Bleak Lighthouses

You Only Get One Life, Make Sure You Live It Right

To me Death of a Salesman was a journey to the past, a journey to my fears but at the same time to my dreams. It was impossible not to relate myself to Biff, especially in these lines in which he refers to the vision of his life.

HAPPY: But I think if you just got started — I mean — is there any future for you out there?

BIFF: I tell ya, Hap, I don’t know what the future is. I don’t know — what I’m supposed to want.

HAPPY: What do you mean?

BIFF: Well, I spent six or seven years after high school trying to work myself up. Shipping clerk, salesman, business of one kind or another. And it’s 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. And always to have to get ahead of the next fella. And still — that’s how you build a future.

HAPPY: Well, you really enjoy it on a farm? Are you content out there?

BIFF (with rising agitation): Hap, I’ve had twenty or thirty different kinds of jobs since I left home before the war, and it always turns out the same. I just realized it lately. In Nebraska when I herded cattle, and the Dakotas, and Arizona, and now in Texas. It’s why I came home now, I guess, because I realized it. This

farm I work on, it’s spring there now, see? And they’ve got about fifteen new colts. There’s nothing more inspiring or — beautiful than the sight of a mare and a new colt. And it’s cool there now, see? Texas is cool now, and it’s spring. And whenever spring comes to where I am, I suddenly get the feeling, my God, I’m not gettin’ anywhere! What the hell am I doing, playing around with horses, twenty-eight dollars a week! I’m

thirty-four years old, I oughta be makin’ my future. That’s when I come running home. And now, I get here, and I don’t know what to do with myself. (After a pause.) I’ve always made a point of not wasting my life, and everytime I come back here I know that all I’ve done is to waste my life.

HAPPY: You’re a poet, you know that, Biff? You’re a — you’re an idealist!

Who hasn’t been in his shoes? Nowadays, most students seem to be choosing their university programs by the money they are going to make. Some others feel force to go to university because they think they will have no future if they don’t. Others don’t even know what they want for a living, but still they study or do what their parents tell them to do, and not to mention when there is someone who gets a national PSU score that wants to study pedagogy or arts… no future for him, people say.

These are only a few examples of how society can affect our decisions and therefore, our lives. We grow up within a country, a family, a culture, surrounded by traditions, or better to say, stereotypes. The ghost of the American Dream still echoes in many people with a fixed mind set.

People always had high expectations on me. Everybody in my family and in the school thought I was going to study to become a dentist, an engineer or a doctor, something that will ensure a good future. Finally, I decided to study pedagogy, but I didn’t know what to choose, I didn’t know what I was supposed to want for my life. After some time studying I went over an existential crisis because I wanted to quit the program, I realized I was going nowhere and I couldn’t stand not doing anything about it.

After some time I found my purpose in life and everything changed. Today I am thankful for that because not many people overcome these crisis, and now I am able to see them with another perspective. I strongly believe that existential crisis are not more than a chance to break the mold, to break with all that tells you your dream is not good enough or is not going to be compatible with your happiness. It is your inside against the world’s pressure, your dream against the conformity, your happiness against your emptiness. It is your responsibility, no one is going to give the lost time back to you, and nobody is going to live the trials for you. You have to decide for what makes you, who you are. You just have to go for what completes your life.

As you know, I am still in the English Pedagogy Program and I pretend to finish it, not because it is what I see myself doing in the future but because it does not interfere with my purpose in life; in fact, it provides some useful tools for the future.

Another character I relate myself to is Linda. When I think about her I immediately think about the poem Housewife by Anne Sexton because it talks about how women are a part of their house and about how taking care of the house becomes their job and they are expected to do nothing more than clean, cook, and look after their family. This poem also reveals how men are seen as dominant and how they take advantage of women and take them for granted. Women are not respected in the same way men are.

Housewife-Anne Sexton

Some women marry houses.
It's another kind of skin; it has a heart,
a mouth, a liver and bowel movements.
The walls are permanent and pink.
See how she sits on her knees all day,
faithfully washing herself down.
Men enter by force, drawn back like Jonah
into their fleshy mothers.
A woman is her mother.
That's the main thing.

This poem encapsulates through daily-life language and imageries how women were seen by society at that time. In the 50’s most women used to have a 24/7 affiliation with the ‘house hold’ things after they got married.

The house is portrayed to be the other kind of skin and having some human’s body parts such as heart, mouth, and liver. It seems to me that the house became a real companion for women in struggling through the life after marriage.

 “Men enter by force,” shows me that men were always forcing their demands. Here, particularly related to the sexual abuse or domestic violence in a family, and women not having the freedom to disagree or desist.

Along the play Linda seemed to be a lovely wife, despite his grumpy and violent husband; however, her devotion and love for her husband made her dependent on his dream and deprived her to have her own.

Overall, I think Death of a Salesman is a demonstration of the American society beliefs during the 1950’s and a great reminder of the impact it can have in our lives nowadays. As women, we have to be thankful that we are not trapped in a housewife model anymore, that’s not the only thing we can aspire to be in life. But how to be thankful? Using that freedom to pursue our own dreams, not anyone else’s dreams, and not being influenced by the new stereotypes, because one thing is true and it’s that the housewife model might have changed but there are some others that can be as damaging as the ones that are not part of our mind set anymore.