The purpose of this research is to examine Lorraine Hansberry's play A Raisin in the Sun. The plan of the research will be to set forth the pattern of ideas and events in the play and then to discuss the means by which this pattern is elaborated in the action, as well as the sociopolitical context in which the playwright's intended effect of the play on the audience can be most readily identified.
The action of A Raisin in the Sun in general involves what people want and what they are willing to pay to get it. Indeed, describing what the characters want very much describes what the play is about. The Youngers, an extended black family, share the dream of escaping their two-bedroom Chicago tenement and everything it represents. How the dream should be fulfilled now that an insurance legacy is coming their way marks the main level of conflict. The forceful widowed matriarch Lena dreams of a house with a garden. Her son Walter, Jr., frustrated and humiliated to be a white man's chauffeur, wants to be his own boss as partner in a liquor store. Her daughter Beneatha, determined to be a doctor, is pulled between two suitors, blatant black bourgeois George Murchison, and black African nationalist Joseph Asagai. Walter's wife Ruth, who has raised a ten-year-old son, Travis, in the ghetto, is not entirely happy because Walter is so miserable, but is most unhappy to have discovered that she is pregnant; she wants an abortion. And meanwhile, Lena and Ruth both work as domestics to help make ends meet.
The Youngers' moral and material priorities emerge and collide in Act I, become increasingly complicated in Act II, and are resolved, in partly unexpected ways, in Act III. Act I shows Lena's presumptive emotional and material tyranny over the crowded household, the emotional strain between Beneatha and Walter over Beneatha's serious educational purpose, and the strain in Walter and Ruth's marriage. In Act II, each character more or less enact...