Course by Dr. Pooyan Changizi
Research principles and methodology I
14 January 2017
The Crashing Down of Capitalism on Willy Loman’s Vacillations and Naïveté
Willy does not persist as the failed product of the elusive American Dream but as the man whose yearnings for the safety of socialism transport him to a point, both metaphysically and psychologically, where the sociological tension between that socialism and the capitalism that Willy has been taught to embrace forces him to the crisis that leads to his suicide.
—Castellitto
Arthur Miller’s Willy Loman’s character type is the representative of a people within a capitalist system, having the similitude of his traits. His character tends to waver increasingly between the capitalism as a pervasive system in which he lives and Marxism whose values occur to him as ephemeral moments of epiphany. The capitalist system is corrupt at its very core and is to fall down any moment as Willy subconsciously senses it although he does not express it; Castellitto further explains: “Willy’s disdain for the substantive products and isolationist wanderings indigenous to capitalism and his yearnings for the family cohesiveness that existed a decade earlier become the catalysts that propel him from his expressionistic musings to his realistic discernment that capitalism has failed, at least for the needs of his own psyche.” (Castellitto 81, emphasis added) Mostly it is said by critics that Willy Loman is but one of the failures of the inefficient capitalist system and the unfulfilled waste of the flawed American Dream whereas some believe that the failure lies within him and stems from his incompetence and the system is not to blame. But it is the system that mostly affects Willy for worse, for instance: the mortgages on household appliances and on the house itself make Willy dependent on the capitalist system until his death that ends with Linda saying: “…We’re free…” (112), or Howard firing him almost shatters all Willy’s dreams.
Beyond the attack on such a selfish attitude as Howard Wagner’s, the most powerful statement on capitalism contained in Death of a Salesman concerns the vast alienation that the capitalist machinery requires in order to run smoothly. We must deceive ourselves, should not think too much, and, above all, should make do with an image of ourselves that is not completely of our own making but rather that has been impressed (or forced) upon us and is therefore slightly distorted in most cases. (Guijarro-González and Espejo 71)
The capitalist system demands alienation for its members in order to be what it wants them to be. Salesmen advertise another company’s products in a selling career, that is, the better they advertise, the more they earn but the fruit, or the outcome, of their efforts is not theirs. They only sell their word, be it honest or not. In the long run, they sell themselves that is quite like prostitution to keep their earnings. In effect, they are alienated from what they do which Karl Marx called “alienated labor”:
For example, his [Marx’s] concern over the rise of industrialism in the mid-nineteenth century was a concern for the effects of factory work on people who were forced to sell their labor to the industries that were replacing independent artisans and farmers. Because factory workers produced such large quantities of products, none of which bore their names or any other mark of their individual contributions, Marx observed that they became disassociated not only from the products they produced but from their own labor as well, and he noted the debilitating effects of what he called alienated labor on the laborer and on the society as a whole. (Tyson 61)
In this system, the members have impersonal and material value for they are seen as per their labors not as humans and whenever the former is not efficient, that member is deemed expendable by the system as Howard fired Willy. In such system, to succeed, one must exceed the limits of morale and contend in a ruthless competition which means even bribing secretaries so as to have one’s products sold so that the state of being “well-liked” remains intact to make a Willy Loman capable of impressing others because he needs it to sell his products and keep his life running.
As he exaggerates his commissions to Linda and Howard, we realize that Willy has no core values or goals that are his own; everything he says and does revolves around impressing others as a businessman. Willy’s lack of core values reflects one of the major criticisms of capitalism, that it encourages self-centered material success and power over the importance of ethical and fair treatment in human relationships.
Willy’s continuous rationalization that he is above society’s rules is fed by his capitalistic dream of success, but the root of Willy’s moral and emotional emptiness stems from childhood events. The abandonment by his father stunts Willy’s emotional growth, which impedes his ability to understand himself. (Uranga 88)
The abandonment of Willy’s father had a profound and lasting impact on him resulting in the arrest of his emotional development and his seeking of a father figure during the entire play. “In the play, Willy constantly seeks guidance from male father figures such as Dave Singleman when endeavoring to understand how to be successful in his career.” (Uranga 81) Sometimes, Willy sees this father figure in Charley for he has been supportive of Willy every time he was in need. In the following dialogue we see how Charley, like a compassionate father, tries to calm Willy by telling him how the system works:
WILLY. That snotnose. Imagine that? I named him. I named him Howard.
CHARLEY. Willy, when’re you gonna realize that them things don’t mean anything? You named him Howard, but you can’t sell that. The only thing you got in this world is what you can sell. And the funny thing is that you’re a salesman, and you don’t know that.
