The play a Raisin in the Sun is a play written by Lorraine Hansberry. This story is about an African American family living in Southside Chicago. In the story, the family goes through many hardships especially when it comes to money. The Younger family lives in an overcrowded apartment which has very little room for all of them. There is a $10,000 check coming from the insurance company for Walter Lee’s dad’s death. He is the man of the house now and is determined to provide a better life for him and his family. Which he figures out at the end that money is not everything.…
Everybody had dreams and aspirations, however those things never always go as planned. This happens to the characters in the play, A Raisin in the Sun. The play was written by Lorraine Hansburry, and it was the first Broadway play written by an African American woman. In the play, the Younger family, a family of five, live in a small two-bedroom apartment in Chicago. Mama, Lena, is about to receive an insurance check from her husband's death in the mail and has to decide what she is going to do with it. The check is seen as a beacon of hope to change their family's lives and make it much easier. Lena's son, Walter, wants to use it to leave his old job as a chauffer for a white man and invest in a liquor store, while Lena's daughter, Beneatha, wants to use it to help pay for her education to become a doctor. In the end, Mama entrusts some money to Walter and decides to buy a house in a white neighborhood to better accommodate their family because Walter's son had been sleeping on the living room couch. Walter's wife, Ruth, also goes through her own problems when she learns that she is expecting another child in a household that is already having a hard time getting by. A Raisin in the Sun is a great play that encompasses many themes of the African American working class culture in the United States. The play goes over important themes such as family, dreams, gender, race, and suffering, and A Raisin in the Sun connects all these themes to each other some way or another.…
In the article , “The art of social Criticism : Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the sun ,” the author states that this play was written for those African American families and their struggles to be able to get out of the ghetto on Chicago’s South Side. Lorraine took every chance to engage herself in her everyday life and her literary work being a writer and a student. African Americans were placed in the lower class while some other families were middle class but still placed in the lower class like Lorraine and her family. Even though Lorraine was placed in the lower class that did not affect her , her privilege still did not insulate her from the struggles and anger she was facing. Basically the the reality of the play is the realization…
In Lorraine Hansberry’s play, A Raisin in the Sun, she tells the value and purpose of dreams and how oftentimes dreams do get deferred. Hansberry got the title for the play based off of Langston Hughes’ famous poem A Dream Deferred. The language Hansberry uses reflects the deeper meaning of Hughes’ poem. Although the Younger women have lived in the same apartment for generations, they each face their unique trials and tribulations. Mama is faced with the decision of how to spend the money she received from her deceased husband’s insurance settlement; Ruth has to choose if she wants to have an abortion; and Bennie continues her aspirations of being a doctor and young feminist in the 1940s. All three women’s stories fall back on one common factor: a dream deferred.…
Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun” is an eye opening experience into the life struggles of an African American family living in the ghettos of Southside Chicago. New dreams come and go like the wind for the desperation of a better life. Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun” has more topics going on in it than just a story about an insurance check worth $10,000 for the death of the father, Big Walter. Topics such as African American oppression, racial stereotypes, and segregation. An introduction of the characters consist of Walter, Ruth, Mama, Travis, Beneatha, and Mr. Lindner. The setting is in a small two bedroom upstairs apartment with barely enough space for a kitchen.…
Heritage is important. In the historical play “A Raisin in the sun” by Lorraine Hansberry heritage is a big part of the characters lives. The story revolves around the Younger's family who are African Americans living in South side chicago. Despite the fact that they live in a caucasian society, the character Beneatha is proud of her heritage. Beneatha shows how the ashanti people are worthy of admiration because they made a big contribution to society, It is the roots of who they are, they're admirable.…
Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun explores the universal ideas of family, dignity, and hope. Hansberry set her play in an old, once well-furnished and loved apartment in Southside Chicago after World War II. It is the story of an African American family’s struggle to prioritize futures and dreams and decide whose dream is most prevalent; once the family makes the choice to purchase a home with part of the money, they face an entirely new plight. One of the major themes of A Raisin in the Sun is the need to band together as a family and fight discrimination as a unified group, as opposed to a group that cannot stop fighting within itself.…
The play narrates the truth about a Negro family in the south side of Chicago. A Raisin in the sun, is a commentary on the failure of democracy and it is shown on the Younger’s family. They lack the access to an equal education system, they suffer from the residential segregation and bad living conditions…
