The literary works by these women, Cather, Hurston, and Millay, forged a connection for the readers that otherwise would have been an impossibility, and this connection expanded worldviews and created entirely new worlds in the minds of readers.  These works created a bond between the reader and the work and the author, and this bond was expanded with each new reader.  A common element was created and shared by an unlikely group, and even without encountering each other in a face-to-face setting, a community was formed through the mindsets of these readers and shared with the authors.  The importance of this shared mindset, this expanded worldview, this newly formed community is still evident.  Women were, and still are, exposed to the thoughts of other women.  It helped to ease a sense of isolation.  This literature created a community that validated emotions and thoughts that had been previously unacceptable.  It also created a community where these feelings and ideas were appreciated.  This literary community enlarged and enriched the realm of reality for the literate world.  It also helped to dispel some of the negativity of femaleness, and it provided strength and hope and an outlet for women.

How were these things accomplished in literature?  Between the years 1914 and 1945, more women were writing, and more women had access to the written word. There was an explosion of female writers and their audience included most of America.  Some people reacted with disgust to these writings.  It was uncomfortable to read some of the poems, short stories, and novels that were being produced during this era.  Writings by Hurston and Millay certainly challenged the mindsets of many people.  As with any good literature, their writings created a mirror held up to the society and forced America to look at itself in a rather, at times, unpleasant view.  With Cather, the challenge was of a different type.  She created strong, intense stories of survival that generally had belonged in the male domain.  Her characters were gritty and brave, and theirs was a world of freedom, harsh conditions, the expanding frontier of America. Much research has been done analyzing the literature of these three women.  But, something has been overlooked.  What happened to readers as they read these works?  What happened to the reader’s worldview?  What happened to the readers’ view of themselves?  How did this literature change the mindset of women about being female?  And, what is the significance of the relationship created through history with the current reader and the literary work written between World War I and World War II?

Willa Cather’s works embody the spirit of the frontier and the sense that freedom was on the untainted prairies and plains of the west where there were no large cities, no urbanization to stifle the American spirit.  Characters were required to possess skills that would either ensure their survival or the lack of these skills led to their failure.  Cather did something highly unusual during her lifetime.  She wrote from a male’s point of view, and did it convincingly.  This was uncommon during this time, and it dismissed many previously held ideas that a woman could not write the type of literature that Cather produced.  In addition to this, her novels created entire worlds for the reader, and these worlds were vivid to the point of complete belief. 

Cather’s works contained a great deal of detail about the lives of settlers, and the richness of her writing sucked the reader into a different world, a world that might have been unfamiliar and foreign, but one that was now vivid and real through Cather’s use of words.  Willa Cather evokes rather than explains her characters.  She provides only the necessary details to draw the reader into this new world of her creation.

In The Professor’s House, Cather tells the story from a male viewpoint, alternating narrators, but remaining within the male characters.  She does not enter into the minds of the female characters in this novel even once.  The women are seen from the outside.  When she does move into the first person, it is an idealized male (Byatt 148).  Here, as in some of her other works, Cather is giving the reader, especially the female reader, an opportunity to experience life from an entirely different perspective.  We are allowed to see what a man’s life experience might be like, the difference in how he reacts to the world compared to the female characters and compared to our own reactions as we are experiencing the events simultaneously with the character in the story.  Also, we are given an insight into the workings of the male mind.  Cather is brilliant in this because she portrays it so convincingly.  The experience of the male is palpable, and the reader is allowed to join these men, one older scientific man, Godfrey St Peter, and the other a younger active man, Tom Outland, in their lives.  It is an authentic experience, and the reader is not misled or left without resolution, and the reader does not become aware of the necessity to suspend disbelief in order to participate in the reality of the novel.  Cather creates a universe, where men are the protagonists, and female readers can inhabit this universe without struggle. 

