What is the symbolism of the fence in Fences?

There’s already a lot of answers to this question that have been posted, so I’m going to try to focus on a few different ideas about the symbolic nature of fences in Fences.

The protagonist of Fences is Troy, a struggling pater familias. Troy’s name is an excellent, often overlooked allusion to fences. The walls of Troy, in The Iliad, are arguably the most famous fences in the history of mankind—fences that eventually came tumbling down, just as Troy’s own insecurities and struggles lead to his own breakdowns with his family. Troy the character is symbolic of the city of Troy. He holds out as long as he can against forces beyond his control, for reasons concerning his own pride, which only end up hurting him.

Gabriel is another character tied to the symbol of fences. In Biblical scholarship, Gabriel is an arc angel of heaven, a correlation August Wilson calls to mind directly with one of Gabriel’s lines near the end of the play: “You ready, Troy. I’m gonna tell St. Peter to open the gates” (2.5). The gates of heaven are fences looming over the action of the entire play—the question of the best way to live one’s life and what, at the end of one’s life, makes it meaningful.

Finally, there is the American ideal of the white picket fence. Troy’s family is part of America, yet separate from it. The white picket fence which symbolizes the ideal American family seems not to apply to them—them being non-white and their circumstances not ideal. Wilson might be making the argument that the very notion of American idealism is a lie; at least for certain, usually minority, people within the American system.

The idea of the fence has a number of meanings in the play. Fences keep things in and keep things out, both literally and figuratively for the Maxson family. 

For Rose, the fence represents an opportunity to define and defend her family. 

Rose thinks the partially built fence around the house will keep her loved ones safe inside.

For Troy, the fence has a more symbolic set of meanings. 

Unable to open up to those that he loves, Troy keeps much of his emotion inside, building imaginary fences between himself and his family and friends.

Beyond symbolizing the idea of Troy's inability to communicate his emotions and his affection, fences also characterize Troy's view of the challenges he has faced in his life. 

He feels restricted by race in his professional life, as he did in his athletic career. Death also represents a significant limitation for Troy, fencing off his potential in an absolute, inevitable and definite way. 

Troy's rivalry with death can be seen as indicative of his mindset generally. Where Troy sees limits, he feels that he is being personally challenged to overcome those limits. 

When Troy played baseball, he was never content to hit the ball into the stands. His hits always had to go over the fence.

What was true for Troy as a baseball player is true for him as a husband and father as well. When Troy feels powerless or limited, he acts out. We see this in his assertions of power over Cory (demonstrating that he will not be limited in his authority as a parent) and we see it as well in his adultery.

Every limit he perceives, he seeks to defeat somehow, including the limit of death.

What are some examples of symbolism in Fences?

There are a number of examples of symbolism in August Wilson’s Fences.

The most prominent example of symbolism comes in the repeated use of fences (variously literal and metaphorical) in the play. Other examples include Troy’s symbolically meaningful habit of swinging at a baseball on a string and Gabriel’s trumpet.

The idea of a fence is given several iterations in the play. Fences are connected to Troy’s baseball career, to his time in prison and to his life with Rose.

Rose wants Troy to build a fence around the property where they live in order to keep the family together. Outside forces (such as other women) will be symbolically kept at bay by this fence. Until the fence is built, those outside forces prey upon the integrity of the family.

In addition to symbolizing a means of maintaining the family unit, fences also symbolize limitations. Troy is almost constantly struggling to overcome what he perceives to be limitations put on his freedom and potential. He rails against the racial boundaries that he feels kept him out of professional baseball and he complains about the racial bias that keeps him from becoming a driver at his place of work. Just as he is a home-run hitter in the prison baseball league, Troy is a person seeking to exceed these outwardly imposed limitations. And sometimes he succeeds.

The connection of limitations to Troy’s time in prison is resonant with similar meanings behind the fence symbol. Troy’s attitude of constant struggle against perceived constraint leads him to break the law and to be imprisoned, suggesting a self-perpetuated cycle. Acting rashly in defiance of constraining limitations, Troy repeatedly undermines his prospects for a happy life.

We can see his affair in this light too.

“His relationship with Alberta is in its own way a confession of his limitations: He must find some kind of escape or crack under the strain.” (eNotes)

Fences, then, function as a symbol of limitations and protections, with each of these ideas appearing as complex, interrelated themes within the story.

Troy’s baseball on a string is symbolic of his cyclical character arc as Troy wants to hit home-runs and so metaphorically attain some level of emancipation from constraint and thus find glory or transcendence. Yet he plays with a ball on a string, metaphorically acknowledging the notion that he cannot see the true nature of the game he is playing. (Troy himself is a limited figure, unable or unwilling to admit to certain truths.)

