Different Female Family Generations

In 20^th-century theater by African-American female playwrights there is a clear majority of black women characters on stage. In the plays considered here the female characters noticeably outnumber their male counterparts. From the overall number of 79 characters, there are 45 female and 34 male characters.²⁸⁰ If we only focus on the main characters in the plays, the difference is even more striking. There are 26 main characters in total, out of which 21 characters are female, while only five of them are male.²⁸¹ In all but one of the plays there are at least two, sometimes even more different generations of black female characters simultaneously introduced on stage.²⁸² Because of the fact that the plays all portray family stories, the female characters represent different generations of female family members around whom the plots generally evolve.²⁸³

This generational representation is most strikingly illustrated in Lorraine Hansberry’s play A Raisin in the Sun (1959), which introduces Lena Younger, “a woman in her early sixties, full-bodied and strong” (RIS 520), and her daughter Beneatha, who is “about

280 The count only includes those characters whose sex can be unambiguously defined by the list of characters, the stage directions, or by the references in the characters’ dialogues. Excluded from the count are (1) unspecified groups of characters such as the dancers, musicians, and passengers in Zora Neale Hurston’s Color Struck, the mob in Myrtle Smith Livingston’s For Unborn Children, and the moving men in Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun and (2) single characters whose sex is undeterminable such as the Gorilla, the senators, witnesses I and II, the reporter as well as the mythic Anima/Animus figure in Judith Alexa Jackson’s play

WOMBmanWARs. Although Jackson’s play is a one-woman show, so that the stage directions use the pronoun “she” when referring to the unspecified characters such as the witnesses or the senators, the list of characters nevertheless also includes explicit references to the sex of specific characters such as the “Good Christian Woman” (WMW 151) or “Mama Thomas” (WMW 151).

The count therefore only includes those characters whose sex is explicitly mentioned.

281 This count includes the exact number of characters that constitute a group protagonist, so that there are three main characters in Gilbert’s Environment, two main characters in Burrill’s They That Sit in Darkness, four main characters in Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, seven main characters in Shange’s for colored girls, and five main characters in Jackson’s WOMBmanWARs.

282 The only exception is Alice Childress’s play Wine in the Wilderness in which the two female characters are about the same age. Tommy, the heroine, is “a woman factory worker aged thirty”

(WIW 738) and Cynthia is “a social worker aged twenty-five” (WIW 738).

283 There are Mrs. Loving and her daughter Rachel in Angelina Weld Grimké’s Rachel; Malinda Jasper and her daughter Lindy in Mary Burrill’s They That Sit in Darkness; Emma and her daughter in Zora Neale Hurston’s Color Struck; Grandma Carlson, her grandchildren, and their unborn offspring in Myrtle Smith Livingston’s For Unborn Children (1926); Mary Lou Williams and her family in Mercedes Gilbert’s Environment; Lena, Ruth, and Beneatha in Lorraine

Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun; the female archetypes on stage and their colored daughters in the audience in Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls; and, finally, Sapphire and her daughter Danisha in Judith Alexa Jackson’s WOMBmanWARs.

twenty” (RIS 519). Lena is the oldest character on stage and the matriarch of the family.²⁸⁴ As such, she occupies a power position in the family and has a strong influence on her children, who are supposed to be her “harvest” and her “beginning again” (RIS 552).

Lena is a determined and “high-minded” (RIS 550) woman whose position as the head of the family gives her the moral authority to decide what her family needs. When she sees that her family is “falling apart today… [sic] just falling to pieces in front of [her] eyes”

(RIS 538), she decides to invest the money that she receives after her husband’s death in a small house in an all-white neighborhood, aiming to provide “a home” (RIS 537) and a place of belonging for her family against all odds.²⁸⁵

It is this resoluteness that Lena shares with her daughter Beneatha, the youngest female character in the play. Beneatha is the only family member to receive a higher education at college and she repeatedly displays her knowledge and beliefs to the other characters, while emphasizing that she does not “expect [them] to understand” (RIS 523).²⁸⁶ By aspiring to the traditionally male medical profession, she challenges conventional gender allocations, which is also indicated in her nickname ‘Bennie,’ a name usually used for men, and in her attitude towards marriage. When asked about her

284 She does however not fit the stereotypical myth of the black matriarch as “the black-widow spider” as Steven R. Carter has convincingly argued (cf. Steven R. Carter, Hansberry's Drama:

Commitment Amid Complexity (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1991)).

285 For an interesting discussion on the meaning of “home” and the different kinds of “home” in Hansberry’s play see Kristin L. Matthews, "The Politics of Home in Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun," Modern Drama 51. Winter 2008.

