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Research paper on zora neale hurston
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Zora neale hurston and the role of women's rights on Their Eyes Were Watching God
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Delia, a flower in a rough of weeds. That is what I got from this story in one sentence, although knowing my grammar possibly not. Hurston’s tale of a shattered woman, gives us a glimpse into what was possibly the life of women at that time. There were many convictions against men in the story, although it may have been unintentional, not to say she was a hard-core feminist there were episodes of male remorse.
Narrator, this was a third person account, thus leaving much to the imagination. The conversation’s language was left as if truly taken from an African American speaker in the south in such a time. The way Hurston made the scenery appear before me was like a white sheet gets stained with red wine, unable to wash out of my mind. The narration was very brut in a grammatical manner, giving a wash bucket effect of never being settled.
Many of the story’s aspects were dominated by setting a slow rise and crashing climax. There were many such climaxes, Pg. 2, Pg. 7, and Pg. 9, give this such evidence. The flow kept me interested, and would grasp my attention as a TV show would. Although is context was far from a TV show. There was much talk about civil lifestyles by the town folk, which were a particularly an odd selection of people to intervene in such a story. Although the reaction witnessed by this allowed us to get another insight, from a second person perspective.
Hurston was very clear about here point of irony, especially by the ending. Hurston kept constant the folk lore style of story telling, by keeping a moral to the story. Many of the stories aspects in moral were shown indistinctively. There were not many hidden messages, Hurston made the story clear to let us easily grasp the moral. There were fore-telling of the end through out the story, such as in the 1st paragraph Pg.
"Sweat" by Zora Neale Hurston is filled with symbolism ranging from images that are easily captured to things that require a little bit more insight. Religion has apparently played a major role in Hurston's life, readily seen in "Sweat" with the references to a snake and Gethsemane. Symbolism plays a big part of this story and after analyzing these, they give the story a deeper meaning and can enlighten the reader as to the full meaning of "Sweat".
Janie sets out on a quest to make sense of inner questions. She does not sit back and
The late first lady Eleanor Roosevelt once said, "Hate and force cannot be in just a part of the world without having an effect on the rest of it." Mrs. Roosevelt means that although one person may feel alone through the hardships one faces, one has millions beside oneself who can relate to and understand what one may feel. Zora Neale Hurston shows that even though Janie's family and spouses continue to be abusive and harsh toward Janie, their hate and control left her stronger than before, preparing her for the next challenges thrown at her. In Their Eyes Were Watching God, the deaths' of close relatives and family positively affect Janie because she tends to become more educated and wiser with each death she overcomes in the obstacles she calls her life.
From the beginning of society, men and women have always been looked at as having different positions in life. Even in the modern advanced world we live in today, there are still many people who believe men and women should be looked at differently. In the work field, on average women are paid amounts lower than men who may be doing the exact same thing. Throughout the novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston brings about controversy on a mans roles. Janie Crawford relationships with Logan, Joe and Tea Cake each bring out the mens feelings on masculine roles in marital life.
The principle characters in Sweat by Zora Neale Hurston, are Delia, a hardworking washerwoman who plays the role of the protagonist and her abusive husband Sykes, the antagonist, who commits adultery and is physically abusive to his wife. Hurston writes, “Two months after the wedding he had given her the first beating “(Zora Hurston 2). Sweat explores the social issue of domestic violence by not only representing the subject in clear and extreme images but by using a variety of literary tools to emphasize the betrayal in common terms for that period with historical similarities.
Perhaps because of her anthropological training and her doubly marginal status as an African-American woman, Hurston invented a strategy that enabled her to speak from the margins. She employed an African-American language, a symbolic system that reconstituted representation itself and disrupted the dualism of the dorninant discourse. "The Negroes...very words are action words... the suggestiveness of African-American art transforms the spectator into an actor who participat[es] in the performance himself carrying out the suggestions of the performer" (Hurston, 49). Blackness becomes experiential rather than essential, a "quality that permeates and suffuses rather than defines"(Wald, 87). The vitality of the language blurs oppositional boundaries and whatever the meaning of 'blackness' is, the performer and spectator are mutually involved in a relationship that undermines the representation of blackness as sin against a moral white background (Wald, 87).
Hurston begins the essay in her birth town: Eatonville, Florida; an exclusively Negro town where whites were a rarity, only occasionally passing by as a tourist. Hurston, sitting on her porch imagines it to be a theatre as she narrates her perspective of the passing white people. She finds a thin line separating the spectator from the viewer. Exchanging stances at will and whim. Her front porch becomes a metaphor for a theater seat and the passers
Delia, in this short story, demonstrates the agency that women have in the face of oppression, and the way they resist sexism and all of its economic and social implications.
Hurston does not concern herself with the actions of whites. Instead, she concerns herself with the self-perceptions and actions of blacks. Whites become almost irrelevant, certainly negative, but in no way absolute influences on her
“What she doin’ coming back here in dem over-halls? Can’t she find no dresses to put on?” Hurston's writing is full of conversations using colloquial diction. He uses a regional dialect to create the picture in your head of what the people speaking may look like by how they talk. In this excerpt, it describes a group of men and some women sitting on a porch watching another local women walk to her home. They are judging every move she makes. “What dat ole forty year ole ‘oman doin’ wild her hair swingin’ down her back lak some young gal?” The way he portrays their accents makes me picture them as somewhat idiotic.
Zora Neale Hurston’s short story “Sweat” presents the efforts and endurance of a very strong yet miserable wife over the course of fifteen years of marriage with an abusive, disloyal, and odious husband who thinks he has lost his power and control over his wife and try to get them back by mistreating, beating and cheating on her. Sykes’ continual abuse against Delia stems from his psychological issues of insecurity related to both not being able to provide and the racial intolerance of the times.
In Zora Neale Hurston’s short story “Sweat” the author not only focuses on portraying different gender roles but also focuses on the theme of good versus evil within the marriage of Sykes and Delia. Hurston portrays Delia as the good in the marriage and Sykes as the evil. The use of religious symbolism and imagery is the support that makes this theme so strong and influential. As the short story progresses you witness the transition of a clean, moral woman who overcomes evil.
Mrs. Hurston not only uses the vernacular of the Deep South she also uses Southern traditional legends. One example of this is how the book refers to death. Death is called the, "Square-toed one," that comes from the West. Even if the reader is not familiar with referring to death as the, "Square-toed one," the use of traditional legends helps to make us feel like we are where the book took place.
In conclusion, Hurston was a modernist writer who dealt with societal themes of racism, and social and racial identity. She steps away from the folk-oriented style of writing other African American authors, such as Langston Hughes, and she addresses modern topics and issues that relate to her people. She embraces pride in her color and who she is. She does not hate the label of “colored” that has been placed upon her. She embraces who she is and by example, she teaches others to love themselves and the color of their skin. She is very modern. She is everybody’s Zora.
In literature, the significant themes of a story can sometimes be developed within dramatic death scenes. With that being said, Zora Neale Hurston 's presents an unappreciated housewife and her high-class husband 's sinful ways which ultimately lead to the husband 's unplanned death, in her short story “Sweat”. The concluding death scene can best be described as illustrating the theme as “what goes around comes around”. Sykes was abusive and tried plotting his wife, Delia 's, death by using a rattlesnake, but his plan backfired and it was Sykes that was killed in the end.