“Youse in New Yawk”: The Gender Politics of Zora Neale Hurston’s “Lost” Caroline Stories

In this essay, I examine two of Hurston’s urban migration tales, “The Country in the Woman,” (1927) and “She Rock” (1933), and conduct the first sustained critical treatment of them as historically embedded subversive critiques of New Negro female identity. Both tales focus on a character who also appears elsewhere in Hurston’s work: Caroline. Hurston’s urban Caroline stories are at once corrective and entertaining as the stories challenge negative, sexually-based stereotypes of African Americans, especially of women, and New Negro attempts to inscribe black women as middle-class wives and mothers. Her Caroline folk characters in these two urban versions resist commodification and posit a folk-based alternative female identity that exists outside of the either/or dichotomies posed by the dominant discourses of the period and implicitly challenge the New Negro notion that black women were solely responsible for the well-being of the race. Only within the context of competing negative and positive discourses on black female identity from the period can we examine Hurston’s Caroline stories and appreciate the sophistication of Hurston’s subversive strategies. While I argue that Hurston’s female and male characters’ gendered identities are mutually constitutive and therefore difficult to separate, a thorough treatment of masculinity in these stories is beyond the scope of this essay. Thus, I explore elements of masculinity only to the extent that the male characters contribute to or reveal constructions of female identity.