Rose, I done tried all my life to live decent … to live a clean … hard … useful life. I tried to be a good husband to you. In every way I knew how. Maybe I come into the world backwards, I don’t know. But … you born with two strikes on you before you come to the plate. You got to guard it closely … always looking for a curve-ball on the inside corner.
It seems like a central premise of my favorite major American plays is the failed American Dream. In Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, for example, Willy Loman grapples with the reality that his son Biff Loman is average. In Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, Walter constantly talks of investing his father’s insurance money but (spoiler alert!) a friend’s betrayal kills his hopes for a better life and future. In Tennessee Williams’ A Glass Menagerie, Tom Wingfield, an aspiring poet, hates his day job at a shoe warehouse. In August Wilson’s Fences, Troy Maxson is an African-American sanitation worker whose washed-up dreams of becoming a baseball pro embitter him and all those who love him.
Why does the American Dream, failed or achieved, make such solid theater? I mean “solid” in a literal sense, in that the characters and their actions in these plays are so identifiable that they appear real. On an individual level, each of us may very well understand the tension between dreaming and having to settle in order to accommodate reality. But the answer, I think, has to do with something larger–how society conditions us to fetishize the American Dream, and what that collective need for stories says about our perception of our own agency. Don’t you love that story about the immigrant kid who got into all 8 Ivies? How about Alexander Hamilton, the immigrant who became one of America’s founding fathers? Or all those artists and actors/actresses who were living out of their cars before making it big in Hollywood? We love the story of the underdog, according to Slate’s Daniel Engber, not just because it’s the story of America’s origin, but also because it “gives us hope” and reinforces “the belief that anyone can overcome his misfortune,” especially in an “unequal society.”
From the start of Fences, Wilson reveals the American Dream as just a story that rewards only a select few. Consider the historical backdrop in which Wilson contextualizes the play:
Near the turn of the century, the destitute of Europe sprang on the city with tenacious claws and an honest and solid dream. The city devoured them. They swelled its belly until it burst into a thousand furnaces and sewing machines, a thousand butcher shops and bakers’ ovens, a thousand churches and hospitals and funeral parlors and moneylenders. The city grew. It nourished itself and offered each man a partnership limited only by his talent, his guile, and his willingness and capacity for hard work. For the immigrants of Europe, a dream dared and won true.
So the American Dream worked out for the European immigrants, according to Wilson. The narrative of hard work and persistence was worth telling for them because it became reality. But not for Troy and his forebears:
The descendants of African slaves were offered no such welcome or participation. They came from places called the Carolinas and the Virginias, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Tennessee. They came strong, eager, searching. The city rejected them and they fled and settled along the riverbanks and under bridges in shallow, ramshackle houses made of sticks and tar-paper. They collected rags and wood. They sold the use of their muscles and bodies. They cleaned houses and washed clothes, they shined shoes, and in quiet desperation and vengeful pride, they stole, and lived in pursuit of their own dream. That they could breathe free, finally, and stand to meet life with the force of dignity and whatever eloquence the heart could call upon.
Troy’s version of the American Dream conforms to this binary. The entire plot of Fences seems to answer the question, “What does it mean to live as an African American who knows that the American Dream is not a universal one?” I think the answer is to keep dreaming. Dreams, Wilson seems to say here, are a necessary condition for living because they’re life-giving–they allow a person to “breathe free” and “stand to meet life with the force of dignity.” So we see Troy and Rose living “in pursuit of their own dream,” even though they were born, as Troy says, “with two strikes” on them. Troy knows that winning the right to drive a truck isn’t a huge promotion, but striving in spite of his circumstances is what matters.
For Rose, Troy is her dream, which she admits to him once she learns of his infidelity:
What about my life? What about me? … You not the only one who’s got wants and needs. But I held on to you, Troy. I took all my feelings, my wants and needs, my reams … and I buried them inside you. I planted a seed and watched and prayed over it. I planted myself inside you and waited to bloom. And it didn’t take no eighteen years to find out the soil was hard and rocky and it wasn’t never gonna bloom.
And to her son, Cory:
When your daddy walked through the house he was so big he filled it up. That was my first mistake. Not to make him leave some room for me. … I took on his life as mine and mixed up the pieces so that you couldn’t hardly tell which was which anymore.
The tragedy of Rose’s dream is that, in a way, she dreamed small–after all, a man is just a man–and was still left disappointed. But Troy’s disillusionment and misbehavior do not diminish Rose as a strong character, as the woman who holds her entire family together. She, as Bono puts it, “[builds] fences to keep people in.”
Another characteristic that these great American plays seem to share is the nuclear family, for the legacy of an American Dream lives or dies with the children who inherit it. I still don’t know what to think about Troy’s fraught relationship with his son Cory. By denying his son the chance to play football, is Troy condemning Cory to a fate better or similar to the one he himself suffered? Troy insists that he acts out of tough love:
I don’t want him to be like me! I want him to move as far away from my life as he can get… I decided seventeen years ago that boy wasn’t getting involved in no sports. Not after what they did to me in the sports.
Isn’t it natural for a child to look up to his parents? How do you tell him/her that you’d wish your life were different because you’ve witnessed hardships that he/she would never understand? It’s an act of self-loathing and love.
What dream does Cory dream? The answer, I think, is revealed in his conversation with Rose: “I don’t want to be Troy Maxson. I want to be me.” Cory’s declaration of independence from his father is also a rejection of his world, in which African Americans aren’t allowed to play sports and are relegated to the role of sanitation worker. By the play’s end, Cory’s fate remains ambiguous because it’s 1965, a year in which the world saw both breakthroughs and confirmation of the status quo. Cory joins the Marines during the Vietnam War–a decision, which Raynell points out, echoes their father’s enlisting in the U.S. Army during World War II–even though the country is at war with itself. Selma, the KKK rally in North Carolina, and the riots protesting segregation in L.A.–all speak to the truth of Wilson’s observation of an “unequal society.”
Overall, Fences was a good way to ease myself into my book-a-week schedule. I found its straight storytelling refreshing and stimulating. I love me some Pirandello, but the humility and earthiness of Wilson’s language make his stories urgent and timeless.
