1 Introduction to the Play and Theories

Death of a Salesman is written by Arthur Miller (1915-2005) and performed in 1948. In 1949, the play won the Pulitzer Prize. It is a two-acts tragedy set in 1940s New York. The plot unveils alongside the protagonist Willy Loman’s a series of flashbacks mingling with realities. Willy Loman is 63 years old, a salesman on the road. He has two sons. The elder Happy takes a fancy to women. The younger one Biff is unsettled after 10 years of struggle across 7 states. His wife Linda stays at home. He also has a brother called Biff who made a fortune in a forest. Willy always envied him. Charley is their neighbor, a striking contrast to Willy. Charley is rich, and his son is academically successful. Howard is his boss, an exploiter. One day, he came home after a business trip, felt angry about his younger son Biff. Seeing his soliloquies and daydreams, the sons worried about his mental condition. Linda revealed that Willy might want to kill himself by gas, which propelled Biff to visit Oliver to borrow money as fund of “The Loman Brothers” business. The sons booked a table for Willy to celebrate. Unfortunately, Biff failed to borrow money and he stole a fountain pen of Oliver. At the restaurant, Biff wanted to tell the truth while Willy slipped into a flashback, in which Biff caught him cheating with “the woman”. Biff and Happy left the restaurant. Willy bought some seeds on his way home. He always wanted do plantings in the backyard. Back home, they had an unpleasant conversation. The rest went to bed while Willy committed suicide and disguised it as a car accident in order to gain insurance. Since its debut, the play has received heated discussions on its theme of American dream and tragedy. Some critics doubt it as a tragedy due to its mundane protagonist. Milly (1949) justified its tragedy nature in his essay “Tragedy and Common Man”. He stated that common man can be tragic hero in that he evaluates himself justly and he exposed a wrong in his environment. Robert Martin (1996) supported Miller’s view by arguing that Willy acted freely and courageously and he secured his personal dignity.

Structuralism has made great achievements in the field of linguistics, anthropology and literary criticism. Anthropologist Lévi-Strauss once disrupted narrative orders of myth stories and rearranged them by similar elements to find out a constant relation undergirding the stories. His method inspired literary structuralists. Structuralism as a method of literary criticism is one that attempts to see literature synchronously in order to isolate its structures which exist “below the surface” as well as to define the relations and rules of transformation that hold among these structures. (Smithson, 1975, p. 151). Narrative theories called the structure formed by synchronic elements deep structure and structure formed by diachronic elements surface structure. In a broad sense, deep structure of a narrative is formed by narrative discourse and cultural background, informing deeper social meaning (Tong, 1992). For example, Tong disrupted narrative orders of The Tale of Liu Yi and rearranged the stories into four sections which fall into two parts, respectively state and action. Certain actions lead to certain state of characters. Thus, the deep structure informs the meaning of pursuing happiness by fighting against conventions.

Freud believed that psychic reality and material reality have different sources of stimulation. According to Freud (1917, p. 3425), “unconscious fantasies “possess psychical as contrasted with material reality.” On that base, Arlow (1969, p. 48) developed reality testing: “There are two centers of perceptual input, introspection and exterospection, supplying data from the inner eye and data from the outer eye. It is the function of a third agency of the ego, however, to integrate, correlate, judge, and discard the competing data of perceptual experience. All of these factors influence the final judgment as to what is real and what is unreal.” If something which is present in the ego as an image can be rediscovered in perception (reality), then it is tested real. Blum, Virginia, and Anna Secor took a broader view of psychic space. It was usually believed that unconscious fantasy stemming from primal scene is the component of psychic reality. But they (2002, p. 9) claimed that unconscious fantasy creates such a “room” (psychic space) in the form of the scene. They (p. 6) argued that “events separated in space and time can psychically be understood as ‘the same’ if certain relations are perceived to be replicated.”, and that unconscious fantasy is such a topological structure to precipitate same events. “Unconscious fantasy encounters the material world in the form of psychic space” which “is the convergence of the material world with psychic reality.” They also argued that unconscious fantasy and psychic space are mutual constitutive element of each other. As a result, our psychic space and unconscious fantasy are constantly in a dynamic relationship. Different from Freud, they rather defined unconscious fantasy’s role to be creating psychic space intermingling psychic and material realities.

