The fence that gives August Wilson's play its title is one of the most heavily assigned symbolism essay topics in American drama, and for good reason, since the image works on multiple levels at once throughout the text. Many students arrive at a surface level interpretation quickly, noting that the fence represents protection or keeping something out, without pushing further into the more complicated meanings the symbol accumulates across the play. Teaching students to layer multiple interpretations of a single symbol, rather than settling for the first reasonable one they find, is the key analytical skill this topic can build.

A useful starting point is examining how different characters explain the purpose of the fence differently, since these differing explanations reveal character rather than simply describing a shared object. Rose wants the fence built to keep her family close and protected, reflecting her focus on togetherness and safety, while Bono suggests that some people build fences to keep loved ones in and others build them to keep people out, directly naming the ambiguity the play is exploring. Having students compare these different characters' stated reasons for the fence gives them concrete evidence for an essay about how a single symbol can carry contradictory meanings simultaneously.

The timing of the fence's construction across the play also carries symbolic weight that students often overlook on a first read. Troy delays finishing the fence for most of the play, only completing it after Rose learns of his affair and after significant damage has already been done to the family, which raises the question of whether the fence is protecting anything by the time it is finished. Asking students to consider what the fence's completion means at that specific narrative moment, rather than treating it as simply a household chore Troy finally gets around to, opens up considerably more sophisticated analysis.

Moving Beyond a Single Fixed Meaning

The strongest essays on this topic resist reducing the fence to one single meaning and instead argue that its significance shifts depending on which character's perspective is being considered at a given moment. For Rose, the fence may represent an attempt to hold her family together despite Troy's failures, while for Troy, it may represent an obligation he resents and delays, connected to his broader ambivalence about domestic responsibility. For Cory, the fence might represent something closer to a barrier between himself and his father's approval. Teaching students to argue for this kind of multiplicity, rather than a single fixed symbol, produces genuinely more advanced literary analysis.

• Compare how Rose and Bono each explain the purpose of building the fence
• Analyze what it means that Troy finishes the fence only after his affair is revealed
• Consider whether the fence represents different things to Troy, Rose, and Cory
• Examine how the fence relates to the play's broader themes of duty and protection
• Push students to argue for multiple, even contradictory, meanings rather than one fixed symbol

Connecting the Fence to the Play's Title

Because Wilson chose to title the entire play after this single symbol, students should be pushed to consider why this particular image, rather than another available symbol like baseball or the devil, was significant enough to define the whole work. This question requires students to think about scope, considering how the fence connects to nearly every major relationship and theme in the play in a way that a more narrowly focused symbol might not. Essays that directly address the significance of the title, rather than treating it as an incidental detail, often demonstrate a more complete understanding of the play's overall structure and purpose.

Some students productively argue that the title itself is meant to be read as a question or an invitation to consider fences broadly, including the invisible barriers of race, class, and generational conflict that structure the entire play beyond the literal wooden structure in the Maxson yard. This kind of expansive reading, where the literal fence becomes a gateway into a discussion of figurative fences throughout the play, tends to produce essays with genuine breadth and ambition. Teachers should watch for this move and encourage it when students attempt it, since it represents a more mature level of symbolic thinking.

Common Mistakes in Symbolism Essays

The most common weakness in student essays on this topic is stopping at a single, often the first, interpretation of the fence without exploring how that meaning might shift or complicate across the play. An essay stating simply that the fence represents Troy's desire to protect his family is not wrong, but it is incomplete if it never addresses the tension between protection and confinement that the play deliberately sets up. Teaching students to ask what else could this symbol mean, even after they have found a reasonable first answer, pushes them toward the deeper, more layered analysis this topic rewards.

Another common mistake is treating the symbol in isolation from the play's dialogue about it, when in fact the characters themselves explicitly discuss and debate the fence's meaning within the text. Students who quote Bono's line about fences keeping people in versus keeping people out, and then build their own interpretation in direct conversation with that quoted line, produce stronger essays than students who develop a purely external interpretation without engaging what the characters themselves say. Pointing students back to this specific dialogue is one of the most efficient ways to strengthen a weak symbolism essay during revision.

Assessment Strategies for Symbolism Essays

When grading symbolism essays, it helps to separate the quality of textual evidence from the originality or depth of the interpretation itself, since these are related but distinct skills. A student can select strong, well chosen quotations about the fence while still offering a fairly surface level interpretation, or conversely, offer a genuinely sophisticated interpretation supported by thinner evidence. A rubric that scores these dimensions separately gives students more precise feedback on which skill needs more attention, rather than a single holistic score that blends multiple different strengths and weaknesses together.

It is also worth building in a specific rubric category rewarding students who address multiple, potentially contradictory meanings of the fence rather than settling for one interpretation and treating the essay as complete. This encourages the layered thinking the strongest essays on this topic tend to demonstrate, while still giving partial credit to students who develop a single interpretation thoroughly and well. Making this expectation explicit before students draft, rather than only reflected in the grading rubric afterward, tends to raise the overall sophistication of the essays a class produces on this classic and heavily assigned topic.