Introduction
Hurston is widely considered one of the foremost writers of the Harlem Renaissance, a period of great achievement in African American art and literature during the 1920s and 1930s. Her fiction, which depicts relationships among black residents in her native southern Florida, was largely unconcerned with racial injustices. While not well known during her lifetime, Hurston's works have undergone a substantial critical reevaluation, particularly since the advent of the black protest novel and the elevation in literary status of authors Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin during the post-World War II era. Hurston's present reputation and popularity are evidenced by the reprinting of several of her works in the late 1980s, including Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). This book has been read as a feminist manifesto for its unconventional female protagonist, Janie Crawford, who is considered by many as a representation of the author herself. Hurston's novel has become a staple in women's studies programs and has inspired many female authors to create nonstereotypical black female characters.
BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION
Hurston was born January 15, 1891, in Notasulga, Alabama, to John, a Baptist preacher, and Lula (called Lucy), a seamstress. When she was still a young child her family moved to Eatonville, Florida, the first incorporated black township in the United States and the setting for most of her fiction. In 1904 her mother died, which devastated Hurston. Her father married a much younger woman with whom Hurston did not get along, and Hurston was sent to school in Jacksonville and then to live with relatives. At the age of fourteen, Hurston left home to work as a maid with a traveling Gilbert and Sullivan theatrical troupe.
For a short time in 1917 Hurston studied at Morgan State University in Baltimore, and in 1918 she entered Howard University in Washington, D.C. While at Howard, Hurston published short stories in Stylus, the university literary magazine, and attracted the attention of noted sociologist Charles S. Johnson. With Johnson's encouragement, Hurston moved to New York City in 1925 and subsequently secured a scholarship to Barnard College with the assistance of Annie Nathan Meyer, a white philanthropist and well-known supporter of Harlem Renaissance artists. While at Barnard, Hurston studied anthropology under Franz Boas, one of the most renowned anthropologists of the era. After her graduation in 1928, she continued her work with Boas as a graduate student at Columbia University.
With the aid of fellowships and a private grant from Charlotte Osgood Mason, a New York socialite interested in "primitive Negro art," Hurston returned to the South to collect folklore. She traveled to Alabama, Louisiana, and Florida, living among sharecroppers and workers lodged in labor camps whose primary form of entertainment consisted of telling tall tales, or "lies." In 1935 Hurston compiled Mules and Men (1935), a collection of African American folktales that expanded upon her academic studies and anthropological field work. Through the next decade Hurston continued to travel for her anthropological research and continued to write fiction.
In 1945 Hurston was accused of sexual corruption of a minor. The charges were dismissed, but the controversy damaged Hurston's reputation. She continued to write but did not find much interest from publishers. After trying to support herself with odd jobs, Hurston became ill and moved into the county welfare home in Fort Pierce, Florida, where she died in 1960.
MAJOR WORKS
In addition to tales and descriptions of voodoo practices and beliefs, Mules and Men includes work songs, legends, rhymes, and lies, all of which contained hidden social and philosophical messages considered essential to survival in a racist society. African American folklore forms...
(This entire section contains 1136 words.)
Unlock this Study Guide Now
Start your 48-hour free trial and get ahead in class. Boost your grades with access to expert answers and top-tier study guides. Thousands of students are already mastering their assignments—don't miss out. Cancel anytime.
Already a member? Log in here.
a basis for all of Hurston's writing, including what critics refer to as her greatest novel,Their Eyes Were Watching God. Thought to be essentially autobiographical, Their Eyes Were Watching God focuses on a woman's search for self-definition in the sexist society of the early 1900s. Janie Crawford is a beautiful, light-skinned African American woman unable to discover her true self until she begins to take charge of her life. The oral narrative employed to relate Janie's quest implies that her strength and identity grow as she becomes more attuned to her black heritage; the telling of tales is as integral a part of black culture as the tales themselves. Similarly, Janie's account is a story within a story, told in a flashback to her good friend Pheoby Watson.
Hurston's autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road (1942) reveals more about Hurston's writing style and her opinions on many of the issues of the day than about her early life. Hurston discusses very little about her birth, her early family life, relationships, and her involvement in the Harlem Renaissance. In Seraph on the Suwanee (1948) Hurston used white protagonists for the first time in her work. Arvay Henson comes from a poor, white "cracker" family and believes she has found her salvation in Jim Meserve, a man who raped her and whom she subsequently married. However, Arvay finds herself stifled by her sexist husband and consistently feels inadequate in meeting his expectations.
CRITICAL RECEPTION
Critics have generally praised Hurston's narrative recreation of southern black rural dialect; however, several critics have reacted negatively to Hurston's use of the same dialect with her white characters in Seraph on the Suwanee. From the initial publication of Their Eyes Were Watching God, critics have debated Hurston's ostensible disregard of the issue of racism. Many of Hurston's black contemporaries considered her an opportunist who catered to white benefactors, and early reviewers believed her book to be an attempt at escapism. However, other commentators have noted that Janie's dilemmas are not centered on issues of racism, but sexism, a concern for all women during the 1920s. Most contemporary critics have argued that Hurston concentrates on strength and affirmation within the black community, and not the denial and anger racism often evokes.
There has also been disagreement among critics regarding Hurston's relationship to feminism. Some commentators have asserted that Hurston's life and work make her a model feminist: as a woman who refused to conform to other's expectations and who did not rely on a man for support, she practiced several feminist traits. Some reviewers have viewed Janie Crawford as a feminist icon, but others have been troubled by the way she relies upon a man to help her and by how long it takes for her to find her voice. Another issue of intense feminist debate amongst scholars concerning Their Eyes Were Watching God, is the death of Tea Cake—Janie's companion after her husband's death. Most commentators have agreed it is essential to Janie's quest that she return to Eatonville alone, but many question whether it is necessary for Tea Cake to be sacrificed for Janie to obtain her sense of identity. The novel's ironic ending is generally considered representative of Hurston's beliefs regarding her writing and her life—in both she challenged conventional norms.
Their Eyes Were Watching God
SUSAN MEISENHELDER (ESSAY DATE 1996)
SOURCE: Meisenhelder, Susan. “Ethnic and Gender Identity in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God.” In Teaching American Ethnic Literatures: Nineteen Essays, pp. 105-17. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996.
In the following essay, Meisenhelder addresses how Janie, the protagonist of Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, struggles with her identity as a black woman.
A. Analysis of Themes and Forms
In [Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God , the] story of a black woman’s search for identity, the main character, Janie, suffers through two unfulfilling marriages to oppressive, materialistic men, who “squinch” her spirit until she meets Tea Cake, a carefree, fun-loving bluesman who encourages her independence and self-expression. Janie leaves behind her “respectable,” economically secure life to go with Tea Cake to the Everglades where they enjoy life to the fullest until a hurricane strikes. After this disaster, Janie returns home, comforted by her memories and sustained by the spirit of affirmation with which, despite tragic events, she faces life.
A major theme Hurston develops in the novel (and one characteristic of much of her work) is a celebration of black folklife. In the section of the novel that takes place in the Everglades (on the “Muck”), she depicts a kind of black Eden—a world of equality, exuberance, and vitality drawn in sharp contrast to the materialism and dehumanization many black writers have seen in the dominant, white world. In this respect, the novel is written in the spirit of black cultural affirmation characterizing the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and early 1930s. Like such writers as Langston Hughes and Claude McKay, Hurston was often critical of middle-class blacks (who, she felt, imitated whites) and much more interested in the life of the black person “farthest down.” In the lives of rural, uneducated blacks Hurston found not only a rich cultural tradition of folklore and music, but a set of values opposed to (and in her mind, superior to) those of the dominant culture. Responding to Hurston’s treatment of this theme, Alice Walker has praised the novel for its “racial health; [the] sense of black people as complete, complex, undiminished human beings” (85).
While earlier readers of Hurston’s work focused on racial and cultural issues, contemporary critics have investigated the importance of gender in the novel. Janie’s search for identity, in fact, involves struggling with her place as black and female. Hurston highlights the racial component of Janie’s quest, for instance, by detailing the negative effects that growing up in the backyard of whites has had on Janie’s sense of self. She has been given so many names by others that she is finally called Alphabet (9), an indication of her fragmented identity reinforced by the fact that she does not see herself as black and cannot even recognize herself in a photograph. As Janie grows into young womanhood, however, the issue of identity—what it means to be black and a woman—becomes even more complex.
Janie’s grandmother (a more sympathetic character for the reader perhaps than for Janie) offers her one vision of the black female self. Nanny’s belief that “‘de white man is de ruler of everything’” leads her to think of society as a multilayered hierarchy involving both race and sex: “‘. . . de white man throw down de load and tell de nigger man tuh pick it up. He pick it up because he have to, but he don’t tote it. He hand it to his women-folks. De nigger woman is de mule of de world as fur as I can see’” (14). Drawing this model of black female identity from her own experience with the harshest forms of racial and sexual oppression (slavery and rape), Nanny dreams of marriage and economic security for Janie. Fearing that Janie may be a mule or a “spit-cup” for men, she seeks protection for her by marrying her off to a well-to-do older man. As that marriage graphically demonstrates, the price is high, for Janie is forced to sacrifice love. In more complex ways, Janie’s first two marriages highlight the limitations of Nanny’s analysis by revealing the ways in which women can be spit-cups and mules with male protection.
Janie has another vision of female possibility, imaged in her experience under the pear tree (10-11). On one level an obvious metaphor for sexual relationships, the passage is a powerful contrast to Nanny’s spit-cup and mule metaphors with their suggestions of rape and female dehumanization. This metaphor for sexuality, on the contrary, is one free of domination and divisions into active and passive: there is no suggestion of rapacious violence on the part of the (male) bee or of passive victimization on the part of the “sister-calyxes [who] arch to meet the love embrace.” The relationship imaged here, one between active equals, is not only one of delight, but as the metaphor of pollination implies, one of creativity. This passage is a key one in the novel: not only will Janie, in the search for a “bee for her blossom,” measure her relationships against this ideal; but Hurston will associate nearly every black character in the novel with tree imagery to suggest their psychic wholeness or mutilation. Ultimately, the image becomes the novel’s ideal for human interaction (sexual, interpersonal, or more broadly social), a model of relationships without hierarchy or domination.
Joe Starks is clearly no “bee” in his relationship with Janie or with the black community. While his role as oppressor is often obvious, much more subtle is Hurston’s analysis of the source of his identity. Numerous details, from his white house (an imitation plantation one) to his fancy spittoon, suggest that he draws his model from a white world. He interacts with the townspeople like a slaveowner, talking like a “section foreman” (33) with “bow-down command” (44) in his face. Starks recreates power dynamics of the most oppressive sort in the town, a fact recognized by the residents themselves, who, when forced by Starks to dig ditches, “murmured hotly about slavery being over” (44). He sees himself as God (his most frequent exclamation is, in fact, “I god”) and acts the part, even bringing light to the community in a parody of Genesis when he installs the first light-post.
Despite his superficially solicitous behavior, Starks’s treatment of Janie is equally oppressive. He puts Janie on a pedestal, above other black women in the community but decidedly beneath himself. This marriage graphically demonstrates the limitations of Nanny’s mule metaphor: merely removing white faces from the social hierarchy changes nothing for Janie, for she is still oppressed by the man above her. Ironically, Janie lives a life with Joe that Nanny worked so hard to avoid for her, enduring what Nanny feared despite having attained the economic circumstances she desired. Hurston emphasizes this shortcoming of Nanny’s strategy for black women by having Janie symbolically associated with the situations that Nanny most feared. Race and gender intersect in complex ways, for instance, when Joe demands that Janie bind her hair in a “head-rag” (86), an artifact of the slavery period. Despite her husband’s wealth, Janie becomes a spiritual slave in this marriage, a sexual object owned and controlled by her master.
In terms of both racial and gender identity, Tea Cake is portrayed as Starks’s antithesis. His feminized nickname promises a “sweeter,” gentler kind of masculinity than that suggested by Starks’s name. Unlike Starks, who draws his models from a white world, Tea Cake is emphatically black, a man who not only revels in his own cultural traditions but also rejects the hierarchy and crass materialism characterizing Starks’s whitewashed world. Also rejecting hierarchy based on sex, he becomes “a bee to Janie’s blossom,” encouraging Janie to express herself and to experience life more fully. Janie must step down from her pedestal to enter a relationship with Tea Cake, but she steps into one built on reciprocity rather than hierarchy. In teaching Janie to play checkers, to shoot, and to drive, and in inviting her to work alongside of him, Tea Cake breaks down the rigid gender definitions that Joe sought to impose.
In the section on the Muck, Hurston projects this model of ideal relationships onto a larger plane. With the status differences and white values that Starks sought to reinforce absent on the Muck, artificial hierarchical divisions evaporate: Janie is just another person rather than Mrs. Mayor, and the West Indians, instead of being ostracized, are accepted as equals in the community. The hierarchies of Nanny’s metaphor are also foreign to this community. With no white man present to toss his load to the black man, black men do not toss theirs on to black women. When Janie goes to work in the fields with Tea Cake, it is not because Tea Cake sees her as a mule but because he wants to be with her. Freely chosen, work for Janie becomes an expression of her equality and vitality rather than her oppression. She and Tea Cake “partake with everything,” sharing in both paid labor and domestic work. With Janie and Tea Cake as the Adam and Eve at the center of this garden, the spirit of their relationship is mirrored in the community. The center of this world is not the commercial enterprise of Joe’s store, but Janie and Tea Cake’s house, the cultural heart of the community where everyone enjoys the guitar-playing and storytelling. Janie is not merely an outside observer, as she had been with Joe, but an active participant and speaker (127-28). In this section, Janie develops both a rich ethnic identity and a vigorous female one.
The exception to the racial health in the community (in fact, the serpent in this Eden) is Mrs. Turner, a woman who, as suggested in her name, rejects her own blackness. Like Starks, she wants to “class off” (135), to elevate herself above other blacks. Cut off from the rich cultural life of the community in her desire to be white, she is depicted as racially and sexually insipid, a pale contrast to the vital people around her.
From this point, critics adopt two different interpretations of the novel. For some, Tea Cake’s death is a tragic end to this love story; these critics argue that the last few pages of the novel, filled with Janie’s memories of Tea Cake, confirm him as an ideal. Other critics see important changes in Tea Cake while he and Janie are on the Muck and, often, a quite different significance in his death.
Critical to this latter view of Tea Cake is the beating he gives Janie as a result of his unfounded fear that she will be attracted to Mrs. Turner’s brother. Clearly, it is not the violence of Tea Cake’s act that Hurston pinpoints as problematic, but his motives. Hurston emphasizes this fact in the contrast between Tea Cake’s beating of Janie and their earlier fight over Nunkie. When Janie feels jealous of Nunkie, she is more than ready to tackle Tea Cake in an honest expression of her passion: “Janie never thought at all. She just acted on feelings” (131). Tea Cake’s violence toward Janie has both a very different motivation and a very different effect. His action is not a spontaneous expression of strong feeling, but a premeditated “brainstorm” (140). Fundamentally manipulative and coercive, the beating is calculated to assert domination over Janie, to demonstrate it to Mrs. Turner and to other men. In subtle ways, Tea Cake’s behavior toward Janie changes from this point on, echoing the falsely solicitous actions of Starks. To assert the power of his masculinity by reassuring himself of Janie’s passive femininity, he “would not let her go with him to the field. He wanted her to get her rest” (146). When the storm strikes, he not only ignores Janie’s warnings but expresses a disconcerting acceptance of white superiority and the racial denigration of Indians (148).
Some critics see Tea Cake’s illness as symbolic of changes in his attitude toward Janie. While his behavior is obviously explainable as the result of his disease, careful examination of details shows a sharp contrast to his earlier behavior toward Janie. He begins, for instance, to speak to her as Starks had, even complaining about her housework (166-67). Some critics argue that Tea Cake now poses such a threat to Janie’s new-found female identity (symbolized in his delirious attempt to kill her) that Janie’s act must be viewed as spiritual, as well as physical, self-defense. Alice Walker, who was perhaps the first to see Janie’s shooting of Tea Cake as a blow for her freedom, argues that Tea Cake’s beating of Janie is “the reason Hurston permits Janie to kill Tea Cake” (305). Even critics who see problems with Tea Cake’s character toward the end of the novel split on the question of whether Janie achieves complete liberation: some say yes, viewing Janie’s attitudes at the end of the novel as evidence of a positive identity (whatever Tea Cake’s faults); some offer a more qualified view, suggesting that Janie’s dream of Tea Cake at the end demonstrates a denial of reality, but her own spiritual strength nonetheless; and some say no, analyzing the god and idol imagery running throughout the novel to conclude that Janie has created yet another false idol in her memory of Tea Cake, just as she had with Jody.
B. Teaching the Work
I think it’s important to begin class discussion of this novel with some biographical material on Hurston’s life. Hemenway’s biography and Hurston’s own Dust Tracks on a Road are helpful here. (Even though critics tend to agree that Hurston is, in many ways, an unreliable narrator in her autobiography, it at least provides insight into the persona that Hurston wanted to present to her contemporaries.) Born into the security of an allblack town in Florida as the daughter of a minister father and a spunky mother who urged her to “jump at the sun,” Hurston found herself alone and unsupported when her mother died while Zora was still a child. By her own account, she was only able to continue her education through a combination of sheer willpower and help from assorted (often white) benefactors and patrons. She was able to finish college and to study anthropology under the direction of Franz Boas. Despite the fact that she never earned a Ph.D., Hurston did extensive fieldwork in anthropology, both in the South and in the Caribbean, publishing two book–length studies of black folk-ways, Mules and Men and Tell My Horse . In addition to Their Eyes Were Watching God, she published several other novels, Jonah’s Gourd Vine, Moses, Man of the Mountain, and Seraph on the Suwanee, as well as an autobiography and numerous stories and articles. While she was well known during the Harlem Renaissance period, she was never able to make a decent living from her writing and died in obscurity and poverty in 1960. Alice Walker has been a major force in bringing Hurston back into popularity (see bibliography), and Hurston is now recognized by many contemporary black women writers as an important foremother.
Even though Hurston highlights both race and gender in Their Eyes Were Watching God, students (especially white students, but not exclusively) tend to highlight gender. They will quickly notice, for instance, that Starks is a chauvinist and Tea Cake is not, but they will need more prodding to see the complicated way in which Hurston comments on the racial identity as well as the masculine identity of both men. With the character of Starks, for instance, instructors may need to direct students to Hurston’s many symbolic references to Starks’s “whiteness.” My students also sometimes overlook the way in which Hurston draws parallels between his oppression of Janie and of the town. While students often accept Starks’s view of himself as a “leader” and “developer” of the community, Hurston repeatedly suggests a more sinister motive for his actions, namely a desire to control the town as he has seen white men do elsewhere. For him, the development of the community is not a cultural endeavor, but merely a commercial venture, one from which he will reap the profits. As one resident’s bitter comment—“‘All he got he done made it offa de rest of us’” (46)—suggests, Starks exploits the community as fully as he does Janie.
