ABSTRACT
Michelle Wallace's own memory perhaps illuminates Zora Neale Hurston's early perception of self which she shared with other black women, the majority of whom, like her, lived in the Southern States where there still persisted the peculiar ideal of womanhood originating from eighteenth-century plantation society. This ideal of Southern womanhood established a standard to which white women might aspire as a norm, but from which all black women were excluded. Theirs had been a history of sexual abuse, they certainly had had to work and, judged by a white aesthetic, they could not even be deemed beautiful. By adopting the role of mediator between narrators and readers, Hurston describes a whole way of life in the community of which she had been a part. To win confidence and to elicit stories she asks questions about customs she probably knew about, for the benefit of the reader.
