Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller

So as I said in my previous post (yep, the one right below), it had been decades since I'd read Death of a Salesman. An op-ed in the NY Times on May 3 ("Death of a Salesman's Dreams" by Lee Siegel) prompted me to read it again.  Everyone (yeah, everyone, right?) knows that the title gives away the ending, so the point of the play isn't that--gasp-- the salesman,Willy Loman, dies. And of course he dies emotionally, spiritually, and psychically before he dies physically, right? So what's the point?

I'm sure there are many points that high school teachers and college professors make when they're teaching Death of a Salesman, but as Lee Siegel writes, "while Death of a Salesman has consolidated its prestige as an exposure of middle-class delusions, the American middle class--as a social reality and a set of admirable values-- has nearly ceased to exist."  Yeah, the middle class has nearly ceased to exist in 2012.  So how are we to think about this play right now in 2012?  A play which is based upon mythology about the American dream, about middle class life, about the notion that by being a hard working, middle class employee you will be a success and you will be able to have what you want. What did Willy Loman want? Happiness and dignity but as Lee Siegel writes, "...today's capitalists no longer share Willy's belief that he could attain dignity through his work." Yeah, it's tough to swallow in 2012 that Willy ever believed such a thing.

It's very, very hard to believe people en masse can derive dignity from being an employee in 2012.  How can there be dignity when at any time we can be laid off, let go, down-sized, fired? (The lucky ones are demoted.) When our salaries are frozen or reduced? When our benefits, whatever they are, are taken away? How can there be dignity when it's understood so well in 2012 that employees are expendable? Of course employees were always expendable, but it wasn't quite so "in your face" back in the day.  As Siegel writes, "... it is unlikely that anyone [in our time] associates happiness and dignity with working hard for a comfortable existence purchased with a modest income" and that "in our current context, Willy's dreams of love, dignity and community through modest work make him a deluded loser."  Death of a Salesman is very intense and not only because the angst is unrelenting but because Willy Loman does indeed look painfully foolish in a world that doesn't exist.

But after I finished reading Death of a Salesman for the first time in decades, I read it again because the American dream is such a powerful mythology and because of what Arthur Miller wrote in his autobiography: "that he hoped the play would expose 'this pseudo life that thought to touch the clouds by standing on top of a refrigerator, waving a paid-up mortgage at the moon, victorious at last."