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Chapter One
Introduction
The importance of history to me is simply to find out
who you are and where youve been. It becomes doubly
important if someone else has been writing your history.
I think Blacks in America need to re-examine their time
spent here to see the choices that were made as a people.
August Wilson, qtd. in Powers 52

As a prominent African American playwright, August Wilson has always been

interested in the exploration and exploitation of black cultural experience in his plays.
He is convinced, those who wrote history books have misrepresented the role of
black people in the countrys making (Shannon, Vision 8). For a long period of
suffering and oppression caused by slavery and especially racial discrimination, the
black people have lost faith in their cultural values and subjected themselves to
indignity. In order to give voice to this oppressed group and arouse black
consciousness, Wilson obtains materials from a fusion of history and his personal life
and imagination. He sees the past as a rich repository of synthesizing power, which
can provide a useful guide for the present and the future. Through writing on the
unexplored landscape of black experience, Wilsons literary objective aims to give
African American history a real status. Moreover, in an interview with Samuel
Freedman, he optimistically expresses his ideal target for the individual:
I concretize the values of that [black] tradition, placing them in action in
order to demonstrate their existence, their ability to offer and provide
sustenance for a man once hes left his fathers houseso that youre not
in the world alone, so that you have values that will guide you in your
life. (qtd. in Shannon, Vision 7)

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He hopes his works will serve as a history book for black Americans and become a
guidebook to inspire his fellow people to think about their future.
August Wilson wrote The Piano Lesson in 1986, and it opened on Broadway in
1990. Following the similar focus on history with the early plays, it points out the
importance of the transmission of black cultural values and inheritance in particular.
Hence, I will use this idea as an example to analyze Wilsons central notions of black
identities via the examination of African American cultural elements distinctively and
recurrently used in his dramaturgy. Before we discuss how Wilson thinks of black
identities, an overview of the playwright, the play, and the theories applied for the
study is necessary.

August Wilson
Since the first successful play, Ma Raineys Black Bottom, opened in 1984,
American playwright August Wilson has attracted the worlds attention to his
dramaturgy. In the following years, he received many awards as well as prestige,1 and
it came to a peak when The Piano Lesson won him his second Pulitzer Prize in 1990
after Fences in 1987. Thus he was confirmed as one of the most important
contemporary American playwrights.
Born in 1945, Wilson was given a name Freddy August Kittel.2 Because his
mothers maiden name was Wilson, he later picked it up for his last name. His father,
Frederick Kittel, was a white baker, but most of the time he did not appear in the
1

From 1985 to1996, August Wilson has won five New York Drama Critics Awards for Best Play (Ma
Rainey, Fences, Joe Turner, Piano Lesson, Seven Guitars), two Drama Desk Awards (Fences, Piano
Lesson), one Outer Critics Circle Award (Fences), six Tony Award nominations (Ma Rainey, Fences,
Joe Turner, Piano Lesson, Two Trains, Seven Guitars), one Tony Award for best play (Fences), and two
Pulitzer Prizes for drama (Fences, Piano Lesson). He has also received Rockefeller (1984), McKnight
(1985), Guggenheim (1986), and Bush Artists (1993) fellowships in playwriting. Wilson is one of the
seven American playwrights to win Pulitzer Prize at least twice (Eugene ONeill, George S. Kaufman,
Robert E. Sherwood, Thornton Wilder, Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, and August Wilson). See
Nadel 1, and Elkins xi, xix-xxii.
2
For more information about Wilsons background, see Shafer 5-18.

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household. His mother had to work hard to support the whole family with six children.
Wilson lived and grew up in the racially mixed ghetto of Pittsburgh. This environment
gave him a great influence upon his writing later. After his natural father died in 1965,
his mother remarried David Bedford and the family moved to a white suburb, where
Wilson encountered radical racism in the community and the schools (Shafer 6). Due
to his classmates discrimination against him, he became involved in so many fights
that he had to transfer to several schools in his high school (Shafer 6-7). Though he
showed a talent in history, his teacher did not trust him and accused him of
plagiarizing a fellow students paper on Napoleon (Shafer 7). Eventually, he gave up
his formal education and proceeded self-study in a local library. It was here that
Wilson spent schooldays reading the classics of world literature, newer work of
black writers, and books about the life of blacks in America (Hill 87). He began to
take a great interest in writing poetry 3 and short fiction.
During the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, Wilson particularly became
involved in the Black Power movement (Nadel 1) through the theatre. In the late
1960s, Wilson and his fellow writer and friend Rob Penny co-founded the Black
Horizons Theatre in Pittsburgh, where he wrote his first one-act play and premiered it.
By way of the theatre, he participated in the activism of the Black Power movement
and became committed to increasing political awareness in his community (Bloom
11). At that time he began his career as a playwright, but it was not successful in the
early years because of his inability to construct dialogue to his own satisfaction
(Bigsby 286). In a 1989 interview he told the critic C. W. E. Bigsby why his earlier
attempts at writing plays failed: The reason I couldnt write dialogue was because I

In the library, he read Afro-American literary works by Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, Countee
Cullen, and Arna Bontemps, the writers of the Harlem Renaissance. His poetic training in his early life
has been reflected in his playwriting. See Galens 244.