Another aspect of this story, The Professor’s House, is what it tells the reader about marriage.  Women, specifically Lillian his wife, exist in this man’s experience as destroyers.  Lillian controls the world of the living in the house, while Godfrey exists in his workroom, living in history and inhabiting the world of his mind.  The unusual experience for the reader comes from the perception of Godfrey regarding Lillian because he believes she has become hardened, and he cannot live with her or the rest of his family.  Near the end of the story, Godfrey is described as being statue-like, and he describes Lillian as also being a chiseled surface:

Her nature was intense and positive; it was like a chiseled surface, a die, a stamp on which he could not be beaten out any longer.  If her character were reduced to a heraldic device, it would be a hand (a beautiful hand) holding flaming arrows – the shafts of her violent loves and hates, her clear-cut ambitions.  (Book 3, Ch.4)

Has she really become this chiseled figure, much like him in his frozen statue state, or is this the image he has created for her in order to justify his inability to live with her and be a part of their family?  The reader experiences Godfrey’s persistent struggle with constantly being aware of his own “distorting contributions” to his idea of his wife (Byatt 151).  The reader sees the inner workings of man’s mind as he encounters and experiences life with female characters, some of which he perceives to be destructive, overpowering forces in his life.

This story also has a savior figure found in the female character, Augusta.  She saves the scientist from death, and she provides a contrast to the other female characters in the story because she is a creator and a savior, not a destroyer.  Cather provides two different perception of women, by one man, that provide a contrast of the different natures and characters found in females.

What does this add to the female community?  Female readers are able to take on a new persona, a male persona, and see the inner workings of the male mind.  This is done so convincingly that the reader is unaware of the required suspension of disbelief that is necessary for this process to occur.  Women are given an opportunity to view the world, their worlds and a foreign world, from a different perspective and gain an insight into the role of men and women and the interactions between the two.  How do we see ourselves compared to how our male counterparts see us?  Why is that important?  Most women would view the matriarch of the household, in this instance Lillian, as being full of life, a creator, vivacious, but Godfrey’s perception of her is the opposite of that.  This text forces us to ask why? And, what is the impact on this realization in our lives?  What role would a woman be required to play in order to be perceived as Augusta, the hired help, who is viewed by Godfrey as the savior.  She saves him from death, but she also tells him that he is ignorant because he is aware of only one type of woman, Lillian.  What are the qualities possessed by Augusta that cause Godfrey to view her as he does?  Are the differences real or created in Godfrey’s mind in order to justify the feelings he has (or has ceased to have) for his wife and family?  The reader becomes aware of the distortion of perception in this novel, and we view this same act in ourselves in the world existing outside of this text.  Cather has created a space where the reader is able to question reality and the difference between perception and truth and which is more powerful in this text.

Zora Neale Hurston had an amazing life that influenced her writing, as evidenced by the autobiographical nature of her work.  Her self-portrait of a black woman who liked herself for being just that was shocking to readers, and even today, it is sometimes hard for the reader to comprehend how Hurston could both possess and practice such a positive self-image during a time in American history when there was an incredible backlash against minorities, not just blacks, but females as well.  What does the reader do with Hurston, who was proud of her heritage, who opposed desegregation because she feared this would give away the power the black community had over their schools, who did not produce a typical powerful female character, whose stories often told of violence and abuse and its acceptance by the people involved and the community as a whole. 

Hurston wrote about the culture of black America with pride, acceptance, and love.  She did not write in a self-pitying style that was full of misery about the state of the world she lived in.  Instead, she wrote about the richness, the fecundity of her world.  Growing up in Eatonville, Florida, her life was free from racism while she was a child because she encountered no whites.  She was an extraordinary woman with an incredible thirst for knowledge.  Despite not completing grade school, she attended Howard University and completed her degree there.  She was quite committed to the oral narrative, and her work reflects the richness of dialogue.  She did not write to uplift her race because she believed it was already uplifted.  Her writings were not always well accepted by men in the Harlem community.  She was not afraid to portray her characters as real human beings with all of their quirks and inconsistencies. Hurston felt that freedom was the most important element in life, and this meant freedom from all coercion, no matter the source.  Her stories tell of life, real life, with the ugliness and the beauty, there is rape, and romantic love, death, birth, struggle and triumph.  It is not a pretty picture, but it is a self-portrait of a Black female living and writing between the Wars.

