Death of a Salesman Stockings Quotes

LINDA: Just mending my stockings. They’re so expensive.
WILLY (angrily, taking them from her): I won’t have you mending stockings in this house! Now throw them out! (Linda puts the stockings in her pocket.)

– Arthur Miller

Death of a Salesman, Act 1. Willy returns to reality after hallucinating about the The Woman he has been having an affair with. He has gifted The Woman a pair of brand new and expensive stockings, when he cannot even provide for his own wife Linda and family. He lashes out angrily at Linda when he sees her mending her torn stockings. This is Willy being haunted by his own guilty conscience, because the stocking are a reminder of his betrayal of his wife.

THE WOMAN: Where’s my stockings? You promised me stockings, Willy!
WILLY: I have no stockings here!
THE WOMAN: You had two boxes of size nine sheers for me, and I want them!
WILLY: Here, for God’s sake, will you get outa here!
THE WOMAN (enters holding a box of stockings).

– Arthur Miller

Death of a Salesman, Act 2. The Woman Willy Loman is having an extra marital affair with demands a box of stockings from him before she leave his Boston hotel room. Stockings are symbolic of Willy’s sexual infidelity in the play and his betrayal not just of wife Linda but son Biff who walks in on Willy during the affair.

WILLY: She’s nothing to me, Biff. I was lonely, I was terrible lonely.
BIFF: You – you gave her Mama’s stockings! (His tears break through and he rises to go.)

– Arthur Miller

Death of a Salesman, Act 2. Willy’s infidelity is exposed as Biff yells at his father about the stockings he bought for his mistress. A heartbroken Biff says that the stockings should have been for his mom. Biff is angry after discovering his father with another woman in a hotel room. It is a devastating moment of disillusionment for the boy. The stockings are a symbol of betrayal. Biff carries the image of them and resentment of the father he once looked up to throughout the play.
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