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Lorraine Hansberry was placed under surveillance by the Federal Bureau of Investigation prior to A Raisin in the Sun’s Broadway debut in 1959. Totalling over a thousand pages of memos, reports, and letters of investigative analysis, Hansberry’s FBI file reveals that the bureau tracked her play for Communist sympathies but also, and more surprisingly, collected interviews in which she insisted that her occupation was not playwright but housewife. This essay returns to A Raisin in the Sun, which has often been seen to uphold conservative gender ideologies of the Cold War era, to explore how Hansberry depicted radical counter-surveillance against the state through housewife characters. While historians have discussed how Black domestic workers employed in white homes became politically involved, little has been done to document how Black women countered surveillance to protect their families in their own homes. Drawing from evidence found in Hansberry’s archive at the Schomburg Center, this article contextualizes A Raisin in the Sun among her unpublished writings and the play’s manuscript drafts to argue that Hansberry deliberately subverted discourses that viewed surveillance as a practice primarily affecting individuals and families within isolated domestic environments. I show that Hansberry turned to drama to portray surveillance as a communal experience, thereby shifting narratives of surveillance from those found within earlier twentieth-century fiction depicting lone male protagonists on the run from state oversight to a dramatic oral mode that insists on communal experience through direct communication between performers and audience.

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This study draws on previous findings regarding adverbial clauses in relation to speaker and interlocutor gender in a corpus of current actual speaker data. Our aim is to examine those same relations in a corpus of Shakespeare's comedies and histories. Mondorf (2004) investigated four types of adverbial clauses in a corpus of modern speech and found that the women used more causal, conditional and purpose clauses than the men, while the men used more concessive clauses. Mondorf's explanation for this difference is that women use the three clause types that mitigate the speaker's commitment to the truth of the proposition, while men tend to use more concessives, which strengthen the commitment. She also found that in mixed-gender conversations these trends were generally intensified. However, other analyses have indicated that these patterns do not hold across contexts. Much more research is called for to understand the localized relations among adverbial clause usage, speaker gender and context in particular settings. One question to pursue is whether we can see gendered patterns of adverbial usage in historical varieties of English. Accordingly, in this study we analyse dialogue in Shakespeare's plays to ascertain whether Mondorf's findings can be extrapolated to the language of these fictional speakers. The results indicate that Shakespeare generally does not use the adverbial clauses to portray the gender of the characters in ways similar to those of actual, modern speakers. Only small differences are found, regarding purpose clauses in the histories and conditional clauses in the comedies. The analysis indicates that female and male characters speak very similarly with regard to syntax, and adverbial clauses contribute to the construction of characters in very localized contexts.

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