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

Over the past two posts, I have written some about the connections I see between Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1898) and Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). Today, I want to move away from the similarities and look at the differences in the way that each novel confronts race. On the surface, the difference in Chopin’s and Hurston’s representations of African Americans is obvious, especially considering that Chopin was a white woman from Missouri and Hurston a Black woman from Alabama. However, I want to take some time and examine the ways that each author presents race in their novels, specifically Chopin’s depictions of Black characters and Hurston’s depictions of white characters.

In Playing in the Dark, Toni Morrison points out that an Africanist presence exists at the heart of American literature, no matter the author. She points out how Edgar Allan Poe’s work uses the gothic and fear as a means of amplifying white fears of Black humanity. She writes about how Willa Cather’s Sapphira and the Slave Girl uses Sapphira’s enslavement to make Cather, who the novel is partly based on, feel better about herself. We can see race at the core of countless texts from Ernest Hemingway’s “Big Two Hearted River” to explicit confrontations of…