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then neither is his wife, Linda. The critic Rhoda Koenig objects to Miller’s treatment of women, “of whom he knows two types. One is the wicked slut. . . . The other . . . is a combination of good waitress and a slipper-bearing retriever.” Linda, in particular, is “a dumb and useful doormat.”9 It would be difficult to imagine a comment wider of the mark. As Miller is apt to remind actresses in rehearsal, Linda is tough. She is a fighter. Willy is prone to bully her, cut off her sentences, reconstruct her in memory to serve present purposes, but this is a woman who has sustained the family when Willy has allowed fantasy to replace truth, who has lived with the knowledge of his suicidal intent, who sees through her sons’ bluster and demands their support.

In part a product of Willy’s disordered mind, in part autonomous, Linda defines herself through him because she inhabits a world which offers her little but a supporting role; she is a committed observer incapable, finally, of arresting his march toward oblivion, but determined to grant him the dignity which he has conspired in surrendering. That she fails to understand the true nature and depth of his illusions or to acknowledge the extent of her own implication in his human failings is a sign that she, too, is flawed, baffled by the conflicting demands of a society which speaks of spiritual satisfaction but celebrates the material. Despite her practical common sense she, too, is persuaded that life begins when all debts are paid. It is she who uses the word “free” at the end of a play in which most of the central characters have surrendered their freedom. Linda’s strength—her love and her determination—is not enough, finally, to hold Willy back from the grave. Yet this does not make her a “useful doormat,” but a victim of Willy’s desperate egotism and of a society which sees his restless search as fully justified and her tensile devotion and love as an irrelevance in the grand scheme of national enterprise.

For Mary McCarthy, always suspicious of American play-wrights, a disturbing aspect of Death of a Salesman was that Linda and Willy Loman seemed to be Jewish, to judge by their speech cadences, but that no mention was made of this in the text. “He could not be Jewish because he had to be ‘America.’ . . . [meanwhile the] mother’s voice [is] raised in the old Jewish rhythms. . . . ‘Attention, attention must finally be paid to such a person.’ . . . (‘Attention must be paid’ is not a normal American locution; nor is ‘finally,’ placed where it is; nor is ‘such a person,’ used as she uses it.)”10 Forty years later Rhoda Koenig objected that “although the characters are never identified as Jewish, their speech patterns constantly proclaim them to be so. Willy answers a question with another question; his wife reverses normal sentence structure (‘To fix the hot water it cost $97.50’).” She adds, somewhat curiously, that “as a result, Jews can enjoyably weep buckets of empathy without worrying that Gentile spectators will consider Willy’s money-grubbing a specifically Jewish failing.” Speaking on behalf of what she calls “my people,” by which she seems to mean Americans in general and New York Jews in particular, she associates money-grubbing with Jews and identifies a characteristic of Willy Loman that is invisible in the play since it is not money he pursues but success. Indeed, Miller has said that “built into him is—distrust, even contempt, for relationships based only on money.” (Beijing 135) Insisting that Miller’s “coded ethnicity” was a product of the more anti-Semitic climate of the 1940s and ’50s, she is seemingly unaware that in 1945 Miller had published a highly successful novel, Focus, which directly and powerfully addressed the subject of American anti-Semitism. In other words, when he wished to create Jewish characters, he did and without hesitation, and at precisely the moment she supposed he was least willing to do so.

Ironically, a road production of the play, which opened in Boston starring Mary McCarthy’s brother, Kevin, and a number of other Irish-American