He lacks the perspective that both Cory and Rose seem to have insofar as they can see the destructive side of Troy’s inner struggle (especially as it is vented outwardly in their direction). They can see that his need for some glorious transcendence saps away his real strength.

“If Troy has been fenced in by the rules and conventions of a racist society, he has also created his own fences, which are both barriers to the understanding and affection of his son and obstacles to Troy’s own spiritual expansion.” (eNotes)

Being so conflicted, the glory that Troy seems to achieve is that which is celebrated by Gabriel with his broken trumpet.

Gabriel performs a cryptic rite and “the gates of heaven stand as wide open as God’s closet” for Troy. In this strangely powerful ending, Gabriel’s silent horn becomes a symbolic representation of the emotional reality that anchored many of the struggles Troy faced. His constraints were sometimes real and sometimes only emotional projections of a self-exempting and selfish sense that he is, in himself, a person with limitations who is unable to face those limitations head-on. Whether the constraints he faced were actual or fabricated, Troy's struggle was real just as Gabriel's trumpet is silent and actual and, somehow, capable of bridging the distance between outer and inner realities.

What does the fence symbolize in August Wilson's play Fences?

Playwrights typically establish the scenes in which the following action will occur with detailed instructions for the production crew. These details, understandably, are intended to help set the mood and context for what will follow. In the opening set instructions for Fences, playwright August Wilson provides this seemingly innocuous description of his protagonists’ home in a rundown section of Pittsburgh:

The yard is a small dirt yard, partially fenced, except for the last scene, with a wooden saw horse, a pile of lumber, and other fence-building equipment set off to the side.

As Wilson’s play proceeds, that unfinished fence becomes a metaphor for an unfinished life, for commitments not met, and for barriers both from the outside world and to entrance into that same world. Exchanges between Troy, the play’s main figure, an embittered former athlete—a black baseball player in the days when racism was a seemingly insurmountable barrier (or fence) to black inclusion and advancement—and now-garbage collector, and his wife Rose, a deeply religious woman ten years younger than her husband and resigned to the indignities and struggles that accompanied many African American lives during the era depicted, invariably return to the topic of the unfinished fence and Rose’s spiritual longing for a barrier to insulate her from the evils of the world. Early in the play, Rose is heard singing, “Jesus, be a fence all around me every day Jesus, I want you to protect me as I travel on my way.”

The partially-completed fence surrounding the Maxson’s yard also symbolizes the gulf between Troy and his son Cory, the only of the three children around the house to which Rose has given birth (the first, Lyons, was from an earlier relationship before Troy and Rose were married; the youngest, Raynell, is the illegitimate offspring of Troy’s extramarital affair). Rose wants Troy and Cory to finish the fence, but that requires a shared experience on the part of a father and son, between whom exists an invisible wall (or fence) separating generations and the chasm between an embittered past and a hopeful future. At one point, Troy inquires about Cory’s whereabouts, suggesting that his, Troy’s, desire to work on the fence is thwarted by Cory’s absence: “He gone out 'cause he know I want him to help me with this fence. I know how he is. That boy scared of work.” Troy’s lack of enthusiasm for finishing the fence, however, is evident in a scene in which Rose suggests that Troy will use any excuse available to avoid working on this project:

You got something to say about everything. First it's the numbers . . . then it's the way the man runs his restaurant . . . then you done got on Cory. What's it gonna be next? Take a look up there and see if the weather suits you . . . or is it gonna be how you gonna put up the fence with the clothes hanging in the yard.

Late in act 2, scene 4, Troy and Cory engage in a confrontation that brings forth years' worth of repressed and not-so-repressed antagonisms between father and son. Cory and Troy engage in a physical struggle that ends with a major break between the two that will, we learn, remain unresolved. As Troy kicks Cory out of the house, the two have the following exchange:

CORY Tell Mama I'll be back for my things.

TROY: They’ll be on the other side of that fence.

It was no mistake that Wilson titled his play “Fences.” Barriers play a vital symbolic role in his play. The unfinished fence around the yard, the location of the much of the play’s action, sits as a silent metaphor for the barriers, wanted and unwanted, that permeate Wilson’s narrative. In this climactic scene, the fence, again, symbolizes the barrier between Troy's life and that of the rest of the world. Inside that fence, he is the master of his realm; outside, he is a poor, under-educated black male denied his proper place in the world. Cory represents the potential and promise denied Troy by virtue of the systemic racism that dominated American society. Troy's death and Cory's reconciliation to the imperfect relationship he had had with his father is the best for which these characters can hope.

What is the symbolism of fences in Fences?

