The Reality of Dreams
by Lisa Cantoni
It is not such an unusual thing for a person to seemingly drift away once in a while, lost in thought or trapped in a daze. Aspirations and hopes for a better future and a fulfilling life occupy the daydreams of many. If not that, then perhaps it is an illusion created to temporarily step away from reality, and to enter a happier place, where the world is not so very bustling or chaotic. The very idea behind a dream is to create an alternate reality and then to imagine oneself embracing it and living it. Unfortunately, many are unable to live out their dream-lives, and have to instead settle for the real world. It may be an unsatisfying or unsettling fact, but eventually, one must come to terms with the realities of life. However, an even more unsettling possibility is the refusal to accept the actuality of one’s life. The thought of failing to achieve one’s fantasies has the potential to create inner denial and disbelief. To fall into an illusion and then refuse to climb out may have traumatic and haunting results on all who witness the plummet. The pain of living in an illusion is evident in two of the most highly acclaimed American dramas ever written. The plays Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller and Long Day’s Journey into Night by Eugene O’Neill grant audiences unsettling insight into the experiences of families who endure the flailing grasps of reality. In both of these stories, a family is greatly affected by the attachment to an impossible dream, a lost fantasy that is more pleasurable (or at least more tolerable) to live in than the reality that surrounds their lives.
As the two plays undeniably share a similar theme of shrouded realities, they each maintain individual stories. Laurence E. Smardan, author of “The Use of Drama in Teaching Family Relationships” is able to pinpoint the different focuses of the two plays: “Miller’s play deals with a man aiming to live ‘the American Dream.’ Willy Loman’s inability to accept reality has a profound impact on his relationships with family members [whereas] O’Neill’s play is an autobiographical drama of a family beset by many crises…family loves and hates lead to continual conflict and the inability to relate” (222-223). Despite the multitude of differences between the plays, Long Day’s Journey and Death of a Salesman are tragically similar as it is evident that escaping from the hauntings of an illusion is unrealistically difficult, almost as unrealistic as the fantasy itself. As both plays encounter comparable situations, a reader can ascertain the differences and similarities regarding why the characters’ dreams are unattainable and simultaneously inescapable. Furthermore, the reader witnesses the physical breakdown of surrounding family members as the dream goes unrealized yet the dreamer regresses into an illusion.
Within Miller’s Death of a Salesman, the main character Willy Loman is a sixty-three year old traveling salesman who has obviously never belonged in the sales business. This is repeatedly evident throughout the play as family and friends make criticisms and comments: the neighbor Charley finds it funny that as a salesman, Willy doesn’t know that “the only thing you got in this world is what you can sell” (1051) and as Willy’s son Biff remarks, “he had the wrong dreams. All, all, wrong” and “he never knew who he was” (1071). It is unfortunate that others can understand Willy and yet have no power to make him see his own truths. The thought of a chance at the “American Dream,” however, entices many to make the sacrifices necessary for financial success and personal happiness. Willy’s dream consists of being well-liked and popular; he looks up to men like his deceased brother Ben, who made fortunes in the diamond mines of Africa and carried himself like a king. As Willy declines into his fantasies, he has “conversations” with Ben, and tries to convince him that his job in sales can bring prominence and popularity to his life and family. Co-authors Otto Reinert and Peter Arnott, in an Afterword to the play, surmise that “What matters to Willy isn’t just the commission or the sales record but the reassurance he gets from big sales that he has a terrific personality – that he is, not just ‘liked,’ like Charley and Bernard, but ‘well liked’” (985). The problem with Willy desiring popularity is the fact that he works in a business world, and it is of no concern whether he is well-liked or not; he has to be able to make sales. This reality makes Willy’s dreams irrelevant and naïve, but as he is unwilling to see the harshness of the truth, he falls into the comfort of his illusions.
As he continuously sinks lower into his fantasies, Willy tries vigorously to recruit his two sons into settling down into the business world as well. While his younger son Happy has begun lower management work and indeed has monetary aspirations, the older son Biff prefers to travel and live from job to job, working mostly as a farmhand and not earning much money. This infuriates Willy, and he constantly asks “How can he find himself on a farm? A farmhand? In the beginning, when he was young, I thought, well, a young man, it’s good for him to tramp around. But it’s more than ten years now and he has yet to make thirty-five dollars a week! (1010). Irving Jacobson, author of “Family Dreams in Death of a Salesman” has the notion that “Because he habitually deflects consciousness of his own failure by focusing attention on his sons, Loman cannot accept Biff’s way of life in the West on its own terms but tries to reabsorb him into a business-oriented culture” (254).
