Berniece as Protagonist in August Wilson's The Piano Lesson

Introduction: Berniece as Protagonist and Heroine

In August Wilson's play The Piano Lesson, Berniece is the protagonist and heroine — the main character who represents the traditions and heritage of her family, reaching back to the era of slavery and even to Africa itself. Willie, by contrast, is the antagonist: a violent, angry man, a thief and a murderer who takes revenge on the Sutter family but now intends to use the proceeds from selling the piano to buy their land. In short, he is a young capitalist who means to move up in America and claim the place once held by the Sutters — a plan Berniece refuses to support.

From the outset, Berniece refuses to cooperate with Willie. For most of the play she remains deeply reluctant to engage with the piano at all, yet in the climactic scene at the end she uses its power to save her brother's life from the ghost of James Sutter. She also teaches her daughter Maretha the instrument's history and meaning, ensuring that the family legacy will pass to the next generation. Berniece is the protagonist because her conflict with Willie drives the entire play, and the choices about whether to sell the piano — and how to use it — are always in her hands. She is the key matriarchal and spiritual figure in the story, and she ultimately invokes the spirits of their ancestors to save their traditions for the future.

Act I: Establishing the Central Conflict

In Act I, Berniece is immediately established as the protagonist. She clearly intends to prevent her brother Willie from selling the piano, even though she fears and dislikes it. Throughout the drama, the central conflict remains between Berniece and Willie, and it is ultimately resolved in her favor. Although she is deeply ambivalent about the piano and the legacy it represents, she never supports Willie's plan to sell it in order to buy the Sutter land. Only at the play's end does she come to accept it as the symbol of their family traditions, stretching back through slavery to Africa.

She also blames Willie for her husband's death, which resulted from a fight he provoked with white men back in Mississippi — the reason Willie had been imprisoned at Parchman Farm for three years. From the start, Berniece makes clear that she does not want Willie in the house at all. She voices her suspicions immediately, saying that "somebody down there pushing them people in their wells" (Wilson 5), implying that Willie murdered the white landowner James Sutter. Symbolically, Berniece also represents the entire family line, including an ancestor named Berniece whom the slave master Robert Sutter traded for the piano 137 years earlier.

Act II: Ambivalence, Loss, and the Weight of the Past

In Act II, Berniece remains reluctant to go near the piano, fearing that doing so would release the spirits of the dead into the house. When August Wilson's character Avery proposes to her, he suggests she either sell the piano or donate it to his church for choir practice. She again reveals her suspicion that Willie murdered Sutter, lamenting that "all this thieving and killing and thieving and killing, and what did it ever lead to? More killing and more thieving" (Wilson 52). If she could, she would escape the past entirely and leave it buried and forgotten — though in the end she makes a different choice.

Berniece also has an affair with Willie's friend Lymon, which symbolizes the end of her widowhood, yet she seems reluctant to commit to him — or to Avery, for that matter. Given that she is the true keeper of the old traditions, neither man seems quite equal to the role her character demands.

Conclusion: Matriarchal Heroism and the Survival of Tradition

In the end, the ancestors drive Sutter out of the house through the power Berniece summons, although she was also prepared to kill Willie or anyone else to protect the piano. Berniece is truly a heroic shaman and priestess, even though the play is set in Pittsburgh during the Great Depression — a seemingly unlikely location for such traditional spiritual beliefs. Throughout most of the play she had feared this role and may even have considered marrying Avery, the Christian minister, as an escape from it.

The question of whether the old traditions, legacies, and family history will survive rests in her hands alone: she could have agreed to sell the piano and taken half the money, or allowed Avery to use it in his church. Instead, her choice is to save her brother's life while refusing to follow his ambition of displacing the Sutter family — the same family that had enslaved, oppressed, and lynched their people for generations. Her path is the feminist and matriarchal one, leading back toward Africa and away from the terms of modern American capitalism.

Works Cited

Wilson, August. The Piano Lesson. Penguin, 1990.