The fence in the play has many possible symbolic meanings. For one thing, the fence is a project Troy's wife, Rose, has wanted finished for a long time; Troy's inability to complete the fence or to work on it in any sustained way is emblematic of his own lack of involvement with his wife, whom he is cheating on, and his oppositional relationship with his sons.

The fence also symbolizes the boundary between family and the outside world. Troy, because of his job as a garbage man, lives much of his life beyond this boundary. For Rose, the fence is a way of keeping the people she loves close to her and of keeping out those who would threaten her family. For her, the fence—if Troy could finish it—would be a symbol of the permanence of her love for Troy and her family.

Troy, however, strains against these boundaries. He is bitter over how his life has been constrained by his skin color, another kind of boundary he is unable to cross. His affair with Alberta and his undermining of his son Cory's football career can be seen in relation to those constraints. In this sense, the unfinished fence is representative of his inability to commit to his wife; because of his bitterness, he is unable to build anything solid for himself or his family.

Early in the play, Troy tells a story about defeating death and says,

Death ain't nothing but a fastball on the outside corner.

Troy tries to diminish death, the symbol of life's limits, as a way to assert his power and courage. Troy has lived a circumscribed life, hemmed in and threatened by institutional racism, and his answer has been to be defiant. He envisions death as a person, an antagonist he can fight, both by using his superior physical strength and his trickster qualities of evasion.

Troy describes death as a man in

a white robe with a hood on it. He throwed on that robe and went off to look for his sickle. Say, "I'll be back."

By picturing death as a mortal man and Ku Klux Klansman in his hooded white robe, Troy is able to reduce the abstract but very real limitations on his life to something concrete he can wrestle with and defeat. This fight with a personified death energizes Troy, who has been abused, damaged, and beaten down.

Physical death for Troy defeats the personified death that is out to get him in life. The play ends with the thought that Troy achieves peace in death, entering into the pearly gates of heaven, thus winning out over what death has tried to do to him.

What is the symbolic role of fences in the play?

Troy takes pride in keeping his family together and providing for them by collecting garbage. Troy's rebellion and frustration set the tone for the play as he struggles for fairness in a society which seems to offer none—and it is race that interferes with fairness, race which is the ultimate fence in society preventing people of color from attaining The American Dream. In his struggle to deal with the fence of race, he builds fences between himself and family. I don’t think in this play that “fences do good neighbors make,” for they seem to be an impediment that must be negotiated or torn down.

Rose believes the fences are symbolic of the safety they provide inside their house. Alberto wants the fences to hold death at bay, and Troy thinks the fences keep intruders out. Yet, for all that the fences symbolically keep out, they also can be seen to keep people confined, such as the imaginary fence that Troy's father uses to control him, or the prison walls that keep him incarcerated.

Just with the Robert Frost poem "Good Fences Make Good Neighbors," this play illustrates how people "fence" themselves in to certain roles in life.  Sometimes these roles are within the family, sometimes within society as a whole.  Basically, the symbolic role represents the boxes we paint for ourselves and within which we choose to live.

What are two symbols in the story "Fences" and their meanings?

The symbols of "fences" and baseball occupy significance in Wilson's drama.  The sport of baseball is symbolic of dreams, their pain, and the division that such love can often bring.  Baseball is the sport that Troy loved playing.  The reality is that race caused a "fence" built around baseball, ensuring that Troy could not achieve his dream.  The dream of baseball haunts at Troy.  It is a symbol because it represents a pure love and an immersion for Troy in which there is no fence, no barrier or obstacle.  Yet, baseball becomes a symbol of his hurt and pain, something within which Troy is never able to fully find peace. Something that Troy participates in without a fence builds a fence to keep him apart from it.  Baseball is a symbol of the hope that causes pain for Troy, something within which he cannot discover the brutal beauty.  Troy is separated from his love as much as any fence divides him from anything else.

Just as the home run in baseball is defined by hitting the ball over a "fence," the symbol of a "fence" is significant in the drama.  Troy's entire being is constructed with physical, social, and emotional fences. Socio- economic realities such as race and class help to develop a fence for Troy, elements he believes helps to deny him his chance at happiness.  In his own past, Troy's life was defined by a "fence" in terms of what prison represented for him.  At the same time, Troy establishes emotional fences between he and his children.  This is best seen with Cory, where the emotional fence that Troy builds prevents father and son from finding some reconciliation.  At the same time, Troy's emotional fence with his wife, Rose, and friend, Bono, help to establish some of his alienation.  Troy finds himself lost within the fence he creates with the people around him.  Troy's desire to build a fence to keep death away from him is a reflection of how much the "fence" has occupied importance in his life.  The symbols of baseball and the fence are significant in the drama because they are physical representations of Troy's emotional state of being.