Major Themes In A Raisin In The Sun By Lorraine Hansberry

The Younger’s are an impoverished African American family that struggles to make ends meet. Walt Disney once said “If you can dream it you can achieve it.” Dreams have a great importance in https://writemyessaytoday.us/write-my-term-paper/ A Raisin in the Sun, with the play’s name coming from a 1951 Langston Hughes poem titled Harlem. Money and acquisitiveness have always had the ability to turn people into someone they are not. Greed can tear apart families and friendships when a person neglects others for their own benefit.

Today, Iyonna plays in the South Jersey area while volunteering to teach at her high school alma mater. Patricia studied voice with Phil Orlick who made it a point that students pick unfamiliar songs as a way to encourage them to find their own voice and discover creative ways of presenting the story and lyrics. She also studied Musical Performance at HB Studio under Helen Gallagher and attended Craig Derry’s vocal boot camp. Patricia is also a longtime member of the Jazz Vocal Collective founded by Carrie Jackson. This ambitious business woman is the CEO of “Fly Balloon Designs” , and has mastered the artistry of using balloons to beautify venues and special events that always brings a smile to those enraptured in her creative aura.

Twentieth Century American Family Literature: A Tree Grows In Brooklyn, And A Raisin In The Sun

Draw evidence from literary or informational texts to support analysis, reflection, and research. Use appropriate and varied transitions to link the major sections of the text, create cohesion, and clarify the relationships among complex ideas and concepts. Cite strong and thorough textual evidence to support analysis of what the text says explicitly as well as inferences drawn from the text.

a raisin in the sun theme essay

Walter Lee’s feelings about his dreams and Ruth’s attitude toward them crystallize in this passage. He is desperate to escape the circumstances of his life, and his dreams represent his belief that he can still change his life, in spite of his weak financial position. But the fact that Ruth does not support him drags him down; part of Walter Lee’s vision of his life is that he should have a wife who believes in him. Throughout the course of the twentieth century, the concept of the American dream changed dramatically, as displayed in Lorraine Hansberry’s play, A Raisin in the Sun.

American Born Chinese

In 1961, a film version of A Raisin in the Sun was released featuring its original Broadway cast of Sidney Poitier, Ruby Dee, Claudia McNeil, Diana Sands, Ivan Dixon, Louis Gossett, Jr. and John Fiedler. Hansberry wrote the screenplay, and the film was directed by Daniel Petrie. It was released by Columbia Pictures and Ruby Dee won the National Board of Review Award for Best Supporting Actress. Both Poitier and McNeil were nominated for Golden Globe Awards, and Petrie received a special “Gary Cooper Award” at the Cannes Film Festival. Waiting for the curtain to rise on opening night, Hansberry and producer Rose did not expect the play to be a success, for it had already received mixed reviews from a preview audience the night before.

  • Petrie succumbs to constraints of society and alludes to their oppression but doesn’t make it the central theme.
  • Walter and Ruth Younger, their son Travis, along with Walter’s mother Lena and Walter’s younger sister Beneatha, live in poverty in a run-down two-bedroom apartment on Chicago’s South Side.
  • He is asking these questions because he himself want to learn those things.
  • I don’t mean yourself write my essay for cheap and also for the family ‘cause we lost the money.

Facing segregation and housing discrimination, African Americans cultivated what I call homemade citizenship—a deep sense of success and belonging that does not rely on mainstream recognition or civic inclusion. Walter’s obsession in investing in a liquor store completely took over causing him to detach from his job, loves ones, and his reality so that he could give complete attention to his dream. What he doesn’t realize is how devastating this could be to his life and whoever is involved. Walter’s selfishness leads him to sacrifice Beneatha’s dreams of becoming a doctor, because he feels that her dreams aren’t important.

Hansberry uses diction of anger to reinforce the previously made statement, with words such as “volcano”, “bitterly”, and “violently”. She explicitly points out the fact that Walter is jealous of people who do not struggle, and he is angry at them, keeping in mind that anger is a form of jealousy. To conclude, Lorraine Hansberry has succeeded in making us experience a feeling of distaste towards Walter because of his repetitive and overwhelming tension. Lorraine Hansberry has done this with the help of multiple language techniques, such as metaphors, punctuation and rhetorical questions. Walter is always talking of his dreams, and here he is complaining from the lack of help from the others, and his overreaction is what makes us feel annoyed with him. Comparison of key ideas in ‘A Raisin in the Sun’ and ‘Clybourne Park’ plays.

The house that she picks isn’t in an African American neighborhood and so she gets a visit from the welcoming committee. A man named Mr. Karl Linder is the welcoming committee and at first the Youngers think he is a nice man and that he wants to help but, then they find out that he only wants to pay them off to not live in the white neighborhood. The white man says that he doesn’t want to ruin the block with how much the people who live their work for what they have by “certain kind of people moving in”.

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