The Rise of Modernism: Fiction

Sadly spring break has come to an end, but fortunately I am back safe and sound. This week's reading includes fiction by Zora Neale Hurston, Katherine Anne Porter, and Ernest Hemingway. Like the modernist poetry from the previous week, these short stories are very different from any I have read before. They are very personal in that elements of the stories are unique to their authors.

In "The Gilded Six-Bits" Hurston describes her "Negro yard around a Negro house in a Negro settlement." The story is regionalistic in both its dialogue and Biblical allusions. The characters' dialect is distinct of the South, a region known as the Bible Belt. There are references to the Jordan River, Samson (Judges 13-16), and Lot's wife (Genesis 19). These elements reflect Hurston's background as an Alabama native and the daughter of a preacher.

Katherine Anne Porter expresses conflict between a character's "way of living and her feeling of what life should be" in "Flowering Judas." Laura, like most us, wants the American Dream. She is discontent with her current way of life and wishes to achieve something fantastic which lies outside of her immediate reach. Porter's biography makes the point that she lived in several different places and perhaps Laura's unhappiness with her current situation mirrors Porter's nostalgia for home.

Ernest Hemingway tells "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" through a narrator who can be described at best as a jerk. He calls his wife a "rich bitch" and blames her as the source of his misfortune and unhappiness. But she should not be at fault on the sole basis that she possesses wealth. We sympathize with the wife and realize that she has done nothing wrong; the man has destroyed his own talent. This unfavorable description of the male is interesting when considering a fact about Hemingway's life--his father committed suicide and Hemingway blamed his mother. This story may be an attempt to gain redempion for this accussation by portraying woman as an innocent figure.

Next week we are reading more modernism, this time a mix of poetry and fiction, so I am looking forward to identifying characteristics of later works from the same period as these. Maybe the same ones will exist but will be handled in a different way by the younger authors. See you then!