Beneatha’s Journey (From Grape to Raisin)
Taylor Swift’s song, “Never Grow Up,” shows what must be going through Beneatha Younger’s head in the novel, A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry. As much as this twenty-year old wants to stay a child and continue life the way it is, she still wants to thrive and become a doctor. This proves to be difficult in her life because of the lack of money and ambition that the most of the Younger family has, which changes when they receive their ten-thousand dollar insurance check, due to the death of Walter Younger, Sr. This occurrence is what really stirs up their lives, causing Beneatha’s life to spin into action. Throughout the novel, Beneatha goes through a struggle becoming who she wants to be. She deals with growing up and following her dreams, even though not everything always went her way. Beneatha has to overcome her childish and argumentative side to become the woman she knows that she can be.
In the novel, Beneatha struggles with being wrongly accused of childish behavior and antics. She tends to make it even more difficult for herself, when she proves that their accusations are accurate. Particularly towards the beginning of the novel, Beneatha was always trying to get under people’s skin. Beneatha eggs her brother, Walter, on by saying, “What do you want from me, Brother--- that I quit school or just drop dead, which!” (Hansberry 37). She gets into those sibling tiffs a lot throughout the play. Not only did Beneatha show her childish side with her brother, but she also was disrespectful to her mother and Ruth. Beneatha didn’t handle her views accordingly and spoke out to Mama, getting this response from Ruth: “You think you a woman, Bennie--- but you still a little girl. What you did was childish--- so you got treated like a child.” (52). Beneatha’s trouble wasn’t what made her childish; it was how she responded to that trouble.
Beneatha was always trying to start an argument with someone in the novel, whether it was Mama, Ruth, Walter, or her various suitors. She couldn’t just accept someone else’s views without questioning them. While Beneatha is arguing with George Murchison, Ruth inquires her excessive arguing, “Why must you and your brother make an argument out everything people say?” (81). Ruth had hit what Beneatha does right on the dot. Beneatha needs to be able to defend what she wants to do and stick to it to be what she wants to be, especially with her challenging life. Even though she wouldn’t have what it takes to be a doctor without this side of her, it does cause bumps in her journey. During times of the novel, she let this argumentative side overshadow her dreams and she stopped believing in herself. Beneatha’s instinct to go against people is shown by what she says to Joseph Asagai, when she had a determent of her plans. Beneatha says, “Don’t you see there isn’t any real progress, Asagai, there is only one large circle that we march in, around and around, each of us with our own little picture in front of us--- our own little mirage that we think is the future.” (134).