Carefully read and follow the directions as you move through each section of the exam. Only
use class notes and course readings - no internet search results - in developing your answer
to each question. Carefully read through your responses before submitting them to make sure
they are grammatically and punctually sound, and you have answered as fully as you can.
Q 2 Black Subjectivity Debate
Q 3 Trickster Figure
Q 4 Colorism
Q 5 Social Construct
Q 6 African Diaspora
Q 7 How is the appearance of language in Charles Chesnutt’s writing related to the
Regionalist literary tradition?
Q 8 List all of the US historical time periods that are part of the Black Subjectivity Debate and
the racial identity questions associated with each of them.
Q 9 What is the significance of African American writers’ practice of detailing the moment
they come to recognize their Blackness? Describe one specific example provided by a writer
in giving your response.
Q 10 How does Harriet Jacobs portray the particular impact slavery’s oppression has on Black
women? Describe one example from Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl in providing your
response.
Q 11 What is the difference between where Black subjectivity is during W.E.B. Du Bois and
Booker T. Washington’s ideological debate versus where Black subjectivity is during Jacobs
and Douglass’ writing of their narratives? What does this difference say about the nature of
race as a social construct?
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Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations
Zora Neale Hurston’s
Their Eyes Were Watching God
New Edition
Edited and with an introduction by
Harold Bloom
Sterling Professor of the Humanities
Yale University
Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations:
Their Eyes Were Watching God—New Edition
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Hurston, Zora Neale.
Zora Neale Hurston’s Their eyes were watching God / [edited with an introduction by]
Harold Bloom.— New ed.
p. cm. — (Bloom’s modern critical interpretations)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7910-9788-5
1. Hurston, Zora Neale. Their eyes were watching God. 2. African American women in
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Contents
Editor’s Note
vii
Introduction
1
Harold Bloom
Literacy and Hibernation
Robert B. Stepto
5
“I Love the Way Janie Crawford Left Her Husbands”:
9
Zora Neale Hurston’s Emergent Female Hero
Mary Helen Washington
The Politics of Fiction, Anthropology,
and the Folk: Zora Neale Hurston
Hazel V. Carby
Language, Speech, and Difference
in Their Eyes Were Watching God
Cynthia Bond
23
41
Naming and Power in Zora Neale
Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God
Sigrid King
Laughin’ Up a World: Their Eyes Were
Watching God and the (Wo)Man of Words
John Lowe
“Mink Skin or Coon Hide”: The Janus-faced
Narrative of Their Eyes Were Watching God
Susan Edwards Meisenhelder
57
71
117
vi
Contents
“The porch couldn’t talk for looking”:
Voice and Vision in Their Eyes Were Watching God
Deborah Clarke
“The Hierarchy Itself ”: Hurston’s
Their Eyes Were Watching God
and the Sacrifice of Narrative Authority
Ryan Simmons
167
“Some Other Way to Try”: From Defiance to
Creative Submission in Their Eyes Were Watching God
Shawn E. Miller
Chronology
205
Contributors
209
Bibliography
211
Acknowledgments
Index
217
215
147
185
Editor’s Note
My Introduction stresses the affinities of Zora Neale Hurston with the heroic
vitalism of Theodore Dreiser and D. H. Lawrence.
The distinguished scholar Robert B. Stepto connects Their Eyes Were
Watching God to Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man by the themes of “ascent and
immersion.”
A more political reading is ventured by Hazel V. Carby, and in linguistic
terms by three essayists: Cynthia Bond, Sigrid King, and John Lowe.
Problems of narrative doubling and of the wavering border of the visual
and language are the concerns of Susan Edwards Meisenhelder and Deborah
Clarke.
Hurston’s evasion of narrative directness is studied by Ryan Simmons,
after which Shawn E. Miller concludes this volume by analyzing Janie’s
transition from her bad first marriage to tragic fulfillment in her second.
vii
HAROLD BLOOM
Introduction
I
Extra-literary factors have entered into the process of even secular
canonization from Hellenistic Alexandria into the High Modernist Era of
Eliot and Pound, so that it need not much dismay us if contemporary work
by women and by minority writers becomes esteemed on grounds other than
aesthetic. When the High Modernist critic Hugh Kenner assures us of the
permanent eminence of the novelist and polemicist Wyndham Lewis, we can
be persuaded, unless of course we actually read books like Tarr and Hitler.
Reading Lewis is a rather painful experience, and makes me skeptical of
Kenner’s canonical assertions. In the matter of Zora Neale Hurston, I have
had a contrary experience, starting with skepticism when I first encountered
essays by her admirers, let alone by her idolators. Reading Their Eyes Were
Watching God dispels all skepticism. Moses: Man of the Mountain is an
impressive book in its mode and ambitions, but a mixed achievement, unable
to resolve problems of diction and of rhetorical stance. Essentially, Hurston is
the author of one superb and moving novel, unique not in its kind but in its
isolated excellence among other stories of the kind.
The wistful opening of Their Eyes Were Watching God pragmatically
affirms greater repression in women as opposed to men, by which I mean
“repression” only in Freud’s sense: unconscious yet purposeful forgetting:
Now, women forget all those things they don’t want to remember,
and remember everything they don’t want to forget. The dream
is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly.
Harold Bloom
Hurston’s Janie is now necessarily a paradigm for women, of whatever
race, heroically attempting to assert their own individuality in contexts that
continue to resent and fear any consciousness that is not male. In a larger
perspective, should the contexts modify, the representation of Janie will take
its significant place in a long tradition of such representations in American
and English fiction. This tradition extends from Samuel Richardson to
Doris Lessing and other contemporaries, but only rarely has been able to
visualize authentically strong women who begin with all the deprivations
that circumstance assigns to Janie. It is a crucial aspect of Hurston’s subtle
sense of limits that the largest limitation is that imposed upon Janie by her
grandmother, who loves her best, yet fears for her the most.
