The Crazy Woman

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.