Another issue that often arises in discussing Starks is the manner in which Janie frees herself from him. After having been humiliated by him, she (in uncharacteristically blunt language) responds: “‘You big–bellies round her and put out a lot of brag, but ‘tain’t nothin’ to it but yo’ big voice. Humph! Talkin’ ‘bout me looking old! When you pull down yo’ britches, you look lak de change uh life” (75). Some students (and at least one critic) feel that Janie’s emasculating comment here is unnecessarily cruel; in discussing this section, it helps to point out that Joe has humiliated Janie in a similarly sexual and explicit way (74).
The issue of how to evaluate Tea Cake’s character always engenders some of the most animated (and heated) discussions of any book I’ve taught. After reading the novel, some students come to class feeling he’s a total fraud and others that he’s a romantic ideal. Often these reactions stem from students’ beliefs about popular contemporary controversies (“male–bashing” and black women “trashing” black men are, for instance, often alluded to when I begin a discussion by asking students for their reactions to the book). To foster more fruitful discussion grounded in the text, it is helpful to have students meet in small groups with others who view Tea Cake similarly in order to develop a case for their point of view. In addition to having them marshal evidence from the text for their interpretations, I also ask them to develop questions for “the other side” to answer. Asking and answering such questions (“If you believe Tea Cake is so wonderful, then how do you explain his beating of Janie?” or “If you think Tea Cake is so awful, then why does Hurston end the book with such beautiful images to describe him?”) is an important part of this exercise because students will tend to leave out evidence that weakens their case. Even though I’m convinced that Hurston meant to suggest flaws in Tea Cake’s character, the novel is ambiguous and complex enough in its treatment of issues to bear a number of divergent but plausible interpretations. I’ve heard admirers of Tea Cake develop quite respectable explanations for the beating episode: “Perhaps,” some have argued, “Hurston wanted to highlight the power of sexism by making even a nearly perfect character like Tea Cake momentarily succumb to it. Hurston is writing realism, not romantic fairytale. Even Janie has dandruff, after all.”
If students are having difficulty generating specifics, I sometimes turn their attention to particular passages that need to be addressed. I ask students enamored with Tea Cake, for instance, to examine closely the language Hurston uses to describe the beating and its aftermath, especially his statement that “‘Janie is wherever Ah wants tuh be’” (141). I ask students critical of Tea Cake to examine the imagery of the last part of the book: If Tea Cake is a villain, why does Hurston associate him with seed imagery, so suggestive of rebirth and the powerful pear tree scene. If discussion is going well, I sometimes push students to think about the ambiguity of earlier passages, such as the money–stealing episode that occurs in Jacksonville right after Janie and Tea Cake are married. Although, on the one hand, the threat implicit in that event seems diffused (Tea Cake, at least, spends the money in a very unStarksian fashion by throwing a party and only excludes Janie because he fears her disapproval), he does admit to motivations at odds with the characteristics we most value in him: he throws the party not just for fun, but to let people “know who he was” and “to see how it felt to be a millionaire” (117).
One issue that often comes up in this discussion of Tea Cake’s character and his relationship with Janie is the nature of oppression. The reaction of some students—Janie is not oppressed by Tea Cake because she doesn’t feel that she is—has often led to interesting discussions in my class about what constitutes oppression. (For students to at least consider the possibility that oppression does not have to be defined in terms of awareness seems crucial to their understanding of many ethnic and women writers.) Students respond even more energetically to more specific discussion of the treatment of romantic love in the novel. More than one critic has suggested that Janie’s blindness to Tea Cake’s faults is precisely the result of an idealizing love for him. In discussion of this very sensitive issue, Nanny’s comments on love always elicit student reaction: love, she argues, is “de prong all us black women gits hung on. Dis love! Dat’s just whut’s got us uh pullin’ and uh haulin’ and sweatin’ and doin’ from can’t see in de mornin’ till can’t see at night” (22). Hurston’s own account of the major love affair of her life (the one, in fact, that served as the rough model for Their Eyes Were Watching God ) also sparks discussion. In the account narrated in Dust Tracks on a Road, Hurston not only stresses her adoration of her lover, but the subtle ways in which he became the “master kind” (257) and she “his slave” (258).
One question students nearly always raise about the novel is the function of the “mule talk” section (Chapter 6). Just as critics have, students see it as anomalous, seemingly unrelated to events preceding it and conflicting with the novel’s realism when the buzzards speak to one another after the funeral. Given Hurston’s emphasis on the black woman as “the mule of the world,” however, students can draw some interesting parallels between the mule and Janie. Like the yellow mule who is the superficial focus of the men’s concern, the light–skinned Janie, while seemingly pampered by her husband, is elevated for his own aggrandizement. At the mule’s funeral, he “stands on [its] distended belly . . . for a platform” (57), just as his status in the community requires him to elevate himself above Janie. Almost as if she senses her affinities with the mule (she is the only person to pity it and speak up for it), Janie soon frees herself from Starks after this episode.
After discussing Their Eyes Were Watching God, students benefit from returning to some discussion of Hurston’s struggles as a writer. I like to end my study of the novel by drawing on Alice Walker’s version (In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens) of Hurston’s life and on her own “discovery” of Hurston’s work (all of it out of print when Walker was in college). Students are invariably moved by her comments on the plight of Hurston and other black women writers and by Walker’s account of her search for Hurston’s unmarked grave.
With its focus on gender, race, and class, Their Eyes Were Watching God works extremely well in the classroom in a unit on how writers of different backgrounds view these issues. Richard Wright’s Uncle Tom’s Children, for instance, with a different conception of blackness, offers interesting contrasts to Hurston’s treatment of race and also fosters good discussion of the role gender plays in ethnic literature. The reviews each author wrote on the other’s book can supplement discussion. In his review, “Between Laughter and Tears,” published in the October 1937 issue of New Masses, Wright had this to say about Their Eyes Were Watching God:
Miss Hurston voluntarily continues in her novel the tradition which was forced upon the Negro in the theater, that is, the minstrel technique that makes the ‘white folks’ laugh. Her characters eat and laugh and cry and work and kill; they swing like a pendulum eternally in that safe and narrow orbit in which America likes to see the Negro live: between laughter and tears.
His searing comments were matched by Hurston’s equally caustic ones in her review of Uncle Tom’s Children, “Stories of Conflict ,” published in Saturday Review, April 2, 1938: “There is lavish killing here, perhaps enough to satisfy all male black readers” (32).
Three novels that foster discussion highlighting race differences in gender identity are Hurston’s Seraph on the Suwanee (which echoes many aspects of Their Eyes Were Watching God in a treatment of white southern life that emphasizes differences in female oppression in black and white communities); Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (which, with its notion of selfhood defined in individualistic terms, contrasts with Hurston’s communal one); and Tillie Olsen’s Yonnondio (which offers many possibilities for comparing Maisie and Janie and for analyzing different views of the effect that class has on gender identity).
I have also found several novels by other black women to be fruitful companions to Their Eyes Were Watching God . Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day, a contemporary treatment of a black woman’s identity by a writer clearly indebted to Hurston, can be used as another view of how race and sex interact in the lives of black women. The novel also offers rich possibilities for comparing Janie and Tea Cake with the main protagonists in Naylor’s novel, Cocoa and George. Nella Larsen’s Quicksand, written by one of Hurston’s contemporaries, provides a sharp contrast both in its emphasis on black female identity in the middle class and its seeming pessimism about the possibilities for black women generally. Finally, Nervous Conditions, a novel by a Zimbabwean woman writer, Tsitsi Dangaremgba, also examines the relationship between race and gender through an exploration of the effects of colonialism on black female and male identity.
DEBORAH CLARKE (ESSAY DATE WINTER 2001)
SOURCE: Clarke, Deborah. "'The Porch Couldn't Talk for Looking': Voice and Vision in Their Eyes Were Watching God." African American Review 35, no. 4 (winter 2001): 599-613.
In the following essay, Clarke asserts that in Hurston's novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, "her concern goes beyond presenting an individual woman's journey to self-awareness" and contends that Hurston's accomplishment is a redefining of African American rhetoric.
"So 'tain't no use in me telling you somethin' unless Ah give you de understandin' to go 'long wid it. Unless you see de fur, a mink skin ain't no different from a coon hide."
(Hurston, Their Eyes 7)
When Janie [in Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God] explains to her friend Pheoby the reason that simply telling her story will not suffice, why she needs to provide the "'understandin' to go 'long wid it,'" she employs a metaphor of vision: Unless you see the fur, you can't tell a mink from a coon. Stripped of their defining visual characteristics, the hides collapse into sameness. Recognizing visual difference, Hurston suggests, is crucial to understanding how identity is constructed: by skin and color. With this claim, she invokes new avenues into an African American tradition that has privileged voice as its empowering trope. From Phillis Wheatley's demonstration that an African can have a poetic voice, to Frederick Douglass's realization that freedom is measured by words and the ability to address a white audience, to Charles Chesnutt's presentation of the triumph of black storytelling in The Conjure Woman, voice has prevailed as the primary medium through which African American writers have asserted identity and humanity. Voice announced that visual difference was only skin deep, that black bodies housed souls that were, in essence, no different from those residing in white bodies. Their Eyes Were Watching God is very much a part of this tradition, and has inspired many fine studies on the ways that its protagonist finds a voice and a self.1 Yet, as others have pointed out, Janie's voice is by no means unequivocally established by the end of the book. Robert Stepto was among the first to express dissatisfaction with the narrative structure and its third-person narrator; for him, the use of the narrator implies that "Janie has not really won her voice and self after all" (166). More recently, Michael Awkward has pointed out that Janie is not interested in telling the community her story upon her return (6), and Mary Helen Washington argues that Janie is silenced at crucial spots in the narrative. Carla Kaplan, reviewing the discussions of voice that the novel has inspired, examines the ways that voice is both celebrated and undermined, noting that "Hurston privileges dialogue and storytelling at the same time as she represents and applauds Janie's refusal to speak" (121). Clearly, Janie's achievement of a voice is critical to her journey to self-awareness, but the highly ambivalent presentation of voice in the novel indicates that voice alone is not enough. As Maria Tai Wolff notes, "For telling to be successful, it must become a presentation of sights with words. The best talkers are 'big picture talkers'" (226). For Hurston, then, the construction of African American identity requires a voice that can make you see, a voice that celebrates the visible presence of black bodies.
I would suggest that, with its privileging of "mind pictures" over words, Their Eyes Were Watching God goes beyond a narrative authority based solely on voice, for, as Janie tells Pheoby, "'Talkin' don't amount tuh uh hill uh beans when yuh can't do nothin' else'" (183). In contrast to Joe Starks, who seeks to be a "big voice" only to have his wish become humiliatingly true when Janie informs him that he "'big-bellies round here and put out a lot of brag, but 'tain't nothin' to it but yo' big voice'" (75), Janie seeks for a voice which can picture, which can make you see. The ability to use voice visually provides a literary space for African American women to relate their experiences in a world where, as Nanny says, "'We don't know nothin' but what we see'" (14). Thus, to expand "what we see" increases what we know. Throughout the novel, Hurston's use of visual imagery challenges dominant theories about the power hierarchies embedded in sight, long associated with white control, with Plato's rationality and logic, and, from a Freudian perspective, with male sexual dominance. She recasts the visual to affirm the beauty and power of color and to provide a vehicle for female agency.
In so doing, Hurston opens up different ways of conceptualizing the African American experience. Responding to the long history of blacks as spectacle—from slavery to minstrelsy to colonized object—she offers the possibility of reclaiming the visual as a means of black expression and black power. Controlling vision means controlling what we see, how we define the world. Visual power, then, brings political power, since those who determine what is seen determine what exists.2
In recent times, the Rodney King beating trial highlighted the significance of this power, when white interpretation sought to reverse the apparent vision presented by the video of the assault. Commenting on the trial, Judith Butler writes that the "visual field is not neutral to the question of race; it is itself a racial formation, an episteme, hegemonic and forceful" (17). Zora Neale Hurston recognized this, anticipating what Houston Baker terms the "'scening' of the African presence" as a means of silencing that presence (42). As opposed to the King jurors, who learned not to see what was presented, Hurston's Janie makes readers "see" her story, and thus takes control of both the visual field and its interpretation. Visual control is not, obviously, the answer to racist oppression: Had the jurors "seen" what happened to Rodney King, it would not have undone his beating, and Hurston fully realized that black bodies bear the material evidence of racial violence (indeed, Janie's perceived beauty—her long hair and light skin—results from an interracial rape). But by taking visual control, Hurston looks back, challenges white dominance, and documents its material abuse of African Americans.
She thus manages to present a material self that can withstand the power of the gaze, transforming it into a source of strength. In establishing a rhetoric of sight, Hurston ensures that black bodies remain powerfully visible throughout the novel, particularly the bodies of black women.3 As Audre Lorde has noted, visibility is the cornerstone of black female identity, "without which we cannot truly live":
Within this country where racial difference creates a constant, if unspoken, distortion of vision, Black women have on one hand always been highly visible, and so, on the other hand, have been rendered invisible through the depersonalization of racism. Even within the women's movement, we have had to fight, and still do, for that very visibility which also renders us most vulnerable, our Blackness.…And that visibility which makes us most vulnerable is that which also is the source of our greatest strength.
(Lorde 42)
In attempting to reclaim visibility, Hurston focuses not just on rendering black bodies visible, but also on redeeming the "distortion of vision" of which Lorde speaks. Neither is an easy task, for Janie's visible beauty makes her vulnerable to both adoration and abuse, and the ability to see does not come readily. As the title of the novel indicates, Hurston is interested in far more than the development of one woman's journey to self-knowledge; she seeks to find a discourse that celebrates both the voices and the bodies of African Americans. By emphasizing "watching God," she foregrounds sight.
The existing theoretical work on vision is both useful and limiting for one seeking to understand Hurston's use of visual language. While various feminist theorists such as Braidotti, Haraway, and Keller have contributed greatly to our understanding of the topic, joining film theorists Mulvey, Doane, and Silverman, their work does not always take race sufficiently into account, though Jane Gaines reminds us of the racial privilege inherent in the gaze: "Some groups," she remarks, "have historically had the license to 'look' openly while other groups have 'looked' illicitly" (25). Some African American theorists such as Fanon, Wallace, and hooks do engage issues of visibility, but it is surprisingly underexamined in African American literary and film theory despite the fact that the visual is critical to black female identity, the source, Lorde insists, of black women's vulnerability and strength. Michelle Wallace has noted that "black women are more often visualized in mainstream American culture … than they are allowed to speak their own words or speak about their condition as women of color" (Invisibility 3). Hurston takes this visualization and turns it into a source of strength and a kind of language, thus redeeming visibility and establishing voice. While vision has long been associated with objectivity, this objective position has been assumed to be raceless (white) and sexless (male). Hurston exposes these dynamics, and in so doing lays the groundwork for a kind of vision that embodies blackness as both body and voice. The visible presence of Janie's material body reflects the complex historical and cultural forces which have created her and offers her a unique, individual identity. The visual, then, allows for a negotiation between the post-structuralist argument that identity is largely a construction and the concerns, particularly by nonwhites, that such a position erases individual identity and presence just as non-white peoples are beginning to lay claim to them. Awareness of the visible brings together the "politics of positioning," of who can look, with a recognition of the political and psychological significance of the gaze and with the "real" presence of a material body and individual self (Braidotti 73).
Hurston's insistence on the importance of visual expression, of course, stems largely from racism's disregard for African American individuality. In "What White Publishers Won't Print," Hurston explains the American attitude toward blacks as "THE AMERICAN MUSEUM OF UNNATURAL HISTORY. This is an intangible built on folk belief. It is assumed that all non-Anglo-Saxons are uncomplicated stereotypes. Everybody knows all about them. They are lay figures mounted in the museum where all may take them in at a glance" (170).4 By characterizing the white American perspective as that of museum-goers, Hurston suggests that the non-white population becomes mere spectacle, "lay figures" to be taken in "at a glance" by white eyes. We generally see this power dynamic in operation when black bodies are displayed. In minstrel shows, as Eric Lott points out, "'Black' figures were there to be looked at, shaped to the demands of desire; they were screens on which audience fantasy could rest, and while this purpose might have had a host of different effects, its fundamental outcome was to secure the position of white spectators as superior, controlling figures" (140-41).
The dynamic still exists. Steven Speilberg's 1997 film Amistad, for example, opens with an extended display of naked black bodies and offers its black cast few words, inviting the public to view blackness rather than listen to it.5 One is defined by how one is seen. For African Americans, this leads to a condition of "hypervisibility," in which "the very publicness of black people as a social fact works to undermine the possibility of actually seeing black specificity" (Lubiano 187). We need only look to Frantz Fanon for confirmation: "… already I am being dissected under white eyes, the only real eyes. I am fixed.… I feel, I see in those white faces that it is not a new man who has come in, but a new kind of man, a new genus. Why, it's a Negro!" (116). The racist power of visibility thus seems daunting, but Hurston not only takes on the challenge of reclaiming the visual as racially affirmative, she does so in response to a masculinist tradition in which visual power so often objectifies women. Her fiction reveals that, even in the context of a black community, the ability to see "black specificity" may be impaired, particularly when the specific individual is a woman. Hurston, a student of Franz Boas, who pioneered the participant-observer model of anthropological study, recognized the need for looking closely and carefully.6
Their Eyes opens with almost an anthropological tone, presenting us with a group of people who have been "tongueless, earless, eyeless conveniences all day long" (1). After spending their days erased by white eyes as a specific presence, they become talkers and lookers. In order to regain human identity after "mules and other brutes had occupied their skins," they need to speak, listen, and see. It is important to note that Hurston equates all three sensory apparati; she does not privilege the verbal over the visual. Just as Pheoby's "hungry listening" helps Janie tell her story, so Janie's keen vision provides her with a story to tell. This vision is far different from one which "glances" at objects in a museum; such a way of seeing merely replicates white erasure of everything but skin color. Hurston seeks a uniquely African American vision, a way of seeing that both recognizes color and sees beyond it. But being black does not automatically confer, for Hurston, visual ability. In fact, visual language is predominantly associated with women in her work. As Michelle Wallace has observed, "Gender is as important as 'race' to understanding how 'invisibility' has worked historically in all fields of visual production" ("Race" 258). Initially, the "big picture talkers" are male in this novel, and much of the talk centers on impressing and evaluating women. Janie's first appearance in Eatonville causes Hicks to proclaim his plans to get a woman just like her "'Wid mah talk'" (34). Hurston's challenge is to redeploy the language of the visual in ways that do not simply reevoke the objectification of women of any color by situating them as objects of the male gaze.
