One Who Can Hurt My Enemies and Help My Friends: Medea and Willy Loman’s Selfish Strife for Greatness
Finding similarities between these two plays may seem difficult. Medea utilizes her own genius, chemical expertise, and exploitation of her husband’s assumptions about gender to exact revenge on him by killing his new wife, his new father-in-law, and the children that she and he have created and raised. Willy Loman does not kill anyone but himself. His fascination is with enacting and succeeding in what he perceives to be his role as a man. Medea is seen as a vicious and heartless murderer. The chorus in Medea focuses often on her ability to over-ride her affection for her children, asking, “Can you have the heart to kill your flesh and blood?” (800) . Willy Loman is seen as a tragically flawed, but generous person of whom his wife could say, “There’s more good in him than in many other people,” (Miller 2352) . Yet one may ask if Willy’s actions were in fact more forgivable than Medea’s.
To answer we might consider Willy’s treatment of his family before his suicide, and compare it with Medea’s treatment of her family before her murders. In Death of a Salesman, Miller places emphasis on the lavish praise and affection that Willy poured on his sons. When the young children had washed and polished Willy’s car, he affectionately praised them, “Terrific. Terrific job, boys” (2337) . Even as Willy is giving Biff unwanted advice about how to best ask for a loan from Bill Oliver, Willy explains the reason that he takes such an emotional interest, “Because you got a greatness in you, Biff, remember that. You got all kinds of greatness,” (2356) . So an image of a caring and affectionate father is presented. It is not all praise and affection, however. Willy is judgmental also, saying of Biff: “he’s lazy, goddammit!” (2330). The expletive here shows a kind of hypocritical attitude toward his children, since later in the play Willy scolds Biff, saying, “Don’t curse in this house! . . . Don’t use that language to me! I won’t have it!” (2354). Another negative aspect of Willy’s treatment toward his family is his deceptive and belittling attitude toward his wife. When Willy got home from a business trip, and his wife asked him how it went, he says, “I did five hundred gross in Providence and seven hundred gross in Boston” (2340). When Linda calculates that this means his commission will be two hundred and twelve dollars, Willy reveals that he actually only sold, “about a hundred and eighty gross in Providence. Well, no – it came to – roughly two hundred gross on the whole trip” (2340). Worse than this deception is the deception the Willy is faithful to Linda in their marriage, despite his affair with “The Woman” for whom he buys “stockings . . . a lot of stockings,” meanwhile his wife is forced to mend her own stockings, “because they are so expensive” (2342). This attitude of deception toward his own wife is one that he instills into his children, telling Biff, “Just wanna be careful with those girls, Biff, that’s all. Don’t make any promises. No promises of any kind. Because a girl , y’know, they always believe what you tell ‘em” (2336). That may not directly translate into encouragement to deceive his future wife, but it certainly places the idea in Biff’s head that women, that wives, are easy to deceive. So Willy Loman gets a mixed review.
Medea’s family dynamic before her murders is equally elusive. Euripides leaves no doubt in the reader’s mind about Medea’s love for her children. As she contemplates the act of killing them, she says, “I weep to think of what a deed I have to do” (775). She says that, “for my children’s reprieve/I would give my very life, and not gold only” (943-944). Medea’s horror at her own plan comes up again and again as its fulfillment draws nearer. Before Medea makes her final plan, however, of revenge, there are hints of a less than pleasant family dynamic in her household also. At the beginning of the play the audience learns that Medea, “has turned from the children and does not like to see them,” this abandonment causes the Nurse to be, “afraid she may think of some dreadful thing” (36-37). The proximity of the Nurse’s concern to the revelation that Medea has abandoned her children is evidence that the Nurse is already concerned that Medea will harm her children in some way. This predisposition calls into question Medea’s affection and sorrow. One might discover that foreshadowing in her personality better by observing the way she uses her children as pawns in her revenge against Jason. It is not only the murder of her children that desecrates the audience’s notions of family, but her attitude toward them generally. Any who have witnessed the devastating effect of a divorce upon children, can empathize with the false joy the children must have felt when Medea told them, “come here, my children, come outdoors to us!/Welcome your father with me, and say goodbye to him,/And with your mother, who just now was his enemy,/Join again in making friends with him who loves us . . ./We have made peace, and all our anger is over” (871-874). The physical situation of being murdered by their own mother is amplified by the emotional reality of the contrast of the attack with this fake reconciliation. The children are only given three lines, all of which are pathetic pleas for rescue from their mother.
