18 pages • 36 minutes read
The Crazy Woman
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Background
Literary Context
The Harlem Renaissance had a significant influence on Brooks, which is seen in this brief poem. The movement occurred in New York during the 1920s and 30s, and it encouraged Black writers and artists to express their lives, voices, and multidimensional identities. While Brooks read and admired the writers of the time, especially Langston Hughes, she rejected the way some artists and writers exoticized Black people, and she sought to present them simply as people. In her poetry and writing, Brooks sought to humanize Black people, showing that Black people experience the same issues, emotions, and experiences as any member of the human race. This plays out in “The Crazy Woman,” where the reader is only aware of the speaker’s gender, but unaware of her race—as such, the sentiment becomes more universal to the experience of women.
Indeed, “The Crazy Woman” is a part of the literary context in which women are deemed crazy or unwell for acting against conventions. In her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), the Harlem Renaissance author Zora Neale Hurston created a unique woman in the character of Janie Mae Crawford. Like the crazy woman, Janie asserts herself and resists norms by standing up to her husband and starting a romantic relationship with a younger man.
Decades before Hurston’s novel, Charlotte Perkins Gilman published a now-famous short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892), which deals with what happens when the majority prevails and a woman is not free to express herself and sing her song when and where she likes. “The Crazy Woman” also connects to women writers and poets, like Emily Dickinson and Gertrude Stein, both of whom were considered eccentric and crazy by critics for their unconventional lifestyles and choices.
Historical Context
Brooks published “The Crazy Woman” in 1960 during a period when women were fighting for more rights and greater equality. Three years after Brooks’s came out, Betty Friedan published a canonical feminist text, The Feminine Mystique (1963), which addressed women’s frustrations at not having the same opportunities and freedoms as men. With her book, Friedan supplied women with a voice. Brooks’s poem is rooted in this historical moment, when women were beginning to enjoy greater visibility and independence. As women in the 1960s began to find their own voices, the crazy woman finds the confidence to assert herself and follow her heart, even if her self-determination comes with name-calling and ridicule.
It is critical to note that Brooks, as with many Black women during this moment, separated themselves from white feminists like Betty Friedan. In 1969, Brooks declared, “I think Women’s Lib is not for Black women for the time being, because Black men need their women beside them, supporting them in these very tempestuous days” (quoted in A Surprised Queenhood in the New Black Sun). At the same time, Brooks, in keeping with the ideals of “The Crazy Woman,” did not expect Black women to yield to demeaning norms. In a 1951 essay,“Why Negro Women Leave Home,” Brooks demands that Black men treat Black women with “dignity and respect,” echoing the feminist movement more broadly.
The historical context of “The Crazy Women” exhibits Brooks’s careful balancing act. On the one hand, there were issues facing Black women not facing white women. Alternately, some issues bonded women together in their push for equality. In the poem, the issue of a woman using her voice when, where, and how she wants is not explicitly expressed in terms of race; instead, the author uses a more neutral voice to speak to the struggle most women had to face to have their voices heard.
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By Gwendolyn Brooks
