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Miller's Death of a Salesman: The 'Tragic Hero' Redefined
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20290 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1992 |
7,709 Words |
| Author
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Anne Paolucci
Anne Paolucci is chairperson of the English Department and
director of the Doctor of Arts degree program ay St. John’s
University in New York. She serves on the National Council of
Humanities. She is an award-winning playwright, a prolific
writer on the Theatre of the Absurd, and president of the
Pirandello Society. |
On June 24, 1984, the New York Times carried a review by Norton Houghton of Arthur Miller's booklength account of the spring 1983 Beijing production of Death of a Salesman, which the playwright had been invited to direct. Miller's record of the enthusiastic mainland Chinese response to Salesman never made the best-seller list (Bob Woodward's Wired was the No. 1 nonfiction entry for that week--a vivid reminder that politics is often more gripping that fiction or drama); but Miller was understandably gratified by what could be interpreted as a resurgence of interest in his work. A less sanguine view might instead interpret the excitement over the Beijing production as a curiously delayed reaction to a play written over four decades ago, when the polarization of economic interests in our country and the world--the legacy of the Great Depression--was the Large Theme. For the Chinese, Salesman confirmed their unyielding view about capitalist oppression and the victimized individual struggling for place--a sign not so much of Miller's revitalized reputation as a reflection of Chinese reactionary thinking and their unchanging attitudes toward what the capitalist West represents.
The Chinese success of Salesman also reminds us that Miller still sees himself in the role of political and social reformer and still enjoys that role immensely, even thought the conditions and realities that made that role impressive in the 1940s no longer exist in the same way. Still at least two generations behind in their political ideology and practice, the Chinese saw in Salesman the timely expression of their own dated reactionary opposition to capitalist ideals (recent events in China confirm their hard-line tactics when opposition is voiced in any way). The Beijing Salesman worked for the Chinese just fine. And where his "message" does not elicit the same responses and enthusiasm of the 1940s, Miller takes on new roles in the public forum.
Critical assessment of Miller's achievement is still ambiguous. At a distance of forty years or more, drama critics (or, more precisely "scholar-critics" as Robert F. Moss calls them) like Eric Bentley, Robert Brustein, John Simon, and Richard Gilman, pretty much agree that Miller's "chief felony appears to be his uncompromising commitment to what he calls 'social drama,' by which he merely means a work that demonstrates the interpenetration of man and society, with special attention to the welts that the human community can raise on the back of its residents." Such theater or art, for these critics, is "automatically rancid," "left over from the thirties," nothing but "old dramas of social protest by people . . . [who] attributed evil to an oppressive economic system instead of to human nature.
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