SOURCE: Baum, Rosalie Murphy. “The Shape of Hurston's Fiction.” In Zora in Florida, edited by Steve Glassman and Kathryn Lee Seidel, pp. 94-109. Orlando: University of Central Florida Press, 1991.

In the following essay, Baum reflects on the politico-feminist aspects of Zora Neale Hurston's work, drawing parallels with other black female writers such as Nella Larson, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison, remarking that many readers of Hurston's work have tended to focus on her sexual politics instead of her racial politics.

We, the critics of black literary traditions, owe it to those traditions to bring to bear upon their readings any “tool” which helps us to elucidate, which enables us to see more clearly, the complexities of figuration peculiar to our literary traditions.

—Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (4)

Despite Virginia Woolf's warning to women that the great female writer must not write as a woman but as a human being...