Zora Neale Hurston Research Paper

Annabelle Fowler

Mrs. Garvey

English 3 Honors

30 January 2016

Rough Draft

"It is one of the blessings of this world that few people see visions and dream dreams" (Hurston). An author, especially during the Harlem Renaissance which immediately followed World War One, is someone who took their dream, acted upon it, and made it into something tangible on paper. An author takes their thoughts and creates something beautifully unique each and every time. Being an author takes a lot of strength in order to find your place in the overpopulated industry of up and coming authors-to-be. In any industry, not just writing, it takes a while to find one's special voice and style. A well respected author of the Harlem Renaissance, Zora Neale Hurston wrote

Their Eyes Were Watching God, a novel that acts as direct evidence of her writing style using southern diction, her influential voice, and her position as a woman.
Zora Neale Hurston was born on January 7, 1891 in a rural part of Alabama ("Zora Neale Hurston is Born"). She was a Harlem Renaissance writer who lived during the first half of the 20th century. The Harlem Renaissance was a time of liberal arts that stretched from 1917 to the 1930's. It was a time of great black liberal arts that expressed their racial pride in America (Wormser). Along with being a well credited author, she was a civil rights activist and black heritage spokesperson. Having grown up in a primarily black town - Eatonville, Florida - Hurston was shielded from segregation and racism in her adolescent years. Both her parents were former slaves in Alabama before they moved to Florida when she was just a toddler. Hurston worked multiple jobs to keep busy and to pay for her education. She "studied anthropology at Barnard" and she also took some time off to study "voodoo in Haiti" ("Zora Neale Hurston is Born"). She is most famous for her work Their Eyes Were Watching God. During her time this book was harshly criticized for not addressing black discrimination or politics but is still being studied today in universities across the nation (Wormser). When Zora Neale Hurston died on January 28, 1960 she "had published more books than any other black woman in America" ("Zora Neale Hurston is Born"). It was not until the 1970's, shortly after her death, that her works were rediscovered. They began being used in woman's literature studies and by "black-studies scholars" ("Zora Neale Hurston is Born").
Zora Neale Hurston had a very distinctive writing style. Their Eyes Were Watching God works as a perfect example of the "3 d's" she used. The "3 d's" in her case would be diction, dialect, and description. Hurston's heritage is also noted for had influencing a major impact on her writing style. She was raised, and lived until her adolescence, in Eatonville, Florida and her best selling novel, along with a couple smaller pieces, were based in Florida. The story began and ended in the same at the time small, black town of Eatonville. This showed how Hurston kept the roots of her upbringing in Eatonville in her work. Hurston was a very religious person, and expressed that with her strong, deep diction. In Their Eyes Were Watching God she claimed that there were "two things everybody's got tuh do fuh themselves. They got tuh go tuh God, and they got tuh find out about livin' fuh themselves" (Hurston 12). She incorporated religion into a majority of her pieces, keeping her grounded in her faith and morals (Berridge). Even after receiving an education from Barnard, she continued to write with the choppy dialect she grew up using, talking, and writing with ("Zora Neale Hurston is Born"). Hurston tied the improper grammar and "spelling-it-like-it-sounds" method into a novel, that would later be a top selling book, to give her writing a raw feeling behind it (Vrotsos). And it worked. Hurston used description and similes when describing things personal to her, such as love, marriage, and faith. "Love is lak de sea. It's uh movin' thing, but still and all, it takes its shape from de shore it meets, and it's different with every shore" (Hurston 77). Her descriptive adjectives gave the story character and feeling that other authors are unable to replicate because of her unique writing style. The "3 d's", used the way she did, are a way to decipher Hurston from other authors and to make her stand out.
An influential voice makes all the difference in the success of an author. Hurston used her ethnicity to her favor and made a voice in American literature during the Harlem Renaissance. The Harlem Renaissance was in short a "cultural, social, and artistic exploration...between the end of World War One to the middle of the 1930's" (Wormser). In her famous works she is known for "[preserving] authentic African-American traditions and voices" (Vrotsos). Although she did authentically write about her race's role in America, she is commonly critiqued for not working to change the 'black' stereotype. She instead agreed with the stereotypes, including poor grammar (Vrotsos). She used sayings and phrases like "lawd don't let him love nobody else but me" and "all Ah wants things sweet wid mah marriage lak when you sit under a pear tree and think. Ah…" in her writing to add to the authentic feel her work gives off (Hurston 104, 72). Along with her writing, she helped the Harlem Renaissance promote its theme of "racial pride" with her influential voice (Wormser). Hurston incorporated that theme and the theme of a woman's strength into her writing style. She is also critiqued for her lifestyle, lots of short relationships with different men and her views on politics." Someone is always at my elbow reminding me that I am the granddaughter of slaves. It fails to register depression with me" (Hurston). Hurston never joined the big racial movement but discreetly made comments about segregation and black pride. Her book shows the disgust whites had for blacks during this time. "You got mo’ nerve than me. Ah jus’ couldn’t see mahself married to no black man. It’s too many black folks already. We oughta lighten up de race" (Hurston 64). The primarily white published critics at this time disagreed with her and the Harlem a Renaissance itself. These critics, and many other factors, made it difficult for people to appreciate her work itself, which led to her not being notably recognized until after her passing. Today in the twenty-first century Their Eyes Were Watching God is studied, analyzed, and appreciated in classrooms, and homes, across the globe.
As a woman, Zora Neale Hurston put a personable, warm, relatable feel into her writing pieces.

