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From the Suwanee to Egypt, There's No Place like Home

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Cynthia Ward
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Abstract

Zora Neale Hurston's Seraph on the Suwanee (1948) and Carolyn Chute's The Beans of Egypt, Maine (1985) feature white working-class women negotiating class hierarchies in rural communities. Despite present-day critics' putative concern with class and demonstrated interest in Hurston's other works, particularly Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), both novels have been largely ignored by the critical establishment, in part because readers lind it difficult to identify with the main characters. Comparing the critical receptions of Seraph, The Beans, and Their Eyes reveals that the mechanism by which readers identify with imaginary characters is constituted by middle-class reading practices. While a sympathetic audience emerged for Their Eyes, one is not likely to appear for the other two novels, which expose the class-bound roots of the literary construction of identity, meaning, and reality. In addition, Seraph and The Beans point, however obliquely, toward a vernacular notion of home that resists middle-class commodification.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 115 , Issue 1: Special Topic: Rereading Class , January 2000 , pp. 75 - 88
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2000

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