Modernist Women of the Harlem Renaissance

On the importance of diversifying our reading lists

Photo by The New York Public Library on Unsplash

As October represents Black History Month here in the UK, and a recent announcement was made that education boards will introduce a more diverse range of texts on the English Literature school curriculum from next year, I began to examine my own literature interests, and although my bookshelf contains a diversity of authors, I realised that my literature courses hadn’t included nearly enough about Black modernist writers.

The Harlem Renaissance in the early part of the twentieth century between the two world wars saw cross-disciplinary artistic and cultural work by African American artists and writers.  Perhaps one of the most well-known of the female modernist writers of the Harlem Renaissance was Zora Neale Hurston. 

Hurston, who had an early career as an anthropologist which likely provided a foundation for her writing dealing in folklore, mastered traditional literary conventions and developed these in her own individual style, placing the focus on characterization, imagery and symbolism.  Her most famous novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), follows Janie Crawford, a young African American woman searching for her identity, experiencing love and the joys and sorrows of life.  Set in the 1930’s Jim Crow era of racial segregation, the book explores Janey’s sensuality and search for a fulfilling love.

The novel was criticised by a contemporary of Hurston’s, Richard Wright, author of books including Native Son (1940) and Black Boy (1945), which were amongst some of the first novels by Black writers protesting the white treatment of Blacks.  He saw Hurston’s book as not explicitly addressing the issue of race, choosing sensuality over social commentary.  What this criticism fails to convey however is Hurston’s choice to write a story of a young Black woman’s experience in the South at the start of the twentieth century.  Hurston’s story allows readers to discover that within this newly emerging world, a Black woman of any socio-economic status is free to find whatever love she desires, and that she is worthy of such love.   

Another of the Harlem Renaissance writers, Nella Larsen, initially published short stories under a pseudonym.  In 1928 she published the novel Quicksand (1928) featuring a headstrong young biracial woman looking for love, acceptance and a sense of purpose.  Larsen, who went on to publish a second novel Passing (1929), became the first Black woman to be awarded a Guggenheim fellowship in 1930, though she never published any further novels.

Photo by Gabriel Almanzar on pexels.com

I find both of these women’s writing interesting in their representation of young female protagonists finding their way in a world which had not been open to their earlier ancestors.  Though writers such as Wright were writing important books around the Black experience, writer’s such as Hurston and Larsen show the nuances of the lives of young Black women living in America in the early part of the twentieth-century.

Considering such successful contemporaries of Hurston and Larsen within the modernist movement, such as perhaps the most famous modernist woman writer of them all Virginia Woolf, with her Bloomsbury Group peers and independent income, as well as access to education and the freedom to write, it is a testament to the spirit and tenacity of such female writers that they persisted with their work.

In a 1927 feature in Opportunity Magazine, writer Georgina Douglas Johnson, a syndicated newspaper columnist, playwright and poet stated:

“I write because I love to write…If I might ask of some fairy godmother special favors, one would sure be for a clearing space, elbow room in which to think and write and live beyond the reach of the Wolf’s fingers.  However, much that we do and write about comes just because of the daily struggle for bread and breath – so perhaps it’s just as well”.¹

Within Johnson’s comments, we see how Virginia Woolf’s idea of ‘a room of one’s own’, with its space and independent income in which a woman could write, was a pipe-dream for Black writers like Johnson. But I think that though this separates writers like Johnson from that of the white privilege of Woolf’s upper middle-class upbringing and economic status, it also unites them in their wish for personal space as women in which to write.

I also love the sentiment that Douglas emits here.  As most writers – male or female – will likely tell you, writing is something of a vocation.  It is a spell which words hold over you, whether you wish to abide by them or not.  It has very little, often, to do with getting published and having a ‘writing career’, (though I think many people who write also do dream of those things), but it is a compulsion to write.  A desire that is so strong that to not write often feels more difficult than to write.

Johnson captures this compulsion to write sentiment here around writing which ‘comes just because of the daily struggle for bread and breath’.  Though we may not be able to imagine the struggles she felt ‘for bread and breath’, many writers begin writing, I believe, because they feel a need to articulate the personal struggles of themselves or the people they live amongst, and the economic situations they find themselves in.

If we think of many of the most powerful writers of the past centuries, they were often living with their own demons as they navigated life.  Their words often offer the most powerful scripture on how people live, whether it be from the battlefield or the kitchen sink. 

People’s lives are what stories are about.  If I cannot imagine being a nurse on the front during WW1, I can read the words of other women who lived that experience.  If I wonder at the drudgery of the 1940’s housewife, trapped by family and circumstance, I only need run my hand down the library shelf and I will find it. 

Likewise, in the stories of Black writers such as Hurston, Larsen and Douglas – not to mention the stories of later successful Black writers such as Alice Walker, Toni Morrison and Maya Angelou – we find the common ground we share as women, as well as the lives we cannot imagine.  The stories of how people lived, and struggled, and how their humanity survived despite or because of their experiences.

Lived experience, ‘the daily struggle for bread and breath’, is within all great writing.  We shouldn’t need to wait for the National Curriculum or a designated month to introduce our children to the multitudes of diverse voices.  We should be reading and studying writers who make us think, and thus who represent our shared humanity, in all its joy and sadness.

1. Georgina Douglas Johnson, Opportunity Magazine, 1927