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didnt respect the way blacks talked; so I always tried to alter it (286). In 1978, he
moved to St. Paul, Minnesota, a city with few black residents. Apart from his
hometown he suddenly gained a new appreciation of the language he had heard all
his life and learned to listen to the voices of his past and create dialogue with reality,
poetry, and dramatic quality (Shafer 9). He explained to the interviewer: for the first
time I began to hear the voices I had been brought up with all my life and I realised I
didnt have to change it. I began to respect it (Bigsby 286).
Wilson kept working on playwriting and submitted his plays to the ONeill
Playwrights Conference, where he met his future director, mentor, and surrogate
father (Shafer 11), Lloyd Richards.4 Finally in 1982 his play Ma Raineys Black
Bottom was accepted by the Conference, directed by Richards, and produced at
regional theatres.5 It was not until his 1984 Broadway hit Ma Raineys Black Bottom
garnered the New York Drama Critics Circle Award that Wilson became famous,
being lifted into the category of major playwright seemingly overnight (Shafer 11).
In 1987, his next play Fences overwhelmingly won many big awards on playwriting,
including his first Pulitzer Prize.6 Fences was even required reading in high schools
across the country with accompanying study guides (Elam 361) to further help
students get a better understanding of black people in a multicultural society.
Originally, Wilson did not intend to write a historical circle until the success of Ma
Raineys Black Bottom made him recognize the logic of his own work (Bigsby 286).
4

According to Shafer, Wilson and Richards have moved into a working relationship which has lasted
through the years based on Richards intuitive response to the plays and Wilsons trust in his
suggestions (11). Almost all of Wilsons plays are directed by Richards (Bloom 12). The critic Sandra
G. Shannon analyzes their long-term director-playwright collaborative as well as father-son team
(195) relationships in her article Subtle Imposition: The Lloyd Richards-August Wilson Formula.
5
As the artistic director for the Yale School of Drama, Lloyd Richards helped Wilson revise Ma Rainey
and put it to stage at the Yale Repertory Theater in 1984. Since Ma Rainey, each of August Wilsons
plays has begun the process: a staged reading at the Conference, production at Yale, then production
sharing at regional theatres throughout the country (Shafer 11) before opening on Broadway.
6
Fences won the five major awards of that year: the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, the Drama
Desk Award, the Tony, the Pulitzer, and the John Gassner Outer Critics Circle award for best American
playwright. See Elkins xxi.

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By this time Wilson told interviewers that he had a plan of writing a play about the
African American experience in each decade of the century (Brockett 630), all of
them dealing with the auto-biography of blacks in America (Shafer 11). Now he
has completed eight plays within the historical circle,7 offering a condensed
first-hand Afro-American history from the 1910s to the 1980s (Bloom 12).
August Wilson draws on many black cultural practices and institutions such as
folk customs and beliefs, music, religion, work, language, food, clothing (Shannon,
Vision 194) in his play. He uses the blues and storytelling (Pereira 12) to express the
recurring themes with which he explores his imaginary black world: the
preoccupation with uprootedness, the characters struggle to define themselves,
and their African heritage within the context of racism and slavery (Bloom 13).
Through his special manipulation of black dialogue, music, tradition, and a historical
backdrop, August Wilson presents his authentic black experience and history which
are different from what the mainstream society records. His plays invite not only
white but also black audiences to think over cultural differences, which he contends
should be treated as sources of pride rather than as evidence of inferiority (Shannon,
Vision 194) for black people. He thinks the African Americans should recover dignity
by recognition of their cultural values left in the past days.

Plot Summary of The Piano Lesson

The background of The Piano Lesson is set in Pittsburgh in 1936, during the
Great Depression. Central to this play is an old piano that stands upright in the parlor
of Doaker Charless house. Berniece, in her mid-thirties, and her daughter Maretha

With the setting time in the parentheses, they are Ma Raineys Black Bottom (1927), Fences (1957),
Joe Turners Come and Gone (1911), The Piano Lesson (1936), Two Trains Running (1968), Seven
Guitars (1948), Jitney (1971), and King Hedley II (1985). For more information about Wilsons plays
and other works, see Shannons Annotated Bibliography of Works and about August Wilson.

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live with her uncle Doaker, a 47-year-old railroad cook. The story begins with a
hurried and loud knock on the door in the early morning when everybody is still
asleep. Boy Willie, Bernieces brother in his thirties, and his friend Lymon
unexpectedly turn up at the house. They set out on a journey from Mississippi in the
South where the Charles family used to live and work as slaves, to Pittsburgh in the
North where widowed Berniece seeks a shelter from a sad memory. Three years ago,
her husband Crawley was killed when trying to help Boy Willie steal wood. The goal
of the travel for Boy Willie is to claim his own right to the use of a 135-year-old
piano (Shannon, Vision 144). This abrupt visit breaks the silence of the twilight hour
as well as the seeming quietness of Bernieces three-year peaceful life in Pittsburgh,
implying something akin to a storm (PL 1)8 is set to occur. Although their
unwelcome appearance makes Berniece anxious and irritated, these two men bring
much needed vigor, passion, and a fresh atmosphere to the coldly hushed house.
With their arrival, they bring with them some information from their hometown
in Mississippi. First, the land-owner Sutter, for whom Boy Willie works as an
indentured farmer and whose ancestors the Charles family had ever served as slaves
in the antebellum period, is found dead falling into a well. The countrymen believe
that the Ghosts of the Yellow Dog (PL 4) catch his life. But Berniece believes it is
Boy Willie who murders him. Second, arriving with a truckload of watermelons, Boy
Willie wants to sell them as one part of his fund-raising project to purchase Sutters
land. In addition to selling fruit, the most important purpose of his visit is to deal with
the old family heirloom, the piano. If he sells it, he will collect enough money to
make his dream come true. It is his dream to buy land from Sutters brother with a
reasonably low price, to hire workers to plant cotton for him, and to remove the

Hereafter, The Piano Lesson will be abbreviated as PL in all parenthetical documentation. All
quotations are from August Wilson, The Piano Lesson. New York: Plume, 1990.

