76 pages • 2 hours read
Lorraine HansberryA Raisin in the Sun
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1959A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Symbols & Motifs
The Apartment and the House
At the beginning of the play, Hansberry describes the Younger family apartment as a place that “would be a comfortable and well-ordered room if it were not for a number of indestructible contradictions to this state of being” (3). The worn-out furniture has “clearly had to accommodate the living of too many people for too many years” (3), although it was once “actually selected with care and love and even hope—and brought to this apartment and arranged with taste and pride. […] Weariness has, in fact, won in this room” (3). Additionally, “the sole natural light the family may enjoy in the course of the day is only that which fights its way” (3) through a tiny window in the kitchen. The apartment has far outlived its original purpose, which was as a transitionary home for the newly-married Mama and Walter Sr., who planned to buy their own home within a year. Now, the place serves as cramped housing for the family but falls short of being a home.
The family shares a bathroom with the family next door, denying them agency over their own bodily functions as they must negotiate and apportion out the times when they can use the toilet or bathe. After Mama buys the house in Clybourne Park, Ruth dreams of the luxury of a private bathroom, telling Beneatha, “Honey—I’m going to run me a tub of water up to here… And I’m going to get in it—and I’m going to sit…and sit…and sit in that hot water” (96). The inconveniences of the apartment particularly affect Travis, as he loses sleep not only because his father entertains friends in his “bedroom”—the living room—well into the night, but also because he must wake up especially early to use the bathroom. Travis’s space in the apartment is temporary. His bed is a pullout sofa that must be returned to its usual function each morning. As the next generation of the Younger family, his adaptation to transience at a young age is shaping him for a future of continued impermanence.
The house represents many things for the family, in terms of convenience and materiality. Travis will have his own room. Mama will have a place to garden. There will be space for Ruth and Walter’s new baby. The house itself represents land ownership, which legitimizes the family as American citizens with a physical stake in the country. It also represents the changing winds of the civil rights movement. Working-class Black families have been backed into a corner with regards to their homes. The gentrification of poor, primarily Black neighborhoods has made it impossible for Black families to purchase houses in those areas, as Mama explains. For most families, renting is the only option. Moving into a white neighborhood is an act of integration. Even without the intent of revolution, the Youngers are entering and staking their claim in white-dominated space. Although Clybourne Park seems to be made up of middle-of-the-road racists, who proclaim their tolerance while expressing their preference for segregation, the Youngers undoubtedly face upcoming hardships as pioneers in previously-segregated space.
Mama’s Plant
Throughout the play, Mama carefully tends a perpetually-dying potted plant. Beneatha asks if she’s going to take “that raggedy-looking old thing” (108) to the new house, and Mama responds, “It expresses me” (108). The plant represents Mama’s spirit, beaten and suppressed yet stubbornly persistent. While a pot is sufficient to keep a plant alive, it prevents full growth. A potted plant is portable and can be moved from temporary space to temporary space, but at the expense of its freedom to thrive.
Like the plant, Mama has been trapped in the apartment. It is a temporary home that is not hers, and is interchangeable with other temporary homes. Mama can survive there, as can her seedlings, but they cannot take root and thrive. Mama faithfully cares for her little plant, explaining to Ruth, “I always wanted a garden like I used to see sometimes at the back of the houses down home. This plant is as close as I ever got to having one” (38). At the beginning of the play, Mama exclaims, “Lord, if this little old plant don’t get more sun than it’s been getting, it ain’t never going to see spring again” (22). This illustrates that the family, as well as the plant, urgently needs a permanent home.
Mama’s desire to garden represents several things. First, gardening is a leisure activity. The ability to grow flowers is a luxury denied to members of the working class who lack the time, money, and land. When the family presents Mama with the gift of gardening tools and a hat, the hat Travis has chosen is comically ornate. Beneatha laughingly compares it to something that Scarlett O’Hara might wear, placing Mama on the same social level as the premiere symbol of white southern womanhood and largesse in American pop culture. Although Mama has told Ruth, “Something always told me I wasn’t no rich white woman” (27), the garden is something that she can now have that is on par with what rich white women have. Plants are a manifestation of life. They are either fed or killed by their conditions, but some plants, like Mama’s little potted plant, persevere regardless. A garden represents land ownership, which was historically a marker of American citizenship and a requirement for early voting rights. Possessing land legitimizes the Younger family as citizens who own a literal piece of the nation. The garden is a place to plant roots that will grow and flourish, building a Younger family legacy.
Music
A Raisin in the Sun is infused with music. At the beginning of the play, Beneatha is learning to play the guitar because she is seeking a way to express herself. After a fight with Beneatha, Mama asks Ruth to sing a gospel song in order to lift her spirits. While the Youngers clean the apartment in Act I, a radio disc jockey “is inappropriately filling the house with a rather exotic saxophone blues” (39). The despondent Walter, angry at the loss of his liquor store dream, frequents a bar called the Green Hat, a place where “you can just sit there and drink and listen to them three men play and you realize that nothing don’t matter worth a damn, but just being there” (93). Music is a mode of culture and expression; the blues is deeply rooted in African-American history, originating on Southern plantations as a mode of expression, entertainment, and coping mechanism.
Asagai gives Beneatha records as a way for her to connect to Nigerian culture. When she plays them, both Beneatha and Walter respond viscerally and corporeally through dance. Although she does not know as much as she would like about Nigerian art and culture, Beneatha expresses an instinctual understanding of how the music functions as if her body is reaching toward her ancestral roots. Before she plays the records, Beneatha turns off the radio, which is playing “good loud blues” (67) and announces, “Enough of this assimilationist junk!” (67). Although Black musicians created the blues, Beneatha uses Nigerian music to draw a line between a form that evolved through hundreds of years of oppression and separation from African cultures and a form that she deems authentically African. This distinction highlights the gulf between the two cultural and national pathways, although Beneatha skirts the issue that colonialism in Nigeria has undoubtedly hybridized what she is considering authentically African.
