Flamingo Think Tank

Let me start by saying that what Sethe did in the Woodshed is undeniably a horrible thing. There is nothing that can make that ambiguous, it's just awful. However, in my opinion, it doesn't make her a bad person.  When trying to reconcile her actions with the character we were initially presented with, it gets pretty complicated. Sethe is an extremely strong, caring, tough and loving person. She does what needs to be done when there is a crisis, and she doesn't let anything stop her. Before this scene, she is presented as the ultimate mother, overcoming superhuman odds to make it back to her children, and protecting them at all costs. In this context, what she did can be extremely difficult to understand. How could a person who had such a love for her children do what she did? After everything she went through to get them out of Sweet Home safely, and to make it to them herself, why would she want to kill them? First of all, I don't think that she wanted to kill the...

In Richard Wright's response to Their Eyes Were Watching God, he criticizes Hurston's characterizations of black people, and her lack of an explicit political message. He aligns himself with the message of "To the Pale Poets" and accuses Hurston of "having no desire move in the direction of serious fiction." In doing so, he seems to have totally missed what's so important about the novel.  Strong and independent female black characters were pretty much unheard of up until this novel was written. While Janie was not always depicted in the most progressive way by Hurston, and she spent most of the book being defined by men, her character also showed strength and, by the end of the book, was totally independent of men. The fact that Eatonville has no white people in it also allows for Hurston to explore what a woman's life experience could resemble, instead of allowing her to be grouped with men of the same race who don't have the same experience...