WILLY. I’ve always tried to think otherwise, I guess. I always felt that if a man was impressive, and well liked, that nothing— (97)
And Willy admits: “That’s funny. For a second there you reminded me of my brother Ben” (45). Plus, Ben has been like a father to Willy back in their childhood when their father abandoned them. It is safe if we assume that the two claims add up and Willy, however subconsciously, considers Charley as a father figure. Ironically, Willy enters fight with Charley and insults him on various occasions by “symbolically rejecting the honest values his neighbor stands for and embracing the amoral code of Ben, with whom he can now talk without any further disturbances.” (Guijarro-González and Espejo 67) This disconcerting relationship goes on between Willy and Charley with both of them well aware of the fact that “Willy suffers from a latent feeling of inferiority and envy regarding Charley, whose existence is portrayed by Miller as balanced and harmonious” (Guijarro-González and Espejo 64). Charley is actually supportive of Willy and his job, shown in his much-debated address-like funeral speech advocating his cause in response to Biff:
Nobody dast blame this man. You don’t understand: Willy was a salesman. And for a salesman, there is no rock bottom to the life. He don’t put a bolt to a nut, he don’t tell you the law or give you medicine. He’s a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine. And when they start not smiling back—that’s an earthquake. And then you get yourself a couple of spots on your hat, and you’re finished. Nobody dast blame this man. A salesman is got to dream, boy. It comes with the territory. (111)
Even Willy himself knows the fact that Charley backs him both financially and emotionally “Willy even admits that Charley is a respected person, implying by juxtaposition that he himself is not.” (Guijarro-González and Espejo 64) Being envious of Charley only hastens the devastation of Willy’s own character stability and sharpens the ambivalence between the reveries of his happy old rustic days and the current urban life in the mouth of the giant mechanical capitalist system.
In other cases, it’s Ben who plays the role of a father and becomes an ideal exemplary man for him “Willy’s father figure Ben went into the jungle and came out rich; for Willy, Ben exemplifies the American Dream, the capitalistic success story. Willy dwells on Ben’s material success without understanding the selfish, even immoral, actions Ben perhaps used to attain his great wealth.” (Uranga 88) Ben, too, was abandoned and he is rugged tough sort of man in whose voice there is heard a certainty which is absent in Willy’s. Ben is the representative of rugged individualism. It is another ideology which is quite in line with the American Dream which sells itself as a natural way of achieving success thereby it is a repressive ideology as identified by Marxism according to Tyson. (Tyson 56-57)
In this country, we believe that it is natural to want to “get ahead,” to want to own a better house and wear better clothes. The key word here is better, which refers not only to “better than I had before” but also to “better than other people have.” That is, embedded within the belief in “getting ahead” is the belief in competition as a natural or necessary mode of being. After all, haven’t we learned from science that nature demands the “survival of the fittest”? And doesn’t this view of human behavior fit perfectly with the belief in rugged individualism upon which America was founded and without which it would not have become the great nation it is today? (Tyson 57)
This agenda creates a ruthless competition among its victims luring them with wealth and success; Nonetheless, to Marxists, this agenda is flawed and oppressive “because it puts self-interest above the needs—and even above the survival—of other people. By keeping the focus on “me” instead of on “us,” rugged individualism works against the well-being of society as a whole and of underprivileged people in particular.” (Tyson 60) Ben is no exception; he abandons everything including Willy in search of wealth in so-called Alaska by going into a jungle for a couple of years and when he comes out, he is rich. That’s all we know and it’s enough for Willy, to seek a model for his ideal life in Ben when he excitedly said: “Ben! That man was a genius, that man was success incarnate!” (27) But it doesn’t matter to him by what means or how he could become rich. In such system, wealth means success, be it earned from working hands or by immoral and criminal means, and the wealthy are thereby praised and respected as long as they are wealthy. “When Charley warns Willy that ‘the jails are full of fearless characters,’ Ben claps Willy on the back and, mocking Charley, replies, ‘And the stock exchange, friend!’ (51), associating the bastion of capitalism with theft and dishonesty.” (Uranga 90)
Willy’s reveries take him to his ideal life, however momentarily, to appease his needs to know the truth but they are no more than dying faint rays in the dark. He knows that his potentialities would flower elsewhere but the pull of American Dream holds him in place in the center of the system, surrounded by tall buildings, and immured by his empty material desires. Linda Uranga is right if she believes that Willy sees a distorted “version of reality” because he already is in illusion about his popularity and acceptance by the society:
Willy’s career choice dooms him to failure because his selection is not his own or based on his own interests but rather is based on someone else’s business dream. The flashbacks in the play reinforce that Willy is more connected with his perceptions of people and conversations that he recalls from the past than he is with real people in the present. The flashbacks reveal that Willy’s perceptions of the past might have never been very accurate reconstructions but rather his own skewed version of reality. (Uranga 84)
In order for the capitalism to sustain its being, it needs to pressure the lower middle class, to which the Loman family belongs, into paying heavy taxes; therefore, living from hand to mouth so that the affluent class, the owners and producers, or the bourgeois, as named by Marx, could keep their earnings even at the cost of the sacrifice of the former. Why don’t the economically oppressed leave the city? This is where the American Dream comes in since “[i]n large part, the middle class is blinded by their belief in the American dream, which tells them that financial success is simply the product of initiative and hard work. Therefore, if some people are poor, it is because they are shiftless and lazy.” (Tyson 57) The middle class blame themselves if they don’t see themselves as the satisfied members of the system. Another question may arise that:
“[h]ow does the American dream enlist the support of all Americans, even of those who fail to achieve it, in promoting the interests of those in power?”
