Part One (Go to Part Two )
4:

• Explain:  "Her language was not so much invented as distilled from the speech she had listened to as a child" (4).

• Explain:  "While racial injustice in the larger society informed the conflicts represented here, they were more profoundly the conflicts of the characters' interior lives" (6).

• What is cultural relativity (besides being "the foundational principle of anthropology" (7))?
• Explain:  "Despite the careful attention to setting, 'Sweat' transcends the category of 'local color fiction'" (7).

• Explain:  "Delia's work is both an economic necessity and a psychological threat to her husband Sykes" (8).

• Explain:  "Hurston was able to break free of the convention of dialect, primarily because of her excellent ear for folk speech" (10) (See also Gayl Jones's essay.)

• Explain:  "Sykes ultimately becomes a threat not so much to Delia's person as to her soul" (11).
• Explain: "If she is willing to return hate for hate, she will no longer be bound by the commandments of her faith" (11).
• Explain:  "This moment of 'specifying' is equally an act of self-defense and self-incrimination" (11).

• What does "crossing Jordan" signify?

• How does the marriage in "Gilded Six-Bits" invert the portrayal in "Sweat"?

• How does the plot of "Six-Bits" reflect "archaic assumptions about gender" (14)?

• Explain:  "The bit of chain that remains attached to the coin is a metonym of slavery, which in turn constituted the ultimate commodification of human beings and disfigurement of relationships" (15).