In both of these works: The Lesson by Tony Cade Bambara and Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller the main character is living a life insulated from reality. In the case of Willy Loman, the world has simply left him behind, and he lives with illusions of past glory as a top salesman. In The Lesson, Sylvia is one of a group of poor black children in 1930s Harlem, who go on an outing to Schwartz’s toy store in Manhattan with a local spinster retired teacher. This world and the one they live in are a universe apart and the children had not been out of their own neighborhood before and did not know of the huge differences and inequalities. While the main theme of Death of a Salesman is the inhumanity of progress, and the main theme in The Lesson is the inequality of American culture, the minor theme of living separated from other reality runs through both works, especially the reality of the American Dream, which is an illusion for the characters in both works.
Willy Loman is a salesman who was of the old school where relationships were what mattered. Willy lives in his own fantasy world where tomorrow he will make that one big sale and his boss will learn to value him. He believes that his son, Biff, still has a chance to be a success. He keeps sending him to new interviews to get him a job. His second son, Happy, is a shoe salesman, which Willy considers as a failure. Near the beginning of the play, Willie loses his job, because he just cannot learn new ways. He owes only one payment on the house for which he has paid for thirty years. He could have borrowed the money, but his pride would not let him. He commits suicide so that his whole life will pay off. His widow, Linda, is devastated because all she really ever wanted was Willy. The theme of being separated from reality runs through the entire play as an undercurrent and the reason why Willy failed so miserably in everything, even in death. He never let go of his dreams for his eldest son, even when they were passed any hope of attainment. He also never stopped believing he would prove that his way of selling was the right way and he would make a huge sale to make his boss see this.
Willy believed in the American Dream, the classic happy and successful family and he believes that being likable and creating relationships are the way to get this (Peck). He dreamed his son Biff could be a football star. He actually thinks that he will become successful himself as a salesman. However, these have no more chance of coming true than do the seeds that Willy plants in his back yard have any chance of growing without any sun, which cannot reach the yard, because the tall buildings around it block the sun.
At the beginning of the play, we hear Willy talking to himself, and act one ends on that note. Will talks to illusions, his absent son Biff and his brother Ben, who went to Alaska and got rich in Africa. In the second act, Willy “remembers” the past and his family as perfect and happy, and he wonders where he went wrong that this happiness and promise remains unfulfilled. He simply cannot understand that being handsome and well-liked is not enough for success. In Act Two the boys invite Willy to dinner, but they abandon him after an argument while he babbles in his delusional memory in the bathroom. Throughout the play, he slips into fantasy more and more often. When the boys finally shake him out of it, Willy takes the car out for the last time. The funeral had only the family and two friends in attendance. Linda wonders where all of Willy’s friends are before she finally ends the play by telling Willy that she made the last payment on the house and there will be nobody home. This is Willy’s final failure. In his suicide, he has deprived his wife of the only thing she ever wanted.
In The Lesson, Miss Moore, a retired teacher who has returned to Harlem to live, takes a group of children to an upscale downtown toy store. These children have never been out of Harlem before and have never ridden in a taxi. Sylvia is given five dollars to pay the taxi fare and a tip, and she is told that she may keep what is left. When they arrive at Schwartz’s Toy Store they see wonderful toys that cost more than any of their family’s annual income.
Sylvia still has four dollars, so she is planning how to keep it. She refuses to let Miss Moor know that she has learned anything, but her friend Sugar betrays her and voices anger that Miss Moore was trying to get them to feel and express at the inequality of life. None of these children actually knew there were people who would, or could, pay more than a thousand dollars for a toy sailboat. Their reality is totally separated from places like Schwartz’s. They would likely not have believed her if Miss Moore had told them about this. But seeing it makes it real. It’s just not their reality and they really do not understand why.
The other reality that separates the children and the Schwartz’s is the idea that they can do anything to change a reality they do not like. At first, the reader might assume that Sylvia has learned the lesson Miss Moore intended. However, this may not be the lesson Sylvia learned at all. All through the story, she calls Miss Moore a stupid bitch and other synonyms. If we understand, as Graves suggested(Graves 214-217), that the narrator is an adult recounting a childhood memory then we have to question this. Why would she still be calling Miss Moore such names if she actually learned the intended lesson, which was to change society by collective action? What we know from the story is that Sylvia understood the intended lesson. We also know she considered the teacher stupid, so we might extend this to the lesson.
If these ghetto children can change reality through collective action then would Sylvia still be so bitter? Perhaps the lesson Sylvia learned was not the one Miss Moore sought to teach. To try to find the answer we have to look at other clues. The first would be the story itself. Why did Slyvia tell this story? Why did she tell it now? What are the possible consequences of the Lesson? Broadly they number five:
- Sylvia learned what Miss Moore wanted and became a political activist, successfully changing her world, Harlem and its kind, for the better.
- Sylvia learned what Miss Moore wanted and became a political activist, failing at changing her world.
- Sylvia learned nothing at all and wishes she did.
- Sylvia learned a different lesson, and it has changed her life.
- Sugar learned the lesson and Sylvia didn’t. Sugar became a political activist and was changed by it, but left Sylvia behind.
I discount number one because she is still unhappy and number three because she would not have told the story were this the case. Number two is improbable since she would likely tell us more in this case. That leaves four and five, which are [possibly two parts of the same answer. So, I looked back at the text to see what I could find and also at Bambara’s biography seeking any evidence there.
Goodwin gives us a clue when he suggests that we know that Sylvia learned the true lesson because we hear her internal thoughts at the end: “ain’t nobody gonna beat me at nuthin (Bambara 96)”. He reasons that the lesson is about life since she is in a footrace and not running. However, there is another possibility. The lesson might be referring to herself and how she sees things. Goodwin writes:
““anomie,” a sociological term generally credited to Emile Durkheim 129 (Crutchfield and Bates 164). The Encyclopedia of Sociology explains anomie: “[W]hen there existed within a society a disjuncture between the legitimate goals that members of a society were aspiring to and the legitimate means of achieving these goals, then that society was in a state of anomie” (Crutchfield and Bates 165).”
It seems that she has learned that she doesn’t have to play fair. Early in the story she and Sugar discuss things like whether or not they can steal. Then Sylvia keeps the money meant for a tip to the taxi driver. Finally, in the end, Sugar wants to race to Hascombs. Sylvia starts in that direction, causing Sugar to run on ahead, while Sylvia takes her time since she never actually said she was going there. “I’m going to the West End and then over to the Drive to think this day through.” (Bambara 96) Has she learned that winning this war will require more than commitment and more than the standard issue of ammunition? Has she learned that maybe sometimes the end does justify the means?
The final attempt to decode this line was to look up Tony Cade Bambara’s biography. This story was her early work, and she simply published it to get it out of her way. “Bambara told Claudia Tate in an interview published in Black Women Writers at Work that when her agent suggested she assemble some old stories for a book, she thought, ‘Aha, I’ll get the old kid stuff out and see if I can’t clear some space to get into something else.’” We can see that this was early and probably not as mature as her later work. Perhaps she was not yet committed to black and feminist activism. This last line may be an indication that the seeds were there. What it does connect to is Sugar’s earlier statement about equal access to the American Dream. She said it was not fair.
Works Cited
Bambara, Toni Cade. “The Lesson.” Gorilla, My Love. New York: Random, 1972.
Graves, Roy Neil. “Bambara’s ‘the Lesson’.” Explicator 66.4 (2008): 214-7. Print.
Peck, David. “Death of a Salesman.” Cyclopedia of Literary Places (2003) Print.