Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin In The Sun

“What happens to a dream deferred?” asks Langston Hughes during the Harlem Renaissance. A question a dreamer might ask before it becomes a reality. This quote is from the first line of a poem titled “Harlem” written by poet Langston Hughes, published in 1951. This poem lays the inspiration for A Raisin in the Sun, published in 1959, written by Lorraine Hansberry, a female African-American playwright. The main characters, the Younger family, a working-class African-American family residing on the South side of Chicago, all have various dreams for their desires and to escape generational poverty. Warnings and predictions of deferred dreams from “Harlem” such as perseverance, hope, and perfection manifest in the characters within A Raisin in the

and didn’t none of it happen” (48). In lines 7 and 8 of “Harlem,” this comes in the form of Mama’s dream of getting a new house crusting over like syrupy sweet as the dream gets harder to achieve due to financial issues. Her lasting dreams of a better life come to the theme of deferred dreams as it was partly unachieved. By showing Mama’s aspirations for a better life, it shows how African Americans were determined to fight for equality despite the denied access to equal opportunities and the challenges of racism they had to face. When a dreamer has chased their dream and held onto hope for too long, it results in the dream becoming unaccomplished because it is too late. Now that the fact that he has lost the money he needs to fund his dream has sunk in, Walter sobs, “THAT MONEY IS MADE OUT OF MY FATHER’S FLESH” (129). A conscious and attentive reader will realize that Walter’s dream of becoming rich and giving his family the best life possible has been chased for too long and now when the opportunity presents itself, it backfires on him and is now stinking like rotten meat, alluding to the fifth line of the poem

Hanberry’s depiction of dreams is a statement to her time’s segregated society that holding onto hope but not acting was a dangerous thing, subtly telling her community that they have to act now to break free from the binds of segregation. Much like how it stinks, rotten meat is also the loss of something it was before. A dream losing its perfection and legacy is the result of a dreamer neglecting their dream and not properly taking care of it. When complaining to Asagai about how Walter, her older brother, took her dream of being a doctor from her, Beneatha contemplates, “I wanted to cure. It used to be so important to me. It used to matter. I used to care” (133). Wise readers see in line 3 of Hughes’ poem comes in the form of Beneatha’s dream of curing and becoming a doctor from where it was like a juicy ripe grape, to a dried-up raisin as a result that was not cared