Women Authors and the Harlem

Women Authors and the Harlem Renaissance

In the early 1900s, particularly in the 20s and early 30s, African-American literature, art, music, and dance began to flourish in Harlem, a section of New York City. Variously known as the New Negro movement, the New Negro Renaissance, and the Negro Renaissance, the movement emerged toward the end of World War I in 1918. The Harlem Renaissance marked the first time that mainstream publishers and critics took African-American literature seriously and that African-American literature and arts attracted significant attention from the nation as a whole. Although it was primarily a literary movement, it was closely related to developments in African-American music, theater, art, and politics The Harlem Renaissance seemed to be the best of times for America, during which whites and African-Americans began to mix and gain a better understanding of one another. Harlem became the epicenter of music, art, and literature. This was the place from which acclaimed writers of the period started their careers. (Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, etc.) Blues and jazz were the prominent styles of music heard throughout the community, made notable by artists such as Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, and Duke Ellington, and could almost always be heard in social bars known as speakeasies. No common literary style or political ideas defined the Harlem Renaissance. What united participants was their sense of taking part in a common goal and their commitment to giving artistic expression to the African-American experience (Watson 1995, introduction, 1-14).

African-Americans were able to find sanctuary in the North, having to face far less racism and abuse than those who remained in the South. Many were now able to hold decent jobs with good pay. They held an intense yearning for equality, however, still faced many challenges. Despite protest and some progress, racism still separated Americans in every aspect of life. White people often went to the same areas as African-Americans to witness what they believed was an inferior way of thinking. Those in high position jobs were criticized and accused of conforming to white standards, leaving their heritage behind in the process. And, although African-Americans could often able to find good jobs and good pay, many were forced to become factory workers with little chance for advancement (Hutchinson 1997).

The Harlem Renaissance was closely related to developments in African-American theater and politics, as well as art. The movement emerged at the end of World War I in 1918, blossomed in the mid- to late 1920s, and then faded in the mid-1930s. There is a profound connection between the blues and the African-American literature and poetry that was produced during this significant time period. Much of what came out of the Harlem Renaissance can be credited to the use of blues. The blues created a social interaction between blacks and whites, influenced some of America's greatest artists, allowed blacks to express their feelings and opened the eyes of many Americans by teaching the truth about Black heritage (Ibid).

The Blues evolved out of the African-Americans struggle for freedom and equality. After the Civil War, Black churches were used for shelter and activity centers for former slaves. With the migration of Blacks from the South to the North, the Blues spread and became respected as a music genre. In Harlem the streets echoed of the blues flowing from the newest jazz clubs. For the first time in history, young middle-class whites were coming into black neighborhoods to listen to jazz. Blacks and whites began mixing in the speakeasies and cabarets. They joined on the dance floor and shared tables at the hottest jazz clubs, connecting the races as they etched a Black neighborhood onto the cultural map of the country, indeed, the world (Floyd 1993).

Harlem was host to some of America's greatest writers, musicians, and artists. The Harlem Renaissance was an era in which black people were perceived as having finally liberated themselves from a past filled with creative limits. For the first time African-Americans were self-assertive and racially conscious, as if they passed through some rite of passage. They seemed to have optimism and pride in all things black, and a cultural confidence that showed through in all they did. Many notable artists who emerged during this time had certain attitudes about the black experience. They expressed their feelings through art, whether in writings, paintings, or musical lyrics, each explored a way to represent the black possibilities. Some of Harlem's finest artists used the blues, all in very different ways, to capture what they saw this time to be. Aaron Douglas painted and Langston Hughes wrote, while Bessie Smith sang her blues.

Aaron Douglas, inspired by blues music, wanted to portray the rhythms and colors on canvas. To capture these elements he used flat, hard-edged, geometric shapes and patterns. Douglas illustrated the blues by painting in bold, hot colors. His most famous work was 'The Creation'. Langston Hughes was one of the Renaissance's youngest and brightest poets. Hughes aspired to write in a personal voice that also reflected his race. He often took his rhythms and inspiration from jazz and blues music. By recreating the jazz scene in his poetry, Langston Hughes increased the middle-class's interest in blues. Other than his great lyrics, his poems were known for their honest portrayal of the urban black life. The blues had been the subject in such poems as "The Weary Blues" and in his collection Fine Clothes to the Jew. Bessie Smith was the greatest and most influential blues singer of the 1920's. She sang with a power and intensity of feeling that was unmatched by any other blues singer. Her self-assurance showed through in every note she sang. Her sharp sense of phrasing enabled her to influence virtually every female blues singer who followed. By the time the decade ended, Smith had become the most respected blues artist in America, for all races (Lewis, Hutchinson, Goodman).

