A Raisin in the Sun

Beneatha is:

about twenty, as slim and intense as her brother. She is not as pretty as her sister-in-law, but her lean, almost intellectual face has a handsomeness all of its own. […] Her speech is a mixture of many things; it is different from the rest of the family’s insofar as education has permeated her sense of English—and perhaps the Midwest rather than the South has finally—at last—won out in her inflection; but not altogether, because over all of it is a soft slurring and transformed use of vowels which is the decided influence of the Southside (17).

Beneatha expresses the same frustration and desperation as her brother, but she has had the opportunity to go to college. Her education has taught her about the globally-oppressive social structures that Walter has only experienced viscerally. For Beneatha, continued education is a road toward social advancement. She first discovered her desire to become a doctor after a neighborhood child mangled his face in a sledding accident and the child returned from the hospital almost entirely healed. To Beneatha, who sees all that is broken in society and her own people, the ability to heal represents the power to fix what is dysfunctional. 

In school, Beneatha also discovers the gaps in her identity that result from the loss of ancestry and heritage that is a hallmark of the descendants of enslaved Africans brought to the United States. She is torn between two worlds, which are represented by two men. George Murchison is wealthy and very much assimilated into white American society. He is not interested in her discussions of what Henry David Thoreau referred to as “quiet desperation” (89), and wants her to reject her African heritage. Joseph Asagai is Nigerian and represents the identity Beneatha might have had if slavery in the United States had not fragmented her history. In the end, she rejects George and leans toward Asagai and Africa, but the play leaves her future ambiguous.  

The matriarch of the family, also known as Mama, Lena is:

a woman in her early sixties, full-bodied and strong. She is one of those women of a certain grace and beauty who wear it so unobstructively that it takes a while to notice. Her dark-brown face is surrounded by the total whiteness of her hair, and, being a woman who has adjusted to many things in her life and overcome many more, her face is full of strength. […] Her bearing is perhaps most like the noble bearing of the women of the Hereros of Southwest Africa—rather as if she imagines that as she walks she still bears a basket or a vessel upon her head. Her speech, on the other hand, is as careless as her carriage is precise—she is inclined to slur everything—but her voice is perhaps not so much quiet as simply soft (22).

Born around the turn of the 20th century, Mama likely had parents, grandparents, and older relatives who were sharecroppers or enslaved. Her definition of success in the United States differs from that of the next generation. For Mama’s generation, “Once upon a time, freedom used to be life” (61). Mama identifies with her little potted plant, which struggles to survive in its ever-impermanent home. She and her husband dreamed of a house where the family could lay down roots. She is determined to realize this dream for the sake of her grandchildren, validating the family’s place through land ownership and the establishment of a home base.

Walter Lee Jr’s wife Ruth “is about thirty. We can see that she was a pretty girl, even exceptionally so, but now it is apparent that life has been little that she expected, and disappointment has already begun to hang in her face. In a few years, before thirty-five even, she will be known among her people as a ‘settled woman’” (4). 

She feeds and cares for her husband and son as a housewife and works all day to bring in much-needed income. Although Ruth has sacrificed herself and her body to support her family, she receives very little respect from her husband, who is preoccupied with his own dreams and unconcerned with Ruth’s. Even Mama second-guesses Ruth’s judgment and abilities as a wife and mother. When Ruth discovers that she is pregnant, she takes it upon herself to make the very difficult decision to abort the baby that she knows her family cannot afford. Although she ultimately chooses to have the child, she demonstrates her willingness to sacrifice for her husband and son. 

Like Mama, Ruth desperately wants the family to have a house. A house represents an escape from the stagnant life the Youngers are stuck in and offers room to grow. She longs for a family home so badly that when Walter loses the money to a dishonest investment partner, she tells Mama that she will work twenty hours a day to help pay the mortgage if necessary.

Beneatha met Asagai, “a rather dramatic-looking man” (45), at college, when she approached him and said, “‘Mr. Asagai—I want very much to talk with you. About Africa. You see, Mr. Asagai, I am looking for my identity” (48). Asagai is romantically interested in Beneatha, although she seems less concerned with finding love than she is with figuring out who she is. Asagai does not understand Beneatha’s claim that a man and a woman can have more than one kind of relationship, and expresses the more traditional belief that men and woman can feel only one way toward each other. Asagai brings Africa, and, more specifically, Nigeria, to Beneatha, through music, authentic dress, and knowledge. While he teases Beneatha for being so serious, he recognizes her deep longing to connect to her roots, nicknaming her Alaiyo, which is a Yoruba word for “One for Whom Bread—Food—Is Not Enough” (52). When Walter loses Beneatha’s medical school tuition money, Asagai challenges her to stop wallowing in her hardships and accuses her of using the misfortune as an excuse to give up on medical school. Instead, he offers an alternative: return with him to Africa as his wife and become a doctor there. Asagai has experienced the suffering brought on by colonialism in Nigeria, and works hard for progress in his community, with the understanding that he may never receive recognition or appreciation. Asagai offers Beneatha immersion in the culture of her ancestry, “and, in time, we will pretend that you have only been away for a day” (126). Asagai represents what Beneatha imagines her life would be if her ancestors had never been stolen from Africa.

The polar opposite of Asagai, George Murchison is a young Black man whose family has assimilated into American society and accumulated wealth. The Youngers are shocked when Beneatha finds such a rich and successful young man to be an uninteresting romantic prospect. George and his family have removed themselves from the Black community that Beneatha seeks to understand. They have achieved financial success by renouncing their fellow African Americans and buying into white society. At first, George expresses amusement at Beneatha’s preoccupation with Africa, expecting her to change out of her Nigerian dress before the theater. But he demonstrates his clear disdain of their African roots by dismissing Africa as “nothing but a bunch of raggedy-assed spirituals and some grass huts!” (72). When George and Beneatha return from their date, he tells her that she is attractive, but he is not interested in her thoughts. George and his family do not use their privilege to lift up other members of the Black community. For instance, Beneatha tells Mama that George’s mother would never approve of his marrying her, a woman from a working-class Black family. When Walter tries to talk to George about potential business opportunities, George brushes him off. George represents the social pressure to reject Black identity and embrace the culture of the oppressor.

Walter and Ruth’s son, Travis is “a sturdy, handsome little boy of ten or eleven” (5). He is well-behaved and complains very little, despite the fact that he sleeps in the living room where his father entertains his friends late into the night. For Travis, a house means a permanent room, a space to call his own. Travis accepts his mother’s assertion that she cannot afford to give him fifty cents for school and has cultivated a work ethic from living in poverty. Rather than pushing Ruth for the money, he asks for permission to earn it himself carrying groceries. Travis represents the possibilities of the future. He does not yet express any dreams, but he also has not had time to make any mistakes. His future is open. Travis is naïve and loving, choosing an inappropriately-embellished gardening hat for his grandmother that demonstrates his innocence of what it means to labor in the dirt. Travis looks to his father as an example and does not yet understand the implications of his father’s (initially) deferent attitude toward Karl Lindner, in the play’s third act. The eventual inheritance of the family house means that Travis will one day become a landowner, a step toward legitimized social standing in a majority-white country. As the civil rights movement rages on in the United States, Travis stands to come of age in a nation that will honor his rights as a citizen, and has the potential to form and realize dreams that are beyond those that Beneatha and Walter harbor.