Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin In The Sun

1359 Words6 Pages
Male leadership roles in all families are important because women and children look up to men for guidance. It’s just natural for the man to be the leader and provider. When the man isn’t the provider, it sort of takes away his authority and respect in his household. Since it is again natural for the man to be the head of his house hold, when he isn’t it also negatively impacts his own self esteem. In her play, “A Raisin in the Sun”, Lorraine Hansberry uses Walter and the changing relationships with the women in his family to illustrate this central fact. Even though Walter knows what being a leader to the women in his family looks like because of his father’s example, he doesn’t want to be like him. He wants to be “the man” (rich and successful)…show more content…
Eventually, he realizes that he cannot raise the family up from poverty alone, and he seeks strength in uniting with his family. When he almost accepted Mr. Lindner’s proposition of not moving into their new home for money (the whites wanted the blacks to stay where they were, and come in there part of town at all), his family convinced him that they have worked too hard to have anyone tell them where they can and cannot live. In other words, his pride, work, and humanity become more important to him than his dream of money. Walter finally “comes into his manhood,” as Mama says, recognizing that being proud of his family is more important than having money. He must endure challenges in order to arrive at a more adult understanding of the important things in life. While both of her children achieve happiness but incomplete fulfillment of their dreams (Beneatha and Walter), Mama realizes her dream of moving at last. As the oldest member of the family, Mama is a testament to the potential of dreams, since she has lived to see the dream she and her husband shared but could not achieve finally fulfilled. With the new house, they are well on their way to the complete fulfillment of their dreams. Mama’s last moment in the apartment and her transporting of her plant (which she loved and took good care of since the beginning of the play) shows that although she is happy about moving, she continues to cherish the memories she has accumulated throughout her life. Hansberry implies, then, that the sweetness of dream fulfillment accompanies the sweetness of the dream itself. Mama pauses on her way out of the apartment to show respect and appreciation for the hard work that went into making the dream come true. Her husband lingers in her recollections, and when she says to Ruth a few lines earlier, “Yeah,
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