Travis is Ruth and Walter’s son. The only child existing in the play. Travis is secluded and over protected by the adults he lives with.
Beneatha Younger is Walter’s younger sister and Mama’s daughter. Beneatha’s main ambition is to become a doctor. A strong willed woman in the drama. Ruth also takes a lot of pride in being an intellectual.
Mama is the mother of Walter and Beneatha and Ruth’s mother-in-law. Mama is a very strong and religious woman in the play. Mama wants her daughter Beneatha to become a doctor. Mama also supports Ruth in many ways as a mother- in- law.
Joseph Asagai is an African student who is very much proud of his cultural background and also admits his love to Beneatha. Joseph also provides Beneatha African robes and records and supports her aspirations into becoming a doctor.
George Murchison is the rich boyfriend of Beneatha. George is disrespectful of other black people. George is very arrogant in his behaviour with Beneatha. Beneatha who prefers Joseph to George.
As a common theme of her play, Hansberry portrays dreams in a great variety of ways. It is interesting to note from the play as a whole that virtually all the characters have dreams. Some are ambitious whilst others are modest; they are a source of frustration as well as of happiness; they are a reflection of an individual’s character and personality traits and as Walter Lee demonstrates, they are dynamic and subject to change according to the prevailing circumstances.
Walter Lee is the central character of the play. Hansberry portrays him as an intense, very bitter and deeply frustrated man suffering the early start of a mid-life crisis. In Act 1 Scene 1 (pg.18), he says: “ I ‘m thirty-five years old; I been married eleven years and I got a boy who sleeps in the living room and all I got to give him is stories about how rich white people live.” Then again in Act 1 Scene 2, he sees into the future at edge of his days, as a big, looming blank space...full of nothing.” Walter’s dream is to achieve a breakthrough in business that would give his family a better life and establish him as a man who is the main breadwinner and head of his household. His immediate hope of a business venture is to invest in a liquor store the full $10,000 insurance money his mother is about to receive as a result of Big Walter’s (her husband’s) death. His dream to lay hands on that money rapidly becomes an overwhelming obsession. When neither his mother Lena nor his wife Ruth approve of such a venture, Hansberry illustrates the depth of total frustration to which a man can sink as his dream becomes more and more indefinable. He becomes abusive to his wife, implying she belongs to “a race of women with small minds” (pg. 19); he is dismissive of sister Beneatha’s dream to become a doctor, telling her “go be a nurse like other women…or just get married and be quiet;” and he yells at his mother when the much-awaited cheque finally arrives. Walter Lee resorts to drinking heavily when his mother refuses to support his investment in a liquor store; he shows bitter resentment towards George Murchison, whom he thinks was born with a silver spoon; he also loses interest in his regular job as a chauffeur. Indeed, he is so blinded by the obsession of having his mother’s money that he explodes with rage when Mama Lena reveals payment of a deposit on the family’s most essential need, namely: a larger house.
Hansberry illustrates the nature of dreams when Walter Lee is offered $3,500 to use as he pleases. Whilst this sum is lower than the $10,000 he was originally dreaming of, it is a cruel twist of irony that in Act 2 Scene 2. A highly thrilled Walter Lee begins to dream of life as a downtown executive who attends conferences, employs bungling secretaries, sends Travis to America’s best schools, drives a Chrysler and can afford to buy Ruth a Cadillac convertible. However, through his dreams, Hansberry is able to reveal the downfalls in Walter Lee’s character: compared to his wife and mother, he is a man of very poor judgement and was extremely gullible to allow himself to be duped by his supposedly loyal friend, Willy Harris.
Compared to her much older and more experienced mother, Beneatha’s dreams portray the natural idealism of youth. Despite the poverty of her family background, Hansberry portrays her as a positive thinker who dreams of becoming a doctor without knowing where her medical school fees will come from. Beneatha is all the more remarkable in her ambitions because it was very unusual in the 1950s for women to enter the medical profession and even less usual for someone from a poor Black family who lived in a ghetto of Chicago. More typically for the period of emerging Black liberation, Beneatha shows a high level of political awareness, keeps in close touch with her African heritage and even dreams of marrying Asagai and settling in Africa to practise as a doctor (Act 3, pg.113). Although she is just as idealistic as her brother (Walter Lee), Beneatha is not obsessed with money as a means to achieving her dreams. She is totally unimpressed by George Murchison’s acquired wealth, arrogance and lack of consciousness of his African heritage. She declares in Act 1, Scene 1 (pg.31), that she could never really be serious about George because he is so shallow and is heard shouting again in Act 3, towards the end of the play, that she would not marry George if he were Adam and she were Eve (pg.114).
