‘The Uses of Flowers Were Infinite’: Beauty After Catastrophe in Lorraine Hansberry’s Post-Apocalyptic Play

In Lorraine Hansberry’s posthumous speculative play What Use Are Flowers?, an elderly hermit confronts the destruction of civilization after a catastrophe and struggles to teach feral children the rudiments of a lost culture through the idea of “use.” Asked to explain the use of flowers, he answers: “the uses of flowers were infinite.” I argue that this enigmatic homage expresses a tragic-pragmatist expansion of ‘use’ from instrumental availability to inexhaustible possibility. Drawing upon Jonathan Lear’s idea of radical hope and the prophetic pragmatism of Cornel West, I suggest that Hansberry challenges accounts of ethical survival that depend on the continued legibility of stable value systems. Instead, the play proposes that beauty may protect from despair even when conceptual structures of meaning collapse. This paper will not attempt to define beauty positively, but rather considers it as the condition under which experience may still answer to something beyond pure survival.