Sweat

Study Guide

Literary Devices

Dialect

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Literary Devices Dialect

In this story Hurston uses formal English for the narration but writes the dialogue in Southern Black vernacular. Her use of dialect establishes the geographic and cultural specificity of the story. “Sweat” is not generic but distinctly a story about the lives of Black men and women in rural Florida in this time period. Much of the story is told through dialogue; in doing so, Hurston captures the rhythm of Southern Black speech, imbuing the story with life and marking the characters as fully realized people belonging to a robust culture.

By alternating between formal English and dialect, Hurston illustrates her command of the poetry inherent in both forms. Lines such as “Anything like flowers had long ago been drowned in the salty stream that had been pressed from her heart” utilize graceful imagery to describe Delia’s exhaustion with her marriage, while Joe Clarke’s extended comparison of bad husbands to men squeezing and discarding sugar cane uses metaphors grounded in the specific setting of the story to give the reader a visceral sense of how Clarke sees Sykes. Hurston moves fluidly between the linguistic styles of the story, sometimes using the same literary devices in each form. For example, she uses parallel construction and repetition in colloquial speech when Delia harangues Sykes (“Work and sweat, cry and sweat, pray and sweat [....] Mah sweat is done paid for this house and Ah reckon Ah kin keep on sweatin’ in it”), and she uses the same device in the narration, saying of Delia, “She had brought love to the union and he had brought a longing after the flesh.” Throughout the story, Hurston demonstrates that both formal English and Southern Black vernacular English possess a richness and the capacity to express meaning with beauty.

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