Paternal Abuse In The Play Fences

Paternal Psychological Barriers around the Maxson Men in August Wilson’s, Fences

August Wilson’s play, Fences, displays an African-American Pittsburgh family as they build around their individual adversaries. Troy Maxson, the father of the family, is a former baseball player in the Negro League but never made it to the Majors due to old age. He continues as an adult, establishing a broken relationship with his children and wife, Rose. Lyons, Troy’s oldest son from a previous marriage, constantly seeks both financial and emotional support from Troy. The most highlighted portion of the play is Troy's conflicting relationship with his youngest son, Cory. Cory aspires to become a football player; however, Troy has completely different plans for

Troy begins to reminisce about how his father was “trapped” and never got the chance to “go out and make his own way” (Wilson 51). Troy’s father initiates the chain of paternal abuse in the play. In the book, A Literary Companion, author Mary Ellen Snodgrass describes the father as “a downtrodden, womanizing sharecropper and punitive father who beat [Troy] bloody” (151). After the civil war, slavery began to slowly transition into the act sharecropping; a system in which black families would rent small portions of land in return for a portion of their crop, to be given to the landowner at the end of each year. A farmer could still not have enough money to buy “his land”, regardless of the fact that he worked basically his entire life for it. The idea that he is partially still a slave seems to bother Troy’s father, along with the fact that his wife left him with 11 children to father explicates the reason he is constantly filled with anger. Troy fears his father up until the point when he attempts to steal his teenage girlfriend and beats

Cory is determined to defy his father but Troy reminds him how he’s “the boss around [there]” and how he does the “only saying that counts” (Wilson 36). Troy intentions for his sons appear to mean well, for he is only “protecting the plate.” But Troy stopped swinging a long time ago without even noticing. This situation relates back to the fact that he has become metaphorically blind. Troy states how it was hard for him when he moved to the north, “Got up here and found out. . .not only couldn’t you get a job. . .you couldn’t find no place to live. I thought I was in freedom. Shhh. Colored folks living down there on the riverbanks in whatever kind of shelter they could find for themselves” (Wilson 59). He believes that Cory “got to make his own way” (Wilson 39) because he made, made being a past tense verb, his. By attempting to ensure Cory of a harmless future, Troy impedes his son's potential and prevents Cory from having a promising future. That leads Cory to resent his father much the same way Troy resented his