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shamefulness caused by slavery. He hopes finally he will be equally treated as the

white people. He knows of some white man who plans to purchase black musical
instruments for collection. He thinks he can accomplish his dream if he persuades his
sister to sell the piano. When he reveals his plan to his uncle Doaker, Doaker tells him
the story of the piano and its relations with the Charles family, whose members were
traded for the piano by the owner in the past days. Berniece regards the piano as a
reminiscence of her deceased mother Mama Ola, who had mourned over her
husbands death for seventeen years. Aware of Boy Willies intention, Berniece
blames her father, brother, and husband for making her and her mother cry. At this
moment towards the end of Act I, Sutters ghost appears and frightens Maretha.
In Act II, Boy Willie encourages Berniece to face herself as a black. He even
asks her to teach Maretha to live with black pride and dignity. The conflict between
Boy Willie and Berniece breaks out when Berniece tries to take out her pistol to
prevent Boy Willie from moving the piano. But in the meantime, their uncle Wining
Boy, a former pianist in his mid-fifties, drunkenly arrives home. His appearance
intervenes the conflict. Finally, when the presence of Sutters ghost is felt again, the
preacher Avery, who used to court Berniece, begins the exorcism to chase the evil out
of the piano. When the Christian exorcising ceremony has failed to drive off the white
ghost, Boy Willie goes into a frenzy and rushes upstairs to wrestle with the ghost.
Aware of the immediate danger to her brother, Berniece plays the piano and chants an
invocation to arouse ancestral spirits to help her. In the meanwhile the sound of a train
approaching is heard. Symbolically the Ghosts of the Yellow Dog defeat the white
ghost. After the ghost Sutter is repulsed, Boy Willie finally decides not to sell the
piano. Before he returns to the South as the end of the journey, he requires that
Berniece and Maretha should continue to play the piano.

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The Historical Background of The Piano Lesson

With regard to the treatment of history, the critic C. W. E. Bigsby contends,
Hansberry, Baldwin, and Baraka are concerned with making history while Wilson is
a recorder of history (297). While the former three writers may try to exercise the
social reforming strategy by dramatizing their political beliefs into the play, Wilson
focuses on restoring the reality of history about the blacks. This does not mean,
however, that he does not play the role of dramatist. In the case of a historical
dramatist like August Wilson, the play critic Sandra G. Shannon argues, history
becomes secondary to his or her imagination, which often becomes the dominant
force at work (Vision 4). Wilson begins with his own experience of growing up in a
black community, and then fuses it with the history of African American culture,
generating an imagined reality of the historical milieu (Shannon, Vision 5) in his
dramatic world. History plays a secondary role to the depiction of human beings in
turmoil. In short, Wilson does not intend to merely record historical events in a
politically correct sense. More importantly, he shows his concern for a reality of black
experience in a retrospectively humanist thinking. He examines and then rehabilitates
black cultural life from a black perspective without distortion or exaggeration.
The background of The Piano Lesson has much to do with Americas history of
slavery.9 According to David Galens, [t]he widespread importation of slaves to
America began in the 1690s in Virginia (252), but the beginning of slavery in
America can be traced back earlier. In an interview with Bigsby, Wilson asserts that
black people have been on the north American continent for three hundred and
seventy years (296). In the early days, the colonizers preferred indentured European
servants over more expensive black slaves. When the employment of European

The piano is a product of the slavery time and still has its influence to cause a profound familial
dispute after decades in the 1930s.

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immigrants could not sufficiently meet the need, however, slavery prevailed with a
forced migration of enslaved people from Africa to America by ship. These Africans
lost their freedom and their offspring to their masters.
Because the reason that the Revolutions expression of freedom and equality for
all men was contradicted by the existence of an enslaved underclass (Galens 252),
some African descendants were sent back to Liberia to build their country under
abolitionist support. With the flourishing development of plantation system in the
South, however, the farm-owners needed more slaves for agricultural labors. In the
antebellum period, while strong opposition to slavery developed in the North,
southern slave-owners and apologists for slavery began to offer the public scientific
and philosophical defenses of slavery (Galens 252). The continuing tension
between the abolitionist North and the pro-slavery South led to the American Civil
War (1861-1865). President Abraham Lincoln issued The Emancipation Proclamation
on January 1, 1863, emancipating slaves in the southern states. Later congress passed
the thirteenth amendment in 1865, thus emancipating all remaining slaves (Galens
252). Although the action of The Piano Lesson is not set in the slavery period, the
story of the play can be traced back to the antebellum period when the members of the
Charles family were still the slaves of the Sutters. Through Doakers storytelling (PL
42-6), we know in the slavery time Boy Willie and Bernieces great-grandmother
Berniece and her son were traded off by Robert Sutter for the piano. In other words,
the story of the play covers a great time span, including at least four generations from
the past to the present.
After the Civil War came the Reconstruction era (1865-1876). The nightmares of
slavery did not totally vanish with the victory of the North. Due to a growing wave
of conciliatory action and nostalgia sentiments for the South, the promise of
promoting black peoples social position was sacrificed by introducing the Jim

