Social Norms In Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin In The Sun

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Many of the obstacles seen in the 1940s or 1950s are still heavily present in the society of today, specifically in race and gender. The play A Raisin in the Sun challenges both the social norms and the expectations of women and people of color, by showing far ahead of their time characters embodying empowerment by taking extreme risks, such as studying to become a black female doctor, or moving into a predominantly white neighborhood. Drawing on her own experience, the author Lorraine Hansberry creates scenes that are both realistic, but also grave, up until the ending. Throughout Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, the seemingly wholesome resolution relies solely on unrealistic faith in humanity, specifically shown through Asagai’s stress on …show more content…

After the entirety of the play relying on the notion of Beneatha’s character as progressive and independent, the ending leaves her with her only option as a wife, following Asagai’s speech on how life is filled with opportunities. After Asagai takes back his former comment about Beneatha being an assimilationist and other heavily misogynistic comments, he asks he to come to Africa with him and marry him. Then he tells her,“All right, I shall leave you...Never be afraid to sit awhile and think. How often I have looked at you and said, ‘Ah- so this is what the New World hath finally wrought’” (Hansberry 137). Not only does he ask her to leave her own family just to go on his own whim, but he asks her to abandon all the opportunity she has in this “New World.” While he’s not directly asking her to give up her dream as a doctor, the idea that this powerful, progressive characters even considers marrying Asagai, it shows the lack of genuinity to the final act of the play. With Beneatha’s decision to his proposal being a maybe, it shows the unrealisticness of the ending, considering she repeatedly states that she never wishes to marry, making this “maybe” extremely out of …show more content…

This, added onto the sudden revolutions of fundamental characters in a way that was so ill-fitted and malapropos, gives a heaving note of falsification to the finale of A Raisin in the Sun. The ending ending in this way results in a sort of two steps forward, one step back. With everything shown in the beginning two acts being so liberating and dynamic, the ending directly negates all this, with the women being married off and the men ingenuine. Even with the note of uncertainty on whether or not the Youngers will be safe in their new community, it still defies all the principles illustrated throughout the play and this uncertainty only gives the family two options: an extremely negative outcome with amplified prejudice, or a false hope used as a safety blanket. As the French saying “mise en place” goes, all is set up in the end, but only for failure or

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