As a former slave, the grandmother, Nanny, is haunted by the
compensatory dream of making first her daughter, and then her granddaughter,
something other than “the mule of the world,” customary fate of the black
woman. The dream is both powerful enough, and sufficiently unitary, to have
driven Janie’s mother away, and to condemn Janie herself to a double disaster
of marriages, before the tragic happiness of her third match completes as
much of her story as Hurston desires to give us. As readers, we carry away
with us what Janie never loses, the vivid pathos of her grandmother’s superb
and desperate displacement of hope:
“And, Janie, maybe it wasn’t much, but Ah done de best Ah
kin by you. Ah raked and scraped and bought dis lil piece uh land
so you wouldn’t have to stay in de white folks’ yard and tuck yo’
head befo’ other chillum at school. Dat was all right when you
was little. But when you got big enough to understand things, Ah
wanted you to look upon yo’self. Ah don’t want yo’ feathers always
crumpled by folks throwin’ up things in yo’ face. And Ah can’t die
easy thinkin’ maybe de menfolks white or black is makin’ a spit
cup outa you: Have some sympathy fuh me. Put me down easy,
Janie, Ah’m a cracked plate.”
II
Hurston’s rhetorical strength, even in Their Eyes Were Watching God, is
frequently too overt, and theatens an excess, when contrasted with the painful
simplicity of her narrative line and the reductive tendency at work in all her
characters except for Janie and Nanny. Yet the excess works, partly because
Hurston is so considerable and knowing a mythologist. Hovering in Their Eyes
Were Watching God is the Mosaic myth of deliverance, the pattern of revolution
and exodus that Hurston reimagines as her prime trope of power:
Introduction
But there are other concepts of Moses abroad in the world. Asia
and all the Near East are sown with legends of this character.
They are so numerous and so varied that some students have
come to doubt if the Moses of the Christian concept is real. Then
Africa has her mouth on Moses. All across the continent there
are the legends of the greatness of Moses, but not because of his
beard nor because he brought the laws down from Sinai. No, he
is revered because he had the power to go up the mountain and
to bring them down. Many men could climb mountains. Anyone
could bring down laws that had been handed to them. But who
can talk with God face to face? Who has the power to command
God to go to a peak of a mountain and there demand of Him
laws with which to govern a nation? What other man has ever
commanded the wind and the hail? The light and darkness? That
calls for power, and that is what Africa sees in Moses to worship.
For he is worshipped as a god.
Power in Hurston is always potentia, the demand for life, for more
life. Despite the differences in temperament, Hurston has affinities both
with Dreiser and with Lawrence, heroic vitalists. Her art, like theirs, exalts
an exuberance that is beauty, a difficult beauty because it participates in
reality-testing. What is strongest in Janie is a persistence akin to Dreiser’s
Carrie and Lawrence’s Ursula and Gudrun, a drive to survive in one’s own
fashion. Nietzsche’s vitalistic injunction, that we must try to live as though
it were morning, is the implicit basis of Hurston’s true religion, which in its
American formulation (Thoreau’s), reminds us that only that day dawns to
which we are alive. Something of Lawrence’s incessant sense of the sun is
paralleled by Hurston’s trope of solar trajectory, in a cosmos where: “They
sat on the boarding house porch and saw the sun plunge into the same crack
in the earth from which the night emerged” and where: “Every morning
the world flung itself over and exposed the town to the sun.”
Janie’s perpetual sense of the possibilities of another day propels her
from Nanny’s vision of safety first to the catastrophe of Joe Starks and then
to the love of Tea Cake, her true husband. But to live in a way that starts with
the sun is to become pragmatically doom-eager, since mere life is deprecated
in contrast to the possibility of glory, or life more abundant, rather than
Nanny’s dream of a refuge from exploitation. Hurston’s most effective irony
is that Janie’s drive toward her own erotic potential should transcend her
grandmother’s categories, since the marriage with Tea Cake is also Janie’s
pragmatic liberation from bondage toward men. When he tells her, in all
Harold Bloom
truth, that she has the keys to the kingdom, he frees her from living in her
grandmother’s way.
A more pungent irony drove Hurston to end Janie’s idyll with Tea
Cake’s illness and the ferocity of his subsequent madness. The impulse of
her own vitalism compels Janie to kill him in self-defense, thus ending
necessarily life and love in the name of the possibility of more life again.
The novel’s conclusion is at once an elegy and a vision of achieved peace, an
intense realization that indeed we are all asleep in the outer life:
The day of the gun, and the bloody body, and the courthouse
came and commenced to sing a sobbing sigh out of every corner
in the room; out of each and every chair and thing. Commenced
to sing, commenced to sob and sigh, singing and sobbing. Then
Tea Cake came prancing around her where she was and the song
of the sigh flew out of the window and lit in the top of the pine
trees. Tea Cake, with the sun for a shawl. Of course he wasn’t
dead. He could never be dead until she herself had finished
feeling and thinking. The kiss of his memory made pictures of
love and light against the wall. Here was peace. She pulled in her
horizon like a great fish-net. Pulled it from around the waist of
the world and draped it over her shoulder. So much of life in its
meshes! She called in her soul to come and see.
III
Hurston herself was refreshingly free of all the ideologies that currently
obscure the reception of her best book. Her sense of power has nothing
in common with politics of any persuasion, with contemporary modes of
feminism, or even with those questers who search for a black esthetic. As
a vitalist, she was of the line of the Wife of Bath and Sir John Falstaff and
Mynheer Peeperkorn. Like them, she was outrageous, heroically larger than
life, witty in herself and the cause of wit in others. She belongs now to literary
legend, which is as it should be. Her famous remark in response to Carl Van
Vechten’s photographs is truly the epigraph to her life and work: “I love
myself when I am laughing. And then again when I am looking mean and
impressive.” Walt Whitman would have delighted in that as in her assertion:
“When I set my hat at a certain angle and saunter down Seventh Avenue . . .
the cosmic Zora emerges. . . . How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my
company? It’s beyond me.” With Whitman, Hurston herself is now an image
of American literary vitality, and a part also of the American mythology of
exodus, of the power to choose the party of Eros, of more life.
