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Death of a Playwright: A Tribute to Arthur Miller
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by Kathleen Puhr
Clayton High School
St. Louis, Missouri
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| | A Staple of the American High School Stage
During my senior year of high school, I had a part in my school's production of The Crucible. I was Martha Corey, and I had four lines. Offstage. But I also was allowed to be one of the townspeople, a role for which my mom sewed a costume: plain ankle-length brown dress, large white collar, brown-and-white bonnet. I was thrilled with my costume and with my roles. (In fact, I later added a scarlet "A+" to the collar and became Hester Prynne for subsequent Halloweens.)
In one of the obituaries for Arthur Miller, the writer noted that The Crucible remains the most frequently performed play in American high schools. That's not surprising. Even as a 17-year-old, I appreciated the bold decision of John Proctor in act 4: his willingness to die for principle, for his integrity. His stirring speech about the importance of his name and his gesture of tearing up his false confession transcend the Puritan era, even the McCarthy era, and point to the courage that one person can show in the face of injustice. John Proctor is Thoreau, Gandhi, King, or Mandela.
Every year when I have taught The Crucible in my American literature class, I have asked students if John Proctor does the right thing. We examine Reverend Hale's argument that "life is more important than principle," and I ask students if they agree with Hale. Many of them do. Often, so do I. But when I ask them whether Miller seems to agree with Hale, they recognize that Proctor, not Hale, is the character whom they should admire because Miller does. Miller's own experiences as a target of the McCarthy witch hunt and his refusal to name names reveal that he also exhibited loyalty and integrity. He wasn't facing a literal death sentence, but he was risking his career and his reputation. He was, in life and in art, a brave man.
A Talent for Drawing Themes Simply
Many critics and tribute writers have noted that Miller is America's Ibsen. They point to Miller's willingness to question American icons and myths: the real value of the "almighty dollar," the true cost of business's bottom line. Those subjects are central to both All My Sons and Death of a Salesman. Like Ibsen, Miller explores the interplay of reality and illusion in the outlooks of his protagonists. How willing we are to see clearly, to face who and what we are: these are the issues that define his plays. As well as being vehicles for self-exploration -- for John Proctor, for Joe Keller, for Willy Loman, among others -- his plays address social issues. Miller's unabashed "liberalism," perhaps even tinged with a socialist hue, led him to assess capitalism as often carrying destructive consequences. I remember reading an article in Time magazine about Miller's visit to China in 1983 to help direct a production of Death of a Salesman. The Chinese communist audience loved the play. They appreciated Miller's skewering of business and applauded his painful exploration of the warped values that can be found in capitalism. When we look at Willy's balance sheet, we can understand why they applauded. I'm not the first to note that it's fairly easy to teach the rudiments of Marxist criticism using this play.
And yet, for all that, Miller never fell out of favor with teachers or directors. Perhaps his talent for drawing themes simply, with believable characters about whom we care, saved him from the polemical exercises that might have alienated his audience. His characters seem like people we know, maybe even ourselves.
Those characters -- so human, so fallible -- always jump off the page for me and for my students. How can one be human and not cry at the end of act 2 in Death of a Salesman? With Biff shouting, "I'm a dime a dozen, Pop, and so are you," and Willy clinging to his conviction that Biff "is going to be magnificent," we are privy to a scene so powerful and moving as to take our breath away. We've witnessed similar scenes in movies and television shows; we may even have witnessed them in our own kitchens. If Tolstoy is right, all families are dysfunctional in their own ways. Yet Miller's scenes involving Willy and his sons seem oh-so-familiar. One year one of my students, a young man born in Poland, told me in an awestruck voice that Miller was telling the story of his relationship with his father. I'm sure that every teacher of American literature has heard such comments.
When my students and I have studied Salesman, we have discussed not just the play's presentation of the business world, not just its exploration of the blurred line between illusion and reality, not just its claim to be a contemporary tragedy despite violating some of Aristotle's rules, but also what it says about parent-child relationships. Our discussions involve not only the question "What expectations do your parents have of you?" but also the question "What expectations do you have of your parents?" Miller's drama becomes the students' own as they recognize the truths he presents. In his works, Miller illuminates all that we are and celebrates all that we can be. His genius as a dramatist lies in creating characters who embody our worst and best selves.
Capturing the Heart of the Human Existence
I asked colleagues at Clayton High School in St. Louis to reflect on Miller's significance, and I offer here some of their thoughts:
"To me, the most cogent lesson that Arthur Miller's work imparts is that there is such a force as truth, and it is of the utmost importance in our human experience. Whether our path means choosing to die for truth, as it does for the reluctant martyr, John Proctor, or choosing to deny truth, as it does for the quixotic Willy Loman, truth is real, and it will not be denied, though to many it is a bastard child." -- Jill Burleson
"Death of a Salesman reaches the apex of dramatic possibility: a compelling, multilayered story, none of whose central characters can be absolved from culpability in the final tragedy, and a utilization of light, darkness, space, and time on stage that is unsurpassed." -- John Ryan
"Salesman is one of those plays that you really don't get on a visceral level until you reach that milestone in life when you realize your father is just flesh and bone, fallible and flawed." -- Kelley Ryan
"The unique feature of Death of a Salesman that makes it the best U.S. play that I have ever studied, bar none, is that I have identified with ALL the major characters in the story. After 30-plus years of teaching, I can remember often thinking that Willy and Linda had so many attributes of my parents; now, about to retire, I think to myself how like Willy we all are sometimes." -- Nick Otten
"The only work that can still move me to tears, literally, after all these years of teaching it is Death of a Salesman. Yet when I start thinking that one must be middle-aged to really get Willy, a 17-year-old boy or girl will exclaim in class, 'This is my family!' In this one play Arthur Miller has captured the pain, the longing, the love and blindness that lie at the heart of our human existence." -- Dan Piquet, from St. Louis's Mary Institute-Country Day School
So, to quote another famous playwright, "Good night, sweet prince."
Kathleen Puhr has taught English at Clayton High School in St. Louis, Missouri, for the past 22 years. She has taught AP English since 1993 and has served as a Reader, Table Leader, and Question Leader for the AP English Language Exam. For the past two years she has been a member of the AP English Development Committee. An AP workshop presenter for the Midwest Office of the College Board, she also served on the Midwest Regional Council of the College Board from 2001 to 2004. She has published articles in English Journal, North Dakota Quarterly, Modern Fiction Studies, and Twentieth-Century Literature.
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