76 pages • 2 hours read
Lorraine HansberryA Raisin in the Sun
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1959A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Themes
Dreams and Dreams Deferred
Hansberry takes the title of the play from the Langston Hughes poem “Harlem,” which asks, “What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?” A Raisin in the Sun depicts a family whose dreams have been deferred, or delayed. Mama, who has dreamed for decades of a home of her own, has been forced to indefinitely postpone her desire in order to meet the daily needs of her family. The Youngers demonstrate that achieving one’s dream is not simply a matter of hard work. Walter Sr. worked as hard as physically possible, ruining his body and laboring until he died, and was still unable to transcend the tiny, worn-out apartment that is too small for the family. But when he died, the insurance payout offers renewed hope for achieving the family’s dreams. A deferred dream, unlike a dead dream, lingers. It awaits potential reconstitution, always painfully out of reach. Mama clings to the dream she shared with her late husband, faithfully watering her bedraggled potted plant in the hope that she might one day allow it to take root in the ground.
Each family member harbors expectations for his or her life. Ruth “was a pretty girl, even exceptionally so, but now it is apparent that life has been little that she expected, and disappointment has already begun to hang in her face” (4). By the time she is 30, her dreams are so sublimated, for the sake of her family, that she never describes them. Instead, she joins Mama in the dream for a house where the family can prosper and grow. Beneatha dreams of medical school, which represents a larger ability to help and heal in a damaged and hurting society. Walter Jr. dreams of independence brought about by having the money to become his own boss, rather than remaining beholden to white employers who require his deference. And while the family awaits the arrival of the insurance check impatiently, the amount is woefully inadequate to meet the size of their dreams. Even before the money appears in the mail, the family is fighting about whose dreams deserve to succeed. When Mama decides how to spend the money, Walter is devastated at the loss of his dream.
While Beneatha and Walter place the potentiality of their dreams in the purview of financial backing, they discover that the money is not the key to freedom that they expected. Walter’s investment opportunity is too good to be true, and his partner steals the money. Beneatha, denied her medical school tuition, discovers a new way of achieving her dreams through Asagai’s invitation to go to Africa and become a doctor there. Only Mama’s original dream, shared with the man whose death made the money possible, becomes a reality. And even the new house represents an upcoming struggle, as the family is not welcome in their new, white neighborhood. But the key to happiness and satisfaction does not lie in using money as a shortcut to success. Before they can reach forward, they must reach back. Mama must reach back to the dream that she started her marriage with. Walter must reach back to the familial pride he has abandoned. Beneatha must reach back to her African roots, finding the part of herself that she has been missing. The house represents a foundation for new dreams—dreams that span generations, rather than simply benefiting the dreamer.
Fatherhood and Black Masculinity
In the absence of the Youngers’ departed patriarch, Walter Sr., his son, Walter Lee Jr., is the oldest male. Much of the play revolves around Walter Jr. coming into his own adult masculinity and becoming the “Man of the House” (99). Walter is the eldest son, and his parents’ bestowment of his father’s name designates him as the heir to the family patriarchy. Although Mama and Walter Sr. had another son who died, the fact that he wasn’t named after his father, along with the ten-year age gap between Walter and Beneatha, suggest that he would have been the middle child. In the absence of his brother, Walter Jr. bears the full onus of responsibility for fulfilling the role as the masculine head of the family. Social expectations of masculinity devastate and nearly ruin Walter Jr.
The institution of slavery in the United States, and its aftermath, created a system that dehumanizes African Americans and emasculates Black men. Displaced, African men were removed from societies where they had social power. In the United States, slavery stripped away social power and moved African Americans to the bottom of the social hierarchy. With very little opportunity for social advancement, a Black man trying to fulfill the traditional masculine gender role as the head of his household could work hard his entire life, as Walter Sr. did, and never move forward. Walter Lee’s job as a chauffeur is less likely to break his body than a job that requires heavy labor, but it does break his spirit. He must constantly be submissive toward his white employers. To Walter, the insurance money represents a transfer of his father’s masculine authority, a chance to become his own authority. Therefore, he views his mother’s control of the money as emasculation. However, the money truly represents his father’s dehumanization and emasculation, as it is the only remnant of a system that stole Walter Sr.’s youth, killed his dreams, and ruined his body.
Walter ties masculinity and proper fatherhood with money. The first rule of the traditional masculine father role is that a man must materially provide for his family. At the beginning of the play, he gives his son not only the fifty cents that his mother said they couldn’t afford, but an additional fifty cents for Travis’s enjoyment, even though he then has to ask Ruth for money to pay for his ride to work. When Ruth becomes pregnant and considers aborting the fetus, Walter does not fight her choice because it is better not to be a father at all than to have a child he cannot support. At the end of the play, Walter finally learns that his masculinity is not contingent upon money. As he prepares to thoroughly emasculate himself in order to recoup the money he lost, Mama forces him to action in front of his son. While seeing his son looking to him as an example, Walter discovers that a dignified father is more masculine than a wealthy father.
Africa and Cultural/Familial Roots
In the United States, African Americans face an identity crisis. The majority of Black Americans descend from people who were enslaved, and a key component of slavery was the dismantling of Black families. Africans were severed from their homeland and heritage, separated from their loved ones, and turned into property for white families. Throughout the two and a half centuries of American slavery, generations of Black captives were prevented from forming permanent familial units. Their names were replaced with white family names. Children were removed from parents, and spouses were separated. African cultures and religions were squashed and replaced with Christianity. While most European Americans can trace their genealogy with reasonable accuracy, African Americans, before the advent of DNA testing, had no way of discovering their true cultural and familial roots. Beneatha, born about seventy years after slavery ended, seeks a conduit back through hundreds of years of oppression, to the inheritances of her homeland. Asagai represents a link to Africa, but Beneatha has no way of knowing whether his home country of Nigeria is anywhere near her own ancestral nationality.
Hansberry presents Africanness as a quality that resides in the essential nature of the descendants of African people, even those who have never been there or even wondered about it. When Beneatha plays one of Asagai’s Nigerian records, she dances in a way that she imagines tribal women of Nigeria might dance. Beneatha becomes “enraptured, her eyes far away—‘back to the past’” (67), a look that Walter takes on as well when he joins in the dancing. Beneatha speaks against assimilating and taking on a culture that has systematically erased African cultures not only in the United States but in Africa as well, through the effects of colonialism. The urgent reclamation of African identities is an act of preservation, and Hansberry locates this Africanness as an undiscovered aspect of Beneatha’s identity, a missing piece that she must recover in order to feel whole. Asagai’s offer to take Beneatha back to Nigeria to become a doctor gives her the opportunity to heal the rapidly-disappearing culture at its source. She can reconnect to Africa until it is as if she had “only been away for a day” (126).
The severing of roots has left the Youngers, like many African Americans, culturally homeless. Stuck in a rented apartment, the family is always transient and temporary. Even after they have spent decades in the same apartment, the space is not theirs. While Beneatha desires her ancestral roots, Mama wants to plant both literal and figurative roots in American soil. She desperately tends her little potted plant that simply cannot get enough sun to survive in the apartment. The house represents a new generation of African-American citizens who enter and change previously homogenous white spaces through nonviolent integration, rather than assimilation. As Walter tells Lindner, “We have decided to move into our house because my father—my father—he earned it. We don’t want to make no trouble for nobody or fight no causes—but we will try to be good neighbors” (138). Contrary to the violent erasure that took away their cultural heritage, the Youngers seek to peacefully take what they have earned, the freedom to begin fresh and lay down the roots of a new culture.
