Paper-5 Willy Loman as a victim of capitalist society

Vaghani Hitesh s

Roll no. - 38

SEM - I

Department of English

Paper no. – 5

Year – 2010-11

Topic:

Willy Loman as a victim of capitalist society

                                                                        

                       Submitted to Mr. Jay Mehta

Department of English,

Bhavnagar University.

Willy Loman as a victim of capitalist society 

The common theme of Miller’s plays is the individual versus Society. As a dramatist he concentrated on the single subject

        

           “The struggle… of the individual attempting

            To again his rightful position in his society”, or

             His family which is a part and unit of society. Like Ibsen, Shaw and Galsworthy, Miller also deals with social problems of the modern men, but in a different manner.

               The worker of Arthur Miller like those of Galsworthy belongs to that school of social realism, which has dominated the theatre ever since, Ibsen produced his realistic plays like. A Doll’s House, Ghosts and pillars of society. Miller’s first successful play. All my sons show the influence of Ibsen. Its theme may be briefly described as the idea of guilt from the past permeating and destroying the present. The guilty protagonist is Joe Keller, an industrialist who, during the war supplied the government with a batch of faulty cylinder heads.

             When these brought about the death of twenty one pilots, Keller committed the second crime of putting all the blame on his innocent manager Deever. Deever goes to jail and Keller prospers. The irony is supported by other instance that Miller offords in the examples of those who suffer fighting for their country and those who, staying behind flourish. But the success of Keller’s is not lasting. The climax of the play is the suicide of his son in the army, on hearing the news of his father’s crime And Killer stripped of his sentimental defense, kills himself.

           In Death of a salesman also the same theme of self-interest appers. Willy Loman, the hero is a salesman who is driven by two examples of success that have have a strong hold on his imagination. Loman is propelled not by ambition for himself but for his two sons for whom he wants very good thing. But contrary to his expectation the sons come eventually to despise him. In his confrontation with his elder son Biff, Loman sees everything with a sense of triumph he asserts that Biff will thus be able to go on better than his neighbour’s son Bernard,

                        

                           “When the mail comes he’ll

                            Beahead to Bernard”, he says

        

              The crucible is a play that has as its background, the puritan Massachusetts. The scenes are laid at the time of the notorious Salem witch trials. The protagonist is a Salem farmer, John proctor who finds himself involved in the witch hunt. Abigail was subsequently sent out of the house by the farmer’s wife. Now the girl who is still in love with proctor, defends his wife, but in defying the court, he finds himself accused of witchcraft and is put in prison. His dilemma is solved by his wife who forgives him and advises him to make a false confession to a corrupt court. Proctor is tempted to do so, but when he learns that his confession will be nailed to the church-door, he is blacken the others and mare ever

          He does not want to blacken the others and moreover he realizes that death is preferable to losing his name. He chooses to die with the others.

             In these three plays of Miller, we find the common theme of the individual versus society. In All My sons we get the idea of a man in the powerful grip of ambition, betraying society. Society is not entirely absolved of blame either. Miller draws up an indictment of the society too for he suggests that it is the pressures of materialist society that guided Keller in making a choice that is anti-social. He could have admitted to the government the fact that the cylinders he supplied them were faulty. But to do so would be to lose the prestige of his business.

                 Again the inescapable relation between individual and society is made clear by Keller’s agency when his neighbors call him “Murderer” and of A Salesman is also influenced in everything by society and success in terms of social evaluation. His identification of success is with a cheering crowd round a foot-ball field. It is the central point of Miller’s social philosophy that society and the individual are inextricably linked. In All my sons. Keller’s betrayal of his parental responsibility also shows the individual facing the society. There is great moral in the irony that Keller who justified his conduct on the ground that he was preserving his small business for his sons, should be exposed as a malefactor by his own son. It is signifint that this man who harms society, his paternal love and devotion to his family’s warfare and exposed as manifestation of egotism. Miller the moralist exposes the faults and follies of Willy loman in Death of a salesman. The hollow success worship, false values and inability to face the truth are depicted, Miller’s later plays. A memory of two Mondays and A view from the Bridge also evince the dramatist’s socially directed attitude. The first of these is about an intelligent Youngman doing malarial labour with a group of people who have no prospect in life other. The dreariness to which these men are condemned and from which the Youngman can hope to rise is evoked effectively. The mutual loyalty and sympathetic affection of these men that make the dreariness endurable are nicely depicted by the dramatist. In A view from the bridge also Miller makes use of the familiar themes of loyalty, of betrayal and of the need for a name and for public recognition.

