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
In Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 play A Raisin in the Sun a number of social issues are both explicitly and subtly exemplified through out the characters experiences and relationships. Living in a cramped Chicago apartment, the Youngers’ display both influential goals and conflicting restraints. Beneatha Youngers is a controversial character; she complicates society’s typical gender roles, introduces the wrestle between assimilation and ancestry of African-Americans, but specifically serves as a paradigm for her generation in the play.
At the beginning of the play Walter Lee younger believes that manhood stems from being able to provide for one’s family. We first encounter Walter’s concept of manhood when he and Ruth are arguing over breakfast and Walter says, “I’m thirty-five years old; I been married eleven years and 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…” (Hansberry 478). This begins to show his ideas because it shows that he is getting older and he still cannot provide for his family. One thing that might hurt Walter the most
The play ‘A Raisin in the Sun’ by ‘Lorraine Hansberry’ is about a matriarchy, Lena Younger or known as “Mama” to her family the Youngers who are poverty stricken family. She is about to receive insurance money from her husband’s life insurance policy, which is rightfully hers. However each member of the Youngers family we come into contact with have a plan to use the money for themselves, each individual’s through-line plays a vital role in their dreams, thoughts and choices in the end. Throughout the play the family have experiences that money can’t buy happiness and the effects of racial prejudice emerge.
The idea of family is a central theme in Lorraine Hansberry’s play A Raisin in the Sun. Hansberry alludes to the Old Testament book of Ruth in her play to magnify “the value of having a home and family”(Ardolino 181). The Younger family faces hardships that in the moment seem to tear them apart from one another, but through everything, they stick together. The importance of family is amplified by the choices of Walter and Beneatha because they appear to initiate fatal cracks in the Younger family’s foundation, but Mama is the cement who encourages her family to pull together as one unit. The hardships of the family help develop a sense of unity for the Younger household.
Lorraine Hansberry’s play, A Raisin in the Sun, centers on an African American family in the late 1950s. Hansberry directs her work towards specifically the struggles faced by African Americans during the late 1950s. Through the dialogue and actions of her characters, she encourages not only a sense of pride in heritage, but a national and self-pride in African Americans as well.
The play by Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun, presents an African-American family living in poverty in the 1950’s. The family receives ten thousand dollars from deceased Mr. Younger’s insurance; the money is supposed to be distributed in buying a house, Beneatha’s education, and Walter’s liquor store investment. However, Walter invests wrongly and loses more than half of the money, forcing Beneatha to consider moving to Africa to pursue an education. Beneatha Younger’s struggle with segregation while pursuing her dream of becoming a doctor demonstrates that education can be obtained with determination and discipline.
Every person who comes to America has a common motive, with underlying details causing their motives to differ. Some come to America with the hope of freedom from the difficult lives they face in their home countries, while others will arrive because of the various opportunities for success that America has to offer. But most of all, many believe the country can give them the chance to find who they are and figure out what their goals are their new life. Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun surrounds a black family in the southside of Chicago, known as the Younger’s. The play gives insight on the life of the family, and the many difficulties they face as each family member tries to achieve their American Dream. Beneatha Younger, the daughter
The story of this play is simple and the majority of African-Americans faced such issues in the 1950’s, living on the south side of Chicago, struggles with poverty, dignity and dreams of a better life. Wanting better for your children and trying to fit in, while maintaining family values. A Raisin in the Sun is an excellent example of the relationship between family values and conflict. In this play it portrays: values and purpose of dreams, the need to fight for racial discrimination and the importance of family.
A Raisin in the Sun is play written about a family in the 1950’s, and the focus of the play is how racism affects that family. The family in the play tries to buy a house in a white neighborhood, and they have to deal with discriminatory housing practices and the threat of racial violence. A Raisin in the Sun is relevant today because a lot of the insights it makes about racism are still debated over today. One of the issues it tackles is racial violence. In the play, the family deals with the threat of racial violence from people who don’t want them to move into their new house. Today, many feel that racial violence is being done by the police. The story also deals with the family’s struggles to buy a house and the abuse they face for
Throughout Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, we see the positive and negative effects of chasing the American Dream. Hansberry expresses her different views on the American Dream through the characters and she portrays the daily struggles of a 1950 black family throughout A Raisin in the Sun. In this play, she is able to effectively show the big impact that even small decisions can make on a family. Hansberry shows the many different attachments that come with the fulfillment of this American Dream. Throughout A Raisin in the Sun, each family member has their own pursuit of happiness, which is accompanied by their American Dream.
In the play Walter Lee Younger Junior is a 35-year protagonist who can't provide or stand up to be the man to his family. Walter Lee Younger Junior suffered so hard and he was tired of they way him and his family were living in poverty and he's trying to take away poverty from his family and try to figure out a new, and better ways to secure its economic prosperity. Walter is going insane due to all
In the 1920’s, many African-American families had left the southern states and migrated north to Chicago’s South Side in search of the “American Dream”, dreaming of freedom, equality, and the opportunity that was supposed to be available to every American. This “American Dream” was sought by many African Americans in the U.S. Written by Lorraine Hansberry and produced in 1959, The play: A Raisin in the Sun, gave readers a strong meaning about the values of dreams and the struggles in fulfilling them. Unlike other plays that contain one main character, A Raisin in the Sun consisted of having two main characters: Walter and Mama. The audience may find that one of the main characters from the play,
The play of "A Raisin in the Sun" displays the optimistic dreams that African Americans carry with them when they come up north. This play follows the Youngers in their journey to accomplish some of those goals they hold. This paper will go through the dreams of the family and whether or not they are accomplished or fall just short in the end. The Youngers family is a moderately sized family. The main characters who have aspirations being Walter Lee, Beneatha, Ruth and Mama.
Walter desires to move up the social ladder without challenging societal ideals, contrasting with Beneatha’s feminist viewpoints. Walter wants the trust and respect that defines him as a strong, pragmatic male figure in the household, whereas, Beneatha believes women have the right to pursue successful careers and lead content lives in which their husbands do not hold them back. She illustrates these feminist ideals when she states to Asagai, “I know – because that’s what it says in all the novels that men write. But it isn’t. Go ahead and laugh – but I’m not interested in being someone’s little episode in America or one of them! That’s funny as he**, huh!” (Hansberry 856). Beneatha cannot tolerate the fact that Walter believes her dreams are less than his because she is a female. She struggles with refuting the societal norm and sexist ideals that define women as domesticated, uneducated housewives. This later causes long disputes dividing the family and a lack of trust which eventually results in the loss of the money and their dreams. Furthermore, Walter’s need to prove himself as the man of the family leads to his clandestine deal to invest in the liquor store with Willy Harris. By blindly handing away his father’s insurance check, Walter hands away not only the family’s future, but also everything his father worked for in an effort
In the words of Jim Cocola and Ross Douthat, Hansberry wrote the play A Raisin in the Sun to mimic how she grew up in the 1930s. Her purpose was to tell how life was for a black family living during the pre-civil rights era when segregation was still legal (spark notes). Hansberry introduces us to the Youngers’, a black family living in Chicago’s Southside during the 1950s pre-civil rights movement. The Younger family consists of Mama, who is the head of the household, Walter and Beneatha, who are Mama’s children, Ruth, who is Walter’s wife, and Travis, who is Walter and Ruth’s son. Throughout the play the Youngers’ address poverty, discrimination, marital problems, and abortion. Mama is waiting on a check from the