Comparison of Hurstons Their Eyes Were Watching God and Walkers Color

A Comparison of Their look Were Watching God and The warp Purple Of Zora Neale Hurstons novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, Alice Walker says it speaks to me as no novel, past or present, has ever done. Though 45 years separate Their Eyes Were Watching God and The Color Purple, the two novels embody many similar concerns and methods. Hurston and Walker write of the experience of uneducated rural southern black women. They find a wisdom that give notice transform our communal relations and our spiritual lives. As Celie in The Color Purple says, referring to God If he ever listened to poor colored women the world would be a different place, I can tell you. Hurstons Their Eyes Were Watching God depicts the process of a womans coming to consciousness, finding her voice and developing the forcefulness to tell her story. This fresh and much-needed perspective was met with incomprehension by the male literary establishment. In his review in New Masses, Richard Wright said the novel lac ked a basic intellect or theme that lends itself to significant interpretation. Hurstons dialogue, he said, manages to catch the psychological movements of the Negro folk mind in their pure simplicity, but thats as far as it goes. . . . . The sensory sweep of her novel carries no theme, no message, no thought. Many male reviewers and critics have reacted with similar hostility and incomprehension to The Color Purple. But to be trick to the definitions these and other women writers give to womens experience is to deny the validity of that experience. For Hurstons heroine, Janie, self-discovery and self-definition consist of learning to recognize and trust her inner voice, while rejecting the formulations others try to impose upon her. Increasin... ... 181-202. Tate, Linda. No billet Like Home Learning to Read Two Writers Maps // A Confederate Weave of Women. Fiction of the Contemporary South. The University of Georgia Press, Athens, Georgia & London, 1994 Wade-Gayler, Gloria. B lack, Southern, Womanist The Genius of Alice Walker // Southern Women Writers. The New Generation. Ed. By Tonette Bond Inge. The University of Alabama Press, Touscaloosa & London, 1990 Critical Essays on Alice Walker. Ed. By Ikenna Dieke. Greenwood Press, Westpoint, Connecticut, London, 1999 Modern Critical Views. Alice Walker. Ed. by Harold Bloom. Chelsea House Publishers. New York & Philadelphia, 1989 Walker, Alice. The Color Purple. Harcourt Bruce Jovanovich, Publishers. New York, San Diego, London, 1992 --. decision Celies Voice, Ms., December 1985, 72--. Meridian. New York Simon and Schuster, 1976.