August Wilson’s Spatial Writing Back on Black Female in Fences to Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God

Abstract

August Wilson has long been admired for his “Pittsburgh Circle” which collectively presented a panoramic view of the love, hate, and the living conditions of African Americans. Among them, Fences written in 1987 as one of his “Pittsburgh Circle” series, and also the first play to win him Pulitzer Prize actually contains a deeper revelation for understanding black females except for overwhelmingly tremendous studies on black community in this work as a whole. Theoretically, when one examines through notions of “Thirdspace” from Edward Soja and garden as one typical kind of “other space” by Michael Foucault, this work of Fences reveals that Rose’s progressive taking up of space from kitchen to porch inside the fences and finally to the family garden exceeding fences recalls the female protagonist Jannie’s eastward re-locations. During her progress, she finally established her own subjectivity and lives along with her three marriages in Their Eyes Were Watching God created by Zora Neale Hurston. Therefore, the intertextual study of the two works proves that through spacial construction, black females as the double other to both whites and males still get a chance to reconstruct their subjectivity, and even before postmodernism identified their feminist voices in literature, great works had already hinted the power of black females which helps them finally emerge from margin to the sight of people.