Homologous to plants, humans need certain environmental factors to thrive. When the environment surrounding a person is auxiliary to that person, humans have the ability to grow physically, similar to plants, but also socially and intellectually. This is comparable to the way a plant thrives in its native environment because of the harmony between the plant and its surroundings. However, if someone removes a plant from its native environment and places it in a foreign environment, the environment will suffer because the unfamiliar species is jarring to the harmony of the community. Similarly, an invasive species will dominate and suffocate an environment, leaving no room for native species to grow and thrive. A human environment bears resemblance to this because a poisonous, opposed environment leaves no space for a person to even grow into their own identity, let alone prosper in terms of social and intellectual growth. Observing the notion that an oppressive society does not have the capacity to foster a harmonious, flourishing populous, Lorraine Hansberry unmasks the effect of the oppression of racial, gender, and class groups on the lives of the members of a society in her play A Raisin in the Sun.
Sunlight plays a key role in the growth of both plants and the Youngers. The Youngers’ residence lacks sunlight, so Ruth is thrilled when Lena informs her that there is an abundance of it in the house that she has just bought (Hansberry 4). The sunlight, which symbolizes hope and growth, gives Ruth reassurance that she and her family will eventually move out of their current residence in a cramped apartment in Southside Chicago in the post-World War II era. The close quarters and the constricting racial views of the society in whic...
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A Raisin in the Sun is a play written by Lorraine Hansberry. The primary focus of the play is the American Dream. The American Dream is one’s conception of a better life. Each of the main characters in the play has their own idea of what they consider to be a better life. A Raisin in the Sun emphasizes the importance of dreams regardless of the various oppressive struggles of life.
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A Raisin in the Sun is written by a famous African- American play write, Lorraine Hansberry, in 1959. It was a first play written by a black woman and directed by a black man, Lloyd Richards, on Broadway in New York. The story of A Raisin in the Sun is based on Lorraine Hansberry’s own early life experiences, from which she and her whole family had to suffer, in Chicago. Hansberry’s father, Carol Hansberry, also fought a legal battle against a racial restrictive covenant that attempted to stop African- American families from moving in to white neighborhoods. He also made the history by moving his family to the white section of Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood in 1938. The struggle of Lorraine Hansberry’s family inspired her to write the play. The title of the play comes from Langston Hughes’s poem which compares a dream deferred too long to a raisin rotting in the sun. A Raisin in the Sun deals with the fact that family’s and individual’s dreams and inspirations for a better life are not confined to their race, but can be identified with by people with all back grounds.
A Raisin in the Sun is a play set in the south side of Chicago during the 1950s. During this time the civil rights movement was happening and racial tension was at a high. Many African
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Hansberry Lorraine. A Raisin in the Sun. [1959] Literature. 5th ed. Eds. James N. N. Pickering and Jeffery D. Hoeper. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice, O. 1700-57.
Racial discrimination is defined as the act of treating a person/group differently than another, solely based on their racial background. The play as its self-received racial discrimination, because its author made history, and because of what she did she was talking about it. An historical significance about A Raisin in the Sun, is that Lorraine Hansberry earned the New York Drama Critics Circle Award as the year’s best play. “A Raisin in the sun brought African Americans into the theater and onto the stage.” The word is that “the reason was that never before, in the entire history of the American theater, had so much truth been seen on stage.