Comparison of Hurstons Their Eyes Were Watching God and Walkers Color

A Comparison of Their Eyes Were ceremonial perfection and The Color purpurate 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 eld separate Their Eyes Were Watching God and The Color Purple, the two novels realise many similar concerns and methods. Hurston and Walker write of the figure of uneducated rude southern black women. They find a wisdom that can modify 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 growing the power to tell her story. This fresh and much-needed perspective was met with incomprehension by the male literary establishment. In his review in sore Masses, Richard Wright said the novel lacked a b asic idea or theme that lends itself to significant interpretation. Hurstons dialogue, he said, manages to get the psychological movements of the Negro folk mind in their pure simplicity, alone 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 distaste and incomprehension to The Color Purple. But to be blind 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 informal voice, while rejecting the formulations others try to impose upon her. Increasin... ... 181-202. Tate, Linda. No Place Like firm Learning to Read Two Writers Maps // A Southern Weave of Women. parable of the Contemporary South. The University of Georgia Press, Athens, Georgia & London, 1994 Wade-Gayler, Gloria. Black, Southe rn, 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 mod 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.