Whether we understand it or not, the entertainment we enjoy has a profound effect on how we see the world. Entertainment not only shows societal values, but helps shape them as we embrace what hear and see as normal and acceptable. Entertainment can also impact our emotions as a well crafted piece of art creates thoughts and emotions. In Fences, Death of a Salesman, The Great Gatsby, Invisible Man and A Streetcar Named Desire, sports and entertainment are used to show the lack of opportunity as well as characters’ hopes and fears.
In the works, characters’ desperation for social improvement through sports shows the lack of social opportunities given to minorities and those outside the wealthy elite. Invisible Man had demonstrated himself to be a skilled speech giver through a speech given at his graduation ceremony. Despite being “praised by the most lily-white men of the town” when Invisible Man is invited to give a speech to the town leadership, he is forced to participate “in the battle royal to be fought by some of [his] schoolmates as part of the entertainment” (Page). Only after enduring a fight can Invisible Man give his speech and obtain the scholarship.
In this scene, Ellison uses the battle royal to dramatize a problem he saw in society, that sports were the easiest, and often only way for African Americans to get a college education. This critique in Fences, when Corry is visited by a recruiter. His father criticizes Corry for wanting to take the scholarship because “the white man ain’t gonna let him get nowhere with that football” however, Corry knows that despite the fact that he “get[s] good grades” that football is the only way he will “be going to college” and “get a chance” to advance his life.
Despite the fact that Cory’s grades seem to qualify him for higher education, the fact that he is poor and black means the only way he will obtain it is through sports. Sports is the only thing that separates the opportunity to gain a white collar job from being stuck learning “how to fix cars or something where he can make a living” (PAGE). In The Great Gatsby, Jordan succeeded in advancing into upper class society through sports.
Despite her family consisting of only “one aunt about a thousand years old,” Jordan is able to enter the usually family obsessed upper crust of society by virtue of her being a “golf champion” causing “everyone [to know] her name” Jordan, is the only self made character admitted into high society, her inclusion draws attention to the fact that there is nobody else like her, a single, self made women in a society otherwise dominated by men and married women, all of whom come from distinguished families. In Death of a Salesman, Biff similarly can only hope for advancement through athletics.
He has “three scholarships lined up” but cannot pass math. According to Willy that teacher “ruined [Biff’s] life” because all of Biff’s opportunities for advancement relied on his athletics. Biff’s case is different from Corry’s, Invisible Man’s, and Jordan’s situations because as a middle class white man, he still could have been a success without sports, but sports provided him with the easiest way to advance beyond his father’s role as a salesman by attending college. Without it, he is merely another uneducated and unskilled worker with little chance for advancement.
In each of these works, the fact that advancement through sports is essential to these characters signifies the difficulty of advancement in American society. Where characters who are born as rich, white males are given tools like a college education and a good job by virtue of their heritage, characters who are female, minorities, or lower middle class must create these advantages themselves with sports as their only option. Another way that entertainment is used to generate meaning is through the use of music to signifie characters’ insanity.
When Willy thinks of Ben, the thought is accompanied by “ Ben’s music — first distantly, then closer, closer” (page number). Ben represents all of Willy’s greatest fantasies. When we are first introduced to Ben, Willy asks “Where is Dad? ” and Ben responds “I was going to find father in Alaska” and later in the conversation Ben remarks “when I was seventeen I walked into the jungle, and when I was twenty-one I walked out. And by God I was rich. ” In this scene, Arthur Miller deliberately uses the music to produce doubt in the reader if the scene should be taken at face value.
Ben has two of the things Willy most desires, a stable family and immense wealth, but Miller’s addition of strange music makes its meaning unclear. Toward the end, the meaning becomes more clear, as Ben constantly changes his story on where he went, sometimes having lived in Alaska, sometimes in Africa. To make sure the insanity is clear, Ben’s arrivals are accompanied by music only Willy can hear. The music Willy wishes he heard is ever present when Willy imagines the man he wishes he was.
As the play continues, Ben begins to appear more frequently, whenever Willy is in a esperate situation to offer Willy advice. His appearance is always accompanied what is described as “Ben’s idyllic music” and only appears when Willy needs him most. As the music repeats and conversations with Ben become more and more surreal, Ben is revealed to be a fantasy for Willy that embodies his hopes and dreams first in having being wealthy from living outdoors, and later plays the role of savior as Willy imagines Ben can make him rich. Blanche’s ever advancing insanity is also accompanied by musical fantasies.
As Blanche remembers Allan, her husband, his memories is accompanied by polka. The polka starts off “in a minor key faint with distance” but as she remembers Allan’s death suddenly“the polka music increases” Later Blanche claims that Mitch “stopped the polka toon in [Blanche’s] head” and that only he can do it. Blanche’s fantasies let her escape from her life to imagine her first boyfriend, the one she loved. She acts in accordance with this fantasy, and finds boys who share the “softness and tenderness which wasn’t like a man’s” that Allan had.
This fantasy leads Blanche to find sensitive men, or young boys to try to return to the time when she was happiest. Additionally, while the polka music is playing, she is seen compensating for the fact that he rejected her sexualy through numerous physical affairs. As Blanche is taken away to an asylum, the Varsouviana polka plays until finally, broken upon realizing the man coming to claim her is not Shep Huntley, Blanche hears “The ‘Varsouviana’ filtered into a weird distortion, accompanied by the cries and noises of the jungle.
