The Theme of Legacy in FENCES
Thematic Analysis of August Wilson’s play, Fences
August Wilson’s Fences is concerned with generations and the legacy that one generation passes on to the next. What is passed on is always important, but it’s not always good. It’s not always positive. But the play’s closing scene suggests that change is possible. A legacy of acrimony and resentment can be redefined. Shine the right kind of light on it and a burden can become a gift.
For a majority of the play, the legacy that Troy Maxson lays out for his sons is anything but a gift. While Troy is dutiful in providing for his two sons, Cory and Lyons, he is emotionally stingy. He berates Lyons for dreaming of playing music for a living. He refuses to allow Cory to try for a college scholarship by playing football on his high school team. His efforts as a parent seem to be aimed at shutting down the dreams of his children.
And when Troy tells the story of how he came north, we can see Troy’s coming-of-age narrative features the same father figure he has become.
Working as a sharecropper, Troy’s father was a taskmaster with his children, putting them to work as soon as they could walk, according to Troy.
He fulfilled all his obligations to his children, making sure they were fed and taught about responsibility, but this was the extent of his parenting. He adhered to his sense of duty like a job.
“He stayed right there with his family. But he was just as evil as he could be. My mama couldn’t stand him. Couldn’t stand that evilness. She run off when I was about eight. She sneaked off one night after he had gone to sleep. Told me she was coming back for me. I ain’t never seen her no more. All his women run off and left him. He wasn’t good for nobody.”
In the end, Troy comes to blows with his father in an episode of stubborn self-assertion. The scene is repeated when Troy comes to blows with his own son Cory. A legacy of brutal father-son relationships seems to be as implacably ingrained in the Maxson line as the Maxson men’s pride.
Yet, this legacy contains something honest as well. And this honesty contains a difficult truth. Some fathers would shield their children from their own sense of the harshness of the world. Some parents would hide their sense that the social and professional world the child will inherit would require them to become self-protective, to insist on their own dignity because no one else could be expected to grant it.
Wilson spoke to this point in an interview:
“There’s strength in that. I think one of the reasons I wrote Fences is that our parents have shielded that from us, trying to protect us from the indignities of things they had suffered being Black. My mother never told me that she went down to Woolworth’s 5-and-10 and they wouldn’t give you a bag because you were Black. That’s not the kind of thing that you want your kid to know, so you keep that away from your kid. She would accept that. I think the thing to do is to pass it on as opposed to holding it in there.”
Troy Maxson, for all his flaws, never lies to his sons. His honesty is often the brutal honesty of the sort that’s used to shake someone from a delusion. And he makes sure his sons are fully awake to the reality that he inhabits.
This is nowhere more clear than when Cory openly asks why Troy never liked him. Troy’s response is to say, “Let’s get this straight right here . . . before it go along any further … I ain’t got to like you. Mr. Rand don’t give me my money come payday ’cause he likes me. He gives me ’cause he owe me.”
While Troy’s truth is unkind, it is also all he feels he has to give. And he says this as well, telling Cory in the same speech that “I done give you everything I had to give you.”
The desperation embedded in this combination of facts underscores Wilson’s darker themes in Fences. A father can give his son only one hard truth because the world has shaped him into a man in a constant defensive stance, leaning over home plate with a bat in his hands and possessed of the desperate knowledge that only a homerun can deliver him. Only by reaching beyond the bounds of the field of play — of marriage, of America’s racial restrictions — can he see a way to define his life as a success.
It’s a profound commentary on the need for dignity and pride and the emotional costs that come with the belief that these things are out of reach — not due to any personal failing but because systems are in place to make it that way.
Troy’s life ends and it seems that this vision of the world has been passed on to both his sons. Like Troy once did, Lyons finds himself in prison and loses his girlfriend. His choices and his future align him with the negative side of Troy’s central truth — a view of a world with no real opportunities for self-fulfillment, only false chances and an assortment of forces that demand to be accommodated.
But Cory returns in the end. Yes, he is full of bitterness against his father. And he feels that Troy gave him nothing. But then his half-sister reminds him of a song that Troy used to sing. Cory and Raynell sing it together. Cory’s mother, Rose, talks to him in a moving speech, reinforcing the idea that Troy gave Cory everything he had to give — even if he was less than gentle while doing it.
“Your daddy wanted you to be everything he wasn’t . . . and at the same time he tried to make you into everything he was. I don’t know if he was right or wrong … but I do know he meant to do more good than he meant to do harm.”
After singing Troy’s song — which Troy had learned from his own father — Cory finds a way to shine a new light on the generational Maxson legacy, transforming it into something compassionate, forgiving, and completely his own. He arrives at an understanding.
And this understanding is a gift. Troy’s honesty made it possible for Cory to see his father fully, to know him. Whatever self-deceptions might have supported Troy’s pride and his inward narratives used to rationalize his most selfish decisions, no deceptions were ever used to shield Cory from Troy’s actual, personal reality.
We can say, again, that the facts of this reality are stark. They are painful. But in being honest, they allow for forgiveness.
