GavestonPS said: "With all due respect to wicked_beast4, I don't know where he got the following: "a man being forced by external perceptions into the role of "degenerate" and being trapped by that identity no matter how hard he sacrifices to try to transcend this lot (Billy))". I think it's true that Billy is a perennial outsider, but the idea that he is forced into the role of "degenerate" is more Genet than Hammerstein.
On the contrary, Billy is simply too lazy to do an honest day's work; he is clearly contrasted with the silly, but all-American entrepreneur, Enoch Snow. Billy is willing to be supported by women if it means he doesn't have to do any lifting heavier than flirting with the local factory girls. Even when he resolves to do the right thing and support his child, Billy's solution is to take part in an armed robbery. Rather than take his punishment, in the play (as opposed to the film), Billy commits suicide to avoid prison.
He is redeemed only after death, when he finally learns to feel empathy.
Myself, a white man, I'm not terribly bothered by a black Billy--but only because we have many portrayals of black men nowadays, so no one character stands as a representative of the group. But if one must find a problem, one might better look at Billy's shiftlessness than Billy's domestic violence. The latter is presented as a one-time occurrence; the former is both a stereotype of black men and essential to Billy's character."
With all due respect to Gaveston (which I think is limited at best) I think not crediting Hammerstein with the same level of social consciously-crafted work that one would imbue to Genet's work is a disservice to what is clearly (as evidenced by the text) an epic of man's place and value within a larger social order. Look back to how EVERY other character in the play, save for Julie, speaks about Billy (with Aunt Nettie *maybe* as an exception). He is always qualified by the idea of how people see him, as this perjorative lazy, by Mrs. Mullin, by Mr. Bascombe – I mean, as kade.ivy quoted earlier, "Ain't you scared of me? Especially after what the cop said about me stealing?" He then proceeds to wax and twist poetic around the notion of a future where people, and he, could be free of inhibitions and of the way the world expects him to behave, allowing one to fully express the potential of who they want to be not tether to the notions of structured behavior that exists in their world.
Even in the second half, we are left with how the idea of a personal struggle with selfhood and the world, and how the generational associations outside of oneself limit some people while imbue others with a false and inflated sense of worth. Louise is seen by her town, and especially in the scene with the Snows, as her father's daughter, mistrusted, never given a chance to transcend the limits of her father's legacy. Would you ever say that she is lazy, just because she falls into the cycle of her parents and struggles with making the right decisions in her life?
Dig a little deeper into the motivations of "lazy" and "enterprising" – SO much of the show revolves around people making choices within the binary of their social circumstance: Carrie and Julie are parallels, both dreaming of love and freedom, but what those dreams mean to them and how they can be achieved take radically separate routes. Carrie is a kind of conventionalist, seeing an enterprising, active (if a little bit odd) man in Enoch Snow who works within the system that benefits him to achieve success in life, pins onto him those dreams in the hope of moving beyond the factory. Julie is the opposite, wanting freedom, but doesn't want to move through the system and chance being stuck there. She sees Billy, another outsider of sorts, and feels a connection, a kinship in people existing outside of how people think they ought to behave. They don't achieve monetary success or even emotional stability, but there is something in there, that connection, that mutual struggle or dissatisfaction with the world, that shows them they are not alone ("What's the use of wonderin'"
. I mean, that song paints a picture clear as day that it isn't about about the binary, about being good or bad, it is the penumbral in-between that defines us and makes us human, even in the direst of interpersonal straits.
I'm not arguing that Billy is some white knight crusading for goodness in the world, but a categorical dismissal of his behavior as lazy or shiftless, and ESPECIALLY the aligning of those characteristic of stereotypes of black men, are EXACTLY what is wrong with how people conceive of identity and agency – the world doesn't present every person with equitable terrain, and as two white men, GavestonPS, you and I certainly do not have a right to be the arbitor of that discussion. People are not lazy "just because" – every human being is the product of their own distinct life experiences, and we behave in the ways that we do because of them. If Billy's solution is to take part in armed robbery, ESPECIALLY after the struggle that is Soliloquy, it is NOT because he is a bad person – what options are left for him? This is what the world has taught his as an option for survival because it has told him that that's what he is and what he is worth. To conflate so-called listlessness that is onset by the unequal social mores with some fundamental notion of "character", and then to connect that so-called "listlessness" to a black male stereotype is foolish at best, and ignorant-bordering-on-reductive at worst.
"He found something that he wanted, had always wanted and always would want— not to be admired, as he had feared; not to be loved, as he had made himself believe; but to be necessary to people, to be indispensable."
-F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise
Updated On: 7/11/17 at 12:06 AM
