willy, and perhaps the laughter so often associated with her also represents his fear that she will laugh at his inadequacy/impotence, which he must overcome by diminishing her.

The Woman insists that Willy acknowledge the knocking, which literally is Biff knocking at the door and symbolically is Willy’s own conscience knocking, which he tries to deny. Before Willy opens the hotel room door, he hides The Woman in the bathroom, associating her with “plumbing” and bodily functions. But The Woman becomes the means of destroying the masculine mythos by coming out of the bathroom.

When Willy lets Biff into the room, Biff confesses his math failure. Willy is shocked and tries to displace blame onto Bernard. But Bernard has not failed in loving submission to Biff—although he “stole” from Bernard, Biff only “got a sixty-one” (118). The numbers, so denigrated before, are extremely important now, and Biff needs Willy to get him the extra four points. If they had left then, Willy’s failure would have remained secret, but his authority would have to be tested against that of another patriarchal figure. Biff, however, goes on to rationalize his failure. This unimportant math class comes right before all-important sports, so he “didn’t go enough” (118), avoiding submission to its alternative value system. Then, too, he is not “well liked” by the teacher; Mr. Birnbaum “hates” Biff for doing a comical imitation of him in front of the class. Biff steals the teacher’s self-esteem by imitating him and showing him as a lesser man. Thus, although Biff failed, he succeeds in displacing another male authority figure. Biff increases his own esteem of his classmates by decreasing their esteem for the teacher, and he repeats his imitation for his father’s approval. Willy pauses to savor Biff’s triumph over male authority and to share male communion by laughing at a supposed lesser man who holds Biff’s fate in his hands. But just as Mr. Birnbaum had walked into the midst of Biff’s ridicule, so does The Woman intrude into its repetition by joining in their laughter and coming out of the bathroom.

Undoubtedly, most readers and audience members feel tension as Biff and Willy talk, knowing that The Woman is hidden in the bathroom, and they are upset when she makes her presence known. The scene is set up in such a way as to protect the males and to put the blame entirely on her. If only she had kept her mouth shut! If only she had stayed in the bathroom where she belonged! But she does not; she insists on being part of the fun, of sharing in the male-defined game. When she enters, she not only laughs, but she also lisps her lines, imitating Biff’s imitation of Mr. Birnbaum—but a woman must not be allowed to share in male camaraderie or to ridicule a lesser man.

To dispel Biff’s shock at her presence, Willy begins his “striving for the ordinary.” He names her, probably giving her real name, but promoting her: “This is Miss Francis, Biff, she’s a buyer” (119). Her promotion is in a sense true—she has been a buyer of what Willy is selling—himself as a likeable commodity.²⁹ She had also bought into the idea that she was a human being to him. But when she sees herself treated as an embarrassment, merchandise no longer desired, she insists at least on the material terms of agreement. Willy tries to force her out into the hall without her clothes, but she demands her promised stockings. Willy tries to deny, but she is armed with numbers: “You had two boxes of size nine sheers for me, and I want them!” (119). And Willy finally produces them for her.

What seems to make “Miss Francis” a “bad” woman is that she refuses to be walked on the way Linda is, that she dares to insist on being recognized and dealt with according to the terms of the contract, and that she understands and resents being humiliated. After she identifies herself as the football that has been kicked around in the male game, she takes her clothes and leaves. The Woman literally has been undressed and Willy literally has been dressed, but Biff has symbolically witnessed Willy defrocked of the patriarchal mantle and has encountered the deflated phallic reality of his father. Through the stockings, Biff has seen the sanctity of family life reduced to an exchangeable commodity: “You—you gave her Mama’s stockings!” (121), he says, as he bursts into tears and gives up on his life in terms of Business World success. For once he seems to identify with Linda; if she as wife-mother can be reduced to an object of exchange by his father, so can he as son. Biff accuses his father of being a “liar” and a “fake” (121) and departs.