R obert B . S tepto
Literacy and Hibernation
I’m not blaming anyone for this state of affairs, mind you; nor merely
crying mea culpa. The fact is that you carry part of your sickness within
you, at least I do as an invisible man. I carried my sickness and though
for a long time I tried to place it in the outside world, the attempt to
write it down shows me that at least half of it lay within me.
—Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
B
Anochecí Enfermo. Amanecí bueno (I went to bed sick. I woke up
well.)
—Jay Wright, Dimensions of History
y the time we travel beyond the major work of Richard Wright, AfroAmerican literature’s narrative tradition is still very much alive—even though
the texts are rarely termed “narratives” by writer or reader, or consciously
placed in an ongoing artistic continuum. However, after Wright it is also clear
that the possibilities for significant revoicings of the ascent and immersion
narratives (and their accompanying rhetorics) are virtually exhausted. This is
not to say that ascent and immersion narratives do not appear in our recent
literature; nor is it to say that Afro-American writers are no longer fascinated
with creating rhetorics of racial soulfulness and soullessness. Indeed, in the
last decade the abiding fascination with rhetorics of the former type has
From From Behind the Veil: A Study of Afro-American Narrative, pp. 163–166. © 1979 by the
Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois.
Robert B. Stepto
become so pronounced that in some quarters it is seen to be an Artistic
Movement, and even an Aesthetic. Be this as it may, the fact remains that,
after Black Boy in particular, the situation is such that any actual forwarding
of the “historical consciousness” of Afro-American narrative must involve
some kind of escape from the lockstep imposed by the tradition’s dominant
and prefiguring narrative patterns. In theory, the logical first stop beyond the
narrative of ascent or immersion (a stop which need not be any more generic,
in a conventional sense, than were the preceding stops) is one that somehow
creates a fresh narrative strategy and arc out of a remarkable combination
of ascent and immersion narrative properties. In theory, attempts to achieve
such remarkable combinations are possible in Afro-American letters anytime
after the appearance of The Souls of Black Folk in 1903. In practice, however,
very few Afro-American narrativists appear to have comprehended the
opportunity before them, let alone fashioned combinations of merit and of
a certain energy.
In The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, for example, James Weldon
Johnson clearly demonstrates that he has some idea of the symbolic journeys
and spaces which the new narrative will require, but his dedication to troping
the Du Boisian nightmare of immersion aborted—which, in his hands, is
fundamentally a commitment to expressing a new narrative content—
precludes his achieving a new narrative arc. In writing Cane, Jean Toomer
takes further than Johnson did the idea of binding new narrative content
to new narrative form; but the success of his effort is questionable, since a
new narrative arc never really emerges from his aggressive yet orchestrated
display of forms and voices. The absence of such an arc is a further indication
of Toomer’s inability to detail his persona’s final posture outside the realms of
ascent and immersion. Without this requisite clarification, Cane appears to be
an inventive text that can evoke, but not advance, the historical consciousness
of its parent forms.
Before Invisible Man, Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching
God is quite likely the only truly coherent narrative of both ascent and
immersion, primarily because her effort to create a particular kind of
questing heroine liberates her from the task (the compulsion, perhaps) of
revoicing many of the traditional tropes of ascent and immersion. Of course,
Hurston’s narrative is neither entirely new nor entirely “feminine.” The house
“full ah thoughts” to which Janie ascends after her ritualized journey of
immersion with Teacake into the “muck” of the Everglades (recall here Du
Bois’s swamp in both The Souls and The Quest of the Silver Fleece) is clearly
a private ritual ground, akin in construction if not in accoutrement to Du
Bois’s study. And Janie’s posture as a storyteller—as an articulate figure
knowledgeable of tribal tropes (a feature probably overdone in the frame, but
not the tale, of Their Eyes) and in apparent control of her personal history—is
Literacy and Hibernation
a familiar and valued final siting for a primary voice in an Afro-American
narrative. Still, there is much that is new in Their Eyes. The narrative takes
place in a seemingly ahistorical world: the spanking new all-black town
is meticulously bereft of former slave cabins; there are no railroad trains,
above or underground, with or without Jim Crow cars; Matt’s mule is a bond
with and catalyst for distinct tribal memories and rituals, but these do not
include the hollow slogan, “forty acres and a mule”; Janie seeks freedom, selfhood, voice, and “living” but is hardly guided—or haunted—by Sojourner
Truth or Harriet Tubman, let alone Frederick Douglass. But that world is
actually a fresh expression of a history of assault. The first two men in Janie’s
adult life (Logan Killicks and Jody Starks) and the spatial configurations
through which they define themselves and seek to impose definition upon
Janie (notably, a rural and agrarian space on one hand and a somewhat urban
and mercantile space on the other) provide as much social structure as the
narrative requires. Furthermore, the narrative’s frame—the conversation “in
the present” between Janie and Pheoby—creates something new in that it, and
not the tale, is Hurston’s vehicle for presenting the communal and possibly
archetypal aspects of Janie’s quest and final posture. Presentation does not
always provide substantiation, and the clanking of Hurston’s narrative and
rhetorical machinery calls attention to itself when Pheoby offers her sole
remark in the final half of the frame: “Lawd! . . . Ah done growed ten feet
higher from jus’ listenin’ tuh you, Janie. Ah ain’t satisfied wid mahself no
mo.’ Ah means tuh make Sam take me fishin’ wid him after this. Nobody
better not criticize yuh in mah hearin’.” But these minor imperfections do
not delimit the narrative’s grand effort to demystify and site the somewhat
ethereal concept of group- and self-consciousness, forwarded especially by
The Souls of Black Folk and Cane. Clearly, Hurston is after a treatment of Janie
and Pheoby that releases them from their immediate posture of storyteller
and listener, and that propels them to one in which their sisterhood suggests
a special kinship among womankind at large.
