Linda Loman: “Attention must be paid”

It might surprise some readers to find this bit of dialogue spoken by the central character, Amelia Earhart, in Arthur Miller’s 1940s radio play Toward a Farther Star: “Isn’t it time to unlock the kitchen and let women out into fresh air? . . . Women must have the right to lead the way once in a while, to search for new things instead of sitting home waiting for men to do the work of the world” (qtd. in Bigsby Arthur Miller: A Critical Study 43–44). For many feminist and other gender- based critics, Miller is guilty of creating sexist texts, which demean or reduce female characters. Although many of Miller’s dramas have been attacked on such grounds, sometimes intensely, as when some accused him of unfairly portraying Marilyn Monroe as Maggie in After the Fall, Death of a Salesman is probably the most discussed of his plays in relation to female characters. As Happy tells Biff, “There’s not a good woman in a thousand” (103). Other than Charley’s briefly seen secretary Jenny and Linda Loman, the women are described as sexual objects: Miss Francis, the “buyer” in Willy’s Boston hotel room, referred to as “The Woman”; Miss Forsythe, whom Happy assures Biff is “on call,” referred to as “Girl”; and her friend “Letta,” also obviously “on call” (102). If Miss Francis is a buyer, Miss Forsythe and Letta are sellers in this masculine world of capital and exchange. Matthew Roudané aptly summarizes much feminist criticism, noting that it argues that “the play stages a grammar of space that marginalizes Linda Loman and, by extension all women, who seem Othered, banished to the periphery of a paternal world” (“Celebrating Salesman” 24). Of course, Miller is under no obligation to make these women three- dimensional characters, given their limited roles. Given her impor- tance, Linda, however, is another matter. Although he claimed to regard Linda as “a very admirable character,” the playwright was sensitive to the criticism directed toward her. He excused her as “a woman of that particular era,” and added, “I think there’s currently a certain amount of standardized thinking in relation to the character. People would like 12 Terry Otten to think that a woman could simply engineer the whole situation, but she can’t. And neither could a man” (“Responses to an Audience” 821). Miller’s defense hardly answers the charges leveled by much of the criticism, however, and Linda remains a controversial figure for many. Even separate from the issue of whether or not Miller exposes his own sexism in projecting her character, Linda has been described as a flawed, even sinister, character in her own right. Guerin Bliquez, for example, calls her “the source of the cash-payment fixation,” whose acquiescence “in all Willy’s weaknesses” makes her a “failure as a wife and mother,” and then adds that she emasculates Willy in the presence of Ben and makes him victim to her “ambition as well as his own” (384, 386). For Brian Parker, she represents a “moral sloppiness” pro- jected onto Happy “one degree farther. . . . Hap is his mother’s son” because she proposes no higher ideal than Willy’s own spurious dream (54). Karl Harshbarger judges her even more harshly, claiming that she coerces Willy “to react to her as a small boy . . . by not allowing him to communicate his deeper needs to her,” by siding with Biff against him, and by blaming him “for his own feelings.” He concludes, “She offers him his reward, love and support, only when he becomes dependent on her” (14). For Charlotte F. Otten, Linda is a “mousy twentieth-century Brooklyn housewife,” who, like Jocasta in Oedipus Rex, prevents her husband “from asking the fateful question, ‘Who am I?’ ” (87). For most critics, however, the fault lies at Miller’s feet, not just with Linda Loman. Linda “is the embodiment of society’s perception of women” and Miller’s own conception, according to Linda Ben-Zvi (224), a view shared by Gayle Austin, who sees Miller as reducing all the women in his play, including Linda, to “objects to be exchanged” and denying them “as active subjects” (61, 63). Still other critics group Linda with other female characters in other works and arrive at similar conclusions. Rhoda Koenig complains that Miller makes all women either the “wicked slut” or “a combination of good waitress and slipper- bearing retriever,” Linda being an especially “dumb and useful door- mat” (10). And Kay Stanton asserts that the playwright conflates his female characters “in the idea of Woman: all share . . . in their know- ing”; and possessing “the potential to reveal masculine inadequacy,” they “must be opposed by man” (82). These and other feminist read- ings, including those offered by Carol Billman, Charlotte Canning, Beverly Hume, Carla McDonough, and Nada Zeineddine (see “Works Cited”), offer a provocative range of insights, a few of which present