Forbes and Fifth

The Tragedy of American Exceptionalism in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman

In her article, “Success, Law, and the Law of Success: Re-Evaluating Death of a Salesman’s Treatment of the American Dream,” Galia Benziman states that “a survey of the critical evaluations of Death of a Salesman reveals that the play has been mostly construed as a powerful, impassioned attack on this national ethos, often designated as the ‘American dream” (Benziman). Arguably, the critical consensus attacks this romanticized “national ethos” by asserting that Willy Loman’s downfall and suicide are the results of his failure to achieve an unattainable American Dream. However, I propose it is not the promise of the American Dream that drives the play’s central tragedy, but a much larger force: American Exceptionalism. According to the Oxford Companion to American Politics, American Exceptionalism can be understood as,

“a quasi-religious belief that the United States is a chosen and superior nation endowed by providence or the creator to be, ‘a city set upon a hill,’ (Matthew 5:14) an illustrious example and beacon for the rest of the world” (Wilson).

I assert that these structures not only exist on a national scale, but they also trickle down to the level of the individual where Willy Loman operates: Not only must America as a nation present the image that it is an “illustrious example and beacon for the rest of the world,” but everyone who lives there must propagate this image by being exceptional themselves. While the Oxford English Dictionary defines the American Dream as “the ideal that every citizen of the United States should have an equal opportunity to achieve success and prosperity through hard work, determination, and initiative,” I believe that this promise of prosperity is a guise under which American Exceptionalism imbues the individual with the belief that they need to be great to succeed in America ("American"). This is why I contend that the American Dream is only what Biff Loman suggests it is: a “phony dream” (Miller). By reading Willy’s progressive downward spiral throughout the play, it becomes clear that many, if not all, of his actions are directly motivated by a need for greatness, which is why I argue that his tragic fate is the direct result of being conditioned by American Exceptionalism. After years of striving to be great in order to win in the competitive world that this ideology has designed (and repeatedly failing), Willy’s belief that he is, or ever was, an extraordinary man “endowed by providence” begins to break down. When, at last, he realizes that he never was, and is never going to be, remarkable, his entire worldview collapses. This leads him to commit suicide, in the hope that at the very least, his sons can become what he could not. Through an analysis of Willy’s relationship to American Exceptionalism as seen in three different relationships: His relationship to his career, his relationship to his family, and his relationship to himself (which is inextricably interlinked with the other two), it becomes clear that Willy pushes himself in pursuit of a version of his life where he is exceptional, even if it kills him.

One way American Exceptionalism is evident as the driving force behind Willy’s downfall is in his failure to be a successful salesman. Willy’s need to be notable in his career stems from his creed that “the man who makes an appearance in the business world, the man who creates personal interest, is the man who gets ahead. Be liked and you will never want” (Miller 33). In Willy’s mind, if he can be a great “[sales]man who makes an appearance in the business world,” and a “[sales]man who creates personal interest,” then he can be the “[sales]man who gets ahead” (Miller 33). If he becomes a great salesman, then he can achieve a certain level of prosperity and reinforce the greatness of the entire nation. To attain this level of success, Willy orients himself towards the standard of the superior salesman: Dave Singleman. According to Willy, Singleman is the pinnacle of salesmen and therefore, the person to emulate:

And old Dave, 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 (Miller 81).

 

When Willy first encounters Singleman, he knows that “selling was the greatest career a man could want”, because it could earn Willy the respect he needs to become a great man and achieve prosperity. In Willy’s mind, Singleman does not have to drive all over the country to make sales, he can make a living just by sitting in his hotel room, putting on his green-velvet slippers and picking up the phone. Singleman does not have to go home to watch his wife mend her stockings instead of buying new ones, or worry about where the money to fix the refrigerator is going to come from, because he is a remarkable man who does remarkable things (Miller 81, Miller 75). For Willy, Singleman is the man who has respect, prestige, and success; in short, he represents nothing less than the zenith of greatness. According to Cortina and Lenkerd,

The encounter with ‘old Dave’ powerfully captures Willy's imagination, where the ideal of success is melded with the ideal of being liked and admired. The story of old Dave is set in stark comparison with the second death of a salesman in the play, Willy's suicide. Willy was a salesman who had not “made it.” He had worked hard all his life only to find his early successes replaced with a series of humiliating professional disappointments… (Cortina and Lenkerd)

It is because Singleman is the type of man who lives such a remarkable life that makes Willy not only want to be him—but need to be him. Even in death, Willy wants to be Dave Singleman, because he was still noteworthy in death: “When he died, hundreds of salesmen and buyers were at his funeral" (Miller 81). Unfortunately, Willy is unable to successfully emulate the prosperity Singleman achieved as a salesman, in life or death. It is because of this failure, coupled with American Exceptionalism’s continuous necessity of greatness that begins Willy’s turns to other methods of becoming successful.