In contrast to her children, Mama Lena is a realist who has cherished a single lifetime dream, which she shared with her late husband, Big Walter Younger. Hansberry portrays her as a God-fearing, law-abiding but poor mother with strong family values. Consequently, her dream is a modest but seemingly unattainable desire to acquire a comfortable house with a garden (which she describes in Act1, Scene 1- pg.28) and to fix it up for herself and her family. Hansberry’s use of symbolism is illustrated by the way Mama Lena keeps her dream alive in much the same manner as she nurtures her potted plant. In a second reference to her wish for garden (pg.35), Mama describes her plant as the closest she ever got to have one. She compares the strong will and spirit of her family with the survival of her plant, which ”ain’t never had enough sunshine or nothing” but continued to thrive against all odds. Again, it is interesting to note Hansberry’s portrayal of dreams and the human nature: when the prospect of acquiring a house actually becomes attainable, Mama Lena no longer opts for a property in Morgan Park but for a house in the more affluent and exclusive White neighbourhood of Clybourne Park. Like Walter Lee’s new vision of himself as a downtown executive, the playwright illustrates the insatiable nature of dreams. The moral of her play is that whatever their status in life or level of attainment, people will always have dreams.
Although Hansberry portrays dreams as the all-important hope on which people depend for motivation and survival, she also highlights the influence of principles in the quest to achieve those goals. It is a tribute to the Youngers’ self-pride, moral fibre and strength of character that Walter Lee is compelled to discard the idea of accepting a pay-off from Mr Lindner not to move into the White neighbourhood of Clybourne Park after he had lost the bulk of the insurance money to Willy Harris. After he announced he had called Mr Lindner to accept the payment, Mama Lena says to Walter: “Son, I come from five generations of people who was slaves and sharecroppers but ain’t nobody in my family never let nobody pay. ‘em no money that was a way of telling us we wasn’t fit to walk the earth. We ain’t never been that poor. We ain’t never been that dead inside”. (Act 3, pg.108). Beneatha dismisses him in similar terms, saying: “That is not a man. That is nothing but a toothless rate” and: “He is no brother of mine”. Eventually, Walter Lee is compelled to restore the family dignity by telling Mr Lindner what a proud family he came from, how they had earned the right to live in Clybourne Park and why they didn’t want his money..
By the end of Act 3, Hansberry leaves her audience with some answers to the questions created in the metaphors of Langston Hughes’ poem, from which her play derives its title: ’A Raisin in the Sun’. From her demonstration that people will always have dreams, it can be concluded that dreams can be deferred but they do not dry up like a raisin in the sun. As Walter Lee demonstrates, dreams can become a painful obsession to be annoying like a running sore and stinks like rotten meat when they go bad. Typical examples are when his dream takes control of Walter Lee’s life to an extent that he becomes abusive to his family and resorts to drink as the dream is deferred. Likewise, as Beneatha’s experience shows, dreams can be likened to a syrupy sweet: good to have but false and elusive if they are deferred. Through no fault of her own, Beneatha’s dream is sweet and noble but it rapidly becomes as false as an illusion when Walter Lee loses the money that would have helped her enter medical school. Although Mama Lena’s dream was never a painful obsession that festered like a running sore, smelled like rotten meat or delude like a syrupy sweet, she carried for such a long period of her life that it sagged like a heavy load until she finally bought the house in Clybourne Street. Whilst Walter Lee and Beneatha’s dreams explode with the loss of most of the much-needed family capital, Mama Lena’s dream remains as flexible as her symbolic plant, which she takes for planting in the garden of their new home. Mama is the only one of Hansberry’s characters to realise her dream.
For every one else, Hansberry’s reference to the sun may well be symbolic of the bright light and hope our dreams represent. The playwright creates the question: should we allow our dreams to dry up like raisins in the sun or should we remain strong and committed, nurturing our dreams like Mama’s plant until we achieve them?
