Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun

Ruth is willing to work day and night to move into the new house, Lena I’ll work twenty hours a day…” says Ruth. The Younger family was stuck in a tight situation when Walter lost all the money for the house including Beneatha's tuition. Ruth feels depressed when Lena makes a decision to not to move into the house, she tries to convince Lena to move in but ends up being unsuccessful. Ruth is amenable to work all to make her family move into the house with her pregnancy. Ruth talks to Lena about the liquor store even though she does not wants to, “Aint nobody a businessman till they go into business” says Ruth. Walter wants his dad's insurance money so that he can invest it in the liquor store. He convinces Ruth to talk to Lena about it as he knows that Lena would not listen to him. Ruth talks to Lena about it but Lenas answer remains the same. This shows that Ruth does not think of her self-respect but of Walter’s unreal

Walter struggles in understanding who he needs to be for his family. He wants to take his place as the patriarch of the family, but he feels incapable of providing them with the lifestyle they deserve. This concern is always at the forefront of his mind, and it affects his attitude and outlook. The anxiety that Walter is dealing with creates confrontation with his sister. He fears that her dream will interfere with his own agenda of making a better life for his family. The severity of the tension becomes more and more apparent with Walter’s unwise investment. Walter is dealing with the burden that he has let his family down, while Beneatha is flabbergasted by the reality that her future has been snatched away from her, and she had no control over it. While reflecting on the situation, Beneatha remarks, “ I sound like a human who just had her future taken right out of my hands! While I was sleeping….things were happening in this world that directly concerned me and nobody consulted me—they just went out and did things—and changed my life” (Hansberry 3.15). Walter and Beneatha’s individual issues with the outcome of the situation cause them to find fault with one another during a time when their family needs to pull together to get through such a financial hardship. Walter is in an emotional pit; his turning to alcohol and music instead of his family for support expands the

       Walter was upset when he heard his mother had spent the insurance money on the house and thought it wasn't fair that Beneatha got some of it for her medical school while he got nothing for his liquor store business. Lena, who always wanted her son to be happy, trustingly gave the rest of the insurance money to Walter. Holding the money in his hands, Walter thanked his mother and appreciated the trust she had in him. Walter then gave the money to his buddies to help him getting his liquor license without realizing that they betrayed him. As his dream crumbled to pieces, Walter was regret that he didn't listen to his mother, wife and sister.

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.

Characteristics and Thematic Significance Walter is Lena’s oldest child and is married to Ruth. As the ambitious man that he is, he still caused everyone in his family lots of trouble. With

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.

Lena is the mother of Walter and Beneatha. She is the one that maintains the family trying to keep everyone happy. Lena helps the family by putting a down payment on a house so that her family can have a better place to live. Beneatha found Walter at a bar and tells him, “I paid the man thirty-five hundred dollars. Monday

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

"The characters are, on the one hand, controlled by their gender roles, but those roles and the behavior in those roles also reflects the impact of race on the family structure" (Copenhaver 156). At times the family members clash with one another due to their attempts of enforcing their way of how the family should live. Lena Younger decides to strip Walter Lee from his control as the man of the house when she perceives his incapability to advise Ruth to not fulfill her decision of having an abortion. The family's negligence and disapproval of Walter's idea of opening up a liquor store leads him to act out. He then displays every common stereotype a male should have and so do a black women's

There is no doubt that Lorraine Hansberry uses her play, A Raisin in the Sun, as a platform to give her opinions and observations on the black community and of the racism they faced in the mid-1900s. Her play is filled with commentary

After World War II, African Americans had unequal opportunities in many aspects of their lives. A Raisin in the Sun, a play by Lorraine Hansberry, mirrors the conflicts endured by African-Americans after World War II who were hoping to better their lives, but still held back by the racism and bigotry of earlier eras. Despite the legal barriers of segregation in the 1950s, black families were still being denied access to jobs, higher education, and particularly as it relates to the play, desirable neighborhoods in which to raise their families. At this time, black families like the Youngers, had planned living arrangements from zoning issues. They were blocked from the neighborhoods because of covenants and racial steering matters. The

Walter's quick and rash choices resulted in his family continuously not support him and his decisions. Although Walter knows his family is struggling to stay on their feet financially he constantly chases after his dream that could end Beneatha’s future for college, Mama’s dream, and the new child. When Mama tells Walter about Ruth’s pregnancy and plans to have an abortion, Walter is too tunnel-visioned to even care about that at the moment so instead just

A Raisin in the Sun is a play telling the story of an African-American tragedy. The play is about the Younger family near the end of the 1950s. The Younger family lives in the ghetto and

The 1950’s was one of the worst times of racism and prejudices in American history. The play A Raisin in the Sun shows what kind of living environments and the struggles a black family had to go through. In Lorraine Hansberry’s play A Raisin in the Sun, Mama just wants her family to be happy; however, money, racism, and housing get in the way of making her family happy. Mama is a great example of this because she overcomes all of these struggles to make her family happy.

Lena, Walter, Ruth, and Benaetha all live under one roof, but they all have different dreams. As Lena dreams that the dreams of her children should come true by using the money of their father’s life insurance and her family must be united in whatever economic and social circumstances they have to face. Walter Lee dreams of a liquor store. He thinks that having a liquor store; he can make his family’s economic condition good. Ruth dreams to have a wealthy and fine family, so that they don’t have to be worry for minor things. Beneatha