The one great flaw in Their Eyes involves not the framing dialogue, but
Janie’s tale itself. Through the frame Hurston creates the essential illusion
that Janie has achieved her voice (along with everything else), and that she
has even wrested from menfolk some control of the tribal posture of the
storyteller. But the tale undercuts much of this, not because of its content—
indeed, episodes such as the one in which Janie verbally abuses Jody in public
abets Hurston’s strategy—but because of its narration. Hurston’s curious
insistence on having Janie’s tale—her personal history in and as a literary
form—told by an omniscient third person, rather than by a first-person
narrator, implies that Janie has not really won her voice and self after all—
that her author (who is, quite likely, the omniscient narrating voice) cannot
see her way clear to giving Janie her voice outright. Here, I think, Hurston is
Robert B. Stepto
genuinely caught in the dilemma of how she might both govern and exploit
the autobiographical impulses that partially direct her creation of Janie. On
one hand, third-person narration of Janie’s tale helps to build a space (or at
least the illusion of a space) between author and character, for the author and
her audience alike; on the other, when told in this fashion control of the tale
remains, no matter how unintended, with the author alone.
Despite this problem, Their Eyes is a seminal narrative in Afro-American
letters. It forwards the historical consciousness of the tradition’s narrative
forms, and helps to define those kinds of narratives which will also advance
the literature in their turn. The narrative successes and failures of Their Eyes
effectively prefigure several types of narratives; but, given the problems I
have just discussed, one might say that the example of Their Eyes calls for
a narrative in which the primary figure (like Janie) achieves a space beyond
those defined by the tropes of ascent and immersion, but (unlike Janie) also
achieves authorial control over both the frame and tale of his or her personal
history. In short, Their Eyes, as a narrative strategy in a continuum of narrative
strategies, directs us most immediately to Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. Janie
is quite possibly more of a blood relative to Ellison’s narrator than either
the “male chauvinist” or “feminist” readers of the tradition would care to
contemplate.
M ary H elen Washington
“I Love the Way Janie Crawford Left Her Husbands”:
Zora Neale Hurston’s Emergent Female Hero
I
n the past few years of teaching Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were
Watching God,1 I have become increasingly disturbed by this text, particularly
by two problematic relationships I see in the novel: women’s relationship
to the community and women’s relationship to language. Their Eyes has
often been described as a novel about a woman in a folk community, but
it might be more accurately described as a novel about a woman outside of
the folk community. And while feminists have been eager to seize upon this
text as an expression of female power, I think it is a novel that represents
women’s exclusion from power, particularly from the power of oral speech.
Most contemporary critics contend that Janie is the articulate voice in the
tradition, that the novel celebrates a woman coming to self-discovery and
that this self-discovery leads her ultimately to a meaningful participation in
black folk traditions.2 Perhaps. But before bestowing the title of “articulate
hero” on Janie, we should look to Hurston’s first novel, Jonah’s Gourd Vine, to
its main character, Reverend John Pearson, and to the power that Hurston is
able to confer on a male folk hero.3
From the beginning of his life, John Pearson’s relationship to the
community is as assured as Janie’s is problematic. Living in a small Alabama
town and then in Eatonville, where Janie also migrates, he discovers his
preaching voice early and is encouraged to use it. His ability to control and
From Invented Lives: Narratives of Black Women 1860–1960, © 1987, Doubleday. Reprinted
in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God: A Casebook, pp. 27–40. © 2000 by
Oxford University Press.
10
Mary Helen Washington
manipulate the folk language is a source of power within the community.
Even his relationships with women help him to connect to his community,
leading him to literacy and to speech, while Janie’s relationship with men
deprive her of community and of her voice. John’s friendship with Hambo,
his closest friend, is much more dynamic than Janie and Pheoby’s because
Hurston makes the male friendship a deeper and more complex one, and
because the community acknowledges and comments on the men’s friendship.
In his introduction to Jonah’s Gourd Vine, Larry Neal describes John Pearson’s
exalted function in the folk community:
John Pearson, as Zora notes in her letter to [ James Weldon]
Johnson is a poet. That is to say, one who manipulates words
in order to convey to others the mystery of that Unknowable
force which we call God. And he is more; he is the intelligence
of the community, the bearer of its traditions and highest
possibilities.4
One could hardly make such an unequivocal claim for Janie’s heroic posture
in Their Eyes. Singled out for her extraordinary, angelicized beauty, Janie
cannot “get but so close to them [the people in Eatonville] in spirit.” Her
friendship with Pheoby, occurring apart from the community, encapsulates
Janie and Pheoby in a private dyad that insulates Janie from the jealousy
of other women. Like the other women in the town, she is barred from
participation in the culture’s oral tradition. When the voice of the black
oral tradition is summoned in Their Eyes, it is not used to represent the
collective black community but to invoke and valorize the voice of the
black male community.5
As critic Margaret Homans points out, our attentiveness to the
possibility that women are excluded categorically from the language of
the dominant discourse should help us to be aware of the inadequacy of
language, its inability to represent female experience, its tendency not only
to silence women but to make women complicitous in that silence.6 Part of
Janie’s dilemma in Their Eyes is that she is both subject and object—both
hero and heroine—and Hurston, apparently could not retrieve her from
that paradoxical position except in the frame story, where she is talking to
her friend and equal, Pheoby Watson. As object in that text, Janie is often
passive when she should be active, deprived of speech when she should be
in command of language, made powerless by her three husbands and by
Hurston’s narrative strategies. I would like to focus on several passages in
Jonah’s Gourd Vine and in Their Eyes to show how Janie is trapped in her status
as object, as passive female, and to contrast the freedom John Pearson has as
subject to aspire to a heroic posture in his community.
