The Gilded Six-Bits
Zora Neale Hurston has been married and divorced twice, which assisted her in developing Joe and Missy May's marriage. Hurston's rocky marriage occurred just prior to the writing of "The Gilded Six-Bits" which portrays a marriage replete with infidelity and hatred. Missy May's infidelity tests the strength of her marriage with Joe, which ultimately succeeds the trials and tribulations. Perhaps Hurston spared Joe and Missy May's marriage to prove to herself that marriages can stand through infidelity, because neither of her marriages continued through the hardships. Hurston saw marriage as an important commitment capable of forgiveness and recommitment. Hurston creates Joe, as the character that forgives and forgets, possibly this is what she expected or desired in her own husbands. Hurston uses her own life experiences to depict her characters as realistic to the readers.
Hurston gives her readers a plentiful amount of dialect and reactions between Joe and his wife, Missy May, to represent the reality of her characters. Hurston opens the story with Missy anxiously awaiting Joe's return home from work. Upon his arrival, they have flirtatious play fights and wrestle in "a furious mass of male and female energy". Joe always placed candy kisses home to Missy May for her to discover in his pockets during a frantic, yet...
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