Lesson Notes By Weeks and Term - Senior Secondary School 1
THEMES, LANGUAGE AND STYLE IN THE PLAY
THEMES, LANGUAGE AND STYLE IN THE PLAY
SUBJECT: LITERATURE-IN-ENGLISH
CLASS: SS1
DATE:
TERM: 3RD TERM
REFERENCE
WEEK FIVE
THEMES, LANGUAGE AND STYLE IN THE PLAY
Blackness and Race RelationsTheme Analysis |
Themes and Colours
Set in Pittsburgh in the 1950s, Fences explores the experience of one black family living in the era of segregation and a burgeoning black rights movement, exposing, at the heart of its characters’ psychology, a dynamic between the inner world of a black community and the expanse of white power around it.
The fence which Troy gradually builds in front of his house serves as a symbol of segregation, as well as the general psychological need to build a fortress where a black ‘inside’ or interior can set itself off from the white-dominated world around it. From one angle, the fence represents the geographical effects of segregation in general: the fencing-off of blacks, the creation of ethnic insularity in certain neighborhoods, and it is a monument to this basic social division effected by white economic and political power. Yet Troy also builds the fence himself; it’s largely his own creation, though Rose initially tasks him with building it. Rose wants the fence in order to set her and her family off from the outside world, to protect a private interior of their experience—lived, black experience—from an outside world threatening to invade it, and from the divisive effects which white power inflicts upon society. While the latter divides with the aim of controlling and limiting black prosperity and influence, the division effected by Troy’s fence is one of protection and an affirmation of the world within it.
Throughout the play, we also see how its characters are forced to define their world in terms of how it’s limited by a racist system of white social and economic power. We see that Troy’s workplace, for instance, is organized according to a racial hierarchy privileging whites, since exclusively white men are hired to drive the company’s garbage trucks, while black men are only hired as garbage collectors. Further, much of the characters’ speech relies on pointing out their status as people of color in order to describe their position in relation to white power.
Wilson’s play therefore, in part, concerns itself with depicting how racism governs and structures the everyday lives of its characters, in order to expose—through the concrete experiences of one family—racism’s many effects on the black American community of the 1950s at large. The meaning behind and need for the fence, and the play’s exposure of a black world in many ways defined by its oppression, are a scathing condemnation of the division and pain inflicted by white power. Fences gives a palpable reality to the abstract mechanisms of racism and white power—it reveals the pain of, as well as the aspirations and opportunities withheld from, its black characters. Through framing pain as being at the heart of almost all its characters’ lives, Wilson reveals the psychological complexity and intensely tiresome and tasking nature of navigating a racist world divided principally between white and black. At the same time, he reveals how that division divides blacks themselves through the pain it inflicts upon them (such as Troy’s conflict with Cory over his desire to play football, since Troy’s parenting is informed by his past experience of discrimination in the world of sports).
Manhood and Fathers Theme Analysis |
The play largely revolves around the turbulent relationship between Troy and his children—particularly his relationship with Cory. Cory’s desire to assert his own manhood and determine his own future clashes with the authority Troy feels as a father. Further, Cory’s ambitions go against everything Troy thinks will be good and healthy for his son’s prosperity.
Cory evolves in the play from cowering in fear of his father to ultimately severing his ties with him in a gesture of ‘masculine’ hubris. While Cory grew up being incredibly passive and submissive to his father out of fear, he gradually starts acting out of his own self-interest (such as his pursuit of football) in his later teens. Troy actively denounces Cory’s attempts to define and pursue his own goals, and believes that Cory is obligated to absolutely bend to his way insofar as Cory lives under his roof. But this eventually pushes Cory to leave home and curse his father’s treatment of him and his mother. Earlier in the play, Troy describes a similar situation with his own father growing up. Troy’s father, while a tough man to live with, looked after his children, according to his account. But Troy, getting into a severe conflict with his father one day, left his father—like his own son—to go out on his own.
Perhaps as a symptom of his own struggles with leading a stable life as an independent man, Troy, in trying to protect Cory from similar struggles, seems to ultimately think that Cory’s desire to make his own decisions fundamentally contradicts their father-son relationship. It’s as if, in order for Cory to become a man—which would inevitably involve assuming independence from his father’s command—he must necessarily be at odds with his father.
