Black Women Writers
Writers present the perspective of their particular community and social order. Readers of literature are enabled to see into different lives, different communities, different worlds. Black women writers take the reader into the world of women and the world of the African-American alike, especially important in a world where black women suffer dual discrimination and numerous indignities because of their status, while these writers show that these women have personalities and thoughts and lives that link them to all of humanity even as they also exhibit certain cultural differences that make them unique.Zora Neale Hurston emerged as part of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and was influenced by Langston Hughes. She represented a feminist-African American mix, though her own personality quirks kept her from developing as fully as she might have. Her works, though, provide readers with a view of the beginnings of both feminism and a different view of African American culture in the twentieth century. Hurston languished in obscurity for decades, in part because much of the literary world does indeed ignore women and blacks and the works they produce. However, as feminist literary criticism continues to diversify in terms o
The response from scholars of all kinds has, accordingly, been to treat the novel from many angles. A reconsideration of the use of feminist analysis in the study of the novel and of Hurston's own critique provides illuminating commentary on the present state of feminist literary criticism. One example of such a conflict is that between her analysis of the capitalist mode, and its effect on women, and the more 'purely' feminist, black feminist, and "racial" critiques in which she engages. The novel tends as well to be much harsher about the narrow-mindedness of the town and the way Janie makes her own choices and often does so as a deliberate challenge to what others see as proper. Such a release would, she predicted, engender expression that was qualitatively distinct from that of men. The point of feminism in terms of women's writing was to release what was unique in women from the thrall of male dominance. As Cixous described it, this new writing would produce texts in which women cried out,I, too, overflow; my desires have invented new desires, my body knows of unheard-of songs. There are contradictions, therefore, that exist within Their Eyes Were Watching God that remain unresolved but are, as this analysis will show, highly suggestive in themselves and demonstrate how, for Hurston in the 1930s, the ambivalence that characterizes current feminism was already a reality. The film is more a soap opera than a serious examination of the social order, and the novel is simply more revealing about black women and their lives in the 1920s and 1930s than is the film. In both cases, the relationships these women have with men form a central issue, one that finds the women testing their sense of the world and learning about themselves as individuals. But, as Gates has pointed out in his discussion of the manner in which the use of two voices in the text "celebrate[s] the psychological fragmentation of both of modernity and of the black American", this type of "unresolved tension" within the novel is typical of Hurston's modernism (Gates 204). There are also conflicts between certain aspects of Hurston's own analyses that similarly prefigure the internal conflicts that characterize today's feminist criticism. Her anger and sense of revolutionary rage would likely be muted in service of the more overt and feminine aspects of her life and relationships, which would be a disservice to her story as told by Brooks. As the film version of Their Eyes Were Watching God shows, though, that aspect is often made the core of dramatic versions of written works even if there is something different and of greater import in the work. Likely those would be white executives, but a black perspective might not be any more dedicated to the rougher edges of the original, as can be seen in the fact that the movie from the Hurston novel was produced by Oprah Winfrey, who also seems to have been drawn more to the romance angle than to the social concerns of the novel.
Common topics in this essay:
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Acceptance Essays
