The Importance of the Domestic Setting in Drama

It is no mere coincident that many favorite television shows are based in a domestic setting. Archie Bunker from All in the Family is often best remembered in his armchair pontificating his view of current issues, the family dinner table was an important gathering place in The Waltons, and how could The Golden Girls have solved all their problems without sitting together at the kitchen table around a cheesecake? Domestic settings are very important to a playwright as a vehicle to connect the audience with the characters and issues on an emotional level and sympathize, or even empathize, with these issues because the audience can relate to these settings in their own lives. The domestic setting provides a view into the daily lives of the characters and of their personalities and relationships with each other and allows the audience comfortable access to the issue the playwright is attempting to address. The domestic setting was used very effectively in the plays Death of a Salesman, Time Flies, and Trifles in different ways.

A main theme in the play Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller is one man's relentless pursuit of, and failure to achieve, his version of the American Dream. His highest ideals are achieving success in the business world and being well liked by the multitudes. The domestic setting provides an excellent place to reveal the hopes, struggles, frustrations and lost dreams of Willy Loman as revealed through his relationship with his wife, sons, brother and his neighbors. In this setting, the audience is able to put themselves into the situation and understand how these events could have happened.

At the early age of three, Willy was deserted by his father and his older brother and he grew up knowing the feeling of being unloved, unimportant and forgotten. He was good with his hands and could have succeeded at many other professions but was drawn to sales as a young man after meeting Dave Singleman, a much older salesman. Willy was not impressed by this man because of the wealth he accumulated, in fact there is no reference to monetary riches. Instead, Willy was drawn to how much the man was liked. In reminiscing about him, Willy says "And when I saw that, I realized that selling was the greatest career a man could want. 'Cause what could be more satisfying than to be able to go, at the age of eighty-four, into twenty or thirty different cities, and pick up a phone, and be remembered and loved and helped by so many different people?" (Miller 1518). Because of his earlier abandonment, he yearned for the love and respect of everyone he met.

The sad irony was that living the life of a traveling salesman kept him from being with those who truly did love him - his wife and sons. He spends most of his life away from home and his family but laments "Work a lifetime to pay off a house. You finally own it, and there's nobody to live in it" (Miller 1777). He could have been a success with his family, but his obsession to be well liked by virtual strangers drove him away from even them.

The domestic setting allows the audience to see the contradictions in the man Willy could have been - a loving and doting husband, the devoted father and pal to his sons, the handyman who was good with tools and loved to build things, the gardener who wanted to plant vegetables - and the struggling, unfulfilled, bitter failure of a salesman that he became. Biff remarks at the gravesite "There were a lot of nice days. When he'd come home from a trip; or on Sundays, making the stoop; finishing the cellar; putting on the new porch; when he built the extra bathroom; and put up the garage. You know