Hansberry’s famous play “A Raisin in the Sun” premiered to an enthusiastic crowd on Broadway in 1959. The play was timely, as it premiered amidst the growing tension regarding the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, and it dealt extensively with many of the issues that black families faced in the United States at that time. However, race is not the only important thematic idea that Hansberry’s famous play dealt with; inequality between genders, classes, and even generations is examined extensively throughout the play. Within “A Raisin in the Sun,” the issues of gender and racial inequality are portrayed as inextricable and interconnected; Hansberry shines a light on a type of inequality that was, by and large, overlooked during the Civil Rights Movement, and examines just what it means to be both a minority in the racial sense, but also what it means to be a woman-- and a man.
Money is one of the primary motivating factors in the play. Although it seems that, on the surface, money has little to do with gender or racial inequality, the undercurrent of the class system is fundamentally important to understanding the themes of gender and racial inequality. It is not for nothing that the old adage says that money makes the world go round-- one of the primary ways both women and minority races have been held down over the centuries is through economic depression. Prior to the Civil War in the United States, African-American people could not own land; in fact, they were kept as slaves, and could not own anything, not even their own lives. This type of economic oppression ensured that African-Americans could never attain true equality with their white counterparts. No matter how well-educated African-Americans became, they would never be able to control anything in their lives. This is one of the reasons that money plays such a large thematic role in the play “A Raisin in the Sun.” Walter’s character recognizes that money is fundamentally important to ensuring a good life for himself and his family, and he sees money as the way forward (Hansberry). However, he does not recognize that there are ethical and unethical ways of obtaining money at the beginning of the play; he merely sees obtaining money as his duty as a man.
At the beginning of the play, Walter has an exchange with his mother about the topic of money. His mother expresses discontent with how obsessed he seems to have become with the topic of money:
MAMA:Oh—So now it’s life. Money is life. Once upon a time freedom used to be life—now it’s money. I guess the world really do change . . .
WALTER: No—it was always money, Mama. We just didn’t know about it.
MAMA :No . . . something has changed. You something new, boy. In my time we was worried about not being lynched . . . You ain’t satisfied or proud of nothing we done. I mean that you had a home; that we kept you out of trouble till you was grown; that you don’t have to ride to work on the back of nobody’s streetcar—You my children—but how different we done become. (Hansberry)
Mama’s character is representative of the ideal mother figure-- she cares for her children, and loves them through thick and thin, regardless of the financial situation of the family. She has strong opinions, and is willing to express them to anyone; she sticks by her moral obligations regardless of how difficult it seems. She is also an under-appreciated character in the play, the rock on which the other characters can lean on (Hansberry). She experienced true racial discrimination in the South, and she continuously tries to remind her children that what they are experiencing is nowhere near like what she experienced, and tries to instill a good moral compass in them. She is a character that the audience is meant to respect and adore; the audience sees enough of her troubled past to respect her for her strength, but also for how willing she is to stand by her beliefs regardless of how difficult it seems at any given point.
Mama always has a lesson to teach her children, as well. She has raised both a daughter and a son, both of whom are experiencing issues within the play. Her daughter, Beneatha, is struggling with her racial identity, while her son, Walter, is struggling with his intrinsic desire for something better in life, which is manifesting itself as greed. However, she loves them both through the difficult times. During one exchange with her children, she says: “Child, when do you think is the time to love somebody the most? When they done good and made things easy for everybody? [] when you starts measuring somebody, measure him right, child, measure him right. Make sure you done taken into account what hills and valleys he come through before he got to wherever he is” (Hansberry). This is a life lesson that she tries to teach to her children over and over again, while still recognizing that her children must make their own mistakes and choices in their lives. As a character, she is similar to the Greek chorus; she gives advice and warnings that are largely ignored by the other characters in the play, but usually turn out to be the best course of action.
Mama’s daughter, Beneatha, is another interesting study in the intersection of race and gender inequality. Whereas Mama represents a lifetime of hardship, and fits the trope of the battle-hardened mother figure, Beneatha is much softer and more wishy-washy (Hansberry). She cannot decide what she wants in her life; she has difficulty fitting in with both the black community and the white community, as neither will accept her fully. Beneatha’s existence is defined by the men in her life, most notably her boyfriend, George, and the student from Nigeria that she knows, whose name is Joseph Asagai. George is representative of the black man that the white majority tried to mold: he is well-educated, and makes every effort to deny his heritage and to fit into the white community. Asagai, on the other hand, is the opposite: he is well-educated by proud of his heritage (Hansberry). He is even from Africa, and is thus a direct link to Beneatha’s African heritage.
Beneatha is defined by these men in her life, a fact that Hansberry seems to neither condone nor condemn. She is not a complete character in the same way that Mama is; she is merely a mirror, a foil to the men in the play. Where her brother, Walter, thirsts for financial independence, Beneatha seems to thirst only for a male character to make her feel whole. When she begins to feel separate from her boyfriend, George, she quickly falls in with Joseph Asagai and begins to absorb and spout his beliefs without much question (Hansberry). She is disappointed by the lack of money from the insurance settlement, but quickly forgets about the issue as she accepts Joseph Asagai’s invitation to return to Africa. Some have pointed to Beneatha as a feminist character, as she eventually abandons her pursuit of “whiteness” in an attempt to reach back to her African roots. However, her character makes few independent decisions, and is completely blank without the male characters of the play to reflect upon her. She does make the choice to accept her racial identity, but it is not a choice she has made on her own; it is a choice that is presented to her by the male characters of the play (Hansberry).
Although the fate of the family is uncertain at the end of the play, the play ends on an uplifting note, as the characters have made what seems to be the morally-upright and correct decisions. Mama’s influence can be seen throughout the play, but never moreso than at the end of the play, where her children abandon their poor choices in lieu of making good, morally-upright decisions. At the end of the play, Walter accepts who he is and does not compromise it for the sake of money; however, there is no true resolution to the issue of racial inequality in the neighborhood. In this way, Hansberry’s “happy ending” is bittersweet and realistic: there is no true ending to the issue of racial discrimination, and the audience is left understanding that racial discrimination will be something the characters will experience for the duration of their lives.
References
Hansberry, L. (1959). A raisin in the sun. New York: Random House.
