In A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry and “Phenomenal Woman” by Maya Angelou, both Hansberry and Angelou use gender to show two different perspectives women brought forth in the 1920s through the 1950s. Hansberry displays in Ruth, a woman of good faith and loyalty to her family, and Beneatha represents Maya Angelou’s phenomenal woman, a woman of poise, class, and dreams. Hansberry and Angelou use characterization, dialogue, archetype, and juxtaposition to compare and contrast a woman’s changing role in society.
There are several generations of women that reside in the Younger apartment. Hansberry uses characterization to demonstrate each generation’s different perspective of themselves as a woman. Mama is a faithful wife, who believes a woman should always listen to her husband because he is the provider for the family and the head of the household. Ruth is also characterized as a woman of good faith. She is vocal enough to tell Mama to follow her dreams, but she does not have enough self-assurance to tell herself to do the same. Beneatha is the complete antithesis of the two older Younger women. Bennie is feisty, Afrocentric, and self-righteous. “Beneatha has embraced some of the frivolous values and activities frequently associated with those American college students who are immature and pampered” (Turner). She has evolved from a woman of good faith into a woman without morals and responds to male instruction as if they were all imbeciles. While Bennie is parading around in her natural attire, George Murchison superciliously says, “Oh, don’t be so proud of yourself, Bennie—just because you look eccentric. Get dressed.”(Hansberry 984). Immediately, Bennie thrashes through Murchison with words, challenging his response to...
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Ever since her rise to fame, Lorraine Hansberry has opened the eyes of many and showed that there is a problem among the American people. Through her own life experiences in the twentieth-century, she has written what she knows and brought forth the issue that there is racial segregation, and it will not be ignored. Her most popular work, A Raisin in the Sun, not only brought African Americans to the theater, but has given many of them hope (Mays 1461). Within this work, we find a “truthful depiction of the sorts of lives lived by many ordinary African Americans in the late 1950s” (Mays 1462). Though there is realism within her work, the idealism is never far away at all. Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun allows one to see that progress is made through an idealistic view of the world and that hope is the root of many changes people search for in life.
According to “The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language”, the word “feminity” is defined as “the quality or condition of being feminine or a characteristic or trait traditionally held to be female.” Further speaking, feminity is formed by various socially-defined and biologically-created gender roles played by women influenced by a number of social and cultural factors. For example, the traditional gender roles of women include nurturer, birth giver, homemaker and caregiver. However, marked by a series of women's rights movements starting from the 19th century, women’s gender roles, as well as the ways how society and men perceive women, have been largely changed. This significant change, described as a process of female awakening, was widely reflected in many contemporary literature works. This essay will specifically focus on the construction of feminity in two short stories, “Hills Like White Elephants” by Ernest Hemingway and “The Stoy of an Hour” by Kate Chopin through examining how the authors define “feminity” in their treatment of female characters.
Hansberry, Lorraine. "A Raisin In The Sun." Comp. Henry Louis. Gates and Nellie Y. McKay. The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. New York: W.W. Norton &, 2004. 1771-830. Print.
In comparing the two novels A Raisin in the Sun and How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents had various similarities like gender role, family conflict, racism and economic hardships. Therefore, first in exploring components of each character with their dreams and reality the first issue observed is gender roles. Beneatha, the youngest of the generation in A Raisin in the Sun attends college, with hopes of becoming a doctor it destroys the gender role of housework and motherhood is the only ambition for women evidence of this is with a conversation with Ruth. She informs her to “Listen I’m going to be a doctor I’m not worried about who I’m going to get marry to yet – if I ever get married” (Hansberry, 2011 p.50). Another gender role analyzed in this story is Ruth, who only wanted to fix her relationship with her companion. Walter exhibits a display of sex role stating why their relationship is not working “That is what wrong with the colored woman in this world Don’t understand about building a man up and making them feel as if they are
Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun is a modern tragedy in which the protagonist, Walter Lee Younger, is unable to find the fulfilling life he wants so badly. A contrasting view of the quest for that fulfilling life is offered in the character of Beneatha (whose name seems a play on her socioeconomic status, i.e. she-who-is-beneath), who serves as a foil against which the character of Walter is defined. Both Walter and Beneatha, representing the new generation of blacks coming of age after World War Two, are in conflict with Mama, who represents the previous generation and its traditions. The character of George Murchison is also opposed to both Beneatha and Walter, since he symbolizes assimilation on the white man's terms. Walter and Beneatha are also in conflict with their environment, a society where they are marginalized and subject to daily humiliation because of what is called their race (not, in fact, a biological distinction but a cultural construct).
