NON AFRICAN DRAMA Lorraine Hansberry: A Raisin in the Sun What impression do you form of Mama's character in the play?

Answer Details

In Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun, Mama (Lena Younger) is the moral centre and matriarch of the family. The impression she leaves is of a strong, dignified, deeply religious woman whose love, wisdom and resilience hold the struggling Younger household together.

A loving and self-sacrificing matriarch. Mama is devoted to her family. Widowed after the death of her husband, Big Walter, she has laboured all her life for her children and grandchild. Her decisions are guided not by selfishness but by the good of the family, and her greatest wish is to see them united, secure and dignified.

Strong and dignified. Mama possesses great inner strength and self-respect. She has endured poverty, racism and hardship without losing her sense of pride. Her insistence on decency and integrity, and her refusal to let the family be humiliated, mark her as a woman of unshakeable dignity.

Deeply religious and morally upright. Mama's faith in God shapes her values. She upholds honesty, family solidarity and moral responsibility, and she rebukes Beneatha sharply when the younger woman denies God. Her religion is not empty ritual but the foundation of her moral authority within the home.

Custodian of the family's dreams. It is Mama who receives the ten-thousand-dollar insurance cheque, and it is she who uses part of it to buy a house in Clybourne Park, a decisive act that expresses her dream of a better life and a proper home for her family. The plant she tends throughout the play symbolises her nurturing spirit and her stubborn hope even in barren circumstances.

Wise and forgiving. When Walter loses much of the money in a foolish scheme, Mama, though grieved, does not abandon him. She helps him recover his manhood and pride, teaching Beneatha that it is precisely when a person is at his lowest that love and understanding are most needed. Her capacity to forgive reveals her greatness of heart.

Significance. Mama represents the older generation's values of faith, endurance and family loyalty. Through her, Hansberry celebrates the strength of the black woman and the power of love and dignity to sustain a family against poverty and racism.

In conclusion, Mama emerges as a loving, dignified, God-fearing and wise matriarch whose strength and moral vision anchor the family and carry it towards a hopeful new beginning.