Zora Neale Hurston's Diction

Jacksonville is where she where Hurston “was now a little colored girl.”(14) The pain that discrimination can cause did not affect Hurston her self-pride and individuality did not allow racial difference to effect her negatively. Hurston writes “I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, I do not mind at all. I do not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood”. (14) Hurston describes how someone is always reminding her of the past transgressions of the White people. Her response is simply that the past is in the past and we must live in the present. Hurston does describe moments when she feels racial difference and her experiences with it. There are time where being amount thousands of white people the author is “a dark rock surged upon, and overswept.”(14) Additionally there are the times where the author is among just one white person in a sea of black people as she describes in her different experience with a friend at a Jazz Club. With all of these situations of difference the author describes not changing and remaining the same. The author explains pride in oneself multiple times throughout the essay stating “I am the eternal feminine” (14) and “How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my

Zora Neale Hurston, known as one of the most symbolic African American women during the Harlem Renaissance in the 1930’s. Hurston was known as a non fiction writer, anthropologist and folklorist. Hurston’s literature has served as a big eye opener during the Harlem Renaissance, celebrating black dialect and their traditions. Most of her published stories “depict relationships among black residents in her native southern Florida, was largely unconcerned with racial injustices” (Bomarito 89). Hurston was unique when it came to her racial point of views, promoting white racism instead of black racism. Even though her works had been forgotten by the time of her death, now her literature has left a bigger impact to future literature

Zora Neal Hurston was criticized by other African American writers for her use of dialect and folk speech. Richard Wright was one of her harshest critics and likened Hurston’s technique “to that of a minstrel show designed to appease a white audience” (www.pbs.org).Given the time frame, the Harlem Renaissance, it is understandable that Zora Neale Hurston may be criticized. The Harlem Renaissance was a cultural movement which redefined how America, and the world, viewed African Americans, so her folk speech could be seen as perpetuating main stream society’s view of African Americans as ignorant and incapable of speaking in complete sentences. However, others, such as philosopher and critic Alain Locke, praised her. He considered Hurston’s “gift for poetic phrase and rare dialect, a welcome replacement for so much faulty local color fiction about Negroes” (www.pbs.org).

I want to focus on the story ‘Sweat’ because it happened to be my favorite from the selected female authors we read this semester. I was very struck by the story because Hurston wasn’t afraid to speak her mind, and represents women even in a male-dominated culture. The story ‘Sweat’ takes place in a rural setting. Hurston tends to focus on relationships and conflicts in her writing. In this story, Delia is a hardworking woman. She is also strong, despite being in an abusive relationship. Her husband is portrayed as rude, and clearly doesn’t appreciate anything she does. The narrator also tells the reader how young and beautiful Delia used to look before her abusive marriage. The husband in the story is upset and mad at white people. However, Delia has to work so she defends herself and her job. The story ends with a snake bite that kills her husband. However, he was the one who brought it in the house to scare and more than likely kill Delia. I believe that Hurston’s intentions were to represent a strong female woman who held no regards for a man who mistreated her. I also believe that her intended audience was for females in general. By making Delia hardworking and strong, she is a woman who represents female empowerment. By doing so, Hurston makes women more aware that they don’t have to be consumed in a male-dominated culture, but that a woman can do as she pleases, and not have to

Paragraph: Published in during the 1900s, at a time when being colored was considered unbeneficial, “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” depicts Hurston’s audacious (for the time) pride in being an African-American woman. In order to emphasize her thesis, she employs pathos and figurative

Hurston uses diction, imagery, and tone to sum up the changed nature of the marriage between Joe and Janie and makes the reader feel angry concerning Joe, and pity concerning Janie.

The memoir “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” by Zora Neale Hurston, was first published in 1928, and recounts the situation of racial discrimination and prejudice at the time in the United States. The author was born into an all-black community, but was later sent to a boarding school in Jacksonville, where she experienced “race” for the first time. Hurston not only informs the reader how she managed to stay true to herself and her race, but also inspires the reader to abandon any form of racism in their life. Especially by including Humor, Imagery, and Metaphors, the author makes her message very clear: Everyone is equal.

