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The Analysis Of Piano Lessons By Wilson August
The Analysis Of Piano Lessons By Wilson August
Piano lesson symbolism
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What should one do with their legacy, and how should it be put to use? In the play “The Piano Lesson”, the Charles' family faces this question, and struggles to find the answer. The family’s legacy is in the form of a piano. On the piano are carvings of their ancestors. The two main characters that are having a conflict over the piano are Berniece and Boy Willie. Boy Willie wants to sell the piano so he can add the proceeds of the sale to the proceeds of selling watermelon’s and buy some land from “Sutter”. Berniece doesn’t want to sell the piano because it holds the memories and blood that stains its wood (Gale, 2000, p255). She refuses to play the piano and keeps its history from her daughter in fear of calling up the spirits that might lie within the piano. The main symbol of the play is the 137-year-old piano, an object that holds a key to the family history. It takes on a number of meanings through the course of its life. It was carved to make Miss Ophelia happy, the piano's wooden figures indicate the interchangeable nature of slavery. As Doaker notes, who is Berniece and Boy willie’s uncle, "Now she had her piano and her niggers too." (ACT I, p741) The slave is the master's gift and accessory. The piano “visibly records the lost lives of Berniece and Boy Willie’s ancestors, and it is the only tangible link remaining between past and present” (Galens 2000). The piano also becomes a symbolic attempt to keep the family together. It is also then the physical record of the family's history. Boy Charles especially understands the carvings as narrative. As Doaker recalls: "…say it was the story of our whole family and as long as Sutter had it he had us. Say we was still in slavery." (Act I, p741) It might appear as if Be... ... middle of paper ... ...ing one's legacy is answered so simply. The living draw strength from the ghosts of the past and the ghosts respond to the living because they speak from that very place. Works Cited Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition © 2007 by Salem Press, Inc. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=lfh&AN=MOL9830000328&site=lrc-live SparkNotes Editors. “SparkNote on The Piano Lesson.” SparkNotes.com. SparkNotes LLC. n.d.. Web. 1 Dec. 2014. "The Piano Lesson." Drama for Students. Ed. David M. Galens. Vol. 7. Detroit: Gale, 2000. 243-262. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Web. 7 Dec. 2014. http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?&id=GALE%7CCX2693200025&v=2.1&u=bali98452&it=r&p=GVRL&sw=w Wilson, August. “The Piano Lesson.” Booth, Hunter, and Mays. The Norton Introduction to Literature. Portable ed. New York: Norton, 2006, p716-778.
Boy Willie’s family piano, engraved with illustrations of his family history, has great sentimental value and his sister, Berniece, believes it is more important and crucial to honor their mother who lost their father after he stole it in an act of defiance against the Sutter family which ultimately led to Papa Boy Charles death. Her mother polished the piano for seventeen years after the death of their father, “seventeen years worth of cold nights and an empty bed. For what? For a piano? For a piece of wood? To get even with someone?” (1232). It represents everything that she lost, raising her children on her own, and so much more. She poured her soul into maintaining its impeccable appearance in an attempt to preserve her relationship to Papa Boy Charles. The carvings portray the history of her family, the hardships they went through to get to where they are today, and their resistance to slavery. In “The Dialects of August Wilson’s Piano Lesson”, Harry Justin Elam suggests, “Sutter’s possession of the piano constitutes a form of enslavement… While no longer physically bound to the slave master, Wilson believes that African Americans remain spiritually and physiologically imprisoned by the dominant culture unable to express or discover
to carry out the command of The Ghost at the time when it become right.
Do you ever have one of those days when you remember your parents taking away all of your baseball cards or all of your comic books because you got a bad grade in one of your classes? You feel a little depressed and your priced possession has been stolen. This event is the same as August Wilson’s, The Piano Lesson. The story is about a sibling rivalry, Boy Willie Charles against Berniece Charles, regarding an antique, family inherited piano. Boy Willie wants to sell the piano in order to buy the same Mississippi land that his family had worked as slaves. However, Berniece, who has the piano, declines Boy Willie’s request to sell the piano because it is a reminder of the history that is their family heritage. She believes that the piano is more consequential than “hard cash” Boy Willie wants. Based on this idea, one might consider that Berniece is more ethical than Boy Willie.
Throughout history women assumed subordination is a constant theme; although in the 1930s and 1920s America this changed. The Twenties brought on woman’s suffrage while the Thirties saw and encouraged a more progressive in women. August Wilson writer of The Piano Lesson supported women’s press towards equality and expressed this in the play. The Piano Lesson follows the Charles family and their heirloom, a piano with carvings of their once enslaved family. Boy Willie wants to sell the piano to purchase land where the Charles family labored as slaves for the family of a man named Sutter, who has died. Bernice, Boy Willie’s sister refuses to let him sell it. Sutter’s ghost, the main antagonist terrorizes the family as his spirit wants the piano
In this play, The Piano Lesson, by August Wilson, readers can see Berniece struggle to accept the piano’s prime significance and traumatic past which it represents. In Berniece’s case, she ultimately struggles to accept what the piano represents, her family's ties to it and the stories behind the piano itself, it’s in her home, but she can barely look at it and has not touched it since her mother has passed. Her daughter plays it, but does not know the piano’s significance to her family, with their ancestral past. Bernice does not want to let the piano go but, she doesn’t fully embrace it either, which causes her to not fully move on with her life. Berniece still has not fully forgiven Boy Willie, or gotten over the fact that Crawley is gone,
The Piano Lesson written by August Wilson is a work that struggles to suggest how best African Americans can handle their heritage and how they can best put their history to use. This problem is important to the development of theme throughout the work and is fueled by the two key players of the drama: Berniece and Boy Willie. These siblings, who begin with opposing views on what to do with a precious family heirloom, although both protagonists in the drama, serve akin to foils of one another. Their similarities and differences help the audience to understand each individual more fully and to comprehend the theme that one must find balance between deserting and preserving the past in order to pursue the future, that both too greatly honoring or too greatly guarding the past can ruin opportunities in the present and the future.