Zora Neale Hurston’s Emergent Female Hero
11
In both Their Eyes and Jonah’s Gourd Vine sexuality is established in the
early lives of Janie and John as a symbol of their growing maturity. The symbol
of Janie’s emerging sexuality is the blossoming pear tree being pollinated by
the dust-bearing bee. Early in the text, when Janie is about fifteen, Hurston
presents her stretched out on her back beneath a pear tree, observing the
activity of the bees:
She saw a dust-bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom; the
thousand sister-calyxes arch to meet the love embrace and the
ecstatic shiver of the tree from root to tiniest branch creaming in
every blossom and frothing with delight. So this was marriage!
She had been summoned to behold a revelation. Then Janie felt a
pain remorseless sweet that left her limp and languid.
She leaves this scene of the pear tree looking for “an answer seeking her” and
finds that answer in the person of Johnny Taylor who, in her rapturous state,
looks like a golden glorious being. Janie’s first sexual encounter is observed
by her grandmother and she is summarily punished.7 To introduce such a
sexual scene at the age when Janie is about to enter adulthood, to turn it
into romantic fantasy, and to make it end in punishment certainly limits the
possibility of any growth resulting from that experience.
John’s sexual encounters are never observed by any adult and thus he is
spared the humiliation and the punishment Janie endures for her adolescent
experimentation. In an early scene, when he is playing a game called “Hide
the Switch” with the girl in the quarters where he works, he is the active
pursuer, and, in contrast to Janie’s romantic fantasies, John’s experience of
sexuality is earthy and energetic and confirms his sense of power:
. . . when he was “it” he managed to catch every girl in the quarters.
The other boys were less successful but girls were screaming
under John’s lash behind the cowpen and under sweet-gum trees
around the spring until the moon rose. John never forgot that
night. Even the strong odor of their sweaty bodies was lovely
to remember. He went in to bed when all of the girls had been
called in by their folks. He could have romped till morning.
A recurring symbol Hurston uses to represent John’s sexuality is the
train, which he sees for the first time after he meets Lucy, the woman destined
to become his first wife. A country boy, John is at first terrified by the “panting
monster,” but he is also mesmerized by this threatening machine whose
sides “seemed to expand and contract like a fiery-lunged monster.” It looks
frightening, but it is also “uh pretty thing” and it has as many destinations as
12
Mary Helen Washington
John in his philandering will have. As a symbol of male sexuality, the train
suggests power, dynamism, and mobility.8
Janie’s image of herself as a blossom waiting to be pollinated by a bee
transforms her figuratively and literally into the space in which men’s action
may occur.9 She waits for an answer and the answer appears in the form of
two men, both of whom direct Janie’s life and the action of the plot. Janie at
least resists her first husband, Logan, but once Jody takes her to Eatonville,
he controls her life as well as the narrative. He buys the land, builds the town,
makes Janie tie up her hair, and prescribes her relationship with the rest of
the town. We know that Hurston means for Janie to free herself from male
domination, but Hurston’s language, as much as Jody’s behavior, signifies
Janie’s status as an object. Janie’s arrival in Eatonville is described through
the eyes and speech of the men on the front porch. Jody joins the men, but
Janie is seen “through the bedroom window getting settled.” Not only are
Janie and the other women barred from participation in the ceremonies and
rituals of the community, but they become the objects of the sessions on the
porch, included in the men’s tale-telling as the butt of their jokes, or their
flattery, or their scorn. The experience of having one’s body become an object
to be looked at is considered so demeaning that when it happens to a man,
it figuratively transforms him into a woman. When Janie launches her most
devastating attack on Jody in front of all the men in the store, she tells him
not to talk about her looking old because “When you pull down yo’ britches
you look lak de change uh life.” Since the “change of life” ordinarily refers to
a woman’s menopause, Janie is signifying that Jody, like a woman, is subject
to the humiliation of exposure. Now that he is the object of the gaze, Jody
realizes that other men will “look” on him with pity: “Janie had robbed him
of his illusion of irresistible maleness that all men cherish.”
Eventually Janie does speak, and, interestingly, her first speech, on behalf
of women, is a commentary on the limitations of a male-dominated society.
Sometimes God gits familiar wid us womenfolks too and talks
His inside business. He told me how surprised He was ’bout y’all
turning out so smart after Him makin’ yuh different; and how
surprised y’all is goin’ tuh be if you ever find out you don’t know
half as much ’bout us as you think you do.
Speech does not lead Janie to power, however, but to self-division
and to further acquiescence in her status as object. As her marriage to Jody
deteriorates she begins to observe herself: “one day she sat and watched the
shadows 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 her clothes.”
Zora Neale Hurston’s Emergent Female Hero
13
In contrast to Janie’s psychic split in which her imagination asserts
itself while her body makes a show of obedience, John Pearson, trapped in
a similarly constricting marriage with his second wife, Hattie, experiences
not self-division but a kind of self-unification in which the past memories
he has repressed seep into his consciousness and drive him to confront his
life with Hattie: “Then too his daily self seemed to be wearing thin, and the
past seeped thru and mastered him for increasingly longer periods. He whose
present had always been so bubbling that it crowded out past and future now
found himself with a memory.” In this new state John begins to remember
and visit old friends. His memories prompt him to confront Hattie and even
to deny that he ever married her. Of course his memory is selective and selfserving, and quite devastating to Hattie, but it does drive him to action.
