Abstract
Miller’s Death of a Salesman provides a third example of the disgust-shame dyad and contamination scripts in a tragedy. Salesman shows the fullest integration of the protagonist’s personality with the play’s dramatic structure. Despite radical cultural-historical differences, tragedy again depends on disgust-shame scripts in the protagonist’s personality structure. Miller provides context in justifying the “tragedy of the common man.” Willy and Biff Loman’s mutually reflected (self-)disgust contamination scripts are mediated by shame damage-reparation scripts. Their conflict’s foundation is a “nuclear scene” and consequential “nuclear script.” For Tomkins, “nuclear scripts represent the tragic” vision of life because they lead people into self-destructive behaviours. Willy and Biff reveal actions that traditional psychoanalysis call unconscious motivations. Both, however, are fully conscious of their truth. In the end, as much as Biff and Willy reject one another due to moral-disgust contamination during the nuclear scene, so are they drawn to repair the damage by the attraction of their mutually remembered ideal. Willy’s tragedy is that he captures Biff’s love but too late.
… Your high-engendered battles ‘gainst a head
So old and white as this. O, ho! ‘tis foul
Shakespeare, King Lear
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
Miller responds to several types of these criticisms in his “Introduction to Collected Plays.”
- 3.
This description is a good example of why Sedgwick and Frank call Tomkins’ writing style an “alchemy of the contingent” (1995, 6).
- 4.
Overall, Schneider’s reading turns the play into Happy’s dream, as if “inside Hap’s head” rather than Willy’s. This is untenable, except perhaps as an over-determined Freudian transference. For additional Freudian readings, see Chester Eisinger’s (1970) “Focus on Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman: The Wrong Dreams” and Karl Harshbarger’s (1979) The Burning Jungle: An Analysis of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman.
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Lucas, D.A. (2018). Case Study Three: Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman . In: Affect Theory, Genre, and the Example of Tragedy. Palgrave Studies in Affect Theory and Literary Criticism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94863-8_6
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