American Drama by Jacqueline Foertsch

Author:Jacqueline Foertsch
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Macmillan Education UK

Drama in Dialogue: Death of a Salesman and A Raisin in the Sun

The conversation between these two classic mid-century works is dynamic and wide ranging. Despite their similar experimental features (i.e., time-bending forays into the past), both are clearly in the realist vein established by Ibsen, Chekhov, and their turn-of-the-twentieth-century brethren in this canon. Criticizing Raisin’s somewhat outdated, “naturalist” set—“as murky and crowded and gadgety as the slum apartment it represents” (“On the Horizon,” 528)—Gerald Weales even likened it to director David Belasco’s wallpaper-and-all reconstruction of the rundown boarding house in Eugene Walter’s The Easiest Way. Both Hansberry’s and Miller’s plays echo Chekhov’s Cherry Orchard theme (with or without the comic undertones) of the beleaguered extended family facing the prospect of group demise at the hands of a society no longer willing to include them and their worldview.

If the traditional melodramatic storyline concluded with the felicitous approach to the altar of a virtuous young woman and a wealthy suitor, whose marriage financially rescues all penurious family members attached to the lucky bride, we can credit Ibsen as one of the innovators who opened his story with that fairytale wedding, then followed the happy couple over the threshold to mark how long the festivities would last. In this tradition, both Miller and Hansberry tell the story of families fallen from connubial grace—the marriages are quarrelsome; the children grown, underemployed, and thus trapped in their parents’ household; the elders unwanted or at odds with the younger generation. Perhaps the most modern aspect of both these works is the profound ironizing of a classic melodramatic element—the boon windfall that arrives in the form of a recovered deed, a well-timed inheritance, or, as above, a marriageable millionaire. In both Miller’s and Hansberry’s plays, the money arrives, but at what cost? How is it to be spent, and is it ever enough? We recall that in A Doll’s House, the marriage of Nora and Torvald foundered on the shoals of financial insolvency, and a key theme engaging modern dramatists since then has regarded the damage done to all the hallmark romantic virtues—love, honor, fidelity, and so on—when the bank account runs dry. Salesman and Raisin provide their protagonists with the windfall that might have rescued Nora in an earlier era but that now bleakly equals an entire life of undercompensated sacrifice and causes its beneficiaries no end of interpersonal conflict and ethical uncertainty.

Many commentators on A Raisin in the Sun—including Hansberry herself—have noted the resemblance between Hansberry’s Civil Rights–era play and Miller’s postwar forerunner; she echoed Miller’s “Tragedy and the Common Man,” when she asserted that “the most ordinary human being … has within him elements of profundity, of profound anguish. You don’t have to go to the kings and queens of the earth—I think the Greeks and Elizabethans did this because it was a logical concept—but every human being is in enormous conflict about something” (qtd. in Carter, 26). Christopher Bigsby referred to Hansberry’s protagonist Walter Lee Younger as a “black Willy Loman, self-deceiving and self-destructive” (qtd.

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