everyone could relate. In Hurston’s time, society was not ready for such a strong voiced women to confront such topics the way she did. Her literature went deeper than her time and ours-her views on individuals, at all levels of society, triumph over time because she looked at human nature in general.The diversity and complexity of African American female writing at the turn of the century is seen in Hurston’s writing. The atmosphere, in which Hurston lived, fostered controversy. There were so many different ideas of race, gender, political awareness, status, and religion, to name a few, that many people were afraid to go against the “norm”. Not Hurston though. She viewed things based on her education and her experience, not what others thought. She wrote what she viewed and felt. It did not matter to her what people thought of her. Unfortunately, relative judgment of Hurston seems to be determined by the gender of the scholar or writer; black male scholars hold one view of her, and black female writers hold another. Mary Helen Washington, in the course of her essay on Hurston’s most popular novel, Their Eyes Are Watching God, has commented on what might be considered a skewed version of black life rendered by black authors: Jenkins 4The black writer sometimes gets his eyes so fixed on the white world and its ways of acting toward us that his vision becomes constricted. He reflects, if he is not careful, but one aspect of his people’s experiences: suffering, humiliation, degradation. And he may fail to show that Black people are more than simply reactors, that among ourselves, we have laughter, tears, and loving that are far removed from that white horror out there. (quoted in Story 28) As refuted by Ralph Story, this debate has more to do with the specific focus of the writer at a given point i...
