From Family To Fences:Miller's Death Of A Salesman And Wilson's Fences In Comparison

The thesis is a comparative study of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman(1949)and August Wilson's Fences(1985).Grounded in an intertextual reading of the two plays,the paper argues that though both Miller and Wilson address the theme of domestic dysfunction in their respective plays,their understandings of and approaches to the subject differ.The divergence finds its root from the varying social milieus that nurtured the two playwrights' different personal experiences and life philosophies.Hence,the two plays' similarities and differences are to be analyzed in three steps: their similar representations of family dysfunction,different treatments of the dysfunctional families in the light of American social conditions and the particular Afro-American community culture and history in Fences.To begin with,both plays adopt a unified structure to demonstrate the condition of a dysfunctional family as a common denominator of domestic realism.They feature resembling domestic crisis in the form of father-son tension to dramatize the predicament and death of the displaced and socially marginalized male protagonist.However,though built into parallel dramatic structure,the two families reveal dissimilar social malaise.While Miller focus on the distorted American bourgeois romanticism by the capitalist logic,Wilson emphasizes the particular Afro-American silenced traumatic history and culture within and beyond racial boundaries.Therefore,regarding Fences,“although the characters and their complications are American,the play's resolution comes from Africa”(Wolfe 73).This is manifested in the protagonist's oral narratives as well as the healing Blues of the Wilsonian “spectacle character” which is anchored in Wilson's belief in their suppressed collective Afro-American history.In conclusion,the paper attempts to illustrate the distinct role of Wilson in American theatre and drama through a comparative reading on how Miller and Wilson contemplate and represent dysfunctional families.On the one hand,articulating the living predicaments of common man within the family framework,Wilson claims kinship with the dramatic tradition of domestic realism in American modern theatre;on the other hand,emphasizing himself as an Afro-American dramatist,Wilson introduces and promotes Black Aesthetics through weaving and signifying Afro-American culture and history as their fences against both racial assimilation and separation into the play.