Seeing through August Wilsons Fences - Essay Example

Seeing Through August Wilson's Fences The of August Wilson's play Fences epitomized what the seed of the story is all about. Set in the 1950s,Wilson created a play that explores the barriers that confine blacks. The title serves as a metaphor for all the fences that imprison the Maxson family. The fence that surrounds the Maxson home is not the white picket fence of the 1950s American ideal. Their fence is not decor and it is not an enhancement-it stands for its sole purpose. At the beginning of the play, Troy thinks he is building a fence to please Rose. She wants a fence that will keep all those she loves safe inside its walls. Later, after Alberta's death, Troy completes the fence to keep danger, death and frustration outside its walls. During the span of events in the play, the characters experience the impact of several important historical U.S. events to which they adapt or of which the characters become frustrated victims. Although the play proper begins in 1957, Troy's recollections reach as far back as the 1900s when he struggled under the cruel authority of a sharecropper father who was himself a product of the Reconstruction era. As soon as Troy came of age, he became part of the steady trickle from southern farmlands to northern cities. In the start of the play, two middle-aged black men make their way home to celebrate another week's end. Troy Maxson and his friend Jim Bono collect garbage for a living. For eight hours a day, they bend, they stoop, and they hoist cans of trash to a huge garbage compactor. As he has done each Friday evening, Troy hands over his weekly paycheck to his wife, Rose, who manages their home. Troy and Jim tease each other and look forward to another weekend away from the mental and physical pressures of their jobs. However, as much as he wanted to try, Troy cannot put the pressure of his job behind him. This is because he could not simply take witness to the outright discrimination on his job and in other aspects of his daily existence. Thus, he keeps a deep-seated disgust for the racism of his country. For example, he fumes over the fact that all of his coworkers who lift garbage cans are black, and all who drive the trucks are white. But garbage collecting is one of the few professions now open to Troy. Although he was aware that he was a good baseball player during the Negro League's heyday, by 1957, he is too old to play on a desegregated Major League team Wessling, 1999). These feelings of being passed over to transform Troy into a man obsessed with extorting from life an equal measure of what was robbed from him. Despite a seemingly loving and passionate relationship with his wife, Troy finds the "big-legged Florida gal" (p. 4), Alberta, irresistible. He is drawn into a physical relationship with her - one that produces their love child, Raynell. After Alberta dies in childbirth, Troy is left to raise the baby girl but finds that his only recourse is to plead with Rose to care for the motherless infant. Rose accepts this responsibility heroically, but at the same time she drives Troy away from her. As feelings of frustrations consume Troy, the negative feelings are passed on to his son Cory as well. In tense dramatic episodes, Troy and Cory clash over the boy's plans to become a football player. When Cory is convinced by high school coaches that he has a future in football, he is quick to quit his after-school job. Troy, who has other plans for Cory's future, secretly discourages an interested recruiter from scouting the boy's talents. As expected, Troy and Cory have a major argument, in which Troy encounters more opposition than he has ever gotten from any member of his family. More conflicts ensue as Troy's brain-damaged brother, Gabriel, always worries that Troy is angry at him; Lyons, Troy's son from a previous marriage, avoids confrontation and visits his father only when he wants a small loan; and Rose exists as a mere shadow in Troy's presence until she learns that he has impregnated Alberta. However, throughout the play, Cory never approved of his father's opinions and is not afraid to express his dissatisfaction, whether verbally, in the form of snide remarks, or physically, in a brief wrestling match. For Troy, the fence represents added restrictions placed upon him. Thus he half-heartedly erects one section of the fence at a time and completes the job only after accepting a challenge from Bono, who agrees to buy his wife, Lucille, a refrigerator as soon as Troy completes the fence. It takes Bono to explain to him the importance of the fence: CORY: I don't know why Mama want a fence around the yard noways. TROY: Damn if I know either. What the hell she keeping out with it She ain't got nothing nobody want. BONO: Some people build fences to keep people out... and other people build fences to keep people in. Rose wants to hold on to you all. She loves you. (p. 61) On a deeper level, Troy sees the fence's completion as a reminder of his own mortality; he senses that he is erecting his own monument. Troy's reluctance to complete the fence seems ominous, for shortly after finishing it for Rose, he dies. The fence, then, becomes a gauge for his life, during which he experiences both literal and figurative incarceration. The play ends in the 1960s, a decade that will bring significant changes for African Americans. The final scene takes place on the day of Troy's funeral: one of his favorite concocted stories about doing battle with the grim reaper has caught up with him, and he has died while batting the rag doll he tied to a tree in the yard. Previously alienated, the family members respond to Troy's death by tightening their communal bonds at this solemn occasion, and Rose gently convinces her prodigal son Cory to tear down the fences that have long existed between father and son. Although the death of Troy is kind wrapped with loneliness and frustration, there is a tinge of hope that his son Cory would rise above the racism that had made him so bitter. For much of the play, he vividly recalls the hard life he was forced to endure because of the circumstances black men faced in America. Like many other naive Negro slaves during their time, Troy was surprised at what their country had to offer: "I thought I was in freedom. Shhh. Colored folks living down there on the river banks in whatever kind of shelter they could find for themselves.... Living in shacks made of sticks and paper" (p. 54). While European immigrants in the early 1900s were welcomed into America's workforce - eventually earning (and able to borrow) enough capital to purchase land, homes, and businesses - blacks continued to be regarded as the country's outcasts. Although the play centers mostly on its male characters, the play has a lot of metaphors that we could link to the real feelings of the characters - the fence, the baseball games and the character of Gabriel. The play effectively stirred up all these metaphors to unfold the message that the most difficult fence for black people is not the discrimination itself, but the aspect that it restricts their achievements, it steals them their opportunities and it is the fence that whites erect to keep blacks one step behind from all of their dreams. This is the fence that the playwright August Wilson wants his audience to see so that this fence could be brought down. The play is quite heart-warming and tragic in the sense that the main character has to die together with his frustrations. Throughout the play, the audience is assisted in understanding how the most such familiar objects could be tool for us to think about historical mistakes through discrimination. We are invited to think that every man and woman always strive for dignity, despite the difficult challenges they face and have faced for generations. Thus, I had no doubt that August Wilson really deserved all the awards he garnered for this play alone in 1986: Pulitzer Prize for drama, Tony Award for best play, and award for best Broadway play. It is a one-of-a-kind family drama that instills the importance of multiculturalism and equality among us Americans. Works Cited Wessling, Joseph H. Wilson's Fences. Explicator 57.2 (winter 1999): 123-27. Wilson, August. Fences. New York: Plume (Reissue edition), 1986. Read More