American Dream in a Raisin in the Sun free essay sample

Identity in the Sight of Other People In actual fact, people have a certain view or conception about what somebody is. This view is quite different from what the individual himself has. But then the harm in all this is that this state of affairs has a great impact on what an individual is supposed to become in life especially when he doesn’t have a great sense of objectivity or when he is not determined to achieve his life goal regardless of the opposition or the influence exerted upon them by society. . . Often times, this conception of somebody makes him loose his self-confidence and try to comply with what others want him to be or think he is. In trying to reajust his nature in order to harmonize his life with other people’s view, he twists his own identity and becomes somebody else than who he is in actual fact. We will write a custom essay sample on American Dream in a Raisin in the Sun or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page This is what we notice through the character of George Murchison who despite his belonging to a certain race, tried to behave like a member of another race because he didn’t have a great sense of Africanness Sometimes, because of the conception they have of other people, they would try to compel them to behave in a certain way. The white society always try then to determine the kind of life Black people are supposed to lead. This can be seen through the novel Invisible Man where the protagonist struggles hard to break from the mold crafted and held together by white society throughout the novel. The stereotypes and expectations of a racist society compel blacks to behave only in certains ways, never allowing them to act according to their own will. Even the actions of black activits seeking equality are manipulated as if they were marionettes on strings. Throughout the novel the invisible man, the protagonist encounters this situation and although he strives to achieve his own identity in society, his determination is that it is impossible. When he returns to Harlem, Tod Clifton has disappeared. When the narrator finds him, he realizes that Clifton has become disillusioned with the Brotherhood, through manipulation and has quit. Clifton is selling dancing Sambo dolls on the street, mocking the organization he once believed in. He is shot to death by a police officer in a scuffle. At Cliftons funeral, the narrator rallies crowds to win back his former widespread Harlem support and elivers a rousing speech, but he is censured by the Brotherhood for praising a man who would sell such dolls. Walking along the street one day, the narrator is spotted by Ras and roughed up by his men. He buys sunglasses and a hat as a disguise, and is mistaken for a man named Rinehart in a number of different scenarios: first, as a lover, then, a hipster, a gambler, a briber, and, finally, as a reverend. He sees that Rinehart has adapted to white society, at the cost of his own identity. This causes the narrator to see that his own identity is not of importance to the Brotherhood, but only his blackness. He decides to take his grandfathers dying advice to over come em with yeses, undermine em with grins, agree em to death and destruction. . . and yes the Brotherhood to death, by making it appear that the Harlem membership is thriving when in reality it is crumbling. Juste like Ras puts on his sunglasses and hat and is mistaken for somebody else, in the same perspective, people mistake Beneatha for somebody she is not especially because of her hair, her nigerian clothes gifted onto her by Asagai. As they consider her to be who she is not, they will expect or even compel her to behave as the one they mistake her for . One’s Own Conception on Identity The poem â€Å"Harlem† captures the tension between the need for black expression and the impossibility of that expression because of American society’s oppression of its black population. In the poem, Hughes asks whether a â€Å"dream deferred† withers up â€Å"like a raisin in the sun. † His lines conf ront the racist, dehumanizing attitude prevalent in American society before the civil rights movement of the 1960s that black desires and ambitions were, at best, unimportant and should be ignored, and at worst, should be forcibly resisted. His closing rhetorical question – â€Å"Or does [a dream deferred] explode? † – is incendiary, a bold statement that the suppression of black dreams might result in an eruption. It implicitly places the blame for this possible eruption on the oppressive society that forces the dream to be deferred. Hansberry’s reference to Hughes’ poem in her play’s title highlights the importance of dreams in A RAISIN IN THE SUN and the struggle that her characters faced to realize their individual dreams, a struggle nextricably tied to the more fundamental black dream of equality in America. These dreams functioned in positive ways, by lifting their minds from their hard work and tough lifestyle, and in negative ways, by creating in them even more dissatisfaction with their present situation. For the most part, however, the negative dreams come from placing emphasis on materialistic goals rather than on familial pride and happiness. Therefore, while the You ngers shared a common dream of having a better life, each family member had their own dream in obtaining it. Unfortunately, their dreams had been deferred for so long that their frustration almost succeeds in destroying the ultimate dream. This frustration is best summed up when Beneatha, who has lost faith in her brother, says, Well, we are dead now. All the talk about dreams and sunlight that goes on in this house. Its all dead now (1892). The Double Jeopardy of Being Black and Female The questions of gender and race have made black women’s path an everyday struggle against the double jeopardy that they are involved into, for being both black