Judith E. Smith, University of Massachusetts – Boston
“Political Economy and Family Economy:
Anti-capitalist Critique and Its Popular Reception
in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman and Lorraine Hansberry’s Raisen in the Sun

Arthur Miller and Lorraine Hansberry were both left-wing intellectuals who were politically committed to critiquing the class inequalities of market capitalism. They both wanted to broaden the terms in which people recognized the implications of political economy by representing alienation as produced by both economy and culture. For different reasons, they were both very concerned about the conservative political potential of US victory culture set in motion during and after WWII. They wanted to write dramatic work for a popular audience which could enter into public debates about capitalism and its successes and failures in the postwar period. Both were inspired by the powerful example of the communist Sean O’Casey’s 1922 play, Juno and the Paycock, which moved easily between humor and tragedy, using the dissension and disintegration of a family to parallel a national political crisis.

Miller’s anti-capitalist framework in Death of a Salesman (1949) accused the familial and the domestic of perpetuating acquiescence, but I will argue that Miller’s efforts were limited by his reproduction of the ideological division between public and private, male and female. Hansberry’s Raisen in the Sun (1959) answered Death of a Salesman by challenging this division, reconnecting the public and private by recasting the familial and the domestic as nurturing resistance. Miller’s vision of universalism was depicted through racially and ethnically unmarked characters; Hansberry’s effort was to create a racially inclusive cosmopolitan universalism. The public silencing of left-wing social critique resulting from the efforts of anticommunists encouraged Miller to attempt to save his play by helping to hide its social origins and minimizing its social critique. The popularity of Miller’s vision of unmarked universalism then helped to make Salesman the model for American family drama, and combined with anticommunist agitation, to narrow mainstream dramatic terrain. The effect was to make it harder, especially for white audciences, to understand the significance of Hansberry’s political and racial challenge. The popular failures to effectively imagine a universalism both racially and sexually inclusive contributed to the political deadlock soon to be addressed by balck nationlism and second wave feminism.

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