Even after Janie acquires the power of speech that allows her to stand
up to Jody, Hurston continues to objectify her so that she does not take
action. Immediately after Jody’s death she goes to the looking glass where,
she tells us, she has told her girl self to wait for her, and there she discovers
that a handsome woman has taken her place. She tears off the kerchief Jody
has forced her to wear and lets down her plentiful hair: “The weight, the
length, the glory was there. She took careful stock of herself, then combed
her hair and tied it back up again.” In her first moment of independence Janie
is not seen as autonomous subject but again as visual object, “seeing herself
seeing herself,” draping before herself that “hidden mystery” that attracts
men and makes her superior to women. Note that when she turns to the
mirror, it is not to experience her own sensual pleasure in her hair. She does
not tell us how her hair felt to her—did it tingle at the roots? Did she shiver
with delight?—no, she takes stock of herself, makes an assessment of herself.
What’s in the mirror that she cannot experience without it: that imaginary
other whom the mirror represents, looking on in judgment, recording, not
her own sensations but the way others see her.
Barbara Johnson’s reading of Their Eyes suggests that once Janie is able
to identify the split between her inside and outside selves, incorporating and
articulating her own sense of self-division, she develops an increasing ability
to speak.10 I have come to different conclusions: that Hurston continues to
subvert Janie’s voice, that in crucial places where we need to hear her speak
she is curiously silent, that even when Hurston sets out to explore Janie’s
internal consciousness, her internal speech, what we actually hear are the
voices of men. Once Tea Cake enters the narrative his name and his voice
are heard nearly twice as often as Janie’s. He walks into Janie’s life with
a guitar and a grin and tells her, “Honey since you loose me and gimme
privilege tuh tell yuh all about mahself. Ah’ll tell yuh.” And from then on it
is Tea Cake’s tale, the only reason for Janie’s account of her life to Pheoby
being to vindicate Tea Cake’s name. Insisting on Tea Cake’s innocence
14
Mary Helen Washington
as well as his central place in her story, Janie tells Pheoby, “Teacake ain’t
wasted no money of mine, and he ain’t left me for no young gal, neither. He
give me every consolation in the world. He’d tell ’em so too, if he was here.
If he wasn’t gone.”
As many feminist critics have pointed out, women do get silenced, even
in texts by women, and there are critical places in Their Eyes where Janie’s
voice needs to be heard and is not, places where we would expect her as the
subject of the story to speak. Perhaps the most stunning silence in the text
occurs after Tea Cake beats Janie. The beating is seen entirely through the
eyes of the male community, while Janie’s reaction is never given. Tea Cake
becomes the envy of the other men for having a woman whose flesh is so
tender that one can see every place she’s been hit. Sop-de-Bottom declares in
awe, “wouldn’t Ah love tuh whip uh tender woman lak Janie!” Janie is silent,
so thoroughly repressed in this section that all that remains of her is what Tea
Cake and the other men desire.
Passages that are supposed to represent Janie’s interior consciousness
begin by marking some internal change in Janie, then gradually or abruptly
shift so that a male character takes Janie’s place as the subject of the discourse;
at the conclusion of these passages, ostensibly devoted to the revelation of
Janie’s interior life, the male voice predominates. Janie’s life just before and
after Jody’s death is a fertile period for such self-reflection, but Hurston
does not focus the attention of the text on Janie even in these significant
turning points in Janie’s life. In the long paragraph that tells us how she has
changed in the six months after Jody’s death, we are told that Janie talked and
laughed in the store at times and was happy except for the store. To solve the
problem of the store she hires Hezikiah “who was the best imitation of Joe
that his seventeen years could make.” At this point, the paragraph shifts its
focus from Janie and her growing sense of independence to Hezikiah and his
imitation of Jody, describing Hezikiah in a way that evokes Jody’s presence
and obliterates Janie. We are told at the end of the paragraph, in tongue-incheek humor, that because “managing stores and women storeowners was
trying on a man’s nerves,” Hezikiah “needed to take a drink of liquor now and
then to keep up.” Thus Janie is not only removed as the subject of this passage
but is subsumed under the male-defined category of worrisome women. Even
the much-celebrated description of Janie’s discovery of her split selves: “She
had an inside and an outside now and suddenly she knew how not to mix
them” represents her internal life as divided between two men: her outside
self exists for Joe and her inside self she is “saving up” for “some man she had
never seen.”11
Critic Robert Stepto was the first to raise the question about Janie’s
lack of voice in Their Eyes. In his critique of Afro-American narrative he
claims that Hurston creates only the illusion that Janie has achieved her voice,
Zora Neale Hurston’s Emergent Female Hero
15
that Hurston’s strategy of having much of Janie’s tale told by an omniscient
third person rather than by a first person narrator undercuts the development
of Janie’s “voice.”12 While I was initially resistant to this criticism of Their
Eyes, my reading of Jonah’s Gourd Vine suggests that Hurston was indeed
ambivalent about giving a powerful voice to a woman like Janie who is
already in rebellion against male authority and against the roles prescribed
for women in a male-dominated society. As Stepto notes, Janie’s lack of voice
is particularly disturbing in the courtroom scene, which comes at the end of
her tale and, presumably, at a point where she has developed her capacity to
speak. Hurston tells us that down in the Everglades “She got so she could
tell big stories herself,” but in the courtroom scene the story of Janie and Tea
Cake is told entirely in third person: “She had to go way back to let them
know how she and Tea Cake had been with one another.” We do not hear
Janie speaking in her own voice until we return to the frame where she is
speaking to her friend, Pheoby.13
There is a similar courtroom scene in Jonah’s Gourd Vine, and there is also
a silence, not an enforced silence but the silence of a man who deliberately
chooses not to speak. John is hauled into court by his second wife, Hattie,
on the grounds of adultery. Like the court system in Their Eyes, this too is
one where “de laws and de cote houses and de jail houses all b’longed tuh
white folks” and, as in Janie’s situation, the black community is united against
John. His former friends take the stand against him, testifying on Hattie’s
behalf in order to spite John, but John refuses to call any witnesses for his
defense. After he has lost the trial, his friend Hambo angrily asks him why
he didn’t allow him to testify. John’s eloquent answer explains his silence in
the courtroom, but more than that, it shows that he has such power over his
own voice that he can choose when and where to use it, in this case to defy a
hypocritical, racist system and to protect the black community:
Ah didn’t want de white folks tuh hear ’bout nothin’ lak dat. Dey
knows too much ’bout us as it is, but dey some things dey ain’t
tuh know. Dey’s some strings on our harp fuh us tuh play on an
sing all tuh ourselves. Dey thinks wese all ignorant as it is, and
dey thinks wese all alike, and dat dey knows us inside and out, but
you know better. Dey wouldn’t make no great ’miration if you had
uh tole ’em Hattie had all dem mens. Dey wouldn’t zarn ’tween
uh woman lak Hattie and one lak Lucy, uh yo’ wife befo’ she died.
