Reading Kate Chopin’s “The Awakening” and Zora Neale Hurston’s “Their Eyes Were Watching God” Together: Part I

Over the past week, I reread Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899) and Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) in preparation for some upcoming episodes of Classics and Coffee. I’ve read each of these novels multiple times, at various stages in my life, and I’ve taught each of them before. However, I’ve never read them in such close proximity to one another, in the same week, one right after the other. As I read them together, I kept thinking about the ways these two texts speak to one another, even though almost forty years separates them.

When thinking about Southern literature, or even just American literature, looking at Chopin’s and Hurston’s most famous novels provides a critical lens to examine the texts that we deem “critical” to the formation of the canon. Today, I want to briefly look at some of the similarities between these two novels but also at some important distinctions. I can’t cover everything in this post, so it may be a few posts. In these posts, I want to highlight the similarities and differences in these novels in order for readers to think about the ways that these texts speak to one another and what that conversation says to us.