Lorraie Hansberry's Play A Raisin in the Sun

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

f social forces had converged in popular and artistic imagination to work their influence on the content of ideas and feelings evident in the play. Direct experience of poverty, invisibility, and more general racial injustice informs the personalities of Walter, Lena, Beneatha, and Ruth. But the play is not merely a social tract. Undoubtedly, as Brady says (49), A Raisin in the Sun "emphasizes that human dignity and values can be maintained in dire circumstances and can overcome violence." But as Keppel points out (passim), it is a mistake to take the view, as well-meaning critics appear to have done when the play opened in 1959, that A Raisin in the Sun is "about" middle class blacks as it were moving on up to the white suburbs. If integration were the real driving force of this play, it would indeed fall into the category of piFce bien faite. The text is a more complex exploration of the way the dream is nurtured, developed, matured, and come to terms with by the Youngers. In the line of action for each characters is an embedded critique not only of the society that prevents the Youngers' dreams from coming true but also of the content of the dreams, shaped as they are by that same society. That is what Nemiroff means when he sa

Category: Literature - L