Death Of A Salesman Analysis

The Woman’s Role in Death of Salesman

The critic Rhoda Koenig criticizes Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, complaining that in this play he depicts all women as being either “wicked sluts” or “a combination of good waitresses and slipper bearing retrievers”, Linda being a “dumb and useful doormat” (Koenig 10). While this critique may seem rash and writers such as Christopher Bigsby and Terry Otten view it as severely “wide of the mark” (Bigsby xix), Koenig does bring up an interesting point on Miller’s categorization of women. In Death of a Salesman, Miller mocks the man driven “American Dream” by categorizing female characters into two stereotypical social roles, namely domestic housewife and extramarital companion, to show the underlying yet influential position of women in a society that is believed to run on “masculine mythos” (Stanton 190). He further makes his point by creating a plot where the housewife Linda instigates the main tragedy through her interactions with Willy.

In Death of a Salesman, Miller does not fully characterize the majority of his female characters, but he does so enough to create two categories into which all but one of the female characters neatly fall. Miller categorizes “The Woman”, Letta, and Forsythe as the stereotypical promiscuous women whose only purpose is derived from men’s desire, and he categorizes Linda as the loyal subservient housewife who does anything to keep her mentally fading husband from feeling “blue” or “unwanted” (Miller 39). Various feminist critics argue Miller is exposing his sexist views in the play when he categorizes the women into these demeaning groupings. They say Miller portrays these characters like they are “objects of exchange”(Austin 49) and reduces these “t...

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...g her composure. Miller injects abundant irony into his play by having the subservient housewife try to preserve the fragile emotions of the “provider”, telling her two sons to be more sensitive towards their father’s feelings and mental state. This certainly brings into question who the real “man of the house is” in this society.

Miller groups these subtly influential women into these stereotypical categories to show the folly in the American Dream ideology. Miller furthers his point by introducing the character Jenny, an employed woman and therefore a minority in her male-dominated world. When Miller makes Willy, a suicidal man without an actual paying job that borrows money to pay the bills, condescendingly ask Jenny, “How’re ya? Workin’? Or still honest?” (Miller 69) when she is employed and working, he is ridiculing the ideology and reinforcing his criticism.