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
Psychological approach is used to explore the main character’s motive in revealing the idea of American Dream. As stated in Reading and Writing about
Literature Rohrberger and Woods, 1971: 81, psychological approach emphasizes on
human psychology and believes that human’s creativity, thought, behavior and other psychological aspect that give influence to literary work. By using this approach, the
writer tries to find out how the ideas of American Dream influence the character’s motive in life.
C. Method of the Study
In analyzing the study, the writer used library research in collecting the data. There were two kinds of sources used in this study. The primary source of data was a
book with an introduction by Robert Nemiroff, published by Vintage Books Edition, Random House Incorporation, New York in 1994.
The secondary sources were some books and criticisms on literature and some books that concerned with the theory of motive and the ideas of American Dream.
Some of the books were A Glossary of Literary Terms from Abrams, History of the Theatre
by Oscar G. Brockett, Reading and Writing about Literature by Mary Rohrberger and Samuel H. Woods Jr., Discovering Literature: Stories, Poems, Plays
by Hans P. Guth and L. Rico Gabrielle, An Introduction to the Study of Literature from W.H. Hudson, Understanding Unseens: An Introduction to English Poetry and
the English Novel for Overseas Students by M. J. Murphy, Mc Graw-Hill
Encyclopedia of World Drama by Stanley Hochman, Fiction: An Introduction to
28
Reading and Writing by Edgar V. Roberts and Henry E. Jacobs, An Introduction to
Fiction by Robert Stanton, How to Analyze Fiction by William Kenney, Humanistic
Psychology by John Cohen, Understanding Human Motivation: A Cognitive
Approach by John Jung, Psychology Principles and Applications by Stephen Worchel
and Wayne Shebilske, Introduction to Psychology by Rita L. Atkinson, Richard C. Atkinson, and Ernest R. Hilgard,
Characteristically American by Ralph Barton
Perry, and The American Dream by Robert H. Fossum and John K. Roth. To gather explanation of the play and the theory of American Dream, the
writer used some online sources, such as, “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire: Changing Conceptions of the American Dream
” by Matthew Warshauer, “A Raisin in the Sun” in the sparknotes.com, “The Aspirations of Women in A Raisin in the Sun” by Emilie
Browne, and PAL: Perspectives in American Literature- A Research and Reference Guide
by Paul P. Reuben. In order to have a good understanding about the meaning of American Dream,
motive and motivation the writer used some dictionaries, such as Merriam Webster’s Encyclopedia of Literature
, Dictionary of Keywords in Psychology, Random House Webster’s College Dictionary
, and New Oxford American Dictionary. Concerning with the library research, there were four steps that the writer
used in this thesis. First, the writer read the play to find the topic. Second, the writer tried to find some references, which could be used to support the topic in revealing
the idea of American Dreams. Third, the writer used some theories to analyze the 29