The projection of the undressed state onto The Woman, however, has left the resolution of the phallic conflict between father and son unresolved until the double masculine failures repeat themselves. In real time, Biff is now armed with two stolen phalluses: Bill Oliver’s gold pen, representing the symbolic paternal power of the Business World, and the rubber gas hose, Willy’s self-destructive phallus in the Home. Without either of them consciously recognizing it, Willy is “emasculated,” put into the position of The Woman, as Biff deserts Willy, leaving his father “babbling in a toilet.”³⁰

Just as The Woman was the scapegoat for Willy’s desertion and failure of the family, so Miss Forsythe and Letta are the scapegoats for his sons’ desertion and failure of him. But as masculine failure had been the means of bringing The Woman out of the bathroom of the Business World, so it brings Linda out of her limited position of foundation and support in the Home. Significantly, Linda is at her most assertive and ominous after the incident with The Woman. She flings down the boys’ proffered bribe of flowers, presented by Happy as he displaced blame onto women for his and Biff’s desertion of their father. But in her wrath, Linda is a superior match for both boys. They cannot cover up or smooth over the truth in her presence, although they sheepishly continue to try. Linda can be threatening not in her own right, but for Willy. Her reaction in this scene is perhaps what could be expected from a woman whose husband had been unfaithful. Yet her devotion to Willy is such that we believe she would not have come at him that way. Although Linda has bought into the system enough to condemn the women as “lousy rotten whores!” (124), she blames her sons more for going to them. She attempts to throw the boys out of the house and stops herself from picking up the scattered flowers, ordering them, for once: “Pick up this stuff, I’m not your maid any more.” Linda finally declares her independence from her role, recognizing that she is better than they are.³¹ For both Linda and The Woman, male failures have provoked female sense of injustice and realization of victimization. Happy turns his back on Linda’s order, refusing to acquiesce to feminine dominance, but Biff gets on his knees and picks up the flowers, as he understands that he is a failure as a man. Willy has been put into the position of the humiliated and abandoned one, like The Woman, the football kicked around in the competition. Linda achieves this position through empathy with him but rises above it into female control, short-lived as it is: women can take charge when the men are defeated by one another. When Linda accuses Biff, “You! You didn’t even go in to see if he was all right!” (124), she is condemning him partly for shunning all of her influence, the nurturing and tending, the human compassion. But Biff insists on seeing Willy now, over Linda’s objections. Because he has become as bad as Willy in betraying Linda, he and Willy can understand each other.

Recognition of his own and Biff’s failures in both the Business World and Home makes Willy revert to the Green World as he attempts to reclaim his lost masculinity after the disaster in the restaurant. “The woods are burning!” (107), as he has previously noted, so he must buy some seeds, because “Nothing’s planted. I don’t have a thing in the ground” (122). His action will be futile in his yard, the remnant of the Green World remaining in the Home realm, because, as Linda knows, “not enough sun gets back there. Nothing’ll grow any more” (72). The Green World has become a sunless/sonless void through male depletion of it, but Willy must continue to assert his masculinity on it, imposing the hoe, as Green World phallic symbol, on Mother Earth. In planting his seed, he attempts to renew Biff’s conception—his own of Biff and Biff’s of him, to start over as new father and new son on a pastoral basis.

The three realms of Green World, Business World, and Home, however, cannot be separated in Willy’s mind, and, as he plants, he considers with a hallucinated Ben his suicide plan—he is actually digging his own grave. His previous suicide plans recapitulate his past and have submerged feminine elements. In the first attempt, femininely witnessed, he was driving down the road, went off track into a little bridge, and was saved only by “the shallowness of the water” (59). The road is symbolically connected with being “on the road” of the Business World, the bridge is perhaps sex as a connection out of his loneliness that he got off track into, and the shallowness of water the prescribed shallow but supportive function of Woman that “saved him.” The second plan, associated with the Home, involves the phallic rubber hose, but the success of that attempt rests on the “new little nipple” (59), a feminine symbol, on the gas pipe. The third plan is formulated in “pastoral” aspect and approved of in “savage” aspect in the Green World, and it uses elements of the Business World and Home realms as well, thus becoming a replacement for the failed synthesis of the three realms in the sports forum. The suicide will be feminine in being a return to the womb, the pre-competitive sanctum. But as such, it will be another scapegoat for masculine failure.