Writing was somewhat an escape for the African-American when life was troublesome. The blues were written to express personal feelings or to tell about hard times. Either way, the words allowed the audience insight into the black world. Blues lyrics were often intensely personal. Some contained sexual references and often dealt with the pain of betrayal, desertion and unrequited love. One of the major themes of the blues is sexuality. Lyrics often contained hidden sexual messages by using words or phrases with double meanings. The blues even addressed situations such as being jobless, broke, hungry, or lonely. Perhaps better than any other music in history, the blues speaks about poverty and making ends meet, merging poetry with music to convey even more universal sadness.

The Harlem Renaissance also refers to the artistic, cultural, and social growth of writing It was a time when black American writers were breaking the barriers and limitations that had held them back before. It was believed that blues could bridge the gap between the black and white worlds if only the black artist was allowed the opportunity to hone his talents. Renaissance writers described the unique qualities of Black Americans and redefined their culture through blues expression. African-Americans were encouraged to celebrate their heritage. These men and women wrote about race and their place in America during this time. Like the blues, the contributions of literature showed both whites and blacks that art -- regardless of its medium, could bring the races together (Wintz 2007).

In the world of art, the movement was more controversial than one might think. Art was one of the most influential expressions of black culture during the era of the Harlem Renaissance. Constantly torn between whether they should return to African routes for inspiration or pull from the American culture they had assimilated into, African-Americans all wanted to have their voice heard at the beginning of the 20th century. They wanted to find their voice that had so long been silenced, even after the Civil War. To free themselves from the bondage of economy and to finally be respected as a people, many turned to art for the advancement of their culture. Serving not only for aesthetic and symbolist qualities, art also served as a voice in the political world (Powell & Bailey, 1997).

Many black political leaders of the time, including W.E.B. DuBois and Alain Locke, believed that art could open up many opportunities for the black population. By painting or sculpting the black individual could be seen as more than just a victimized or one-dimensional race. Through art, one could break the stereotype of "Jim Crow" and be seen as a profound and intriguing character. People such as DuBois and Locke also believed that by selling art, music, or literature, blacks could become financially stable and be able to participate in the mainstream economy (Hutchinson).

The artists of the time, however, were pulled into two very different directions. The though that looking to Africa for inspiration was the only option were being pressured into their heads as well as pressures from other individuals who believed drawing from American culture was the only way to be seen differently, as a culture, in the United States. Some artists, such as Aaron Douglas, captured the feeling of Africa in their work because they wanted to show their ancestry through art. Others, like Archibald J. Motley Jr., obtained their inspiration from the surroundings in which they lived in; where jazz was at the forefront and African-Americans were just trying to get by day-to-day like any other Anglo-American. Additionally, some Black American artists felt more comfortable in Europe than they did in America. These artists tended to paint landscapes of different European countries. Most of the latter, however, were ostracized for this because many black politicians felt they should represent more of their African culture in their work (Campbell 1994, Powell and Bailey).

Whatever the case, most African-American artists during this period of time had a similarity that tied them together. Black art was often very colorful and vivacious; having an almost rhythmic feel to it. This was appropriate because African-American culture was filled with a tremendous zeal for life and an excitement. Alongside paintings of black culture, the movement also focused on a freedom from captivity, and the passion for life so apparent in black culture (Ibid).

It is difficult, at times, to make a strong gender separation regarding contributions of artists during the Harlem Renaissance. A poem might be written by a man, interpreted as a song by a woman, or visa-versa. A novel might be written by a woman, but brought to the stage or oration by a woman. The importance of gender is circumspect -- Black Women were allowed a semblance of artistic expression that might have been new to the community, but was occurring in other areas at the same time; women were extolling their independence in politics, art, science, and even in the workforce. In fact, one of the most famous women writers of the Harlem Renaissance, Zora Neale Hurston, formulated much of her personal philosophy and characterizations not just from the individual people of the era, but from her skirmishes and aesthetic debates between herself, Langston Hughes, and Richard Wright (Story 1985, 25-31).

Writers present the perspective of their particular community and social order. Readers of literature are enabled to see into different lives, different communities, and different worlds. Black women writers take the reader into the world of women and the world of the African-American alike, especially important in a world where black women suffer dual discrimination and numerous indignities because of their status, while these writers show that these women have personalities and thoughts and lives that link them to all of humanity even as they also exhibit certain cultural differences that make them unique. Along with the other artists presented in this essay, three African-American women stand out as seminal examples of dynamic fiction during the Harlem Renaissance: Zora Neal Hurston, Jessie Fauset, and Dorothy West (Jones 2002).

