The Analysis of Cleo’s Character in West’s “The Living Is Easy

Abstract

This study analyzes the heroine character in Dorothy West’s novel, The Living Is Easy. This heroine is a different literary character in the African American literature of the twentieth century, the Harlem Renaissance. During this period, African people had been accepted as independent individuals in the American society. This supports Greve’s belief that “African American literature is now at a different stage…with strong and independent black characters…” (62). On the contrary, Cleo is presented as a black woman with a twist fact that she appears to behave as a white person, but not truly as a female. Therefore, the author depicts a protagonist who could be any one of us, a human of any gender; a woman of any race. Accordingly, this literary work is not like other common African American works in which its themes are about slavery or the impact of slavery over the coming generation. It is about those blacks who escape from the south to the north of the United States in order to have a prosperous life, just like the luxurious life of white people at that time. West’s protagonist wants to search “…for a different life from their parents” (Bay: 203). In this paper, we investigate this new type of an African American heroine who appeared to be a victim of herself and her norms by denying both, being a black person and a typical feminine.