In a culture that has so long defined black people as spectacle and black women as sexualized bodies, one needs to transform and redeem the potential of vision. While the visual certainly holds the threat of objectification, it can also serve as action—both personal and political. bell hooks argues that, for blacks, looking can be viewed as an act of resistance. She asserts that "all attempts to repress our / black peoples' right to gaze … produced in us an overwhelming longing to look, a rebellious desire, an oppositional gaze." With this gaze African Americans declared, "Not only will I stare. I want my look to change reality" (116). Looking becomes an act charged with political resistance, a way to reconfigure the world and its power dynamics.7 One must look, then, at African American writing as a means of challenging the power of the white gaze. We need to employ what Mae Hendersen terms a new "angle of vision" (161), a means of looking back, of seeing without objectifying. To analyze Hurston's "angle of vision," I would argue, necessitates bringing together a wide range of theoretical perspectives, for seeing and being seen are highly complex acts in her fiction, acts which place individuals within an intricate web of personal and historical forces.
In Hurston's work, looking is more than a confrontational challenge. Her fiction is replete with examples of women's need to look, see, understand, and use language visually. In "Drenched in Light," an autobiographical story which recalls Hurston's descriptions of her childhood days, Isis, "a visual minded child," "pictur[es] herself gazing over the edge of the world into the abyss" (942). She escapes punishment for her many mischievous actions by impressing a white lady as being "drenched in light" (946); her strong visual force marks her as a child destined for creative accomplishment. Delia, the protagonist of "Sweat," prefigures Janie in her use of visual metaphors to re-evaluate her marriage. "She lay awake, gazing upon the debris that cluttered their matrimonial trail. Not an image left standing along the way" (957). This visual realization grants Delia the strength to defy her abusive husband. "The Gilded Six-Bits" presents the story of Missie May, unable to see through the shining currency to recognize its meager value; this mis-sight leads her to an affair with the man who owns the false coins, nearly ruining her marriage. Interestingly, her husband Joe finally forgives her when her son is born and turns out to be "'de spittin image'" (995) of Joe himself. Only visual proof of paternity can erase his anger.
Jonah's Gourd Vine, in many ways a pre-text for Their Eyes, examines many of the same issues of voice and identity with a male protagonist. But though John Pearson, like Janie Crawford, struggles to establish a self, he does not employ her rhetoric of sight. In fact, his white boss specifically associates him with blindness as an explanation for John's lack of foresight:
Of course you did not know. Because God has given to all men the gift of blindness. That is to say that He has cursed but few with vision. Ever hear tell of a happy prophet? This old world wouldn't roll on the way He started it if men could see. Ha! In fact, I think God Himself was looking off when you went and got yourself born.
(86)
Not only is John a result of God's blindness, but John consistently fails to see his way, particularly in failing to pick up on Hattie's use of conjure tricks to entrap him into a second marriage. The vision in the novel belongs to his first wife, Lucy. She is the one whose "large bright eyes looked thru and beyond him and saw too much" (112). Lucy, far more self-aware and perceptive than John, harnesses the power of vision so successfully that her visions live on after her death. Interestingly, when John finally does attain a degree of vision, it proves highly ambiguous and problematic, leading to his death when he drives his car into a railroad crossing: "He drove on but half-seeing the railroad from looking inward" (167). Lacking Lucy's ability to put her visual power to practical use, John fatally blinds himself to his surroundings and pays the ultimate price for his inability to see. Here Hurston sets up her paradigm: Vision must be embodied, one must see outwardly as well as inwardly.
Hurston establishes the full power of the visual in Their Eyes Were Watching God. Initially subjected to the defining and objectifying power of a communal gaze, Janie, unlike John Pearson, learns to employ vision in ways that are self-affirming rather than self-sacrificing. Returning to Eatonville at the novel's start, Janie finds herself in a position very familiar to her: the object that all eyes are upon. When she approaches, the people are full of hostile questions to which they "hoped the answers were cruel and strange" (4). But when she keeps on walking, refusing to stop and acquiesce to their voyeuristic desires, talk becomes specularization: "The porch couldn't talk for looking." The men notice her "firm buttocks like she had grape fruits in her hip pockets; the great rope of black hair swinging to her waist and unraveling in the wind like a plume; then her pugnacious breasts trying to bore holes in her shirt." The women focus on the "faded shirt and muddy overalls." Looking at her body, the men see her as sexed; for the women, gazing on her apparel, she is gendered. In both cases, it seems, Janie vanishes. The men define her as female body parts and the women deny her feminine identity. While the female resentment of her attire may seem less intrusive than the male x-ray vision, both looks constitute "mass cruelty" (2). Yet having set up Janie as spectacle, Hurston then illuminates the positive potential of vision in the ensuing interchange with Pheoby. Here, the visual takes on a different tone. Just as voice, according to Kaplan, becomes a kind of double-edged sword, so can vision—particularly when shared between friends—both specularize and affirm. Pheoby tells Janie, "'Gal you sho looks good.… Even wid dem overhalls on, you shows yo' womanhood'" (4). What she sees is presence, not absence. To look like a woman is to look good, a way of visualizing which does not fixate on sexual anatomy but which allows for materiality. She shows her womanhood, a far different sight than that gazed upon by the men, who see not Janie's presence but their own desire, desire which her body is expected to satisfy.
The materiality of Janie's body as an object of desire has, of course, determined much of her history. Her first husband, Logan Killicks, presumably wants to marry her based on what he sees, though her own eyes tell her something very different: "'He look like some old skullhead in de grave yard'" (13). But her vision lacks authority; despite what her eyes tell her, she is married off to him, defeated by Nanny's powerful story of her own oppression which seems to give her the right to impose her will upon Janie. Having "'save[d] de text,'" Nanny uses language to desecrate Janie's vision of the pear tree (16). Joe Starks, Janie's next husband, is likewise attracted to her beauty: "He stopped and looked hard, and then he asked her for a cool drink of water." This time, Janie does not submit passively to this specularization, and tries to look back, to return the gaze, pumping the water "until she got a good look at the man" (26). But her look still lacks the controlling power of the male gaze, what hooks calls the ability to "change reality." At this point, Janie has difficulty even seeing reality, as is evidenced by her inability to see through Joe Starks. She takes "a lot of looks at him and she was proud of what she saw. Kind of portly, like rich white folks" (32). What Janie sees is whiteness, and her valuation of this sets her on a path that will take twenty years to reverse. Looking at Joe's silk shirt, she overlooks his language of hierarchy, his desire to be a big voice. She has privileged the wrong kind of sight, a vision that fails to see into blackness and thus fails to see through language.
Still, Janie is not entirely fooled. Joe does "not represent sun-up and pollen and blooming trees, but he spoke for far horizon. He spoke for change and chance" (28). Janie thus gives up a vision she has seen—that of the pear tree—in favor of one she can only imagine: horizons, chance, and change. In allowing herself to be swayed by his language, she fails to notice that his rhetoric is that of speech, not vision. Joe only speaks; he does not see. Consequently, Janie's own vision deteriorates even further. Having initially recognized that Joe does not represent "sun-up and pollen," she later manages to convince herself that he does: "From now on until death she was going to have flower dust and springtime sprinkled over everything. A bee for her bloom" (31). Stubbornly, she tries to force Joe into her vision, possibly to justify running off with him. Convincing herself to see what is not there leads Janie into an unequal marriage in which she is expected to sit on a "high chair" (58), an infantilizing position where she can overlook the world and yet also be subjected to its envious eyes.
But Joe has a problem, for while he wants to put Janie on display in order to reap the benefit of reflected glory as her owner, this is precisely the position which is threatened by the eyes of other men. He wants her to be both present and absent, both visible and invisible, a task he attempts to accomplish by insisting that she keep her hair tied up in a head rag because he sees the other men not just "figuratively wallowing in it" (51) but literally touching it, and she "was there in the store for him to look at, not those others" (52). Joe wants to engage privately in scopophilia within a public forum, without subjecting Janie herself to this public gaze. Once she is fixed by gazes other than his own, he loses his exclusive ownership of her body. As Lorde notes, while visibility entails vulnerability, it can also be a source of great strength, a characteristic Joe certainly does not want to see in Janie. But the situation reflects more than Joe's concern about Janie's gaining cultural power; Janie's visibility also invokes a classic Freudian scenario. Laura Mulvey, in her ground-breaking psychoanalytic study "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," notes that the female figure, beyond providing pleasure for the looker, also implies a certain threat: "her lack of a penis, implying a threat of castration and hence unplea-sure.… Thus the woman as icon, displayed for the gaze and enjoyment of the men, the active controllers of the look, always threatens to evoke the anxiety it originally signified" (21). Indeed, Joe's greatest anxiety is not focused on Janie's body but on his own. He wants to have the dominant position, but without being visually objectified by the viewers. "The more his back ached and his muscle dissolved into fat and the fat melted off his bones the more fractious he became with Janie. Especially in the store. The more people in there the more ridicule he poured over her body to point attention away from his own" (73-74).
But the racial situation problematizes this notion of woman as icon, which presumes looking to be a masculine act. The cultural permutations of the significance of the gaze within the African American community challenge a strictly Freudian reading. If looking is an act of political defiance, it cannot be exclusively associated with black masculinity, particularly given the long history of black female activism and resistance. When Janie challenges Joe, she does so not just to defend her female identity—"'Ah'm uh woman every inch of me'" (75)—but also to protest against Joe's almost constant oppression. Joe, with his prosperity and seemingly white values, fails to realize that his mouth is not all powerful, that, despite his favorite expression, "I god," he is not divine. His centrality as mayor and store owner renders him even more vulnerable to specularization than Janie, and he falls prey to a kind of reversed Freudian schema of the gaze which entails serious repercussions for his political power.
Having set up the dynamics of the body as visualized object, Joe becomes its victim, as Janie linguistically performs the castration of which she is the visual reminder. As she tells him publicly, "'When you pull down yo' britches, you look lak de change uh life,'" her pictorial language renders it impossible for him to deny the vision she creates. He tries to erase the image by questioning her speech. "'Whawhut's dat you said?'" It doesn't work, however, for Walter taunts him, "'You heard her, you ain't blind.'" This comment highlights the interconnection between hearing and seeing; to hear is to see. And yet, given the words of her insult, Joe might as well be blind, for Janie has, in fact, revealed his lack of visual difference. By not using a visual metaphor in this case, she emphasizes that there is nothing there to see. She bares his body to the communal gaze, not only denying his masculinity but displaying his lack to other men: "She had cast down his empty armor before men and they had laughed, would keep on laughing" (75). Feminized by the visual dynamics that he has established, Joe dies, unable to withstand the gaze which erases his masculinity and identifies him as empty armor. Not only is it impossible for him to continue as mayor under these circumstances, it is impossible for him to continue. Joe has no life once denied both sexual and political power.
Though Hurston uses the visual to expose the vulnerability of a phallocentrism which abuses women, she also recognizes its empowering potential. In transforming the visual into a tool of female power, Hurston reclaims the power of the visual as a vehicle for examining African American women's experiences. After all, if one erases vision, one erases race, which is culturally visualized by the physical body, the sign of visual difference. As Michelle Wallace notes, "How one is seen (as black) and, therefore, what one sees (in a white world) is always already crucial to one's existence as an Afro-American. The very markers that reveal you to the rest of the world, your dark skin and your kinky/curly hair, are visual" ("Modernism" 40). Racial visibility as a marker of difference allows black women to "show" their womanhood.
Yet, as Joe's experience makes clear, this must be a particular kind of vision, a way of seeing which expands rather than limits understanding. Despite Joe's entrapment in his own gaze, the novel is replete with examples of the affirmative quality of the visual. Janie's attempts to define a self originate with the act of looking. Her "conscious life" begins with her vision of the pear tree, leading to her sexual awakening. Having felt called to "gaze on a mystery" (10), she beholds a "revelation" in the bees and flowers. She seeks her own place in the picture, searching for "confirmation of the voice and vision." Looking down the road, she sees a "glorious being" whom, in her "former blindness," she had known as "shiftless Johnny Taylor." But the "golden dust of pollen" which "beglamored his rags and her eyes" changes her perspective (11). Johnny Taylor's kiss, espied by Nanny, sets Janie's course in motion. Whether or not Johnny Taylor represents a better possibility is both impossible to determine and irrelevant; what matters is Janie's realization that her fate is linked to her vision, though the recognition will lead her astray until she learns effectively to interpret what she sees.
This vision, after her mistake in mis-seeing Joe Starks, is finally fulfilled when she meets Tea Cake, a man who is willing to display himself rather than subject others to his defining gaze. When Janie says, "'Look lak Ah seen you somewhere,'" he replies, "'Ah'm easy tuh see on Church Street most any day or night'" (90-91). By denying any anxiety in thus being viewed, Tea Cake transforms sight from a controlling, defining gaze into a personal introduction, demystifying himself by inviting inspection. In fact, Tea Cake cautions her about the importance of looking closely in the ensuing checkers game, challenging her claim that he has no right to jump her king because "'Ah wuz lookin' off when you went and stuck yo' men right up next tuh mine. No fair!'" Tea Cake answers, "'You ain't supposed tuh look off, Mis' Starks. It's de biggest part uh de game tuh watch out!'" (92). His response underscores the importance of watching, of using one's vision not to fix and specularize but to see and think, to understand. Consequently, Janie realizes that he "could be a bee to a blossom—a pear tree blossom in the spring" (101), a man who can confirm her initial vision. She defines him with visual metaphors: "He was a glance from God." This metaphor highlights Tea Cake's connection to the visual; he recognizes the need to combine voice with understanding, remarking that Janie needs "'tellin' and showin'" (102) to believe in love.
But Janie does not need simply to find a man capable of assimilating voice and vision, she needs to learn for herself how to formulate a self which is not predicated upon oppression. She finds the task particularly challenging because her racial identity is founded upon invisibility, upon her inability to see herself. The photograph which reveals her color, her difference, divides her from her previous notion of the identity of sameness: "'Before Ah seen de picture Ah thought Ah wuz just like de rest.'" To be black is to be not just different but absent, for Janie looks at the photograph asking, "'Where is me? Ah don't see me'" (9). Both blackness and femininity are culturally predicated upon lack; thus Janie needs to learn to show her womanhood and to find visible presence in blackness. Priscilla Wald has suggested that Janie's problem with seeing herself stems from her "white eyes": "The white eyes with which Janie looks see the black self as absent, that is, do not see the black self at all" (83). This is a particularly important point, for it indicates that Janie needs not just vision, but black vision—black eyes. Vision, which initially divides her from herself, must then provide the means for re-inventing a self, one in which racial identity adds wholeness rather than division. To deny either her blackness or her whiteness is to deny the specificity of her being, for her body is the site of the physical evidence of white oppression and a partially white origin. The answer is not to retreat into colorlessness but to reconstitute the definition of the self into something that acknowledges the conditions of her physical being: the visible evidence of her whiteness and her blackness, the heritage of slavery and sexual abuse.
Janie takes the first step toward acquiring this visual sense of self in response to Joe's oppression. "Then one day she sat and watched the shadow of herself going about tending store and prostrating itself before Jody, while all the time she herself sat under a shady tree with the wind blowing through her hair and clothes." (73). She sees the self that prostrates itself before Jody as her shadow, and this realization acts on her "like a drug," offering an escape from an oppressive life. In order to move from passive spectator to active doer, however, she needs to take that vision further. The act of seeing must become active and affirmative before she can re-integrate the disparate parts of her identity into one unified whole. As Andrew Lakritz has written, "Some of the most powerful moments in Zora Neale Hurston's writings occur when a figure in the narrative is represented as watching events unfold, when such acts of looking become constitutive of the entire question of identity" (17). But looking itself does not automatically constitute identity; one must learn how to do it. Barbara Johnson's much cited analysis of Janie's recognition of her division into inside and outside also can be viewed as an experience in learning to use the visual. Johnson identifies Janie's realization that the spirit of the marriage has left the bedroom and moved into the parlor as an "externalization of the inner, a metaphorically grounded metonymy," while the following paragraph where Janie sees her image of Jody tumble off a shelf "presents an internalization of the outer, or a metonymically grounded metaphor." This moment leads Janie to a voice which "grows not out of her identity but out of her division into inside and outside. Knowing how not to mix them is knowing that articulate language requires the co-presence of two distinct poles, not their collapse into oneness" (Johnson 212). If, indeed, the moment leads her to voice, it does not lead to a voice of self-assertion, as Janie remains silent under Joe's oppressive control for several more years.
I would suggest that the moment does not engender Janie's voice so much as it moves her toward a way of visualizing her experience which will, in time, lead her toward a picturing voice. In imagining her marriage as living in the parlor, she creates, as Johnson notes, a metonymy. But her metaphor of Joe as statue is also a metaphor infused with vision:
She stood there until something fell off the shelf inside her. Then she went inside there to see what it was. It was her image of Jody tumbled down and shattered. But looking at it she saw that it never was the flesh and blood figure of her dreams. Just something she had grabbed up to drape her dreams over. In a way she turned her back upon the image where it lay and looked further. She had no more blossomy openings dusting pollen over her man, neither any glistening young fruit where the petals used to be.…She had an inside and an outside now and suddenly she knew how not to mix them.
(67-68)
The significance of this moment lies not just in Janie's recognition of the division between inside and outside but also in the ability to turn her back on the image and "look further." No longer content with surface vision, Janie is learning to "look further," a necessary precondition for finding an expressive voice.
Joe's death offers her further opportunity to use this knowledge as she fixes her gaze upon herself. Janie goes to the mirror and looks "hard at her skin and features. The young girl was gone, but a handsome woman had taken her place" (83). This scene illustrates why vision is so crucial to Hurston's work. Recalling Butler's comment that the "visual field" is a "racial formation," one sees Hurston establishing precisely that. In looking hard at her "skin and features," Janie looks hard at her interracial body, seeing it now not as different but as handsome. She uses her own vision to find beauty and value in her visually inscribed racial identity. She then burns her head rags, symbol of Joe's attempts to deny her beauty and to hide her from the communal gaze while subjecting her to his own. Displaying her abundant hair, presumably another indication of her racially mixed heritage, brings her still closer to an affirmation of her visual self, a self that celebrates rather than denying the mark of race—of both races. Kaja Silverman asserts that the "eye can confer the active gift of love upon bodies which have long been accustomed to neglect and disdain. It can also put what is alien or inconsequential into contact with what is most personal and psychically significant" (227). Even before Janie gains the aid of Tea Cake's loving eye, her own eyes confer love upon her body as she begins to assimilate what has often seemed an alien world into her own psyche.
