Confusion in a dream deferred: Context and culture in teaching A Raisin in the Sun

Studies in the Literary Imagination, Spring 1998 by Kodat, Catherine Gunther

the only working-class Negroes who are fit for integration are those who can be made to mouth middle-class values, sentiments, and strivings: platitudes that are acceptable to the whites of the middle classes.... Raisin arrived on Broadway in the midst of . . . the Negro middle-class social revolution. Consequently, the Negro working-classcharacters had to mouth middle-class ideology-witness the line about Mama Younger with her wide-brimmed hat: "She looks just like Mrs. Miniver." (279-81)

Not all critics, of course, take this view of Hansberry and of A Raisin in the Sun.15 But Cruse is right to point to class dissonances that emerge in the course of the play, of which the Mrs. Miniver line is but one example. There is, for instance, Ruth and Beneatha's exchange in Act II, scene iii, which begins with Ruth's proud display of the curtains purchased on impulse for the Clybourne Park house ("hand-turned hems!") and includes her injunction to Beneatha to "put a special note on that carton over there. That's your mama's good china and she wants 'em to be very careful with it" (Raisin 110). But the biggest source of class dissonance lies in the character of Beneatha herself, whom Sheri Parks claims is "based upon a younger Lorraine Hansberry" (216). Even Steven R. Carter, whose careful reading of the play takes considerable pains to dispute the charges leveled against it by critics like Cruse, admits that the characterization of Beneatha represents "the one serious artistic misstep in A Raisin in the Sun" (62). As Carter points out, the scene in which we learn something of Beneatha's efforts to improve herself-the guitar lessons, the drama club, the $55 riding habit and membership in a riding club, the purchase of camera equipmentcomes on the heels of the scene in which Ruth refuses Travis fifty cents and then watches, "with murder in her eyes," as Walter gives the boy a dollar (Raisin 30-31). Carter believes that Beneatha's scene arises from Hansberry's desire to show Ruth and Mama's "fond amusement at the younger woman's forms of selfexpression. . . and their vicarious delight at her ability to break free from restrictions, including that of having to weigh the cost of everything," but he admits that "it is inconceivable that a woman [Ruth] who could refuse such a small sum to a dearly beloved son would so casually accept the squandering of a much larger contribution to a mere sister-in-law" (62). Carter calls this lapse a "rare occasion [when], by concentrating exclusively on the moment and neglecting to see its relation to previous parts of the play, Hansberry, to a small but disconcerting extent, damages the whole" (62), but Cruse's comments about the play help us place the problem of Beneatha's characterization in a larger frame: rather than resulting from a simple miscalculation, the false note arises from the larger problem of the play's implicit class assumptions. Thus a "confusion" emerges in Hansberry's vision of the "dream deferred," a confusion very much generated by her difficulty in forging an argument for black equality that does not depend on an appeal to middle class assumptions.