Women study courses all over the country, continent, and even the world use Hurston's book Their Eyes Were Watching God in their classes. The book is good for women's studies because it shows "physical and psychological changes [of main character Janie Crawford]", who apparently directly reflects Zora Neale Hurston's personality (Berridge). The story of Ms. Crawford's roller coaster of a life is considered, by professionals, to be a frame story that can be interpreted to fit anyone's story at any point in their life. A frame story usually has an emphasized setting or background with strong characters. This is exactly what Zora Neale Hurston did with her emphasized background of Eatonville and the Everglades. "She was stretched on her back beneath the pear tree soaking in the alto chant of the visiting bees, the gold of the sun and the panting breath of the breeze when the inaudible voice of it all came to her" (Hurston 11). She also used the role of Janie as a strong character through her emotional ups and downs in life, ranging from the loss of her love of her life to discrimination to little things. Her iconic line "ah'm born but ah ain't dead. No tellin' whut ah'm liable to do yet" shows how her writing style relates to not just a woman of her time, but how it also relates to women today (Hurston 56). It metaphorically, and discreetly, shows parallels between Janie Crawford

and the average woman who lives today (Berridge). Her story helps puts her position as a woman in perspective for those reading it. "She knew now that marriage did not make love. Janie’s first dream was dead, so she became a woman" (Hurston 114). Critics have analyzed that this line was intended to mean that a girl does not become a woman until she experiences some sort of hardship. Although this is true, it was meant to be Hurston's way of saying men and women are equal in strength (Berridge). When writing Their a Eyes Were Watching God Hurston never imagined what the book would become today. By the time of her death in the 60's she never got to fully see the potential the book had to shape and change someone's path of life. She was considered "ahead of her time" with her strong intellect expressed in her novel (Vrotsos). Hurston is a widely admired woman for her strength and success during the first half of the twentieth century.
Zora Neale Hurston had a dream to become a published writer. She persevered as an African American woman in the twentieth century and acted upon her dream to excel in the writing industry. After much persistence she left the world merely with her thoughts on paper, but what better way to leave than like that? Author's often have very different writing styles varying in dialect, sentence structure, format and much more. Hurston expressed her personal writing style in her best selling novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. She used her deep authentic southern diction, her strong influential voice and her notable position as a woman in her favor when establishing her iconic writing style. Zora Neale Hurston is recorded as saying "I want a busy life, a just mind, and a timely death," and that is exactly what she accomplished (Hurston).

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