Theme Of Beneatha In A Raisin In The Sun

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Despite Sophie being of a different generation and of a different cultural background, Beneath Younger in Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun shares Sophie’s struggle of establishing her true sense of self. Also similarly to Sophie, Beneatha’s struggle to find her identity is rooted in the concept of assimilation, where for Beneatha, her struggle is exemplified in her troubled fixation with proving that she is not assimilating into the predominant white culture of America. In particular, Beneatha, provoked and very much influenced by her admirer Asagai, overcompensates and tries to embed her identity into her conceived identity as a woman with deep African roots. This perfectly exemplifies Beneatha’s identity crisis: instead of forming …show more content…

In “A Raisin in the Sun”, Beneatha’s search for her identity is used as the play’s vehicle to explore one of the play’s themes of the challenges of finding one’s identity and culture, while trying to overcome the pressures to assimilate into the dominant culture of the society you are living in.
We are first introduced to Beneatha 's personal struggle of overcoming assimilation and her battle to find her identity, when Asagai presents the argument of whether or not Beneatha is assimilating to white culture. The discussion begins on the topic of Beneatha’s hair, when Asagai refers to Beneatha 's hair as "mutilated hair (1.2.61)." Beneatha suddenly responds with, "My hair-what 's wrong with my hair?" Already, we can see that Beneatha is not secure in the way that she wears her hair. Asagai leads Beneatha further into a discussion of Beneatha natural hair, asking her what her natural hair looks and feels like. Beneatha self consciously responds that her hair is "crinkly", "hard to manage when it 's, well -raw (1,2,62)," and that of course her present hair is not the one she was born with. Asagai further provokes her, asking …show more content…

Historically, black woman have been characterized as "other", where a black women 's hair has been seen as unappealing, and directly contradicts the dominant American hair beauty standard that glorifies white women 's hair as most beautiful. With regards to this, I point to Patricia Hill Collins 's ' Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. Collins states in regards to Black women 's

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