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Crow segregation laws that disfranchised blacks and made true civil rights
impossible in the 1880s and 1890s (Galens 252). Though these ex-slaves received
less education and fewer opportunities for jobs than white Americans, they still could
make a living by hands working on the farms as sharecroppers or by leaving for urban
factories. Most people chose to settle in the South, but in the boom years of the
1910s and 1920s, and during and after World War I (1914-1919) in particular, there
was a mass exodus of southern blacks to the northern cities (Galens 252-53). When
time went forward to the 1930s, the Depression undermined Americas economic
stability, making it difficult enough for most Americans but devastating for blacks
(Pereira 86). It is against this background that The Piano Lesson is set in 1936, when
the Great Depression still had a conspicuous effect on society.
Wilson takes advantage of the issue of economic instability in society as well as
black migrations from the South to the North to bring out his concern over black
identity issues. Because of the gloomy prospect and the sad experience in the South,
Berniece moves to Pittsburgh to live with her uncle Doaker. Because of the economic
instability in the 30s, Boy Willie has a chance to buy his former masters land.
Because of Bernieces migration to Pittsburgh, Boy Willie takes on a journey to the
North. Finally, because of the economical reason and the dispute over the use of the
piano, the protagonists in this play are confronted with the question of identity.

Literary Reviews
As the fourth play of Wilsons ten-play project produced on Broadway, The Piano
Lesson continues to depict black experience by applying folklore, music, and spirits to
his dramatic work. Though it has won the Drama Desk Award, the New York Drama
Critics Circle Award, a Tony nomination, the Outstanding Play Award from American
Theatre Critics, and the Pulitzer Prize (Elkins xxi), it received more hostile criticism

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than any earlier play (Shafer 37). For example, in New York John Simon complained
that it was an unwieldy mixture of farce, drama, and Broadway musical (qtd. in
Galens 254). Mimi Kramer in the New Yorker found the play too long, the ending
mystical and melodramatic, and the conclusion unclear (Shafer 37).
The most negative criticism came with Brustein and Simons attack on Wilsons
incompetent and immature technique in dramaturgy. In his article The Lesson of
The Piano Lesson published in New Republic, Robert Brustein considered The
Piano Lesson the most poorly composed of Wilsons four produced works (28). He
found Wilsons dialogue lacking of power, poetry, and music (28-29) and the
performance too long for its subject matter (29). He also pointed out the
awkwardness of the supernatural element and he felt Wilson was reaching a dead end
in his examination of American racism (29-30). In his opinion, the appearance of the
ghost in a realistic play merely showed the playwrights incapability to handle his
material. As for Wilsons successful presentation of black experience, he thought it
was likely to stimulate the guilt glands of liberal white audience by exercising a
perception of victimization throughout the play (28). In addition to Brusteins
vehement criticism on Wilsons clumsy technique, Simons negative comment
centered on its having many sub-plots, mixing genres, and being repetitive (qtd.
in Galens 255).
However, most critics affirmed that The Piano Lesson was worthy of
appreciation. Clive Barnes in New York Posts praised it as the fourth, best, and most
immediate in the series of plays exploring the Afro-American experience during this
century (qtd. in Galens 254). Concerning the presence of supernatural elements, on
the contrary, Michael Morales in his article Ghosts on the Piano: August Wilson and
the Representation of Black American History contends that the interconnection of
the mystical and the historical cannot be brushed aside (112). Whereas other critics

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attack the mixing genres of the play,10 David Galens recognizes Wilsons dramatic
strategy:
Wilsons mixing of genres is natural for a playwright who seeks to
represent dual cultural traditions in one form and on one stage, and his
inclusion of a supernatural sub-plot reflects African-American culture in
the 1930s, not white American culture in the 1980s. (254)
As an important contemporary American playwright, August Wilson certainly
has been frequently interviewed and discussed. Many articles and books have been
written to explore the themes of his imaginative world as well as to examine his
dramatic skills. After my research on such criticisms, I find black music, or namely
the blues, and Wilsons perspective of history undoubtedly consist of the two major
themes that have drawn peoples attention to his dramaturgy.
Music is found a unique but universal component in Wilsons theatre.
Concerning musical elements utilized in the play, Brian Crow and Chris Banfield in
An Introduction to Post-colonial Theatre attribute the power of the blues to the
forces by which cultural emancipation and empowerment may be achieved (60).
They believe music in Wilsons theatre functions as summoning mysterious powers
of recovery and reintegration (57) for it brings one to connect with the cultural past.
By way of connecting music with the discourse of history in terms of its narrative
function, theatre critic Jay Plum in Blues, History, and the Dramaturgy of August
Wilson considers the blues as an empowering text that records African American
experiences (564). Similarly, in August Wilsons Burden: The Function of
Neoclassical Jazz, Craig Werner shares the same idea of musics functionality with
Plum, contending black music encodes memories of historical events and personal

10

William A. Henry III argued that Wilson had blurred genre boundaries by mixing tales of the
supernatural with kitchen-sink realism. See Galens 254.