In an excerpt from I Love Myself When I Am Laughing…and Then Again When I Am Looking Mean and Impressive, “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” gives the reader an excellent insight into how Hurston felt about herself and her role in the world.  She discusses when she first became “colored” and describes how in her childhood, up until the death of her mother and her departure from Eatonville, she had just been Zora, not colored, not anything out of the ordinary, just Zora, who liked to dance and sing and perform for the tourists who passed through the all black town of Eatonville.  When she left Eatonville on a steamboat, she was Zora, but when she arrived at Jacksonville, she was not “Zora of Orange County any more, I was now a little colored girl.  I found it out in certain ways.  In my heart as well as in the mirror, I became a fast brown-warranted not to rub nor run”(153).  Her change in location had produced a change in how the world viewed her.  She no longer belonged to the community of Eatonville where everyone claimed her.  The community that she lived in while growing up shaped her tremendously, and the reader will see the topic of community returned to again and again in her writings. 

One of the most amazing elements of Hurston’s writings is that she does not portray the life of African Americans as tragic.  Instead, she celebrates herself.  Through her work in folklore with Franz Boas, she was able to discover and explore the richness of her heritage and her community.  Again, in “How It Feels to Be Colored Me”, she states:

But I am not tragically colored.  There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes.  I do not mind at all.  I do not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are all hurt about it.

This was in stark contrast to a great deal of the writing being created during the Harlem Renaissance, and she had many disagreements with Langston Hughes about ideologies.  Her writings were about life, and it just so happened that her life happened to be one of a black woman, but the most important thing was that it was life.  Work, love, fighting, deceit, happiness, betrayal, these were all part of life, and for Hurston, this life was universal.  Zora Neale Hurston was proud of who she was, what she was, and from whence she came.  She was comfortable in her black skin, as is evidenced in her writings (Plant 148).   Her writings critiqued her own race and other races as well, but her writings did not focus on the unfairness of being born black.

Hurston’s perspectives on gender were quite conventional for her time.  She had clear conceptions of women’s roles.  She admired women in some respects, but she did not necessarily hold them in high esteem.  She criticized women for lacking and independent spirit, and she publicly opposed “the natural apathy of women, whether Negro or white, who vote as their husbands do” (Hemenway 308).  Hurston’s critique of women was that they could not act independently; they could not think for themselves.

Hurston classified women into two categories: Those who are “good women” and know when they have a good man, and those women who were jealous and malicious (Plant 161).  Hurston felt that women should be the gentler sex, the softer sex in order to balance out the characteristics of the man.  In her writings, the reader can see the balance and harmony created between a good woman and a good man.  The reader can also see what happens when one part of the couple fails in his or her role.  This is especially true in stories like “The Gilded Six Bits” where the reader is introduced to a married couple, Missy Mae and Joe, and the couple adores one another.  They are very much in love.  He is the provider, and she is the nurturer.  Then, another character is introduced into the story, and his façade is one of wealth and power, of which he has neither.  Missy Mae desires his wealth for her husband, and she is seduced by the promise of this money to have sex with this stranger.  Her indiscretion is revealed, and the marriage suffers greatly from it, but it is not destroyed.  However, in this story, it is Joe’s benevolence that keeps the marriage together.  Missy Mae is redeemed through him.  She conceives his child, and it is not until the child is born, and looks like her husband that their relationship returns to its previous state.

Her portrayal of women and their relationships with one another and with men is not always considered to be a flattering portrait of womanhood, but her characters do possess traits that are easy to identify with.  In many instances, it is that which disturbs us, angers us, and unsettles us that forces us to question our behavior, our beliefs, and our roles, thus creating a dialogue that opens us up to different perspectives.

Hurston’s protagonist in “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” Janie, does not, at first glance, possesses many of the qualities that are generally associated with a strong woman.  She is not independent.  She goes from depending on her grandmother for sustenance to a series of husbands.  She is young and naïve, and she awaits something glorious to happen, like the budding of the trees in the spring.  When we first meet Janie, she is not aware that her actions have repercussions, and she views marriage as a punishment that she believes she does not deserve.  Once she has convinced herself that she will grow to love the man that her grandmother has arranged for her to marry, she agrees to do so, but it is with sad disappointment that she returns to talk to her grandmother about the fact that she has not grown to love him, in fact, he disgusts her.  The grandmother’s advice is to think about the security that Janie has with this man, the financial well-being that she possesses due to him and to forget about romantic love.

