CHAPTER III: The Impact of Identity on Dreams –

1. Identity in the Sight of Other People
In actual fact, people have a certain view or conception about what somebody is. This view is quite different from what the individual himself has. But then the harm in all this is that this state of affairs has a great impact on what an individual is supposed to become in life especially when he doesn’t have a great sense of objectivity or when he is not determined to achieve his life goal regardless of the opposition or the influence exerted upon them by society. . . Often times, this conception of somebody makes him loose his self-confidence and try to comply with what others want him to be or think he is. In trying to reajust his nature in
The women characters of Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun (1959) are not absent of this double form of discrimination; however, as the racial issue is more at stake than gender in the play, the last one is usually forgotten in the analysis of the most part of the critics. As race can never be let apart of gender, since they are two intermingled issues in the plight of black women, we intend to analyze the implications of the two terms in the lives of the women characters of Hansberry’s play. Although A Raisin in the Sun does not focus in one single woman character as the great heroin of the plot, which usually happens in the majority of works by black women writers, we are arguing that Hansberry is concerned to race as well as gender in the construction of her play. Race in her play is like one point of a strand, but it cannot fulfill its purpose of becoming a knot if it did not have gender, the other point. This metaphor is to emphasize that the black women characters of her play come from three generations of struggles in which it is impossible to dissociate race of gender. Lorraine Hansberry was born on May 19, 1930 in Chicago, Illinois, and she died of cancer at the age of thirty-four on January 12, 1965. Although she had a very brief career, in this short period of time Hansberry called literary critics’