Peddler and Pioneer in Death of a Salesman

PEDDLER AND PIONEER IN DEATH OF A SALESMAN ALTHOUGH MUCH HAS BEEN WRITTEN ABOUT Death of a Salesmanl the use to which Arthur Miller has put the American frontier tradition-especially the motifs of peddler and pioneer-has not been sufficiently discussed. First of all, Willy Loman thinks of himself as, in his own right, a pioneer: WILLY. When I went north the first time, the Wagner Company didn't know where New England was.1 This characterization of Willy as pioneer is not sarcastic or ironic. It is consistent with the small scale of Willy's life that his frontier is not, say, the Northwest Territory but-quite literally, in the salesman's jargon-the New England Territory. However, such a frontier is not enough for Willy. He must try to create a literal one: WILLY. It's Brooklyn, I know, but we hunt too. BEN. Really, now. WILLY. Oh sure, there's snakes and rabbits and-that's why I moved out here. Why, Biff can fell anyone of these trees in no timeI (Act I, p. 158) . But why should it be necessary for Willy Loman, an easterner. in the nineteen-forties, to create a frontier in the backyards of Brooklyn? Why should he feel the need to be a pioneer? If the answer were only that Willy is an American and that the frontier is a significant force in the American consciousness, then the play would not be nearly so effective and Willy would not be nearly so moving. True, Willy Loman is a contemporary Everyman-or, at least, Everyamerican-but he must also be, at the same time, a particular human being, if Death of a Salesman is to be anything more than a dissection of a national disease. No, Willy Loman must need a frontier for particular, as well as universal, reasons. The father-son relationship is one of the major motifs in Death of a Salesman. In addition to the most important relationship between Willy and his sons, there is neighbor Charley and his son Bernard, and Willy's dead boss Wagner and his son ,Howard. But it is too frequently forgotten that Willy, too, has a father. And 1 Arthur Miller'S Collected Plays (New York, 1957), p. 11I1I. Subsequent page references are to this edition. 406 MODERN DRAMA February it is his father, the exemplar of the Yankee peddler, who helps to; explain, in large part, Willy's need for a frontier and to suggest some of the reasons for Willy's failure: BEN. Father was a very great and wild-hearted man. We would start in Boston, and he'd toss the whole family into the wagon,. and then he'd drive the team right across the country; through Ohio, and Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, and all the Western states. And we'd stop in the towns and sell the flutes that he'd made on the way. Great inventor, Father. With one gadget he made more in a week than a man like you could make in a lifetime. (Act I, p. 157) And it is certainly true that some of this SpIrIt survives in Willy. He, too, wanders a territory peddling wares. But they are not his. own wares made with his own hands. Nor can he choose his own territory; Willy has started and ended in Boston. The fault is not Willy's; given the tradition in which he was raised, Willy Loman is simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. A man can no> longer· wander the country selling what he makes with his own hands. If a man is to be peddler, he cannot, as his father was, be pioneer as well. Willy can boast of his heritage and his pioneer traditionWILLY . My father lived many years in Alaska. He was an adventurous man. We've got quite a little streak of self-reliance in our family. (Act II, p. 180) -but the self-reliance of the Yankee peddler is useless to the modern peddler. Willy's world places value on getting along with others, not on getting along on one's own. One source of Willy's failure is his inability to apply...