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Realism In James Baldwin's The Living Is Easy

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Realism is a way of thinking that allows people to express themselves using a real life approach this became very popular among African Americans. After embracing the new Negro approach. Being able to express one’s self without restraint of consequences and to give the truth of their circumstances with unrated reality. Some authors who demonstrated realism in their works would be Dorothy West. In her excerpt “The Living is Easy” creates a story of a woman who can’t escape the circumstance of which she was raised while struggling with her self-identity. The main Character Cleo represents the middle class of African American society but she wants more for herself and her family. She wants the Boston American dream. She is not one to indulge in the ways of her southern brothers. Instead one either “black or white, should consider himself a special species of fish.”(West 116) Using the word …show more content…

Authors such as James Baldwin and Lorraine Hansberry had a unique way of using realism in their works that had a way of setting the tone. In going to meet the man by James Baldwin. The author uses his characters to express how animalistic society has become “They were animals, they were no better than animals, what could be done with people like that” (Baldwin 454). Using very blunt imagery to depict the sexual provocativeness of African Americans to whites. He managed to illustrate a basic human instinct such as lust and portray how it was so deeply wrapped in hatred. Much like Baldwin Lorraine Hansberry also takes a unique approach in her play “A Raisin in the Sun” she manages to show another human instinct; Fight or Flight. She uses her character pushing their case of violence and threats all the way to the Supreme Court. But also she shows love. “MAMA: There is always something left to love. And if you ain’t learned that, you ain’t learned nothing.”(Hansberry

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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.

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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.

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“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.

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“ The term realism refers to a movement in English gathered from the 1830’s to the end of the century”.

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