It is not that Hurston wrote of empowered women.  It is the fact that she wrote of real women.  Her characters were portrayals of the life she knew, that she had observed, and it is not necessary for female characters to always be empowered; in fact, it is both impossible and false for the entire female experience to be one of control and strength.  There is vulnerability, weakness, and dependency that exist in the female experience, and Hurston was addressing these issues during a time when doing such a thing was controversial and unpopular.  While Hurston’s  adherence to the belief in a stereotypical relationship between man and woman that involves dominance and subservience was contrary to the feminist movement, her writings strengthened the female community by creating a dialogue about the human experience as it pertains to the female, especially the Black female.

According to Deborah G. Plant in her book, “Every Tub Must Sit on Its Own Bottom: the Philosophy and Politics of Zora Neale

Hurston”:

Hurston’s texts raise many questions surrounding “the central conflicts” of her life as a Black woman and the lives of Black women in general.  No matter how bravely and admirably one deals with the import of institutionalized marginilization, one is never unaffected by it. (144)

The power comes from surviving; the importance of the text comes from its ability to force us to question ourselves and our acceptance of prescribed roles in society. 

Hurston’s writings create an opportunity for the reader to dissect the society and culture between World War I and II.  It is her ability to make us honestly look at ourselves, our responsibility in the way the world operates that creates her continued importance.

Edna St. Vincent Millay was one of the greatest poets of her generation, and this can be attributed to several factors.  One was her subject matter; she wrote of the universal human experience; another factor in her popularity was her style.  She had an incredible grasp of the English language, and her works have the ability to evoke a multitude of emotions from the reader.  Her lifestyle contributed to her popularity, in the sense that she enjoyed being a celebrity, and her eccentricities increased the public’s desire to know more about her, but nothing, not her lifestyle nor her gender, outweigh the fact that she was an incredibly talented writer.

In “I, Being Born a Woman and Distressed” written in 1923, the female narrator possesses certain characteristics because she is female, and one of these traits that is inherent in women propels her to find a love interest, and a desire exists within the narrator as a representative of womankind to bear her lover’s “weight upon my breast.”  This is not really unusual or striking, but the narrator’s conversation with her lover after revealing her physical reaction and attraction to the lover is interesting.  The narrator, or Millay, if the reader concludes that the author and narrator are the same person, states that her body has committed “treason” against her brain, and when this act is over, when the emotion has passed, she sees no need to converse with this person, the former lover, ever again.

The idea that the body could betray the brain was not new, but the fact that the person discussing this betrayal is a woman is uncommon.  Even more incongruent with the female community’s dialogue at that time was the concept that once a physical tryst had occurred and passion had overruled reason for a moment, a woman would see no reason to converse or continue the relationship in any form with the lover.  This was contrary to the typical mindset that first, sex was reserved for a marital relationship; second, that a woman who found herself in this sort of relationship, for whatever reason, would feel guilt and remorse and normally attempt to engage the lover in a relationship that would develop into a marital one; and third, a woman would believe her passion had been her “heart” and that it was leading her in the right direction, and she would have dismissed her intellectual beliefs and insisted on “following her heart.”

In this poem, Millay provides us with an empowered woman.  Here is a woman who admits she is experiencing weakness of the flesh, but this is a woman who knows she will recover from this lapse, and her rational side will rule again.  When this happens, she sees no reason to further their relationship or even continue it on any level.  Why not?  Whatever reason might exist to unite two people in a relationship is missing from the one found in this poem.  Physical attraction and acting on its existence does not constitute a relationship, and a woman will make irrational decisions based on lust, but she is capable of recovering and moving on after the decision has been made.

When asked if her poetry was personal, she replied “Personal? Of course, everything one writes is personal.  But if it were actual reporting of my own experience, I certainly shouldn’t admit it” (Milford 329).

Her poetry was immensely popular with her own generation.  It struck a chord and rang true.  Millay attributed her popularity to her subject matter.  Her subjects were the experiences she believed everyone shared.  She was the most well-known poet of her time.  When asked in an interview with a family friend, Elizabeth Bruer, about her role as a female poet and the different standards for male and female artists, Millay stated:

What you produce, what you create must always stand on its own feet regardless of your sex.  We are supposed to have won all the battles for our rights to be individuals, but in the arts women are still put in a class by themselves, and I resent it, as I have always rebelled against discriminations or limitations of a woman’s experience on account of her sex.  Nov. 1931

Millay’s work brought female experiences into the forefront of society’s consciousness, and changed the focus from the isolated, negatively perceived female experience to a human experience.  She did not see herself as a female poet; she saw herself as a poet, and the topics she addressed in her works were not female topics for her; they were topics that belonged to humankind.  Her impact on the female community cannot be too greatly emphasized.

