University of Cape Town – ELL1013F
‘A Raisin in the Sun’ Essay
‘Satis House in Chicago’s Southside’:
The reconnecting timelines of the Younger family
“Time isn’t holding us, time isn’t after us
Time isn’t holding us, time doesn’t hold you back
Letting the days go by, letting the days go by…
Same as it ever was, same as it ever was, same as it ever was…” – Lyrics to ‘Once in a Lifetime’ by Talking Heads
“It’s been a long, a long time coming
But I know a change is gonna come, oh yes it will”
– Lyrics to ‘A Change is Gonna Come’ by Sam Cooke
By now it’s most likely an abhorrent cliché to reassert the Younger family of Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun as victims of their deferred dreams. It may not be a false assertion of course, but it does rashly ignore the nuances of the family’s true temporal concerns as well as their seemingly irreconcilable intergenerational disjunctions. In other words, as Freud might have put it, what does each of the Youngers really want and when do they want it? (And, as a logical corollary, why haven’t they got it yet?) To answer by making a necessarily generalized thesis, the three ‘generations’ of the play and household- Mama, Ruth & Walter and Beneatha & Travis- possess dreams immanently embedded in the Past, Present and Future tenses respectively. This essay will successively unpack each of these characteristic temporal temperaments against the backdrop of their one connecting factor: the unavoidably “tired” condition (23) of the apartment itself. The socio-political function of the play’s setting can be seen as an example of – to indulge in a cultural-theory namedrop- one of the German critic Walter Benjamin’s ‘ruins’ through which the history of modern life can be clearly viewed for what it is (Benjamin, 1999). In its ‘petrified’ state of weariness, the Younger apartment is shown to be a tragic by-product of post-war America, evidencing the literal ‘weight’ that racial oppression incurs in the real of domestic existence. Ironically, Hansberry’s “realistic” portrayal of the Youngers shows anything but a melancholic intention, meaning to “stat[e] not only what is, but what can and should be.” [Playwright quoted in (Bigsby, 1992: 270)]. It is this utopian leaning to a self-created future, burdened by the weight of the past’s oppression, and firmly placed in the present-tense of a particular family’s paradigm that defines A Raisin in the Sun’s continuing insightful relevance.
When ‘Mama’ Younger unequivocally berates her son for forgetting that “[o]nce upon a time freedom used to be life” (74), she refers to the ‘promised land’ mentality so valued by her generation. Along with being the de facto slogan of the Great Migration, demonstrating the inherent hope of millions of newly-urban Black Americans, it coloured the distant time when Mama and Walter Sr. first moved into the Southside apartment “[in which they weren’t] planning on living…no more than a year”. But by the deliberately indeterminate post-war year of the play’s action, as Ruth attests, “[the family had] put enough rent into this here rat trap to pay for four houses by now. ” (44) So why then has the apartment “clearly had to accommodate the living of too many people for too many years” (23) if money could have been saved to facilitate an earlier move? The obvious answers of the pressures of the working-class economy and the Youngers’ increased dependence on their one piece of certain property are valid but don’t quite fully explicate their ‘weary’ condition. Instead, a psychological diagnosis might. It’s not that Mama is or her late husband ever was effectively ‘living in the past’, but that the frame of reference for their historical idealism changed without them noticing so. When Walter Sr. is remembered as stating that “[God]… gave [the ‘coloured folk’] children to make [their] dreams seem worth while” (46) he’s implying, in effect, that it’s his children’s- and not his- great obligation to overcome the oppression and inequality enforced on his generation. This leads to a state of socio-economic stasis. Mama inadvertently typifies this attitude when she identifies black Americans as “just plain working folks” in objection to Walter Lee’s financial ambitions. Ruth replies, with cutting insight, “[but] colored people ain’t ever going to start getting ahead till they start gambling on some different kinds of things in the world…” (42). There is an implied fatalism and restraint in Mama and her generation, the absence of which in her children she just “can’t seem to understand in no form or fashion.” (52) This becomes most clear- almost explosively so- when her closest Christian values are glibly challenged, as when Beneatha professes her independent atheism, prompting Mama to slap her into sense and reaffirm that “in [her] mother’s house there is still God.” (51) Likewise, any transformative new idealisms are simply not accepted in Mama Younger’s household, and so change is seemingly impossible. But Mama redeems her history by single- handedly proving that it is. Her revolutionary act is one of self-eviction: following on from her husband’s dreams, she uses his life-insurance to gain for her family a revitalized, if uncertain, new life in the suburbs. Her reasoning is that “[w]e was going backwards ‘stead of forwards…[so I just had] to do something different, push on out and do something better…” (94)
