A Few Thoughts on Richard Wright’s Critique

            As we discussed in class earlier this week, following the publication of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, Richard Wright became one of the most prominent critiques, mentioning several aspects of Hurston’s writing in his own article “Between Laughter and Tears.” Wright criticized Hurston in writing, saying that “Hurston can write, but her prose is cloaked in that facile sensuality that has dogged the Negro expression since the days of Phillis Wheatley.” He goes on to say “Her dialogue manages to catch the psychological movements of the Negro folk-mind in their pure simplicity, but that’s as far as it goes.” Wright seemed to dislike the fact that Hurston’s writing included very little about protest and social commentary, which in his perspective, was “proper” and “necessary” for black literature (at the time). He comments on the fact that her dialogue only adds to the flowery, idealistic setting and goes no further than that. In my perspective, while some of Wrights points hold value, I think he overgeneralized black writing in that it all had to be protest literature. However, it does seem like Hurston avoided making her novel about protest altogether, purposefully or not, making Wright partly correct.

            As Mr. Mitchell assigned the ten minute writing prompt in class asking our opinion on Wright’s critique, like I mentioned before, I held a sort of neutral stance.

In my point of view, its true that protest was not the largest point Hurston was trying to get across, instead, she focused more on the strong character of Janie and her many marriages as well as capturing the general setting of the small southern town of Eatonville and the dynamic there. Hurston included the character of Ms. Tyler and other minor events that seemed related to protest and a social commentary of the time, but we know after finishing the book, that these events were very much in the minority. In this aspect, Wright is accurate in identifying that compared to his novel Native Son and other black literature of the time such as Invisible Man, Their Eyes Were Watching God doesn’t focus on protest as much.

However, I think there is a line to how much of Wrights critique is valid. In Wrights perspective, the non-inclusion of protest is a problem and a fault in Hurston’s novel. While the inclusion of protest is in fact minor, by no means does this suggest a fault in Hurston’s writing. Hurston has a seemingly different point to make than Wright, and in my perspective, this doesn’t make the book any worse. Additionally, Hurston may very well have had protest in mind when writing her novel, just not the same emphasis on racial protest Wright focuses on in his novels. Using a strong independent woman as the main character that chooses what to do on her own --concerning her many marriages and actions in general-- is itself a protest to traditional literature at the time and could have been the “deeper theme” Hurston was trying to make in her novel. It’s also possible that Hurston had no “deeper meaning” about protest to make and instead wanted to write a novel capturing the realistic Southern lifestyle of the town, which she went in such detail to describe. Either way, even though Wright is correct in some of his assumptions, some of his larger points about the inclusion of protest in my point of view aren’t valid.