The Gilded Six-Bits Essay | Critical Essay #3

The Gilded Six-Bits Critical Essay #3

In the following essay, Jones argues that through the use of dialect in the story the reader is brought inside the African-American community depicted in the story, which opens the possibility for a more complex examination of the characters.

Hurston's "The Gilded Six-Bits" (1933) takes us out of the conventional restrictions observed in Dunbar. This transformation is partly due to the shift in perspective: we are inside rather than out side the black community and there is not the same double-conscious concern with an exclusive white audience. Because there are not the same motives of the anti-lynching story or of the tradition of protest literature in general, Hurston can be concerned with the relationship between a man and woman in "a Negro settlement." She can expand the range beyond "humor and pathos" to a crisis-of-love story; there can be development and recognition, dilemma and resolution, delineated personality.

Critic...
(read more)