Key Quotes

• 'Man says to his woman: I got me a dream. His woman says: Eat your eggs. (Sadly, but gaining in power.) Man says I got to take hold of this here world, baby! And a woman will say: Eat your eggs and go to work.' pg18


  Walter resents the women in his life, he believes his wife is the reason why he cannot attain his dreams.

  Eggs symbolise boundaries to dreams: raw eggs are the dreams of what the future may become; but they are scrambled and heated through the conflict in the AA lives (society, yet Walter blames his wife)

  Women = practical.
• 'go be a nurse like other women - or just get married and be quite' 


  Epanalepsis, imperatives, synecdoche of women (theme for Walter)

  Dynamic verb 'quite' silencing women, linked to 'married' shows masculine control

  Mitigating 'just', reducing women's lives to marriage.

  'Quite' connotes 1950s - Women occupied the private sphere, which includes the home and children.
• ‘sometimes its like I can see the future stretched out in front of me… the future Mama. Hanging over there at the edge of my days. Just waiting for me – a big, looming blank space – full of nothing. Just waiting for me.’ pg 54 


  Realistic, bathetic ‘a big looming blank space', dreams reduced to nothing

  Personal pronoun 'me', sense of pressures of being the man of the house 'me.'

  Nihilistic undertones.
• 'All anyone seems to know about when it comes to Africa is Tarzan' pg38


  Allusion: Tarzan = inauthentic colonial story about white boy in Africa Generic pronoun: collective ignorance.

  Loss of identity in AA, Hansberry making a point of there never having been any sense of black identity being allowed / seen in America.
• 'Why all you college boys wear them f*****y-looking white shoes?' p62


  Pejorative, homophobic adjective reflects desire to emasculate, reflecting W's internal conflict

  Connotations of 'white shoes' symbolise purity + wealth: a lifestyle and status W is alienated from
• 'Big. Invest big, gamble big, hell, lose big if you have to.' 


  Triadic epiphora 'big' underscores desires for grand success

  Semantic field of monetary risk ('gamble' 'invest' 'lose') shows life of poverty has made him reckless (characters effected by environment)

  Interjection 'hell' emphasises intensity to speech: determination.

  Big dreams = unattainable inevitability.
• 'Cause we all tied up in a race of people that don't know how to do nothing but moan, pray and have babies.' pg65 


  Intersectional lens - Walter blames black women for his failures.

  Black feminism philosophy centres on the idea that ‘black women are inherently valuable, that [black woman's] liberation is a necessity not as an adjunct to somebody's else's but because of our need as human persons for autonomy.’

  Victim of racial injustice - blaming his sisters.
• RUTH: 'you remember how we used to talk when Travis was born … about the way we were going to live.. the kind of house (she is stroking his head) well, its all starting to slip away from us…’ pg67


  Like G, Ruth reminisces on their past collective dream

  Ruth + Walter can be compared to Myrtle + George - WC marriage

  Stage directions underscore tenderness of her longing and emotional exhaustion

  Ellipsis = trailing thought

  Past tense, Walter no longer contributes to their collective dream.

  Metaphoric ending
• RUTH 'Oh, Walter … (softly) Honey, why can't you stop fighting me?

  WALTER (Without thinking) Who's fighting you? Who even cares about you?' pg65


  Adverbial prosodics 'softly' avoidance of tension

  'Honey' personal address of emotional plea - ongoing conflict tearing her apart.

  Present continuous tense 'fighting'

  'cant' out of his control

  Anaphoric interrogative dismissal of wife, harsh. Marriage has fallen victim to W's quest for self-importance.
• 'Ruth has her fist clenched on her thighs and is fighting hard to supress a scream that seems to be rising in her.' pg41


  Symbolism of the unspoken female AA struggle of the 1950s

  Verb 'clenched' implies intense effort

  Past continuous tense

  Potent sibilance 'supress a scream' raw emotion being restrained

  Emotional and psychological impact of systemic oppression
• 'Listen, I'm going to be a doctor. I'm not worried about who i'm going to marry yet - if i ever get married.' pg33 


  Rebellion.

  Parenthesis, conditional clause, future is vast. = controversial for 1950s, independent woman, especially for AA women who were not privileged to be independent.

  Stative imperative = certain.

  She wants to make her life a challenge to gender stereotypes.
• 'Beneatha is in dungarees, with a handkerchief tied around her face.' pg 36


  Allusion to Rosie the Riveter.

