A Raisin in the Sun-Lorraine Hansberry

1701 Words7 Pages
This is a story about an economically challenged African American family that lives in Chicago in the 1950’s. This family has come into some money from a life insurance policy due to the loss of the mother’s husband and the children’s’ father, “Big Walter” Younger. Regardless of the fact that the check belongs to the matriarch of the family Lena, each and every member of the family has different ideas about how the money should be spent as well as deciding who should make those decisions. Regardless of what the rest of the families ideas are about how the money should be spent Lena makes a down payment on a house in an all-white neighborhood. She doesn’t choose this neighborhood to make a point; she chose it because the house was large enough for her family and it was simply what she could afford. She also decided to put part of the money away for the tuition for her younger daughter Beneatha whom aspires to be a doctor. After a particularly dramatic scene in the play when Ruth and Lena find that Walter has not been going to work and is about to lose his job Lena admits to her son that she has “been doing to him (you) what the rest of the world been doing to him(you)” Act 2 Scene 2. Lena hands the money over to Walter and advises him to take part of the money and put it in the bank for Beneatha’s tuition and for him to take the rest and do with it as he sees fit. At this point Lena tells Walter he is to be the “head of this family from now on like he (you) is supposed to be.” Act 2 Scene 2 Consequently Walter trusts the money, all of it, to his friend Willy. We learn later from Bobo that Willy took all of the money and ran. In the meantime a white man named Karl Linder went to visit the Younger family in hopes of paying them off in order to get them to not move into their all-white neighborhood. Initially the Youngers told Mr. Linder to get lost and were obviously

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