Lorraine Hansberry 's A Raisin

Lorraine Hansberry used symbolism in her successful drama, “A Raisin in the Sun” to portray emotions felt in the lives of her characters and possible her own. Hansberry set her piece in Chicago’s South Side, probably the early 1950’s. During this period in history, many African-Americans, like the Youngers, struggled to overcome the well-known prejudices that were far too familiar. The main scene, in this touching realist drama, is the home of the Youngers, an overcrowded run-down apartment. Hansberry used this private scenery to enhance the many feelings the Youngers, and other African-Americans, fought to conquer and to embrace in the name of happiness.

In his 1931 book, The Epic of America, James Truslow Adams defined the American dream as, “that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement” (Adams). Throughout the 1950s, the American Dream was a major philosophy believed by many. Much of society felt no matter what race, gender, or nationality they are, they are capable of achieving success. Within the play, A Raisin in the Sun, the characters are faced with many difficult challenges and obstacles that they strive to overcome. Each of them focus on a better life for themselves and the Younger Family. In A Raisin In The Sun by Lorraine Hansberry, Beneatha dreams of becoming a doctor because in her perspective becoming an

Many people go through different moralities in there life some that they believe can change their life for the better but don’t know the consequences. This ties in with issues involving money. Many people believe that money is the way to happiness and do what they can to get money even if it means to hurt your loved ones. In the play “Raisin in the Sun” Walter Lee Younger is man that lives in South Side Chicago and at point in life that he’s in, he wants to do something in his life and make a difference for colored people. The way he believes he can accomplish that is by opening a bar to make money for his family while believing money is the only source of happiness. Walters ideal morality was to make sure he got his hands on the insurance money so he could open up the bar even if it meant his family would suffer when things went wrong.

Hansberry develops this particular issue by illustrating how important success is to the second generation of the Younger family, Walter and Beneatha. After a long heritage of slavery and servitude, the Younger siblings want to take advantage of this age of social reform and break from the binding traditions that have beset their race in the past. Mama illustrated this when she says, “Son – I come from five generations of people who was slaves and sharecroppers – but ain’t nobody in my family never let nobody pay ‘em no money that was a way of telling us we wasn’t fit to walk the earth. We ain’t never been that poor. We ain’t never been that – dead inside” (Hansberry, 143). They view the expected income of $10,000 in insurance money as a gateway to get what they each desire and achieve success. Walter Younger feels degraded and miserable in his job as a

What is being attempted in the play is simply the Youngers as an African American family trying to make it day by day. The dreams are real, but the

Lorraine Hansberry was a writer during the Great Depression and the Civil Rights Movement. She was the first woman, the first black person, and the youngest person to get a show on broadway with her hit A Raisin in the Sun. The name comes from Langston Hughes’ famous poem Harlem (Dream Deferred) where Lorraine got all of her inspiration from. Harlem is about what happens when you put off a dream for too long. In A Raisin in the Sun Hansberry uses the characters Walter, Beneatha, and Momma to show the consequences of deferring your dreams.

In the play Lena Younger and her family was rewarded ten thousand dollars of life insurance money, which is a lot of money for a family of their socioeconomic class. With that kind of money the Youngers dreamt for better things, like a new house, a family owned business as well as med school for Lena’s youngest daughter Beneatha. The poem Harlem by Langston Hughes paraphrases these dreams perfectly. One could see how all of their dreams exploded into existence during the weeks leading up to them receiving the check, and ultimately ended up sagging like a heavy load when Lena’s son Walter Lee Younger lost most of the money to his thieving friend Willy Harris. Their dreams were instantly deferred because they had to come back to the reality of not expecting anything when Walter Lee lost the money. Walter’s dreams were

In Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun” (1959), she reveals the life of the Youngers family. In doing so, there surfaces a detrimental ideology that destroys the family financially and in their overall happiness. In Act II Scene I, Walter, the father figure of the family, says, “Why? You want to know why? 'Cause we all tied up in a race of people that don 't know how to do nothing but moan, pray and have babies!” (Hansberry 532). By way of explanation, the family and much of the African-American community for the 1960’s, is built upon a loose ideology that is a brutal cycle that infects the lives of those who inhabit the area; tired of all the commotion from the Caucasians who, to them, miraculously achieve a life of ruling and

Throughout the play, many conflicts arise between the main characters; Mama, Walter, Ruth and Beneatha. An example of one conflict is poverty, which causes tension to escalate within the Younger family. Everyone in the play has different dreams, yet they have the same goal to overcome poverty. In the opening scene, Hansberry describes the living conditions of the Younger family, who live in Chicago 's South Side in a congested two-bedroom apartment with no bathroom of their own. This location is historic because during the 1950s, it was predominantly a poverty-stricken neighborhood largely populated by African Americans. As a result of “discriminatory real estate practices” and

The play “ A Raisin in the Sun” by Lorraine Hansberry shows three generation of women under the same roof and the struggle each women face, the dreams that they had and how they overcome the obstacle in their life to move on to something better. The women in the family has had to sacrifice a lot to make the family either happy or progress further in life.

"A Rasin In The Sun" is written by Lorraine Hansberry. Most of Hansberry's work is about the struggle of African American's during 1950's. Hanberry was the first African-American women to have her play played on Broadway. "Seems like God don't see fit to give the black man nothing but dreams but He did give us children to make them dreams seem worthwhile" as said by Lorraine. A Raisin in the sun is about a family who is facing economic hardship and racial prejudice. The theme of the play is Dream; American dream for the colored family.

Broadway in 1959. A character named Walter Lee invisions to buy a liquor store in his poverty.

The Younger family is a black family that struggles to gain middle class acceptance. When the play opens, Mama, who is the mother of the Younger family, is waiting for a $10,000 life insurance check from the death of her husband. Walter Lee Younger who is the son of Mama, shows signs of disappointment with his current living conditions “I got a boy who sleeps in the living room… and all I got to give him is stories about how rich white people live…”(1477). Walter was desperate to attain a better live for their growing family that he

Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun can be deliberated as a milestone in American art because it speaks on so many concerns vital during the 1950s in the United States. The 1950s are commonly ridiculed as an era of complacency and conformity, embodied by the growth of money-making culture and suburbia. Underneath the economic victory that followed America in the years after World War II brewed a rising racial tension. The stereotype of 1950s America as a land of black’s satisfied with their lesser status resulted in an upsurge of social anger that would find a voice in Hansberry’s masterpiece. However, the significance was somewhat lost and skewed by the White Americans as so thoroughly described in Robin Bernstein’s article. “Inventing the Fishbowl: White Supremacy and the Critical Reception of Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun” is written by Bernstein who is a professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard. Bernstein wrote an exceptional article in which every piece of evidence brought forth, such as the mention of prejudiced views of the audience, constructing African American culture to a point of comprehension and lastly disregarding Hansberry’s opinions on class and politics reveals every bit of truth behind her argument. She states that White Americans fail to recognize that A Raisin in the Sun could have both general and specific applications because individuals of the majority need to produce a paradoxical illusion called the fishbowl.

A Raisin in the Sun is written by a famous African- American play write, Lorraine Hansberry, in 1959. It was a first play written by a black woman and directed by a black man, Lloyd Richards, on Broadway in New York. The story of A Raisin in the Sun is based on Lorraine Hansberry’s own early life experiences, from which she and her whole family had to suffer, in Chicago. Hansberry’s father, Carol Hansberry, also fought a legal battle against a racial restrictive covenant that attempted to stop African- American families from moving in to white neighborhoods. He also made the history by moving his family to the white section of Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood in 1938. The struggle of Lorraine Hansberry’s family inspired her to write the