The Responsibility in Representation: Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God

Abstract

Their Eyes Were Watching God was published in 1937: in the middle of severe whirlwind of ideological debates in Afro-American literary arena. When Zora Hurston put the work out to the world, Richard Wright, so called belligerent proponent for Afro-American literature as a battlefield in which black life should be represented in the raw and it's harshness is to alarm both white and black complacency, unhesitantly called the novel counterrevolutionary. Wright grumbled that "Miss Hurston seems to have no desire whatever to move in the direction of serious fiction." Another influential Harlem Renaissance figure like Alain Locke reduced the novel to "folklore fiction at best" dismissing it's literary value to such point of an anthropological episode." Those above are main responses, mainly depreciating and hostile in it's nature, to Hurston's work around at the time of publication; it's lack of seriousness as a ficton, naive compromise to the traditional image of the Negro who always laugh and shed tears.