            The above survey of Miller’s plays makes clear the moral war that Miller has been waging through them and the social philosophy that they demonstrate. As for his realism, it is evident in the characters who he depicted and the environment that he pictured, “In a plays such as all my sons, there are elements beyond doth plot and idea that engage our interest. Characters are brought to life, an atmosphere or mood is evoked, an environment is presented; an insight into how people feel and think or rationalize is present.

                The texture and actual aliveness of All my sons consist of the realist of family life as observed by Miller; of the reality of Miller’s Joe Killer depicted as a shrewd “ Little man” with a feeling for family and a sense of cleverly concealed desperation of Keller’s wife presented as the  affectionate “little woman for whom issues of right and wrong or guilt and retribution are secondly to keeping life going with creature comforts and amiable personal relation ship; of the ambivalences of  killer’s surviving son, whose trivial loyalty is being severely tested when he must inform against his father Miller, in short, created his play rather than merely contrived it. He presented life as well as argument on the stage” 

        In Death of a salesman too Miller has combined the realistic teeth unique with the expressionistic intermixing of the present and past events and weaving a complex pattern of immediate tensions and recollected crises. Though his scenes are imaginative the background are real. They are definitely and recognizably middle class.  The Though Willy Loman’s “memories and hallucinations moved critically over time and space” they were tied tightly together by his immediate tensions and conflicts.

         The play is a story of Willy Loman an Amrican salesman who has worked for the Wagner firm for thirty four years, and when he is old, he is fired and rendered jobless. His two sons Bill Loman and Happy loman are lost ones. He is lost in the world of Maya. He suffers from a sense of incidequaoy and insecurity, inferiority and loneliness. He is a dreamer. In order to make his family well of the commits suicide so that his sons may get money from the life. In, urance company which has insured his life. 

         An overriding theme of the play says Gerald weales, is that it is a play about the last terrible day of a man and about the flood of facts and lies, of reality and fantasy, of the actual and the potation that made him and killed him. Dillingham says that the theme of Death of a salesman is “loss of conscience”. Some other critics regard the play as a propaganda play which reveals some evils of the contemporary. American society. Among such critics the names of Harold clubman and john Gassner are notable. Raymond Williams sees the play as a treatment of alienation, in the classical Marxist rather than the existential sense, and sees in Miller the beginnings of a new social drama. On the other hand, Fuller sees the play as one man’s failure and not as an indictment of the system. There are some others who have interpreted to it other abstruse psychological theories. Froma catholic point of view the play has been regarded as a warning against the meaninglessness of life where there no religious faith.

   

            “Salesman”, according to Miller. “Is a tragedy of man alone was not meeting the qualifications laid down for mankind by those clean-shaven frontiersmen who inhabit the speaks of broadcasting and advertising offices. From those forests of canned goods nigh up near the sky, he heard the thundering command to succeed as it ricocheted down the newspaper lined canyons of his city, heard not a human voice, but a wind of a voice to which no human can reply in kind, except to stare into the mirror at a failure.”

        

             So Death of a salesman is not merely a drama of domestic quarrels between a father and his sons, a drama of conflict between capitalism and communism, between self and soul, between psyche and conscience, between religiosity and religiosity, between a sales man and a manufacturer, but of a conflict between the individual and society, a conflict between man’s value and his environment. The play Wright was trying in “Salesman” to set forth what happens web a man does not have a grip on the forces of life and has no sense of values which will lead him to that kind of a grip

            “Death of a salesman is the most poignant statement of man as the most poignant statement of man as the must face himself”. It’s basic these is man’s loss of conscience. Loyalty to family also is its theme. It is an annatto my of failure.

        

           Eleanor Clark 1949. The play is a crude Mardaist attack on the brutal capitalist “System” in America.  

         

           Some have regarded the play as communist propaganda denouncing the evils of capitalism, while others have seen it as a sympathetic study of the problems of big business. Some have interpreseted it in Freudian terms and attributed to its author abstruse psychological theories, while drama catholic point of view the play has been regarded as a warning of the meaninglessness of life where there is no religious faith.