Race and Economic Class in Literature

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.