Zora Neale Hurston Analysis

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Zora Neale Hurston and Alice Walker share many similarities in their work as Hurston had great influence on Walker’s writing. There is a strong connection between the two writers. Walker a contemporary woman writing critically successful work, and Hurston, almost a cultural figure who died in relative anonymity in the sixties. According to Mary Churchill, who wrote “Alice Walker and Zora Neale Hurston: The Common Bond” stated, “Walker seems to have found her muse in Hurston.
Both literary tellers of the same cultural and spiritual tradition, share in the root of their work, an admiration for people who "persist...in spite of everything (7).” The characters in the two authors' major work are troubled women, the "mules of the world," who must rise from the most hopeless circumstances to relative peace, freedom, and self-sufficiency. Alice Walker’s novel, The Color Purple contains aspects of Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God as well as characteristics of Hurston’s female lead, Janie infused in her writing. The aspects in Walker’s novel that are …show more content…
Not only was she raped and threatened repeatedly by her stepfather as he told her, “You gonna do what your mammy wouldn’t” (Walker, 1) but she was also trying to protect her younger sister from the same abuse (Walker, 2). This is very similar characterization to Hurston’s main character Janie in Their Eyes Were Watching God. While Janie’s childhood may not have been as traumatizing as Celie’s, she grew up without a mother or a father and was instead raised by her grandmother who married her off to a man she did not love when she was just sixteen years old. Both women have experienced tremendously trying times in their lives, but have utilized their strength and spirituality to overcome their hardships and reshaped their lives in order to obtain contentedness within their own
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