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The play A Raisin in the Sun was generating from a poem. This poem is talking about the everyday struggles of African Americans and making it in the real world. Also about dreams and how they can easily turn into nightmares. But no matter what the outcome of the dream is, it is reality. The poem is like a vision of a big question, asking, what happens to a dream that is deferred? In the end it kind of gives the reader a vague answer.
Which gives the reader a sense of optimism. Hansberry was both a realist and optimist, viewing the world with what she described as sighted eyes and feeling heart (Wilkerson 12). This aspect in the poem gives the reader a sense of truth and it really sets the stage for the reader about the play they are about to read. She believed the human race does command its own destiny and that destiny can eventually embrace the stars (Wilkerson 12) For the author, Lorraine Hansberry, this play helped her become one of the many great African American authors today. Her accomplishment on this play at age twenty-nine was stupendous. In 1959, Hansberry was the youngest American, the fifth woman, and the first black playwright to win the Best Play of the Year Award of the New York Drama Critics.
She was able to let us see through her eyes of how a black family lived and how much of a struggle it was to be a minority in the forties. This story had so much truth to it of black peoples lives at that particular decade and she might have been trying to send a message to everyone what she, and her fellow African American brothers and sisters were going through. On January 12, 1965, cancer claimed the life of Lorraine Hansberry. She was only thirty-four and died at a pretty young age. She died before her time but her legacy still lives on through out the country. Her mission in live was simple it was to give people a sense of hope and I think she was able to capture that in her play.
Hansberry also wrote another play, which was called Les Blanc's. An African-American critic Clayton Riley addressed some of these divisions in his New York Times review. Les Blanc's, he wrote, polarize [d] an opening night audience into separate camps, not so much camps of color, of Black and White, although that, too, was part of it. The play divides people into sectors inhabited on the one hand by those who recognize clearly that a struggle exists in the world today that is about the liberation of oppressed peoples, a struggle to be supported at all costs. In the other camp live those who still accept as real the soothing mythology that oppression can be dealt with reasonably particularly by black people Blacks will just bear in mind the value of polite, calm and continuing use of the democratic process (Clayton 3).
This play is about an ordinary black family struggling to make it day in and day out. Hansberry used this technique to make all of her characters ordinary people no matter what their ethnic background was because it gives a better sense of comfort and understanding of where they stand in society. It cant be stressed enough what a truthful and real story this is. Hansberry understood that the Younger family's struggles were just the beginning but, as Keppel notes, the critical establishment of 1959 read Hansberry's text as fundamentally a confirmation of, rater than a challenge to, the American ethos (Keppel 202) Lean Younger (Mama), is the head of the household in the beginning of the play but eventually lets her son, Walter, take over the lead. Mama wants what every mother wants she wants her family to succeed and stay close together. She understands that her children have dreams and she is going to do everything in her power to make them come true.
She is very kind and generous woman. Even before she became a widow she was a hard-working woman doing everything she could to provide for her family. Walter Younger was a strong-minded man who wanted to find success. A person could argue that he was the main character in the play, but its pretty much a toss up between him and his mother, Mama. Every character in the play is essential for its success and wouldnt be the same without one of them. Walter was having a personal struggle in his life but eventually finds his meaning in life throughout the play.
In the beginning his dream was to own a liquor store and become an entrepreneur. The insurance check was in the mail was the ticket to success. Mama wouldnt part with all the money for a liquor store and Walter became very upset with her choices and accuses her of destroying a dream of his. Walter eventually understands that his mother was right when he throws away his share of his money. He starts to see things a little differently and stops thinking selfishly and realizes that his family is most important and that they must come first. Ruth was a housewife, also Walters wife.
She stayed home and broke her back everyday to help out her family. She sacrificed working herself to take care of her family and sometimes it just wasnt good enough for Walter and she just didnt know what else she could give him. She was a loving mother and took good care of her child, Travis, and she has another one on the way, which she will love just as much. Ruths dream is to live in a house and get out of the rundown apartment they were living in. Beneatha was another one of Mamas children who also has a dream to be a doctor.
Everyone in the story has a dream like most everyone today has some kind of dream of what they want to do with their lives. Beneatha didnt play really much of a significant part but to become an African American doctor was extraordinary in that time. She also brought some new characters to the play such as Joseph Asaghi was a man from Nigeria and he helped Beneatha to find herself. George Murchinson was a college guy that had taken a liking to Beneatha and she wasnt ready to be part of that. The play is about dreams and how much work and dedication is needed to make a dream come true.
The most heartfelt part was when Mama used part of the insurance check to put a down payment on a house in a dominant white neighborhood. She wanted all of her family to have a better life and live in a better place. The end of the play is so well organized it leaves the reader wondering. She was once misquoted as saying she was not a Negro writer but a writer who happens to be Negro, a statement that continues to be reprinted despite its obvious contradictions of Hansberry's lifelong belief that her ethnicity shaped her work in fundamental ways (Kaiser and Nemiroff 286 - 287). That was very interesting to me because Colin Powell used that saying in his autobiography that he was not a Negro Secretary of State but a man who happens to be a Negro.
I feel it shouldnt matter what your ethnicity is as long as you put your does in. The story took place before all the harsh racism and riots that took place in the sixties and it leaves the reader wondering what is going to happen to them after they move into their new house. Their dream to have a better lives may come true or maybe not only time can tell. But no matter what is in store for them, its going to be reality. Works Cities Hansberry, Lorraine.
A Raisin in the Sun. New York: Vintage, 1958. Kaiser, Ernest, and Robert Nemiroff. A Lorraine Hansberry Bibliography. Freedom Ways 19 (1979): 285 - 304. Keppel, Ben.
The Work of Democracy: Ralph Bunche, Kenneth B. Clark, Lorraine Hansberry, and Cultural Politics of Race. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1995. Riley, Clayton. A Black Critic on Les Blanc's: An Incredibly Moving Experience.
New York Times 29 November 1970: 3 a. Wilkerson, Margaret. The sighted Eyes and Feeling of Heart of Lorraine Hansberry. Black American Literature Forum 17 (1983): 8 - 13.
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