Reading and rereading the thirties: Historical and social contexts and the literary receptions of Pearl S. Buck, Margaret Mitchell, and Zora Neale Hurston

The literary text is an act of discourse in a social context, not an isolated, autonomous aesthetic object. It reflects and affects not only the values of its writer, but of the society in which it exists at any given time. Criticism is, therefore, a social process situated within a web of interacting disciplines, practices, and discourses. Two such discourses, the concepts of race and the rural dream, transverse popular culture, literature, and literary history. Interwoven with other social constructs such as gender, sexuality, class, and nation, these concepts provide a frame of reference for reading the works of three women writers of the thirties: Pearl S. Buck, Margaret Mitchell, and Zora Neale Hurston. More specifically, this project examines the ways different interpretations of 1930s literature emerged and are emerging, highlighting the relationship between the narratives of particular artistic expressions, literary history, and race and the context in which these narratives were produced and received.; Chapter I provides a social constructionist analysis of racial categorization and the rural dream and examines the ways such ideologies are constructed and then sustained and reconstructed through cultural practices such as history, literature, and literary criticism. Chapters II and III address the works of Pearl Buck and Margaret Mitchell, respectively, and the ways popular culture and literary criticism in the thirties reflect the cultural contexts in the Depression. Buck's The Good Earth popularizes and even attempts to universalize the rural community within a discourse in which racial considerations are hidden. Mitchell's Gone With the Wind portrays a world in which rural/agricultural values have been replaced by urban/industrial values. Unlike Buck, however, Mitchell's construction of the rural community relies explicitly on racial categorization. In showing the destruction wrought by the disturbances of the antebellum social system, Gone With the Wind implies that only in returning to a rural social system with clearly defined racial lines will peace and order be restored.; Chapter IV turns to Zora Neale Hurston, whose novel Their Eyes Were Watching God reconfigures the rural community of the South with African-Americans at its center. Hurston subverts the romanticized worlds of both Buck and Mitchell by attributing the values of urban, industrial America to the white community and the values of rural America to the black community. Zora Neale Hurston, a woman of color, drawing consciously on a folk tradition, presents an alternative vision of American life that can be read with and against the visions of Buck and Mitchell.