Janie transforms her understanding of color so that the sting of her original recognition of her photograph, "'Aw! aw! Ah'm colored!'" (9), can be alleviated and reversed by recognizing the visual beauty of color. The evening she meets Tea Cake, she watches the moon rise, "its amber fluid … drenching the earth" (95). This scene reveals the darkness of night to be full of color, transcending the stark blackness of the sky and whiteness of the moon. Hurston thus presents color as a full range of variation and beauty. Janie starts wearing blue because Tea Cake likes to see her in it, telling Pheoby not only that visual mourning should not last longer than grief, but that "'de world picked out black and white for mournin'" (107-08). By specifically associating mourning with black and white, Hurston subtly suggests that going beyond the color binary moves one from grief to happiness, from mourning and loss to fulfillment. She further challenges the black-white binary with the episode after the storm in the Everglades, when Tea Cake is forcibly conscripted into burying bodies. The white overseers insist that the workers "'examine every last one of 'em and find out if they's white or black'" (162). This ridiculous and horrific command inspires Tea Cake to comment, "'Look lak dey think God don't know nothin 'bout de Jim Crow law'" (163). The suggestion that God needs the aid of coffins to "see" racial difference again highlights the absurdity of seeing the world only in terms of black and white. By tying vision so intricately to race, Hurston offers a way out of the oppositional hierarchy of both.8
Thus Hurston destabilizes the visual racial binary, and Janie learns a new respect for color and for her own image. She restores the image that was desecrated by the photograph, when Tea Cake tells her to look in the mirror so she can take pleasure from her looks. "Fortunately," says Silverman, "no look ever takes place once and for all" (223). As Hurston well understands, looking is not a static activity. To "transform the value," as Silverman puts it, of what is seen, one needs to use one's life-experience in order to see it better. Having stood up to her husband, survived the gossip implicating her in his death, taken over the business, and dared to consider a lover, Janie learns to transform her gaze into one that accepts and values her own image.
After learning to use her vision to value herself, Janie is ready to take the next step: using vision to find God. The title episode of the novel reveals the full importance of the power of sight and of being an active looker; watching God is an active rather than a passive enterprise.
They sat in company with others in other shanties, their eyes straining against crude walls and their souls asking if He meant to measure their puny might against His. They seemed to be staring at the dark, but their eyes were watching God.
(151)
Like Alice Walker in The Color Purple, Hurston re-visions the old white man with a long beard. Instead, one approaches God not just in darkness but by looking through darkness, to see God where others see blackness. In so doing, she enables a kind of vision that deifies darkness, replacing the emptiness with presence, presence in blackness. At the height of the storm, Janie tells Tea Cake, "'If you kin see de light at daybreak, you don't keer if you die at dusk'" (151). Since she can "see" the light in darkness, neither it nor death holds any fear for her. By having her characters watch God in darkness, Hurston redefines rationalist and masculine control of the gaze, transforming scopophilia into spirituality. Her enabled gaze does not make women specularizable, for it takes place in darkness; rather, it makes God viewable and blackness visible. Similarly, in Toni Morrison's Paradise, the midwife Lone, trying to find out what the men plan to do to the women at the convent, sits in the dark to read the signs: "Playing blind was to avoid the language God spoke in. He did not thunder instructions or whisper messages into ears. Oh, no. He was a liberating God. A teacher who taught you how to learn, to see for yourself" (273). Learning how to see—particularly, learning how to see in darkness—takes on special meaning for African American women. One comes to God not through light but through the ability to see in the dark.
But Hurston's world is not solely visual; material bodies exist tactily as well as visually, and color is not always beautiful, as the historical forces of slavery and oppression can be read on Janie's body. She is the product of two generations of rape, one of them interracial. She suffers physically for her interracial body when Tea Cake beats her to display his ownership in the face of Mrs. Turner's theories of Janie's superiority due to her light skin. The bruises, of course, are clearly evident precisely because of that light skin, as Sopde-Bottom enviously remarks, "'Uh person can see every place you hit her'" (140). These marks inscribe both visually and physically the full implications of her racial identity as well as the violence that brought it into being. Just as black women cannot ignore the visual, neither can they escape the tactile, a physical language which highlights the material racist and sexist abuse of the body.9 As Sharon Davie argues, Hurston's bodily metaphors "acknowledge the tactile, the physical, which Western culture devalues" (454). But Hurston does more than acknowledge the tactile; she reveals it. In Hurston's world, the mark of violence is seen, making the tactile visual. Though she celebrates the power of vision, she has no illusions that it can erase or replace the discourse of violence and racism. Rather, it documents, for all to see, the effects of brutality.
Janie's act of killing is an act of physical self-defense to protect the body that Tea Cake has restored to her. Yet even this highly tactile response has a visual component. She waits for a sign from the sky, a visual indication that God will relent and spare Tea Cake's life, but "the sky stayed hard looking and quiet" (169). I find it telling that this is a daytime supplication, as Janie seeks to find a message "beyond blue ether's bosom," waiting for a "star in the daytime, maybe, or the sun to shout." This daylight sky appears much less accessible to her searching eyes than the blackness of the storm. The God sought in darkness evokes a reaffirmation of love, but this light (skinned?) God forces murder. Lack of visual contact spells doom, and Tea Cake's vision consequently suffers to the point where the "fiend in him must kill and Janie was the only thing living he saw" (175). Thus Tea Cake's death both saves Janie's physical body and erases his false vision.
Her final test involves learning to integrate voice and vision in a different form of self-defense. The trial scene reconstitutes Janie as speaker rather than object. The spectators are there not to watch but to listen. Janie's verbal defense succeeds because she "makes them see," a phrase repeated three times in six sentences:
She had to go way back to let them know how she and Tea Cake had been with one another so they could see she could never shoot Tea Cake out of malice.
She tried to make them see how terrible it was that things were fixed so that Tea Cake couldn't come back to himself until he had got rid of that mad dog that was in him.…She made them see how she couldn't ever want to be rid of him.
(178; emphasis added)
Despite critical concern with the narrator replacing Janie's voice at this crucial moment, we must recognize that Janie has made them see, as she has already made the reader see, that voice at this moment is subordinate to the ability to visualize, an effect that may be heightened by Hurston's deflection of Janie's story. We don't need to hear her, since we can see her story. She manages to refute the implications of the black male spectators, that "'dem white mens wuzn't goin tuh do nothin' tuh no woman dat look lak her'" (179), and they turn their anger against Mrs. Turner's brother who puts "himself where men's wives could look at him" (181). But Janie's looks have not been directed at him; she has been too busy learning to visualize to waste time specularizing.
Consequently, she returns home to discover "'dis house ain't so absent of things lak it used tuh be befo' Tea Cake come along'" (182). Having learned to make presence out of absence, she can now not only re-visualize Tea Cake, whose "memory made pictures of love and light against the wall," but can also call "in her soul to come and see" (184). In thus successfully employing a visualized voice, Janie becomes both spectator and participant in her own life. To speak the body, for an African American woman, means to recognize its visual racial difference as well as affirming its sexual identity. Hurston's mind-pictures and seeing-voices reclaim the physical world of pear trees and the beauty of the visible presence of blackness. As Hurston herself noted, pictorial language is of primary importance in black discourse, where everything is "illustrated. So we can say that the white man thinks in a written language and the Negro thinks in hieroglyphics" ("Characteristics" 24). By filling Janie "full of that oldest human longing—self revelation" (Their Eyes 6), Hurston presents a text of "revelation"—with all of its visual implications. Her hieroglyphics reflect a community of people whose world is their canvas and whose lives and bodies are pictured in living color.
She thus provides a model for reconciling voice and vision, for transforming black bodies from museum pieces or ethnographic objects into embodied voices, by recasting spectacle as visual, a move away from passive sensationalism to active participation. Hortense Spillers notes of the Du Boisian double-consciousness that "it is also noteworthy that his provocative claims … crosses [sic] their wires with the specular and spectacular: the sensation of looking at oneself and of imagining being seen through the eyes of another is precisely performative in what it demands of a participant on the other end of the gaze" (143). In Hurston's hands, looking is indeed a performative act. In fact, it becomes a linguistic performance which affirms bodily presence, reversing Fanon's claim that, in the white world, "consciousness of the body is solely a negating activity" (110). Hurston, as Priscilla Wald so aptly puts it, "redesignates 'color' as performance in a process that draws her readers into the dynamics of 'coloration'" (87). Through the use of hieroglyphics, she reconstitutes women as active and colored performers. Vision, so often a means of fixing and silencing African Americans, can also provide the means to foreground the body with-out surrendering the voice. As the title of Hurston's novel indicates, her concern goes beyond presenting an individual woman's journey to self-awareness; her accomplishment is nothing less than redefining African American rhetoric, rendering it verbal and visual.
Notes
- Along with several studies cited within the text of my article, the following represent only a few of the many fine analyses of various aspects of voice and language in Their Eyes: Bond; Brigham; Callahan; Gates, "Zora"; Holloway; Kubitschek; McKay; Racine; Wall.
- For more on the political power of the visual, see Rosi Braidotti, especially 73.
- In this, Hurston differs markedly from Ralph Ellison, who focuses not so much on attaining vision as on the implications of invisibility. Whereas Ellison documents in intricate detail the confines of being invisible, Hurston examines the process of learning to see and be seen.
- Indeed, in film theory, as Miriam Hansen points out, "an aesthetics of the glance is replacing the aesthetics of the gaze" (135). This reflects a move from the intensity of a gaze to the glance, "momentary and casual" (50), according to John Ellis, who notes that, with a glance, "no extraordinary effort is being invested in the activity of looking" (137). While this may result in a less controlling and hegemonic situation, it can also, as Hurston indicates, illustrate a lack of deep perception.
- Film, both popular and documentary, has long specularized black bodies. According to Fatimah Tobing Rony, early-twentieth-century ethnographic films "incessantly visualized race" (267).
- I am indebted to Lori Jirousek's 1999 Penn State dissertation "Immigrant Ethnographers: Critical Observations in Turn-of-the-Century America" for better understanding the significance of Boas to Hurston's fiction.
- Indeed, vision can offer a challenge to the links which Homi Bhabha has traced between the scopic drive and colonial surveillance (28-29).
- As Donna Haraway has suggested, "Vision can be good for avoiding binary oppositions" (188).
- Again, we see further evidence in Morrison's work in Beloved's scar and Sethe's "tree"; like Hurston, Morrison demands that one read the body visually.
Works Cited
Awkward, Michael. Inspiring Influences: Tradition, Revision, and Afro-American Women's Novels. New York: Columbia UP, 1989.
Baker, Houston A. "Scene … Not Heard." Gooding-Williams 38-48.
Bhabha, Homi K. "The Other Question.: The Stereotype and Colonial Discourse." Screen 24.6 (1983): 18-36.
Bond, Cynthia. "Language, Speech, and Difference in Their Eyes Were Watching God." Gates and Appiah 204-17.
Braidotti, Rosi. Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. New York: Columbia UP, 1994.
Brigham, Cathy. "The Talking Frame of Zora Neale Hurston's Talking Book: Storytelling as Dialectic in Their Eyes Were Watching God." CLA Journal 37.4 (1994): 402-19.
Butler, Judith. "Endangered/Endangering: Schematic Racism and White Paranoia." Gooding—Williams 15-22.
Callahan, John F. In the African-American Grain: The Pursuit of Voice in Twentieth-Century Black Fiction. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1988.
Davie, Sharon. "Free Mules, Talking Buzzards, and Cracked Plates: The Politics of Dislocation in Their Eyes Were Watching God." PMLA 108 (1993): 446-59.
Doane, Marianne. The Desire to Desire: The Woman's Film of the 1940s. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987.
Ellis, John. Visible Fictions: Cinema, Television, Video. Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982.
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks: The Experiences of a Black Man in a White World. Trans. Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove P, 1967.
Gaines, Jane. "White Privileging and Looking Relations: Race and Gender in Feminist Film Theory." Screen 29.4 (1988): 12-27.
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. "Zora Neale Hurston and the Speakerly Text." Southern Literature and Literary Theory. Ed. Jefferson Humphries. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1990. 142-69.
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., and K. A. Appiah, eds. Zora Neale Hurston: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. New York: Armistad P, 1993.
Gooding-Williams, Robert, ed. Reading Rodney King, Reading Urban Uprising. New York: Routledge, 1993.
Hansen, Miriam. "Early Cinema, Late Cinema: Transformations of the Public Sphere." Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film. Ed. Linda Williams. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1995. 134-52.
Haraway, Donna. "Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective." Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. London: Free Association Books, 1991. 183-201.
Henderson, Mae G. "Response" to Houston A. Baker, Jr.'s "There Is No More Beautiful Way: Theory and the Poetics of Afro-American Women's Writing." Afro-American Literary Study in the 1990s. Ed. Houston A. Baker, Jr., and Patricia Redmond. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1989. 155-63.
Holloway, Karla F. C. The Character of the Word: The Texts of Zora Neale Hurston. Westport: Greenwood P, 1987.
hooks, bell. Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston: South End P, 1992.
Hurston, Zora Neale. "Characteristics of Negro Expression." 1934. Negro: An Anthology. Ed. Nancy Cunard. Ed. and abridged by Hugh Ford. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1970. 39-46.
——. "Drenched in Light." 1924. Zora 940-48.
——. "The Gilded Six-Bits." 1933. Zora 985-96.
——. Jonah's Gourd Vine. 1934. Zora 1-171.
——. "Sweat." 1926. Zora 955-67.
——. Their Eyes Were Watching God. 1937. New York: Harper, 1990.
——. "What White Publishers Won't Print." 1950.
——. I Love Myself When I Am Laughing … And Then Again When I Am Looking Mean and Impressive. Ed. Alice Walker. Old Westbury: Feminist P, 1979. 169-73.
——. Zora Neale Hurston: Novels and Stories. New York: Library of America, 1995.
Johnson, Barbara. "Metaphor, Metonymy and Voice in Their Eyes Were Watching God." Black Literature and Literary Theory. Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York: Methuen, 1984. 205-19.
Kaplan, Carla. "The Erotics of Talk: 'That Oldest Human Longing' in Their Eyes Were Watching God." American Literature 67.1 (1995): 115-42.
Kubitschek, Missy Dehn. "'Tuh de Horizon and Back': The Female Quest in Their Eyes Were Watching God." Black American Literature Forum 17 (1983): 109-15.
Lakritz, Andrew. "Identification and Difference: Structures of Privilege in Cultural Criticism." Who Can Speak?: Authority and Critical Identity. Ed. Judith Roof and Robyn Wiegman. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1995. 3-29.
Lords, Audre. Sister Outsider. Trumansburg, NY: Crossing P, 1984.
Loft, Eric. Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. New York: Oxford UP, 1993.
Lubiano, Wahneema. "Don't Talk with Your Eyes Closed: Caught in the Hollywood Gun Sights." Borders, Boundaries, and Frames: Cultural Criticism and Cultural Studies. Ed. Mae Henderson. New York: Routledge, 1995. 185-201.
McKay, Nellie. "'Crayon Enlargements of Life': Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God." New Essays on "Their Eyes Were Watching God." Ed. Michael Awkward. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990.
Morrison, Toni. Paradise. New York: Knopf, 1998.
Mulvey, Laura. Visual and Other Pleasures. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1989.
Racine, Maria J. "Voice and Inferiority in Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God." African American Review 28 (1994): 283-92.
Rony, Fatimah Tobing. "Those Who Squat and Those Who Sit: The Iconography of Race in the 1895 Films of Felix-Louis Regnault." Camera Obscura 28 (Jan. 1992): 263-89.
Silverman, Kaja. The Threshold of the Visible World. New York: Routledge, 1996.
Spillers, Hortense J. "'All the Things You Could Be by Now, If Sigmund Freud's Wife Was Your Mother': Psychoanalysis and Race." Female Subjects in Black and White: Race, Psychoanalysis, Feminism. Ed. Elizabeth Abel, Barbara Christian, and Helene Moglen. Berkeley: U of California P, 1997. 135-58.
Stepto, Robert. From Behind the Veil. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1979.
Wald, Priscilla. "Becoming 'Colored': The Self-Authorized Language of Difference in Zora Neale Hurston." American Literary History 2.1 (1990): 79-100.
Wall, Cheryl. "Zora Neale Hurston: Changing Her Own Words." American Novelists Revisited: Essays in Feminist Criticism. Ed. Fritz Fleischmann. Boston: Hall, 1982. 371-93.
Wallace, Michelle. Invisibility Blues: From Pop to Theory. New York: Verso P, 1990.
——. "Modernism, Postmodernism and the Problem of the Visual in Afro-American Culture." Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures. Ed. Russell Ferguson, Martha Gever, Trinh T. Minhha, and Comet West. Cambridge: MIT P, 1990. 39-50.
——. "Race, Gender, and Psychoanalysis in Forties Films: Lost Boundaries, Home of the Brave, and The Quiet One." Black American Cinema. Ed. Manthia Diawara. New York: Routledge, 1993. 257-71.
Washington, Mary Helen. "'I Love the Way Janie Crawford Left Her Husbands': Emergent Female Hero." Gates and Appiah 98-110.
Wolff, Maria Tai. "Listening and Living: Reading and Experience in Their Eyes Were Watching God." Gates and Appiah 218-29.
Young, Lola. Fear of the Dark: "Race," Gender and Sexuality in the Cinema. New York: Routledge, 1996.
Principal Works
Color Struck (play) 1926
The First One: A Play, in Ebony and Topaz (play) 1927
The Great Day (play) 1932
The Gilded Six-Bits (folklore) 1933
Jonah's Gourd Vine (novel) 1934
Mules and Men (folklore) 1935
Their Eyes Were Watching God (novel) 1937
Tell My Horse (folklore) 1938; also published as Voodoo Gods: An Inquiry into Native Myths and Magic in Jamaica and Haiti 1939
Moses, Man of the Mountain (novel) 1939; also published as The Man of the Mountain 1941
Dust Tracks on a Road (autobiography) 1942
Polk County: A Comedy of Negro Life on a Sawmill Camp [with Dorothy Waring] (play) 1944
Seraph on the Suwanee (novel) 1948
I Love Myself When I Am Laughing … and Then Again When I Am Looking Mean and Impressive: A Zore Neale Hurston Reader (fiction and nonfiction) 1979
The Sanctified Church (novel) 1981
Spunk: The Selected Stories of Zora Neale Hurston (short stories) 1985
The Complete Stories (short stories) 1994
Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings (nonfiction) 1995
Novels and Stories (novels and short stories) 1995
Collected Essays (essays) 1998
Every Tongue Got to Confess: Negro Folk Tales from the Gulf States (folklore) 2001
Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters [edited by Carla Kaplan] (letters) 2002
Seraph on the Suwanee
CAROL P. MARSH-LOCKETT (ESSAY DATE 1999)
SOURCE: Marsh-Lockett, Carol P. “What Ever Happened to Jochebed? Motherhood as Marginality in Zora Neale Hurston’s Seraph on the Suwanee. ” In Southern Mothers: Facts and Fictions in Southern Women’s Writing, edited by Nagueyalti Warren and Sally Wolff, pp. 100-10. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999.
In the following essay, Marsh-Lockett explores Hurston’s portrayal of motherhood in Seraph on the Suwanee.
