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CHAPTER THREE:  Mythological Conversions in Fences

By Michael Downing

"In this play, the search for identity by blacks is an exploration of their individual characteristics, their mythic signification, and their struggle to integrate with society."
---Kim Pereira

"A mythmaker who sees his basically naturalistic panorama-plays as stages in an allegorical history of black America, Wilson is also a folk ethnologist, collecting prototypical stories, testimonies, rituals of speech and behavior, which he embeds in his larger compositions."
---Michael Feingold

The mythological conversions from stereotype to archetype continue in August Wilson's next play, Fences. As in Ma Rainey, Wilson is concerned in Fences with converting stereotype to archetype and then considering how those archetypes interact with each other within his emerging African American mythology. Wilson is also concerned with how white culture interprets the African archetype; however, unlike Ma Rainey, where white characters take the stage to represent the response to Wilson's African mythology, the white response to the characters in Fences is represented through by black characters through word of mouth.

As Sandra Shannon points out in the "Chronology" which opens her book, The Dramatic vision of August Wilson, the script which was eventually revised by Wilson to become Ma Rainey's Black Bottom was written originally in 1976 (xv-xvi). Therefore, it is not surprising to note that Wilson's conversions from stereotype to archetype are somewhat less pronounced--less well-defined--in Ma Rainey's Black Bottom than they are in such later plays written during the mid-1980s as Fences. By the time Wilson writes Fences, it is clear that his tendency to convert stereotype to archetype is emerging as a standard and powerfully recurring motif in his dramaturgy. In Fences, as well as in such later plays as Joe Turner's Come and Gone, Two Trains Running, and The Piano Lesson, Wilson's stereotypes become distilled--more simple and more direct--and his archetypes are more easily connected to other existing literary archetypes than they are in Ma Rainey. It is, nevertheless, important to study Ma Rainey to see how Wilson's early dramatic tendencies began to take shape.

The conversion of the character of Troy Maxson probably presents the most compelling and significant archetypal conversion in Fences. At the outset of the play, Troy tells a story to his friend, Bono. The story is about a "nigger [who] had a watermelon this big. (He indicates with his hands.)" (1). This example represents Wilson's choice to use this blatant racial stereotype as a baseline for an array of conversions from, as Michael Awkward identifies them, "pejorative racist stereotypes" into positive mythological archetypes (217).

According to Alan Nadel, the main problem faced by Troy in Fences
can be seen as Troy's attempt to take measure of himself in a world that has denied him the external referents. His struggle is to act in the literal world in such a way as to become not just the literal but the figurative father, brother, husband, man he desires to be. (91)
As he moves toward fulfilling a figurative capacity for these roles, Troy will find his way from literal stereotype to transcendent archetype. He will become more than a biological father. Eventually, Troy will come to emerge as a dramatic character who rivals Willy Loman in his stature and intensity within the world of drama, and Troy's emergence as such a mythological character--it is crucial to note--begins with a watermelon joke.

These conversions are essential to August Wilson's role as cultural mythmaker. In citing his own example of an African-American poet serving as Africa-American myth-maker, Rollo May writes about Alex Haley, who set out to discover his personal identity by asking the simple question, "Who am I?" In Chapter Three of his book, The Cry for Myth, May writes:

"One member of our mainly mythless century, Alex Haley, set out to find his own myth and reported his search in his book, Roots. . . . In the spiritual maelstrom of slavery, with its unimaginably humiliating injustices, two of which were forced breeding and requiring slaves to take the names of their owners, the psychological identity of the slaves was routinely crushed. . . . This robbing a person of identity, this destruction of his or her myth, is a spiritual punishment which threatened the human character of the slaves, even though their humanity persisted under the most brutal conditions, as in their folk songs" (47).

To cite this page:

Downing, Michael. "Chapter Three:  Mythological Conversions in Fences." AugustWilson.net. Date of Publication. Today's Date. URL.
 

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