Intro
Ecocriticism jumps at any text flashing a bit of green, be it a novel, a poem, or a stage drama. And Arthur Miller flashes us some very well-placed bits of nature in Death of a Salesman. So our favorite nature-minded thinkers have a lot to dig into in this text.
The play itself follows the story of Willy Loman, an older man who's losing his job as a salesman, and that whole process kind of makes him lose his mind. All he can think about is helping his son Biff become successful and well-liked.
Biff was a high school quarterback, after all. Everyone who's anyone knows that when you're a teenage football star, the American dream is just one short pass-play away. Right? Right…? Sigh. How wrong-headed we can be.
But what's ecological about the very human disappointments of Willy Loman, a guy who just wants to be liked by his peers and his family and, for once, be recognized for his efforts? His madness, that's what. As Willy loses his marbles toward the end of the play, he becomes obsessed with planting a garden.
He gets super, super interested in how the city has overtaken green spaces. Some part of his mushy brain understands that it's the pressures of modern life that are making him nutso. It's his lack of real and metaphorical roots that're getting him down. Hm.
Willy sounds exactly like the kind of guy that cantankerous nature-writer Ed Abbey described in Desert Solitaire …
Quote
"A man can't go out the way he came in, Ben, a man has got to add up to something."
"Nothing's planted. I don't have a thing in the ground."
Analysis
Ed Abbey could be talking directly to Willy when he moans:
My God! I am thinking, what incredible s*** we put up with most of our lives – the domestic routine (same old wife every night), the stupid and useless degrading jobs, the insufferable arrogance of elected officials, the crafty cheating and the slimy advertising of the business men, the tedious wars in which we kill our buddies instead of our real enemies back in the capital, the foul diseased and hideous cities and towns we live in, the constant petty tyranny of automatic washers and automobiles and TV machines and telephone!
It's almost as if Arthur Miller and Ed Abbey sat down and created Willy Loman together (while eating steaks and drinking whiskey, of course). Abbey uses profanity here because he saw so many Willy Lomans in society, all stumbling through life in these degraded conditions.
In the 1950s, Miller couldn't use the naughty words. He was censored. But he had Willy and his wife worry about "the constant petty tyranny" of their refrigerator, which broke down just as they get it paid off. And our boy Willy dies in a car, one of those great objects that daily disconnect us from our environments.
Still, where does Willy turn in his darkest hour? A garden. "I don't have a thing in the ground." That little bit of wilderness, of grounding in nature and the stuff that's really important about life, becomes as important to Willy as "water and good bread." Brilliant.