Linda is the heart of the Loman family in Arthur Miller’s play, Death of a Salesman. She is wise, warm, and sympathetic. She knows her husband’s faults and her son’s characters. For all her frank appraisals, she loves them. She is contrasted with the promiscuous sex symbolized by the Woman and the prostitutes.
They operate in the world outside as part of the impersonal forces that corrupt. Happy equates his promiscuity with women to taking manufacturer’s bribes, and Willy’s Boston woman can “put him right through to the buyers.” Linda Loman holds the family together – she keeps the accounts, encourages her husband, tries to protect him from heartbreak. She becomes the personification of Family, that social unity in which the individual has real identity. The concepts of Father and Mother and so on were received by us unawares before the time we were conscious of ourselves as selves. In contrast, the concept of Friend, Teacher, Employee, Boss, Colleague, Supervisor, and the many other social relations come to us long after we have gained consciousness of ourselves, and are therefore outside ourselves. They are thus in an objective rather than subjective category.
In any case what feel is always more “real” to us than what we know, and we feel the family relationship while we only know, and we feel the family relationship while we only know the social one. (Arthur Miller, “The Family in Modern Drama”) If Willy is not totally unsympathetic (and he is not), much of the goodness in him is demonstrated in his devotion to his wife, according to his lights. Though he is often masterful and curt, he is still deeply concerned about her: “I was fired, and I’m looking for a little good news to tell your mother, because the woman has waited and the woman has suffered.” Biff is attached to his mother, and Happy’s hopelessness is most graphic in his failure to be honest with, or concerned about, his family. The family’s devotion to one another, even though misguided, represents a recognizable American ideal. Linda, for all her warmth and goodness, goes along with her husband and sons in the best success-manual tradition. She tries to protect them from the forces outside and fails.
The Essay on Family and Government in Chinese Social HIstory
Chen Village, China, gives us a close-up look at the life of majority of China’s population – the villagers – during the era of Communist leadership and policies during the 20th century. It presents an enthralling account of facts on Chinese villages in the throes of Maoist revolution followed by dramatic changes in village life and local politics during the Deng Xiaoping period. The ...
The memory of her suffering and her fidelity does not keep Willy and Happy from sex or Biff from wandering. Miller’s irony goes still deeper. While Linda is a mirror of goodness and the source of the family’s sense of identity, she is not protection – by her silence and her support, she unwittingly cooperates with the destructive myth. Linda follows the rules laid down by the self-help advocates. She is a good home manager, she understands and encourages her husband, she keeps her house neat and is a good mother. Babson recommends a good wife as a major factor in working towards success: “A good wife and well-kept house and some healthy children are the utmost importance in enabling one to develop the six “I”s” of success and to live the normal, wholesome, upright life.” Linda stays in her place, never questioning out loud her husband’s objectives and doing her part to help him achieve them..