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experiences omitted from or distorted by the written documentation of European

American cultural memory (26). Keith Clark in Black Manhood in James Baldwin,
Ernest J. Gaines, and August Wilson brings up the importance of musics role in
Wilsons plays. Analyzing the black subjectivity in terms of male characters and
communities, he indicates the centering of black music stands as his most striking
modal departure from his white dramatic predecessors (96). In general, the
investigation of the significance of black music becomes an imperative research work
for those who are interested in Wilsons drama, including The Piano Lesson. Actually
the playwright has admitted that the blues constitutes the most influential element on
his creative writing. 11
Besides black music, history is another aspect through which Wilson has spent
time and energies restructuring his imagined black world. Because of his endeavors to
complete a ten-play historical cycle that aims to represent an authentic black
experience in the twentieth century, scholars particularly feel interested in Wilsons
idea about history. For Wilson, in C. W. E. Bigsbys words to encapsulate his view of
history, [t]he past is the present (286). The past provides itself as a retrospection and
abundance of cultural values for people in the present to define themselves. In The
Dramatic Vision of August Wilson Sandra G. Shannon suggests that The Piano
Lesson thus becomes the playwrights self-authored textbook of culture and history,
instructing playgoers about the black experience in America (147). She asserts that it
is not only the characters in the play, who find their cultural past (163), but also the
playwright and the audience, who find a space to examine their cultural identity
11

August Wilson has once mentioned what casts an effect on his writing: In terms of influence on my
work, I have what I call my four Bs: Romare Bearden; Imamu Amiri Baraka, the writer; Jorge Luis
Borges, the Argentine short-story writer; and the biggest B of all: the blues (qtd. in Rocha 3). Romare
Bearden is both a musician and a collagist, whose paintings in a modern and African American fashion
offer Wilson an inspiring insight into his dramatic landscape. The Piano Lesson and Joe Turners Come
and Gone are the two plays directly inspired by his collages. For more information about the four Bs,
see Mark William Rochas August Wilson and the Four Bs Influences and Joan Fishmans Romare
Bearden, August Wilson, and the Traditions of African Performance.

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through the lesson of the piano incident. Michael Morales in Ghosts on the Piano:
August Wilson and the Representation of Black American History contends that the
task Wilson shares with the other African American writers is a simultaneously
reactive/reconstructive engagement with the representation of blacks and the
representation of history by the dominant culture (105).
Despite the fact that music and history are common themes in all of Wilsons
plays, there is still another space for scholarly research. Kim Pereiras book, August
Wilson and the African-American Odyssey, bases its analysis on the recurring ideas of
separation, migration, and reunion (2) and brings the idea of journey into the greater
discussion of Wilsons works. The most recently published essay on The Piano Lesson
is Harry J. Elam, Jr.s The Dialectics of August Wilsons The Piano Lesson. Elam
approaches the play from a dialectical perspective that explicates [t]he argument
between brother and sister plays out as a dialectical debate for which the audience
must construct a synthesis (362). Elams words implicitly touch upon the social
function of theatre when dealing with the relationship among the playwright, the
characters, and the audience. Moreover, he relates The Piano Lesson to Lorraine
Hansberrys masterpiece A Raisin in the Sun (1959) and makes a comparative analysis
of these two plays by using Henry Louis Gates Jr.s critical term signifyin(g).12
From this point of analysis, he argues that the former is a signifyin(g) revision (367)
of the latter. Although such criticisms facilitate a general understanding of Wilsons
12

Henry Louis Gates Jr. introduces this term signifyin(g) in his book The Signifying Monkey. A
concise definition of it can be found in Joseph Childers and Gary Hentzis The Columbia Dictionary of
Modern Literary and Cultural Criticism: Based upon a sociolinguistic analysis, signifyin(g) in Gatess
formulation names an African-American trope of tropes, a metafigure denoting all rhetorical
strategies that subvert the dominant meaning of language practices through forms of linguistic free play.
Functioning by means of indirection, implication, and metaphorical reasoning, signifyin(g) subsumes
the many vernacular forms of African-American culture, including marking, loud-talking, testifying,
calling out (of ones name), sounding, rapping, [and] playing the dozens (279). In Harry J. Elam, Jr.s
analysis of these two plays, for instance, we can comprehend a parallel relationship between the male
protagonists Boy Willie and Walter Lee Younger and the female protagonists Berniece and Mama
Younger in terms of the signifyin(g) effect. For more discussion on signifyin(g) effect and the
comparison, please see Elam 363-67.

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drama, there is something more to be done in order to envision his aspiration to better
understand black people and black culture.

The Argument
Among the critical works on August Wilsons ambition to handle African
American materials in The Piano Lesson, several conceptshistory, music, migration,
spirits, and identityhave often been discussed as indispensable ingredients to survey
the playwrights narrative style and purpose. While reading each of his plays, most
critics choose two or three of these items to examine Wilsons presentation of black
living experience;13 however, they only treat these recurring issues separately and
functionally, not coherently and contextually. For example, critics frequently examine
the function of the blues and the meaning of history as themes in all of Wilsons plays.
But they are seldom framed by an overarching central motif that organizes the
isolated themes. Consequently I cannot see a comprehensive perspective that
integrates these themes to grasp Wilsons concern hidden in the words.
As for the non-traditional genre mingled with black music, ghosts and spirits,
and folktales, my argument is that they facilitate our reading of black culture because
they help construct a realistic landscape. The combination of African American
elements has become a part of Wilsons distinctive creative style. Nevertheless, many
important themes and directions revealed in the play beg the question of how one
should employ and integrate them to illuminate the literary and social meaning that