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, Walter, showed a hard time in understanding the values of dreams. The audience may also find Walter’s character to be portrayed as both: a sympathetic and an unsympathetic representation of African-American men in Chicago’s Southside during the 1950-1960’s.…
African-American stereotypes have evolved during the last 400 years, beginning with slave trade around the mid-fifteenth century. Slave traders targeted and captured blacks because they believed they were creatures without souls intended for hard labor and intense physical work. It was common for white colonists, settlers and slave traders to spread myths and misconceptions to induce even more fear and hatred amongst them.…
White slave owners in the American South during the 18th and 19th centuries often attempted to make their slaves lose their identity through a variety of means. They did this to empower themselves over the blacks, as the blacks would no longer feel like a real person with a unique and individual identity. Although the patterns of white dominance over blacks have not disappeared over time, they have changed in this regard. In the 1900s, blacks were finally express their own identity, and were not held back by whites. The play “A Raisin in the Sun,” by Lorraine Hansberry, exemplifies this. The play only provides a glimpse into the life of the Younger family and those they interact with, as it takes place over a short period of time. However,…
Lorraine Vivian Hansberry was born May 19, 1930 in Chicago, Illinois the youngest by seven years, of four children. Her father, Carl A. Hansberry, is a successful real estate broker, and a civil right activist. Her mother, Nannie Perry, is a schoolteacher who entered politics and became a ward committee woman. When Lorraine was eight, her parents moved to a white neighborhood where the experiences of discrimination led to a civil rights suit that they won. The granddaughter of a freed slave and deeply committed to the Black struggle for equality and human rights, Lorraine Hansberry became a spokesperson for black Americans. Her writings reflect her fight for black civil rights, which is reflected by her views against racism and sexual and statutory discrimination. A Raisin in the Sun was first produced in 1959. The play personified many of the issues which were to divide American culture during the decade of the 1960s. Lorraine Hansberry, the playwright, was an unknown dramatist until she achieved unprecedented success when her play became a Broadway sensation. Not only were successful women playwrights rare at the time, but successful young black women playwrights were virtually unheard of. Within its context, the success of A Raisin in the Sun is particularly stunning. She used plot characters and setting to embody the struggles Blacks had to overcome while facing discrimination and an underlying desire to succeed beyond conception. The play occurs during the late 1950s, a time when many Americans were prosperous and when some racial questions were beginning to be raised, but before the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs is an excellent theory to analyze A Raisin in the Sun since needs and wants are the basics to human survival. Its core is that of humankind equality which crosses geographic, racial, gender, social, ethnic and religious backgrounds. The situational setting of A Raisin in the Sun makes Maslow’s theory of Hierarchy of…
A Raisin in the Sun had allowed all people to view the average life of an African-American family in the 1950s. Lloyd Richards recalls in the Washington Post, “A white couple said to me, ‘I have never been in a black person’s home, and now you have permitted me to go into that home.’ It was also very important for black audiences because they could go see themselves onstage.” By viewing the struggles that the Youngers faced every day in the play, it gave an understanding to families not in the same situation. This play reveals the average life of an African-American family to all people who otherwise, would not have understood.…
Lorraine Hansberry’s play, A Raisin in the Sun, is about an African American family who lives in Chicago and suffers from harsh issues of poverty in the 1950’s. The family does not have enough money to afford the house they are living in and they often have to make a lot of sacrifices. They cannot even give their son money when he needs it for school and their son was sleeping on a couch for a very long time and did not even have a room of his own. They also have another baby on the way. Now where is that baby going to stay? They barely have enough money to have a room or a crib for the baby. Hansberry gave everyone in that family a dream and they are trying to achieve those dreams of theirs. Therefore, dreams were a big part of their lives. Like, Mama had a dream of having her own garden, but that was kind of impossible because they lived in a small apartment, so she just has a little plant, and Hansberry used that plant as a symbol of their families dreams.…
A Raisin in the Sun written by Lorraine Hansberry primarily involves the story of a particular social group: a family of an African-American living on the South Side of Chicago in the 1950s. The beginning of the play tells us that the Younger family is waiting for the $10000 insurance money that they will get from the death of Mamas’ husband; afterwards the story focuses on how the insurance money will be spent. From this main plot itself, we could tell that the play is about the struggle of the Younger family to gain acceptance from different areas of issues they are facing—economic status, ‘white’ neighborhood and their African identity, which might be the struggle of a large population of African-American in 1950s as well.…