Compare And Contrast My Last Duchess And Zora Hurston

Zora Neale Hurston’s short story “Sweat” is about a woman, Delia who is physically and emotionally abused by her husband, Sykes, whose actions she struggles to overcome towards her. Through all the abuse, Delia takes pride in her hard work and her religion. In this story, Hurston uses religions and moral symbolism that controls the character’s actions throughout the plot.

    I chose to compare and contrast two women authors from different literary time periods.  Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861) as a representative of the Victorian age (1832-1901) and Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) as the spokeswoman for the Modernist (1914-1939) mindset.  Being women in historical time periods that did not embrace the talents and gifts of women; they share many of the same issues and themes throughout their works - however, it is the age in which they wrote that shaped their expressions of these themes.  Although they lived only decades apart their worlds were remarkably different - their voices were muted or amplified according to the beat of society's drum.

Zora Neale Hurston. "Sweat." Literature for Composition An Introduction to Literature. Eds. Sylvan Barnet, Ed. William Burto and William E. Cain. 10th ed. Boston: Pearson, 2014. 705-712.

I want to focus on the story ‘Sweat’ because it happened to be my favorite from the selected female authors we read this semester. I was very struck by the story because Hurston wasn’t afraid to speak her mind, and represents women even in a male-dominated culture. The story ‘Sweat’ takes place in a rural setting. Hurston tends to focus on relationships and conflicts in her writing. In this story, Delia is a hardworking woman. She is also strong, despite being in an abusive relationship. Her husband is portrayed as rude, and clearly doesn’t appreciate anything she does. The narrator also tells the reader how young and beautiful Delia used to look before her abusive marriage. The husband in the story is upset and mad at white people. However, Delia has to work so she defends herself and her job. The story ends with a snake bite that kills her husband. However, he was the one who brought it in the house to scare and more than likely kill Delia. I believe that Hurston’s intentions were to represent a strong female woman who held no regards for a man who mistreated her. I also believe that her intended audience was for females in general. By making Delia hardworking and strong, she is a woman who represents female empowerment. By doing so, Hurston makes women more aware that they don’t have to be consumed in a male-dominated culture, but that a woman can do as she pleases, and not have to

Zora Neale Hurston is unequivocally open about her race and identity in “How It Feels to Be Colored Me.” As Hurston shares her life story, the reader is exposed to Hurston’s self-realization journey about how she “became colored.” Hurston utilizes her autobiographical short story as a vehicle to describe the “very day she became colored.” Race is particularly vital in Zora Neale Hurston’s essay, “How it Feels to Be Colored Me” as she deals with the social construct of race, racism, and sustaining one’s cultural identity.

Ever since the days of World War I, women have been seen as second rate to men. They had to live up to many social standards that men didn’t have to and had strict guidelines on how to live their lives. This all changed when modernism deliberately tried to break away from Victorian Era standards in which women were subjugated to a lot more scrutiny. Ezra Pound, who was a large figure in the modernist movement, captured the spirit of the era in his famous line “Make it new!” Consequently, many writers started to experiment with many different and wild writing styles, which led to the short stories and poems we have today. The stories The Wife of His Youth and Mrs. Spring Fragrance were all written in this era of modernism. While they are written in a more traditional style of writing, both these stories have strong implications on feminism from the viewpoints of both male and female writers.

The United States is a notoriously patriarchal society in which men view women as objects and their own possessions. Through history, men consistently constrained the rights women have to equality and self-expression because they deemed women as inferior. As a result, feminist movements erupted and propelled the importance of self-identity in victims of oppression, not just in females. One element of these movements was the use of literature as social protest. Zora Neale Hurston is an author who predominantly wrote through the Great Depression to advocate for equality, specifically for African American women. In her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston employs the symbolization of hair and the motif of speech to substantiate that one must be confident in making decisions to have individual power.

Almost every man in the world can be seen as good or bad in some way, shape, or form. The novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, written by Zora Neale Hurston, has many examples of how bystanders judge a man on his actions. The book is about a woman named Janie who is on her journey to find true love and just like everyone else, she has a few problems along the way. Throughout the novel, Janie is with three different men. Two of the men she enjoys her life with, but only one of them she loves dearly. The man she falls in love with is Tea Cake. Tea Cake is seen as a bad person by the townspeople because they think he is with her for the wrong reasons. Janie is the only one that knows the real truth and recognizes that Tea Cake is just a normal

The literary element of Marxist feminism focuses on the idea in which women are oppressed through capitalism and private property. Starting from the Harlem Renaissance the Hurston’s work focuses on issues presenting on the turmoil of African-Americans from American literature in the nineteenth century on. Zora Neal Hurston’s work entitled “Sweat” is a prime example of how culture is affected by its cultures standards of economic “base”. The story was published in 1926 during a time of trial and error considering the obstacles that faced many female authors at the time. Hurston’s story “Sweat” overlaps with her novel “Their Eyes are Watching God” which also supports the idea that culture

The two female characters in "Sweat" by Zora Neale Hurston, and "A Rose for Emily by William

Zora Neale Hurston was born on January 7, 1891 in Alabama. She is known to be one of the most influential novelist of the twentieth century in African America literature. Hurston is described to be a very opinionated woman that stood for what she believed in; which reflected in some of her works. In addition to her many titles such as, being an anthropologist and short story writer, she was closely related and heavily focused on the Harlem Renaissance. Zora Neale Hurston and her political opinions placed her at odds with important figures during that time which I wholeheartedly believe played a part in the undeniable attraction that most people have towards her works. Being that Hurston was such a unique writer, to understand the ethics and themes of her and how she contributed to African American literature comes with an understanding of the background and childhood she had.

It is impossible to discuss the role of women in literature without mentioning the influence of feminism. The later in the timeline one reads, the more prominent it becomes. Each new wave of feminism brings with it its own goals, yet it also continues to strive for some of the same goals as past generations because not everything is accomplished all at once. Although “The Well of Loneliness” by Radclyffe Hall and “Rubyfruit Jungle” by Rita Mae Brown, are two starkly different texts that strongly reflect the feminist eras in which they were written, they have some similarities as well.

only way this is possible is to kill her. This occurs to him after he

Carol Ann Duffy’s ‘Medusa’ and Robert Browning’s ‘My Last Duchess’ are two entirely different poems in many respects. Written in entirely different eras, some would say that they are as opposite as poetry could be. However, their central characters have some remarkable similarities that strike a chord with the reader and represent a common theme.

The two Browning poems, ‘Porphyria’s Lover’ and ‘My Last Duchess’ were written to convey to the reader how women were treated in that era; as possession, as assets. Both of these poems can be read from different points of view and they also both are what is