Jan 10, 2006 Fences

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Fences | Style

Act
A major division in a drama. In Greek plays the sections of the drama signified by the appearance of the chorus and were usually divided into five acts. This is the formula for most serious drama from the Greeks to the Romans to Elizabethan playwrights like William Shakespeare. The five acts denote the structure of dramatic action. They are exposition, complication, climax, falling action, and catastrophe. The five act structure was followed until the nineteenth century when Henrik Ibsen (A Doll's House) combined some of the acts. Fences is a two-act play. The exposition and complication are combined in the first act when the audience learns of Troy's affair with another woman and of the conflict between father and son, the role sports plays in each man's life. The climax occurs in the second act when Troy must admit to having fathered a child with his mistress. The climax to the father-son friction also occurs in the second act when the conflict between Troy and Cory escalates, and Cory leaves his father's home for good. The catastrophe also occurs in this act when the players assemble for Troy's funeral and Cory is finally able to deal with his resentment and accept his father's failings.

Setting
The time, place, and culture in which the action of the play takes place is called the setting. The elements of setting may include geographic location, physical or mental environments, prevailing cultural attitudes, or the historical time in which the action takes place. The location for Fences is an urban city in 1957 America. The action occurs over a period of several months and then jumps ahead seven years for the last scene. The action is further reduced to one set, the yard of the Maxson home.

Character
A person in a dramatic work. The actions of each character are what constitute the story. Character can also include the idea of a particular individual's morality. Characters can range from simple stereotypical figures to more complex multi-faceted ones. Characters may also be defined by personality traits, such as the rogue or the damsel in distress. "Characterization'' is the process of creating a lifelike person from an author's imagination. To accomplish this, the author provides the character with personality traits that help define who he will be and how he will behave in a given situation. For instance, in the beginning of Fences Troy seems to accept the responsibilities he has acquired. He appears content with his marriage and comfortable in providing for his family and caring for Gabriel. As the action progresses, however, it becomes clear that Troy yearns for escape from these responsibilities. He finds this escape with Alberta but at the cost of his marriage.

Conflict
The conflict is the issue(s) to be resolved in the play. It usually occurs between two characters, but it can also occur between a character and society (as it does in Arthur Miller's The Crucible). Conflict serves to create tension in a plot—it is often the motivating force that drives a plot. For instance, in Fences there is a clear conflict between Cory's desire to play footfall and the disappointments that his father felt when his dreams of success in professional sports were never realized. There is also conflict between Troy and his wife when she discovers that he has fathered a child with another woman. And finally, Troy's disappointment in sports represents the conflict between a largely white-dominated organization, professional sports, and a talented black man who feels he has been cheated and deprived of success. This conflict provides one of the fences that isolates black athletes from opportunities available to white Americans.

Metaphor
Metaphor is an analogy that identifies one object with another and ascribes to the first object the qualities of the second. For example, the fence is a metaphor for the walls that confine Troy and Bono to prison. There are fences (though unseen) between Troy and his family. It is also a metaphor for the white society that confines blacks and restricts their opportunities. In this drama, baseball is also a metaphor for Troy's life. His successes are hits over the fence, but his failures are strike-outs.

Plot
This term refers to the pattern of events. Generally plots should have a beginning, a middle, and a conclusion, but they may also be a series of episodes connected together. Basically, the plot provides the author with the means to explore primary themes. Students are often confused between the two terms; but themes explore ideas, and plots simply relate what happens in a very obvious manner. Thus the plot of Fences is the story of a black family divided by the loss and anger of past and present disappointments. But the themes are those of family unity and love and racial intolerance.

Fences | Historical Context

Professional Athletics
By 1957, the year in which Fences is set, black athletes had become an integrated part of professional and college sports, at least on the surface. The all-white teams of the World War II—and previous—years began to include blacks in 1947 when Jackie Robinson became the first black to play professional baseball since the color line was drawn in the 1890s. But the change still did not bring the same opportunity and equality as blacks might have hoped. Black leagues began to falter and disappear as more blacks began to support the now integrated ball teams. Troy Maxson, who had played in the Negro Leagues, found the change to integrated leagues had come too late; he was now too old to play professional ball.

The Negro Leagues had been financial disasters for players; salaries were inadequate to support a family. But, ten years after integration, the major leagues did not prove to be a financial bonanza for black players either. The huge salaries that were to become the hallmark of professional sports in the 1980s and 1990s simply did not exist in the late 1950s. The picture for college athletics was also different for blacks than for whites. Black players were not always permitted to live in campus housing, and when they traveled to games, black athletes were sometimes refused accommodations at hotels where the team was staying. Instead, black players were dropped off at the YMCA or lodged with black families. Given this knowledge, it is little wonder that Troy is suspicious of the recruiters who want to seduce his son with scholarships and the possibility of a career in professional sports.

Employment
When the flood of immigrants poured into the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century, they found opportunity and employment in factories, offices, and small business. The white work force was plentiful and employers took advantage of the availability of the eager new citizens, who came expecting that hard work would make it possible to marry, raise a family, and live the American Dream. But for blacks, who were also moving into large northern cities in huge numbers, the American Dream remained an elusive possibility, just beyond their grasp.

Troy admits that had he not been able to use his brother's disability benefit, he would not have been able to purchase a home, even though he had been working hard for nearly twenty years. With the availability of a large white work force, blacks were too often the last hired and the first fired. In addition, many black workers lacked the training necessary to get ahead. The job of hauling garbage is available to blacks, but even within that job, there is a division of work by race. White employees drive trucks; black employees load the garbage. Troy cannot read and does not have a driver's license, but he breaks through the color barrier to win a driver's job because he complains that there are no black drivers. The union, which protects his job when he complains, is the one ally the black workers have.

Housing
Because of limited job opportunities, most blacks did not earn enough money to own their own homes. But in 1957 the American Dream became a reality for many white families. In the post-war economy, home ownership for whites was booming. The World War II G.I. bill had made it possible for returning servicemen to go to college. These better educated men found successful careers that brought a higher standard of living than the previous generation had known. This resulted in an explosion of new home building, the creation of suburbs, and ultimately, the exodus of whites from the inner city. Few blacks could afford the new homes that were going up on development sites all across the country. Instead, many urban blacks lived in the same kind of ghetto in which Wilson himself had been born. The front yard of the Maxson home is a rarity for most black families who often lived in huge inner-city apartment buildings.

Racism
The 1950s still revealed an America with two races, separated by color and economic barriers. Blacks and whites attended different schools, lived in different neighborhoods, and received different benefits from their citizenship. Before the advent of forced busing in the 1960s, most blacks attended schools in poorer neighborhoods. Because schools are funded by a complicated system of bonds supported by taxes, black schools (in neighborhoods that collected lower taxes) received less money and thus had smaller resources with which to pay salaries, maintain buildings, or buy new equipment. The result was that students at predorminately black schools received a sub-standard level of education.

Other areas of inequality included suffrage and justice. Blacks were not encouraged to vote; in fact, many areas discouraged blacks from voting by instituting difficult competency exams as qualifiers. Whites were not required to pass these exams. Accordingly, blacks had little input into the political decisions that shaped their lives. Blacks also suffered unequal treatment under the law. Many could not read the contracts they signed or were too intimidated to protest. In addition, blacks often became the victims of discrimination under criminal statutes. Ignorance of their legal rights meant that blacks often languished in jail. In some cases, blacks were lynched by unruly mobs who were sometimes sanctioned by a law enforcement organization that looked the other way. The civil unrest of the 1960s was a direct result of these injustices.

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