286 Rachelle S. Gold argues that “Beneatha uses two modes of knowledge to separate herself from her family, one where she merely broadcasts her beliefs, without asking anyone to subscribe to them, and one where she elevates her belief systems over theirs […]” (Rachelle S. Gold,

""Education Has Spoiled Many a Good Plow Hand": How Beneatha's Knowledge Functions in A Raisin in the Sun," Reading Contemporary African American Drama: Fragments of History, Fragments of Self, ed. Trudier Harris (New York: Lang, 2007): 7.) It is however important to note when Beneatha displays her knowledge, using language that “differs from the rest of the family’s insofar as education has permeated her sense of English” (RIS 519), as the stage directions put it.

On the one hand, she uses this language in conversations with her suitors George Murchison and Joseph Asagai, who have also been to college and who thus share Beneatha’s education and knowledge. On the other hand, she uses her higher-class terminology to speak about, but not to speak to or with the other family members. When she calls Walter Lee a “Monsieur le petit bourgeois noir” and a “Symbol of a Rising Class! Entrepreneur! Titan of the system” (RIS 649;

italics original), she is not talking to him and does not expect him to reply. She rather comments on him and asks an absent third persona: “Yes – just look at what the New World hath wrought!...

[sic] Just look! (she gestures with bitter disgust) There he is!” (RIS 549; italics original) The theatricality of her advice to look at Walter Lee suggests that she is addressing the audience in this moment, even if the invisible border between the stage and the auditorium is not completely transgressed or destroyed.

9. Engendering Time: Black Motherhood and MaleMaturity 158

relationship with her suitor George Murchison, Beneatha replies: “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” (RIS 524). Although she repeatedly stresses her independence and insists that she has “never asked anyone around to do anything for [her]” (RIS 519), the fulfillment of her dream of becoming a doctor is, however, dependent on the financial support of her mother, who is determined to provide her daughter with the money she needs. When asked how she wants to invest the money she inherits, Lena replies: “Some of it got to be put away for Beneatha and her schoolin’ – and ain’t nothing going to touch that part of it. Nothing”

(RIS 522).

In spite of their similarities in terms of strong-mindedness and determination in trying to achieve their aims, there are also some major differences between Lena and her daughter, which reveal themselves in a confrontation about faith in God. In contrast to Beneatha, her mother is a deeply religious woman who believes in God and his benevolence. When Beneatha explains that she is “tired of hearing about God all the time” (RIS 524), Lena rebukes her, telling her: “It don’t sound nice for a young girl to say things like that – you wasn’t brought up that way. Me and your father went to trouble to get you and Brother to church every Sunday” (RIS 524). In spite of her mother’s reprimand, Beneatha continues to emphasize that she does not believe in God, which results in a severe confrontation between the two women which is worth quoting at length:

BENEATHA Mama, you don’t understand. It’s all a matter of ideas, and God is just one idea I don’t accept. It’s not important. I am not going out and be immoral or commit crimes because I don’t believe in God. I don’t even think about it. It’s just that I get tired of Him getting credit for all the things the human race achieves through its own stubborn effort. There simply is no blasted God – there is only man and it is he who makes miracles!

(MAMA absorbs this speech, studies her daughter and rises slowly and crosses to B^ENEATHA and slaps her powerfully across the face. After, there is only silence and the daughter drops her eyes from her mother’s face, and MAMA is very tall before her)

MAMA Now – you say after me, in my mother’s house there is still God (there is a long pause and B^ENEATHA stares at the floor wordlessly. M^AMA repeats the phrase with precision and cool emotion) In my mother’s house there is still God.

B^ENEATHA In my mother’s house there is still God.

(A long pause)

(RIS 524; italics original)

For Lena, God is an existential truth, while for her daughter Beneatha God is only an

“idea” that she does not want to accept and that she replaces with humanism. In contrast to her mother she believes that mankind forges its own destiny and that people can live well without religion. Lena cannot accept her daughter’s lack of faith and her neglect of God’s power and so uses her authority to forbid Beneatha to blaspheme God in her presence. The structure of the sentence “in my mother’s house there is still God” places religion within the sphere of Lena’s house, giving Beneatha the freedom not to believe in God outside the range of her mother’s authority.

This focus on the social role of mothers in interaction with their daughters is indeed a common theme in all of the plays considered here. They all introduce intergenerational mother-daughter-relations and represent the female characters in their roles as either actual or potential mothers struggling with the question of how to mother black children in a white-dominated society.