The suicide plan provides Willy with the fantasy means of re-establishing a fraternal relationship with Ben. Although he had “missed the boat” of Ben’s success, Willy can catch the “boat” of death to join the recently dead Ben and, through him, their dead father. In this proposed paternal-fraternal community, Woman is again made the foundation. Willy asserts to the hallucination of Ben that the proposition is “terrific” because “the woman has suffered” (126). But what his understanding of Linda’s (and through his ambiguous phrasing, The Woman’s) suffering is is not revealed. Apparently she has suffered because he has failed to live up to his own standard, not that he has ever seriously considered hers: “A man can’t go out the way he came in, Ben, a man has got to add up to something” (125). Thus, the suicide synthesis, like the sports synthesis, involves a confused fantasy appropriation of math. Rather than continuing to live while “ringing up a zero” (126), Willy wants to turn himself into money through death as he perceives Ben had. His plan is a “twenty-thousand-dollar proposition” that is “Guaranteed, gilt-edged” (126). The money, which he will try to steal from the insurance company by making his death seem accidental, will be Willy’s gold. Gold had been the value symbol associated with Business World success through Bill Oliver’s gold fountain pen and with sports success as Biff in the legendary Ebbets Field game had appeared “in gold.” But the death is also imaged as a “diamond, shining in the dark, hard and rough, that I can pick up and touch with my hand” (126). While he puts his seed into the earth, he wants to get something out, the diamonds that his brother found but that he had missed, the value to be appropriated from the Green World as he simultaneously adds and subtracts. A diamond is “Not like—like an appointment!” (126) that is soft in contrast to the manly hardness of the diamond. The death would be tangible in the money, but Willy quickly jumps to another appointment: the funeral, which he envisions will be “massive,” attended by “all the old-timers” from four states, because, as Biff never realized in thinking him “nothing,” “I am known!” (126). The suicide plan thus becomes the perfect merging of Green World, Business World, and Home, as he, like Ben, will go into the dark jungle of the unknown and come out rich; will, like Dave Singleman, have the death of a salesman in a grand funeral and secure the hero-worship of Biff in the legacy of controlling Biff’s future. In forming this synthesis, Woman is exploited once more. Although the plan had begun in relation to Linda, because “the woman has suffered,” she has been left out of the grand male scheme again because the money will go to Biff, not her, so that Willy can “amount to something” by masculine standards by regaining the phallus and looking “big” in Biff’s eyes.

Although the gold of the gilt-edged insurance policy and the diamond of suicide are presented in masculine terms, they too have submerged feminine significance, because gold and diamond are the elements of a wedding ring. Rather than interpreting gold and diamond as objects to be stolen, Willy could recognize that he already has them in Linda, could understand that value can be achieved rather than objectified and seized, if he submits himself to Linda’s system of worth. In her system, big or little, inflated or deflated, are irrelevant to having compassion and dignity and sharing love. But Ben is the primary rival to that vision; he and the suicide plan ultimately represent infidelity to a true marriage with Linda.

Willy is preparing himself to enter the dark, yet he really wants to “get back to all the great times” that “Used to be so full of light and comradeship” (127). One of his main problems is that he yearns for the boys’ adolescence that provided him with his own, out of which he and the boys have never quite grown. But the joy of their fraternal adolescence died in their struggle for phallic patriarchal power, and now Biff enters to take the hoe, the last remaining phallic symbol, away from Willy and to assert paternal authority by demanding that Willy return to the Home to “tell Mom” of their failures as father and son. As Willy has been trying to re-establish roots in a pastoral Green World, Biff has determined to uproot himself by leaving permanently for his pastoral Green World.

The confrontation scene between Willy and Biff begins in the Green World remnant, the yard, but it must be played out in the Home, in front of Happy as lesser man, and especially Linda. When they enter, Linda withdraws into her support function for both of them, gently asking Willy, “Did you plant, dear?” (128), and allowing Biff the “public” credit for her idea, in fact demand, that Biff leave the Home forever. But Biff cannot leave without wanting Willy to shake his hand, thereby acknowledging his defeat and Biff as the winner. Neither Biff nor Willy is ready for it to be over until one has asserted authority over the other, so they begin a contest of competing reasons for Biff’s failure: blaming it on Willy or attributing it to Biff’s spite. Willy repeatedly turns to Linda to ratify his version, spite. Yet what Willy wants here is for Biff to maintain the masculine system of conspiracy, which involves protecting Woman (and themselves) from the truth of male failure. If he can make Biff submit to this version, Willy will both triumph over Biff and be safe in Linda’s eyes. Although Biff repeatedly denies attributing blame to his father, Willy is too agitated to hear Biff’s response. Instead, he accuses Biff of “trying to put a knife in me” (130)—using phallic weaponry against him. Then Biff rises to the challenge, not with a knife but with the rubber hose.