So, what ever happened to Jochebed? I raise this question in the context of Zora Neale Hurston’s fiction not as an examination of Hurston’s use of an Old Testament character but as a way of addressing a void in Hurston scholarship: the treatment of motherhood in her fiction. Study of her novels reveals that motherhood is a presence therein but that it exists in a marginalized, politically powerless form, the mothers themselves lacking communities of women and rarely finding their own voices except to uphold a patriarchal superstructure. In short, while motherhood is not an explicit theme and is not central to Hurston’s writing, it is a problematic stretch in the fabric of her fiction. For the purposes of this essay, while I shall mention Their Eyes Were Watching God,
Jonah’s Gourd Vine, and Moses, Man of the Mountain, I shall focus on the relatively untreated Seraph on the Suwanee, which appeared in 1948 during a controversial period of Hurston’s life.1
In his comments on Seraph on the Suwanee, Hurston literary biographer Robert Hemenway concludes, “The book itself is not nearly so interesting as the authorial emotions that coalesced in the creating of it.”2 In his discussion, Hemenway suggests the necessity of extratextual evidence for a full understanding of the novel and its meaning. He also suggests, moreover, that the piece is given to certain failures because Hurston had abandoned black life and culture as a primary source of artistic inspiration. Indeed, Hurston was especially sensitive to the sanctions American society placed on black literary imagination and to the accompanying politics of the literary marketplace. To read and dismiss this text in terms of its failure to portray black life and culture, however, is to miss the salient portrayal of the sexual politics which renders it as relevant to gender issues at the end of the twentieth century as it was in 1948.
Seraph on the Suwanee, Hurston’s last published work, openly explores sexism in family life and relates, more clearly than any other Hurston novel, a mother’s story. The text contains a fully developed portrait of a mother, Arvay Henson Meserve, whose very mothering is a function of patriarchy and whose story is so psychologically violent that she cannot narrate it herself. Only twice in the novel does Arvay find her own maternal voice, both occasions in the context of great emotional turmoil and maternal loss resulting first from the death of a child and later from her other children’s passage into adulthood. Most of her story is rendered through her consciousness from the limited omniscient point of view, and it is significant that in the novel she never achieves self-actualization or affirmation in her status as a mother. Like Their Eyes Were Watching God, Seraph on the Suwanee can be read as a feminist text. In The Politics of Reproduction, however, Mary O’Brien writes that in traditional or first wave feminist discourse, motherhood has been “despised, derided, and neglected.” Interestingly, such treatment is actually patriarchal and hostile to women, since the virtues necessary for successful mothering require great control, discipline, and resourcefulness. In the world of Seraph on the Suwanee, motherhood is not dismissed so harshly. While—as opposed to many feminists— Hurston does not denigrate motherhood and portray it as an impediment to a woman’s development and empowerment, she nonetheless allows motherhood to be marginalized and to survive only according to the dictates of a capitalist, patriarchal ethic.3
Set in the first quarter of the twentieth century, the novel centers upon Arvay Henson, an impoverished young white woman from Sawley, Florida, who spends most of her life nursing externally imposed insecurities about her attractiveness and desirability and harboring a distorted perception of the world as a menacing place. In her teens, in response to her sister’s marrying a man whom Arvay, herself, loves, she embraces religion and seeks to become a foreign missionary. Eventually, she marries Jim Meserve, even though he pours turpentine in her eyes and later rapes her during their engagement. Meserve is an ambitious northerner who removes her from her impoverished “cracker” life and installs her in a solidly middle class existence. In light of the courtship and engagement, the marriage is unsurprisingly sexually and emotionally tense. Arvay’s oppression in this new middle class existence is underscored by the symbolic surname (Me-serve) which she assumes upon marriage to Jim, for events in the marriage indicate that Arvay is to serve herself only through acquiescence and service to Jim. Although throughout the novel Arvay becomes increasingly privileged and quietly celebrates her escape from poverty, she never achieves true personal empowerment. Ultimately, the marriage experiences a fracture when Arvay asserts herself by withdrawing from Jim in response to his tyrannical and arbitrary behavior, and he leaves her. Reconciliation comes at the end of the novel when as a middle-aged woman, after more than twenty years as a victim of patriarchy, she now consciously conspires in her own oppression when she concludes peacefully that she must love Jim like a “mother”—which, in this context means self-effacing, unconditional capitulation to sexist dogma and failure to expect any growth on the part of her partner.
From a maternal feminist perspective—one which celebrates, embraces, and finds empowerment in motherhood—the portrayal of motherhood here is troubling. Miriam Johnson speaks to the issue at hand: “Feminists who do not separate motherhood from its male dominated context are likely to interpret a positive evaluation of motherhood as conservative.”4 Indeed, nowhere in Hurston’s fiction is there a positive evaluation of motherhood. In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston raises feminist arguments, but does not develop a maternal forum. In Jonah’s Gourd Vine, Amy Crittenden and Lucy Pearson subsume maternal to marital concerns. And in Moses, Man of the Mountain, while Jochebed’s very act of giving birth and subsequently guaranteeing Moses’s existence transforms the mother from a traditionally passive observer and victim to an active revolutionary, Hurston does not develop the possibilities of the maternal voice, instead retaining the Old Testament focus on the story of Moses. We note, also, that Moses’s mother-in-law is not given a name but remains “Jethro’s Wife,” and Jochebed cannot publicly admit to rearing her own child. Within the tales themselves, a woman’s status as a mother is likely to be subordinated to her position as any other functionary (that is, wife, lover, daughter, sister). Moreover, within these fictive worlds, women remain subordinates of a patriarchal superstructure which ultimately determines their very movements through space and time. The problem with this is that there is no advancement of the maternal cause; in all of her fiction, Hurston theoretically perpetrates the disenfranchisement of an entire class of women.
This marginalization of motherhood is not new. O’Brien notes that as early as the Timaeus, Plato used the motif of motherhood, which he makes passive and abstract while ascribing to male creativity the qualities of potency and regeneration. The notion that Woman is little more than a womb, which has historically pervaded much of western thinking, is manifest in Jim Meserve’s perception of women: “Women folks don’t have no mind to make up nohow. They wasn’t made for that. Lady folks were just made to act loving and kind and have a man to do for them all he’s able, and have him as many boy children as he figgers he’d like to have, and make him so happy that he’s willing to work and fetch every dad— blamed thing that his wife thinks she would like to have. That’s what women are made for.” In another instance, Jim says to Brock Henson, Arvay’s father: “A woman knows who her master is, and she answers to his commands. We’ll make out good enough.” And later, he refers to Arvay as his “damn property.”5 In these statements lies the articulation of the patriarchal view of Woman as Other, clearly objectified, subordinate, and inferior to men. Such a notion, as has been widely documented, is essential to capitalism, in which motherhood and patriarchy form a curious but necessary union. Simply put, women constitute, when needed, a part of the labor force; more importantly, as mothers they facilitate the acquisition of private property in a system where children (ideally male) belong to the father. In this environment, beyond the functions of birth and nurturance, mothers serve no serious purpose.
Against this backdrop, then, we find Arvay. Mothers in her world are powerless. Worse yet, their very ability to bond with or mentor their children, especially daughters, who are potential mothers themselves, is interrupted at patriarchal will. In short, in this novel, there is no possibility for the development of a positive female identity because of the marginalization of motherhood within the world of the text.
The need for a healthy female identity, and the centrality of a healthy mother-daughter relationship to that identity, has been explored by feminist theorists. Nancy Chodorow and Carol Gilligan note that as opposed to male identity which develops through early separation from the mother, female identity develops through early continued connection with the mother. Thus the female identity is grounded in relationship with another. Emphasizing the importance of connection and affiliation in a woman’s existence, Chodorow explains: “Because of their mothering by women, girls come to experience themselves as less separate than boys, as having more permeable boundaries. Girls come to define themselves more in relation to others.” Gilligan goes further and addresses the area of moral development. She postulates a female ethic of relationship and concern for others; “[female] identity is defined in a context of relationship and judged by a standard of responsibility and care.”6 In the world of Seraph on the Suwanee, however, the intrusive nature of patriarchy and male chauvinism sabotage both the mother-daughter and mother-son relationships, with the result that the mother is forced to operate autonomously without the respect and consistent support of her husband and without the loyalty of her children. In addition, mothers frequently find themselves powerless to protect and assist their children at critical times. Throughout the novel, then, maternal impotence, which renders the maternal influence marginal at best, is evident.
Close reading of the novel reveals Arvay in a series of failed relationships, initially with her own mother and subsequently with her own children. Arvay’s relationship with her mother, Maria Henson, is never characterized by the bonding essential to the development of an autonomous self. The relationship is apparently peripheral to Arvay’s existence just as Hurston’s portrayal of it is peripheral to the text. We see Arvay’s interaction with Maria in the first three and the final three chapters of the novel, but as a mere extension of Arvay’s father, Brock Henson, Maria has no autonomy and no originality of thought. Her loyalty to Arvay, then, is circumscribed by her husband’s notions of social conventions and expectations. When she shepherds Arvay into marrying Jim Meserve, she merely mirrors Brock’s sentiments:
“Call yourself trying to cold shoulder Jim Meserve, I take it. If you had the sense that God give a June bug you’d feel glad that he feels to scorch you to and from. Ain’t you never going to have sense enough to get yourself a husband? You intend to lay round here on me for the rest of your days and moan and pray?”
“I help you to say,” Maria Henson agreed. “Arvay ain’t acting with no sense at all. Here all these girls around here ’bout to bust they guts trying to git to him, and Arvay, that seems like she got the preference with him, trying to cut the tom fool.”7
While Brock’s remarks are directed to Arvay, Maria’s are directed away from her and function only to reinforce the father’s disregard for his daughter. In another instance, when Brock embarrasses Arvay in front of Jim at the dinner table, Maria uses the gravy in the kitchen as an excuse not to support Arvay. Brock therefore sets the tone of the relationship between Maria and Arvay and consequently controls the extent to which Maria is able to mentor Arvay and influence her sense of connectedness.
The physical contact between Maria and Arvay is interrupted by Arvay’s marriage, but resumes in the final chapter of the novel on the occasion of Maria’s illness and death. As in earlier encounters, Maria is still powerless in her capacity to mother, but this time Arvay and Maria do achieve mutual affirmation. Impoverished and weak at the end of her life, Maria looks to Arvay for assurance of a decent burial, and finds comfort in Arvay’s success as a mother. Ironically, however, Maria measures this success by the quality of material attention Arvay’s children have paid her, all of which is a result of Jim’s patriarchal and economic achievement.
Perhaps the most disconcerting feature of the relationship between Maria and Arvay, however, is that male influence continues to intrude negatively in Maria’s death, even as it did in her life. That death and burial, Arvay’s satisfaction with the closure of the relationship, and her successful completion of her responsibilities as a daughter all contribute to aid the political ambitions of Bradford Cary, a leading Sawley citizen. His subsequent gubernatorial success is linked in part to the exploitation of Arvay when he helps to bury her mother. The mother-child relationship, particularly because it involves two women, is no less vulnerable now to manipulation from outside the family circle and in the larger political arena than it was in Maria’s lifetime.
Maria’s ineffective mothering of Arvay both foreshadows and frames Arvay’s relationship with her own children. Given that effective mothering is a choice based not only on biology but also on the decision to care for one’s children, and given that effective mothering is characterized by a woman’s total commitment to and strong will to act on behalf of her children’s welfare, the maternal styles of Maria and Arvay are strikingly passive. Arvay is no more successful than Maria as a mother. Like the Henson household, the Meserve household still embraces patriarchal attitudes, and Arvay’s maternal influence is clearly subordinate to Jim’s will. Ultimately, Arvay’s relationship with each of her children fails because Jim dictates the nature and development of the parent-child relationship in the household.
Arvay’s relationship with Earl, her first born, effectively illustrates how mothers can be powerless to guarantee the physical well-being—and even the very lives—of their children. Born with an unnamed form of retardation, Earl requires special care and vigilance from birth. He elicits from Arvay a heightened sense of duty that Jim does not share. Moreover, early in the child’s life, the marriage loses vitality. Mothering Earl, albeit halfheartedly, and fabricating delightful anecdotes about him compensate for the marital emptiness Arvay experiences.
Nevertheless, Arvay is basically powerless with regard to Earl’s welfare, a fact evident in Jim’s indifference to his son’s special state and his role in Earl’s destruction. When, for example, Arvay voices apprehension about Earl’s safety around a tract of swamp land that Jim has purchased, Jim sneers at her fears. Later, when it is obvious that Earl is abnormally attracted to the Corregios, Jim suggests that Earl be institutionalized. When, as a result, Arvay becomes frantic—even accusing Jim of racial disloyalty—he dissociates from her pain, exerting his superiority over her and her family. Jim blames Arvay’s parental lineage for Earl’s condition and refuses to identify with her maternal anguish. When Earl attacks Lucy Ann, a lynch mob hunts him down and kills him with Jim’s sanction. Arvay’s essential right to mother is denied by her husband’s violence, and here it is obvious that mothers cannot guarantee the physical existence of their children. Arvay is helpless to prevent Earl’s death because Jim sanctions the violence. Worse yet, exhibiting unspeakable callousness, while Arvay mourns the death of the child, Jim insists on having sex. Jim discounts her grief by asserting sexual domination over her and further nullifies her maternal role.
Arvay’s effectiveness as a mother to Angeline, her second child, is similarly compromised. Because of Earl’s abnormality, Arvay’s second pregnancy is a source of fear and insecurity. Her chief concern is that Jim will leave her should the baby not meet his expectations. With this pregnancy and the subsequent events of the child’s life, we are again able to recognize the diminished correlation between motherhood and personhood as the woman’s role as a womb emerges in the patriarchal schema of the novel. Angeline is born in physically comfortable but emotionally uncertain circumstances. Arvay is happy only after the baby seems normal, thus securing Jim’s approval. Significantly, this birth is attended by a male doctor as opposed to a midwife, and rather than being woman centered, the birth event becomes a bastion of patriarchy in which the woman does not experience fulfillment as a principle player but participates, instead, to gratify the male ego by bearing a normal, healthy child.
That traditional patriarchy is a major contributor to the failure of Arvay’s relationship with Angeline is evident from Angeline’s infancy, when Jim makes himself central to both mother and child, and undermining an effective bond between them. Recording Angeline’s birth in the family Bible, Jim in the act of writing her name marks Angeline’s existence with his own imprimatur, and in so doing, he symbolically precludes further maternal involvement. By bonding himself to the baby, he perpetuates mother-daughter rivalry. He instructs Arvay in disciplining the child to such an extent that Arvay feels that Angeline has jurisdiction over her. Thus the reader is again aware that, as with Earl, maternal authority is not a serious factor. Jim also fuels Arvay’s insecurities about her status with him and maintains his centrality with his assertion that he loves mother and daughter through each other.
As Angeline grows up, Jim continues to exercise his authoritarian will and maintain Arvay’s position on the periphery of Angeline’s development. His forceful presence makes Arvay reluctant to observe Angeline’s maturity, and she does not involve herself in her daughter’s psychological and social concerns, such as personal ambitions, awareness of men, and dating. Thus it is Jim who effectively shepherds Angeline into womanhood and marriage. When Arvay worries about Angeline’s possible sexual involvement with Hatton Howland, whom she subsequently marries, Jim laughingly dismisses the mother’s concerns and so emerges as the voice of reason in the matter. Jim assesses Hatton Howland’s suitability for marriage to the underage Angeline and then excludes Arvay from the marriage, which he alone witnesses and informs Arvay of much later; Arvay’s involvement is limited to her preparation, upon Jim’s instruction, for the bride and groom’s return. Jim has again undermined the maternal presence, and Angeline, through her silence, colludes in her mother’s marginalization. And, finally, the economic success of the marriage and the couple’s upward social mobility result both from Jim’s instructions and from their own willingness to subscribe to a patriarchal, capitalist ethic that prevents Arvay from having any input into their welfare.
Arvay’s relationship with third child Kenny, while not as dramatic, is as unsuccessful as her relationships with Earl and Angeline, thus underscoring the role of male privilege and authority in the polarization of mothers and children. The third pregnancy is a time of torment for the mother as Jim viciously teases her, demanding that the baby she is carrying be a son. Jim’s chauvinism has rendered Arvay so insecure that eventually, doubting his ability to love and protect her, she retreats into religion, identifying with the biblical Hannah and Hagar as well as other “sorrowful women.” Arvay’s drawing on Old Testament stories, which reflect what is loosely referred to as the era of patriarchs, symbolizes her subscription to a value system that reduces the totality of womanhood to a woman’s ability to bear sons. Like the women of the Old Testament, she articulates fears about events over which she has no control: “Be nice, honey. Be nice now, and come here a boy-child for your Mama. You see the fix I’m in. Jim is liable to leave me if you ain’t a boy. Me with my three little hungry mouths to feed and to do for.”8 Here again there is no affirmation for Arvay in pregnancy and motherhood—only concern that she be able to satisfy Jim’s patriarchal dictates, at the root of which lie his unconscionable ego demands. It is therefore not surprising that while Kenny demonstrates a normal developmental gender separation from Arvay as he matures, no significant bond develops between them, since Jim seizes control of Kenny’s social, emotional, and professional growth. With the third of her children, then, Arvay is once again marginalized and her maternal authority trivialized and sabotaged.
Nowhere in the world of Seraph on the Suwanee, in either the marital or the parent-child relationship, is motherhood separated from its male-defined and male-dominated context. Therein lies the plight of Jochebed, the mother whose narrative encompasses manipulation of the text and reader expectations that allow no forum for the political empowerment of motherhood. In Seraph on the Suwanee, Hurston has subsumed Arvay’s story as a mother to the narrator’s story of Arvay as a wife. Thus while the novel was ahead of its time in raising strong feminist questions, especially regarding the institution of marriage, it also fails—as much of feminism has failed—to empower mothers, to lift the maternal voice, and to move mothers from the periphery to the center of social concerns and expectations. When Hurston allows Arvay in her maternal role to remain static—consistently weak, insecure, and irrational in her mothering—the novel reinforces the notion, popular with first-wave feminists, that motherhood is without credibility or respectability and that it undermines women. Writers and critics have recently begun to address this weakness in feminism. Marianne Hirsch, for example, in her examination of women’s fiction, claims, “Feminist writing, continuing in large part to adopt a daughterly perspective, could be said to collude with patriarchy in placing the mother in a position of object and thereby keeping mothering outside of representation and maternal discourse a theoretical impossibility.”9 And so it is with Arvay’s story.
One can only speculate why Hurston failed to capitalize artistically on this significant aspect of the female experience. We can perhaps conjecture that the death of her biological mother when Hurston was a young child, her tempestuous and hostile relationship with her stepmother, her own childlessness as an adult, and the pernicious, latent effects of patriarchy contributed to placing the issue of motherhood beyond her literary imagination. In any event, Seraph on the Suwanee, like the rest of her work, fails to make a full contribution to the strength of women which Adrienne Rich terms “the bloodstream of [women’s] inheritance.”10 Thus the novel renders the important undertaking of mothering, in which much of the world’s adult population engages and without which humanity would cease to exist, marginal and useless.
Notes
1. Zora Neale Hurston,Their Eyes Were Watching God (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1937); Hurston, Jonah’s Gourd Vine (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1934); Hurston, Moses, Man of the Mountain (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1937); Hurston, Seraph on the Suwanee (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1948; reprint, Harper & Row, 1991).
