The Comparison of Southern White Womanhood between Langston Hughes and Richard Wright

Langston Hughes (1902-67) and Richard Wright (1908-60) lived in almost the same era, but it is obvious that their ways of describing the people, who are manipulated by gender-based controlling images, are different. Both Wright and Hughes try to reveal how reality is disturbed by the black men's and white women's prevailing stereotypes; however, their works have very different tones. In Richard Wright's short story, "The Man Who Killed a Shadow," and Langston Hughes' poems in his early days, "Silhouette" and "The South," the stereotyped images of black masculinity and white womanhood are transformed and destroyed. While Hughes celebrates the black culture amicably, Wright depicts completely hopeless black men living in the world dominated by white supremacy. This difference is indicative of the shifting views from Harlem Renaissance to Post-Harlem Renaissance. While romantic tones can be still found in Hughes' poems, Wright subverts the power dynamics between the black man and the white woman, and completely ruins sentimentality which tends to be attached to the Southern stories in the $19^{th}$ century.