Just before he shows the hose, Biff says, “All right, phony! Then let’s lay it on the line.” The implication, especially through the word “phony,” is that Biff will reveal Willy’s infidelity in front of Linda and Happy, conflating infidelity with the suicide attempts. But both Linda and Happy already know about the hose and try to prevent Biff from disclosing that they know. It is like presenting the naked phallus in public: indecent exposure. Willy pretends not to recognize the hose, but it is the revelation of Willy’s rising (“What is this supposed to do, make a hero out of you?”) and falling (“This is supposed to make me sorry for you?”) phallus. But even this is not enough; Biff perseveres that Willy is “going to hear the truth—what you are and what I am!” When Happy interrupts, Biff begins with him: “You big blow, are you the assistant buyer?”, asserting that Happy is “full of it! We all are! And I’m through with it” (130–31). This affirmation, along with Biff’s statement a few lines earlier that “We never told the truth for ten minutes in this house!” (131), implies that Linda is included, but not if we remember that she has never been given the status of being one of them. She alone has told the truth of what Willy is, what the boys are, and of Willy’s suicide plans (albeit to the boys but not Willy). Again she is discounted, but with her value appropriated yet unacknowledged.

Now that Willy’s phallic flaws have been made public, Biff must confess his own: “I stole myself out of every good job since high school!”—and he had spent time in jail for theft. Although Biff had earlier absolved Willy from blame, he places it now: Biff “never got anywhere” because Willy “blew me so full of hot air I could never stand taking orders from anybody! That’s whose fault it is!” The tumescent image here connects with his calling Happy a “big blow” (131), and both reveal Biff’s recognition of the artificially inflated phalluses of all the Loman men; he tries to make himself and them face their own deflated condition.³² Willy’s response is “Then hang yourself! For spite, hang yourself!” Thus Biff’s confession of failure leads Willy unconsciously to the same conclusion as his own of suicide. But Biff answers that “Nobody’s hanging himself” (131–32). He has finally learned that acknowledging limitations does not lead necessarily to self-annihilation but to choosing alternate paths—for him, acceptance of the pastoral Green World and rejection of the Business World.

Biff’s castration of the Business World in his theft of the gold pen has resulted in his recognizing the pointlessness of stealing other men’s phallic power to “become what I don’t want to be” (132)³³ and his accepting the Green World as the appropriate realm for his truest inclinations. But because the Green World also involves asserting manhood, Biff still cannot be free to enter that realm until he completes his “castration” of Willy by imposing his new-found truth. He now turns, significantly, to the “real math” of value computation to do so, asserting to Willy that “I’m a dime a dozen, and so are you!”, that Willy is only a “hard-working drummer” and Biff himself, on any turf, is “one dollar an hour.” Furthermore, Biff is “not bringing home any prizes any more” (132), and Willy is not to expect them. Once he has defined himself as “nothing,” Biff can and does cry. We have only seen him cry once before, in the hotel room, and these tears connect these two incidents. They culminate in the conclusion of the conflict, which had been delayed by sustaining the masculine myth between them. But this resolution has taken place on the grounds of relating represented by Linda: the emotional, compassionate way of interaction. Willy turns to Linda for an explanation of Biff’s tears, recognizing that she can understand better. Biff has finally learned to love himself and Willy for what they are, pretensions stripped away—what Linda has been advocating and has demonstrated throughout, without recognition.

Biff asks to be let go, for Willy to “take that phony dream and burn it before something happens” (133). But he cannot carry through and re-establish a relationship on compassionate terms; he can only escape: “I’ll go in the morning.” And once again, Linda is made to do the difficult part: “Put him—put him to bed” (133).

At first it seems strange that Willy, who has gotten what he wanted—the return of Biff’s love—still intends to commit suicide. He is enraptured because Biff has become a boy again; they have gone back to the day when Biff confronted him in the hotel room, and it has been “made right,” with Biff acknowledging Willy as the one in control and with the power to “take and burn that phony dream.” But neither Biff nor Willy follows through. Neither can handle a relationship that is based on “feminine” compassion and mutual self-recognition. Yet Willy is pleased because he now believes that Biff will accept the money; perhaps he has an idea that his suicide will burn away the phoniness from the dream but leave the dream intact.

Linda alone feels the danger and asks Willy to come to bed. But Willy must seize and make the most of this moment of glory, take the ball and run with it, listening to Ben again. Willy makes the same mistake that he has always made: not appreciating real moments of value as they happen because they have always got to be topped with bigger dreams for the future. That prevented his full enjoyment of the boys’ youth, and that prevents him from living on. He can only think to top this moment by leaving Biff twenty thousand dollars. If Biff has done a great thing in crying to Willy, sacrificing his self-image to his father, Willy must sacrifice his life for Biff, still competing with him. Happy appropriately asks for recognition now, behaving as if he had been the source of the trouble, maintaining that he is going to be the perfect son, replacing Biff, staying and living out the dream. But Willy cannot even acknowledge his younger son as he pays increasing attention to his older brother. Therefore, Linda must give Happy the comfort he needs.