2.Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978), 314.
3. Mary O’Brien, The Politics of Reproduction (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983), 8. For useful insight into male privilege and dominance, see Miriam Johnson’s discussion of women and family life in Strong Mothers, Weak Wives: The Search for Gender Equality (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988), 25-37.
4. Johnson, Strong Mothers, 30.
5. O’Brien, Politics of Reproduction, 125; Hurston, Seraph on the Suwanee, 25, 33, 216.
6. Nancy Chodorow,The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978), 93; Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), 160. Gilligan’s observations would appear to mean only the matrix of white society. History suggests that the composition of viewing audiences at lynchings, for example, indicates that white women do not uniformly extend this concern to people of color. More specifically, in the novel, Arvay shows no concern for Belinda, the child of the black Kelsey family, when Kenny has obviously exploited her.
7. Hurston, Seraph on the Suwanee, 13-4.
8. Ibid., 99.
9. Marianne Hirsch, “Maternal Narratives: Cruel Enough to Stop the Blood,” Reading Black, Reading Feminist: A Critical Anthology, ed. Henry Louis Gates (New York: Meridian Press, 1990), 415.
10. Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (New York: Bantam Books, 1977), 216.
Further Reading
Bibliographies
Cairney, Paul. “Writings about Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God: 1987-1993.” Bulletin of Bibliography 52, no. 2 (June 1995): 121-32.
Provides a listing of material about Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God.
Dance, Daryl C. “Zora Neale Hurston.” In American Women Writers: Bibliographical Essays, edited by Maurice Duke, Jackson R. Bryer, and M. Thomas Inge, pp. 321-51. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1983.
A bibliography about Hurston and her life and work.
Davis, Rose Parkman. Zora Neale Hurston: An Annotated Bibliography and Reference Guide. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1997, 224 p.
A listing of critical commentary and books about Hurston.
Glasrud, Bruce A., and Laurie Champion. “Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960).” In American Women Writers, 1900-1945: A Bio-Biographical Critical Sourcebook, edited by Laurie Champion and Emmanuel S. Nelson, pp. 162-72. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 2000.
Details sources on Hurston’s life and work.
Biographies
Boyd, Valerie. Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston. New York: Scribner, 2003, 527 p.
A highly regarded biography focusing on details about both Hurston’s life and writing, examining her politics and love interests in the context of the Harlem Renaissance, the Great Depression, and World War II.
Hemenway, Robert E. Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980, 371 p.
Traces Hurston’s life and work and addresses conflicting or inaccurate information from her autobiography.
Criticism
Anokye, Akua Duku. “Private Thoughts, Public Voices: Letters from Zora Neale Hurston.” Women: A Cultural Review 7, no. 2 (autumn 1996): 150-59.
Provides a new perspective on Hurston’s relationship with her white patrons by looking at some of Hurston’s correspondence.
Awkward, Michael. New Essays on “Their Eyes Were Watching God.” Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990, 129 p.
Contains critical commentary about Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God.
Benesch, Klaus. “Oral Narrative and Literary Text: Afro-American Folklore in Their Eyes Were Watching God. ” Callaloo 11 (1988): 627-35.
Assesses the relationship between Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God and African American folklore.
Bethel, Lorraine. “‘This Infinity of Conscious Pain’: Zora Neale Hurston and the Black Female Literary Tradition.” In All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies, edited by Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell-Scott, and Barbara Scott, pp. 176-88. Old Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist Press, 1982.
Discusses Hurston’s place in the canon of African American female literary tradition.
Bloom, Harold. Zora Neale Hurston: Modern Critical Views, edited by Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea, 1986, 222 p.
Offers a variety of critical perspectives on Hurston’s work.
———. Zora Neale Hurston’s “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” edited by Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea, 1987, 231 p.
Presents critical commentary about Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God.
Primary Sources
SOURCE : Hurston, Zora Neale. “Chapter 12.” In Their Eyes Were Watching God, 1937. Reprint, pp. 105-10. New York: Harper and Row, Perennial Library, 1990.
In the following excerpt from Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston relates the consternation of the townspeople with the growing relationship between Tea Cake and Mrs. Janie Starks. Janie’s husband, Joe Starks, has recently died.
It was after the picnic that the town began to notice things and got mad. Tea Cake and Mrs. Mayor Starks! All the men that she could get, and fooling with somebody like Tea Cake! Another thing, Joe Starks hadn’t been dead but nine months and here she goes sashaying off to a picnic in pink linen. Done quit attending church, like she used to. Gone off to Sanford in a car with Tea Cake and her all dressed in blue! It was a shame. Done took to high heel slippers and a ten dollar hat! Looking like some young girl, always in blue because Tea Cake told her to wear it. Poor Joe Starks. Bet he turns over in his grave every day. Tea Cake and Janie gone hunting. Tea Cake and Janie gone fishing. Tea Cake and Janie gone to Orlando to the movies. Tea Cake and Janie gone to a dance. Tea Cake making flower beds in Janie’s yard and seeding the garden for her. Chopping down that tree she never did like by the dining room window. All those signs of possession. Tea Cake in a borrowed car teaching Janie to drive. Tea Cake and Janie playing checkers; playing coon-can; playing Florida flip on the store porch all afternoon as if nobody else was there. Day after day and week after week.
“Pheoby,” Sam Watson said one night as he got in the bed, “Ah b’lieve yo’ buddy is all tied up with dat Tea Cake shonough. Didn’t b’lieve it at first.”
“Aw she don’t mean nothin’ by it. Ah think she’s sort of stuck on dat undertaker up at Sanford.”
“It’s somebody ’cause she looks might good dese days. New dresses and her hair combed a different way nearly every day. You got to have something to comb hair over. When you see uh woman doin’ so much rakin’ in her head, she’s combin’ at some man or ’nother.”
“‘Course she kin do as she please, but dat’s uh good chance she got up at Sanford. De man’s wife died and he got uh lovely place tuh take her to— already furnished. Better’n her house Joe left her.”
“You better sense her intuh things then ’cause Tea Cake can’t do nothin’ but help her spend whut she got. Ah reckon dat’s whut he’s after. Throwin’ away whut Joe Starks worked hard tuh git tuhgether.”
“Dat’s de way it looks. Still and all, she’s her own woman. She oughta know by now whut she wants tuh do.”
“De men wuz talkin’ ’bout it in de grove tuhday and givin’ her and Tea Cake both de devil. Dey figger he’s spendin’ on her now in order tuh make her spend on him later.”
“Umph! Umph! Umph!”
“Oh dey got it all figgered out. Maybe it ain’t as bad as they say, but they talk it and make it sound real bad on her part.”
“Dat’s jealousy and malice. Some uh dem very mens wants tuh do whut dey claim deys skeered Tea Cake is doin’.”
“De Pastor claim Tea Cake don’t ’low her tuh come tuh church only once in awhile ’cause he want dat change tuh buy gas wid. Just draggin’ de woman away from church. But any-how, she’s yo’ bosom friend, so you better go see ’bout her. Drop uh lil hint here and dere and if Tea Cake is tryin’ tuh rob her she kin see and know. Ah laks de woman and Ah sho would hate tuh see her come up lak Mis’ Tyler.”
“Aw mah God, naw! Reckon Ah better step over dere tomorrow and have some chat wid Janie. She jus’ ain’t thinkin’ whut she doin’ dat’s all.”
The next morning Pheoby picked her way over to Janie’s house like a hen to a neighbor’s garden. Stopped and talked a little with everyone she met, turned aside momentarily to pause at a porch or two—going straight by walking crooked. So her firm intention looked like an accident and she didn’t have to give her opinion to folks along the way.
Janie acted glad to see her and after a while Pheoby broached her with, “Janie, everybody’s talkin’ ‘bout how dat Tea Cake is draggin’ you round tuh places you ain’t used tuh. Baseball games and huntin’ and fishin’. He don’t know you’se useter uh more high time crowd than dat. You always did class off.”
“Jody classed me off. Ah didn’t. Naw, Pheoby, Tea Cake ain’t draggin’ me off nowhere Ah don’t want tuh go. Ah always did want tuh git round uh whole heap, but Jody wouldn’t ’low me tuh. When Ah wasn’t in de store he wanted me tuh jes sit wid folded hands and sit dere. And Ah’d sit dere wid de walls creepin’ up on me and squeezin’ all de life outa me. Pheoby, dese educated women got uh heap of things to sit down and consider. Somebody done tole ’em what to set down for. Nobody ain’t told poor me, so sittin’ still worries me. Ah wants tuh utilize mahself all over.”
“But, Janie, Tea Cake, whilst he ain’t no jailbird, he ain’t got uh dime tuh cry. Ain’t you skeered he’s jes after yo’ money—him bein’ younger than you?”
“He ain’t never ast de first penny from me yet, and if he love property he ain’t no different from all de rest of us. All dese ole men dat’s settin’ round me is after de same thing. They’s three mo’ widder women in town, how come dey don’t break dey neck after dem? ’Cause dey ain’t got nothin’, dat’s why.”
“Folks seen you out in colors dey thinks you ain’t payin’ de right amount uh respect tuh yo’ dead husband.”
“Ah ain’t grievin’ so why do Ah hafta mourn? Tea Cake love me in blue, so Ah wears it. Jody ain’t never in his life picked out no color for me. De world picked out black and white for mournin’, Joe didn’t. So Ah wasn’t wearin’ it for him. Ah was wearin’ it for de rest of y’all.”
“But anyhow, watch yo’self, Janie, and don’t be took advantage of. You know how dese young men is wid older women. Most of de time dey’s after whut dey kin git, then dey’s gone lak uh turkey through de corn.”
“Tea Cake don’t talk dat way. He’s aimin’ tuh make hisself permanent wid me. We done made up our mind tuh marry.”
“Janie, you’se yo’ own woman, and Ah hope you know whut you doin’. Ah sho hope you ain’t lak uh possum—de older you gits, de less sense yuh got. Ah’d feel uh whole heap better ’bout yuh if you wuz marryin’ dat man up dere in Sanford. He got somethin’ tuh put long side uh whut you got and dat make it more better. He’s endurable.”
“Still and all Ah’d ruther be wid Tea Cake.”
“Well, if yo’ mind is already made up, ’tain’t nothing’ nobody kin do. But you’se takin’ uh awful chance.”
“No mo’ than Ah took befo’ and no mo’ than anybody else takes when dey gits married. It always changes folks, and sometimes it brings out dirt and meanness dat even de person didn’t know they had in ’em theyselves. You know dat. Maybe Tea Cake might turn out lak dat. Maybe not. Anyhow Ah’m ready and willin’ tuh try ’im.”
“Well, when you aim tuh step?”
“Dat we don’t know. De store is got tuh be sold and then we’se goin’ off somewhere tuh git married.”
“How come you sellin’ out de store?”
“’Cause Tea Cake ain’t no Jody Starks, and if he tried tuh be, it would be uh complete flommuck. But de minute Ah marries ’im everybody is gointuh be makin’ comparisons. So us is goin’ off somewhere and start all over in Tea Cake’s way. Dis ain’t no business proposition, and no race after property and titles. Dis is uh love game. Ah done lived Grandma’s way. Now Ah means tuh live mine.”
“What you mean by dat, Janie?”
“She was borned in slavery time when folks, dat is black folks, didn’t sit down anytime dey felt lak it. So sittin’ on porches lak de white madam looked lak uh mighty fine thing tuh her. Dat’s whut she wanted for me—don’t keer whut it cost. Git up on uh high chair and sit dere. She didn’t have time tuh think whut tuh do after you got up on de stool uh do nothin’. De object wuz tuh git dere. So Ah got up on de high stool lak she told me, but Pheoby, Ah done nearly languished tuh death up dere. Ah felt like de world wuz cryin’ extry and Ah ain’t read de common news yet.”
“Maybe so, Janie. Still and all Ah’d love tuh experience it for just one year. It look lak heben tuh me from where Ah’m at.”
“Ah reckon so.”
“But anyhow, Janie, you be keerful ’bout dis sellin’ out and goin’ off wid strange men. Look whut happened tuh Annie Tyler. Took whut little she had and went off tuh Tampa wid dat boy dey call Who Flung. It’s somethin’ tuh think about.”
“It sho is. Still Ah ain’t Mis’ Tyler and Tea Cake ain’t no Who Flung, and he ain’t no stranger tuh me. We’se just as good as married already. But Ah ain’t puttin’ it in de street. Ah’m tellin’ you.”
“Ah jus lak uh chicken. Chicken drink water, but he don’t pee-pee.”
“Oh, Ah know you don’t talk. We ain’t shame faced. We jus’ ain’t ready tuh make no big kerflommuck as yet.”
“You doin’ right not tuh talk it, but Janie, you’se takin’ uh mighty big chance.”
“’Tain’t so big uh chance as it seem lak, Pheoby. Ah’m older than Tea Cake, yes. But he done showed me where it’s de thought dat makes de difference in ages. If people thinks de same they can make it all right. So in the beginnin’ new thoughts had tuh be thought and new words said. After Ah got used tuh dat, we gits ’long jus’ fine. He done taught me de maiden language all over. Wait till you see de new blue satin Tea Cake done picked out for me tuh stand up wid him in. High heel slippers, necklace, earrings, everything he wants tuh see me in. Some of dese mornin’s and it won’t be long, you gointuh wake up callin’ me and Ah’ll be gone.”
General Commentary
SOURCE: Pierpont, Claudia Roth. "A Society of One: Zora Neale Hurston, American Contrarian." New Yorker 73, no. 1 (17 February 1997): 80-91.
In the following essay, Pierpont provides an overview of Hurston's career and the public's response to it, and asserts that it is impossible to categorize Hurston's writing.
In the spring of 1938, Zora Neale Hurston informed readers of the Saturday Review of Literature that Mr. Richard Wright's first published book, Uncle Tom's Children, was made up of four novel-las set in a Dismal Swamp of race hatred, in which not a single act of understanding or sympathy occurred, and in which the white man was generally shot dead. "There is lavish killing here," she wrote, "perhaps enough to satisfy all male black readers." Hurston, who had swept onto the Harlem scene a decade before, was one of the very few black women in a position to write for the pallidly conventional Saturday Review. Wright, the troubling newcomer, had already challenged her authority to speak for their race. Reviewing Hurston's novel Their Eyes Were Watching God in the New Masses the previous fall, he had dismissed her prose for its "facile sensuality"—a problem in Negro writing that he traced to the first black American female to earn literary fame, the slave Phillis Wheatley. Worse, he accused Hurston of cynically perpetuating a minstrel tradition meant to make white audiences laugh. It says something about the social complexity of the next few years that it was Wright who became a Book-of-the-Month Club favorite, while Hurston's work went out of print and she nearly starved. For the first time in America, a substantial white audience preferred to be shot at.
Black anger had come out of hiding, out of the ruins of the Harlem Renaissance and its splendid illusions of justice willingly offered up to art. That famed outpouring of novels and poems and plays of the twenties, anxiously demonstrating the Negro's humanity and cultural citizenship, counted for nothing against the bludgeoning facts of the Depression, the Scottsboro trials, and the first-ever riot in Harlem itself, in 1935. The advent of Richard Wright was a political event as much as a literary one. In American fiction, after all, there was nothing new in the image of the black man as an inarticulate savage for whom rape and murder were a nearly inevitable means of expression. Southern literature was filled with Negro portraits not so different from that of Bigger Thomas, the hero of Wright's 1940 bombshell, Native Son. In the making of a revolution, all that had shifted was the author's color and the blame.
As for Hurston, the most brazenly impious of the Harlem literary avant-garde—she called them "the niggerati"—she had never fit happily within any political group. And she still doesn't. In this respect, she was the unlikeliest possible candidate for canonization by the black- and women's-studies departments. Nevertheless, since Alice Walker's "In Search of Zora Neale Hurston" appeared in Ms. in 1975, interest in this neglected ancestress has developed a seemingly unstoppable momentum. All her major work has been republished (most recently by the Library of America), she is the subject of conferences and doctoral dissertations, and the movie rights to Their Eyes Were Watching God—which has sold more than a million copies since 1990—have been bought by Oprah Winfrey and Quincy Jones. Yet, despite the almost sanctified status she has achieved, Hurston's social views are as obstreperous today as they were sixty years ago. For anyone who looks at her difficult life and extraordinary legacy straight on, it is nearly impossible to get this disarming conjure artist to represent any cause except the freedom to write what she wanted.
Hurston was at the height of her powers in 1937, when she first fell seriously out of step with the times. She had written a love story—Their Eyes Were Watching God—and become a counter-revolutionary. Against the tide of racial anger, she wrote about sex and talk and work and music and life's unpoisoned pleasures, suggesting that these things existed even for people of color, even in America; and she was judged superficial. By implication, merely feminine. In Wright's account, her novel contained "no theme, no message, no thought." By depicting a Southern small-town world in which blacks enjoyed their own rich cultural traditions, and were able to assume responsibility for their own lives, Hurston appeared a blithely reassuring supporter of the status quo.
The "minstrel" charge was finally aimed less at Hurston's subjects, however, than at her language. Black dialect was at the heart of her work, and that was a dangerous business. Disowned by the founders of the Harlem Renaissance for its association with the shambling, watermelon-eating mockeries of American stage convention, dialect remained an irresistible if highly self-conscious resource for writers, from Langston Hughes and Sterling Brown to Wright himself (whose use of the idiom Hurston gleefully dismissed as tone deaf). But the feat of rescuing the dignity of the speakers from decades of humiliation required a rare and potentially treacherous combination of gifts: a delicate ear and a generous sympathy, a hellbent humor and a determined imperviousness to shame. All this Hurston brought to Their Eyes Were Watching God—a book that, despite its slender, private grace, aspires to the force of a national epic, akin to works by Mark Twain or Alessandro Manzoni, offering a people their own language freshly caught on paper and raised to the heights of poetry.
"It's sort of duskin' down dark," observes the otherwise unexceptional Mrs. Sumpkins, checking the sky and issuing the local evening variant of rosy-fingered dawn. "He's uh whirlwind among breezes," one front-porch sage notes of the town's mayor; another adds, "He's got uh throne in de seat of his pants." The simplest men and women of all-black Eatonville have this wealth of images easy at their lips. This is dialect not as a broken attempt at higher correctness but as an extravagant game of image and sound. It is a record of the unique explosion that occurred when African people with an intensely musical and oral culture came up hard against the King James Bible and the sweet-talking American South, under conditions that denied them all outlet for their visions and gifts except the transformation of the English language into song.
Hurston was born to a family of sharecroppers in tiny Notasulga, Alabama, in 1891—about ten years before any date she ever admitted to. Both her biographer, Robert E. Hemenway, and her admirer Alice Walker, who put up a tombstone in 1973 to mark Hurston's Florida grave (inscribed "'A Genius of the South' 1901-1960 Novelist, Folklorist, Anthropologist"), got this basic fact as wrong as their honored subject would have wished. Hurston was a woman used to getting away with things: her second marriage license lists her date of birth as 1910. Still, the ruse stemmed not from ordinary feminine vanity but from her desire for an education and her shame at how long it took her to get it. The lie apparently began when she entered high school, in 1917, at twenty-six.
