Saint-Mamas, Strudel, and the Single Man in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman

Although Death of a Salesman has been called "the most devastating portrait of punctured middle-class dreams in our national literature" (Siegel A31), the play has always had its detractors. In 1970, the critic Tom Driver complained that its "thematic content is confused" (312) because the playwright vacillates between blaming Willy for his demise and suggesting that he is victimized by larger forces. In a devastatingly critical recent article, Bert Cardullo maintains that Death of a Salesman fails as serious political critique in part because the idealized male figures in Willy's life strike extremely false notes. Cardullo also claims that the play is implausibly decontextualized, as it fails to mention either World War II or the Depression, which would have been more or less concurrent with its present and past action. It is the argument of this article, by contrast, that the play takes as its context a tapestry of ideals about American manhood that developed over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and seeped into Willy's self-perception as uncritically absorbed articles of faith, only to be passed along to his pliable sons. Because Willy has digested but not scrutinized them, these ideals are crude and simplistic-not because Miller's thinking is muddled but because Willy's is-and they prevent him from achieving fulfillment while stunting his sons' psychological growth. Willy's pantheon of male heroes includes his father, who embodies self-made manhood; his brother Ben, the virile protocapitalist who conquers jungles; and Dave Singleman, who transplants these qualities into the corporate world. These figures do indeed strike false notes, because they have been passed through the filter of Willy's wishful and also self-loathing imagination. What they have in common is wanderlust, perfect self-reliance, and the freedom to thrive in an all-male universe. Indeed, every fantasy of fulfillment that Willy has in the play is exclusively male. When he considers following Ben into the jungle, he exclaims, "Me and my boys in those grand outdoors!" (Miller 85). His wife goes unmentioned. As it happens, Linda Loman does her best to cater to Willy's fantasies while reorienting them toward the domestic sphere-by, for instance, excluding herself from a celebratory dinner as she knows Willy will be happiest if the occasion includes just his sons. Yet despite an affection for Linda that appears profound, Willy cannot fulfill his culturally constructed understanding of masculine success without becoming, like his male heroes, an essentially if not literally single man. It is for this reason that the Loman men collapse women into two categories: they are either "strudel"-sexual objects to be consumed-or saintly mothers who provide males with a "foundation and support" while never being viewed as sustaining companions (Miller 18). Both the strudel and the saint-mama exist to prop up the male ideal, which, if fully achieved, permits the male to discard them. Yet the exalted ideal of single manliness is always out of reach for Willy. Ironically, it may be that Biff achieves it when he ostensibly rejects Willy's dream and heads off to the West, to reclaim a life that he describes as "beautiful" (Miller 22) but that appears to feature only himself, alone in those "grand outdoors."In his important history of American masculinity, E. Anthony Rotundo argues that the meaning of manhood in American culture underwent a series of transformations as the nation took shape. What Rotundo describes as "communal manhood"-an ideal fostered in colonial America that yoked the male's place as head of the household to his place in the larger social system and saw both as divinely sanctioned-metamorphosed in the nineteenth century into a conception of "self-made manhood" that developed in response to the spreading of a market economy and the growth of the American middle class. In this context, a man's sense of identity emerged "from his own achievements" (Rotundo 3) and not from some set of cosmic absolutes. …