13

As I have mentioned in Literary Reviews, for instance, Kim Pereira in August Wilson and the
African-American Odyssey seizes specific terms and issues in the playthe function of the blues, black
peoples migration, selling the piano, and the appearance of the ghostto discuss how The Piano
Lesson provides a new direction in the odyssey of African Americans in the twentieth century (103).
While she strives to demonstrate the importance of those mentioned above with a textual study, I do not
see a consistent and holistic vision of black experience in terms of the themes she has rendered. In brief,
the four themes neither correlate to one another nor are framed by an underlying, central motif that
centers on the problem of black cultural identity, to which I think we should pay much attention in
Wilsons plays.

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August Wilson embeds into the play. In an interview with Bigsby, Wilson shows his
concern for the difficulties confronting black people:
As a whole our generation knows very little about our past My parents
generation tried to shield their children from the indignities they
suffered I think its largely a question of identity. Without knowing
your past, you dont know your presentand you certainly cant plot
your future You go out and discover it for yourself. (293)
Since what the playwright cares for is a question of identity, we should begin with
examining his idea of black identity by way of his play. In this essay, I would like to
discuss the degree to which August Wilson successfully reconstructs a new black
identity, which is different from the old stigmatized one. I will center my analysis on
three prominent aspects that are closely connected with the identity issue in the play:
the migration, the ghost on the piano, and the black music.
My first concern is the quest for black diasporic identity. Both the concept of
migration and the search for the American dream have significant roles in the play.

14

It is frequently seen that the characters wander everywhere only to seek a better life.
Boy Willie travels to the North with his dream of becoming a land-owner. Doaker as a
railroad cook has to move from place to place with the train. After emancipation,
though black Americans are free to move, they have lost both a geographical and a
communal linkage to Africa, their motherland. In the case of the characters in The
Piano Lesson, where should they go to find their home? In the South of the USA or in
Africa? By exploring black diasporic identity, we will understand more about the
mobility and instability of the black subjects nature.
14

All of the characters in The Piano Lesson have had or suffered from the experiences of migrating
from one place to another place, particularly from the South to the North, in search of a dream which I
call the American dream. For example, Boy Willies friend Lymon drives a truck with him from their
hometown Mississippi to Pittsburgh for seeking a job, a wife, and a home. I will discuss the issue of the
black peoples American dream in terms of diasporic identity in Chapter Two.

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My second concern is the emergence and effect of racial identity along with the
encounter of the past in the present. With Boy Willies journey to the North, Sutters
ghost turns up to claim its right to the ownership of the piano. His occurrence brings
about the conflict of the position between the self and the other, namely the white and
the black. When the piano undermines the past history, the protagonists have to face
their racial selves, which lead to their subsequent identity crises. I think the analysis
of the arrangement of the white ghost challenges the protagonists racial identity,
which makes it easier for the readers to comprehend the marginal position of the black
subject in postmodern society.
The relationship between black music and cultural identity is my third concern.
Like Wilsons other plays, the characters often sing songs and play black music, such
as the blues ensemble. This is especially true at the end of The Piano Lesson when
Berniece determines to play the piano and chant an invocation to her ancestors for
help. Here I am interested in the power of black music as well as its cultural function
in connecting the individual and the collective. I will discuss in the thesis how the
blues shapes and demonstrates black identity. After the investigation of this
musicalized identity, it will be manifest to show the communicability and connectivity
of the black subject through playing music.

Theoretical Framework
As the fourth addition to the ten-play historical circle, The Piano Lesson
continues with Wilsons ambition to explore, structure, and locate a black subject in a
white dominant society. He looks passionately at the margin, or the black
experience in America that cannot be found from the history book (Bigsby 287).
Thus, he tries to illuminate this marginalized African American history by positioning
African Americans as the subjects of his plays (Plum 562). As the black subject is

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the concern of Wilsons play, I will examine Wilsons display of the black subject by
discussing black diasporic, racial, and musicalized identities. I will apply Paul
Gilroys assertion of the Black Atlantic with regard to the dimensions of diaspora,
slavery, and music, Stuart Halls notion of cultural identity and diaspora, Michel
Foucaults counter-memory and the concept of history, and Frantz Fanons
postcolonial theory to the reading of The Piano Lesson. The main body of my thesis
will be divided into three parts, each of which will scrutinize the black subject from
its respective analysis of the diasporic, racial, and musicalized nature of black
existence. Finally I will conclude my thesis with a demonstration of how August
Wilson creates a new black subject through reconstruction of black identities in The
Piano Lesson.
Given the notion that The Piano Lesson is about the black subjects quest for
identity, Paul Gilroys concept of the Black Atlantic greatly facilitates my
understanding of the complex condition of modern and postmodern black identity. His
book, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, is an insightful
reference and will serve as a theoretical basis for my thesis. As a British sociologist
and cultural theorist, Gilroy tries to depict black culture from a more holistic,
cross-boundary perspective than the monolithic, nation-oriented outlook on race as a
biological distinction. In contrast to ethnic absolutism or cultural nationalism, Gilroys
argument emphasizes the intercultural and transnational formation (ix) of the black
culture across the Atlantic Ocean. He regards the image of the Black Atlantic as a
preliminary framework for further discussing the cultural connection between black
people of the New World and the Old World. He bases his ideas upon the trend of the
globalization of cultures and identities and offers a definition of the subject of this
book:
The specificity of the modern political and cultural formation I want to