Dey thinks all colored folks is de same dat way.
John’s deliberate silence is motivated by his political consciousness. In
spite of the community’s rejection of him, he is still their defender, especially
in the face of a common adversary. Hurston does not allow Janie the insight
16
Mary Helen Washington
John has, nor the voice, nor the loyalty to her people. To Mrs. Turner’s
racial insults, Janie is nearly silent, offering only a cold shoulder to show her
resistance to the woman’s bigotry. In the courtroom scene Janie is divorced
from the other blacks and surrounded by a “protecting wall of white women.”
She is vindicated, and the black community humbled. Janie is the outsider;
John is the culture hero, their “inspired artist,” the traditional male hero in
possession of traditional male power.
But John’s power in the community and his gift for words do not always
serve him well. As Robert Hemenway asserts in his critical biography of Hurston,
John is “a captive of the community’s need for a public giver of words.”
His language does not serve to articulate his personal problems
because it is directed away from the self toward the communal
celebration. John, the man of words, becomes the victim of his
bardic function. He is the epic poet of the community who
sacrifices himself for the group vision.14
For John, words mean power and status rather than the expression of feeling.
When he first discovers the power of his voice, he thinks immediately of how
good he sounds and how his voice can be exploited for his benefits:
Dat sho sound good . . . If mah voice sound dat good de first time
Ah ever prayed in, de church house, it sho won’t be de las’.
John never feels the call to preach until the day on Joe Clarke’s porch when
the men tease John about being a “wife-made man.” One of his buddies tells
him that with a wife like Lucy any man could get ahead in life: “Anybody
could put hisself on de ladder wid her in de house.” The following Sunday
in his continuing quest for manhood and power, John turns to preaching.
The dramatic quality of his preaching and his showmanship easily make him
the most famous preacher and the most powerful man in the area. John’s
inability to achieve maturity and his sudden death at the moment of his
greatest insight suggest a great deal about Hurston’s discomfort with the
traditional male hero, with the values of the community he represents, with
the culture’s privileging of orality over inward development. Janie Starks is
almost the complete antithesis of John Pearson: “She assumes heroic stature
not by externals, but by her own struggle for self-definition, for autonomy,
for liberation from the illusions that others have tried to make her live by or
that she has submitted to herself.”15
While Janie’s culture honors the oral art, “this picture making with
words,” Janie’s final speech in Their Eyes actually casts doubt on the relevance
of oral speech:
Zora Neale Hurston’s Emergent Female Hero
17
Talkin’ don’t amunt tuh uh hill uh beans when you can’t do
nothing else . . . Pheoby you got tuh go there tuh know there.
Yo papa and yo’ mamma and nobody else can’t tell yuh and show
yuh. Two things everybody’s got tuh do fuh theyselves. They
got tuh go tuh God, and they got tuh find out about livin’ fuh
theyselves.
Janie’s final comment that experience is more important than words is an
implicit criticism of the culture that celebrates orality to the exclusion of
inner growth. The language of men in Their Eyes and in Jonah’s Gourd Vine
is almost always divorced from any kind of interiority. The men are rarely
shown in the process of growth. Their talking is a game. Janie’s life is about
the experience of relationships. Logan, Jody, and Tea Cake and John Pearson
are essentially static characters, whereas Pheoby and Janie allow experience
to change them. John, who seems almost constitutionally unfitted for selfexamination, is killed at the end of the novel by a train, that very symbol of
male power he has been seduced by all of his life.16
Vladimir Propp, in his study of folklore and narrative, cautions us not
to think that plots directly reflect a given social order but “rather emerge out
of the conflict, the contradictions of different social orders as they succeed
or replace one another.” What is manifested in the tensions of plots is “the
difficult coexistence of different orders of historical reality in the long period
of transition from one to the other . . .”17
Hurston’s plots may very well reflect such a tension in the social order,
a period of transition in which the conflictual coexistence of a predominantly
male and a more egalitarian culture is inscribed in these two forms of culture
heroes. Both novels end in an ambiguous stance: John dies alone, so dominated
by the ideals of his community that he is completely unable to understand
his spiritual dilemma. And Janie, having returned to the community she
once rejected, is left in a position of interiority so total it seems to represent
another structure of confinement. Alone in her bedroom she watches pictures
of “love and light against the walls,” almost as though she is a spectator at
a film. She pulls in the horizon and drapes it over her shoulder and calls in
her soul to come and see. The language of this section gives us the illusion
of growth and development, but the language is deceptive. The horizon
represents the outside world—the world of adventure where Janie journeyed
in search of people and a value system that would allow her real self to shine.
If the horizon is the world of possibility, of journeys, of meeting new people
and eschewing materialistic values, then Janie seems to be canceling out any
further exploration of that world. In Eatonville she is a landlady with a fat
bank account and a scorn for the people that ensures her alienation. Like
the heroine of romantic fiction, left without a man she exists in a position of
18
Mary Helen Washington
stasis with no suggestion of how she will employ her considerable energies in
her now—perhaps temporarily—manless life.