and white. The women characters of Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun (1959) are not absent of this double form of discrimination; however, as the racial issue is more at stake than gender in the play, the last one is usually forgotten in the analysis of the most part of the critics. As race can never be let apart of gender, since they are two intermingled issues in the plight of black women, we intend to analyze the implications of the two terms in the lives of the women characters of Hansberry’s play. Although A Raisin in the Sun does not focus in one single woman character as the great heroin of the plot, which usually happens in the majority of works by black women writers, we are arguing that Hansberry is concerned to race as well as gender in the construction of her play. Race in her play is like one point of a strand, but it cannot fulfill its purpose of becoming a knot if it did not have gender, the other point. This metaphor is to emphasize that the black women characters of her play come from three generations of struggles in which it is impossible to dissociate race of gender. Lorraine Hansberry was born on May 19, 1930 in Chicago, Illinois, and she died of cancer at the age of thirty-four on January 12, 1965. Although she had a very brief career, in this short period of time Hansberry called literary critics’ attention to her work and was reminded for two important achievements: she was the first woman to have a play to be produced on Broadway and the first black playwright to win the New York Drama Critics’ Award for Best Play of 1959. To bind Africa in America is what black American woman writers have also pursued in their writings. Since the past generations, of Zora Neale Hurston and Lorraine Hansberry to the present ones, of Alice Walker and Toni Morrison, the African heritage has worked as a key element for black women to rediscover their roots. However, beyond blackness, there is a second element in the realm of struggles of the African-American woman writer: a commitment to their gender, to the special position of being a black woman in American society. On the one hand, women share the same plight as of black men, being repudiated and usually granted inferior jobs, suffering the retaliation for making part of a group whose skin color constitutes enough reason for being let apart in society. On the other hand, they assume an antagonist position in their relations to the opposite sex, including their black counterparts, since they share the jeopardy of being a woman in a society that privileges male individuals. The approach of feminism by black women deserves an analysis of their own. Of course the first and second wave of feminism granted relevant contributions to the struggle of black women, but it was not enough to touch them in a pragmatic way. White women were advocating what they considered elementary rights, such as the approval of the Women’s Rights and Women’s Suffrage. But as Bell Hooks states in her essay â€Å"Black Women: Shaping Feminist Theory† (1984), black women live sexism in their daily experience, in opposite to some white women who became aware of this oppression through the influence of the feminist movement: †¦There are white women who had never considered resisting male dominance until the feminist movement created an awareness that they could and should†¦They do not understand, cannot even imagine, that black women, as well as other groups of women who live daily in oppressive situations, often acquire an awareness of patriarchal politics from their lived experience, just as they develop strategies of resistance (even though they may not resist a sustained or organized basis. ) (Hooks 277, 278). As Hooks observes in the end of this quotation, black women did not organize themselves in a kind of movement, as the white feminists did, probably because the white feminist movement did not cause a great impact in their liv es, since it did not bring in anything different of what they experienced in their everyday lives. As in this work we propose to discuss the intersection of race and gender in Hansberry’s play, we pass to the analysis of the play itself, to demonstrate how these two terms, race and gender, are intermingled in the construction of the three female characters and turn to be strategies these women had to overcome their â€Å"dream deferred†. As the three black women characters of the play (Mama, Ruth and Beneatha) constitute our object of analysis in this work, we are focusing in the double jeopardy they are involved into: to be black and woman. Although would be unsuitable to affirm that the three women of the play correspond to three different generations, since in general there is a 25 year period between one and another, (Ruth is her thirties, Beneatha in her twenties), there is a strong conflict of ideas between them. Even between Ruth and Beneatha, there is a deep abysm separating the way each one conceives the world, and such conflict is related to the realm of th e ideas. Since the first scene in which Lena Younger appears, she is presented as â€Å"Mama†, then we, as readers, immediately picture her in our minds: she is the â€Å"Big Mother† of a traditional black-American family; in other words, she is the matriarch of this family. When we get to know her better, by the middle of the play, we realize that she is a much bigger mother than we have ever thought. She is the one who is able to abandon her own dreams, if that meant her children’s happiness. As a widow in the play, Mama is going to receive money from an insurance that her husband had left her after many years of effective work. In the role of a protective mother, Mama intends to use part of the money to help her daughter Beneatha to pay her studies in a Medicine course and she dreams of using the other part in a down payment to buy a house with a yard, (for her grandson plays), in a better neighborhood.