According to the theories abovementioned, this paper argues that the deep structure of the play reveals the incompatibility of capitalist society. And the element forming the deep structure are the struggles between Willy’s psychic reality and material reality in his psychic space. In the play, Willy’s built psychic spaces around three persons. Biff was the first form taken by his psychic space where Willy struggled between “Biff” and “Loman”, displaying his struggle between plain and happy family life and money-worshiping family life. Willy’s second psychic space built around Ben where he struggled between city and forest, showing the aspect of his psychic reality of living in the forest. The third psychic space took the form of the woman where he struggled between the woman and Linda, demonstrating his psychic reality of relaxing intimate relationship. In the process of his struggles, his psychic space and unconscious fantasy underwent a dynamic development. As his unconscious fantasy incessantly provided psychic space to engage his psychic and material realities, his psychic reality experienced deterioration. The process in turn corroded his unconscious fantasy and led to his final death.

2 Struggles In Willy’S Psychic Spaces

2.1 The Struggle in the Psychic Space of Young Biff

Biff was Willy’s younger son. Willy always hoped him to be someone, to be a “Loman”. But at high school, he flunked math and didn’t graduate. Later he left home and travelled 7 states without a settled job. Willy’s psychic reality identified Biff as a boy with muscle instead of a boy with economic mind. In Willy’s psychic reality, he enjoyed a relaxing and happy family life. But material reality stressed him out.

Willy’s psychic reality appeared in his psychic space of Young Biff, showing through memories and flashbacks. According to Blum, the memory about Biff in childhood became an original scene accessed by unconscious fantasy which then played the role of topological structure to create a psychic space to precipitate “same” event. Young Biff became the form of such a psychic space, a retreat where Willy’s psychic reality was put on stage. When Willy came home stressed out, he recollected young Biff. Willy’s memory about young Biff contained his psychic reality of plain and happy family life. Berenstein defined psychic reality as “a set of experiences, emotions, and unconscious representations, personified as objects, which the ego feels to be internal and real. It is related to and different from, another reality, called external in relation to the ego, which the latter feels outside itself and inhabited by people as well as institutions, cultural norms, laws, etc.” (as cited in Fayek, 2002, p. 475). What Willy’s ego felt true is plain and happy family life with young Biff. He talked about him swinging with Biff between two elms. He relished memories about Biff. He hyperbolized how Biff simonized his old red Cheevy to the extent that the dealer refused to believe there was eighty thousand miles on it. They expressed missing to each other and shared intimacy. They planned a trip to New England.

Arlow (1969, p. 38) contended that the ego would blur the line between memory and fantasy for the purpose of defense. Taking more and more pressure from material reality, Willy’s memory about young Biff transformed into flashbacks where psychic reality and material reality engaged with each other and where material reality snatched more psychic space. In Willy’s flashback, Biff was excited about the surprise of a punching bag. There also appeared jumping rope and football. He was also proud of Biff leading a sporting team very well. As to Biff’s grades, he couldn’t care less. When Biff’s classmate Bernard invited Biff to study math, Willy even mocked him as anemic. Biff’s uneconomic mind was accentuated by the theft of a football, to which Willy not only gave silent consent but also encouraged: “Coach’ll probably congratulate you on your initiative!” (Miller, 1948, p. 19). Willy’s psychic reality in flashback expressed simple and plain family values.

However, the material or external reality was the opposite. “The external world comprises parents, friends, teachers, culture, political climate, all of which communicate their own particular subjective realities.” And there are also “some broadly and generally verifiable objective reality.” (Rollman-Branch, 1969, p. 57). In this play, Linda is a major constitutive of material reality. She represented the capitalist values. In front of her, “Willy Loman is a man who from selling things has passed to selling himself, and has become, in effect, a commodity which like other commodities will at a certain point be discarded by the laws of the economy.” (Barker, 2007, p. 40). She reduced Willy into a salesman who then reduced Biff to a loser. Arlow (1969, p. 34) analyzed “when the ego becomes aware of the threatening development of the danger situation associated with the emergence of an instinctual demand, it institutes the signal of anxiety to stimulate the function of defense.” Linda’s appearing in Willy’s flashback broke off the harmony between father and son and set Willy rather anxious. Willy became furious about Biff’s flunking math in contrast to former joking. As for Biff’s theft, he turned from encouraging to punishing. Under the pressure of Linda, he felt ashamed of his son’s unsuccess which made him lower in front of people. In Willy’s psychic space, “unconscious fantasy encounters the material world.” (Blum et al, 2022, p. 6). The material reality of capitalism represented by Linda invaded into Willy’s psychic space of relaxing relationship with Biff. He struggled between his psychic reality of Biff being a muscle boy and material reality of Biff being a businessman “Loman”. At the beginning of the play, material reality just started to prevail and Willy still had power to defend.