In order to compensate for his lack of achievement, Willy begins to rely on two methods to feed his desire to be exceptional: overcompensation and fantasy construction. Despite advancing in age, Willy continues to attempt to become great, compensating for a lack of success with dedication in the hope that after over forty years as a salesman, he will finally receive the recognition he deserves (Miller 14-15). However, he ends up overcompensating for his lack of success by running himself ragged, to the point where he almost runs his car off the road “a little above Yonkers”, at the start of the play (Miller 13). After realizing that dedication and hard work will no longer get him the success he needs, Willy resorts to creating fantasies in which he is, or once was, great. These narratives are usually constructed around an exaggerated sense of self, but they also appear to be built on delusions of grandeur. For example, when Willy goes to his boss, Howard Wagner, to request that he be allowed to work in New York, he tries to justify his request, while also keeping the fantasy of being notable alive, by stating:

WILLY. Your father—in 1928 I had a big year. I averaged a hundred and seventy dollars a week in commissions.

HOWARD. Impatiently, Now, Willy, you never averaged...

WILLY. Banging his hand on the desk, I averaged a hundred and seventy dollars a week in the year of 1928! And your father came to me—or rather, I was in the office here—it was right over this desk—and he put his hand on my shoulder... (Miller 82).

 

The number of pauses and rapid detail changes in Willy’s retelling of this narrative suggest that even he is not sure where the truth ends and the fantasy begins. What is crucial about this encounter is that Willy clearly attempts to reaffirm the narrative that he once was, or still is, superior, either by relying heavily on past events or by simply fabricating the facts. Willy is so determined to become great, no matter the cost, that he is ultimately fired from his job and his belief that he is an “illustrious example and beacon” begins to collapse. The combined stress of these two events continues to build in his mind as the play progresses and eventually will lead him to commit suicide in the hope that he will become noteworthy through his posterity.

Evidence that American Exceptionalism is the driving force behind Willy’s tragic downfall can also be seen in his relationship with his sons. Willy’s belief that one needs to be remarkable to be prosperous in America is not something that is exclusive to him: he has also been projecting this idea onto his sons, because successful fathers raise their sons to be successful, too, thus perpetuating the continuity of success. Ama Wattley reinforces this when she states, “Willy desires his sons to be like him, or more accurately, like the image of himself he projects to them” (Wattley). Here, Wattley’s argument explains why Willy is consistently depicted as being disappointed or angry at Biff and Happy: they had the potential to be great, but could never live up to the image Willy forced onto them. By focusing primarily on Willy’s projection of exceptionalism onto Biff, it is evident that this need for greatness does not only have a negative effect on the father, but also negatively impacts his son.

Within many, if not all of the flashbacks, Willy constantly tries to transmit the teachings of exceptionalism to Biff. For example, one of Willy’s many attempts to make his son great can be seen in the flashback involving Biff stealing the football:

WILLY. …Coach’ll probably congratulate you on your initiative!

BIFF. Oh, he keeps congratulating my initiative all the time, Pop.

WILLY. That’s because he likes you. If somebody else took that ball there’d be an uproar (Miller 30).

 

Within this encounter between Willy and Biff, Willy’s contentment with his son is the result of Biff’s attempt in becoming notable. Willy’s remark that Biff is well-liked by his coach and will be congratulated for his initiative reaffirms that he is trying to make Biff see himself as “an illustrious example and beacon for the rest of the world.” Furthermore, the comment that if “somebody else” and not Biff “took that ball there’d be an uproar,” reinforces this notion that Willy is trying to teach Biff that he is greater than everyone else. This is also evident in the same flashback, when Biff tells Willy he’ll score a touchdown for him:

BIFF. This Saturday, Pop, this Saturday—just for you, I’m going to break through for a touchdown.

HAPPY. You’re supposed to pass.

BIFF. I’m takin’ one play for Pop (Miller 32).

 

Instead of chastising Biff for stealing the football and “break[ing] through for a touchdown” when he is supposed to pass, “Willy encourages and revels in Biff’s local stardom and believes it to be one sign of Biff’s greatness and potential to be a success in life” (Wattley 10). Furthermore, Willy encourages Biff by projecting an image of exceptionalism onto him. In the same flashback, it is clear that Willy’s projecting quickly begins to have an effect on Biff, because of his comment that “he [the coach] keeps congratulating my initiative all the time.” In these two excerpts, there is a clear sense that Biff becomes defiant towards authority and rules, because he has been taught that he is above them.

