Summary
It is morning at the Youngers’ apartment. Their small
dwelling on the South Side of Chicago has two bedrooms—one for Mama
and Beneatha, and one for Ruth and Walter Lee. Travis sleeps on
the couch in the living room. The only window is in their small
kitchen, and they share a bathroom in the hall with their neighbors.
The stage directions indicate that the furniture, though apparently
once chosen with care, is now very worn and faded. Ruth gets up
first and after some noticeable difficulty, rouses Travis and Walter
as she makes breakfast. While Travis gets ready in the communal
bathroom, Ruth and Walter talk in the kitchen. They do not seem
happy, yet they engage in some light humor. They keep mentioning
a check. Walter scans the front page of the newspaper and reads
that another bomb was set off, and Ruth responds with indifference.
Travis asks them for money—he is supposed to bring fifty cents to
school—and Ruth says that they do not have it. His persistent nagging
quickly irritates her. Walter, however, gives Travis an entire dollar
while staring at Ruth. Travis then leaves for school, and Walter
tells Ruth that he wants to use the check to invest in a liquor
store with a few of his friends. Walter and Ruth continue to argue
about their unhappy lives, a dialogue that Ruth cuts short by telling
her husband, “Eat your eggs, they gonna be cold.”
Beneatha gets up next and after discovering that the
bathroom is occupied by someone from another family, engages in
a verbal joust with Walter. He thinks that she should be doing something
more womanly than studying medicine, especially since her tuition
will cut into the check, which is the insurance payment for their
father’s death. Beneatha argues that the money belongs to Mama and
that Mama has the right to decide how it is spent. Walter then leaves
for his job as a chauffeur—he has to ask Ruth for money to get to
work because the money he gave Travis was his car fare. Mama enters
and goes directly to a small plant that she keeps just outside the
kitchen window. She expresses sympathy for her grandson, Travis,
while she questions Ruth’s ability to care for him properly. She
asks Ruth what she would do with the money, which amounts to $10,000. For once,
Ruth seems to be on Walter’s side. She thinks that if Mama gives
him some of the money he might regain his happiness and confidence,
which are two things Ruth feels she can no longer provide for Walter.
Mama, though, feels morally repulsed by the idea of getting into
the liquor business. Instead, she wants to move to a house with
a lawn on which Travis can play. Owning a house had always been
a dream she had shared with her husband, and now that he is gone
she nurtures this dream even more powerfully.
Mama and Ruth begin to tease Beneatha about the many
activities that she tries and quits, including her latest attempt
to learn how to play the guitar. Beneatha claims that she is trying
to “express” herself, an idea at which Ruth and Mama have a laugh.
They discuss the man that Beneatha has been dating, George Murchison. Beneatha
gets angry as they praise George because she thinks that he is “shallow.”
Mama and Ruth do not understand her ambivalence toward George, arguing
that she should like him simply because he is rich. Beneatha contends
that, for that very reason, any further relationship is pointless,
as George’s family wouldn’t approve of her anyway. Beneatha makes
the mistake of using the Lord’s name in vain in front of Mama, which
sparks another conversation about the extent of God’s providence.
Beneatha argues that God does not seem to help her or the family.
Mama, outraged at such a pronouncement, asserts that she is head
of the household and that there will be no such thoughts expressed
in her home. Beneatha recants and leaves for school, and Mama goes
to the window to tend her plant. Ruth and Mama talk about Walter
and Beneatha, and Ruth suddenly faints.
Analysis
All of the characters in A Raisin in the Sun have
unfulfilled dreams. These dreams mostly involve money. Although
the Younger family seems alienated from white middle-class culture,
they harbor the same materialistic dreams as the rest of American
society. In the 1950s, the stereotypical
American dream was to have a house with a yard, a big car, and a
happy family. The Youngers also seem to want to live this dream,
though their struggle to attain any semblance of it is dramatically
different from the struggle a similar suburban family might encounter,
because the Youngers are not a stereotypical middle-class family.
Rather, they live in a world in which being middle class is also
a dream.
Mama’s plant symbolizes her version of this dream, because
she cares for it as she cares for her family. She tries to give
the plant enough light and water not only to grow but also to flourish
and become beautiful, just as she attempts to provide for her family
with meager yet consistent financial support. Mama also imagines
a garden that she can tend along with her dream house. The small
potted plant acts as a temporary stand-in for her much larger dream.
Her relentless care for the plant represents her protection of her
dream. Despite her cramped living situation and the lifetime of
hard work that she has endured, she maintains her focus on her dream,
which helps her to persevere. Still, no matter how much Mama works,
the plant remains feeble, because there is so little light. Similarly,
it is difficult for her to care for her family as much as she wants
and to have her family members grow as much as she wants. Her dream
of a house and a better life for her family remains tenuous because
it is so hard for her to see beyond her family’s present situation.
Beneatha’s dream differs from Mama’s in that it is, in
many ways, self-serving. In her desires to “express” herself and
to become a doctor, Beneatha proves an early feminist who radically
views her role as self-oriented and not family-oriented. Feminism
had not fully emerged into the American cultural landscape when
Hansberry wrote A Raisin in the Sun, and Beneatha
seems a prototype for the more enthusiastic feminism of the 1960s
and 1970s. She not only wants to have a career—a
far cry from the June Cleaver stay-at-home-mom role models of the 1950s
(June Cleaver was the name of the mother on Leave it to
Beaver, a popular late-1950s sitcom
about a stereotypical suburban family)—but also desires to find
her identity and pursue an independent career without relying solely
on a man. She even indicates to Ruth and Mama that she might not
get married, a possibility that astonishes them because it runs
counter to their expectations of a woman’s role. Similarly, they
are befuddled by her dislike of the “pretty, rich” George Murchison.
That Beneatha’s attitude toward him differs from Ruth’s or Mama’s
may result from the age difference among the three women. Mama and Beneatha
are, of course, a generation apart, while Ruth occupies a place
somewhere in the middle; Hansberry argues that Beneatha is the least
traditional of the women because she is the youngest.
