Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin In The Sun

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“What happens to a dream deferred?”() This is the keystone question to Langston Hughes’s poem, “Harlem (A Dream Deferred)”. In the play A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry, this very question is answered. It is not answered by accident though, these two works were paired on purpose. The former poem is actually the epigraph to the latter play. The story that unfold in A Raisin in the Sun takes place in the Chicago Ghetto. An African American family consisting of Mama (the grandmother), Walter (her son), Beneatha (Mama’s daughter), Ruth (Walter’s wife), and Travis (the son of Walter and Ruth) all live in the same household. They all live lives which are driven by dreams. All of the dreams of this family have something to do with escaping…show more content…
More specifically her dream is to become a doctor. Much like Mama, Beneatha’s dream is also to rise out of the situation she has been stuck in for many years, except instead of it being a home it is a whole class of people. As a Doctor she could easily leave her low class life behind. She would make much more money than the rest of the family combined. She would have a chance to help others. She would finally be free of the trap of living in a low income home. Although one would think her whole family would be support her dream, Walter did not. Her feels she is selfish because Mama plans to set aside a large sum of the $10,000 for her schooling. During a fight, Beneatha irately asks her brother Walter if he prefer she, “quit school or just drop dead” (497) She cannot understand why he feels this way. Her quitting school is the equivalent in her mind to dying. It just would not make sense. She is unable to understand why her brother does not desire for her to become someone and something that many thought she could not be. Beneatha’s dream seems within her reach until Mama gives Walter access to the $6500 allotted for Beneatha’s education. All she can do is hope that her brother makes the right choice and does not squander it away. Beneatha’s dream to become a doctor was as much about her passion for medicine as it was about her being able to escape her current…show more content…
He tells his wife Ruth he cannot take being poor anymore and that he has change his life because he is “choking to death” (494). Believing that money is the key to changing his life situation, Walter schemes on how he can strike it rich. He becomes set on owning a liquor store. When Mama receives the check and trusts Walter with $6500 of it he instantly wants to put it towards his business idea. The money changes the way he acts. At the movie theatre the husband and wife “hold hands” (549) and Ruth cannot even remember the last time the two of them held hands. Sadly, this change is only momentary because he ends up getting scammed and loses all of the money. The only way he could possibly regain his fortune is to sell their new home to the white neighbors. After much deliberation he tells of the representative for the neighbors and puts his family over the money. Walter dreamed of being a successful businessman and using that as an outlet to escape his rough lower class life, but he experienced difficulties when trying to achieve
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