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A DESIRE THAT TRANSCENDS DEATH

© Emily Woodward

Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman and Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire have titles that reflect their thematic differences. "Death" denotes mortality, while "Desire" suggests resurgence and rebirth. The tension between these themes is stressed by "Streetcar's" protagonist, Blanche DuBois. "Death," she says, "the opposite is desire." Desire, then, is reserved for those who do not know death: the young, who have no concept of mortality, and those, like Blanche, who have passed beyond it. By taking a trip on a streetcar named "Desire", Blanche has crossed over to the opposite reaches of death. She has transcended her own mortality and been reborn into the afterlife. This is her condition when the play opens; what follows is her journey through judgment and the apocalypse. By contrast, Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman is still grappling with his mortality. Indeed, he does not pass on until the end of the play. Willy's death serves as the culmination of the play's look at human suffering. Afterwards, no attempt is made to look beyond the grave. Rather, the impact of Willy's death is seen only on those characters who are still alive. This limits the scope of Willy's tragedy, and of the play itself. Unlike "Streetcar", "Death" does not make the journey from this world to the next. Moreover, while the characters in "Death" appear markedly human, those in "Streetcar" seem to have crossed the limits of humanity. Indeed, they are at once bestial and cosmic in scope; instruments of power and destruction on an epic scale.

It is difficult to analyze Death of a Salesman without taking into account its historical context. This is due to the way in which the play depicts 1940s urban America. The era is represented in painstaking detail, through such symbols as Linda's homespun aprons and darned stockings, Willy's "dark gray business suit, felt hat...and...large sample cases" (Act I) Howard's "[w]ire recorder" (II) the "Hastings refrigerator" (II) and "whip[ped] cheese" (I). Indeed, the symbolism in the play is so realistic and evocative of its time that it is difficult to imagine the characters in a different setting. This is the case despite the fact that they are faced with timeless human dilemmas: fathers disappointing their sons; sons unable to recapture the glory of their youth, and wives who love their husbands too much to do what's best for them. Ironically, these ubiquitous issues seem to have outlasted the relevance of the play's characters. Too much about them is tied to the world in which they live, from Linda's pre-feminist submissiveness to Willy's obsession with succeeding in business - an obsession which only those who suffered through the

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