She had been very young when the family moved to Eatonville, Florida, the first incorporated black town in America (by 1914 there would be some thirty of them throughout the South), in search of the jobs and the relief from racism that such a place promised. In many ways, they found precisely what they wanted: John Hurston became a preacher at the Zion Hope Baptist Church and served three terms as mayor. His daughter's depictions of this self-ruled colored Eden have become legend, and in recent years have seemed to hold out a ruefully tempting alternative to the ordeals of integration. The benefits of the self-segregated life have been attested to by the fact that Eatonville produced Hurston herself: a black writer uniquely whole-souled and self-possessed and imbued with (in Alice Walker's phrase) "racial health."
Her mother taught her to read before she started school, and encouraged her to "jump at de sun." Her father routinely smacked her back down and warned her not to act white; the child he adored was her docile older sister. One must go to Hurston's autobiographical novel, Jonah's Gourd Vine, for a portrait of this highly charismatic but morally weak man, whose compulsive philandering eventually destroyed all he'd built. The death of Zora's mother, in 1904, began a period she would later seek to obliterate from the record of her life. Although her actual autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, is infamously evasive and sketchy (burying a decade does not encourage specificity), it does acknowledge her having been shunted among her brothers' families with the lure of school ever giving way to cleaning house and minding children. And all the while, she recalls, "I had a way of life inside me and I wanted it with a want that was twisting me."
Working at every kind of job—maid, waitress, manicurist—she managed to finish high school by June, 1918, and went on to Howard University, where she published her first story, in the literary-club magazine, in 1921. Harlem was just then on the verge of vogue, and the Howard club was headed by Alain Locke, founding prince of the Renaissance, a black aristocrat out of Harvard on the lookout for writers with a sense of the "folk." It was what everybody would soon be looking for. The first date that Hurston offers in the story of her life is January, 1925, when she arrived in New York City with no job, no friends, and a dollar and fifty cents in her pocket—a somewhat melodramatic account meant to lower the lights behind her rising glory.
One story had already been accepted by Opportunity, the premier magazine of "New Negro" writing. That May, at the first Opportunity banquet, she received two awards—one for fiction and one for drama—from such judges as Fannie Hurst, a best-selling, four-handkerchief novelist, and Eugene O'Neill. Hurston's flamboyant entrance at a party following the ceremonies, sailing a scarf over her shoulder and crying out the title of her play—" Color Struck !"—made a greater impression than her work would do for years. This was the new, public Zora, all bravado and laughter, happily startling her audience with the truth of its own preoccupations.
That night, she attached herself to Fannie Hurst, for whom she was soon working as a secretary and then, when it turned out that she couldn't type or keep anything in order, as a kind of rental exotic, complete with outlandish stories and a turban. (Her new boss once tried to pass her off in a segregated restaurant as an African princess.) Hurston's Harlem circle was loudly scornful of the part she was willing to play. For her, though, it was experience: it was not washing floors, it was going somewhere. And the somewhere still hadn't changed. At the banquet she had also met Annie Nathan Meyer, a founder of Barnard College. In the fall of 1925, this ever-masquerading, newly glamorous Scott-within-Zelda of Lenox Avenue enrolled in school again—she had completed less than two years at Howard, and had finagled a scholarship out of Meyer—and discovered anthropology.
Hurston dived headlong into this new field of intellectual possibility, which had been conceived principally by her teacher, Franz Boas, a German-Jewish immigrant who'd founded the department at Columbia. (Like all his students, Hurston called him Papa Franz, and he teased that of course she was his daughter, "just one of my missteps.") The bedrock of Boas's frankly political theorizing was the adaptability and mutability of the races. Believing that culture and learning have as much influence on human development as heredity, he set out to prove how close the members of the family of man might really be. Probably no one except her mother influenced Hurston more.
Boas's fervent belief in the historic importance of African cultures had already had tremendous impact on W. E. B. Du Bois, and Hurston was similarly inspired by the sense of importance that Boas gave to Southern black culture, not just as a source of entertaining stories but as the transmitted legacy of Africa—and as an independent cultural achievement, in need of preservation and study. Boas literally turned Hurston around: he sent her back down South to put on paper the things that she'd always taken for granted. Furthermore, his sanction gave her confidence in the value of those things—the old familiar talk and byways—which was crucial to the sense of "racial health" and "easy self-acceptance" that so many relish in her work today. It seems safe to say that no black woman in America was ever simply allotted such strengths, no matter how strong she was or how uniformly black her home town. They had to be won, and every victory was precarious.
As a child, Hurston informs us in her autobiography, she was confused by the talk of Negro equality and Negro superiority which she heard in the town all around her: "If it was so honorable and glorious to be black, why was it the yellow-skinned people among us had so much prestige?" Even in first grade, she saw the disparity: "The light-skinned children were always the angels, fairies and queens of school plays." She was not a light-skinned child, although her racial heritage was mixed. If the peculiarities of a segregated childhood spared her the harshest brunt of white racism, the crippling consciousness of color in the black community and in the black soul was a subject she knew well and could not leave alone.
Such color-consciousness has a long history in African-American writing, starting with the first novel written by a black American, William Wells Brown's 1853 Clotel (a fantasy about Thomas Jefferson's gorgeous mulatto daughter), which takes color prejudice "among the negroes themselves" as its premise. By 1929, the heroine of Wallace Thurman's bitterly funny novel The Blacker the Berry … was drenching her face with peroxide before going off to dance in Harlem's Renaissance Casino. But there is no more disconcertingly morbid document of this phenomenon than Hurston's prize-winning Color Struck. This brief, almost surreal play tracks a talented and very dark-skinned woman's decline into self-destructive madness, a result of her inability to believe that any man could love a woman so black. Although the intended lesson of Color Struck seems clear in the retelling, the play's fevered, hallucinatory vehemence suggests a far more complex response to color than Hurston's champions today can comfortably allow—a response not entirely under the author's control.
It would be wrong to say that whites did not figure prominently in Hurston's early life, despite their scarcity. It was precisely because of that scarcity that she took hold of racism not at its source but as it reverberated through the black community. Whites around Eatonville were not the murderous tyrants of Richard Wright's Deep South childhood, but they exerted, perhaps, an equally powerful force—as tantalizing, world-withholding gods, and as a higher court (however unlikely) of personal justice.
There is a fairy-tale aspect to the whites who pass through her autobiography: The "white man of many acres and things" who chanced upon her birth and cut her umbilical cord with his knife; the strangers who would drive past her house and give her rides out toward the horizon. (She had to walk back, and was invariably punished for her boldness.) Most important was a pair of white ladies who visited her school and were so impressed by her reading aloud—it was the myth of Persephone, crossing between realms of dark and light, which, she recalls, she read exceptionally well because it "exalted" her—that they made her a present of a hundred new pennies and the first real books she ever owned.
Hurston's autobiography won an award for race relations, in 1943, and put her on the cover of the Saturday Review. The book has since been reviled by the very people who rescued her fiction from oblivion, and for the same reason that the fiction was once consigned there: a sense that she was putting on a song and dance for whites. In fact, there is nothing in Dust Tracks on a Road that is inconsistent with the romantic images of white judges and jurors and plantation owners which form a fundamental part of Hurston's most deeply admired work. The heroine of Their Eyes Were Watching God ends up on trial for the murder—in self-defense—of the man she loved. (Having been infected by a rabid dog, he lost his senses and came at her with a gun.) The black folks who knew the couple have sided against her at the trial, hoping to see her hanged. It is the whites—the judge and jury and a group of women gathered for curiosity's sake—who see into the anguished depths of a black woman's love, and acknowledge her dignity and her innocence.
Does this reflect honest human complexity or racial confusion? In what world, if any, was Hurston ever at home? While at Barnard, she apparently told the anthropologist Melville Herskovits that, as he put it, she was "more white than Negro in her ancestry." On her first trip back South to gather evidence of her native culture she could not be understood because of her Barnard intonations. She couldn't gain people's confidence; the locals claimed to have no idea what she wanted. When Hurston returned to New York, she and Boas agreed that a white person could have discovered as much.
So she learned, in effect, to pass for black. In the fall of 1927, in need of a patron, she offered her services to Mrs. R. Osgood Mason, a wealthy white widow bent on saving Western culture from rigor mortis through her support of Negro artistic primitivism. For more than three years, Mrs. Mason paid for Hurston to make forays to the South to collect Negro folk material. Hurston's findings were not always as splendidly invigorating nor her attitude as positive as they later appeared. "I have changed my mind about the place," she wrote despairingly from Eatonville, in an unpublished letter of 1932. "They steal everything here, even greens out of a garden." But she became increasingly accomplished at ferreting out what she had been hired to find, and the results (if not always objectively reliable) have proved invaluable. Alan Lomax, who worked with Hurston on a seminal 1935 Library of Congress folk-music-recording expedition, wrote of her unique ability to win over the locals, since she "talks their language and can out-nigger any of them."
The fruits of her field work appeared in various forms throughout the early thirties: stories, plays, musical revues, academic articles. Her research is almost as evident in the 1934 novel Jonah's Gourd Vine as in her book of folklore, Mules and Men, which appeared the following year. Now routinely saluted as the first history of black American folklore by a black author, Mules and Men was faulted by black critics of its own time for its adamant exclusion of certain elements of the Southern Negro experience: exploitation, terror, misery, and bitterness.
By this time, however, Hurston had won enough recognition to go off on a Guggenheim grant to study voodoo practices in the Caribbean. It was not a happy trip. The anecdotal study she produced—Tell My Horse, published in 1938—is tetchy and belligerent, its author disgusted by the virulent racism of light-skinned mulattoes toward blacks in Jamaica, and as distinctly put out by the unreliability and habitual lying she experienced among the Haitians. In any case, this particular trip had been prompted less by an interest in research than by a need to escape from New York, where she'd left the man she thought of as the love of her life—a still mysterious figure who belongs less to her biography than to her art. In a period of seven weeks, in Haiti, in the fall of 1936, she wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God, a novel meant to "embalm all the tenderness of my passion for him."
In her autobiography, Hurston quickly dismisses her first marriage and entirely neglects to mention her second; each lasted only a matter of months. She wed her longtime Howard University boyfriend in May, 1927, and bailed out that August. (Apparently unruffled, Hurston wrote her friends that her husband had been an obstacle, and had held her back.) In 1939, her marriage to a twenty-three-year-old W.P.A. playground worker dissolved with her claims that he drank and his claims that she'd failed to pay for his college education and had threatened him with voodoo. "The great difficulty lies in trying to transpose last night's moment to a day which has no knowledge of it," she writes in DustTracksonaRoad. She concludes, "I have come to know by experience that work is the nearest thing to happiness that I can find."
Those admirers who wish Hurston to be a model feminist as well as a racial symbol have seized on the issue of a woman's historic choice between love and work, and have claimed that Hurston instinctively took the less travelled path. On the basis of Hurston's public insouciance, Alice Walker describes, with delicious offhand aplomb, "the way she tended to marry or not marry men, but enjoyed them anyway, while never missing a beat in her work." No sweat, no tears—one for the girls. It is true that Hurston was never financially supported by a man—or by anyone except Mrs. Mason. Hemenway, her biographer, writes that it was precisely because of her desire to avoid "such encroachment" on her freedom that her marriages failed.
Without doubt, Hurston was a woman of strong character, and she went through life mostly alone. She burned sorrow and fear like fuel, to keep herself going. She made a point of not needing what she could not have: whites who avoided her company suffered their own loss; she claimed not to have "ever really wanted" her father's affection. Other needs were just as unwelcome. About love, she knew the way it could make a woman take "second place in her own life." Repeatedly, she fought the pull.
There is little insouciance in the way Hurston writes of the man she calls P.M.P. in Dust Tracks on a Road. He was "tall, dark brown, magnificently built," with "a fine mind and that intrigued me.…He stood on his own feet so firmly that he reared back." In fact, he was her "perfect" love—although he was only twenty-five or so to her forty, and he resented her career. It is hard to know whether his youth or his resentment or his perfection was the central problem. Resolved to "fight myself free from my obsession," she took little experimental trips away from him to see if she could stand it. When she found she couldn't, she left him for good.
Her diligent biographer, who located the man decades later, reports that he had never known exactly what had happened. She'd simply packed her bags and gone off to the Caribbean. Once there, of course, she wrote a book in which a woman who has spent her life searching for passion finally finds it, lets herself go within its embrace, and learns that her lover is honest and true, and that she is not being played for a fool—despite the familiar fact that he is only twenty-five or so and she is forty. (He tells her, "God made it so you spent yo' ole age first wid somebody else, and saved up yo' young girl days to spend wid me.") And then, in the midst of love's perfection, the woman is forced—not out of anger or betrayal but by a hurricane and a mad dog and a higher fate—to shoot him dead, and return to a state of enlightened solitude.
Their Eyes Were Watching God brought a heartbeat and breath to all Hurston's years of research. Raising a folk culture to the heights of art, it fulfilled the Harlem Renaissance dream just a few years after it had been abandoned; Alain Locke himself complained that the novel failed to come to grips with the challenges of "social document fiction." The recent incarnation of Hurston's lyric drama as a black feminist textbook is touched with many ironies, not the least of which is the need to consider it as a social document. The paramount ironies, however, are two: the heroine is not quite black, and becomes even less black as the story goes on; and the author offers perhaps the most serious Lawrentian vision ever penned by a woman of sexual love as the fundamental spring and power of life itself.
The heroine of Eyes, Janie Crawford, is raised by her grandmother, who grew up in "slavery time," and who looks on in horror as black women give up their precious freedom for chains they forge themselves. "Dis love! Dat's just whut's got us uh pullin' and uh haulin' and sweatin' and doin' from can't see in de mornin' till can't see at night." But no one can give a woman what she will not claim. Nanny's immovable goal to see Janie "school out" meets its match in the teenager's bursting sexuality. Apprehensive, Nanny marries her off to a man with a house and sixty acres and a pone of fat on the back of his neck. "But Nanny, Ah wants to want him sometimes. Ah don't want him to do all de wantin'," Janie complains, and she walks off one day down the road, tossing her apron onto a bush.
It isn't exactly Nora slamming the door. There's another man in a buggy waiting for Janie, and another unhappy marriage—this time to a bully who won't let her join in the dazzling talk, the wildly spiralling stories, the earnest games of an Eatonville that Hurston raises up now like a darktown Camelot. After his death, a full twenty years later, she is rather enjoying the first freedom of widowhood when a tall, laughing man enters the general store and asks her to play checkers: "She looked him over and got little thrills from every one of his good points. Those full, lazy eyes with the lashes curling sharply away like drawn scimitars. The lean, overpadded shoulders and narrow waist. Even nice!"
It's the checkers almost as much as the sex. After Nanny, this man, who is called Tea Cake ("Tea Cake! So you sweet as all dat?"), is the staunchest feminist in the novel. He pushes Janie to play the games, talk the talk, "have de nerve tuh say whut you mean." They get married and set off together to work in the Everglades, picking beans side by side all day and rolling dice and dancing to piano blues at night. Hurston isn't unaware of the harsh background to these lives—trucks come chugging through the mud carrying migrant workers, "people ugly from ignorance and broken from being poor"—but she's willing to leave further study to the Wrights and the Steinbecks. Her concern is with the flame that won't go out, the making of laughter out of nothing, the rhythm, the intensity of feeling that transcends it all.
During the nineteen-seventies, when Their Eyes Were Watching God was being rediscovered with high excitement, Janie Crawford was granted the status of "earliest … heroic black woman in the Afro-American literary tradition." But many impatient questions have since been asked about this new icon. Why doesn't Janie speak up sooner? Why can't she go off alone? Why is she always waiting for some man to show her the way? Apologies have been made for the difficulties of giving power and daring to a female character in 1936, but then Scarlett O'Hara didn't fare too badly with the general public that year. The fact is that Janie was not made to suit independent-minded female specifications of any era. She is not a stand-in for her author but a creation meant to live out other possibilities, which are permitted her in large part because—unlike her author—she has no ambition except to live, and because she is beautiful.
"I got an overwhelming complex about my looks before I was grown," Hurston wrote her friend and editor Burroughs Mitchell in 1947, but went on to declare that she had triumphed over it. "I don't care how homely I am now. I know that it doesn't really matter, and so my relations with others are easier." Despite the possible exaggerations of a moment, this vibrantly attractive woman was well acquainted with what might be called the aesthetic burdens of race ("as ugly as Cinderella's sisters" is a phrase meaning Negro, Hurston reported to Mrs. Mason), and she spared her romantic heroine every one of them.
Janie recalls of an early photograph, "Ah couldn't recognize dat dark chile as me," and by the middle of the book neither can we. By then, we've heard a good deal about her breasts and buttocks and so extraordinarily much about her "great rope of black hair"—a standard feature of the gorgeous literary mulatto—that one critic wrote that it seemed to be a separate character. But it is only when Janie and Tea Cake get to the Everglades and confront the singularly racist Mrs. Turner, eager to "class off" with other white-featured blacks ("Ah ain't got no flat nose and liver lips. Ah'm uh featured woman"), that we hear of Janie's "coffee-and-cream complexion" and "Caucasian characteristics." The transformation is both touching and embarrassing—something like George Eliot's suddenly making Dorothea sublimely beautiful in the Roman-museum scene of Middlemarch. It's as though the author could no longer withhold from her beloved creation the ultimate reward: Dorothea starts to look like a Madonna, and Janie starts to look white.
With Hurston, though, pride always rushes back in after a fall. These alternating emotional axes are what make her so unclassifiable, so easily susceptible to widely different readings, all of which she may intend. For Janie never acts white, or even seems to care whether she looks that way. She is sincerely mystified by Mrs. Turner's tirades. "We'se uh mingled people," she responds, seeming to rebuke her author's own reflexive notions of beauty, too. "How come you so against black?"
Although Janie spends much of the book struggling to gain the right to speak her mind, she is not particularly notable for her eloquence. There is, however, a great deal of poetry of observation running through her head, which we hear not as her thoughts, precisely, but in the way the story is told. Those who analyze "narrative strategies" have pulped small forests trying to define Hurston's way of slipping in and out of a storytelling voice that sometimes belongs to Janie and sometimes doesn't and, by design, isn't always clear. (As in "Mrs. Dalloway," the effect is of a woman's sensual dispersal through the world.) Janie's panting teen-age sexuality is rendered in a self-consciously hyper-adolescent prose of kissing bees and creaming blossoms—prose that Wright seized on for its "facile sensuality" and that Hurston's admirers now quote with dismaying regularity as an example of her literary art. But Hurston at her best is simple, light, lucid, nearly offhand, or else just as simply, Biblically passionate. Janie wakes to see the sun rise: "He peeped up over the door sill of the world and made a little foolishness with red." (There is an archaic sense of power in Hurston's sexing of all things: "Havoc was there with her mouth wide open.") As for Tea Cake, even as Janie tries to push his image away he "seemed to be crushing scent out of the world with his footsteps," Hurston writes. "Crushing aromatic herbs with every step he took. Spices hung about him. He was a glance from God."