As Willy continues to lose Biff’s respect and as he converses with Ben more, Willy suspects that the only way to regain his son’s love and admiration is through committing suicide and allowing his family to cash in on his life insurance policy. Leonard Moss has noted that Willy chooses death “not simply as an escape from shame but as a last attempt to re-establish his own self-confidence and his family’s integrity…Thus in a single act Loman hopes to achieve…prominence and his lost unity with Biff” (qtd. in Jacobson 255-256). Willy is so submerged in his illusions at this point that he believes the money from his insurance policy will give Biff the incentive to pursue a career and to “get ahead of Bernard again!” (1070). Willy leaves his house for the last time, and sees his impending death like a jungle adventure, in which he can come out with diamonds. His final dreams for Biff’s career however, go unfulfilled as his older son realizes that he does not belong indoors “to suffer fifty weeks of the year for the sake of a two-week vacation” (1013), and he turns down Happy’s offer for a joint partnership, saying “I know who I am, kid” (1072). Happy, however, is determined to follow in his father’s footsteps, in an aggressive effort to “show you and everybody else that Willy Loman did not die in vain. He had a good dream. It’s the only dream you can have. He fought it out here, and this is where I’m gonna win it for him” (1072). The reader is left wondering at the end if Happy does make it big, or if he truly follows Willy’s path and faces the same fate.
To take a character such as Willy Loman and multiply him by four would give a reader a sketchy idea of the disturbing autobiographical play Long Day’s Journey into Night by Eugene O’Neill. The tragedies of the Tyrone family are great and burdensome. While there are no funerals at the end of the play, little is left to the imagination regarding the dim futures of several family members. Where the Loman family has one member hiding from reality, all four Tyrones suffer. The entire family looks to hide from the cruel realities of life, and each chooses his or her poison of preference (that being morphine or alcohol) in order to escape their hauntings of the past, present, and even future. As each character interacts with the other, each feels the need to constantly bring the other down, and to draw out one another’s flaws. These are desperate attempts to conceal one’s own demons. Bryan Thiessen, a professor at Trinity Western University, shares similar views as he asserts that, “Rather than address the factors that perpetuate their misery, and collectively combat them, the Tyrones move in endless cycles of guilt and evasion… To escape the reality of their own culpability, then, the Tyrones must shift the blame for their misery to each other, or they are faced with the responsibility of facing it themselves.” Mary Tyrone escapes from reality into her own world through morphine. As her addiction may be labeled the central crisis of the play, her relapse (after being drug-free for a short while) may possibly be the determining factor in the other characters’ similar conditions. As the reasoning for each member’s isolation is the responsibility of another, Mary submits to the morphine in order to escape the tragedy of Edmund’s consumption. Throughout the play she vocally denies Edmund’s illness, but she senses her need for the morphine at the very beginning of the day with her allusions to the impending fog: “Well, if you’re going to work on the hedge why don’t you go? I mean, take advantage of the sunshine before the fog comes back. Because I know it will” (2019). Mary carries an additional burden as she blames herself for her second son, Eugene’s, death. For these two reasons, Mary repeatedly makes references to the fog throughout the day and her addiction is more visible as the hours pass. Her yearning for the fog is offset by her distaste for the foghorn. While Mary is able to melt into the fog and be forgotten, the foghorn constantly calls her back to reality:
◦I really love the fog…It hides you from the world and the world from you. You feel that everything has changed, and nothing is what it seemed to be. No one can find or touch you anymore… It’s the foghorn I hate. It won’t let you alone. It keeps reminding you, and warning you, and calling you back. (2044)
As she contracts into her child-like state and reminisces about her days in the convent, Mary is avoided by her husband and two sons, who are too grief-stricken to see her relapse.