Zora Neale Hurston emerged as part of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and was influenced by Langston Hughes. She represented a feminist-African-American mix, though her own personality quirks kept her from developing as fully as she might have. Her works, though, provide readers with a view of the beginnings of both feminism and a different view of African-American culture in the twentieth century. Hurston languished in obscurity for decades, in part because much of the literary world does indeed ignore women and blacks and the works they produce. However, as feminist literary criticism continues to diversify in terms of its aims and methods, one of the best ways of understanding the implications of this expanding discourse is to revisit a work firmly installed in the canon of feminist masterpieces and analyze the benefits and limitations of the feminist critique as applied to that work. Zora Neale Hurston's famous novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) has a curious history that points up, in several ways, how a multiplicity of critiques is required to do it justice (Boyd 2004).

Despite her fame and success, Hurston languished in obscurity in the last decades of her life and her literary productions -- once quite popular -- were completely disregarded. Following the resurrection of her works by Alice Walker around 1975, scholars began to investigate the struggle for literary dominance that had taken place between a number of black male writers, advocates of social or critical realism in fiction, and Hurston's "mythic realism" with its "lyrical black idiom" (Gates 200).

The resurgence of interest in this seminal work resulted in a situation where "within the critical establishment, scholars of every stripe have found in Hurston texts for all seasons" and the diversity of feminist approaches meant a diversity of approaches to Their Eyes Were Watching God. But Hurston's novel, aside from being the object of such analyses, is also the home and the source of several types of sophisticated critique devised by the author. In many ways the diversity of approaches employed by the writer herself not only antedate but also prefigure the diversity of approaches in feminist literary criticism today. There are also conflicts between certain aspects of Hurston's own analyses that similarly prefigure the internal conflicts that characterize today's feminist criticism. A reconsideration of the use of feminist analysis in the study of the novel and of Hurston's own critique provides illuminating commentary on the present state of feminist literary criticism (Gates, Goodman, Hutchinson).

Dorothy West was born in 1907 and died in 1998, having seen so many changes in African-American culture in her 91 years she commented that none of her colleagues from the 1920s would ever believe the way the world had changed. She is probably best known for her novel, The Living Is Easy, about the life of an upper class black family. In 1926, West tied for second place in a writing contest sponsored by Opportunity, a journal published by the National Urban League with her short story, "The Typewriter." Ironically, her co-winner was none other than Zora Neale Hurston (Shockley 1989).

West's principal contribution to the Harlem Renaissance was the publishing of the magazine Challenge, founded for $40 in 1934. She also continued with the magazine's successor, New Challenge. These publications remain important to the movement in that they were the first literary works to focus on realistic portrayals of African-Americans in real, non-stereotypical, situations. Writers like Richard Wright, Margaret Walker and Ralph Ellison first wrote in West's magazine.

Unfortunately, both magazines lacked the financing and advertising dollars to continue, but West worked for President Franklin Roosevelt's "Works Progress Administration Federal Writer's Project" until the mid-1940s, writing a number of short stories for the New York Daily News. Her novel, The Living is Easy, was published in 1948, to critical kudos, but lack of popular support until 1982, when a feminist press brought it back into print, giving new attention to West as an important part of the Harlem Renaissance and an integral figure in the synergism of many African-American writers of the period. As a result of the attention her book received, she finished a second novel, The Wedding, featured by Oprah Winfrey into a television miniseries and brining even more attention to West's importance as both a feminist, an organizer of equal rights issues, and an extremely talented writer who used emotional confluence to move her audiences into an alternate realm of thinking about injustice and race (Jones 2002).

Jessie Redmon Fauset was exceptional for her time, graduating from the Philadelphia High School for girls as the only black student, and then receiving her degree from Cornell University in 1905, and the first black woman to graduate Phi Beta Kappa. She was a literary editor under W.E.B. DuBois, and eventually 57 or her 77 works appeared in the NAACP journal "The Crisis." She wrote four novels, worked as a schoolteacher, and died in 1961 (Beaulieu 2006).

Langston Hughes called Fauset one of the "midwives" of the Harlem Revolution; her work tends to focus on the romanticized view of the middle-class African-American lifestyle and its rigid morality. Her works are complex, but still had a popular audience. Unlike Hurston and West, Fauset preferred to slowly take her readership through the movement of cultural accepting, both White to Black and Black to White. She believed that it would be through the integration of ideas and structure of commonality that true equality would arise. Her contribution was more of a support to the other members of the Harlem Renaissance and to provide an alternative approach to the subject of race, racial equality, and the African-American experience. She was perhaps far ahead of her time, for after the 1930 she married, and lived out her remaining years in a more domestic atmosphere. With the rebirth of studies on the Harlem Renaissance, however, Fauset was rediscovered as being one of the most emotionally balanced of the Black Women writers of the time, and one who foretold many of the same philosophies that would come to characterize the Civil Rights Movement itself -- namely, equality for all, not special treatment, but equal treatment (Kuenz 1999).