Hurston, Zora Neale - Laurie Champion (essay date fall 2001)
Laurie Champion (essay date fall 2001)
SOURCE: Champion, Laurie. “Socioeconomics in Selected Short Stories of Zora Neale Hurston.” In Southern Quarterly 40, no. 1 (fall 2001): 79-92.
[In the following essay, Champion asserts that Hurston depicts strong women in her stories who “develop independence in spite of oppressive social conditions, particularly those influenced by a politics of gender- and ethnic-biased economics.”]
Zora Neale Hurston sets most of her work in or near the all-black town of Eatonville, Florida,1 which she uses to portray lifestyles of rural African Americans by showing folk customs and beliefs, communal attitudes, and voodoo practices.2 Hurston's choice of Eatonville as setting reflects one of her major artistic philosophies, central to which is her need to celebrate African American culture. As she explains in her well-known essay “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” she realized that...
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