The Quest Of The Silver Fleece: An Analysis

In 1911, when W.E.B. DuBois published The Quest of the Silver Fleece, the African American community stood at a critical time in the course of black history. For the first time in America, they were “free.” Looming all around was the Negro question. The whites asked “what to do with the Negro,” while the blacks asked “what shall I become?” These questions are mentioned explicitly and implicitly through DuBois’ novel. Emphasis has always been put on “great whites” attempt to answer that question. Characters like Miss Smith wanted African Americans to get an education, she believed that was salvation for blacks. Characters like Henry Cresswell wanted African Americans to sharecrop to a make him a profit and continue the tradition of enslavement. However through the novel, DuBois uses characterization to highlight the black voices, black questions and …show more content…
They were not unique events…,” (70). Gilroy’s major arguments in that particular chapter of his book was that modernity often forgets the black voices. Modernity asks, “What to do with the Negro?” However, it does not allow blacks to answer that question. Even though DuBois was highly capable of revealing what he thought about the “Negro problem,” he uses the novel to express it. He chiefly uses Zora to characterize the experience that DuBois believed African Americans should go through as they expressed modernity. His use of a dominant female as a chief vehicle to explain his thoughts was very compelling. In Rita Felski’s book, The Gender of Modernity, Fleski argues that modernism must be analyzed through the eyes of women and through a feminist perspective. The very fact that Zora is a very dominant female character, makes her characterization and analysis