The Gilded Six-Bits | Breaking Out of the Conventions of Dialect: Dunbar and Hurston
In the following essay, Gayl Jones argues that through the use of dialect in the story the reader is brought inside the African-American community depicted in the story, which opens the possibility for a more complex examination of the characters.
Hurston's ‘‘The Gilded Six-Bits’’ (1933) takes us out of the conventional restrictions observed in Dunbar. This transformation is partly due to the shift in perspective: we are inside rather than outside the black community and there is not the same double-conscious concern with an exclusive white audience. Because there are not the same motives of the anti-lynching story or of the tradition of protest literature in general, Hurston can be concerned with the relationship between a man and woman in ‘‘a Negro settlement.’’ She can expand the range beyond ‘‘humor...
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