constraints created by white society.In order to discover some of the underlying origins of the very different gender roles in these two novels, a complementary comparison of the autobiographies of Wright and Hurston, Black Boy and Dust Tracks on a Road, respectively, is especially useful. To contrast the gender-related themes employed by Wright and Hurston, and to subsequently analyze the roots of these differences, is to create a portrait of two drastically dissenting views and literary techniques. These views have contributed to the creation of two distinct bodies of literature in the African-American community. The answer to this gender question can only begin to adequately analyze the factors that caused two astoundingly talented African-American artists of the same time period to create literature that is so vehemently contradictory. V. JanieZora Neale Hurston, in keeping with themes dealing with personal relationships and the female search for self-awareness in Their Eyes Were Watching God , has created a heroine in Janie Crawford. In fact, the female perspective is introduced immediately. "Now, women forget all those things they don't want to remember, and remember everything they don't want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly" (Their Eyes 1). On the very first page of Their Eyes Were Watching God, the contrast is made between men and women, thus initiating Janie's search for her own dreams and foreshadowing the "female quest" theme of the rest of the novel. "Detailing her quest for self-discovery and self-definition, it [Their Eyes] celebrates her [Janie] as an artist who enriches Eatonville by communicating her understanding" (Kubitschek 22). Janie is a Black woman who asserts herself beyond expectation, with a persistence that characterizes her search for the love that she dreamed of as a girl. She understands the societal status that her life has handed her, yet she is determined to ov...