These three women wrote in different genres, different styles, and of different characters, but their writings all impact the reader in a profound way that enlarges the reader’s worldview by expanding the cultures the reader has contact with.  All three writers also address real life in their works.  Life is not neat and organized and easily controlled, and these women incorporate this into their works.  Their writings encourage the reader to question several elements: society, the reader’s role in society, why events are occurring at all, if blame can be assigned for a tragedy, where does the blame belong, and what is the purpose of love and relationships with one another and with members of the opposite sex.

Cather wrote of strong women who operated on the margin of society, who, at times, took on roles differing from the ones of traditional females.  These women were removed from some of the bonds created by conventional society.  Her writings created new, foreign worlds, where skill and perserverance were valued above all else.  The women were concerned with survival, and if they possessed adequate skills, then they did survive.  This writing was something unusual.  Characters were allowed to fail or succeed based on their merits, not because they fit into a mold or acted according to expectations.  Another valuable contribution by Cather is the opportunity she provides for her readers to enter into the male psyche, and it is a role that we are allowed to experience in a painless, smooth process.  The reader can enter into a new universe and gain new perspectives and insights into humanity through her writings.

Hurston wrote of rural Black life in the south.  Often there were forces operating outside of the character’s control that impacted the character’s life in a monumental way.  Hurston creates an environment where the reader must question what makes someone a good person, a good wife, a good husband, and what reward is there for being good in these roles.  She also places a great deal of responsibility for the survival of a marriage onto the female.  If the female is trustworthy, honest, good, then the marriage will survive, and she does not focus a great deal on the impact that beatings by the husband or infidelities by the husband have on the state of the marriage.  This may not seem just since she does spend a great deal of time addressing these issues for women, the role of “sassing” the husband, a wife’s infidelities, and the reader may wonder what is the reason for that.  One reason may be that Hurston is writing about life that she knows, life that she experiences, and life for a Black woman between the two Wars contained these truths.  It did fall to the woman, the majority of the time, to keep a family together, regardless of the actions of the man, it was often considered to be better to stay with him, no matter what, and sometimes is was not a matter of consideration, the woman’s survival depended on the man.  This may not be comfortable for the reader to encounter, but it is necessary in order to understand that slice of history, that part of the human experience.  Hurston’s portrayal of life during this time is accurate; it sometimes makes us uncomfortable, and that adds to its significance. It has something valuable to reveal to readers.

Millay wrote of a woman with a new voice, not necessarily of a new woman.  The women in her works dealt with emotions and situations much as a man would, and this is one of the main points.  Men and women experience life; they react to life; their reactions shape their worlds.  Women feel loneliness, lust, love; they have desires and ambition and goals.  These things do not contribute to a sense of negativism.  Instead, these things unite women in the human experience with men.  Life is not experienced differently because of gender; it may be shaped by geography and social status, but the fundamental experience of being a human is the same for both men and women.  Millay discussed these topics in a way that made them accessible for both readers then and now.  Her work shattered the myth that women didn’t have physical desires or that women were incapable of being ruled by their intellects.  She wrote of tragedies and triumphs for humans, and through her writings, she dispelled much of the negativity that had been thrust upon womanhood by society.

If the goal of good literature is to evoke a response in the reader, force the reader to think about more than just words running in a steady stream in front of the eye, then these women authors are hugely successful.  Their writings fulfill all of the criteria for an excellent work of literature. Their stories and poems are entertaining.  The reader is sucked into their worlds; we know these characters; we live with them; in fact, we may be them.  We question their motivations; we are curious about crises, climaxes, and resolutions.  We seek answers to the questions these writers have created.  Their works give us insight into the society and culture they are writing in and about.  Our views of the world have been changed through their writings.  We have made a connection with them, and we share an experience involving a raised consciousness with fellow readers of their works.  Thus, a connection has been made between the writers and the readers and between readers as well.  A community has been created through the words on a page created by three women who strove to portray their experiences as accurately and realistically as possible.