2.2 The Struggle in the Psychic Space of Ben

Apart from Biff’s childhood, Ben also appeared a lot in Willy’s flashbacks as another form of psychic space created by Willy’s unconscious fantasy. That every time Willy mentioned Ben, the time of his windfall was different made Ben a topological role which is “sets of properties that retain their relationships under processes of transformation.” (Blum et al, 2022, p. 2). According to Blum (p. 5), “The unconscious fantasy is triggered, in other words, by this particular location, which is precisely what enables the repetition, or put differently, the topological reiteration of the central coordinates.” In this sense, every time material reality overwhelmed Willy, Ben was summoned as a room created by unconscious fantasy for Willy to retreat into. But just like young Biff, material reality again invaded into this room and got an upper hand.

Psychic space of Biff exhibited Willy’s psychic reality of plain and happy family life and of living in a forest. Ribkoff (2007, p. 122) says that “his elder brother, Ben, becomes the measure of success and manhood for his sons to live up to because Willy is abandoned at the age of three by his father.” In Willy’s flashback, Ben taught Biff how to fight out of the jungle. His comment on Biff’s stealing of timberland was “Nervy boy. Good!” (Miller, 1948, p. 34). To fight and win was his simple working values. He “represented the fantasy of success through the ruthless Darwinian spirit.” (Bliquez, 1968, p. 2), which is Willy’s psychic reality. More importantly, Willy mentioned several times that Ben went into the forest and became rich one year later finding a diamond mine. Easy success with muscle in a Darwinist society is what Willy took as real. It was his psychic reality. Ben also offered Willy a job looking after timberland in Alaska. Willy looked forward to it. “Ben functions as a symbol of Willy's dream.” (Bettina, 1962, p. 410). Willy liked living in nature. He wanted to look up at the stars, but his house was surrounded by “towering, angular” (Miller, 1948, p. 1), apartments on all sides. He liked to plant vegetables, but fresh air was run out due to large population. And sunshine was warded off by skyscrapers. He was good at carpentry and building. “All the cement, the lumber, the reconstruction I put in this house! There ain’t a crack to be found in it any more” (Miller, 1948, p. 74). But “Willy’s hands are useless to build the home he desires.” (Barker, 2007, p. 40). For him, living in city is a torment. “They’re full of talk and time payments and courts of law.” (p. 61). He was like a square peg in a round hole with those civilized managements.

Different from object of psychic reality, “an object of a physiological nature, in essence and origin, is experienced as a demand.” (Fayek, 2002, p. 490). The demand from material reality overwhelmed Willy’s psychic reality of living in forest. In the psychic space built around Ben, Willy’s psychic reality of living in a forest deteriorated. In opposition to Ben, Charley, Howard and Linda all represented material reality. Ben praised Biff’s muscle and valor in their dabbling fight while Charley cast him a cloud by saying that his New England man bled out. Charley’s son grew up to be a successful lawyer while Biff earned 35 dollars a week, which made Willy lower in front of Charley. His boss Howard wouldn’t give him a job in New York after he toiled 34 years for his company. When Willy became old, his boss “eat the orange and throw the peel away.” (Miller, 1948, p. 58). More importantly, Linda prevented Willy from going to the forest. She dictated that Willy “got a beautiful job here” and he was happy enough “right here, right now.” (Miller, 1948, p. 61).