In the opening sentence of the story Hurston’s writes, “It was eleven o’clock of a Spring night in Florida. It was Sunday” (Hurston, 73). The beginning signifies correct English grammar and proper sentence structure, but in seamless Zora Neale Hurston’s fashion, the dialogue from the protagonist Delia Jones reads in broken incorrect syntax, “Sykes, you quit grindin’ dirt into these clothes! How can Ah git through by Sat’day if Ah don’t start on Sunday” (74)? In her short stories Hurston’s diction is elevated with the usage of morphology with the constant exchange of word formation with infixes, affixes and the combining of word choices. Hurston’s choice of diction offered a rhymical affect that adds a melodious tone to her writing shaped by the Harlem Renaissance period. As noted in the, The Florida Historical Quarterly “Hurston blended narrator and protagonist through language” (Haskin, 207) Her writing style aid in the management of mood, tone, character depiction, movement, and atmosphere in storytelling procedures. In the commencement of her stories, the storyteller, is communicating in standard English, the third-party narrative speaks as a representative for the character waiting to find his or her voice. As the character(s) discoveries their voice, they sway the narrator, and in the conclusion the narrator and central character are speaking for each other, using equally poetic, participating language (207).

Instead, she portrays him as being racially whole and emotionally healthy. Hurston didn't want to change the world based on racial movements, she had her own ideas about things. Capturing the essence of Black womanhood was more important to her than social criticism.

Modernism is a literary style of American literature that begins in the 1920s and was ongoing until World War II. World War I, industrialization, The Great Depression, and World War II influenced many authors. These authors exemplify disillusion, loss of faith, loss of hope, and feeling of futility within their works. Hurston’s literary work, “Sweat”, a story of a black woman and her abusive husband describes Delia’s struggles against society, and the little power she has against her husband Sykes. Searching for comfort and happiness is a main focal point of Modernism within this story. Sykes does this and tries to be a snake by his evil qualities, physical abuse, and being unexpected like a rattler.

The more important in Zora Hurston's view is her personal identity. “At certain times I have no race, I am me." (14)

Instead of valuing the message one is sharing, society becomes hung up on the formality of the speaker. Hurston’s incorporation of this rough language highlights the hardships members of her community faced to move up in the ranks. They are judged immediately for their voice rather than the content of their ideas. Hurston plays off this stereotype in “Spunk” by recounting the whole story through the idiom of the rural South. Subconsciously, she is spreading awareness of the low economic and social status of her hometown and culture, and then busting the stereotype through the voice of the narrator. The voices of the townspeople mirror Hurston’s origins, and the voice of the narrator illustrates how far she had come in her education and success. Society should not stereotype minority groups because of their lack of resources that hold them back from what they are truly capable of. Unfortunately, critics such as Langston Hughes did not understand Hurston’s intentions. He “accused her of using the dialectic speech and the elements of folklore to degenerate her own people and to please whites, who expected unsophisticated language and behavior from African Americans,” (“Spunk” 296). Hurston along with the many other Harlem Renaissance characters were evidence themselves that the African American culture has unique elements that make it worth celebrating rather than a burden dragging the United States down.

In a harrowing story one woman’s search for true love, Zora Neale Hurston draws readers in through her use of literary devices throughout the book, Their Eyes Were Watching God, and influences readers to care deeply about Janie’s life. On page 166, when Tea Cake and Janie struggle to survive a raging river, Hurston creates a tone of fear through her use of word choice, similes, and sentence structure. In a book filled with suspense to see what happens to Janie next, Hurston manages to rise above that suspense and create an even larger tone of fear during this scene.

In “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” Hurston points out she realized she was colored when she went to Jacksonville. Before Hurston left Eatonille, she lived within a whole African American environment. The authors used metaphor to demonstrate that she felt colored by comparing with other people. She notes, “I found it out in certain ways; I was now a little colored girl. In my heart as well as in the mirror, I became a fast brown-warranted not to rub nor run” (186).

While in the last half of Hurston’s essay “How it Feels to be Colored Me” she reveals a strain among her color and her uniqueness as she goes back and forth between identifying with and stepping away from her race, “I feel my race. Among the thousand white persons, I am a dark rock surged upon, and over swept, but through it all, I remain myself,” (Hurston 785). Here Hurston’s imagery conveys strong depictions of a sense of racial unity against the “sharp white background” that she seeks to remove herself from (Hurston 785). Steele’s example of Staple was meant to show that jumping to any conclusion, mainly one based on a person’s race can be wrong, especially when it is impulsive. This goes along with Hurston’s belief that racial identity is important, but if it is made the sole trait of an individual it is harmfully diminishing. Hurston seeks to remove herself from the persecution African Americans once faced, and like Staple she is aware of what white people think about her, but she does not let it define her every move and change who she