텍스트에 반영된 작가의 무의식 :『세일즈맨의 죽음』을 중심으로

The Writer's Unconscious Reflected in Death of a Salesman

Miller has been regarded as a social dramatist and modern tragedy playwright on the grounds that he has dealt with the organic relationship between each individual and his society and established the concept of modern tragedy. Miller considers the protagonist's free will as an important faculty winch can make him recognize the injustice of society and revolutionize his society. Most critics insist that Miller's works show us the universal characteristics of conflicts coming from human passion and the universal tragedy resulting from these conflicts. This point of view emphaslzing the universal truths of humanity reflects the humanistic trend of criticism which considers human beings as an existence that can keep a timeless human nature as a unified and autonomous subject. But this trend has recently been severely criticized by materialist critics. Materialist critics react against ahistorical impulses of the humanistic critics and emphasize "the historicity of text" refusing the notion of a unifited and autonomous text isolated from its context. In their point of view, the literary text is an ideological product Pierre Macherey, who extends Althusserian discussion of art and ideology, assures that like psychoanalyst, the literary critic attends to the text's unconscious. And Eagleton, who surveys the interrelations between ideology and literary form, also argues that criticism is to examine each writer's ideological situation and analyze the contradictions winch develop in their thinking and the attempted resolution of the contradictions in their writings. This essay aims at examiinng the writer's unconscious reflected in Arther Miller's play, Death of a Salesman from Eagleton's point of view and Macherey's point of view on criticism by analyzing Miller's discourse in his essays and the dominant and excluded discourses in the text Miller makes the theme and the hero of the play clear in his essays. He makes many direct comments on the issues in this play. He regards Willy Loman, who commits suicide to let his sons inherit his insurance money, as a conscious hero who resists the real and continuing peril of capitalism in his essays. By means of self-destrucbon, Willy tries to show his love for his sons and to rid himself of a guilty feeling for his failure as a bread winner. But Willy's choice of death reveals a lack of strong will power to resist the power which controls him, and to choose a life in nature. He cannot recognize the truth that what his sons want is not money, but true love. It may be said that Willy is not an anachronistic figure who cannot adapt himself to the capitalistic society. Willy pursues capitalistic values paranoically. Therefore, Willy's behavior suggests that the subject should not be an existence which holds a timeless human nature, but just a product of the ideology of the ruling class. And Miller also classifies Charley, who pursues capitalistic values and doesn't have any conflicts with capitalistic values as the most decent man. HIs criterion of normality and abnormality is weather one follows capitalistic values or not this suggests that there is a capitalistic ideology in his unconscious which controls Miller's point of view on normality and abnormality.