As Biff and Happy go to bed, only Linda remains as a living interactive presence for Willy. In his last moments on stage, he alternates between attending to the real voice of Linda and the fantasized voice of Ben. Linda continually entreats him to follow her, and she is put into direct competition with his desire to follow Ben. Willy cannot acknowledge the superiority of the feminine value system to his own, so he must choose Ben. Ben’s way is presented erotically—“One must go in to fetch a diamond out” (134)—one must enter sexually, impose the phallus, to get a diamond—son—out. Linda’s “I want you upstairs” (134) is both a command and, perhaps, a sexual invitation, to counter the sexuality of Ben’s offer. But Willy cannot satisfy Linda on her terms. When Linda says, “I think this is the only way, Willy,” meaning that Biff should leave, Willy conflates it with the suicide plan: “Sure, it’s the best thing.” And Ben agrees: “Best thing!” (134). Here is the only point where all three agree, but two are agreeing to a plan between them, to a dream in which Woman is left out, not to the basis of the real experience just past.

Willy is finally left alone with Ben, as he wishes. The male-male connection can now be savored only by males, with no female commentary. He shares with Ben his wonder that Biff loves him and always has. But instead of being content with love, Willy must inflate it to worship which he seeks to provoke in Biff by his suicide that Ben now urges him toward, promising, “It’s dark there, but full of diamonds.” When Linda calls, his reply, “Coming!” (135), answers Ben more than her.

Before following Ben, Willy “elegiacally” relives the preparation for the Ebbets Field game, the day of Biff’s stardom, when Willy was the authority figure. After much advice, he says, “There’s all kinds of important people in the stands” (135) and suddenly recognizes his aloneness in the male-defined game. Willy starts asking for Ben, but instead Linda calls again. She has repeatedly offered acceptance on the terms of love for being what he is, average, and Biff has just offered the same, but Willy must make one more grandstand play. Yet it is obvious that accepting love, the feminine way, frightens him. Responding to Linda’s call, he tries to quiet her, but his “sh!” unleashes “sounds, faces, voices” (136) that swarm in upon him, and he tries to “sh” them too. They are probably the voices of truth represented by Woman, the contradictions and failures in his world view. In the midst of his “sh”-ing, the ancestral flute music of his father stops him, rising in intensity “to an unbearable scream” (136). The music of male harmonic blending is now the only thing he hears, although Linda, and even Biff following her lead, calls out again. But the music draws Willy to the car, another symbol of masculine unity in the play, and Willy, the car, and the music all crash, “in a frenzy of sound, which becomes the soft pulsation of a single cello string,” which further develops into “a dead march” (136). Willy has crashed the car and killed himself, driven to the beat of the male song.

The scene dissolves into a dumb show of preparation for the funeral, with the “leaves of day” appearing “over everything” (136), suggesting Willy’s final rest in the pastoral dream that was just as much death for him as were the other dreams. But as the Requiem begins, Charley notes that “It’s getting dark, Linda” (137). Willy is finally put to rest in the darkness that he had sought, the void that the competing realms made of Woman, and he exists now only in the competing summations of his value presented by Linda, Charley, Biff, and Happy.

Critics have often been puzzled at Linda’s speech of incomprehension at the grave, because she knew Willy was trying to kill himself.³⁴ But what she cannot understand is why. The reason is partly that Willy could not accept no longer being a boy or having a hope of boyhood in his sons—that the dreams could not be realized. Linda is always patronized for not understanding Willy’s “massive dreams,” but she comprehended the dreams well enough. Willy Loman’s “massive dreams” were little more than adolescent male dreams of being massive. What Linda cannot understand is why those dreams of inflated masculinity are more important than family love, compassion, and respect—why real virtues are seen to have no honor and the “little man” cannot accept his dignity.