Willy’s psychic space appeared in the form of Ben for the purpose of defense just like young Biff. Willy was a misfit in the material reality of money worship in capitalist society. What he took true was simple work in jungle and Darwinist existential law. But a capitalist society is ruled by money only. Unfortunately, material reality prevailed in the psychic space built around Ben. And during the dynamic process of mutual formation of unconscious fantasy and psychic space, the change in psychic space in turn changed Willy’s unconscious fantasy. At first, Ben was a projection of Willy psychic reality, his ideal life, but approaching the end of the play, Willy started to produce opposite unconscious fantasy about Ben. As he vacillated between killing himself for insurance and not killing himself, Ben dithered too. Ben became just as twisted as himself. “An expansion of psychical reality in depth is also necessary to insure autonomy and freedom of choice.” (Rollman-Branch, 1969, p. 63). Linda, Howard and Charley, the most intimate persons around him, together built a water-tight material world of capitalism which occupied too much of his psychic space of forest and muscle. Willy’s mind was tied, and his autonomy and freedom were curtailed. At this time, “the individual conscience is thus pacified and willing to adopt a distorted reality as its own.” (Rollman-Branch, 1969, p. 63). He gradually let the capitalist material reality corrode himself.

2.3 The Struggle in the Psychic Space of “The Woman”

Willy had an affair with “the woman” in Boston. The woman expressed Willy’s psychic reality of the relaxing intimate relationship, which contrasts with the pressing intimate relationship with Linda, representing material world. Freud called “the primitive, self-centered world of daydreams the individual's secret rebellion against reality and against the need to renounce pleasurable instinctual gratification.” (Arlow, 1969, p. 35). Willy rebelled against material reality by escaping into the woman. In this sense, young Biff, Ben and the woman were all forms of Willy’s psychic spaces built by unconscious fantasy. But again, this psychic space was invaded and finally occupied by material reality.

As a salesman, Willy blamed his unsuccess on his unlikable personality and appearance. When he confessed to his wife that “people don’t seem to take to me”, that he “talks too much” (Miller, 1948, p. 36) and that once a salesman called him “walrus” 24 and he “cracked him right across the face.” (Miller, 1948, p. 24), the woman instead appeared in his flashback. She said: “I picked you”; “you’re so sweet”; “you’ve got such a sense of humor, and we do have such a good time together.” and “I think you’re a wonderful man.” (Miller, 1948, p. 25). Arlow (1969, p. 35) stated that “Young children regularly intermingle their perceptions of reality with wishful fantasy thinking and sometimes find it hard to distinguish in recollection between what was real and what was imagined-between what constituted fantasy and what constituted accurate memory” and when they grow older and reality takes domains, they stop intermingling. In that sense, Willy’s inability to distinguish between reality and fantasy is more like a regression into child in front of devastating reality. In his flashback, he joked and flirted with the woman. He wasn’t thinking about his selling though she was one of his buyers. He was relaxed and happy.

Linda, on the other hand, imprisoned him in capitalist material reality. Willy repeated several times that Linda has “suffered”. “Exactly what Linda has suffered is a failure, and the failure is Willy himself.” (Bliquez, 1968, p. 385). Presumably, the content of Willy’s selling was stockings according to his conversation with the woman in Boston. Therefore, Linda’s action of mending stockings constantly reminded Willy’s failure as a salesman. Besides, she contradicted almost everything Willy wanted, including Swiss cheese, working in the forest and planting. When Willy decided to spit out the ghost haunting him (“I have such thoughts, I have such strange thoughts.” (Miller, 1948, p. 6)), she refused to share his worry and arbitrarily ascribed it to working on the road. “Linda is a strong support, therefore, not for Willy but for his dream” (Bliquez, 1968, p. 385), his dream of success which is distorted by capitalism. To be around Linda is a torture while in the women, Willy could live in his psychic reality. As Otten said (2007, p.106), “the sexual encounter with the woman is not the cause of Willy’s violation of his love for Linda or his sons but the symptom of a tragic conflict which he has, nonetheless, created.”

Biff’s witnessing of Willy’s cheating introduced the material reality of Linda into Willy’s previous private psychic space of the woman. Linda as a representative of material reality, crushed Willy’s psychic reality of relaxing intimate relationship with the woman even without actually engaging with her. Centola (1993, p. 33) said that “This sudden revelation of the naked soul in all its weakness and imperfection is more than Biff can bear because he has been trained to elude reality and substitute lies for truth.” Thinking otherwise, Biff’s witness of his father’s real self kindled his emancipation from a web of lies and he wanted his father to be emancipated as well. However, it turned out to be the last straw that wrecked his psychic reality.