In the 1950’s through the 1960’s women were not respected in there everyday lives, in the job field or in general. They did not have the rights they deserved, so during this time the “women’s movement” began. Women fought for their rights and fought for the self-respect that they thought they deserved. In the play A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry, the character Mama, expresses her feelings of pushing or extracting a new side for a woman. Her role explains that woman can be independent and can live for themselves. Through her behavior in this play she demonstrates that women can support and guide a family. Mama is in charge of the family, which is unusual, since men are traditionally the “head of a family”. Through Mama’s wisdom and dialect she expresses and portrays an image of pro-feminism. Mama’s experience in the play A Raisin in the Sun illustrates the expressions, the emotions, and the feeling with which Mama and women had to cope. She was able to characterize this through her passionate dreams, her control and her strong willed attitude.
Ernest Hemingway’s 1927 short story “Hills Like White Elements” explores the way a couple discuss an ‘operation’ (42) which the woman is to receive, which is implied to be abortion without actually mentioning the word itself. It is set at a table at a train station somewhere between Barcelona and Madrid in Spain. The couple consists of an American male and a ‘girl’ (5), whose name is later revealed to be Jig (42), which might imply that perhaps she is younger, but not a local of Spain since she asks the American to translate for her in the first few lines of their conversation (15). Jig resists the idea of aborting the child throughout the course of the story and the American tries to convince her by
Traditional gender roles exist in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, but traditional distribution of power between the genders does not. In analyzing each character and their life, it’s easy to see how Marquez presented each in terms of his own view on gender constructs. Marquez portrays femininity and masculinity very differently. But why would Marquez choose to make such a clear distinction between the roles of each gender? Marquez sees women as spiritual and overpowered by traditional standards, and men doomed by their own obsessions. Men are wily and therefore vulnerable, whereas women are dignified and durable, and survive for much longer.
“Girl” written by Jamaica Kincaid is essentially a set of instructions given by an adult, who is assumed to be the mother of the girl, who is laying out the rules of womanhood, in Caribbean society, as expected by the daughter’s gender. These instructions set out by the mother are related to topics including household chores, manners, cooking, social conduct, and relationships. The reader may see these instructions as demanding, but these are a mother’s attempt, out of care for the daughter, to help the daughter to grow up properly. The daughter does not appear to have yet reached adolescence, however, her mother believes that her current behavior will lead her to a life of promiscuity. The mother postulates that her daughter can be saved from a life of promiscuity and ruin by having domestic knowledge that would, in turn also, empower her as a productive member in their community and the head of her future household. This is because the mother assumes that a woman’s reputation and respectability predisposes the quality of a woman’s life in the community.
The play, A Raisin in the Sun, has a very strong view of feminism in the 1960’s. The way that the females are portrayed and talked to in this play is not only an example of how the relationship between a man and a woman in society is unequal, but reflects a particular patriarchal ideology. Throughout this play, as the characters strive to achieve their dreams, the relationships that we see can be seen as feminist and as sexual stereotypes.
Hansberry, Lorraine. A Raisin in the Sun. The Norton Introduction to Literature. 10th ed. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2011. 950-1023. Print.
Throughout American Literature, women have been depicted in many different ways. The portrayal of women in American Literature is often influenced by an author's personal experience or a frequent societal stereotype of women and their position. Often times, male authors interpret society’s views of women in a completely different nature than a female author would. While F. Scott Fitzgerald may represent his main female character as a victim in the 1920’s, Zora Neale Hurston portrays hers as a strong, free-spirited, and independent woman only a decade later in the 1930’s.
...present powerful characters, while females represent unimportant characters. Unaware of the influence of society’s perception of the importance of sexes, literature and culture go unchanged. Although fairytales such as Sleeping Beauty produce charming entertainment for children, their remains a didactic message that lays hidden beneath the surface; teaching future generations to be submissive to the inequalities of their gender. Feminist critic the works of former literature, highlighting sexual discriminations, and broadcasting their own versions of former works, that paints a composite image of women’s oppression (Feminist Theory and Criticism). Women of the twenty-first century serge forward investigating, and highlighting the inequalities of their race in effort to organize a better social life for women of the future (Feminist Theory and Criticism).
Society has redefined the role of woman by their works thru poetry that has changed their life
Feminism has made a major change in not just women’s lives but in the world. Throughout the world, women have always been considered “second class citizens” yet as the years have passed, proven facts show that women are capable of working just as good as men and even do more duties at the same time. In the early centuries most women weren’t able to get any type of credit without a male cosigner and in certain countries their husbands had complete control not only for their property but for their earnings as well. Men created a false public sentiment by giving to the world a different code of morals for men and women, by which delinquencies which exclude women from society, are not only tolerated, but deemed of little account in man. Women