tle characters, especially young Alexandra. As is often the ease in Miss Hellman s plays, she applies her thesis on both a personal and general social level. Here she is always saying that capitalistic greed exploits the lower economic sectors of society. summary of the play as given in L. R. Holmin s book is: Ben and Oscar Hubbard and their sister Pegina Giddens are members of an avaricious clan in a small Southern town in 1900. They represent the rise of the industrial South in its most ruthless aspect. Oscar s gentle wife, Birdie, represents the old aristocracy, which the new order is replacing. In the social gathering which opens the play, we see the manner in which this new breed, rising from the poor whites, attempts to ape the cultural graces of the passing order.Chicago tycoon paying a visit is willing to-put up 400,000 dollars for the building of a cotton mill in the Southern town, where cheap costs and cheap labour will make high profits possible. Ben, Oscar and Regina are each to put up one-third of the remaining 225,000 dollars required for the financing of the project. For this investment they will receive 51% of the stock in the firm.struggle ensues between Regina and her husband, Horace Giddens, who is very ill with a heart ailment, over his unwillingness to put up their third. It is over this contest for money that we see first one, then another of the little foxes achieve the upper hand in their vicious talk among themselves. When Horace finds that Oscar s son Leon has, with Ben and Oscar s blessing, borrowed bonds from his safe deposit box for the project, he balks. He te lls his wife, who despises him, that his vengeance on her is to pretend he loaned the bonds to the brothers and to write a new will which will cut off her dreams of going to Chicago to live a life of ease in society there. Her viciousness knows no bounds when she allows him to die by refusing to give him his medicine needed to prevent a heart attack, thus adding murder to her bag of tricks. Once again in power, she threatens the Hubbard men with exposure and demands three-fourths of the profit of the enterprise. Brother Ben accepts the arrangement, temporarily we feel, with a humor which has characterized brother and sister in their dog-eat-dog contest. Regina, however, is faced with what seems to the audience a hollow victory, when her daughter Alexandra, finally aroused, announces that she is leaving home to escape from the Hubbard influence.Miller s best work, Death of a Salesman, is one of the most successful in fusing the realistic and the imaginative; in all of his other plays, however, Miller is the master of realism. He is a true disciple of Henrik Ibsen, not only in his realistic technique, but in his concern about society s impact on his characters lives.Miller created more directly social plays based on an ambiguity of images, whether defined in a family or broader cultural sense. Death of a Salesman (1949), the account of Willy Loman s tragic struggle with the law of success < span align = "justify">, became another classic. The Crucible (1953), in which the Salem witch-hunts are used as a parable (witchcraft trials of the 17th century in which Puritan settlers were wrongly executed as supposed witches), and A View from the Bridge (1955) enhanced his reputation. Miller s plays, the course of the action and the development of character depend not only on the characters psychological makeup, but also on the social, philosophical, and economic atmosphere of their times. s most notable character, Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman, is a self-deluded man; but he is also a product of the American dream of success and a victim of the American business machine, which disposes of him when he has outlived his usefulness. Loman has worked for Howard Wagner s company for thirty-six years. He has opened new markets for their trademark. Wagner s father promised him a job in New York, but Howard does not need him in town and fires him altogether. Willy realizes the futility of his dreams. He has been squeezed out and when he is unable to bring in a large profit he is dismissed. I put thirty-six years into this firm. You can t eat the orange and throw the peel away - a man is not a piece of fruit , he says bitte...
