Arthur Miller's Suicidology of the Stage: Suicide and Dramatic Form in Death of a Salesman

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• Arthur Miller's Suicidology of the Stage:Suicide and Dramatic Form in Death of a Salesman
• Nicholas Duddy (bio)

On August 5, 1962, the body of Marilyn Monroe, Arthur Miller's exwife, was found in the bedroom of her Brentwood home. Tangled bedsheets, bottles of pills, a rotary phone receiver by her hand—the room resembled the mise-en-scène of a murder mystery, and in death the cultural icon received just as much attention as in life.¹ Newspapers across the world announced her death with front page headlines that were both equivocal and sensational: "Marilyn Dead" (Daily News), "Marilyn Phone Riddle" (Daily Express), "Marilyn Monroe Kills Self: Found Nude in Bed … Hand On Phone … Took 40 Pills" (New York Mirror).²

Less than two weeks later, Los Angeles County Coroner Theodore Curphey, clad in a white lab coat, cigar in mouth, sat before a room of reporters to announce the findings of his inquest. He prefaced his ruling with a public appeal:

Ladies and gentlemen, I must be frank to state that in seeking in my own mind any justification for this conference the most impelling reason that occurred to me is the importance of recognizing that in the death of Marilyn Monroe she has unwittingly and unfortunately played the greatest role of her career in focusing the attention of every one of us living on the gravity of a worldwide problem that bathetically cries out for a solution.³

Sitting beside Curphey were two men, psychologist Norman Farberow and psychiatrist Robert Litman, who had helped the coroner reach the verdict of a "probable suicide" by performing a "psychological autopsy" on Monroe, studying her lifestyle, behavior, and character traits to uncover her suicidal state of mind.⁴ Solemn in their black suits, Farberow and [End Page 33] Litman fielded questions from the press about Monroe's final moments. "The only conclusion we could reach was suicide," Litman stated. "Or at least a gamble with death."⁵

Farberow and Litman had developed this method of psychological enquiry while working with Edwin Shneidman at the Los Angeles Suicide Prevention Center, an organization established just four years earlier as a clinical practice, public health agency, and research site into suicide. The Center's origins, though, date to 1949, the year Death of a Salesman opened in Broadway's Morosco Theatre. While Miller refined Salesman's production script, Shneidman, who would later be considered "a father of contemporary suicidology," analyzed 721 suicide notes pulled from a coroner's vault and compared them in a blind test to simulated notes written by non-suicidal individuals.⁶ This systematic study became a seminal development in the emerging discipline of "suicidology," "the scientific study of suicidal phenomena."⁷ And it is this investigation into Monroe's death, an infamous event in twentieth-century history, and a seminal moment in the contemporary study of suicide, that represents the nexus between Miller and Shneidman, the playwright and the psychologist, two men preoccupied with understanding suicidal experience.

Although working in different fields, Miller's and Shneidman's approaches to suicide reflected a similar interest in the circumstances and motivations driving an individual to death. Born in 1915 and 1918 respectively, Miller and Shneidman came of age during the Great Depression, an event that saw the American suicide rate increase by over twenty percent.⁸ As college students, both men expressed an interest in the connection between literature and psychology: Miller, an English major, took a sophomore psychology course with Walter Bowers Pillsbury at the University of Michigan; Shneidman, a Psychology major, took a sophomore American literature course with George Shelton Hubbell at the University of California Los Angeles.⁹ Over their careers, they gravitated towards literature that probed the human psyche. Miller cited the experience of reading Dostoevsky—whose four great novels Crime and Punishment (1866), The Idiot (1869), Demons (1872), and The Brothers Karamazov (1880) delve into suicidal psychology, what the Russian writer called "the dreadful question of our age"—while a high [End Page 34] school senior as the moment when "I knew that I had to be a writer."¹⁰ Shneidman, too, believed "the world's greatest psychologists are not Wundt or Titchener or...