SOURCE: Green, Suzanne D. “Fear, Freedom and the Perils of Ethnicity: Otherness in Kate Chopin's ‘Beyond the Bayou’ and Zora Neale Hurston's ‘Sweat’.” Southern Studies 5, nos. 3-4 (fall-winter 1994): 105-24.

In the following essay, Green contends that Hurston and Kate Chopin “both construct communities in which woman is equated with Other” in their respective stories “Sweat” and “Beyond the Bayou.”

In the short fiction of Kate Chopin and Zora Neale Hurston, we often see women-particularly women of color—portrayed as a microcosm of society in which we are to view them not only as individuals, but as symbolic representations of the universal problems that women face. Within the microcosm that each writer creates, their female characters deal with issues that range from guilt and fear to racism and Otherness. These issues direct their lives and their interactions with their communities. Women are often marginalized because of their gender, and...