Theme, symbolism, and conflict in August Wilson's Fences

Fences

Where Have All the Fathers Gone?

August Wilson's award-winning play Fences takes as one of its central themes the shimmering figure of the African-American father. That person so often missing from actual black families, where women head their families generation after generation as the fathers of their children become increasingly alienated, disenfranchising themselves even as a number of forces push them away from their families. Wilson reminds us that simply because a father is missing it does not mean that the vacuum so created does not bend everything in its path.

Both the characters of Troy and Bono tell stories from their Southern childhoods, stories that twist and turn around the fathers who have disappointed them in different ways -- even as they continue to compel their children's love. Wilson writes about the ways in which children and fathers hurt and forgive each other:

When the sins of our fathers visit us

We do not have to play host.

We can banish them with forgiveness

As God, in his Largeness and Laws.

Troy and Bono spend Act One, Scene Four talking to Lyons about the particular sins of their particular fathers. Their stories underscore how the pains and loves faced by different generations of men share key similarities but are even more distinctly marked by their differences. For while the stories of black men in the decades since Restoration are filled with many of the same hardships and strains in familial relationships, the lives of each generation bend in unique ways.

The stories of each men reflect the history of their generation. Troy's father is like so many of the black men of his generation a man who tried and failed as a sharecropper -- a line of work that is even at its best an admission of having failed to find a secure place for oneself and one's family in society.

Troy's picture of this father is of a man who was so cruel and so without any of the basic virtues that women refused to stay for him for any period of time. His father thus drove away woman after woman who might have been a mother to Troy. Thus Troy was in many ways orphaned through a combination of his father's cruelty and the lack of any consistent female figure. When Troy allows a mule in his care to wander off and his father comes looking for him, Troy learns that his father is even more cruel and conscienceless than he had thought. Troy's father beats his fourteen-year-old son and then rapes the boy's friend.

Troy understands in this moment that the cruelty in his life is represented by men. And part of the real evil that he seems as emanating from men is that they destroy women and drive them away. Troy sees the real harm that his father has done to women. And yet he also struggles to understand how a man who could be so vicious to women could also struggle to support his children. What Troy does not seem to understand -- even as he becomes the financial support of his own family -- that the abuse and the position of breadwinner are in fact closely linked to each other. The man who provides all of the money that his father has and the rapist are both men who control those around them.

Bono's father is also absent in important ways from Bono's life. Bono describes his father as being plagued by "the walking blues." This condition meant that he could not -- would not -- settle down in any one place with any one woman. Bono's attachment to his father is so thin that he barely recognizes him. Bono's father is drawn by the siren call of the "New Land," part of the Great Migration that many blacks (mostly men) took to states north of the Mason-Dixon line.