Further, Wilson seems to be exposing us to one kind of ‘masculinity,’ one way it is constructed and defined—and how that construction is based in the social world around it as well as in the characters’ personal history. In this case, the masculinity is that of Troy, and can be interpreted as something of an archetype of a certain kind of working black father in the 50s.
This masculinity is defined by having defied one’s father in the past, endured poverty propped-up by a racist society, and failed to follow one’s dreams—but having nonetheless survived, stayed alive, and kept going, despite all the odds. In the eyes of their father, then, Cory and Lyons live comparatively privileged lives having been entirely provided for until they were grown. But, in the eyes of Troy’s sons—especially Cory—this isn’t enough. Cory doesn’t feel loved by his father, and can’t see how his father’s harshness is in anyway symptomatic of something larger than him and beyond his control. The play perhaps shouldn’t be read as siding with Troy’s treatment of his children and his decisions in raising them—rather, it tries to show, once again, how two worldviews clash in the father-son relation.
Wilson doesn’t seem to offer a clean-cut solution to escaping the cycle of misunderstanding, anger, and stuck-in-the-past-ness characteristic of men like Troy and their fathers. He does show, however, how they can have such incredible power in shaping the future of their children—e.g., Cory doesn’t get to go to college—and therefore the future generation. Additionally, Wilson shows how difficult it is to free oneself from such a father without totally severing the relationship.
Ultimately, Wilson’s decision to make the conflict between father and son the central pivot of the play underscores his desire to show how abstract forces of history—particularly white social and economic power—manifest themselves, through their racist exertion on peoples’ lives, in real, concrete, everyday lived black experience. The microscopic, psychological relationship between a father and his son is one of the most intimate venues for those more macroscopic forces, and as such, is very powerful to witness—it’s a venue with an educational power for white audiences.
MortalityTheme Analysis |
The topic of death appears throughout the play in various forms, both in the physical death of two characters (Troy and Alberta), as well as in the stories told by Troy and through his brotherGabriel’s obsession with the Christian afterlife.
Troy mentions the grim reaper (“Mr. Death”) several times throughout the play, telling a story about how they once wrestled. Troy seems to believe that, while death is an unavoidable fate, one should try to go out with a fight. Troy says that he knew Death had the upper hand in their battle, but that he nonetheless wanted to make his death as difficult as possible to achieve. Further, the fence can be read as a barrier to the inevitable onslaught of death. Troy mentions that the fence he builds is a way of keeping Death out of his life.
Gabriel, always thinking about judgment day, has perhaps just as strong an obsession with death as his brother. Gabriel’s obsession, however, is more loud and noticeable because it’s expressed in his manic, psychotic ideas about his supposed spiritual powers. Troy’s obsession with death is perhaps just as strong, however, for in a way it sustains him: Troy’s pride in having survived against all the odds—his father, intense poverty, personal failure—relies on death to fuel itself.
On the day of Troy’s funeral, Gabriel declares that Troy has successfully entered the gates of heaven. While this declaration may not indicate the opinions of other characters, it nonetheless ends the play, and is the final word on Troy’s death. Gabriel’s proclamation therefore has both a punctuality and an ambivalence; the play ends with the gates of heaven opening onto and usurping Troy’s fenced-off existence. Death ends the play by annihilating the in/out distinction effected by a fence, and Troy dies in an unfavorable status because of his adultery.
Wilson therefore seems to speak against Troy’s view of death, and how this view informs his approach to life and the lives around him. If we take Troy to view death as a force that should be fought against at all costs, to the extent that one should give up on taking any risks (such as Cory’s football ambitions, in his mind) and even sacrifice one’s ability to give love and compassion to one’s family members as a result of that fight, then Wilson seems to speak against this.
By having Troy die unsatisfied and in low moral standing, Wilson suggests a couple of things. First, with regard to Troy’s adultery, he did take a risk—but one for himself, and which endangered his family, rather than a risk at least attempting to invest in his family (like letting Cory try out football and attend college, despite his uncertainty about its promise). Troy lets the pressure of death eat at him to such an extent that he seeks to find satisfaction in life (to defy and thwart that pressure) in an extreme form, somewhere outside the space he’s cultivated and fenced off for his family. Secondly, Troy is ultimately unhappy because of this decision to find satisfaction beyond his fence—he ruins his relationship with Rose, and Alberta dies because of the baby with which he impregnated her. This suggests that Troy’s constant struggle to defy death and win out against it—or at least his specific methods of doing so—is something which ultimately fails, and which hurts everyone who’s affected by that failure.
