Personal Identity In Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God

In “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” Zora Neale Hurston discovers the effects of race and gender on creating one’s identity. There is often a conflict between personal identity and the identity formed by members of society, which makes it challenging to truly understand oneself. In Hurston’s novel, Janie is able to overcome opinions about her developed by other people and become the woman she wished to be, but not before she is subjected to the restrictions placed on her due to her black ethnicity. The story is based on the growth of Janie’s womanhood and independence, as well as her great triumph over her authoritarian husbands and the controlled society she lives in. Nevertheless, novelist Richard Wright has found this literary work to be “tradition which was forced upon the Negro in the theater, that is, the minstrel technique that makes ‘the white folks’ …show more content…
Though they equally rejected each other's literary aesthetic methods to depictions of racial blackness, they both shared a political aesthetic approach known as perspective. This perspective was displayed as the developing political power of black female voice in the United States. The now notorious literary review of Hurston by Wright have brought many readers to view their works as oppositional, and continue to form the ways in which we read these authors as representatives of a set of contrasts in African American literary history. Wright focused precisely on the gendered nature of Hurston’s writing and narrative illustration of voice. Wright attempted to separate his writing from Hurston's more feminine writing techniques. Wright declares Hurston's use of dialect a continuation of "minstrel technique", but she does this to express her dedication to her culture. By using strong prose in the story and the dialect in the dialogue, she is accommodating to white people while staying true to her own