생계부양 남성성과 돌봄의 비가시화－『세일즈맨의 죽음』의 학제융합적 읽기 = Breadwinner Masculinity and the Invisibility of Care - An Interdisciplinary Reading of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This study examines Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman through the interplay between stage-bound domestic apparatuses and discursive regimes, asking how the tragedy is set in motion and made to endure. Its analytical focus is the “narrative rationalization” by which Willy reorders and legitimates his present deficit in performance by reconfiguring it as past success and future promise. This mechanism is interpreted through Paul Ricoeur’s concepts of sameness and selfhood (idem/ipse). Drawing on Nancy Fraser’s account of the capital–care contradiction, the study further argues that breadwinner masculinity and the invisibilization of care constitute the conditions that sustain such narrative rationalization.
The scene-based analysis proceeds from the opening, where the language of performance intersects with the discourse of care, to the value rules implied in the firing scene, the semiotic shift triggered by the exposure of the affair in the Boston hotel, and the clash between factual reporting and imperative speech in the restaurant scene. In this process, Linda’s affective buffering and household management temporarily defer catastrophe, yet her care work is shown to be excluded from regimes of evaluation and reward.
Accordingly, as this article’s analysis suggests, the play’s critical thrust is not confined to the moral critique of the American Dream. Rather, it reveals how the language of reputation and recognition colludes with rules of inscription and quantification to exclude care, thereby structuring the process through which individual burnout is produced. The tragedy thus indicts not a patriarch’s personal failure but a systemic failure that externalizes the costs of social reproduction. On this basis, the article calls for a reconsideration of the limits of performance-centered regimes of valuation and of the structural omission of care, while offering an interdisciplinary reading that connects narratological inquiry with care economics.