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call the black Atlantic can be defined, on the one level, through this
desire to transcend both the structures of the nation state and the
constraints of ethnicity and national particularity. These desires are
relevant to understanding political organising and cultural criticism.
They have always sat uneasily alongside the strategic choices forced on
black movements and individuals embedded in national political cultures
and nation states in America, the Caribbean, and Europe. (19)
Establishing his theory upon the works and the arguments of black writers such as
W.E.B. Du Bois, Richard Wright, Martin Delany, and Frederic Douglass for textual
and theoretical supplements, Gilroy examines the relationship between modernity and
the Black Atlantic, whose goal is to show people,
the experiences of black people were parts of the abstract modernity they
found so puzzling and to produce as evidence some of the things that
black intellectuals had saidsometimes as defenders of the West,
sometimes as its sharpest criticsabout their sense of embeddedness
in the modern world. (ix)
Gilroy uses Du Boiss critical term double consciousnessto be both
European and black (1)in conjunction with a transnational study of black culture
to challenge the obsessions with racial purity which are circulating inside and outside
black politics (xi). Through the exploration of the historical migrations, exchanges,
discontinuities of the diaspora culture, he attempts to reaffirm the notion of the
modern world as a cultural hybrid with the instability and mutability of identities
which are always unfinished, always being remade (xi). Aside from the arguments of
Du Bois and Wright, the central themes he attributes to forming or displaying black
modernity in The Black Atlantic are diaspora, slavery, and particularly the black music,
three of which play significant roles in the making of black history. Later I will bring

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his explanation of these three essential aspects, which are relevant to the shaping of
the black culture, into my examination of black diasporic, racial, and musicalized
identities.
The image of migration finds a historical meaning in the black history during the
period in which the Africans were shipped across the Middle Passage to the New
World. Today, black peoples migrations take place primarily across the American
continent and are motivated by economic or social reasons, not by the threat of mortal
force as in the past. In order to examine the migrating nature of the black existence,
Paul Gilroys concept of diaspora and Stuart Halls delineation of cultural identity and
diaspora can help us obtain a clear outline of it. According to Gilroy, the term
diaspora refers to a network of people, scattered in a process of non-voluntary
displacement, usually created by violence or under threat of violence or death
(Diaspora 328). He applies the concept of diaspora in terms of the sameness of
miserable experienceskidnapped, shipped, enslaved, labored, and oppressed by the
white mastersand of cultural inheritances from Africa 15 to the discussion of
postmodern black identities. This diaspora consciousness (318) that is produced by
that shared experience helps black people share with one another the diasporic
identity of the Black Atlantic which transcends geographical origins or bonds of
kinship.
British cultural theorist Stuart Halls explication of identity can serve as a
complement to the study of the mobility of black nature. In Cultural Identity and
Diaspora, he examines the questions of representation and cultural identity of black
people, and then leads to the debate over diasopra issues. First, he asserts that we
should pay much attention to the analysis of identityidentity is not a fixed thing, but
15

Music is one of the most important cultural inheritances from Africa. Many forms of musical
expressions such as the blues, jazz, rap, and hip-pop are played and celebrated by individuals and
communities of the black culture. For the discussion of black music and identity, see Chapter Four.

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should be seen as an on-going process (Question 287). Second, he poses two

ways of thinking about cultural identity. One is based upon a shared experience, that
is to say, a collective memory. This gives people a common cultural identity in which
they may be called one people (223). The other is seen from the viewpoint of
difference (225), which draws our attention to the distinctness of individuals.
Consequently, with these two different ideas towards black diasporic identity, Hall
contends that people of the African diaspora are those who are constantly producing
and reproducing themselves anew, through transformation and difference (235). That
is to say, their identities are hybridized through the process of the diaspora experience.
For them the original Africa is no longer there because Africa has been
transformed (231). The characters in The Piano Lesson seem accustomed to
wandering or traveling, and eagerly try to find their home. This is evident at the end
of the play, when Boy Willie decides to return to his hometown in the South to settle
down. Hence, I would like to employ Gilroys and Halls theories about diaspora to
investigate the concept of home of the characters as well as the nature of their
migrations.
Based on the notion that white terror, or the system of slavery has its significance
in the western civilization and modernity of the Black Atlantic, Paul Gilroys
examination of racial slavery in The Black Atlantic helps to see the relationship
between slave-owners and slaves. Looking into the legacy of the Enlightenment, he
inspects the thinking of the first great wave of writers and thinkers about modernity
(qtd. in Atlantic 46), especially that of Hegels master-slave dialectic. In Hegels
allegory, the slave finally refuses death but submits to the slave-owner because of the
mortal terror of his sovereign master and the continuing trial by death (qtd. in