As the male characters present their competing versions of who Willy was and what he represents, it becomes evident that they understand him less than Linda does. Each identifies himself with Willy, making a male synthesis to contrast and outdo Linda. Biff relates to the camaraderie and construction, the “nice days” such as “Sundays, making the stoop.” Forgetting that the stoop was constructed from stolen materials, Biff muses fondly, “there’s more of him in that front stoop than in all the sales he ever made.” Linda’s reply may be meant as a punning sexual tribute: “He was so wonderful with his hands.”³⁵ But then Biff says his famous lines, “He had the wrong dreams. All, all, wrong.” Happy responds angrily, but Biff continues, “He never knew who he was,” speaking as much about himself as Willy. Charley begins his “Nobody dast blame this man” speech partly to break up a pending fight between the boys. Oddly, in saying what a salesman is, Charley has to specify what he is not, including “He don’t put a bolt to a nut”—which Willy actually did, albeit not as a salesman. Charley also is talking partly about himself: he has been the one unaccustomed to using the tools of reconstruction. Furthermore, it is Charley, the unsentimental, non-dreaming realist, who now says, “A salesman is got to dream, boy. It comes with the territory,” thus combining his reality with acceptance of Willy’s dream. This speech does little to reconcile Biff and Happy, who ignore it and continue their rivalry. Once again, Biff suggests his fraternal dream—that Happy go with him—but Happy says, “I’m not licked that easily” and refers once more to his fraternal dream, “The Loman Brothers!” Happy reaffirms the part of Willy that he identifies with: “the only dream you can have—to come out number-one man” (138–39). He plans to show Biff and everybody else that Willy Loman did not die in vain.

What Willy did die for if not in vain is not clear in any of the characters’ minds, particularly not in Happy’s, because not much earlier he had denied that Willy had any “right” to kill himself. Happy’s speech is meant to be received by the audience as pathetic, and it is. For one, it defines the only dream possible as coming out “number-one man,” women excluded, other men trampled beneath. Biff has now rejected it and turns to his mother. But Linda sends the men on their way, so that she, the only one who truly loved Willy, can be alone with him, and the flute music plays through her speech.

Alone at his grave, Linda asks Willy to forgive her for not being able to cry. Her loyalty and dedication to Willy are such that she wishes to do the expected, appropriate, female supportive behavior even when Willy is no longer there to require it. The two notes sounded alternatively throughout the speech are that she cannot cry and she cannot understand it. Thus part of what she cannot understand is why she cannot cry. On the one hand, Willy’s death seems like just another of his absences, when she carries on, managing the bills, etc., as always. She has made the last payment on the house today, and “there’ll be nobody home,” considering herself, as Willy had, to be nobody. But suddenly a sob rises as she says, “We’re free and clear.” The idea of freedom releases her to sob more fully: “We’re free … We’re free” (139). What she cannot yet sort out, perhaps, is that she could not cry for Willy because of her unconscious sense of his oppression of her and her sons. She will no longer have to bend under the burden of the masculine ego. Biff is free of the patriarch now, and so is she: free and crying in the emotional intensity that her freedom releases.

Although mystified to seem otherwise, the male American Dream of Death of a Salesman is, as the play shows, unbalanced, immature, illogical, lying, thieving, self-contradictory, and self-destructive. Only Willy literally kills himself, but the Dream’s celebration of the masculine mythos is inherently self-destructive in its need to obliterate other men or be obliterated, to castrate or be castrated.³⁶ It prefers to destroy itself rather than to acknowledge the female as equal or to submit to a realistic and balanced feminine value system. This tragedy of the common man also wreaks the suffering of the common woman, who has trustingly helped the man to maintain and repair the Dream and has helplessly watched him destroy it and render her sacrifices meaningless. One could argue that Linda as common woman possesses more tragic nobility than Willy.³⁷ Her only flaw was in harnessing all of her talents and energies to support the self-destructive American masculine mythos that requires Woman’s subjugation and exploitation. Yet, at the end of the play, Linda lives—and even, for once, gets the last word. Biff, under her unacknowledged influence, now even shows her some tenderness as they leave the stage. But Happy exits last, alone, with the male music of the flute remaining, reminding us of the perpetuation of the Dream.

Thus the audience and readers are left with a choice between Happy and Linda, as Willy had had a choice between Ben and Linda. We can continue to side with the immature masculine mythos in degrading and ignoring Woman while making her the scapegoat for failures in American male-dominated society, or we can free Woman to rise from her oppression by choosing with her the appreciation of love and compassion, the recognition of the values of human dignity, and the worthwhile contributions of men and women.

Source

From Feminist Rereadings of Modern American Drama, ed. June Schlueter (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1989): 67-102. Copyright © 1989 by Associated University Presses. Reprinted by permission of Associated University Presses.

Notes