The Character of Linda Loman in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman

The Character of Linda Loman in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman

Linda is the heart of the Loman family in Arthur Miller's play, Death of a Salesman. She is wise, warm, and sympathetic. She knows her husband's faults and her son's characters. For all her frank appraisals, she loves them. She is contrasted with the promiscuous sex symbolized by the Woman and the prostitutes. They operate in the world outside as part of the impersonal forces that corrupt. Happy equates his promiscuity with women to taking manufacturer's bribes, and Willy's Boston woman can "put him right through to the buyers." Linda Loman holds the family together - she keeps the accounts, encourages her husband, tries to protect him from heartbreak. She becomes the personification of Family, that social unity in which the individual has real identity.

The concepts of Father and Mother and so on were received by us unawares before the time we were conscious of...

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...good home manager, she understands and encourages her husband, she keeps her house neat and is a good mother. Linda stays in her place, never questioning out loud her husband's objectives and doing her part to help him achieve them.

Works Cited

Miller, Arthur. "The Family in Modern Drama" The Theater Essays of Arthur Miller, Da Capo, 1996.

Miller, Arthur. Death of a Salesman: Text and Criticism. Ed. Gerald Weales. Viking Critical Library. New York: Penguin, 1996.