28 pages • 56 minutes read
Zora Neale HurstonDrenched in Light
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1924A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context: Zora Neale Hurston
Zora Neale Hurston was born in Notasulga, Alabama, in 1891, but her family moved to Eatonville, Florida, when she was a child. Eatonville, established in 1887, was the United States’ first incorporated Black township and serves as a setting for many of Hurston’s stories, including her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. “Drenched in Light” provides a small glimpse of daily life for a young, Black girl in a setting that resembles Eatonville. Hurston not only experienced life in a small town similar to protagonist Isis, but she also traveled the American South collecting oral histories from African Americans who grew up in similar conditions.
While growing up in Eatonville, Hurston’s father served as mayor and was pivotal in creating the laws that governed their town. Hurston did not graduate from high school until she was in her late twenties, but she studied and read many literary classics and mythology. Despite her struggle to earn her high school diploma, she went on to earn her associate degree at Howard University, a historically Black college in Washington, DC. Later, she enrolled in the anthropology program at Barnard College of Columbia University, where she was the only Black student.
As a student, Hurston published her first short stories and attracted the attention of Alain Locke, one of the Harlem Renaissance’s most influential figures. Locke included Hurston’s work in The New Negro, an anthology of Harlem Renaissance writing, alongside authors like Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, and Jean Toomer. Hurston was both a writer and an anthropologist, and by 1935, she had published several short stories, articles, a novel, and a collection of Black southern folklore called Mules and Men. During her career, Hurston wrote four novels, two folklore books, an autobiography, short stories, essays, and plays.
Despite a successful literary career, Hurston died in poverty and did not receive much recognition for her work until Alice Walker, author of The Color Purple, wrote about Their Eyes Were Watching God in the 1970s. Since then, her work has gained recognition and is frequently included in high school and college courses in the United States.
Socio-Historical Context: Harlem Renaissance
Spanning from roughly 1918 to 1937, the Harlem Renaissance was an influential movement for African American culture that included literature, music, theatre, and visual arts. Alain Locke is credited as the movement’s leader for his status as a writer, philosopher, educator, and patron of the arts. Key literary figures of this movement include Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Zora Neale Hurston, as well as musicians like Duke Ellington and Billie Holiday. Centered in Harlem, New York City, the artists and thinkers in this movement tasked themselves with accurately representing African American culture in fields that generally centered white narratives of the Black experience. Along with artistic representation, this movement was also concerned with civil rights activism, though its participants ascribed to different political philosophies and disagreed about the best ways to effect change.
Many African Americans fled the South after the Civil War due to oppressive Jim Crow laws that legalized segregation and anti-Black violence. During this “Great Migration,” Harlem, New York became a destination and developed alongside its residents’ creative expression. Opera houses, theaters, and literary magazines all operated in Harlem, and thinkers posited different methods for achieving change, from Langston Hughes’s communism to Zora Neale Hurston’s emphasis on individualism. The National Museum of African American History and Culture claims that “what united these diverse art forms was their realistic presentation of what it meant to be black in America” (Smithsonian. “A New African American Identity: The Harlem Renaissance”). Harlem served as a cultural hub for the arts, allowing artists, social justice leaders, scholars, and more to come together in a space dedicated to African American heritage and forging a new Black American identity. The Harlem Renaissance thrived until the mid-1930s, when the economic realities of the Great Depression shifted people’s focus away from the arts.
Hurston was an influential Harlem Renaissance leader through her writing and anthropological studies. With the help of a patron, she traveled through the rural American South and collected stories and folklore, specifically in Florida. She documented her travels with photography as well. By publishing Black folklore, Hurston captured unique aspects of African American culture at this time and cultivated widespread attention for African American traditions and culture.
Related Titles
By Zora Neale Hurston
