![]() ![]() The Pittsburgh of the Maxson family is a town where Troy and other men of his generation fled from the savage conditions of sharecropping in the south. ![]() Wilson asks his audience to put together what they know of American history with the way his various characters experience and perceive history through their own, often conflicted eyes. Maxson represents an amalgamation of Troy's history in the south and present life in the north that are inextricably linked. Troy's last name, "Maxson," is a compressed reference to the Mason-Dixon line, considered as the imaginary line originally conceived of in 1820 to define the separation between the slave states and the free states. In Fences as in Wilson's other plays, a tragic character helps pave the way for other blacks to have opportunities under conditions they were never free to experience, but never reap from their own sacrifice and talents themselves. Fences ends in 1965, but the themes of the play directly place its consciousness in a pre-civil-rights-movement, pre-Vietnam-war-era psyche. ![]()
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