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Willy Loman and The Soul of a New Machine: Technology and the Common Man

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

Richard T. Brucher
Richard T. Brucher
Affiliation:
Richard T. Brucher is Associate Professor of English at the University of Maine, Orono, Maine 04469.
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Extract

As Death of a Salesman opens, Willy Loman returns home “tired to the death” (p. 13). Lost in reveries about the beautiful countryside and the past, he's been driving off the road; and now he wants a cheese sandwich. But Linda's suggestion that he try a new American-type cheese — “It's whipped” (p. 16) — irritates Willy: “Why do you get American when I like Swiss?” (p. 17). His anger at being contradicted unleashes an indictment of modern industrialized America:

The street is lined with cars. There's not a breath of fresh air in the neighborhood. The grass don't grow any more, you can't raise a carrot in the back yard. (p. 17).

In the old days, “This time of year it was lilac and wisteria.” Now: “Smell the stink from that apartment house! And another one on the other side…” (pp. 17–18). But just as Willy defines the conflict between nature and industry, he pauses and simply wonders: “How can they whip cheese?” (p. 18).

The clash between the old agrarian ideal and capitalistic enterprise is well documented in the literature on Death of a Salesman, as is the spiritual shift from Thomas Jefferson to Andrew Carnegie to Dale Carnegie that the play reflects. The son of a pioneer inventor and the slave to broken machines, Willy Loman seems to epitomize the victim of modern technology.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 17 , Issue 3 , December 1983 , pp. 325 - 336
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1983

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References

1 Miller, Arthur's Death of a Salesman (1949) is quoted from the Viking Critical Edition, ed. Weales, Gerald (New York: Viking Press, 1967)Google Scholar.

2 See Bates, Barclay W., “The Lost Past in Death of a Salesman,” Modern Drama, 11 (1968), 164–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Eisinger, Chester E., “Focus on Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman: The Wrong Dreams,” in American Dreams, American Nightmares, ed. Madden, David (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1970), pp. 165–74Google Scholar; Gross, Barry Edward, “Peddler and Pioneer in Death of a Salesman,” Modern Drama, 7 (1965), 405–10CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Weales, Gerald, “Arthur Miller: Man and His Image,” in Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman, ed. Weales, Gerald, pp. 350–66Google Scholar.

3 Whitman, is quoted from Leaves of Grass and Selected Prose, ed. Bradley, Sculley (San Francisco: Rinehart Press, Rinehart Editions, 1955)Google Scholar.

4 Mailer, Norman, Of a Fire on the Moon (1970; paper rpt. New York: New American Library, 1971), p. 55Google Scholar.

5 Marx, Leo, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (1964; paper rpt. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1973), p. 226Google Scholar.

6 Kidder, Tracy, The Soul of a New Machine (Boston: Little, Brown, 1981)Google Scholar. All quotations are from this edition.

7 See Walden (1854), especially Chapter 4, “Sounds”: “What recommends commerce to me is its enterprise and bravery… I see these men every day go about their business with more or less courage and content, doing more even than they suspect, and perchance better employed than they could have consciously devised.” Quoted from the Signet edition of Walden, ed. Miller, Perry (New York: New American Library, 1960), p. 84Google Scholar.

8 But see Deford, Frank, “Are Electronic Video Games Bad for Kids? Well, Really and Not Really,” Sports Illustrated, 57: 16 (11 10, 1982), 6–7, 10Google Scholar: “Video games are not sophisticated pinball machines… The quiddity of video games is that they are patterned… They can't tilt! It's all rote” (p. 10). Pinball games, on the other hand, “require a certain imaginative dexterity. They may even be a metaphor for life…because the trick with pinball games is to know how to stretch, even to sorta kinda exceed the limits…but ever so gingerly – to caress some extra points out of the machine without ever quite tilting the whole shebang. Pinball teaches you to skirt, to fudge, to finagle, to take sensible risks” (p. 7).

9 The Time of Your Life (1939) is quoted from Famous American Plays of the 1930's, ed. Clurman, Harold (New York: Dell, Laurel Drama Series, 1959)Google Scholar.

10 See Emerson, 's “Self-Reliance,” in Selected Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Atkinson, Brooks (New York: The Modern Library, Modern Library College Editions, 1950), p. 148Google Scholar.

11 See “Tragedy and the Common Man” (1949), reprinted in the Viking Critical Edition of Death of a Salesman, ed. Weales, , pp. 146–47Google Scholar.