tries to reveal as response toward the society in her play A Raisin in the Sun. Those theories are related to one another and built the basic understanding of the study. The
theories also give important role in analyzing the problems presented in this study. 25
CHAPTER III METHODOLOGY
A. Object of the Study
This thesis takes Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun as the object to be analyzed. A Raisin in the Sun was firstly published by Random House Incorporation,
New York in 1958. The play of A Raisin in the Sun was first performed on 11 March 1959 in New York. The play that the writer used as the primary source of this study is
taken from the book with an introduction by Robert Nemiroff, published by Vintage Books Edition, Random House Incorporation, New York in 1994.
The book that is used in this study consists of 151 pages. Lorraine Hansberry divided the play into three acts. Act one was divided into two scenes. The first scene
was begun on Friday morning and scene two in the following morning, while act two was divided into three scenes. Scene one, later the same day as in the act one, scene
two opened on Friday night, a few weeks later and the last scene of act two began one week later. Act three had only one scene, which opened an hour later. In this edition,
the book contains the story of A Raisin in the Sun and some important information. The first one is an introduction of the play by Robert Nemiroff and the second one is
the information about the author in brief with her works. The play itself was the first drama by a black woman to be produced on
Broadway in 1959. The production was first taken out of New York and played in New Haven, Philadelphia, Chicago, and in all places audiences loved it. It also won
26
the New York Drama Critic’s Circle Award as the best play of the year. The film version of A Raisin in the Sun in 1961, which starred Sidney Portier as Walter Lee,
received a special award at the Cannes film Festival. In 1937, her ex-husband Nemiroff and Charlotte Zaitzberg adapted Hansberry’s first play into a musical,
entitled Raisin. Raisin won the Tony Award as the best musical and ran on Broadway for nearly three years. Her success opened the floodgates for a generation of modern
black actors and writers who were influenced and encouraged by her writing. The play takes setting in a house of a black family who live in Chicago, South
America. A Raisin in the sun is generally about an African-American family’s efforts to move into an all white neighborhood to fulfill all of their dreams or to find a better
future for the family. Even though refused by all white community at the place that they are going to stay, they persist to move there.
B. Approach of the Study
In order to analyze the play A Raisin in the Sun, the writer uses the psychological approach as the most suitable approach to be applied in this study
because the writer studies on the main character’s motive of life in the play itself. Rohrberger and Woods in Reading and Writing about Literature divided literary
approaches to literature into five basic sections. There are: formalist approach, biographical approach, psychological approach, sociocultural-historical approach,
and mythopoeic approach 1971: xi. 27
