Writers present the perspective of their particular community and social order. Readers of literature are enabled to see into different lives, different communities, 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.
             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 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.
             As is well known, 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 1...