Dreams Deferred in Raisin in the Sun - Article Example

Dreams Deferred in Raisin in the Sun The South was the epicenter for the civil rights movement but racial problems had no regional boundaries. Most people learn about the widely accepted racial discrimination that took place in the southern states after the Civil War. Although black people were now free, they were deeply resented and still considered to be a substandard race. The racial practices of the South even found legislative expression in what is now referred to as the Jim Crow laws. Although the industrialized cities generally offered greater opportunity for the black family, mostly because of the factory’s incessant need for workers, the streets were not exactly paved in gold for them in the North either. Black people living in the Northern cities also had to deal with a great deal of racism and lack of opportunity. Not as recognized because it was not codified, the boundaries discovered in the Northern cities were sometimes just as harsh as those experienced in the Southern fields. Several of the limitations or boundaries experienced by black people in the Northern towns might have gone largely unrecognized had it not been for bold playwrights such as Lorraine Hansberry who willing to capture, as much as possible, her interpretation of the black experience. In “A Raisin in the Sun”, Hansberry is able to expose the hidden boundaries her characters encounter as they attempt to achieve a modest version of the American dream. The play “A Raisin in the Sun” attempts to portray a relatively typical black family realistically attempting to cope with the boundaries the American society has placed on them in the post-Civil War, pre-Civil Rights era of the northern states. In these areas, Jim Crow laws were not in place yet black people remained relegated to the lowest rungs of the social structure. Opening the way for future writers to blatantly name their experience, the play opened on stage in 1959 and received positive reaction from white and black audiences for its bold realism (Biography, 2006). Some recognized the play for its brilliantly realistic portrayal of life for black people while others recognized it for its ability to transcend racial lines to portray the experience of all common people. The action of the play essentially reveals what happens during the few weeks following the death of the father, Mr. Younger, as the family attempts to determine what they should do with the substantial life insurance payment they are expecting. Mr. Younger (Big Walter) and Mrs. Lena Younger had once hoped of achieving the American Dream as she remarks to Ruth in Act I, scene 1: “We was goin’ to set away little by little and buy a little place out in Morgan Park. Had even picked out the house … you should know all the dreams I had about buyin’ that house and fixin’ it up; makin’ me a little garden in the back … And didn’t none of it never happen” (Hansberry 69). The family is waiting on the delivery of an insurance check in the amount of $10,000 and they know they want to use the money to secure the family’s future, but their ideas of how to best achieve this goal are very different. Someone’s dream now has a chance of coming true, but each member of the family has a different idea of the dream’s shape. This debate is what makes up the major action of the play. For Lena (Mama), the dream is still focused on her dreams as a young wife, to own a house in the suburbs where her grandchildren can play on the lawn. She had thought she would have this house by now as her younger plans had been to put some aside each year to purchase the house, but she and her husband soon discovered that there wasn’t anything left over to save. At this point, she could use the money to put a downpayment on a house, but she knows that fulfilling this dream will require everyone, including herself, to keep working. As a result, the dream of buying a house would only guarantee the family’s welfare into the future for as long as everyone remains willing to work and does not provide anyone with the kind of freedom or advancement that the others are seeking. That Lena and Big Walter struggled their entire lives to provide shelter for their children and could never manage anything greater than the small two bedroom apartment that they “wasn’t planning on living here no more than a year” (Hansberry 44) indicates the struggle of the black people to get even a little piece of the American dream. Their inability to attain it is not the result of a lack of effort but is instead the result of a lack of opportunity. Lena’s daughter, Beneatha, wishes to spend the insurance money on her own pursuit of a medical education. She reasons that if she becomes a doctor, she will make enough money on her own to be able to support the family and no one else will need to work. This would free them up to pursue their dreams as well without being trapped in dead-end, low-paying jobs. The problem with this dream as the other characters understand it is that the medical profession was not a traditional occupation for a woman so Beneatha’s success was not guaranteed. If she failed the course or failed to complete the program, the money would then have been wasted. Beneatha dreams of an education, but feels bounded by her poverty and her gender. This is expressed as she fights with Walter over the importance of her education as well as when she expresses her feelings to Joseph Asagai in Act I, scene 2. She tells him she knows that people believe love should be enough between a woman and a man “because that’s what it says in all the novels that men write. But it isn’t. Go ahead and laugh – but I’m not interested in being someone’s little episode in America” (Hansberry 92). Even the people most important to her in her life have a hard time taking her seriously which proves to be nothing but frustrating to her as she