Edmund also feels passionately about the fog, and he admires the fact that one can hide in the fog, but he does not equate it with a drug addiction. He may perhaps have a desire for death though, and Thiessen contemplates that “Edmund’s illness may be a manifestation of his death-wish, his desire to escape from his human body.” There is further evidence when Edmund speaks of the fog to Tyrone: “The fog and the sea seemed part of each other. It was like walking on the bottom of the sea. As if I had drowned long ago. As if I was a ghost belonging to the fog… It felt damned peaceful to be nothing more than a ghost” (2059). In addition to disappearing in the night, Edmund, despite minimal protests, also takes comfort in a drink. He escapes the consumption, his mother, and the troubles of his family with a bottle. Edmund chooses to flee because “who wants to see life as it is, if they can help it?” (2059).
Edmund’s older brother, Jamie, also finds consolation at the bottom of a beer mug, as well as in the arms of promiscuous women. Mary blames her husband, Tyrone, for Jamie’s addiction to alcohol, and Jamie blames his mother for his frequent brothel visits. Thiessen states that “Jamie, for his part, credits his ‘worldly wisdom’ to hard experience and disappointment. In reality, it is a result of his parents’ aloofness; and, having been denied his mother’s love, he seeks a corrupted substitute rather than pursuing meaningful relationships.” Jamie drinks for another reason as well; Mary holds him partially responsible for the death of his first younger brother, Eugene, who had contracted the measles from Jamie. When the morphine has taken affect, Mary admits her accusation: “I’ve always believed Jamie did it on purpose. He was jealous of the baby. He hated him” (2039). Jamie’s sorrows are more difficult than most because he is blamed by his mother; he cannot release his pain until he is forgiven.
The last member of the family also carries a great burden of responsibility. Tyrone originally used acting to escape reality; the theater was his reason for existing, his only reality. But his blessing became his curse, as he could not escape his success as the “Count of Monte Cristo.” Tyrone’s short-term success and quick monetary gain could no longer provide an escape from reality, and after Eugene’s death and Mary’s newly-acquired addiction, Tyrone turned more heavily to alcohol. He is, like the others, isolated and drowning in his sorrows. He bears the titles of “miser” and “selfish”; he is blamed for not helping Mary recover from her addiction as well as for sending Edmund to a cheap sanatorium. He does, undeniably, love and care for his wife, but he has been let down and disappointed repeatedly; he is tired of building false hope, yet he continually does, for the love of Mary.
At the play’s end, there are no feelings of hope, no spark of life. The reader or the audience (with a much greater impact) sees only desolation and a family who cannot join together. There is a moment when the three men seem to open up and disclose to each other, but one is given the impression that after Mary descends the staircase, each will turn inward to what comforts him the most, and deny the others access. The isolation is a tremendous presence, as is the desire to be secluded and unaware of the world that moves about them all.
Drifting away into one’s personal thoughts, desires, fantasies and dreams are all usually preferable to the loud and boisterous racket that most call their lives. The idea of being secluded, cut off from anyone else, in a happy peaceful existence is a tempting thought that one guiltily steals when he or she is supposedly engaged elsewhere. The joys of a daydream, however, are no longer joys if they are used to consume every waking moment. The dreams become one’s individual reality, and as is shown in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman and Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night, the isolation becomes overwhelming, and the fantasy is inescapable. So while it’s nice to escape for a time, and to enjoy the little delights of a daydream, at some point, reality steps in and one must understand that living in a dream does not work.
Works Cited
Arnott, Peter, and Otto Reinert. “Death of a Salesman: Afterword.”
Twenty-Three Plays. Boston; Little Brown, 1978. 981-988.
Jacobson, Irving. “Family Dreams in Death of a Salesman.” American
Literature. 47.2 May 1975: 247-258. JSTOR. Naugatuck Valley
Community College Lib., Waterbury, CT 4 May 2006
<http://www.jstor.org/>.
Miller, Arthur. Death of a Salesman. Thinking and Writing about
Literature: A Text and Anthology. Ed. Michael Meyer. Boston;
Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2001. 1007-1072.
O’Neill, Eugene. Long Day’s Journey into Night. A Norton Critical
Edition. Ed. James McIntosh. New York; W.W. Norton & Co,
1987. 2005-2082.
Smardan, Laurence E. “The Use of Drama in Teaching Family
Relationships.” Journal of Marriage and the Family. 28.2 May
1966: 219-223. JSTOR. Naugatuck Valley Community College
Lib., Waterbury, CT 4 May 2006 <http://www.jstor.org/>.
Thiessen, Bryan. “Alone in the Dark: Isolation in O’Neill’s Long Day’s
Journey into Night” Ed. Harley Hammerman. eOneill.com. 8
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