¶ … Exchange at the End of Act Two:
THE WOMAN: I just hope there's nobody in the hall. That's all I hope. To Biff: Are you football or baseball?
BIFF: Football
THE WOMAN: (angry, humiliated) That's me too. G'night.
Both Biff and Happy are shown throughout the course of Death of a Salesman to have a very careless attitude in regards to how they treat women. They treat women like conquests, not as human beings. In a flashback sequence, Linda complains that mothers have informed her that they are worried that Biff is rough with girls; Happy has slept with a number of the girlfriends and fiancees of the superiors at his place of employment. He does so not because he is in love with these women but as a passive-aggressive way of getting back at the people who tell him what to do on a daily basis at work.
In this exchange, the woman slyly takes a dig at Biff that she is just a football in the relationships she is in, something to be batted back and forth. This exchange takes place when Biff surprises Willy after he learns that he has failed math and needs to go to summer school. Willy tries to conceal the woman from Biff but she refuses to be treated as someone just to be shoved into the bathroom. A football is an object tossed between men, not something which has value in and of itself. The woman is thus suggesting that she is like a football or an object that Willy is using for his own pleasure and fun, not because he has any respect for it. In the dialogue she implies that she literally 'is' a football, versus merely is playing football like Biff. By the end of the scene she decides to demand the silk stockings promised to her by Willy and to leave, as a way of demanding that Willy regard her as more than a sexual plaything.
Q2. An analysis of this scene from the end of the play:
CHARLEY...
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