“Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It’s beyond me.” Full of passion, irreverence, and wit, Zora Neale Hurston was a remarkable individual who insisted on creating her own, unique identity. From Notasulga, Alabama to Eatonville, Florida, she found success and her passion in the wake of heartbreak and loss. She dedicated her life to studying anthropology and folklore which led to the creation of many plays and successful novels. Hurston inevitably became a part of the Harlem Renaissance, the cultural movement that spanned the early 1902s through the 1930s. It was best known as the “New Negro Movement” and while it originated …show more content…
Eatonville was an all-black town run by an all-black government. Because of its racial makeup, prejudice was virtually nonexistent. Hurston’s father opened a carpentry shop and became a Baptist minister, while her mother worked as a seamstress and taught Sunday school. To Hurston, Eatonville was a community filled with sunshine and limitless opportunities. Hurston’s mother played a significant role in her upbringing. She assisted her children in their education and believed skin color should neither define one’s accomplishments nor serve as an excuse for failure (Marsico,19). Her father on the other hand, was less than encouraged by his daughter’s enthusiasm for literature. As a strict disciplinarian, her father had little patience for her daydreaming and tall tales. (Marsico, 20). Hurston didn’t let the lack of support from her father dampen her ambition or passion for mythology. She dove headfast into the world of folklores, fairy tales, and myths spun by the Romans ad Greeks at an early age. At the age of 13, she experienced loss and heartbreak for the first time. With her mother’s passing from an illness, she was thrust into adulthood with no prior warning. Her mother’s death only brought more violence and discontent to the Hurston household. Soon, her father sent her off to live with her older siblings Bob and Sarah at Florida Baptist Academy in Jacksonville, Florida (Marsico,
Appiah, K.A. and Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. eds. Zora Neale Hurston: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. New York: Amistad Press, Inc., 1993.
Zora Neale Hurston grew up in Eatonville, Florida also known as “Negro Town” (Hurston, 1960, p.1). Not because of the town was full of blacks, but because the town charter, mayor, and council. Her home town was not the first Negro community, but the first to be incorporated. Around Zora becoming she experienced many hangings and riots. Not only did Zora experience t...
Jones, Sharon. Rereading the Harlem Renaissance: Race, Class, and Gender in the Fiction of Jessie Fauset, Zora Neale Hurston, and Dorothy West. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2002.
Hurston describes Eatonville not in a negative way, but more as a place that is not beneficial to an independent woman like Janie. Janie Starks, the wife of the mayor, is sentenced to spend her days as a worker in the town store, hair tied up, and silent. She must deal with money and figures without being able to enjoy the “lying sessions” on the porch, or attending such impressive town events like the “muleogy.” To the reader, Eatonville represents all that is repressive in life. Janie’s nature is restricted not by the town itself, but by her status in the town.
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.
It is strange that two of the most prominent artists of the Harlem Renaissance could ever disagree as much as or be as different as Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright. Despite the fact that they are the same color and lived during the same time period, they do not have much else in common. On the one hand is Hurston, a female writer who indulges in black art and culture and creates subtle messages throughout her most famous novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God. On the other hand is Wright, who is a male writer who demonstrates that whites do not like black people, nor will they ever except for when they are in the condition “…America likes to see the Negro live: between laughter and tears.” Hurston was also a less political writer than Wright. When she did write politically, she was very subtle about stating her beliefs.
Both Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes were great writers but their attitudes towards their personal experience as an African American differed in many ways. These differences can be attributed to various reasons that range from gender to life experience but even though they had different perceptions regarding the African American experience, they both shared one common goal, racial equality through art. To accurately delve into the minds of the writers’ one must first consider authors background such as their childhood experience, education, as well their early adulthood to truly understand how it affected their writing in terms the similarities and differences of the voice and themes used with the works “How it Feels to be Colored Me” by Hurston and Hughes’ “The Negro Mother”. The importance of these factors directly correlate to how each author came to find their literary inspiration and voice that attributed to their works.
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
Zora Neale Hurston was a novelist, folklorist, and anthropologist. Zora plays an important role for the Harlem Renaissance. Zora Neale Hurston is considered one of the titans of twentieth-century African American literature. Despite that she would later fall into disgrace because of her firm views of civil rights, her lyrical writing which praise southern black culture has influenced generations of black American literary figures. Hurston’s work also had an impact on later black American authors such as Ralph Ellison, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison.
But soon she is off, true to her free-minded self. It is interesting to note that Hurston does not dwell on the socio-economic situations (i.e., slavery, poverty) that bring about the two rapes, as another black author (perhaps Richard Wright?) might have done. Hurston instead focuses on Janie’s very real, very necessary search for self-fulfillment. This kind of focus was not common in Black literature at the time of the writing (early 1930’s), and Hurston drew much criticism for what was seen as a refusal to address the social, economic and political issues that preoccupied her contemporaries such as Wright and Ralph Ellison. However, it can be argued that what Hurston was attempting, a portrayal of a culturally “self-sufficient” black community, was just as necessary for a full realization of Black consciousness as was the “protest” literature of the Harlem Renaissance.
In Zora Hurston’s essay “How It Feels To Be Colored Me” she separates her life into four sections, using vivid imagery in each, to show her audience different examples of how she overcame prejudice, not by conforming, but by remaining herself. In her first section she sketched out her childhood to show how she was “everybody’s Zora” (Hurston 4). The second section goes on to show how her skins color “fails to register depression” (Hurston 7) with her, she is proud of her history and embraces it actually. In the third section, she sets the scene in a jazz club, and describes the difference in how she feels the music and how a white man just hears it. And in the fourth section, she explains how she is not defined by her race then goes on to compare it to a brown bag. In this essay I will detail each section of Hurston’s essay and explain how each section has its own lesson to teach us and how it all ties in together.
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.
Alice Walker and Zora Neale Hurston are similar to having the same concept about black women to have a voice. Both are political, controversial, and talented experiencing negative and positive reviews in their own communities. These two influential African-American female authors describe the southern hospitality roots. Hurston was an influential writer in the Harlem Renaissance, who died from mysterious death in the sixties. Walker who is an activist and author in the early seventies confronts sexually progression in the south through the Great Depression period (Howard 200). Their theories point out feminism of encountering survival through fiction stories. As a result, Walker embraced the values of Hurston’s work that allowed a larger
One traditional cause for racism is the ignorance of one to additional races. Must to the time people have the propensity to fear what they do not comprehend. If a person has not grown up near a specific race previously, then the chance of the person being a racist to that particular group critically increases. Not always, but this happen when they do not have a real experiences with at list one of them. . The purpose of this essay is the people know the idea of being black, and I will explain how racism did not stop the dreams of a black woman. What Zora Hurston was as a person?
The civil rights movement, the great migrantion, and the abolition of slavery are the historical events that impacted the writings of Langston Huges, Countee Cullen, Zora Hurston and many other writers and entertainers who also made up the Harlem Renaissance. The Harlem Renaissance was a movement by the African American population to break free from oppression and express their unique culture through entertainment and other forms of art. The writers during this time also shared the experiences that African Americans had in the 1900s. These experiences were nothing less than racism, and inequality. When a great amount of blacks migrated north to seek liberty and freedom, they were faced with the biggest slap in the face, more oppression. "Housing