BENEATHA

• 'well, we are dead now. All the talk about dreams and sunlight that goes on in this house. It's all dead now.' 


  Euphemism for lack of dreams, dreams mean money and money means life.

  Syntactic parallelism / reformulation
• 'I mean it! I'm just tired of hearing about God all the time. What has He got to do with anything? Does he pay tuition?' pg33


  Faith does not supply financial security + survival in 1950s America

  Blending religion + reality

  Repeated interrogatives.
• What does Beneatha represent?

  Self-expressing AA (pan-Africanism).

  She wants more than to just get by (in contrast to Daisy); she wants to find ways to truly express herself.

  Beneatha brings politics to the apartment - she is progressive, independent (exploring identity) and feminist due to education.
• 'her speech is a mixture of many things; it is different from the rest of the family's insofar as education has permeated her sense of English.' pg19


  Lack of AAVE due to education = assimilation.

  Stage directions: growth through education experience makes her condescending and forgets family (Mama) work hard to put her through education.

  Progressive, independent and feminist, simile 'as intense as her brother. '
• '(dropping to her knees) Well - i do - all right - thank everybody! And forgive me for ever wanting to be anything at all... forgive me, forgive me!' pg22


  Kinesics - dramatic portrayal of sarcasm

  Civil rights movement excluded women from leadership roles.

  Anaphoric build into exclamative
• 'not so much a profile of a Hollywood queen as perhaps a queen of the Nile!.' pg44


  Chiasmus of regal and majestic presence - drawing contrast between genuine qualities and artificial glamour of Hollywood.

  Exploration of identity, heritage and personal empowerment.
• 'That was what one person could do for another, fix him up... That was truly being God.' pg104


  Anecdotal monologue behind dreams

  Theological allusion - power = godlike, benevolent and compassionate aspect through kindness and assistance.

  Like G, the godlike figures are those that look out for others 'Dr TJ Eckleburg.'
• 'I wanted to cure. It used to be so important to me. I wanted to cure. It used to matter. I used to care.' pg104


  Personal pronoun + shift to past tense = temporal shift in priorities / perspective

  Repetition 'i wanted to cure' emphasises the significance of past ambitions

  Loss of idealism - shift from looking to the future possibilities to reflecting on past ambitions.

  Minor sentences
• 'yes - 'independence!' but then what?' pg105


  Interrogative and exclamative creates juxtaposition of certainty and doubt: the never ending human misery that demoralizes B.

  Fronted conjunction - open ended sentence
• 'Don't you see there isn't any real progress... there is only one large circle that we march in, around and around each of us with out own little mirage that we think is the future.' pg 105

  Metaphor 'one large circle' = cycle of life / racism, societal progress is limited, stuck.

  Symbolism 'mirage' is an illusion, a sense of disillusionment with the repetitive nature of dreams.

  Repetition 'around and around' mimics notion of circles: literally and figuratively.

  Individualism vs collective identity: no one is special
• Ruth values economic success (survival) whilst Beneatha values identity and character.
• Beneathas enthusiam when dancing with her brother is sober and genuine.
• Assimilation would make Beneatha more palatable to her white counter parts, which could pay off as she works her way through the white-dominated medical field: but she veiws this as shallow.
• Beneathas disgust with George's superficiality develops into disdain, cementing Hansberrys opposition to assimilation.
• Beneatha is representive of a young AA generation in the late 1950s that struggles to either assimilate into or diverge from white culture.
• Stage directions introducing beneatha: 'thick hair stands wildly about her head. her speach is a mixture'
• 'perhaps the Midwest rather than the south has finally - at last - won out in her inflection'

  Notably aggressive dynamic verb 'won' describes her internal conflict between integration into white culture vs deviation from it.

  Metaphoric / personification AA body's are a battleground
• Through Beneathas struggles with her identity, Hansberry conveys the absurd nature of asking African Americans to choose one of two unattainable ideals: rejecting own culture or embodying a foreign one.
• By placing Benatha in between assimilationism and afrocentrism. hansberry seems to make a claim that AA are able to exist between these two extremes. (Brady)
• 'people have to express themselves one way or another' pg31
• 'the only people in the world who are more snobbish than rich white people are rich coloured people.' pg33 


  chiasmus

  comparative 'more'
• quote continuation: '– but I’m not interested in being someone’s little episode in America or – (With feminine vengeance) – one of them!' pg 45


  anecdotal phrase 'someones... america' implies transient, insignificant role of AA women

  prosodics 'feminine vengeance' emotionally charged declarative.