In Act II of the play, it is revealed that Willy’s attempts to instill this ideology of greatness into his son did not make him exceptional, but instead had a terrible effect on his ego. As a result of his father’s repeated attempts to project exceptionalism onto him, Biff has been conditioned to believe that he will be successful at everything. However, towards the end of Act II, Biff reveals to his father how this constant transmitting of these ideas actually kept him from being successful at anything:

BIFF. I stole myself out of every good job since high school!

WILLY. And whose fault is that?

BIFF. I never got anywhere, because you blew me so full of hot air I could never stand taking orders from anybody! That’s whose fault it is! (Miller 131).

 

A clear cause-and-effect correlation emerges between the scenes, where Willy projects an image of greatness onto Biff in his teenage years, and adult Biff’s revelation that he could never take orders because he was always being blown “so full of hot air.” Biff directly admits that he could never be exceptional—he could not even be averagely successful—because Willy was constantly projecting an image that he could not live up to. Just as Willy was conditioned to believe that he is exceptional, so was Biff. But whereas Biff can accept that he was not “endowed by providence or the creator” to be great, Willy cannot. At the climax of the play, Biff, in a moment of foreshadowing, begs his father: “Will you take that phony dream and burn it before something happens?” (Miller 132). Biff’s statement that Willy has only been pursuing a phony dream his entire life is his breaking point. It is at this moment that Willy decides to make something happen in order to push his son towards the success that he could never achieve and make him exceptional, at last.

When Willy kills himself in order to collect the twenty-thousand dollars in insurance money, this final tragic act can be seen as a father who broke under the weight of American Exceptionalism making one last attempt at making his children successful. Willy constructs his suicide so that Biff can collect the insurance money and use it to become prosperous, just as Willy always hoped he would grow up to be. In the closing moments of Act II, Willy suggests that by sacrificing himself,

WILLY. That boy---that boy is going to be magnificent!

Ben appears in the light just outside the kitchen.

BEN. Yes, outstanding, with twenty thousand behind him (Miller 133).

 

Through Willy’s suicide, not only will Biff get the twenty-thousand-dollar life insurance policy that will make him magnificent, Willy will finally get the death of the “greatest” salesman where “hundreds of salesmen and buyers” will be at his funeral. Willy’s realization that he will never be extraordinary, coupled with the need to be superior to succeed in America, leads him to believe that if he cannot be a remarkable man in life, the least he can do is leave behind an exceptional corpse to be mourned at an exceptional funeral by his soon-to-be exceptional family. Unfortunately, this line of reasoning only occurs in Willy’s mind: The reality is that he will not have a magnificent funeral with “hundreds of salesmen and buyers” in attendance, but a small funeral, where very few people will show up including his still average, but slightly wealthier, family.

In The Cambridge Companion to Arthur Miller, Matthew Roudane argues Death of a Salesman presents a rich matrix of enabling fables that define the myth of the American dream” (Roudane). As I have argued, it is not a failure to achieve this mythologized notion of the American Dream that leads to the death of the salesman, it is the ideology of American Exceptionalism. This “quasi-religious belief” conditions him to believe that he must be “an illustrious example and beacon for the rest of world” by promising him wealth and success if he contributes to the prosperity of the entire nation. This conditioning is also present in his relationship with his sons: Willy’s theory is that if his children are not remarkable it means he failed, because he could not raise them to greatness. Although many would contend that it is Willy’s need to achieve the fable that is the American Dream which brings about his suicide, I argue that it is because Willy has been conditioned to believe that he has to be successful in everything: his job, his marriage, and his family, that ultimately leads to his downfall. Having been taught to believe that he has been “endowed by providence or the creator” to become a great man, Willy pushes himself to be exceptional because being average would be unacceptable.

Bibliography

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Cortina, Mauricio and Barbara Lenkerd. “Willy Loman’s American Dreams: A Sociopsychoanalytic Interpretation of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman.” Contemporary Psychoanalysis 44, no. 2 (2008): 247-265. Accessed July 5, 2019. journals-scholarsportal-info.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/pdf/00107530/v44i0002/247_wlad.xml.

Miller, Arthur. Death of a Salesman. New York: Penguin Books, 2006.

Roudane, Matthew C. “Death of a Salesman and the Poetics of Arthur Miller.” In The Cambridge Companion to Arthur Miller, edited by Christopher Bigsby, 63-88. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Wattley, Ama. “Father-Son Conflict and the American Dream in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman and August Wilson’s Fences.” The Arthur Miller Journal 5, no. 2 (2010): 1-20. Accessed July 8, 2019. https://search-proquest-com.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/docview/1424668....

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Volume 15, Spring 2019