A Raisin in the Sun Essay Analysis

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A Raisin in the Sun Essay Analysis Paper

A Raisin in the Sun play is basically about dreams. The leading actors attempt so hard to deal with the tyrannical situations that govern their lives. The name of the tragedy allusions an assumption that Langston Hughes superbly modeled in a poem he transcribed about dreams that were put off or forgotten. At the center of Hansberry’s ‘A Raisin in the Sun’ is the general dispatch of the yearning for social growth in the middle of the varying viewpoints on how to attain it. A Raisin in the Sun is a tragedy about an African American household aiming to move past disenfranchisement and segregation in 1950s Chicago (Danica, 228). The central themes in A Raisin in the Sun are race, selfishness, and dreams. Every person in the tragedy has a dream. However, accomplishing someone’s dreams shows a complicated striving, particularly when aspects like gender, class, and race interfere. A Raisin in the Sun play represents the life of an African-American household of Youngers residing in Southern Chicago during the 1950s. It starts with the Youngers getting ready to get $ 10,000 for insurance from his life insurance course of action. Consequently, all grownup affiliates of the family have planned for the cash, with every person having different viewpoints on spending the money.

The tragedy develops various thematic perceptions, such as issues with conflicting expectations, family strength, and prejudice and stereotyping (Danica, 229). The play can be analyzed through the close study of character and scenes improvement in addition to the examination of the structure, language choices, and symbolism. One understands the play to develop understanding in addition to analyze some poetry.

Dreams have a great significance in A Raisin in the Sun, with the tragedy’s designation from a 1951 Langston Hughes poem named Montage of a Dream Deferred. In the poem, part of which works as its epigraph, the poet enquires, “What happens to a dream deferred?” thinking whether it shrinks up “like a raisin in the sun” or explodes. The author’s open question generates Hansberry’s book’s foundation, with conflicting and intertwined ambitions of the Youngers moving the tragedy’s plot. All the personalities cling to different dreams that have long been delayed due to socioeconomic limits put on the family by racism. These dreams’ tenacity gives the play a pervasive logic of hope, regardless of the results of the prediction of upcoming fights for the household in Clybourne Park.

A vital feature in the Younger family, self-esteem exerts a uniting power all the way through the play. Mama shows pride in her family’s context and attempts to instill in her broods a sense of respect for their ancestors, who were Southern slaves and sharecroppers. Mrs. Johnson censures the family as “one proud-acting bunch of colored folks,” the family holds fast to its ancestral dignity, an heirloom it considers to be more significant. In 1959 many of the United States, including Chicago, remained de facto separated, signifying that racial separation continued in employment, education, and housing even though the Supreme Court had overturned segregation that was established by law as unconstitutional. Set in de facto ghettoized Chicago, his tragedy comes from the author’s personal life, for example, her family’s experience with housing discrimination in 1930s Chicago. 

A Raisin in the Sun is rife with conflicts: gender conflicts, generational conflicts, ideological conflicts, and maybe most significant conflicts of dreams, which are at the focus of the play. By putting three generations in the same cramped quarters, Hansberry emphasizes some of the vital modifications between age and youth intensely (Chapman, 446). Mama Younger’s uneasiness is continually for the health of her broods. She wants to give for Beneatha’s schooling and get a contented home for the household. She and her hubby, Big Walter, had fought to make life better and for the children. Although he had worked himself to death, he had taken out the $10,000 life insurance policy as security for them.

Walter Lee and Beneatha, conversely, are more self-interested in their concerns. Beneatha misuses money on frisky hunts and dedicates her attention to her relationships. At the same time, Walter is oblivious to everyone else’s requirements, with the possible exception of his son, in his mania with the dream of turning out to be a businessman (Nathaniel, 27). In archetypal childlike fashion, Travis influences all the adults in the play to attain his personal ends. Conceptual conflicts also thrive, nourishing the central theme of the novel. Beneatha, having been newly exposed to some fundamental concepts in the university setting, has left the God-focused Christian conviction of her mother and has comprised atheism, or at least secular humanism. The main clang between these two ideologies results from a dramatic scene in which Mama forces Beneatha to admit, at least in words, the presence of God by imposing her to repeat the saying, “In my mother’s house, there is always God.”

Works Cited

Čerče, Danica. “Race and politics in the twentieth-century Black American play: Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun.” Neohelicon 46.1 (2019): 227-239.

Chapman, Erin D. “Staging Gendered Radicalism at the Height of the US Cold War: A Raisin in the Sun and Lorraine Hansberry’s Vision of Freedom.” Gender & History 29.2 (2017): 446-467.

Nesmith, Nathaniel G., et al. “A Raisin in the Sun at 0: A Conversation.” Text & Presentation, 2019 16 (2020): 27.