Father and Son

Introduction

Langston Hughes expressed his determination to write fearlessly, shamelessly, and unrepentantly about working class black life in spite of opposition. He also exercised much freedom in experimenting with blues as well as jazz. Hughes's poems and other writings have been adapted by numerous dramatists. The one-act play Trouble with the Angels was adapted by Bernard Schoenfeld from a short story by Hughes. The poems in Montage of a Dream Deferred were adapted by Robert Glenn for Shakespeare in Harlem, presented as a double-bill with God's Trombones at 41st Street Theatre in 1960. His prose, poetry, and lyrics were featured in Langston, presented at Mitzi Newhouse Theatre, New York City, in 1979.( Gates, 127)

Discussion

There are many similarities in plot and theme in Langston Hughes' "Father and Son" and D. H. Lawrence's "The Prussian Officer." While each story is told in a very different style, the general tone is similar in each. The focal point in each story is a relationship between one man in power, and another man who is a subordinate. The dominant man has generally benevolent feelings towards his subordinate, information which is related to the reader through an omniscient narrator. Due to societal influences, the man in power suppresses this emotion not only from others, but from himself. This suppression later erupts into violence. Colonel Tom ("Father and Son") feels affection for his illegitimate black son, whereas the Prussian officer ("The Prussian Officer") harbors a homoerotic attraction to his orderly. These feelings are socially unacceptable to the point that neither man is capable of admitting this attraction even to himself.(Hughes,251)

Initially, Hughes's poem seems to break down into three voices (father, son, and an elusive third voice) that cut in and mutually interrupt each other, causing abrupt shifts in style and tone that, in the end, disarticulate voice from identity. In the opening lines, the son asserts his mulatto identity and pleads for recognition from his white father. The unnamed son's address to a generic “white man” suggests that his voice oscillates between the particular and the general, between the son as individual and the son as representative of all mulattos.

Instead of immediately giving us the father's response to his son's accusatory plea, the poem then shifts to an objective, racially unmarked voice that describes the natural setting of the Georgia dusk And the turpentine woods. While this three line interpolation give us terms dusk and ...