dried up grape: 3

I felt that, in Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun, Ruth is the biggest round character.  At the beginning of the play, she is irritable, grumpy, difficult, and overall just unpleasant.  When her husband "reaches for her" on the first morning of the play, "she crosses away" (Hansberry, 438).  She did not give her husband the time of day, and wasn't always very nice to Travis and Beneatha.  When Ruth first discovered that she was pregnant, she is absolutely devastated and "collapses into a fit of heavy sobbing" (Hansberry, 464).  I felt sick to my stomach when it was revealed that she had already made a downpayment to abort her unborn child.  She went through such a transformation though!  Where the prospect of abortion was out of desparation, the promising future with more money and a new home changed Ruth.  She was HAPPY for once.  She started mending her relationship with Walter, and never mentioned anything else about killing her baby.  Ruth went from being willing to murder her child, to having a new, positive and hopeful outlook on life.