• 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...

• 阿瑟·米勒的舞台自杀学：《推销员之死》中的自杀与戏剧形式
• 尼古拉斯·达迪（简介）

1962 年 8 月 5 日，阿瑟·米勒的前妻玛丽莲·梦露的尸体在她布伦特伍德家中的卧室里被发现。纠缠在一起的床单、药瓶、她手上的旋转电话听筒——房间里的场景就像谋杀之谜的场景，这位文化偶像死后和生前一样受到了同样多的关注。¹世界各地的报纸以模棱两可且耸人听闻的头版头条宣布了她的去世：“玛丽莲死了”（《每日新闻》）、“玛丽莲电话之谜”（《每日快报》）、“玛丽莲·梦露自杀：被发现裸体在床上……手”在电话里……吃了 40 粒药”（《纽约镜报》）。²

不到两周后，洛杉矶县验尸官西奥多·柯菲身穿白色实验服，嘴里叼着雪茄，坐在一屋子记者面前宣布他的调查结果。他在裁决前公开呼吁：

女士们先生们，我必须坦率地说，在我自己的头脑中寻找召开这次会议的任何理由时，我想到的最令人信服的理由是认识到玛丽莲·梦露在不知不觉中不幸地去世时扮演了最伟大的角色的重要性。她的职业生涯让我们每个人都关注这个全球性问题的严重性，迫切需要解决方案。³

坐在柯菲旁边的是两名男子，心理学家诺曼·法伯罗和精神病学家罗伯特·利特曼，他们通过对梦露进行“心理尸检”，研究她的生活方式、行为和性格特征，帮助验尸官得出“可能自杀”的结论。她的自杀心态。⁴身着黑色西装的法伯罗和[完第 33 页]利特曼庄严地回答了媒体关于梦露最后时刻的问题。“我们能得出的唯一结论是自杀，”利特曼说。“或者至少是一场与死亡的赌博。” ⁵

法伯罗和利特曼在洛杉矶自杀预防中心与埃德温·施奈德曼合作时开发了这种心理调查方法，该组织成立于四年前，是一个临床实践、公共卫生机构和自杀研究中心。不过，该中心的起源可以追溯到 1949 年，即《推销员之死》在百老汇摩罗斯科剧院 (Morosco Theatre) 上演的那一年。米勒完善了《推销员》的制作剧本，而后来被认为是“当代自杀学之父”的施奈德曼则分析了从验尸官金库中提取的 721 份自杀笔记，并在盲测中将它们与非自杀者所写的模拟笔记进行了比较。⁶这项系统研究成为“自杀学”、“自杀现象的科学研究”这一新兴学科的开创性发展。⁷正是对梦露之死的调查，这是二十世纪历史上的一个臭名昭著的事件，也是当代自杀研究的一个开创性时刻，代表了米勒和施奈德曼，剧作家和心理学家，两个专注于理解的人之间的联系。自杀经历。

尽管工作领域不同，米勒和施奈德曼的自杀方法反映了对导致个人死亡的环境和动机的相似兴趣。米勒和施奈德曼分别出生于 1915 年和 1918 年，他们在大萧条时期长大，当时美国的自杀率上升了百分之二十以上。⁸作为大学生，两人都对文学和心理学之间的联系表现出了兴趣：米勒主修英语，在密歇根大学师从沃尔特·鲍尔斯·皮尔斯伯里 (Walter Bowers Pillsbury) 学习大二心理学课程；施奈德曼是一名心理学专业学生，他在加州大学洛杉矶分校跟随乔治·谢尔顿·哈贝尔学习了大二美国文学课程。⁹在他们的职业生涯中，他们偏向于探索人类心灵的文学。米勒引用了阅读陀思妥耶夫斯基的经历——陀思妥耶夫斯基的四部伟大小说《罪与罚》（1866年）、《白痴》（1869年）、《恶魔》（1872年）和《卡拉马佐夫兄弟》（1880年）深入探讨了自杀心理，这位俄罗斯作家称之为“可怕的自杀心理”。我们这个时代的问题”——而在高三[完第 34 页]的时候，“我知道我必须成为一名作家”。¹⁰施奈德曼也相信“世界上最伟大的心理学家不是冯特、蒂钦纳或……