by Molly Brooks
Although Zora Neale Hurston is today widely known and praised for her
contribution to American literature, this recognition has been long
delayed. Hurston's work virtually disappeared from the literary
landscape after first printings and did not fully reappear until 1973
when Alice Walker "rediscovered" Hurston's work, particularly
Their Eyes Were Watching God, thereby reclaiming its
importance to African-American literature. The disappearing act is
not as incredible as it may seem to 1990s readers; examining three
major schools of literary criticism in the 1930s provides important
clues to understanding the cause of the marginalization of Hurston's
work. The schools include the Left, which was strongly supported by
Proletarian Realist Mike Gold, the "high aesthetic" (Edel xvii) or
"intellectuals" such as Edmund Wilson, and the Harlem Renaissance, of
which Alain Locke provides essential documentation, definition, and
support. These divisions of literary criticism reveal philosophies
and social and cultural goals of literature for the 1930s that
exclude Hurston's work in the traditions of folk tale, her use of
myth, colloquial narration, and her representation of Black culture
completely within a Black community.
In the midst of the Great Depression, a time of economic disaster and of seemingly spiraling social, moral, and spiritual decline in America, literary critics called out for a new culture and new American values (Edel xviii). Among them was Edmund Wilson, who urged the creative forces in America to build foundations for "new social forms, new social order, and new human values" (Edel xviii). Wilson was obsessed with national newness, believing (like a true modernist) that America's recovery depended on creating new order from the chaos and destruction of the present. He wrote that "old conceptions. . . should be 'dynamited' and new ones, 'as shocking as necessary, substituted'" (Edel xvii). Specifically, Wilson sought nationalism as America's societal keystone. In his utopian manifesto, Wilson proposed "temporary dictatorship of class-conscious workers" (Edel xviii) until a new nationalism was achieved. The "high aesthetic" yielded to the leftist concern with the proletariat; however, Wilson diverged from this view. In light of his hope for a new nationalism, Wilson called for the intellects to bond with proletarians in an effort to strengthen national unity.
As a devoutly leftist philosopher, critic, and writer, Mike Gold, too, perceived the desperate need in 1930s America for new American values and culture. Gold's hope for a new social forms, human values, and American culture, resided in the establishment of socialism in America (Folsom 7) rather than in the invocation of a new nationalism. Striving beyond Wilson's push for a bond between the classes, Gold suggests that American writers should seek "a knowledge of working-class life in America gained from first-hand contacts" (Gold 188). Thus, Gold called not for middle-class workers to bond with the proletariat, but for the proletariat to represent themselves in American literature. According to Gold and leftist thinking of the 1930s, the working class should provide the new voices of American literature, and their lives should be the stuff of it. In the new culture, Gold imagined a "new writer" (Gold 188) who would be the laborer himself. In his call for a proletarian literature, Gold proposed transcending representation of proletarian life and worked in favor of Proletarian Realism, in which the only the voice was the voice of the masses. For the left, the new American culture would be "the culture of the world's millions" (Gold 204). Rejecting the tradition of the past, Gold called, too, for an unromanticized view of this life, without dramatizing tragedy and despair in proletarian life. Thus, Gold encouraged a utilitarian, almost journalistic approach to literature, proposing that "literature is useful, has a social function" (Gold 206).
Using literature to serve a social function was also an important element of the writings of the Harlem Renaissance. Alain Locke, a central figure in the Harlem Renaissance, was also interested in newness and in the possibilities that the Depression's destruction allowed for the creation of new social forms. Locke criticized Hurston's work because (in his opinion), it completely lacked social critique. Although this criticism is debatable, it reflects Locke's view of literature in the 1930s and reveals the importance of role of literature as a social critique and forum for social change. Unlike Gold, however, artistry in African-American literature was equally important to Locke. Therefore, he both praised Hurston for her realistic, colloquial narration and the mythic quality of her work and criticized it for the absence of social commentary. Locke expressed the importance of both the social and artistic aspects of literature for Harlem Renaissance: "the social promise of our recent art is as great as the artistic" (Locke 52). Thus, Locke understood the stigmatizing convention that Black writers of the 1930s were "supposed to write about the 'Race Problem'" (Howard 33), but he also valued literature as an effective vehicle for social criticism and change.
Although Gold and Wilson did not directly criticize Hurston's work as Locke did, the basic philosophies of each school of criticism prevent the characterization of Their Eyes Were Watching God as a primary literary influence in the 1930s. Simply, "[Hurston] wanted to exalt black people and black culture" (Howard 6). For Wilson and his "intellects," the folk tale quality and all-black community of Hurston's work would lack a necessary sense of nationalism and creation of social and aesthetic forms. While the criticism of Mike Gold and the Left would appreciate the realism of Hurston's narrative voice, it would exclude her from their movement on the basis of the rural setting of her work and the lack of specific examination of the working class. Locke and other participants in the Harlem Renaissance, while appreciating the artistry of Hurston's work, criticize its lack of social critique, particularly because it is based in a racially homogenous community. Although it impossible to definitively label the relationship of these schools of thought and Hurston's "disappearance" as that of cause and effect, the facts suggest the possibility that this might be the case. As major schools of criticism of 1930s literature, the Left, the "intellects," and the Harlem Renaissance had the power to decrease the influence and power of Hurston's work. Hurston's literature did not promote the philosophies of any of these major literary schools; thus, it was all too easy for Hurston's work to slip into near-obscurity.