The flaws of the main characters in Death of a Salesman and Medea, then, establish the tragedy of the plays. The flaws within Medea and Willy, however, are not alone to blame for the tragedy. The system of gender roles themselves are called into question. The real distance between Willy and his children is not necessarily due to personality differences between Willy and Biff. The conflict comes when Willy attempts to encourage Billy enact the kind of manhood that Willy has sought and is seeking. When the children are young, they love Willy, and love his outlook on life. When Willy teaches Biff and Happy, “Be liked and you will never want,” they take it seriously (2339). Whenever Biff and Happy talk about the “successful” men they encounter, especially those who seem more successful than their father, they immediately focus on how liked they are. For Willy if a man is “liked – but not well liked,” and, “when he walks into the store the waves part in front of him,” or, “can’t handle tools,” he, “is not a man,” such is the definition of a “man” for Willy (2338, 2340, 2344). If you do not match that definition, then “You’re disgusting” (2344). It is a definition that Biff and Happy accept.
It is not until Happy finds himself living that lifestyle, that he discovers its flaws. Happy defines that concept of manhood as “a measly manner of existence. To get on that subway on the hot mornings in summer. To devote your whole life to keeping stock, or making phone calls, or selling or buying. To suffer fifty weeks of the year for the sake of a two-week vacation, when all you really desire is to be outdoors, with your shirt off” (2333). The effect on Biff is not more positive. Trying to live according to that standard causes Biff to, “have an overdeveloped sense of competition,” which causes him to seduce the wives and girlfriends of other men, and to devalue women (2335). It is that rigid concept of their role as “men” that cause Willy, Happy, and Biff to fail.
A distorted sense of gender roles is what causes Medea’s violence also. She gives a speech that could be seen as an answer to the bleak role of men described by Happy. “With an excess of wealth it is required/For us to buy a husband and take for our bodies/A master; for not to take one is even worse./And now the question is serious whether we take/A good or bad one; for there is no easy escape/For a woman, nor can she say no to her marriage . . . A man, when he’s tired of the company in his home,/Goes out of the house and puts an end to his boredom/And turns to a friend . . ./We are forced to keep our eyes on one alone” (230-245). Medea’s rage at Jason’s betrayal, then, is because it reinforces this container called “womanhood” in which she feels trapped. Her resolution, “I shall kill my own children,” is thus made so that, “no one [may] think me a weak one, feeble-spirited,/A stay-at-home, but rather just the opposite,/One who can hurt my enemies and help my friends;/For the lives of such persons are most remembered” (776-794).
Both plays are often reduced to simple morals within the text. For Death of a Salesman Linda provides the moral. Despite Willy Loman’s flaws and his failure to fulfill his dreams, “Attention must be paid. He’s not to be allowed to fall into his grave like an old dog. Attention, attention must be finally paid to such a person” (2350). This is a beautiful sentiment. Euripides gives a similar one for Medea, “Zeus in Olympus is the overseer/Of many doings. Many things the gods/Achieve beyond our judgment. What we thought/Is not confirmed and what we thought not go/Contrives” (1390-1394). In Death of a Salesman, if this often quoted moral is used to summarize the play, we can take something quite simple from it. To avoid tragedy, notice people. Be kind to your parents, even if they fail. In Medea we can escape from the horror of the tragedy, Euripides seems to be saying, by acknowledging God’s supremacy and our limitations. But that seems evasive. What could Happy and Biff have noticed about their father, paid attention to, that would eliminate their conflicts and Willy’s self-loathing? What comfort could Jason have possibly taken at the end of the play in knowing that God allowed the murder of his children for some unknown purpose? It seems that the real moral of both stories is that a distorted and rigid definition of gender has tragic consequences. Medea’s tragedy was the result of her rebellion against the gender role she was assigned. Willy’s tragedy was the result of his failure as he strove to fulfill the gender role to which he was assigned. The real tragic flaw in both instances exist in the culture that defines humans into separate, and simplistically impossible containers.
Works Cited
Euripides. Medea. The Norton Anthology of Western Literature. Ed. Sarah Lawall and William G Thalmann. Trans. Rex Warner. Eighth. Vol. I: The Ancient World Through the Renaissance. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc, 2006. II vols. 690-719. Print.
Miller, Arthur. Death of a Salesman. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Ed. Nina Baym, Jerome Klinkowitz and Patricia B Wallace. Seventh. Vol. IV: Literature Since 1945. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc, 2006. IV vols. 2328-2392. Print.
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