It is more telling, however, that Walter Lee is ultimately the one who climactically ensures the move. His ‘transformative new idealism’ is quite simple: he openly embraces the rags-to-riches logic of urban capitalism. As such, he already has the everyday temperament of a cutting-edge predatory businessman- what Beneatha diagnoses as the “quiet desperation” (96) of an “elaborate neurotic.” (49) Which is to say -like, most obviously, Willie Loman in Death of a Salesman- he is an extremely anxious man; “lean, intense”, his words always spoken with “a quality of indictment.” (25) Walter self-consciously lives in the present and thus he seemingly doesn’t remember much besides his paradigm: “I listen to you every day, every night and every morning, and you never say nothing new” Ruth complains. (34) What he does say is that he “can see the future stretched out in front of [him]…- a big looming blank space- full of nothing.” (73) For Walter this is not just a kind of mid-life crisis; it’s a living nightmare only he can help his family escape from (To Ruth: “You tired ain’t you? Tired of everything. Me, the boy, the way we live- this beat-up hole- everything” (32) and to Travis: “Just tell me, what it is you want to be- and you’ll be it…” (109)) The only model he has for the ‘real life’ his family deserves is that of the businessmen he chauffeurs, hence, to Walter, “life is money” (74) and always has been, because the platitudes of his mother’s generation have done nothing to ensure his autonomy as a patriarch. To his discredit, this concern for his family too often neglects Ruth’s role as his supporter and foil, as if his domesticated working-class predicament was more tragic for his complaints being louder than hers or anyone else’s. “What else can I give you, Walter Lee Younger?” (88) she asks in near despair when he shrugs off her consolations. Her own similar ‘present-tense’ concerns and the apartment’s oppressive presence in fact only become clear when Ruth reacts to the prospect of moving: “I say it loud and good, HALLELUJAH! AND GOODBYE MISERY…” (93-4) Walter’s true greed then is his capacity to nearly throw away both his wife’s joy and his child(ren)’s security to the needless gamble of his liquor-store investment. Only by then decisively turning to the uncertain future of life in the suburbs does he redeem himself of the existential ‘in-the-moment’ egotism that nearly loses his family everything.
This is actually the long-hoped-for future of the younger Youngers. To match the other two, this generation’s ‘future-tense’ definition of ‘life’ for Beneatha (included for her relatively immature standpoint), Travis and Ruth’s unborn child would most probably be ‘choice’. More than freedom or money, choice is their necessary liberator as it allows them to change not only their defining prospects but also to conceptualize their histories and predicaments in ways neither Mama nor Walter Lee can imagine. At its surface-level, choice is manifested in the play through Beneatha’s lightly- handled experiments with ‘self-expression’. Whilst maintaining a respectable course in medical training, she “flit[s]” on whims “from one [absorbing interest] to another” (47) whilst indulging in a standard scholarly political awakening through Joseph Asagai and the open potential for financial security through George Murchison. Walter’s not far off when he labels his sister as “the first person in the history of the entire human race to successfully brainwash [her]self.” (113) The pertinent part of the joke is precisely that Beneatha does have the freedom to choose her form of ‘brainwashing’. As such she’s the only Younger to correctly diagnose the family’s condition as “acute ghetto-itis.” (60) Her problem is that for all her autonomy, she has no actual plan- besides that of her obligatory career- and no understanding of where the future could lead her. Thus she is just as helpless as both Travis- condemned to sleep in whichever room’s available- and Ruth and Walter’s conceived child, whose life depends on whether the family has the space and money to support it. In their climactic argument scene, Asagai therefore acts as Beneatha’s conscience of foresight. Tearing apart her allegory of a meaningless circular existence, he posits possibly the only hopeful conception of both history and the future- that it is “simply a long line” about which we “cannot see how it changes.” (134) When Walter’s gamble seems to ruin her security, Beneatha’s temporal misconceptions become clear in her cry that “people went out and took the future right out of my hands.” (134) The future was never in her hands to begin with. By endorsing Asagai’s offer of ‘escaping to Africa’ she takes the first step to a mature sense of responsibility for her life decisions.
With Beneatha’s assent, the agreement of all three generations in the play’s climax becomes clear- they each make a decisive turn from their previous temporalities to the promise of the future, in all its radical uncertainty. In dramaturgical terms, their relationship with the old apartment and their desperate condition is such that a parallel is created “between the setting and those who inhabit it which makes the later decision to move house equally a decision to remake those who inhabit it.” (Bigsby, 1992: 271) It doesn’t come easy, but as each Younger readdresses their former structural notions of the past, present and future, they each come to the same conclusion: “we got to MOVE! We got to get OUT OF HERE!! (140)
Word Count: 1639
Reference List:
Benjamin, W. 1999. Theses on the Philosophy of History. In Illuminations. London: Pimlico Press. 245-255.
Bigsby, C.W.E. 1992. Modern American Drama: 1945-1990. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hansberry, L. 1994. A Raisin in the Sun. New York: Vintage Books.
Categories: Essays/Prose