Miller and Eliot on Beauty
Comparing and Contrasting "Beauty" in Miller and Eliot
Arthur Miller and T.S. Eliot are two 20th century American playwrights. While the latter is more commonly noted for expatriating to Britain and writing some of the most memorable poetry of the early 20th century, the former is noted for his famous depiction of the common man's struggle to find meaning and fulfillment in Death of a Salesman. As distinct as the two writers may seem, they both conceive of and treat the theme of beauty -- Miller analyzing its absence in Salesman, and Eliot analyzing its abandonment in several poems like "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and "The Wasteland." This paper will compare and contrast both writers and show how they deal with the theme of beauty in their works.
The Absence of Beauty in Salesman and "Prufrock"
Beauty is missing from Willy Loman's life in Death of a Salesman, and Miller represents this fact by contrasting Willy to his surroundings through various motifs. Motif is a literary device constantly used throughout Salesman to bring to light certain points (ideas such as peace, happiness, success, defeat, and awe). Miller, however, does more than merely employ motif to stimulate drama: he creates a character that is utterly unable to measure up to the kind of heroism and beauty as defined by men like Aristotle. Miller's Loman ("low man") may be the measure of inadequacy in the modern world. What is missing from Loman's life, it may be said, is the appreciation of Beauty -- or Truth, as Keats called it.
This absence of Beauty is observed in the cessation of flute music in the play's very beginning. The flute motif begins the drama, setting off Act One with a melody that is meant to evoke Beauty -- images of "grass and trees on the horizon" -- encouraging the audience to imagine pastures that appear, perhaps, greener on the other side. This motif is ironically juxtaposed, however, with the setting of the Act, which is the Salesman's house, outlined against a world of hard, towering high rises. As Willy Loman enters the scene and begins to speak with his wife, the flute dies out and the cessation of this motif tells us much about Willy's present situation, adding a kind of pathos to his line to Linda, "I'm tired to the death" (Miller 2). Miller indicates that the "flute has faded away," (2) which illustrates thematically the notion that Willy's life has lost its melody, its happiness, its sense of being -- and its beauty. Willy has, essentially, one foot out the door -- and his wife (literally) is surprised to find that he is still hanging on.
If Willy is barely there (as a person), so too is Eliot's Prufrock -- a character who cannot even rouse himself to the level of humanity. Indeed, Prufrock is as much a wisp of a man as Loman, and both seem to have abandoned the struggle to attain a higher peace or purpose in life. While Loman appears to be haunted by the fact in Death of a Salesman, Eliot's Prufrock appears to be content with what may be termed, essentially, his damnation.
Eliot's Use of Dante and the Old World as an Indication of Beauty
In fact, the idea of damnation -- that loss of the True Beauty, which in Christian terms is the attainment of and unification with God -- is present at the very beginning of "Prufrock." Eliot quotes one of the damned souls of Dante's Inferno as a preface to the poem -- and the quotation is indicative of the despair that fills Prufrock. What Prufrock "knows" is that there is no hope for the modern world -- it has been abolished -- and, thus, he is an empty shell of a man, on the cusp of old world religion and art, unable to pry open the doors of the beauty of the old world (even though it hangs in the galleries and "the women come and go, talking of Michelangelo") (Eliot 13-14, 35-36). For Prufrock, Michelangelo has been emptied out, because that which he represents -- an old world ideology -- has been repudiated by the ideology of the modern world, thus sealing off both Beauty and Truth as it relates to God, the ultimate source of all goodness and beauty according to the old world ideology.
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