Young Biff, Ben and the woman were all original scenes accessed by Willy’s unconscious fantasy and later became forms of his psychic space. They served as defenses or retreats. But now material reality occupied all of those psychic spaces. As claimed by Blum (2022) that psychic space can reversely compose unconscious fantasy, Willy’s unconscious fantasy collapsed as well. Blum (2022, pp. 9-10) said that “we always inhabit psychic space, the topological structure of unconscious fantasy, but it is only at certain moments, when topological space sharply diverges from topographical space, that we become aware of the gap.” Unlike Biff who was aware of the gap and who thus could correct his psychic reality accordingly through reality test, Willy wove a tight web of psychic space as defense against the unacceptable material world. He couldn’t close the gap between the two in that he couldn’t simultaneously be himself and provide for his family. When his psychic space collapsed, what left with him was only dreadful material world. At the end of the play, Willy’s purchasing of seeds and planting were to reclaim his psychic space of simple and plain life in forest, which of course are desperate measures and destined to failure. The collapse of his psychic space consequently changed his unconscious fantasy. He let suicide creep into his mind. His unconscious fantasy became swindling insurance by suicide for Biff to start a new business. He let himself completely corroded by material reality of capitalism. The struggle between his psychic reality and material reality came to a resolution. Willy was totally exposed to the material reality of capitalism in which his only option is to change money with his death. “We confront a tragic ‘hero’ who not only lacks heroism but desires to merge with and be a part of a social landscape that cannot or will not accept him.” (Barker, 2007 p. 40).

3 Conclusions: The Incompatibility of Capitalist Society

“As a topological approach to the psyche shows us, events separated in space and time can psychically be understood as ‘the same’ if certain relations are perceived to be replicated.” (Blum et al, 2022, p. 3). Willy’s unconscious fantasy constantly drugged him into psychic spaces where his psychic reality and material reality competed. Those elements of struggles between Willy’s psychic reality and material reality supported the deep structure of the play which reveals the incompatibility of capitalist society. His struggles gradually fizzled out and ended on a total change of his unconscious fantasy into insurance fraud. He finally was confronted with the material reality of capitalism for which he died a pyrrhic victory, as Rollman-Branch (1969, p. 60) said: “The conflict between external and internal reality is the substance of all Tragedy.”.

The capitalist society under the disguise of American Dream runs around money and only money. In One-Dimensional Man (2006, p. xxvii), Marcuse proposed the concept of “one-dimension”. He argues that in a capitalist society, there is only dimension of man, that is to “conform to pre-existing structures, norms, and behavior, in contrast to multidimensional discourse, which focuses on possibilities that transcend the established state of affairs.” Any critical dimensions or “dimensions of potentialities that transcend the existing society” is repressed. Such a society necessitates people to “engage in transformative practice” to realize “dictates of external, objective norms and structures”:

One-Dimensional Man raises the specter of the closing-off, or "atrophying," of the very possibilities of radical social change and human emancipation. Marcuse depicts a situation in which there are no revolutionary classes or groups to militate for radical social change and in which individuals are integrated into the existing society, content with their lot and unable to perceive possibilities for a happier and freer life. (Marcuse, p. xxix)

Willy Loman’s psychic reality adored forest, muscle, family intimacy, plain and easy life, which was in contrast of the principle of capitalist society that worships money. As Otten (2007, p. 96) said: “It is faith in the supremacy of the material over the spiritual.” The law of American Dream is “a rhetorical superstructure of ‘success,’ self-serving and duplicitous (a constant pretext); Willy’s hamartia is a transgression against this law.” (Barker, 2007, p. 42). If Willy doesn’t worship money as others do in a capitalist society, he would have no foothold. Capitalist society won’t allow him to live in forest and provide for himself without the agent of money. It won’t satisfied by the plain and relaxing family lives unless Willy’s sons have decent jobs. It won’t allow Willy to gain relaxing intimate relationship with a woman if he is not well-off. Willy struggled between his psychic reality and the sole material reality which goes against it and finally became a one-dimensional man. People are born to be free, creative, self-determined and on those basics to have values, aesthetic traits, and aspirations which would enhance their life. But a capitalist society follows the exclusive rule of money which produces exclusive values, aesthetic trait and aspiration to make people fit in. Willy’s tragedy lies in “another dimension” of his psychic reality. “Another dimension” fated him to struggles that finally killed him. The deep structure of the play demonstrates how a human incompatible with the capitalist society ended tragically.

References

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