| Mid-twentieth century American visual culture changed dramatically with the explosion of television, cinema, and photo magazines. Zora Neale Hurston, Tennessee Williams, and Ralph Ellison respond to this visually inflected society by enlisting the tenets of plastic art to portray character interiority. Although they produce their major works over a fifteen year span and work in different genres, the social concerns dominating their creative fields in the 1930s and 1940s compel them to address similar issues. In a departure from the proletarian writing that directed audiences outward to ponder environmental conditions, Hurston, Williams, and Ellison refocus their audiences inward to consider the evolving American consciousness.; All three achieve this feat through a dependence on visual culture. They build on the foundation Henry James provides in his novels and plays, works which exploit visual art to depict characters' subjective experiences. Hurston, Williams, and Ellison respectively develop James's narratorial style, objet d'art metaphors, and hyperconscious characterizations to push beyond contemporary representations of folk culture, Southern temperament, and racial identity. They craft visually minded characters to reappraise traditional spaces and methods of identity formation destabilized by the modern world. Hurston questions the public folk spaces of the porch and the church as legitimate places for shaping consciousness; Williams broods over the tenuous position of Southern memory in forming modern minds, and Ellison contemplates the inadequacy of social and political philosophies for molding black subjectivity. To address these individual concerns, Hurston, Williams, and Ellison employ visual economies established by plastic art to illustrate the creative process. In this sense, their works offer portraits of writers working to convey the complexity of artistic consciousness. |
