Privacy is the Key A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry was published in the year 1959, a time of discrimination, racism, and segregation for Blacks. Hansberry wrote A Raisin in the Sun to portray the difficulty of being an African American in the 1950’s. Lorraine Hansberry particularly chosed to write a private play to bring the audience into an intimate experience with the family and their drama so that we can understand how it was to be black and that the play was a form of activim/. The set in A Raisin in the Sun was located in the Younger family’s apartment in Chicago’s Southside.
In Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, she portrays a character named Walter Lee Jr. Walter Lee Jr. is the eldest of two children. The father has passed away, and his mother is trying to maintain her family together. Gender roles force Walter Lee Jr. to be the provider for his family. Throughout the play Walter Lee Jr. encounters major conflicts and is changed by it.
She has told the inner as well as the outer truth about a Negro family in the south-side of Chicago at the present time. Since the performance is also honest and since Sidney Poitier is a candid actor, A Raisin in the Sun has vigor as well as veracity and is likely to destroy the complacency of any one who sees it.” He also noted one negative comment, which is, “That is Miss Hansberry's personal contribution to an explosive situation in which simple honesty is the most difficult thing in the world.” In general, his report was really nice.
The story of “Raisin in the Sun” This story expresses the perspective of a black family’s experience in Chicago, as they improve their financial problems with insurance money from their father’s death, and deal with racism and assimilation. Hansberry, the author, demonstrates a character “Beneatha” who symbolizes her as a cultural woman, who wants to be independent and thrive in life rather than marriage. The author uses her persuasive moves to convey that you are capable of doing anything you desire no matter what.
Many of the African Americans in the play are fighting for equal rights and against injustice. Even women held their own part, gaining their own equality. The play set a time of simple oppositions and an eager, personal justice system. Hansberry’s, “A Raisin in the Sun” does a good job at pointing out all of society’s flaws at the time.
“It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are”-e. e. Cumming. In the book A Raisin in the Sun, Lorraine Hansberry writes about a black family living in the 1950’s in Chicago. During this time there were many racist people. Beneatha Younger, an ambitious, resilient, selfish young woman treated like a child by her family.
The play "A Raisin in the Sun" by Lorraine Hansberry examines the hopes and challenges faced by the Youngers, an African-American family living in Chicago during the civil rights movement. Mama's plant, Beneatha's hair, and the insurance money, are all utilized throughout the play to symbolize the characters' dreams and goals. While Mama's plant stands in for her drive to provide a loving and warm home for her family, Beneatha's hair signifies her quest for individuality and desire to go against social standards. The insurance money, which the family got from Mr. Younger, symbolizes both Walter's aspiration for financial success and the families shared motivation to have a more prosperous future. These symbols reflect on the racial and economic discrimination that
A Raisin in the Sun was a breakthrough in history because it made people think about what really happens in people's lives and it gave African Americans a voice, finally. “ Set in a modest apartment in Southside Chicago after World War II, the play focuses upon the Younger family: Lena, the matriarch; her son, Walter Lee, a chauffer; her daughter Beneatha,a college student; Walter Lee’s wife, Ruth; and their son, Travis. In the opening scene,Ruth rouses her family on an early Friday morning. Hansberry describes her as “a settled woman,” whose disappointment in life clearly shows in her demeanor. Walter, conversely, is a lean, intense man whose voice always contains “a quality of indictment.”
In the play Raisin in the Sun written by Lorraine Hansberry takes place on the southside of Chicago where Walter and his family are racially profiled and show us how the survive throughout their struggles. The central struggles for the younger family in their search for the American dream is mostly poverty and being racially profiled against for their actions. Hansberry challenges the traditional gender roles and issues of dominance throughout the play when Mama gives Walter lee the rest of the money at the end of the play. He becomes all excited and was supposed to save some for himself and put the rest of the money to Beneatha 's education. Instead, he gave all that money to Willy another character in the play which later on that he stole from him.
Hansberry shows what it is like for a black family to live in poverty during the 1950s, and how when your dream is set aside, there are negative consequences that come with it. In her play, Raisin in the Sun, Hansberry uses Walter, Ruth, and Beneatha to show the negative consequences that occur when you put off your dream. First, Hansberry uses Walter to show the negative consequences that occur when you put off your dream. Walter Lee Younger is husband to Ruth,
“A Raisin in the Sun,” written by Lorraine Hansberry in 1959, was the first play ever produced on Broadway by an African-American woman and was considered ground-breaking for it’s time. Titled after Langston Hughes’ poem “Harlem,” sometimes known as “A Dream Deferred,” the play and the subsequent film adaptations are honest examinations of race, family, poverty, discrimination, oppression and even abortion in urban Chicago after WWII. The original play was met with critical praise, including a review by Brooks Atkinson of the New York Times where he wrote, “For A Raisin in the Sun is a play about human beings who want, on the one hand, to preserve their family pride and, on the other hand, to break out of the poverty that seems to be their fate. Not having any axe to grind, Miss Hansberry has a wide range of topics to write about-some of them hilarious, some of them painful in the extreme.” The original screen adaptation released in 1961 was highly acclaimed in its own right, and was chosen in 2005 for preservation in the United States of America National Film Registry by the Library of Congress for its cultural and historical significance.
A Raisin in the Sun: Strength of Family Racism, segregation, oppression, and poverty; these are some of the struggles that black people in 1950’s America had to deal with every single day. That’s what the book “A Raisin in the Sun” focused on. This book was written about a closely-knit black family who had to get through new and difficult challenges, especially when it came to the racism that ran rampant through America at the time and their own attempts to escape the seemingly bottomless pit of poverty. These struggles forced this black family to stay together, even in times when the family seemed to be coming apart at the seams.
Reader Response: 3 “A Raisin in the Sun” by Lorraine Hansberry, is a play about a black families experience in 1950s South Side Chicago. The story revolves around what happens to the family when Lena Younger, the matriarch of the family, receives a ten thousand dollar life insurance check upon the death of her husband. Everyone from the family has different plans for what they want to do with the money. Lena Younger serves as the head of the family. She is Walter and Beneatha’s caring mother so they and Ruth call her Mama.
A Raisin in the Sun addresses major social issues such as racism and feminism which were common in the twentieth century. The author, Lorraine Hansberry, was the first playwright to produce a play that portrayed problematic social issues. Racism and gender equality are heavily addressed throughout the play. Even though we still have these issues today, in the 1950’s and 60’s the issues had a greater part in society. Racism and gender have always been an issue in society, A Raisin in the Sun is an important piece of American history during that time period.
Just within the recent decades, men and women started to fight against the gender stereotypes and started to challenge their roles in a family and in the society. The play, A Raisin in the Sun, portrays the lives of African–Americans during the 1950s. Lorraine Hansberry, a writer and a social activist, reinforced the traditional gender roles, especially female’s, by depicting how the Youngers interact and how they act in an economical struggle. Throughout the play, A Raisin in the Sun, she uses Walter Lee Younger, Ruth Younger and Lena Younger to reinforce the traditional role of fathers, wives and mothers within a family.
