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The Roles Of A Family Drama In 'A Raisin In The Sun'

Decent Essays

Philip Wambach
Professor Brophy
English 152
20 December 2017
Drama Essay “Like Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie (pr. 1944), Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (pr., pb. 1949, and other classic American plays, A Raisin in the Sun is fundamentally a family drama. Lena, the family matriarch, is attempting to keep her family together in difficult circumstances. She is the family’s moral center, urging her children to end their quarreling, accept their responsibilities, and love and support each other. That the Youngers pull together in the closing scenes is more a credit to Lena than to her spirited but sometimes inconsiderate children, Walter and Beneatha. By allowing Lena to play this central role in the Younger family, Hansberry asserts the importance of the mother figure in the African American family. Lorraine Hansberry’s play confronts crucial issues that have faced African Americans: the fragmentation of the family, the black male’s quest for manhood, and the problems of integration.
An equally absorbing development in Hansberry’s drama is Walter’s quest for manhood. As the play opens, his father—Big Walter—has recently died, and Walter wants more than anything else to take his father’s place as head of the family. Walter’s job as a white man’s chauffeur gives him a feeling of inferiority, and his wish to purchase a liquor store is an assertion of economic independence, a desire to provide for his family and live out his version of the American Dream. Walter’s

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