Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin In The Sun

In Langston Hughes’s poem titled “Harlem (A Dream Deferred)”, he asks an interesting question, “What happens to a dream deferred?” In Raisin in the Sun, Lorraine Hansberry uses the backdrop of discrimination on an African American family to examine the effect of dreams on people. Hansberry utilizes symbols such as Mama’s withering plant to represent how the family’s dreams are struggling to live while the members have conflicting ideas of the future. She also employs the life insurance money as a symbol of Big Walter’s dream to bolster and possibly make his family’s dreams come to life. Big Walter said “[God] give us children to make them dreams seem worth while" (934). Dreams are an integral part of Raisin in the Sun, so much so that even the symbols represent dreams themselves. …show more content…
The family’s dreams are dwindling because of their family strife and the racial oppression of that time period; this is equal to how the plant is in a perpetual state of lifelessness from a from the fact that it “ain’t never had enough sunshine or nothing” (938) even though Mama has put so much work into that plant. The plant also symbolizes her dreams for her family living in a nice house with her own garden. Since she has kept that “little old” (938) plant alive with such little necessities, she believes that she could have a thriving garden “like the one I used to see sometimes at the back of the houses down home” (938). The plant can stand for so many things, but the check has more deep-rooted