The piano held symbolic significance in the story of the family and their struggle to move forward. The piano represents the importance and value of slaves during slavery. Slaves were traded for objects during slavery. Slaves were of no importance to their slave owners. As Doaker says in the story “now she had her piano and her niggas too”, meaning slaves were nothing more than an accessory to their slave owners (Wilson 395). Doaker sarcastically speaks of how slaves were not considered humans but property. As Sandy Alexandre states in her work, “Property and Inheritance in August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson”, “Doaker sees greed where there should be something like repulsion or at least a semblance of hesitation to accept such an ill-begotten gift”(77). Alexandre argues slaves are not given the proper respect and are not considered equal. This specific event from the story shows how little to ...
Surprisingly, this novel ends with Boy Willie and Lymon going back to Mississippi without selling the piano. Finally, Boy Willie closes by telling Berniece that if she doesn’t keep playing on the piano, he and Sutter would both be back. In saying this, Boy Willie means that if they don’t keep their inheritance close to their heart, unfavorable events could begin happening once
The play begins with Orgon’s mother, Madame Pernelle, unleashing her unsolicited and shameless opinions upon her grandchildren as she prepares to take her leave. She begins with her grandson Damis, who she claims is a dunce, unworthy of his noble father’s love and affection. She then turns her attentions to his sister Mariane, who she believes to be a manipulative and mysterious girl who plays at being wholesome and shy. To her daughter-in-law Elmire, Madame Pernelle offers up her thoughts on Elmire’s bad examples for her children, stating that she is too free with her expenses and that her brother Cleante is much too experienced in the ways of the world to be considered decent company to keep. In fact, the only words of kindness she has to offer are to Tartuffe, a religious man who has found his way into the good graces of her son Orgon.
In the play, The Piano Lesson, music played an important role. The piano in the play represented the African American history and culture. The ghost of Sutter represented the pain and trauma that had been endured throughout the generations in the Charles family. Berniece did not play the piano because she associated it with pain and the bad things that happened to her family members. She did not want to accept the things that had happened in her family’s past. She thought that she could deny everything and act like it never happened. She believed if she continued to run from everything and everybody that the pain would go away. Berniece was burdened and haunted by the ghost of Sutter until she gave in and played the piano after all of those years. After playing the piano, Berniece was no longer burdened or haunted by the past. She was free from all of the denial. She escaped the pain through the music and reflecting on the carvings on the piano, which represented her heritage. Berniece’s brother, Boy Willie, told her “Berniece, if you and Maretha don’t keep playing on that piano… ain’t no telling… me and Sutter both liable to be back” (Wilson 108). By saying that, he meant that if she did not allow her daughter to continue playing the piano and learning about her culture that she would end up going through the same things that Berniece had gone through. Music has a huge impact on the African American culture in several ways and many things about the past can be learned through it.
The piano represents itself as something different for everyone. For Berniece, it exists as an artifact to speak with her ancestors. For Boy Willie, it acts as a piece of property he can sell to get more money, no matter how much it means to the family. And to Doaker, it stands as just a piano that has a good and bad effect on the family, until the end where the ghost of Sutter leaves them for
In conclusion, Wilson’s “The Piano Lesson” portrays racist stereotypes through symbols, such as the piano, watermelons and supernatural powers, characters like Breniece, Boy Willie, and Avery and also through conflicts within oneself, with another character and also supernatural power. Racism was prominent throughout the play but these are the symbols, characters, and conflicts that were very significant. Wilson’s “The piano lesson” did indeed teach about the happiness of white men in the misery of black men, as once said by Fredric Douglas, “The white man's happiness cannot be purchased by the black man's misery.”
In The Piano Lesson each central character learns a lesson. August Wilson uses plenty of symbolism throughout his play, the strongest symbol being the piano itself, representing the family's history, their long struggle, and their burden of their race. Throughout the play, the conflict revolves around the piano, and Berniece and Boy Willie's contrasting views about its significance and about what should be done with it. Berniece is ashamed and cannot let go of the past, or the piano, and Boy Willie wants to move his life forward, and use the piano to do so. Wilson portrays the 'lesson' of the piano as accepting and respecting one's past and moving on with one's life gracefully, through Berniece and Boy Willies contrasting actions and the play's climactic resolution.
This report will discuss the career of prominent Italian architect, Renzo Piano. Topics discussed include: design approach, influences, building typology and the materials used, as well as a biography of Renzo.
When the plays begins, we are introduced to the “Blue Piano”. It represents the spirit of life (page 3) in the setting. We see the music have a great impact during Stella’s and Blanche’s conversation about Belle Reve. When the music gets louder, the conversation intensifies after Stella asks what happened to Belle Reve, causing Blanche to show her sadness to the fullest about losing Belle Reve and experiencing the deaths in the