Discussion Topic
Setting and Staging in Death of a Salesman
Summary:
The setting of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman is crucial to its themes and character development. Set in 1949, primarily in Brooklyn and Boston, the play explores the impact of the American Dream and capitalism on Willy Loman and his family. The encroaching city symbolizes Willy's lost dream of rural life, highlighting his disillusionment. The transparent stage design reflects Willy's mental state, blurring past and present. The setting underscores Willy's struggles against societal changes and personal failures, ultimately influencing his and Biff's perceptions of success and identity.
What is the setting of the play Death of a Salesman?
Setting refers to where and when the action in a story takes place. In “Death of a Salesman”, the play is set in 1949. Willy has experienced the depression and the post-war boom and, like the rest of America at this time, is consumed by the desire for material possessions which force him into a lifetime of credit.
The action moves between New York and Boston. It is while Willy is on the road in Boston that Biff discovers his father’s affair – an event which changes his opinion of his father forever.
The Loman house is in Brooklyn. The walls of the property are used flexibly by Miller to highlight the sequences which are out of time: Willy’s flashbacks and dream sequences.
The entire setting is wholly or, in some places, partially transparent…whenever the action is in the present the actors observe the imaginary wall-lines…but in the...
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scenes of the past these boundaries are broken.
The house was formerly surrounded by space, but an apartment block and other buildings now dominate it-
We see a solid vault of apartment houses around the small, fragile-seeming home.
Other settings in Brooklyn are also referred to. The restaurant where Biff and Happy abandon their father, Howard’s office and the site of Willy’s grave in the requiem are also seen.
When is the setting of Death of a Salesman?
This play is set in "the present." That is, it is set in the time when it was first performed. Specifically, it is set in the year 1949.
The setting of the play is important for the themes that it is meant to explore. For example, one of the major themes is that Willy Loman is up against forces that are larger than he is. He is confronted with a society and economy that are changing. During the late 40s and early 50s, the US economy was getting bigger and companies were more important. Willy was not qualified to function in this economic reality.
How does the setting influence the play in Death of a Salesman?
The setting as far as time lines shift from past to present and back to the past. The scenes that occur in the present tense are characterized by Willy's flashbacks in time, which influence the play in that it shows the qualities of Willy's character.
- A man stuck in the past, unable to move forward, still haunted by his mistakes, will lost, going towards insanity, dysfunctional, hopeless.
Those same flashbacks affect Biff similarly in a way, a he also becomes enthralled in his father's long lost world. They also help us see that Biff, in his own way, is not much different from his father in terms of giving up and letting circumstances take over his life.
Hence, Biff has also a) lost the image of his father as a hero, b) does not trust him, c) still remembers his father's infidelity, and d) he quit a possible football career because of all this. He also has all hope lost, and he is also caught in the past.
What we get from this is that in Death of a Salesman the past is what maintains the present stuck in a rut.
The future does not look as bring as it should, but ironically looks brighter without Willy. The “Requiem,” which takes place after the funeral, exposes the true image of the salesman described under the same light as Willy: Aperson whose streaks of luck, charisma, and personal magnetism are the only weapons that ensure their success. Hence, once Willy, or any other salesman , loses those weapons, their only resort is to dream, like Charley expressed. Yet, as Willy had an uneventful funeral which followed an uneventful and incomplete life, the one bright window into the possible future of the Lomans is when his wife says, poignantly referring to making their last house payment: "We are Free".
Why is the setting of Death of a Salesman significant to the text?
There are two reasons that I can think of. Firstly, and perhaps most importantly, New York is of course the financial capital of the United States, and therefore a very appropriate place for Miller to set his play which is all about capitalism, the rat race and trying to achieve the nebulous American Dream. By setting his play in New York, Miller makes Willy's misery that more acute because he is constantly surrounded by the mantras of capitalism and continually seduced by the phantoms of success. Biff, too, is seduced by those same voices for part of the play, until he has his epiphany and realises that he was never meant for a job in the city.
The second reason is the way that the encroaching city is shown to symbolise Willy's true desire or calling to live away from the city and in the countryside. Remember when they first bought their house it was in the countryside, but steadily and surely, as the city developed, their house was overtaken and now they are unable even to grow anything in the back yard because of the buildings surrounding them blocking out the sunlight. Willy says to Linda at the beginning of Act II:
You wait, kid, before it's all over we're gonna get a place out in the country, and I'll raise some vegetables, a couple of chickens...
We realise more and more as we watch this play that Willy's life has been futile, and he and his whole family would have been much happier had they lived in the countryside and Willy had got a job as a handyman or a carpenter. As Biff says in the Requiem, there was more of his father in the front stoop of the house than there ever was in the sales he made.