Striving to dream big is easy to comprehend in the safety of our home, but going outside to “jump at the sun” results in the promise of being burned. In Dust Tracks on a Road by Zora Neale Hurston, endless opportunity is only a conceivable concept in the protection of the
indoors, whereas the outdoors expose the treacherous reality of high hopes.
Masculinity versus femininity has never been a neglected element of writing, from books like Lolita by Vladamir Nobakov. Like many other writers, she meticulously fruits and flowers to depict the more feminine side of her life – the abundance of plants, food, and children – whereas beef is used to create a masculine image – the lack of beef in her life opposed to the bounty of chicken and fish. When Hurston describes her trip to New York, she expresses her surprise at the price of flowers that were
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plentiful back home: “A dollar for a Cape jasmine bloom! Folks up north there must be crazy.” Because of the great amount of Cape jasmine blooms back in the south, the lack of them in the unfamiliar territory of the north is strange. Femininity is more prominent in her childhood than masculinity, as represented through the floral imagery and the frequent mentions of her mother. Her father is mentioned sparingly, showing the absence of masculinity in her childhood. However, the unequal presence of masculine and feminine figures in her life doesn’t seem to affect her negatively. Opposite ideas often times complement each other, and the idea of inside compared to outside in Hurston’s piece highlights the differences of the two.
Hurston talks about her home positively, as a place where she could openly dream without being oppressed for it; as her mother said, “… jump at de sun. We might not land on the sun, but at least we would get off the ground.” The outdoors, on the other hand, is written as tense and dangerous, and her father contradicts her mother by “predicting dire things” for her. Because her mother is usually inside at home and her father is often outside in the real world, the metaphors they’re written as portray the indoors versus the outdoors. At home, nothing could hurt Hurston – she’s able to get a decent education, she has food, and she has entertainment and room to dream. In the outdoors, though, she can easily get hurt, and she has to keep her dreams out of sight because “the white folks are not going to stand for it.” Despite her idealistic mother, her father keeps his traditional, straight-laced values, although they both want what’s best for her and her
siblings. While Hurston’s childhood is filled with plenty of contradictions, her writing of it in Dust Tracks on a Road doesn’t imply that she’s unhappy as a child. If anything, she writes her early years to be quite fun and positive. With the abundance of fruits and flowers and the opposing poles of the indoors and outdoors, her childhood contains all the aspects of reality that she’d face in the real world.
The almighty American dream, commonly misconceived as the property of those who reap great materialistic wealth, has been analyzed and sought after through generations. However, this dream, “could come from anywhere and be anything you want in this country” (Goldberg), and the numerous success stories of impoverished beings proves this. This subjectiveness stems from the great diversity within human nature and the variation of goals and pleasures. The characters in novels such as The Glass Castle, To Kill a Mockingbird and the play, The Crucible, act to portray several attempts towards achieving this dream. Ultimately, the almighty American Dream manifests itself through the novels as the desire to accomplish stability and content within one’s
Joe, although actually being black, is depicted as a white man to portray his power in the community. One of the ways Hurston depicts Joe as being white is through the description of his house. The narrator is describing Joe’s personality according to the townspeople’s view of him when Hurston writes, “The rest of the town looked like servant quarters surrounding the ‘big house’. And different from everybody else's in the town he put off moving in until it had been painted, in and out. And look at the way he painted it-a gloaty sparkly white” (p. 47). By Joe’s house being described
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.
Dreams prove as a powerful, motivating force, propelling an individual forward into real achievements in life. Conversely, dreams can transpire as blatantly artificial. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Winter Dreams” depicts the story of Dexter Green, a young man who dreams of achievements and works hard in a real, non-illusionary world to win them. His work in this plain, unromantic world brings him ever closer to the dream world he so desperately wants, while at the same time the dreams show themselves as decaying or empty. Unfortunately, this does not cure him of dreaming and does not push him to abandon his dreams in favor of a healthier attitude.
It’s no wonder that “[t]he hurricane scene in Zora Neale Hurston’s novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, is a famous one and [that] other writers have used it in an effort to signify on Hurston” (Mills, “Hurston”). The final, climactic portion of this scene acts as the central metaphor of the novel and illustrates the pivotal interactions that Janie, the protagonist, has with her Nanny and each of her three husbands. In each relationship, Janie tries to “’go tuh God, and…find out about livin’ fuh [herself]’” (192). She does this by approaching each surrogate parental figure as one would go to God, the Father; she offers her faith and obedience to them and receives their definitions of love and protection in return. When they threaten to annihilate and hush her with these definitions, however, she uses her voice and fights to save her dream and her life. Hurston shows how Janie’s parental figures transform into metaphorical hurricanes, how a literal hurricane transforms into a metaphorical representation of Janie’s parental figures, and how Janie survives all five hurricanes.
