Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman and Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie were created with an interval of 9 years. Besides this, these two plays have much in common in terms of their subject and composition. That is why it is interesting to compare the details of the two stories, and the peculiarities of both dramas’ actions.
Both plays touch on the issues of losing sense of reality and living in the bondage of wrong dreams and illusions. Although it is often said, that one has the right to be what he wants, tough reality forces an individual to adapt his dreams and goals to the general flow of life. If he fails to do it, the life “rubs him off”.
The action of both plays is focused on the destinies of such “dreamers” and their families. Protagonist of the Miller’s play, 63-year old Willy Loman lives inside his memories and dreams about his son’s future. His life is devoted to eternal financial struggles, where he shows his incapacity all the time. Willy was terminated after thirty-four years of working, which confirms that during all his life, he did not manage to achieve anything and to build a stable future for himself and his family. He meets his old years in misery and despair, struggling for survival.
Amanda from The Glass Menagerie seems to be a pragmatist, a self-confident and reliable mother. In some incredible way, she combines these features with complete helplessness, having lost her touch with reality. She is eager to find a suitor for her daughter and puts strong efforts to do this.
Willy’s incapacity affected the destiny of his children, who initially showed big potential, but in effect did not achieve much in their lives. As well, Amanda’s son tried to escape from his boring reality, spending free time watching movies. Her daughter Laura was also influenced by Amanda’s unusual personality, having become a shy, weak-willed dreamer. Her glass unicorn is a symbol of their helplessness and fragility.
Another issue that makes the two plays similar is the protagonists’ diligent and eager attempts to survive and help their children. From the outside, they both seem entrepreneurial and smart. Amanda makes her best to settle her daughter’s personal life; Willy also works hard to deal with his problems. However, the attempts of both characters seem miserable, as they imply only chaotic useless actions with no result.
What makes two protagonists different is their attitude to their failures. Amanda stays confident in her rightfulness and looks to the future; Willy plunges into his memories and tries to analyze what we did wrong:
No wonder Willy shouts out his name. He is listening for an echo. No wonder he researches desperately back through his life for evidence of the moment he took a wrong path… (Miller VII).
The characters’ attitude to time has been embodied in the composition of both dramas’ actions.
Time is performed in two plays in somewhat different ways. The play of Williams is “a memory play”, where the present and the past are separated. The whole story is devoted to the young years of the narrator, Tom.
We can also see some information about the family’s life before the moment of the story; however, it is shown mainly through the characters’ dialogues. The past is performed in the play as a shadow, a kind of background that makes the audience better understand the characters.
In Death of a Salesman, the past has filled the whole space of Willy’s thoughts and his real life. This includes the stages of Willy’s memories, and his dialogues with his invisible interlocutors.
This has defined the difference between organizing space in two performances. In Miller’s drama, space is used to “delimit” the past and the present:
Whenever the action is in the present the actors observe the imaginary wall-lines, entering the house only through its door at the left. But in the scenes of the past these boundaries are broken and characters enter or leave a room by stepping ‘through’ a wall onto the forestage (Styan 118).
The action in Death of a Salesman is a flow of the protagonist’s consciousness: the audience watches his story not from the outside, but as with his own eyes. This makes the storytelling persuasive and clear.
Miller’s playsets a task for the director and designer to make the space of the stage flexible and easy, fulfilling a role of conductor of Willy’s thoughts. Not accidentally, Miller remarked that while writing the play, he imagined the stage as an absolutely empty space (Murphy 10).
Despite the story told on the stage is limited by 24 hours, Miller’s play implies transformations that are difficult to fulfill: first, the action is not limited to Willy’s house, it takes place in the graveyard, hotel room, business office; at the same time, several stages show Willy’s house many years ago. Some performances of the play were organized as follows: Willy’s house occupied the whole background, and other scenes were placed at the forestage (Murphy 17).
In Williams’s play, the space of narration is limited with the characters’ flat. At least two of three classic unities of drama, unity of space and unity of action, are followed in the play. In The Glass Menagerie, the space is organized more traditionally. In some performances, the walls may disappear when it is necessary to show the action in the neighboring room or outside the flat.
Amanda’s dialogues are full of self-confidence. She manages to put all the responsibility for their miseries onto others’ shoulders:
That’s right, now that you’ve had us make such fools of ourselves. The effort, the preparations, all the expense…Go to the movies, go! Don’t think about us, a mother deserted, an unmarried sister who’s crippled and has no job! Don’t let anything interfere with your selfish pleasure… (Williams 95).
Willy’s dialogues with his family members show him to the audience as an aggressive man. He often shouts at Linda, especially in the presence of their sons. However, before calling Willy a cruel person, it is necessary to understand his initial motives. He has spent all his life trying to make the destiny of his family better. Seeing no result of his effort, Willy becomes annoyed and desperate, shouting at his closest people. As a result, it seems that his wrongdoings outweigh the good things he has done for his family. Nevertheless, his aggression differs from Amanda’s self-confident exclamations: he shouts helplessly, understanding personal misery. The tone of Willy’s dialogues to his family changes according to his mood, as he is “a bleeding mass of contradictions” (Miller XVI).
However, Amanda’s and Willy’s dialogues have much in common: both characters are full of eagerness to help their children and to be good parents in their eyes:
My devotion has made me a witch and so I make myself hateful to my children! (Williams 30).
Williams shows the peculiarity of the relations between a mother and a son through the contrast in their phrasing: the mother’s speech is emotional and full of exclamations, while Tom’s answers are short and dry.
Not accidentally, in the preface, Amanda is described as a woman who has “endurance and a kind of heroism” (Williams XVIII). No doubt, both characters deserve this title of heroes owing to their efforts and devotion.
Bibliography
Miller, Arthur, and Christopher Bigsby. Death of a salesman: Certain Private Conversations in Two Acts and a Requiem. New York, NY: Penguin, 1998. Print.
Murphy, Brenda. Death of a Salesman. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Print.
Styan, J.L. Modern Drama in Theory and Practice: Expressionism and Epic Theatre. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Print.
Williams, Tennessee. The Glass Menagerie. New York: New Directions, 1999. Print.