Previous

Their Eyes Were Watching God

Like many of Zora Neale Hurston’s most well-known works, including “Spunk,” her masterpiece Their Eyes Were Watching God explores themes of marriage and freedom. The novel follows Janie’s quest for love and freedom, beginning with her sexual awakening as a teenage girl, continuing through marriages to men who seek to control her without understanding her and eventual tragic true love, before culminating in Janie finding her own sense of freedom. Stories like “Spunk,” written more than a decade before Their Eyes Were Watching God, show Hurston’s lasting interest in establishing the Black communities of rural Florida she lived in as a child as settings worthy of great literature. 

“Sweat”

Another early short story by Zora Neale Hurston, “Sweat” details the demise of a bad husband, Sykes, who is killed by a rattlesnake he has brought into his house in order to frighten his wife, Delia, into leaving. Like “Spunk,” “Sweat” is set in a fictionalized version of Hurston’s hometown of Eatonville, Florida, an all-Black rural community that inspired much of Hurston’s literary and anthropological work. The story includes commentary from the men gathered at Joe Clarke’s store, men known in “Spunk” as the loungers. As with Their Eyes Were Watching God and “Spunk,” Hurston explores themes of marriage and consequences of reckless behavior.  

Hamlet

In William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, as in “Spunk,” a ghost ensures that a conflict between two men over a woman continues beyond death. Just as Spunk murders Joe in order to assure his possession of Lena, Claudius kills Hamlet’s father in order to marry Gertrude. Hamlet’s father’s ghost, like Joe’s, returns to earth to ensure revenge for the killing. The “funeral baked meats” Hurston describes at Spunk’s visitation echoes the same phrase in Hamlet, used in the play to point out that food leftover from Hamlet’s father’s funeral is served at Claudius and Gertrude’s wedding. This subtle allusion hints that Lena’s next wedding is likewise expected to follow the funeral quickly, as a new man claims her as a symbol of masculine triumph.

Previous section Historical Context: Eatonville

Take a Study Break