A Raisin In The Sun Character Analysis

“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.

Lorraine Hansberry’s play, “A Raisin in the Sun,” perfectly captures the problems of an African-American family during the 1950s. Most of the conflicts portrayed by the characters are still very relevant to this day and the over looming issues of racism and stereotypes are still existent to society today also. These problems don’t just affect one group or race of people nowadays; they affect almost everybody in our society no matter what race or gender you are. In the play, personal conflicts such as Beneatha’s internal struggle to genuinely be herself can be seen in the present society. Racial profiling is also portrayed effectively in this play, and can also be seen in our present society. Through these, the characters seem to be very relatable

The play A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry debuted on Broadway in 1959, and the movie was made in 2008. “A Raisin in the Sun” is about the Younger family, the fifth generation of lower-class African-Americans living in Chicago’s Southside. They are faced with problems such as racial discrimination, poverty, and conflicting dreams. As the family decides on how to spend the insurance check of $10,000 from Walter’s father’s death, these problems cause many conflicts to rise. Reading the 1959 play and the 2008 movie, I have realized certain similarities and differences in how the story plays out.

“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. While both stage and screen portrayals were highly acclaimed there are some similarities as well as some marked differences in each interpretation.

A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry is a play which contains many different obstacles that the characters face. One character, Beneatha, faces an obstacle that is out of her control. This obstacle is gender inequality. Throughout A Raisin in the Sun, gender inequality is experienced by Beneatha and reflects the struggles women faced in the 1950s.

Through the use of the historical lens, looking specifically at the economic struggles, the struggle of unequal opportunity, and the housing covenant that African-American’s faced in the 1950’s, Hansberry’s message of A Raisin in the Sun is revealed: the perseverance of an ethnic minority in a time of racial discrimination. A Raisin in the Sun is set in a time of great racial discrimination, the 1950’s in the united States. This featured racism towards those of color or non-caucasians, and the struggles commonly faced by the African-American family is shown through the eyes of the Younger family through the writing and experiences of Lorraine Hansberry.

In A Raisin in the Sun, a play written by Lorraine Hansberry, the audience was able to obtain a sense of the struggle for the American dream. We are introduced to the Youngerś a black family living in the Southside of Chicago around the 1950’s. Each member of this family has their own meaning to what is the American dream. A Raisin in the Sun teaches us that even though life might be full of conflicts, it is important to not give up on our dreams.

Family is important to everyone in some way because family sticks together no matter what. The play A Raisin in the Sun is about a black family named the Youngers and the hardships they face together as a family. In A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry, Ruth Younger is motivated by her family. This is shown by Ruth wanting to make her family happy, her working even though she is tired, and later when Ruth finds out there is going to be another mouth to feed.

Throughout the 1950s, people of color have struggled with achieving their dreams due to the lack of equality that is portrayed in that specific time era. It has been a constant battle for equality for all races and genders over the course of time. In Lorraine Hansberry’s play A Raisin In the Sun the character Beneatha struggles with her racial inequality, education, and gender stereotyping. These specific struggles are the blocks she deals with trying to achieve her dream.

Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun presents the rise of feminism in America in the 1960s. Beneatha Younger, Lena Younger (Mama) and Ruth Younger are the three primary characters displaying evidences of feminism in the play. Moreover, Hansberry creates male characters who demonstrate oppressive attitudes towards women yet enhance the feministic ideology in the play. A Raisin in the Sun is feminist because, with the feminist notions displayed in the play, women can fulfil their individual dreams that are not in sync with traditional conventions of that time.

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. The famous play shows the audience the life it was like to live as a black female, and shows the struggles that the Young family faced being the first African American family to move into a white neighborhood. This play is considered a

"Education has spoiled many a good plow hand" (Hansberry 103). This quote is significant because it is applying that education is better than being a hard-worker. A Raisin in the Sun, written by Lorraine Hansberry, is taken place in South Side, Chicago between World War II and the present. The main focus of this play is about a poor African-American family who has a chance to escape this lifestyle with a ten-thousand-dollar life insurance check, but is not desired to live in a "white" neighborhood.

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.

The setting of the Raisin in the Sun is the ghetto of Chicago, where most black families lived and most of these black families had dreams of moving to a better neighbourhood, because of crime, but the housing industry causes segregated housing and manipulates communities with white fears of black integration. When Lorraine Hansberry was a child, her family also experienced the results of a government unconcerned with blacks leaving segregation. Lorraine used her play to tell people about her own struggle with racism, her play shows us that her problems were handled with determination.

A Raisin in the Sun (“Raisin”) written by Lorraine Hansberry (“Hansberry”) and For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf (“For Colored Girls”) written by Ntozake Shange (“Shange”) are both successful plays, most noted for their accomplishment of “bringing black audience to Broadway.” The plays brought black audiences to Broadway because they carried issues that black women faced daily but were unspoken. Hansberry and Shange utilized the forum to speak on behave of their own life experiences and that of all colored women. Although Raisin and For Colored Girls were written from two different social movement eras, the women characters in the plays parallel the struggles and triumphs of femininity through their experiences