A Raisin in the Sun — themes, the deferred dream, and the Youngers

Lorraine Hansberry · 1959

Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun was the first play by a Black woman to be produced on Broadway, opening at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on 11 March 1959, when Hansberry was twenty-eight. The play ran for 530 performances, won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award (Hansberry was the youngest American and the first Black playwright to win it), and was adapted into a 1961 film, a 1973 musical, and multiple stage revivals since. Its title comes from a line in Langston Hughes's poem "Harlem" (1951): "What happens to a dream deferred? / Does it dry up / like a raisin in the sun?" The play takes the question seriously.

The plot

The Younger family — three generations sharing a cramped South Side Chicago apartment in the 1950s — is about to receive a $10,000 life-insurance check after the death of the family patriarch. The play takes place over the days during which the family debates what to do with the money. Lena Younger (Mama) wants to buy a house. Walter Lee, her son, wants to invest in a liquor store. Beneatha, Walter's sister, wants money for medical school. Ruth, Walter's wife, is pregnant and considering an abortion the family cannot quite afford to refuse. The play's three acts work out the family's competing dreams and the cost of each.

The Hughes epigraph

The play takes its title from Hughes's "Harlem":

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore —
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over —
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

The poem's catalogue of possible outcomes for deferred dreams structures the play. Each character carries a dream; each dream has been deferred by their circumstances; each risks one of Hughes's outcomes. Mama's dream of a house has sagged for decades. Walter Lee's dream of business success is festering. Beneatha's dream of becoming a doctor is at risk of drying up. The play asks which of Hughes's metaphors will describe each Younger by the end.

The Youngers as ensemble

The play's structural achievement is that it gives all five major characters — Lena, Walter, Beneatha, Ruth, and Travis — real interiority. None is reduced to a function. This was a deliberate corrective to the period's theatrical representation of Black families, which had usually reduced characters to single traits.

Lena (Mama) — the matriarch, deeply Christian, the moral centre. Her dream is a small house with a garden, and she has been carrying it for forty years.
Walter Lee — the chauffeur and son who feels he is suffocating in a world that won't let him provide for his family. His arc is the play's most sustained — from grandiose dreaming, through humiliating failure, to the dignity of refusing the buy-out at the end.
Ruth — Walter's wife, the tired working woman, pregnant and considering an abortion. Hansberry treats her decision with seriousness rare in 1959 American drama.
Beneatha — Walter's college-age sister, in transit between identities (assimilationist via George Murchison, Pan-Africanist via the Nigerian Joseph Asagai). She is the play's voice of generational change.
Travis — Walter and Ruth's son. Small but present throughout; the silent inheritor of whatever the family becomes.

Walter Lee's transformation

Walter Lee carries the play's most extended character arc. He begins demanding the insurance money as his right, dreams of becoming a "big man" through his liquor store investment, loses most of the money to a swindler, and is brought to the play's lowest point — preparing to accept the white neighbour Karl Lindner's buy-out offer, which would have the family not move into the white neighbourhood Mama has bought a house in.

In the play's climax, Walter Lee — with his son Travis beside him at Mama's insistence — refuses the buy-out and asserts the family's dignity. The transformation is the play's moral resolution. He has not become rich; he has not gotten the liquor store; he has, however, become a man whose self-respect his mother and his son can recognise.

Beneatha and the question of identity

Beneatha's plotline — caught between her white-assimilated suitor George Murchison and her African suitor Joseph Asagai — is the play's investigation of mid-twentieth-century Black American identity. George wants her to stop wearing her natural hair, to study less seriously, to conform to mainstream respectability. Asagai introduces her to Yoruba culture, to the possibility of going to Nigeria, to the broader Pan-African identity movement.

The play does not resolve Beneatha's choice — she has not chosen by the final scene — but the question is the play's central younger-generation motif. The future Black American identity, the play is asking, will be made by choices the previous generation could not predict.

The neighbourhood

The Youngers' eventual move to the all-white Clybourne Park — and Karl Lindner's visit to discourage them — is based on Hansberry's own family's experience. The Hansberrys had moved to a white neighbourhood in Chicago in 1937; the resulting legal case (Hansberry v. Lee, 1940) reached the Supreme Court. Hansberry was eight at the time. The play's setting is autobiographical at the deepest level.

The play also makes clear that the move is not triumph. The Youngers are walking into a neighbourhood that does not want them. The play ends before they get there. The deeper political claim is that the move is necessary anyway.

The afterlife: Clybourne Park

Bruce Norris's 2010 play Clybourne Park, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2011, is a direct response to A Raisin in the Sun. The first act is set in the Clybourne Park house in 1959, the day the white family sells it to the Youngers; the second act is set in 2009 in the same house, now in a gentrifying Black neighbourhood about to be sold to a white family. The play works because Raisin exists and is part of the cultural foundation it is talking to.

Themes worth tracking

The deferred dream. Each major character carries one. The play's central Hughesian question is which dreams survive deferment.
Family vs. individual. Walter Lee's ambition is individual; the play argues that his ambition cannot be separated from his obligations to the family.
Gender and Black family life. Mama, Ruth, and Beneatha each occupy a different relation to gender expectations. The play takes their experiences seriously in ways American theatre had not previously.
The moral economics of money. What money is for, who decides, what it costs to acquire and what to refuse — the $10,000 is the play's catalyst.

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