The answer, at least in part, is that the American dream, much like the state lotteries or the big-bucks sweepstakes that are its latest incarnation, opens the possibility that anyone can win, and, like gambling addicts, we cling to that possibility. In fact, the less financial security we have, the more we need something to hope for. The American dream also tells us what we want to hear: that we are all “as good as” the wealthiest among us. It’s not supposed to matter that the wealthy don’t think I’m as good as they are as long as I believe it’s true. (Tyson 58)
For Willy, the fulfillment of the American Dream turns out to be no more than a mirage but he cannot relinquish it for he is addicted to it so seriously that he becomes desperate of any help coming from outside the system. Even the dream of becoming a successful salesman is not his, it belongs to Dave Singleman, an example for Willy during the entire play simply because Dave could sell very well at an old age and “he’d go up to his room, y’understand, put on his green velvet slippers—I’ll never forget—and pick up his phone and call the buyers, and without ever leaving his room, at the age of eighty-four, he made his living. And when I saw that, I realized that selling was the greatest career a man could want.” (61, emphasis added) His realization is comprised of duplicating Singleman’s dream for himself and setting him as the example of an ideal salesman.
However, other critics’ views on the issue discussed is of importance and can be taken into consideration. The fact that every imagination, thought or idea that is to become a piece literature, can be expressed through different forms of which the work before us to analyze has been put into tragedy thus the likelihood of it being an indictment of capitalism or an advocate of Marxism is considerably reduced for in any given tragedy since those of Greece, the flaw, or hamartia, has belonged to the character, one individual, and it does not blame the capitalist system as being flawed for having not been able to secure the future of a salesman who has dedicated his life for it “and we are thus led to overlook the negative influence of the capitalist ideology that is, at bottom, responsible for all the action in the play.” (Tyson 67) Sometimes, critics point to Willy’s failure as caused by his own incompetence rather than blaming the system for its inefficacies. He does not belong in the field of sales yet he insists on assuming a false identity that he has been one of the best salesman through being “well-liked” though actually he is not successful nor is he popular as we witnessed how his funeral went down.
Willy brags about his talent as a builder yet fails to realize that one will fail in the capitalist system if one chooses the wrong profession, such as choosing sales over carpentry. Willy chooses manual work as the weapon to humiliate Charley because he knows that it is one of the few areas in which he clearly outdoes his neighbor and because he feels upset after failing, unlike Charley, at the capitalist system. (Guijarro-González and Espejo 64)
It is arguably said by the critics that Charley and Bernard too are the denizens of the same capitalist system but they live unaffected by its throes. In the case of Charley, perhaps it’s because of the fact that he considers the key to his success the fact that he never took “any interest” (96) in them. As of his son, “Bernard is closer to the myth of the American Dream that so much preoccupies Willy than to the world of business, and he probably embodies the ideal of social success more than any other character in Death of a Salesman.” (Guijarro-González and Espejo 67) It is only through Howard that we see the “ruthless capitalism”:
But it is neither through Charley nor Bernard that Arthur Miller offers his crudest view of capitalism; Howard Wagner stands in marked contrast to them as the only scene in which he appears forcefully demonstrates. It is Howard who utters in Death of a Salesman the ultimate credo of capitalism, a tautological statement that requires no further explanation: “business is business” (80); with these words he lets Willy know that, whenever economic interests are at stake, no other considerations should be taken into account. (Guijarro-González and Espejo 69)
Willy being envious of Charley only hastens the devastation of his character stability and sharpens the ambivalence between the reveries of his happy old rustic days and the current urban life in the mouth of the giant mechanical capitalist system.
Works Cited
Castellitto, George P. “Willy Loman: The Tension between Marxism and Capitalism.” (n.d.): 79-86.
Guijarro-González, Juan Ignacio and Ramón Espejo. “Capitalist America in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman: A Re-consideration.” Sterling, Eric J. Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. Amsterdam; New York: Rodopi B.V., 2008. 61-78.
Miller, Arthur. Death of a Salesman. New York: Penguin Books, 1998.
Tyson, Lois. Critical Theory Today. 2nd. New York: Routledge, 2006.
Uranga, Linda. “Willy Loman and the Legacy of Capitalism.” Sterling, Eric J. Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. New York; Amsterdam: Rodopi B.V., 2008. 81-93.