constantly finds herself having to bash her head against a brick wall of social resistance to change. Walter, Lena’s son, feels the best way for him to help the family succeed is to go into business for himself. He reasons that only entrepreneurs are making any money these days because without long years obtaining an education, the only jobs available to black people are low paying. With a business of his own, he is confident that he will be able to pull in enough profit quickly to pay for Beneatha’s education and enable his mother and his pregnant wife to stop working while still buying them the house they all dream of. The problem with this idea lies in the type of business Walter has decided on. He has decided the family should invest in the liquor store business and he has even selected some somewhat shady men as his partners. Like Beneatha, Walter is trapped within the oppressive structure of the white man’s world. Walter Lee is tired of working for his white boss, driving him around all day long and never making more than just what he needs to almost survive. “From the first moment that Walter Lee mentions his plans for a profitable liquor store, his connections, the need for spreading money around in Springfield, the audience knows that the money will be stolen; supposedly, in good naturalistic tradition, the audience should sit, collective fingers crossed, hoping that he might be spared, that the dream might not be deferred and shrivel, like a raisin in the sun, as the Langston Hughes poem has it” (Weales, 1959: 529). Walter doesn’t want to wait for his dream to be fulfilled, he just wants to own his own business now and stop thinking of himself as someone else’s servant through lack of options. His focus to own his own business occupies his thoughts to such an extent that he can’t seem to realize that his dream of owning a liquor store is merely another man’s way of scamming a sucker. Ruth, Walter’s wife, wants to support her husband in his endeavors but privately shares Lena’s dream for the security of a comfortable home. Expecting a child, Ruth wants nothing more than a better future for her children and to not have to abort the one she carries. At the opening of the play, this is exactly what she is considering not because she doesn’t want the baby, but because she is not sure that the family can afford another mouth to feed and her own enforced absence from work during the pregnancy and early infancy of the child. Even Ruth, who seems too sick in her new pregnancy to be too worried about boundaries, is concerned that this new baby will place too much strain on the family and considers aborting it as her only potential option of keeping the family together. However, by the end of the play, the family’s move into a real home complete with a backyard and a garden that the grandchildren will play in symbolize the growing equality and opportunity that the black race was beginning to discover as they forced opportunity for themselves. “With the benefit of twenty years hindsight, Bennett observed, ‘the timing [of the plays opening] was perfect. Remember, this was 1959, five years after the Supreme Court decision on school desegregation, four years after Montgomery, the eve of the sit-ins. The time was ripe for Lorraine Hansberry. She was a kind of herald, a person announcing the coming of something. It was in the air, I think, and whites felt it as well as Blacks’” (Bernstein, 2008: 26). In the character of Ruth, Hansberry illustrates the hope for the future of her race and their increasing ability to make changes for themselves. While the family eventually finds their way into the white suburbs by the end of the play, their future remains uncertain. This is because none of the characters are actually settled with their careers and their ability to make ends meet in this new environment and they continue to discover that there are new boundaries for them to attempt to overcome. They have the house, fair and legal, but their white neighbors are less than welcoming, making life somewhat lonely and highly isolated for themselves and the grandchildren that are supposed to benefit so much by this change. Through the medium of the play, Hansberry is able to explore both the humanity of her characters in their normal pursuit of the American Dream as well as their boundaries because of the color of their skin. This is in spite of the fact that these characters lived in the Northern cities where opportunities were supposed to be available for all. What this story demonstrates is that while the black man may have achieved the right to work and earn a living, the cost of living was set so high that he was kept always at a subsistence level, never gaining the opportunity to ‘lay by’ anything for the future. In spite of this, Hansberry demonstrates that the perseverance of the family, the binding connections the characters form through love and mutual responsibility, enable them to make steady strides toward a more equal future. In the end, the youngest children of the family are able to grow up playing in their own safe yard, an opportunity that their slightly older counterparts never had yet still with significant challenges of their own to overcome in creating a more equitable and happier future for their own children. Works Cited Bernstein, Robin. “Inventing a Fishbowl: White Supremacy and the Critical Reception of Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun.” Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism. Ed. Thomas J. Shoenberg & Lawrence J. Trudeau. Vol. 192. Detroit: Gale, 2008: 16-27. “Biography of an Intellectual.” Social Justice Movements. 2009. October 2009 Hansberry, Lorraine. A Raisin in the Sun. New York: Signet Books, 1986. Weales, Gerald. “Thoughts on A Raisin in the Sun.” Drama for Students. Ed. David M. Galens & Lynn M. Spampinato. Vol. 2. Detroit: Gale, 1998: 527-530. Read More