In American Literature, it seems that the past two books we
have read have been from completely different sides of the spectrum. In The Great Gatsby the culture and
population discussed was the white upper class. In Their Eyes Were Watching God the culture and population are the
black lower class. This Racial segregation strikes me as interesting especially
when looking at the economic and racial segregation of the time period. As we
spoke about in class a while back. African Americans were stuck in a vicious
cycle of poverty brought on by sharecropping and segregation. These prohibited
advancement in society which kept generation after generation of African
Americans down. Hence, it seems fairly reasonable that economically, Caucasian
Americans and African Americans would be in different social classes. Now, that
does not mean that this divide was okay, simply that it was present. While this
divide is certainly present today, it was highly present in the time period we
are studying as well. This explains why books written about or during the early
1900s would contain an economic and racial divide. Next, let’s take a look at
why the books we have read almost exclusively stay in one such class. First, The Great Gatsby, this book looked at
the picture image of “the American dream” and what that may entail, also
exploring ideas of collapse. In order to portray this, successful Americans
such as Jay and Tom needed to be portrayed. Due to the previously mentioned
vicious cycle, in order to include an African American character, it would have
to go on a tangent to explain how they got to the position of fulfilling the
American Dream, this may cloud the meaning of the book, and hence the characters
were mainly white, upper class people. In Their
Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston aims to record African American Life and
hence it makes sense that in this book the majority of characters would be
African American. By looking at the vicious cycle behind the economic and
racial divide as well as the individual motives for the books we have read to
have such a divide, we can reason that the segregation in literature represents
a combination of a preexisting condition as well as the individual motive of
the book.
