Absence And Presence: A Study Of Fatherhood In Lorraine Hansberry's Plays

Lorraine Hansberry,the first black female playwright to perform a play on Broadway in the United States,is considered one of the most important voices in African-American theater.Almost each of her works involves the influence that a dead father exerts on his children,which is not only due to her father's influence on her in real life,but also related to the tradition of ghost worship in African Yoruba culture.For a long time,scholars at home and abroad have studied Hansberry's plays from the perspectives of blackness,gender,culture,globalization and community,but seldom paid attention to the influence of an father.In view of this,this paper focuses on the family space in A Raisin in the Sun,The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window and Les Blancs and explores the cultural transmission between a deceased father and his son around the Western literary theme of "fatherhood",and examines the political ideal conveyed by Hansberry in the play.The thesis consists of five parts.The introduction outlines the life and works of Hansberry.It gives a comprehensive and brief literature review of the current research status both at home and abroad about A Raisin in the Sun,The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window and Les Blancs.And it points out the significance of this research.The main body of this thesis is divided into three chapters.Chapter One studies a typical black family living in the black ghetto of the south Chicago in A Raisin in the Sun,and discusses the father's black American dream,Mother's words as the effectual presence of the deceased father and the inheritance of the black father's unfulfilled will,aiming to show that the construction of the ideal homeland is the racial mission that black men must undertake and also the dream that all marginalized groups fight for.Chapter Two demonstrates a white family in Greenwich Village in The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window,the coexistence of “Electra Complex” and “Patricide” in the white family,Mavis-the eldest daughter serving as father's surrogate and the inevitable deconstruction of white fatherhood consist the body of this chapter,which proves the white father's traditional values that highlight the difference of race,class and gender are in essence a toxic cultural legacy.Chapter Three focuses on the deceased African tribal leader's family in Les Blancs,and analyzes the implicit association between father and sons on racial issue as well as the critical inheritance of the father's rebellious spirit,and ahistorical metaphor of black fatherhood,aiming to explore the effective ways to achieve political freedom and racial equality.Based on above analysis,it can be seen that in each of Hansberry's plays,the father figure is absent but achieved an invisible presence via his influence on the children.The thesis then concludes: through the father's apparent absence and actual presence,Hansberry unfolds her political imagination that rejects the traditional Western paradigm of dualistic thinking and advocates a holistic salvation of universal significance from both positive and negative perspectives,and at the same time,shows an effective path to realizing her political imagination,embodying the political ideal of a humanistic public intellectual.