Plot Analysis

In her ground-breaking suffer A Raisin in the Sun, Lorrown(prenominal)e Hansberry challenged widespread cultural conceptions astir(predicate) African the Statesns.By focusing her wanton away on exacting realism, Hansberry was able to create a fit which, in both theme and technical execution, offered something radically antithetical than the portrayal of American life typically seen on Broadway stages in the mid twentieth century.The impact of the swindle, both visually and textually, on American listenings was visceral and controversial. Hansberry relied on depicting vastly disparate delirious states and conditions for her characters, as well as enticing her audience to hold up the world of her characters with as much empathy as possible.The plays opening, for example, establishes that the jr. family is waiting for a ten-thousand dollar insurance distinguish to arrive after the death of the familys father.The fact that the family is so steeped in meagerness that all(pren ominal) of them concocts elaborate schemes and ideas of how to drop the currency before it even arrives, grips the ref or alert audience member with emotion and concern. The trespass of the expected funds also begins the tension in the play and drives the conflicts surrounded by the plays characters., most notably amidst Mama and Walter Lee.In say to engage the audience, and to cause them to locate with the Youngers, Hansberry uses the device of realism, which includes the expression of a one-room apartment circumscribe, sail by dint of with all the trappings of poverty cramped quarters, raddled furniture and carpets, and a conspicuous lack of privacy.Before the audience has even begun to grasp the events of the play, they are immediately cognizant of the familys dire financial situation.The shock of the set at a purely visual and spatial take communicates the Youngers distress to the audience. Teh ensuing emotional tension between Mama and her son is meant to show th at the external attri exactlyes of poverty get under ones skin corresponding emotional and psychological impacts and have extended to the relationships between the characters.By the end of the opening scene, the reader or audience member knows that great fancy and expectation has been pinned by the family on the insurance money and m both readers or spectators of the play would probably compass that the familys emotional crisis goes far beyond anything which can be repaired with money.The idea is to advance the plot in a real valet de chambrener so that the audience or reader not but experiences the events of the play but feels the emotional resonance which is intended to be a part of the event which are portrayed. In order to accomplish this, every aspect of the play, not only the plot, are steeped in realism.One element of dramatic proficiency that enables Hansberry to successfully create a dynamic and realistic drama is her use of vernacular in the plays converse.Unlike th e blank-verse constructions of Shakespeare, or the witticism of Oscar Wilde, or even the dreamy musings of Tennessee Williams, Hansberry delivers the negotiation of A Raisin in the Sun in conversational language and this aspect of them play enhances the plays verisimilitude.The realism of the play then causes the audience to more closely hear with the plays characters and plot, and each of these aspects of the play helps to communicate the important sociological and racial themes that drive A Raisin in the Sun.This caution to realism and detail is important to the plays plot, also, because as the vents of the play unfold, the reader is drawn more deeply into an emotional connection with the characters because the characters seem for all intents and purposes to be veritable people who cheek actual, real-life struggles.As the plot progresses, the insurance mark out actually arrives and in their haste to be a controlling interest in the spending of the money, each of the Youngers manages to ignore the others emotional needs in inquisition of personal materialistic dreams.When Mama decides to use the money to move the family to a snow-covered neighborhood, a moreover adept of doom pervades th action as the Youngers fall further into emotional discord.Throughout the progression of the plot, the plays dialogue leaves an opening for the emotional outpouring which is markedly indifferent from the (seemingly banal) progression of events.Hansberrys dialogue, in fact, becomes a key driveway force of the plays ultimate revelatory impact on the audience. As the play progresses and the characters become more intelligibly defined with motivations that the audience can identify with (or despise) the mother tongue of the play begins to attain a lyrical singularity a vocal music which was unlike any other play on the Broadway stage of the time.Lines such as Seem like God didnt see fit to give the black man nothing but dreams. (29) or There is ceaselessly somet hing left to love. And if you aint learned that, you aint learned nothing.(135) attain the berth of aphorism in the context of the play and erupt important social and racial realities that, for most Americans in the mid-twentieth century, existed, if at all, as merely si-debar untestedspaper articles or in some other abstract realization.Hansberrys play, through its fierce and relentless realism, coupled with its themes of yearning and aspiration seemed to marry the American ideal to the American incubus in a verbally original and thematically cathartic fashion, elevating the dialogue of racial issues in America to a place of cultural acceptance.Simultaneously, the plays plot moves in an arc of excited expectation to dissolution of dreams patch expressing the internal progressions of the characters with a portrayal of external events.When Mrs. Johnson tells the Youngers slightly a black family that was bombed because they moved into a white neighborhood, the audience feels th e dream of Mamas to live in a better neighborhood deflating.The audience realizes that money, alone, despite the naivety with which the Youngers regard its power, leave behind do little, perhaps nothing, to transfigure the misery of their lives.The Youngers have regarded money and the future confide of what it may bring with a sort of exotic hopefulness which, in its perceived futility during the vents of the play, should cause emotional foiling and variance in the reader and in the the audience.This dissonance reflects the same dissonance which exists between the Youngers dreams and their actual repose in the world.By combining a realistic set with realistic dialogue, a kind of exoticism was reached by Hansberry, through the depiction of extreme poverty and want, which is a powerful force in granting the play consent of theme, place, and time in keeping with Aristotles theories of dramatic construction in his Poetics.This latter attribute helps ground the play in the tradit ional dramatic structure which off-sets the aforesaid(prenominal) exoticism of the plays set and characters.Despite the reluctance for most Americans in the late 50s and early 60s to face the racially establish challenges of that era, A Raisin in the Sun demonstrated, through fanciful expression, the urgency of the plight of African Americans in a racist society.The plays climax, when it is decided that despite the conflicts and hardships that the money has caused that Mamas formulate to move to a new neighborhood will go through, exerts a sense of hopefulness in the face of manifested obstacles (and potential violence) which seems to suggest that optimism, ambition, and togetherness can weather storms and pass off fulfillment despite the truth of prejudice and poverty.However, a close reading of the play is just as likely to reveal in the reader, a sense that the Youngers are simply caught in a fierce one shot of hope and despair and that with each new breath of hope a corre sponding suppress of bad luck or ill-fortune will be experienced. It is not fitting to say that the play, therefore, has a halcyon ending, but simply an ending which reflects an unending cycle of hope against an equally unending series of obstacles.Work CitedHansberry, Lorraine. A Raisin in the Sun. Random House, New York. 1959