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Atlantic 55). Gilroy utilizes the stories of Frederic Douglass and Margaret Garner,16
in which they prefer death to enslavement, as evidence to invert Hegels slave
narrative. He emphasizes the modernity of the black subject as contradictory to
western rationalism and constructs a conception of the slave subject as an agent
(68). Gilroys idea, when applied to the reading of The Piano Lesson, is exemplified
by Boy Willies courage for fighting with the white ghost and his fathers unflinching
bravery to take away the piano from the Sutter family.
The piano in the play is a gate to the past memory and history of the descendants
of black slaves. Through different reactions to the piano, the protagonists intend to
re-examine their history and give it an authentic meaning. Here, Michel Foucaults
concept of history and counter-memory is useful to study Wilsons view of history. In
Foucaults central idea, history is fragmented, flowing, and discontinuous. His
viewpoint towards the nature of history is the opposite of the traditional perspective
that emphasizes the continuity of historical events. In Language, Counter-Memory,
Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, he brings up an ideal term named effective
history (154), whose essence is different from that of official history which
represents the voice of the authority. He thinks only effective history can convey the
voice of otherness. This concept appropriately supports Wilsons insistence on his
expression of the marginalized black experience, which is described in his historical
project. Writing black experience for Wilson can be seen as a counter-memory
(Foucault 160) to the orthodox history. I will employ this idea to examine Wilsons
argument for establishing his chronically contrived historical cycle.
As for the white ghost, in spite of its supernatural appearance in the realistic
setting, it has recast a vast shadow on the survivors of slavery since emancipation.

16

For more information about the stories of these two persons, please see Chapter Three, pp. 7475.

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The ghost evokes black terror of the white and anxiety about self-consciousness.
Frantz Fanons postcolonial theory in Black Skin, White Masks can be properly used
to analyze the repressed racial identities of the characters facing the oppression from
the haunting memory. Based upon a psychoanalytical viewpoint, in Fanons book, he
states the black self is fixed by the gaze of the other, and was born an object in the
midst of other objects (109). In other words, the existential nature of the black self
has been shaped from the eyes of the white, through the recognition of the other. It is
only from the perspective of the other, the white, that the black self has been informed
of his difference, his perceived inferiority to the dominant other. Because his skin
color becomes the most obvious feature of the body, the consciousness of the body
spontaneously produces a negating activity (110) to depreciate the values of the
black. His racial identity is thus formed as savages, brutes, illiterate along with
shame and self-contempt (116-17). As Fanon painfully describes the black as an
object, Wilson recounts how the slave ancestors of the characters in The Piano Lesson
were traded for goods, for the piano, by white masters. On the other hand, the debate
over the piano causes identity crises among the protagonists and brings them into a
struggle with what Fanon calls the fact of blackness (109). The conflict between
Boy Willie and Berniece will provide Fanons postcolonial analysis of blackness an
opportunity to show us the reasons why the two siblings confront each other in so
contrary a manner.
The blues is the production of the shared black experience in America. Though
music has been performed for its recreational purpose, black music or the blues is
endowed with social and cultural functions in Wilsons plays. Paul Gilroys analysis
of black music in The Black Atlantic helps explain the importance of the blues in
black culture. For Paul Gilroy, black music has much to do with the politics of racial
authenticity. In his argument, he contends, the self-identity, political culture, and

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grounded aesthetics that distinguish black communities have often been constructed
through their music (102). Through music and its rituals (102), the performer of
the music and the crowd can build a connective relationship with each other
regardless of time and space; ones identity will go through a process of
transformation, exchange, and development in the blues playing. In this manner,
music becomes a model whereby identity can be understood neither as a fixed
essence nor as a vague and utterly contingent construction (102). It is with the
musical function called the blues aesthetic (Jackson 51) that black music acquires
its communicative capability to demonstrate the subject position of blacks, solicit for
solidarity in the collective memory, and foster a new black identity. Most importantly,
Gilroy suggests the power of music makes black musical expression a distinctive
counterculture of modernity (36), which forms his central argument in The Black
Atlantic. Furthermore, I would also like to utilize LeRoi Joness (Imamu Amiri
Barakas) critiques on history of the blues and Simon Friths cultural theory of music
and identity to supplement my discussion.
In Chapter Two I will apply Stuart Halls study of cultural identity and diaspora,
and Paul Gilroys idea of diaspora to the examination of black diasporic identity. In
Chapter Three my discussion of black racial identity as well as Wilsons historical
project will benefit from Michel Foucaults concept of history and counter-memory,
Frantz Fanons postcolonial reading of blackness, and Gilroys analysis of slavery in
terms of modernity. In Chapter Four I will use the elaboration on the blues history
from LeRoi Jones and on the function of black music from Gilroy to discuss the
relationship between the blues and black identity. Chapter Five is the conclusion of
my thesis. Through the exploration of the old and new black identities, it will be
helpful to see the formation of a black subject in August Wilsons dramatic vision.
The old black identity is a repressed, stigmatized, and marginalized one given by

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the dominant white society. Due to the old identity, black people lose confidence,
encounter an identity crisis, and even refuse to respect their own culture. Now Wilson
in The Piano Lesson deconstructs that kind of black history by writing black
experience. By writing Boy Willies fighting with the ghost, Bernieces invocation
through music, Boy Willies final decision to return home, and what is more important,
their faithful recognition of the past culture, Wilson lets the characters find their
subject positions in the world. He reconstructs new identities for the real black people.
In an interview he reveals his expectation for black people: if black folks would
recognize themselves as Africans and not be afraid to respond to the world as Africans,
then they could make their contribution to the world as Africans (qtd. in Bigsby 293).
This is precisely a part of black identity Wilson strives to construct in his plays.