Piano Lesson Ghosts of the Thesis

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This is certainly suggested in Boy Willie's ruthless and callous demeanor with respect to an heirloom for which his father gave his life. Doaker reports at one point that "he say he gonna cut it in half and go on and sell his half. They been around here three days trying to sell them watermelons. They trying to get out to where the white folks live but the truck keep breaking down. They go a block or two and it break down again. They trying to get out to Squirrel Hill and can't get around the corner. He say soon as he can get that truck empty to where he can set the piano up in there he gonna take it out of here and go sell it." (Wilson, 29)

Boy Willie's representation of the blind ambition to advance casts this path in a particularly negative light, but also denotes that Willie's own frustrations are a motive for his selfishness. Moreover, it reflects a distinction in African-American experience as endured separately by men and women, with Boy Willie and Berniece reflecting the separate courses of identity often split along gender lines.

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As Kubitschek (1994) observes, "The Piano Lesson presents 'missing' women's history and viewpoints as essential to overcoming alienation in a system where men and women initially speak not only different but opposing languages." (Kubitschek, 183) Certainly, this comes out in the debates between Berniece and her brother. Committed to the idea of owning land as a way to be elevated in status, Boy Willie's foolhardy ways of approaching this ambition are indicative of a dilemma not unique to the Charles family. More to the point, what makes Wilson's work so challenging is the rationality in that which Boy Willie aspires to do. We are emotionally appalled at the idea of his auctioning off a symbol of the family's heritage, and yet, as he defends the ambition to protect his family and provide for them with their own land, we are given some modest insight into the losing dilemma and sacrifice which faced African-Americans in the early 20th century shadow of slavery.

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