  Unlike Daisy + 1920s women, she has more freedom in her clothing choices.
• 'mutilated hair and all' and 'its so hard to manage when it's, well, raw.' pg43


  Links to slavery with transitive verb 'mutilated.' Even after abolishment - WA continue to mutilate AA.

  Social + literal connotations to 'manage'
• 'ASAGAI: For a woman it should be enough

  BENEATHA I know – because that’s what it says in all the novels that men write. But it isn’t. Go ahead and laugh'


  Synecdoche reducing women to romantic relations.

  Dissatisfaction with portrayal of women in literature - Hansberry voice?

  Rejects the idea of being reduced to a temporary or superficial role, emphasizing her desire for a deeper, more meaningful connection.
• BENEATHA 'how can something natural be eccentric.' pg59

  Assimilation has taken control of AA ideas of AA. Loss of culture.

  Balanced sentence structure: end focus
• BENEATHA: 'what they think we going to do - eat 'em?'

  RUTH 'No honey, marry 'em' pg94


  Chiasmus suggests that segregation is a result of a fear of "miscegenation" (a.k.a. interracial marriage), reflects the WA attitude that places 'eat' and 'marry' on the same level

  Connotations of hostility and violence

  Link to TOM from the gg.
• GATSBY: 'if personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him. some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life.' pg8 


  Semantic field of delicacy ('unbroken', 'gestures' , 'gorgeous', 'sensitivity', 'promises') presenting G as a performance, like a doll

  Hyperbole 'heightened sensitivity'

  Sibilance, poetic

  Vague mitigation 'something', ambiguous attraction
• GATSBY: 'his gorgeous pink rag of a suit' pg147


  Clothing motif.

  Juxtaposition of 'gorgeous' and 'rag' highlights appearance vs reality, deception and facades, creating a stark visual and emotional impact.

  Symbolism of 'pink' is romanticism, love, innocence, Gatsby's final attempt to project this image to Daisy

  Metaphoric 'rag' of his glamourous appearance decaying

  Outward extravagance shields his underlying vulnerability and struggles.
• DAISY: 'the next day she married Tom Buchanan without so much as a shiver' pg75


  Feminist lens = gothic, sense of death in marriage, numb.

  Sense of detachment or resignation.

  Ironic = lack of emotional response, enthusiasms, passion. All typical emotion a women marrying a man of toms class would be expected to feel in the 1920s.

  Symbolism = conforming to societal expectations, transaction rather than deep emotional connection, superficial and material
• 'the girl who was with him got into the papers too, because her arm was broken.' pg75


  Another woman paying for Toms reckless antics.

  HInts at an affair - the power imbalance in T and D's marriage.

  Car crash = reckless wealth, carelessness of who gets hurt in the process = prolepsis of Myrtles death.
• MAMA: 'we ain't no business people, Ruth. we just plain working folks.' pg25


  Juxtaposition between 'business people...working folks'

  Mama emphasizes that their strength lies in their collectively (we)as WC individuals rather than in pursuing business ventures.

  Limitations and societal barriers faced by AA families

  Simple sentence + HF lexis
• MAMA: 'i seen... him... i seen him grow thin and old before he was forty... working and working and working like somebody's old horse...killing himself... and you - you give it all away in a day...' pg102


  semantic field of human sacrifice ('thin and old', 'working', 'killing himself')

  Anaphoric 'i seen' and fragmented sentence building a visual break, emotional struggle, the weight of her memories watching her husband deteriorate

  Triadic polysyndetic list , underscoring the relentless nature of slavery
• Son... but ain’t nobody in my family never let nobody pay ‘em no money... telling us we wasn’t fit to walk the earth. We ain’t never been that poor. We ain’t never been that – dead inside.' pg 113


  Symbolism of enduring legacy of oppression and exploitations

  Semantic field of pride and dignity ('no money', 'never been that poor', 'dead inside')

  Negation

  Anaphoric reformulation from 'poor' to 'dead inside' metaphor illustrating emotional tool of oppression

  Encapsulates the complex interplay of history, identity, pride, and resilience within the African American experience
• Mamas’ speech ‘there’s always something left to love, if you ain’t learnt that you ain’t learnt nothing.’ pg115


  Challenging the racism that exists in the audience

  Rhetoric 'have you cried for that boy today' and evocative figurative personification 'world done whipped him today.' connotes oppression

  Hansberry appeal to not judge the marginalized in society before you have lived their experience.
• Lindner: ‘life can really be so much simpler than people let it be most of the time’ pg116


  'people' = euphenism for african americans.

