Lorraine Hansberry's play A Raisin in the Sun

Lorraine Hansberry's play A Raisin in the Sun was an important work as the first truly successful play by a black playwright, so much so that it has come to be viewed by many as the key portrait of black American life in the theater. This is unfortunate because Hansberry's characters represent only one aspect of black life, and a somewhat idealized representation at that. The play does say important things for the history of black American theater, and elements in the play do serve to show aspects of the black experience. Still, the black experience is much broader than this play, which is why white audiences should not view it as definitive. What Hansberry writes is clearly derived from her own experience, and in this sense it is urged out of her blood. The family she writes about exists in a specific time period--the 1950s--and a specific milieu--the south side of Chicago in that time period. The Younger family is on the verge of escaping from the ghetto, with each family member having his or her own dream. This dream begins with the desire to achieve the American dream, though by the end of the play the seamy reality of that dream has been exposed and the family has shifted to a celebration of its own value system rather than aspiring to emulate white society. Indeed, the one thing that is generally missing from Hansberry's play except in the most controlled and acceptable quantities is anger. Hansberry finds disillusionment, and through this she finds a new hope i

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or the film, and it is the sanity and freedom of the males that is the inherent subject. McMurphy is the free soul who appears ultimately to be bested by the system, though his legend and what he symbolizes survive him and continues to threaten the system, embodying itself in some degree on Chief Bromden. The men are either free souls or bound souls, but they do have souls. Much of the story is concerned thematically with the importance of developing and freeing that soul. The women have no souls. They are either whores or beasts, and in either case they have only a specific role and no other. They are defined by their relationship to the males, and the males are defined by whether or not they defy the dominant women and dominate the submissive women. The nature of individual freedom is an essential and central theme. It can be related to all spheres of life--political, social, and psychological--asserting itself differently in each realm. In psychological terms, this freedom is seen as holding that certain kinds of dependence are healthy, such as the dependence of the patient on the doctor. However, the intent of such dependence is one day to produce independence, and Nurse Ratched is a parody of this idea. She dest

Category: Literature - L