I think both authors would agree with this view. Both stories involve a woman and how they are viewed as well as the struggles they face. Hurston’s story is about a power struggle between men and women. She states “see God and ast Him for a li’l mo’ strength so Ah kin whip dis ’oman and make her mind.”
This paper examines the drastic differences in literary themes and styles of Richard Wright and Zora Neale Hurston, two African--American writers from the early 1900's. The portrayals of African-American women by each author are contrasted based on specific examples from their two most prominent novels, Native Son by Wright, and Their Eyes Were Watching God by Hurston. With the intent to explain this divergence, the autobiographies of both authors (Black Boy and Dust Tracks on a Road) are also analyzed. Particular examples from the lives of each author are cited to demonstrate the contrasting lifestyles and experiences that created these disparities, drawing parallels between the authors’ lives and creative endeavors. It becomes apparent that Wright's traumatic experiences involving females and Hurston's identity as a strong, independent and successful Black artist contributed significantly to the ways in which they chose to depict African-American women and what goals they adhered to in reaching and touching a specific audience with the messages contained in their writing.
The symbols that Hurston uses are necessary because it destroys the typical gender role stereotypes between men and women. This is necessary because there is such a difference between the portrayal of men and women, men often being superior to women. Hurston uses her symbol to show some equality between men and women, or at points women can also be superior to men. A symbol found in Hurston’s story, “Sweat,” that Hurston uses to destroy the gender stereotypes of men and women is the bed.
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 Despite the current scrutiny that her race faces she asserts to the reader that her race and color define her as a person and does not determine her identity.
How does Hurston experience and transcribe the of everyday resistance if she herself as an outsider? Hurston encounters resistance from the workers on the job when she first arrives.(15) In these early scenes at the lumber camp, her narrative style is present as a clumsy "I" who can't quite fit in. She drives a fancy car, she wears expensive clothing, and the workers suspect that she is a detective. She explains what she had to do to become part of the "inner circle": "I had first to convince the 'job' that I was not an enemy in the person of the law; and, second, I had to prove that I was their kind" (65). As she gains their trust, her narrative persona shifts more easily between first- and third-person. Finally, when she follows the men on the job, her narrative practically disappears. Instead, she situates her tales in relation to conditions in the camp. Hurston learns to overcome resistance by fitting in, and her studied invisibility enables her to display folklore's power as a discourse of nonconformity.
She even talks about how they were being generous to her. For example, Hurston says, “During this period, white people differed from colored to me only in that they rode through town and never lived there. They liked to hear me “speak pieces" and sing and wanted to see me dance the parse-me-la, and gave me generously of their small silver for doing these things, which seemed strange to me for I wanted to do them so much that I needed bribing to stop, only they didn 't know it” (539). Hurston would soon find out that when she had to leave her small town to go to a boarding school because of family changes that the real world is full of racism and discrimination towards colored people. I think this is when she realizes that she is
Everyone has a dream or aspiration that they wish to attain in the future. However, some people are faced with hardships that interrupt their desires. In Gwendolyn Brooks’ optimistic poem, “Kitchenette Building,” she utilizes metaphors, rich imagery, and contradictions to explore the relationship between challenging reality and dreams and to argue the notion that impecunious people can still have hopes. Tension can arise throughout the poem because readers often interpret this poem as a story that describes the rejection of dreams because of the harsh pressures of reality.
Perhaps God was not an everyday part of her people's lives, but when there was a problem with love or nature that was impacting their lives, God was certainly a significant and appropriate part of their lives. This title and the novel reflect one woman's journey to discover life and love while realizing God's presence through it all and immortalizes the way many people in Hurston's time must have felt regarding God and nature.
When people think of the American Dream, they usually picture a wealthy family who lives in a big house with a white picket fence. They see the husband being the breadwinner for the wife and kids, by supporting and providing the best way that he can. They also picture the wife catering to her husband 's every need. The protagonist Janie Crawford lives this American Dream but soon comes to a realization that this life isn’t her destiny. Crawford learns that love does not involve money but rather being joyful. In Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, Janie breaks the American Dream myth by living a non-traditional life through belief, happiness, and freedom.
We all have a dream, but the difference is how we realise our dream, how we obtain our dream, and how our dream changes us. This is evident in our learning of dreams and aspirations through the texts Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keys, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? by Lasse Hallström, and through my own studies of Million Dollar Baby by Clint Eastwood. These three highly acclaimed texts represent the same ideas on dreams and aspirations, which can be defined as hope, desire or the longing for a condition or achievement, but these texts express the same ideas differently, shaping our understanding of dreams and aspirations.