The FenceSymbol Analysis |
The fence that Rose asks Troy to build, and envisions as wrapping protectively around her family, can be read in a several ways. On one level, the division effected by the fence seems to echo the separation of people and social spaces central to the workings of segregation—an unjust practice pervading the time in which the play takes place. Yet, while Troy and Cory’s construction of a border around their home may resonate with the racial divide plaguing the society it pictures, it’s also an emblem of black courage and strength, and of the integrity of black lives and history. Rose yearns to fence-off and fence-in her family’s lives and the bond connecting them from a racist world of white dominance—from a society bent on delegitimizing black life and casting it as second-class. The fence therefore also speaks to the psychological need Rose and many like her felt, and still feel, to preserve an inner, private life against the brunt of an outside world where that life is rejected and made to conform to the mechanisms of white power.
The fence also seems to serve as a figure for Troy’s career, resembling the perimeter of a baseball stadium: the fence he strived, with his bat, to hit beyond. Despite Troy’s talent, his skin color barred him from any chance of a steady career in the white-dominated world of professional baseball. The fence of Troy’s career, therefore, was at once a marker of his skill whenever he hit a home run, as well as a border enclosing a world and a future he could never fully enter. Therefore, when Troy builds the fence for Rose, he’s building his own limit, his own arena—a limit not imposed upon him by forces of discrimination out of his control.
While it’s critical to read the fence as a symbol of race division and how it affects the Maxson family, the motivation to build it can also be read as stemming from Rose’s sheer, maternal desire to protect and fortify her family. Additionally, Troy’s efforts to wall-off his home resonate with his ongoing conflict with “Mr. Death.” By fortifying the perimeter of his home, Troy gestures towards his desire to dam-up any lethal forces assailing him from the outside world.
August Wilson introduces his audience to the primary conflict in Fences at the very beginning of the play. All the characters are introduced in act 1, and their interrelationships are explained; the conflict between father and son is imminent. In Troy’s stubborn effort to prevent his own harsh history from repeating itself with his son Cory, Troy imposes his legacy on Cory’s dreams and aspirations. Heinous and misguided as Troy’s anger is, it does not seem irrational, because Wilson makes the audience understand the facts of Troy’s life. In a gripping speech (act 1, scene 4), Troy takes the audience along every painful mile of his “walking blues.” Fleeing from the rural racism of the South only to encounter the impoverished slums of the North, Troy Maxson epitomizes the African American males of his generation who were psychologically scarred by their social status: They were neither slaves nor free men.
Act 2, scene 1, further complicates the conflict between Troy and Cory, as Wilson creates conflict among other characters. The turning point of the play occurs when Rose attacks Troy for crossing her boundaries. This crucial moment changes the direction of the action and paves the way for the complications to unwind. The process by which Cory and the others reconcile themselves with Troy—and retrieve the pride he lost—is manifested in the play’s affecting denouement: It can only be accomplished after Troy’s death. Though the conclusion aims to reestablish a stable situation so that the drama may end, the audience is left with feelings of ambivalence. This ambivalence is the hallmark of Wilson’s achievement; he makes the audience understand Troy Maxson’s behavior without ever resorting to sentimentalizing him.
While Wilson’s tableau-like staging could serve any front-porch play, his clever use of the fence is another way in which the play achieves its effect. The fence provides a silent commentary on the action taking place all around it. Almost all August Wilson’s humor, poetry, and social observation somehow center on the fence. The tensions created by the image of the fence heighten the play’s conflict and invite the audience to participate in an emotional identification with the characters, who demand that the audience take sides in their disagreements.
EVALUATION QUESTIONS
How does the author use symbol in the work?
GENERAL EVALUATION
GENERAL EVALUATION/REVISION QUESTIONS
READING ASSIGNMENT
How does the play end.
WEEKEND ASSIGNMENT
THEORY
Discuss the use of contrast in the work.
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