After Blanche’s last fantasy, the idea that Shep Huntley will take her away and she can be wealthy, is broken, the music of her fantasies becomes an animalistic mess. The music represented the return to ideal time with Allan, as the last connection to it breaks, the music breaks as well. This music as a signifier of insanity also is seen in Gabe in Fences. When Gabe is first introduced, the stage directions note that “he carries an old trumpet tied around his waist and believes with every fiber of his being that he is the Archangel Gabriel” (page number).
Gabe’s fantasies grow throughout the play, as more and more often he asks characters to “get ready for the judgement. ” Again, the music of the insane characters is used to signify hopes. August Wilson uses Gabe to use a common African American hope, especially of this time period. While Corry’s desires to become educated and achieve an advanced standing represent a new age of black hopes, Gabe’s songs about judgement represent the traditional hope. Advancement is viewed as impossible in this racist society, so the hope is to advance after death.
Throughout all of these works, music is used to indicate the hopelessness of the insane characters and to show both the conditions that led them to insanity and their mechanisms for dealing with this insanity. In Fences, Death of a Salesman, and A Streetcar Named Desire, insane characters have fantasies used to represent their true desires, and the music is used to represent and develop the fantasy. When sports fail, the other way minority characters can achieve success and improve their status is through entertainment.
Many of the entertainers in The Great Gatsby come from Eastern European backgrounds that those invited would avoid if they were not entertainment. Although many people like Tom would avoid these non western europeans otherwise, none object to the “gypsies in trembling opal” dancing at the parties, or to “Vladimir Tostoff’s Jazz History of the World” (PAGE NUMBERS). Through entertainment Eastern European’s generally shunned for their heritage can gain wealth and status the were previously unable to.
In the book, the fact that Eastern Europeans can only gain status through entertainment highlights Eastern European’s inability to gain status through conventional means. In Invisible Man, “when special white guests visited the school” the college has a choir “sing what the officials called ‘their primitive spirituals’” (Page number). Although many of the students view singing the spirituals as degrading, they are still performed because the university gains more money from white donors if they hear spirituals.
The fact that the university need to perform spirituals shows that, according to Ellison, African Americans are viewed by whites as a source of entertainment above all else and they will only be given improvements if they comply with this worldview. In A Streetcar Named Desire, the jazz as being played by “Negro entertainers” “with the infatuated fluency of brown fingers” (PAGE). Additionally, the only named hispanic character is jazz musician Xavier Cugat. In the play, Williams also depicts successful minority characters as entertainers.
In each of these works, minority characters are only societally relevant when athletes or entertainers. The message is clear, a critique of the fact that successful minorities are only able to come from the ranks of athletes or entertainers. Finally, music is used throughout these works as a way for characters to rebel and experience their own culture free from other’s choices. At the beginning of Invisible Man the narrator describes listening to Louis Armstrong because he has “ made poetry out of being invisible” and that Invisible Man’s “grasp of invisibility aids me to understand his music” (page number).
Through the music, Invisible Man can hear the words of another in his circumstance, another intelligent black man in a white dominated society. Invisible Man remains alone, but the music lets him feel, if even for a small time, that somebody is with him. Later, in New York, when Invisible Man has no job, no money, and feels hopelessly southern in New York society, he begins to sing a blues song that leads IM to “[remember] the times that [he] had heard such singing at home” (page number), and then to join in.
Through this music, IM is no longer trapped feeling alone while searching for a job in an alien location because, for one brief moment, he can lose himself into the familiarity of home. In Fences, jazz music fills a similar role for Lyons. Although he is not successful in his musical endeavors, Lyons views them as essential to his life because music is “the only way [he] can find to live in the world” and that he needs it as “something that gonna help [Lyons] to get out of the bed in the morning” (page number). For Lyons, music is the thing he needs to feel as if he has a purpose, as if his life is worth living.
Although Wilson states that Lyons is “more caught up in the rituals and “idea” of being a musician than in the actual practice of the music,” this increases connection to Lyons, a character who, like Gabe is trapped by the hopelessness he sees around him, and like Lyons, escapes into music. In The Great Gatsby, Gatsby attempts to use music in a similar way, by playing music around Daisy attempting to reject the outside world. When Gatsby first invites Daisy over, he has Klipspringer play “The Love Nest” in order for he and Daisy to escape the world and only experience love for each other without thinking of the world around them.
Later on in the novel, as Daisy is at Gatsby’s party, she feels herself being “call[ed] back inside” by the music playing inside (page number). Daisy, when the music is playing, allows herself to return to the house, to continue her affair with Gatsby, to pretend her actions do not have consequences. Daisy is perfectly aware that she cannot continue with her lover, but she allows herself to be with him in a flight of escapism, and when she does is accompanied by music. In each of these works, music provides characters with the ability to, for a brief moment in time, escape their position in life, and imagine a life that they dream of having.
When the music stops, each character returns to their normal lives: Invisible Man is once again alone and invisible in a strange place, Lyons is again unemployed and discriminated against, and Daisy is still married to Tom, but for a fleeting moment they all can imagine more. Characters use music as escapism to escape their day, momentarily showing their true desires and fears. In Fences, Invisible Man, Death of a Salesman, The Great Gatsby, and A Streetcar Named Desire, entertainment and sports are used to show lack of opportunity in society as well as providing a window into characters hopes and fears.