This is a sermon from the woman's church of Eros. And, like the sermons in which Hurston was schooled—like her entire book, as it winds in and out of this realization of sexual grace—her message lives in its music. At her truest as a writer, Hurston was a musician. The delightfully quotable sayings that she "discovered" on her field trips (many of which recur as plucked examples in Mules and Men and her other books) are embedded in this single volume like folk tunes in Dvořák or Chopin: seamlessly, with beauties of invention often indistinguishable from beauties of discovery. The rhythms of talk in her poetry and the substance of poetry in her talk fuse into a radiant suspension. "He done taught me de maiden language all over," Janie says of Tea Cake, and there may be some truth to the tribute: Hurston had never written this way before, and she never rose to it again. It seems likely that without the intensity of her feelings for "P.M.P." this famously independent woman would not have written the novel that is her highest achievement and her lasting legacy. It perhaps complicates the issue of a woman's life and work that the love she tore herself away from so that she could be free, and free to write, turned out to have been the Muse.
Hurston's ability to write fiction seems to have dried up after the commercial failure of Their Eyes Were Watching God, which sank without a trace soon after publication. Her next novel, Moses, Man of the Mountain, published in 1939, seems a failed reprise of the Bible-based all-Negro Broadway hit Green Pastures, with the story of Exodus as its blackface subject. ("Oh, er—Moses, did you ask about them Hebrews while you was knocking around in Egypt?") Gone is the miraculous ear. Gone, too, are her great humor and heart. Moses is a weary book, heavy with accumulated resentments. Hurston's disillusionment is fully evident in her mordant, angry journalism of the nineteen-forties, in which she witheringly commends the Southern custom of whites favoring their own "pet Negroes" (and their eager pets returning the favor) as a functioning racial system, and rails against the substandard Negro colleges she calls "begging joints." The title of one article—"Negroes Without Self-Pity"—speaks for itself.
This was her life's theme, and she sounded it all the louder as two new novels were rejected, her poverty went from bohemian to chronic, and her health gave way. She bought a houseboat and spent much of the mid-forties sailing Florida rivers: individualism, her refuge from racism, had lapsed into nearly total isolation. She returned to New York in 1946, looking for work, and wound up in the campaign office of the Republican congressional candidate running against Adam Clayton Powell. When her side lost, she was stranded for a terrible winter in a room on 124th Street, in a different sort of isolation. She didn't ask for help, and she didn't get any. She felt herself slipping, surrounded by racists and haters, the whole city "a basement to Hell."
It was just after this that she wrote her last published novel, Seraph on the Suwanee. The story of a white Southern woman and her family, it contains no prominent black characters. Among Hurston's supporters, Alice Walker has called it "reactionary, static, shockingly misguided and timid," and Mary Helen Washington has called it "vacuous as a soap opera." Everyone agrees that Hurston had fallen into the common trap of believing that a real writer must be "universal"—that is to say, must write about whites—and that she had simply strayed too far from the sources that fed her. In fact the book is poisonously fascinating, and suggests, rather, that she came too close.
The story of beautiful, golden-haired Arvay Henson, who believes herself ugly and unworthy of love, contains many echoes of Hurston's earlier work, but its most striking counterpart is the long-ago play Color Struck. The works set a beginning and an end to years of struggle with their shared essential theme—the destructive power of fear and bitterness in a woman's tortured psyche. Arvay is born to a poor-white "cracker" family; in a refraction of Hurston's own history, a preference for her older sister "had done something to Arvay's soul across the years." She falls in love with a magnificent fallen aristocrat, who rapes her—for Arvay this is an act of ecstatic, binding possession—and marries her. Tormented by her failure to live up to his perfection, she comes to hate him almost as much as she hates herself.
The book is a choking mixture of cynicism and compulsion. Hurston was desperate for a success, and hoped for a movie sale—hence, no doubt, the formulaic rape and the book's mawkish ending, in which Arvay learns to sing happily in her marital chains. But to reach this peace Arvay must admit, after years of pretense, that she is not really proud of her own miserably poor and uneducated family, that poverty and ignorance lend them neither moral superiority nor charm, and that she is, in fact, shamed and disgusted by them. Arvay's last attempt to go home to her own people results in her burning down the house in which she was raised.
The book was sharply criticized because Hurston's white Southerners speak no differently from the Eatonville blacks of her earlier work. The inflections, the rhythms, the actual expressions that had been declared examples of a distinctive black culture were all now simply transferred to white mouths. The incongruous effects, as in her Moses book, point to a failure of technique, an aural exhaustion. But in a letter to her editor Hurston gave an even more dispiriting explanation for what she'd done. "I think that it should be pointed out that what is known as Negro dialect in the South is no such thing," she wrote, in a repudiation nearly as sweeping as Arvay's, at once laying waste to her professional past and her extraordinary personal achievement. The qualities of Southern speech—black and white alike, she claimed—were a relic of the Elizabethan past preserved by Southern whites in their own closed and static society. "They did not get it from the Negroes. The Africans coming to America got it from them."
The novel's publication, in the fall of 1948, was swallowed up in a court case that tested all Hurston's capacity for resisting bitterness. That September, in New York, an emotionally disturbed ten-year-old boy accused her of sexual molestation. The Children's Society filed charges, and Hurston was arrested and indicted. Although the case was eventually thrown out, a court employee spilled the news to one of the city's black newspapers—the white papers were presumably not interested—and the lurid story made headlines. Hurston contemplated suicide, but slowly came back to herself on a long sailing trip.
She never returned to New York. For the rest of her life, she lived in Florida, on scant money and whatever dignity she was able to salvage. In Miami, she worked as a maid. Later, she moved to a cabin up the coast that rented for five dollars a week, where she grew much of her own food. She labored over several books, none considered publishable. Her radical independence was more than ever reflected in her politics: fervently anti-Communist, officially Republican, resisting anything that smacked of special pleading. When Brown v. Board of Education was decided, in 1954, she was furious—and wrote furiously—over the implication that blacks could learn only when seated next to whites, or that anyone white should be forced to sit beside anyone black. It was plain "insulting." Although there was some hard wisdom in her conclusion—"the next ten years would be better spent in appointing truant officers and looking after conditions in the homes from which the children come"—her defiant segregationist position was happily taken up by whites of the same persuasion. Her reputation as a traitor to her people overshadowed and outlasted her reasoning, her works, and her life.
Hurston died in January, 1960, in the Saint Lucie County welfare home, in Fort Pierce, Florida, four days before the first sit-in took place, at a Woolworth lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina. She was buried in an unmarked grave in a segregated cemetery in Fort Pierce. All her books were out of print. In 1971, in one of the first important reconsiderations of writers of the Harlem Renaissance, the critic Darwin Turner wrote that Hurston's relative anonymity was understandable, for, despite her skills, she had never been more than a "wandering minstrel." He went on to say that it was "eccentric but perhaps appropriate"—one must pause over the choice of words—for her "to return to Florida to take a job as a cook and maid for a white family and to die in poverty." There was a certain justice in these actions, he declared, in that "she had returned to the level of life which she proposed for her people."
The gleaming two-volume Library of America edition of Hurston's Novels and Stories and Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings makes for a different kind of justice. These books bring Hurston a long way from the smudged photocopies that used to circulate, like samizdat, at academic conventions, and usher her into the national literary canon in highly respectable hardback. She is the fourth African-American to be published in this august series, and the fifth woman, and the first writer who happens to be both. Although the Hurston revival may have been driven in part by her official double-victim status—a possibility that many will take as a sign that her literary status has been inflated—Their Eyes Were Watching God can stand unsupported in any company. Harold Bloom has written of Hurston as continuing in the line of the Wife of Bath and Falstaff and Whitman, as a figure of outrageous vitality, fulfilling the Nietzschean charge that we try to live as though it were always morning.
Outside of fiction, this kind of strength is mainly a matter of determination. For many who have embodied it in literature—Nietzsche, Whitman, Lawrence, Hurston—it is a passionate dream of health (dreamed while the simply healthy are sound asleep) which stirs a rare insistence and bravado. "Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry," Hurston wrote in 1928. "It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company!" In the venerable African-American game of "the dozens," the players hurl monstrous insults back and forth as they try to rip each other apart with words. (Hurston and Wright both call up the game, and quote the same now rather quaint chant of abuse: "Yo' mama don't wear no DRAWS, Ah seen her when she took 'em OFF "). The near-Darwinian purpose was to get so strong that, no matter what you heard about whomever you loved, you would not let on that you cared to do anything but laugh. It's a game that Richard Wright must have lost every time. But Zora Neale Hurston was the champ.
It is important not to blink at what she had to face and how it made her feel. Envy, fury, confusion, desire to escape: there is no wonder in it. We know too well the world she came from. It is the world she rebuilt out of words and the extraordinary song of the words themselves—about love and picking beans and fighting through hurricanes—that have given us something entirely new. And who is to say that this is not a political achievement? Early in Their Eyes Were Watching God Hurston describes a gathering of the folks of Eatonville on their porches at sundown: "It was the time to hear things and talk. These sitters had been tongueless, earless, eyeless conveniences all day long. Mules and other brutes had occupied their skins. But now, the sun and the bossman were gone, so the skins felt powerful and human. They became lords of sounds and lesser things. They passed notions through their mouths. They sat in judgment."
The powerless become lords of sounds, the dispossessed rule all creation with their tongues. Language is not a small victory. It was out of this last, irreducible possession that the Jews made a counter-world of words, the Irish vanquished England, and Russian poetry bloomed thick over Stalin's burial grounds. And in a single book one woman managed to suggest what another such heroic tradition, rising out of American slavery, might have been—a literature as profound and original as the spirituals. There is the sense of a long, ghostly procession behind Hurston: what might have existed if only more of the words and stories had been written down decades earlier, if only Phillis Wheatley had not tried to write like Alexander Pope, if only literate slaves and their generations of children had not felt pressed to prove their claim to the sworn civilities. She had to try to make up for all of this, and more. If out of broken bits of talk and memory she pieced together something that may once have existed, out of will and desire she added what never was. Hurston created a myth that has been gratefully mistaken for history, and in which she herself plays a mythic role—a myth about a time and place fair enough, funny enough, unbitter enough, glad enough to have produced a woman black and truly free.
Further Reading
Bibliographies
Cairney, Paul. "Writings about Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God: 1987-1993." Bulletin of Bibliography 52, no. 2 (June 1995): 121-32.
Provides a listing of material about Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God.
Dance, Daryl C. "Zora Neale Hurston." In American Women Writers: Bibliographical Essays, edited by Maurice Duke, Jackson R. Bryer, and M. Thomas Inge, pp. 321-51. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1983.
A bibliography about Hurston and her life and work.
Davis, Rose Parkman. Zora Neale Hurston: An Annotated Bibliography and Reference Guide. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1997, 224 p.
A listing of critical commentary and books about Hurston.
Glasrud, Bruce A., and Laurie Champion. "Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960)." In American Women Writers, 1900-1945: A Bio-Biographical Critical Sourcebook, edited by Laurie Champion and Emmanuel S. Nelson, pp. 162-72. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 2000.
Details sources on Hurston's life and work.
Biographies
Boyd, Valerie. Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston. New York: Scribner, 2003, 527 p.
A highly regarded biography focusing on details about both Hurston's life and writing, examining her politics and love interests in the context of the Harlem Renaissance, the Great Depression, and World War II.
Hemenway, Robert E. Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980, 371 p.
Traces Hurston's life and work and addresses conflicting or inaccurate information from her autobiography.
Criticism
Anokye, Akua Duku. "Private Thoughts, Public Voices: Letters from Zora Neale Hurston." Women: A Cultural Review 7, no. 2 (autumn 1996): 150-59.
Provides a new perspective on Hurston's relationship with her white patrons by looking at some of Hurston's correspondence.
Awkward, Michael. New Essays on "Their Eyes Were Watching God." Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990, 129 p.
Contains critical commentary about Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God.
Benesch, Klaus. "Oral Narrative and Literary Text: Afro-American Folklore in Their Eyes Were Watching God." Callaloo 11 (1988): 627-35.
Assesses the relationship between Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God and African American folklore.
Bethel, Lorraine. "'This Infinity of Conscious Pain': Zora Neale Hurston and the Black Female Literary Tradition." In All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women's Studies, edited by Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell-Scott, and Barbara Scott, pp. 176-88. Old Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist Press, 1982.
Discusses Hurston's place in the canon of African American female literary tradition.
Bloom, Harold. Zora Neale Hurston: Modern Critical Views, edited by Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea, 1986, 222 p.
Offers a variety of critical perspectives on Hurston's work.
——. Zora Neale Hurston's "Their Eyes Were Watching God," edited by Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea, 1987, 231 p.
Presents critical commentary about Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God.
Bordelon, Pam. "New Tracks on Dust Tracks: Toward a Reassessment of the Life of Zora Neale Hurston." African American Review 35, no. 5 (1997): 5-21.
Provides a close reading of Hurston's autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road.
Boxwell, D. A. "'Sis Cat' as Ethnographer: Self-Presentation and Self-Inscription in Zora Neale Hurston's Mules and Men." African American Review 26 (1992): 605-15.
Analyzes Hurston's Mules and Men.
Byrd, James W. "Zora Neale Hurston: A Novel Folklorist." Tennessee Folklore Bulletin 21 (1955): 37-41.
Discusses the importance of folklore in Hurston's work.
Caron, Timothy P. "'Tell Ole Pharoah to Let My People Go': Communal Deliverance in Zora Neale Hurston's Moses, Man of the Mountain." Southern Quarterly 36, no. 3 (1998): 47-60.
Examines Hurston's Moses, Man of the Mountain.
Cooper, Ian. "Zora Neale Hurston Was Always a Southerner Too." In The Female Tradition in Southern Literature, edited by Carol S. Manning, pp. 57-69. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993.
Explores Hurston's work as part of the tradition of southern literature.
Crabtree, Claire. "The Confluence of Folklore, Feminism, and Black Self-Determination in Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God." Southern Literary Journal 17, no. 2 (1985): 54-66.
Evaluates Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, focusing on such issues as folklore, feminism, and black identity.
Gates Jr., Henry Louis. "Zora Neale Hurston and the Speakerly Text." In The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism, pp. 170-216. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.
Analyzes Hurston's writing style.
Jordan, Jennifer. "Feminist Fantasies: Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God." Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 7 (1988): 105-17.
Offers a feminist reading of Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God.
Krasner, James N. "The Life of Women: Zora Neale Hurston and Female Autobiography." Black American Literature Forum 23 (1989): 113-26.
Discusses Hurston's autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road.
Lurie, Susan. "Antiracist Rhetorics and the Female Subject: The Trials of Zora Neale Hurston." In Unsettled Subjects: Restoring Feminist Politics to Poststructuralist Critique, pp. 44-77. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997.
Analyzes Hurston's relationship to black feminist politics and her attempt to create an antiracist discourse that does not undermine black feminism.
Menefee, Samuel Pyeatt. "Zora Neale Hurston 1891-1960." In Women and Tradition: A Neglected Group of Folklorists, edited by Carmen Blacker and Hilda Ellis Davidson, pp. 159-72. Durham, N.C.: Carolina Academic Press, 2000.
Addresses Hurston's relationship with folklore throughout her life and career.
Meisenhelder, Susan. "False Gods and Black Goddesses in Naylor's Mama Day and Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God." Callaloo 23, no. 4 (fall 2000): 1440-48.
Asserts that Gloria Naylor drew on Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God in her novel Mama Day, and delineates the similarities between the two texts.
——. Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick: Race and Gender in the Work of Zora Neale Hurston. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999, 253 p.
Explores issues of race and gender in Hurston's work.
Oxindine, Annette. "Pear Trees beyond Eden: Women's Knowing Reconfigured in Woolf's To the Lighthouse and Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God. "In Approaches to Teaching Woolf's "To the Lighthouse," edited by Beth Rigel Daugherty and Mary Beth Pringle, pp. 163-68. New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 2001.
Compares Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse to Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God to show how both authors use the sensual inner lives of their female protagonists to subvert the patriarchal order of the male characters.
Plant, Deborah. Every Tub Must Sit on Its Own Bottom: The Philosophy and Politics of Zora Neale Hurston. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995, 214 p.
Contains essays tracing Hurston's beliefs through her work.
Powers, Peter Kerry. "Gods of Physical Violence, Stopping at Nothing: Masculinity, Religion, and Art in the Work of Zora Neale Hurston." Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 12, no. 2 (summer 2002): 229-47.
Examines Hurston's contribution, as a major writer of the Harlem Renaissance, to the discourse on gender, race, and religion.
Wall, Cheryl A. "Mules and Men and Women: Zora Neale Hurston's Strategies of Narration and Visions of Female Empowerment." Black American Literature Forum 23 (1989): 661-80.
Discusses Hurston's treatment of women in Mules and Men.
Walters, Keith. "'He Can Read My Writing but He Sho' Can't Read My Mind': Zora Neale Hurston's Revenge in Mules and Men." Journal of American Folklore 112, no. 445 (summer 1999): 343-71.
Traces the history of Mules and Men and provides a close analysis of the book's opening and closing tales.
OTHER SOURCES FROM GALE:
Additional coverage of Hurston's life and career is contained in the following sources published by the Gale Group: African American Writers, Eds. 1, 2; American Writers Supplement, Vol. 6; Authors and Artists for Young Adults, Vol. 15; Beacham's Guide to Literature for Young Adults, Vol. 12; Black Literature Criticism; Black Writers, Eds. 1, 3; Concise Dictionary of American Literary Biography Supplement; Contemporary Authors, Vols. 85-88; Contemporary Authors New Revision Series, Vol. 61; Contemporary Literary Criticism, Vols. 7, 30, 61; Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vols. 51, 86; DISCovering Authors; DISCovering Authors: Canadian Edition; DISCovering Authors Modules: Most-studied Authors, Multicultural, and Novelists; DISCovering Authors 3.0; Drama Criticism, Vol. 12; Drama for Students, Vol. 6; Encyclopedia of World Literaturein the 20th Century, Ed. 3; Exploring Novels; Exploring Short Stories; Feminist Writers; Harlem Renaissance: A Gale Critical Companion; Literary Movements for Students, Vol. 2; Literature and Its Times, Vol. 3; Literature and Its Times Supplement, Ed. 1; Literature Resource Center; Major 20th-Century Writers, Eds. 1, 2; Modern American Women Writers; Novels for Students, Vol. 3; Reference Guide to American Literature, Ed. 4; Reference Guide to Short Fiction, Ed. 2; St. James Guide to Young Adult Writers; Short Stories for Students, Vols. 1, 6, 11; Short Story Criticism, Vol. 4; Twayne's United States Authors; Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism, Vols. 121, 131; and World Literature Criticism Supplement.