  Privaleged position of speech - privileged idea, saying people make a fuss of these problems, problems that he doesn’t have.

  Straight white male privilege.
• GEORGE: 'as for myself, i want a nice (groping) simply (thoughtfully) sophisticated girl ... not a poet - OK?' pg73

  He wants a women with no mind.

  Beneatha = a completion to his status - marrying for status rather than love.

  Direct adress = shutting her down, belittling beneatha as this is not what she is, euphemism for telling her to be nice, simply and sophisticated.
• GATSBY: ‘The touch of a cluster of leaves revolved it slowly, tracing, like the leg of transit, a thin red circle in the water.’ pg154


  Euphemistic

  Sibilance – sounds beautiful and lovely, soft flowing and poetic, clean.

  ‘Water’ purity, baptism, cleanliness, and lack of awful sight in death.

  ‘Revolved, tracing, circle’ cyclical language
• NICK: 'i had a dog - at least i had him for a few days until he ran away.' 


  Parenthetical aside of restlessness of the 'lost generation' of US

  Colloquial lang revealing lack of care, the ruling elite's callous disregard for the lower classes, symbolised by the 'dog'

  Social fragmentation of the 1920s.
• NICK: 'i am one of the few honest people that i have ever known' pg59 


  Intensifiers 'one' and 'ever' emphasise the horror of the others in the story.

  Irony

  Highlights the inauthenticity of the 1920s elite with the paradox of the narrative filled with deceit and lies

  The rise of fraud and 'dirty money' in the 1920s, people lost morals to keep up with the booming economy.
• DAISY: ''she had the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down, as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again. There was excitement in her voice that men found difficult to forget.' 


  Motif of voice

  Siren (Greek myth) luring soldiers to shipwrecks.

  Enchanting mystique effect on men, melodic imagery.
• JORDAN: 'she was incurably dishonest. she wasn't able to endure being at a disadvantage and, given this unwillingness, i suppose she had begun dealing in subterfuges... in order to keep that cool, insolent smile turned to the world.' pg58


  feminist lens: euphemism 'disadvantages' = being a woman

  facade of confidence that helps her navigate the world: a control of power.
• 'i put my arm around Jordan's golden shoulder.' pg77


  trophy, symbol of wealth: social status.

  dehumanized object

  implies she has little personal merrit besides her physical atrractiveness.
• TOM: 'the fact that he had one [a mistress] was insisted upon wherever he was known' chapter two. 


  Tom contrasts the idea of deceit and lies: he parades Myrtle around NYC unashamedly, he has no respect for his wife.

  Dehumanises Myrtle into his possession

  Control, freedom, corruption.
• TOM:'something was making him nibble at the edge of stale ideas as if his sturdy physical egotism no longer nourished his peremptory heart.' chp1


  Zoomorphism + metaphoric presentation of his disillusionment and internal struggle with the unfulfilling AD
• TOM: 'two shining arrogant eyes had established dominance over his face and gave him the appearance of always leaning aggressively forward... enormous power of that body.... great pack of muscle...' chp1


  Double pre-modifier of personification of the physical brutish force of Tom Buchanan

  Motif

  Patriarchal aggression
• MYRTLE: ‘Mrs Wilson had changed her costume some time before and was now attired in an elaborate afternoon dress of a cream-coloured chiffon.’ Pg33


  Her costume is a performance = ersatz.

  'cream coloured' = impure

  'elaborate' = over the top
• MYRTLE: 'Myrtle Wilson, her life violently extinguished, knelt in the road and mingled her thick dark blood with the dust.' pg131 


  Dysmorphic description of her death contrasts Gatsby.

  'thick dark blood' shows a visceral symbol of transgression in women (Shakespeare) pushed back to the dust.

  Fire vs Air (daisy)

  Hyperbaton

  Freedom in death
• MYRTLE: 'her breast was swinging loose like a flap' pg131


  sexualised even in death

  her one attribute liked by the elite (toms sexualisation / having myrtle as his whore) is ripped from her: reflecting the disintegration of moral and social order.
• MYRTLE: 'the mouth was wide open and ripped a little at the corners, as though she had choked a little in giving up the tremendous vitality she had stored so long.' pg131


  silenced abruptly in death

  in her struggle for a better life and social status she has been choked by the harsh reality of her circumstances.
• 'he's so dumb he doesn't know he's alive' pg29


  Prolepsis

  Tom's classism

  Stupidity works in toms favour

  Dehumanizes George