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In/visible Men: Hurston, "Sweat" and Laundry Icons

It's also been judged "by far the best of [her] early writings" and "arguably [her] finest short story." As a result, "Sweat" ( 1 926) has incited wide-ranging discussion. Not fully appreciated, though, is how teasingly it dances at the dizzy edge of dangerous wit. So dizzy is that edge that critics are still falling into a trap set by the laughing-up-her-sleeve satirist who remains half-known, only, to the academy. That was the risk run by an artist whose aesthetic merged anti-racist initiatives with ironization of figurations circulated so energetically, over so many years, that they signified as icons. With the passage of time, those icons' disappearance has left even labor-alert readers likely to miss trenchant play in "Sweat." I spotlight that play by tackling the misapprehension that the laundry Delia whitens laboriously symbolizes her "innate goodness."1 That interpretation is short-sighted for two reasons. One, white laundry puns on the means by which she bought and keeps the house in which she invests so much (too much?) love. Two, goodness doesn't mesh with her decision to say nothing when her unloved husband Sykes intrudes on a rattlesnake. The morality play enacted by her silence is honored by realization that "Sweat" blurs folkloric narrative methods