American Dream Critique in Miller and Hansberry's Plays
This paper examines how Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman and Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun function as sustained critiques of the American Dream and capitalist ideology. Drawing on the film The Pursuit of Happyness as a contemporary frame, the paper traces the American Dream from its origins in Benjamin Franklin and Horatio Alger through its mid-century literary deconstruction. The analysis focuses on how both playwrights use their protagonists' dehumanized labor roles, escapist fantasies, and ultimately tragic trajectories to expose the moral failures of a society that measures human worth purely in economic terms. The paper also considers race, alienated labor, and symbolic imagery as tools of social critique in both works.
- The American Dream as Cultural Mythology: American Dream as archetype, film framing, thesis
- Willy Loman and the Dehumanization of Sales Labor: Charley's eulogy, alienated labor, Willy's identity
- Walter Lee Younger and the Void of Black Economic Life: Walter's chauffeur speech, racial dignity, empty future
- Fantasy, Escape, and the African Imaginary: Walter's African fantasy, Willy's hallucination of Ben
- Capitalism, Human Worth, and the Limits of the Dream: Ben as symbol, jungle metaphor, capitalism critique
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What makes this paper effective
- The paper opens with a contemporary cultural touchstone — the 2006 film The Pursuit of Happyness — to anchor the American Dream mythology before moving into literary analysis, making the argument immediately accessible and relevant.
- Parallel textual analysis is used skillfully: the paper places Charley's eulogy speech alongside Walter's monologue about his chauffeur job, allowing the two plays to illuminate each other rather than being treated in isolation.
- The paper integrates critical voices (Harold Bloom, Manohla Dargis, William James) without letting them overshadow the writer's own interpretive claims, maintaining a clear argumentative thread throughout.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates comparative close reading across two primary texts, identifying structural and thematic parallels — alienated labor, escapist fantasy, and the African "jungle" as symbol — while also accounting for important differences, particularly the role of racial self-awareness in Hansberry versus the more abstract disorientation in Miller. This technique allows the writer to build a unified argument without flattening the distinctiveness of each work.
Structure breakdown
The paper opens with a broad cultural framing of the American Dream, introduces its thesis about both plays as capitalist critiques, then devotes focused sections to each playwright's treatment of labor and fantasy before synthesizing. The argument moves from mythology to text to symbol, building complexity as it progresses.
The American Dream as Cultural Mythology
The idea of the "American Dream" — of achieving material success through one's own efforts — is not merely a constant topic in American literature; it seems to be a fundamental archetype of American national mythology. The autobiography of Benjamin Franklin and the popular stories of Horatio Alger in the 19th century established this motif as central to the American concept of manhood. We can see the same motif still at work, virtually unaltered, in the 2006 film The Pursuit of Happyness. Based on the story of a real man, Chris Gardner (played by Will Smith), who is rendered homeless with his five-year-old son (played by Will Smith's real-life son Jaden), Gardner manages through charm and a few lucky breaks not only to drag himself out of the poverty caused by his unwise investment in bone-density scanners, but back up into success. As Gardner tells his son in the film: "You gotta dream… You gotta protect it. People can't do somethin' themselves, they wanna tell you can't do it. If you want somethin', go get it. Period." (Muccino 2006).
Yet Gardner's dreams pay off, ensuring this Hollywood production is precisely what Manohla Dargis called it in her review of The Pursuit of Happyness in The New York Times — "a fairy tale in realist drag." Dargis concludes tartly that "how you respond to this man's moving story may depend on whether you find Mr. Smith's and his son's performances so overwhelmingly winning that you buy the idea that poverty is a function of bad luck and bad choices, and success the result of heroic toil and dreams." In other words, the very existence of the "American Dream" seems ineluctably to conjure up its own opposite — a dark critique of the pursuit of what one critic (William James) would darkly term "the bitch-goddess Success."
I would suggest that the protagonists of two important mid-century American plays — Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman and Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun — are really intended as illustrations of the moral failures of the capitalist pursuit of "success." Indeed, the notion of any human problems (social, ethical, or otherwise) being solved by the system of profit-making private enterprise as it exists in America in the mid-twentieth century (and to this day) is made to seem absurd by both plays. In the end, both Miller and Hansberry present their central characters as a way of critiquing an American mindset that views human beings purely in terms of their cash value.
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