August Wilson 작품에 나타난 블루스의 상징

Abstract

The Blues Symbols in August Wilson's Plays Seung-jo Jeong August Wilson(1945-) has drawn considerable attention in contemporary American drama. Wilson, a black American playwright and Blues dramatist, in particular, is interested in black-American's past and experience. In order to represent the past, Wilson finds the Blues the most compatible agency in his drama. Blues is the most popular song for both Black people and White ones in America. There are many reasons that Wilson sticks to Blues in order to describe Black tradition and culture in his drama. He believes that It can tell the story of the African slaves and American slaves. It is not so much a common song as a legacy to Black American in his drama. Throughout the plays, Blues plays an important role as much as protagonists. Wilson, intentionally, introduces indispensable, suitable meanings of the Blues to audience. Blues contains reconciliation and conflict, experience and reality, mute resistance and submission, legacy and fortune, tradition and new style, finally assimilation and dissimilation in Ma Rainey's Black Bottom(1984), Fences(1987), Joe Turner's Come and Gone(1988), The Piano Lesson(1990). We experience family's reconciliation and conflict through Blues in Fences, Berniece's view of legacy and Boy Willy's fortune in The Piano Lesson, resistance and submission in Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, freedom and slavery history in Joe Turner's Come and Gone. The reason Blues usually accompanies Wilson is that Black voices will be vacant, meaningless, especially, proofless without hearing the Blues in his drama.