Hurston was obviously comfortable with the role of the traditional
male hero in Jonah’s Gourd Vine, but Their Eyes presented Hurston with a
problem she could not solve—the questing hero as woman. That Hurston
intended Janie to be such a hero—at least on some level—is undeniable.
She puts Janie on the track of autonomy, self-realization, and independence.
She allows her to put on the outward trappings of male power. Janie
dresses in overalls, goes on the muck, learns to shoot—even better than Tea
Cake—and her rebellion changes her and potentially her friend Pheoby.
If the rightful end of the romantic heroine is marriage, then Hurston
has certainly resisted the script of romance by having Janie kill Tea Cake
(though he exists in death in a far more mythical and exalted way than in
life). As Rachel Blau Du Plessis argues, when the narrative resolves itself
in the repression of romance and the reassertion of quest, the result is a
narrative that is critical of those patriarchal rules that govern women and
deny them a role outside of the boundaries of patriarchy.18
While such a critique of patriarchal norms is obvious in Their Eyes,
we still see Hurston’s ambivalence about Janie’s role as “hero” as opposed to
“heroine.”19 Like all romantic heroines, Janie follows the dreams of men. She
takes off after Jody because “he spoke for far horizon,” and she takes off after
Tea Cake’s dream of going “on de muck.” By the rules of romantic fiction, the
heroine is extremely feminine in looks. Janie’s long, heavy, Caucasian-like hair
is mentioned so many times in Their Eyes that, as one of my students said, it
becomes another character in the novel. A “hidden mystery,” Janie’s hair is
one of the most powerful forces in her life, mesmerizing men and alienating
the women. As a trope straight out of the turn-of-the-century “mulatto”
novel (Clotel, Iola Leroy, The House Behind the Cedars), the hair connects Janie
inexorably to the conventional romantic heroine. Employing other standard
devices of romantic fiction, Hurston creates the excitement and tension of
romantic seduction. Tea Cake—a tall, dark, mysterious stranger—strides into
the novel and wrenches Janie away from her prim and proper life. The age
and class differences between Janie and Tea Cake, the secrecy of their affair,
the town’s disapproval, the sense of risk and helplessness as Janie discovers
passionate love and the fear, desire, even the potential violence of becoming the
possessed are all standard features of romance fiction. Janie is not the subject of
these romantic episodes; she is the object of Tea Cake’s quest, subsumed under
his desires, and, at times, so subordinate to Tea Cake that even her interior
consciousness reveals more about him than it does about her.
In spite of his infidelities, his arrogance, and his incapacity for selfreflection, John Pearson is unambiguously the heroic center of Jonah’s Gourd
Vine. He inhabits the entire text, his voice is heard on nearly every page, he
Zora Neale Hurston’s Emergent Female Hero
19
follows his own dreams, he is selected by the community to be its leader,
and he is recognized by the community for his powers and chastised for
his shortcomings. The preacher’s sermon as he eulogized John at his funeral
is not so much a tribute to the man as it is a recognition that the narrative
exists to assert the power of the male story and its claim to our attention.
Janie has, of course, reformed her community simply by her resistance to
its values. The very fact of her status as outsider makes her seem heroic by
contemporary standards. Unable to achieve the easy integration into the
society that John Pearson assumes, she stands on the outside and calls into
question her culture’s dependence on externals, its lack of self-reflection, and
its treatment of women. Her rebellion changes her and her friend Pheoby,
and, in the words of Lee Edwards, her life becomes “a compelling model of
possibility for anyone who hears her tale.”20
Not e s
1. Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 1978).
2. Robert Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography (Urbana: University
of Illinois Press, 1977), 239. Hemenway says that Janie’s “blossoming” refers personally to
“her discovery of self and ultimately to her meaningful participation in black tradition.” But
at the end of Their Eyes, Janie does not return to an accepting community. She returns to
Eatonville as an outsider, and even in the Everglades she does not have an insider’s role in
the community as Tea Cake does.
3. Zora Neale Hurston, Jonah’s Gourd Vine (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott,1971).
4. Ibid., 7.
5. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “Zora Neale Hurston and the Speakerly Text,” in The
Signifying Monkey (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). Gates argues that Their Eyes
resolves the implicit tension between standard English and black dialect, that Hurston’s
rhetorical strategies create a kind of new language in which Janie’s thoughts are cast—not
in black dialect per se but a colloquial form of standard English that is informed by the
black idiom. By the end of the novel this language (or free indirect discourse) makes Janie’s
voice almost inseparable from the narrator’s—a synthesis that becomes a trope for the selfknowledge Janie has achieved. While Gates sees the language of Their Eyes representing
the collective black community’s speech and thoughts in this “dialect-informed” colloquial
idiom that Hurston has invented, I read the text in a much more literal way and continue to
maintain that however inventive this new language might be it is still often used to invoke
the thoughts, ideas, and presence of men.
6. Margaret Homans, “Her Very Own Howl,” SIGNS 9 (Winter 1983): 186–205.
7. One of the ways women’s sexuality is made to seem less dignified than men’s is to have
a woman’s sexual experience seen or described by an unsympathetic observer. A good example
of the double standard in reporting sexual behavior occurs in Ann Petry’s “In Darkness and
Confusion,” in Black Voices: An Anthology of Afro-American Literature, ed. Abraham Chapman
(New York: New American Library 1968), 161–191. The young Annie Mae is observed by
her uncle-in-law who reports that her sexual behavior is indecent. In contrast, his son’s sexual
adventures are alluded to respectfully as activities a father may not pry into.
20
Mary Helen Washington
8. The image of the train as fearsome and threatening occurs in Hurston’s
autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road: An Autobiography, ed. Robert Hemenway (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1984). When she is a young girl on her way to Jacksonville,
Zora, like John Pearson, is at first terrified of its “big, mean-looking eye” and has to be
dragged on board “kicking and screaming to the huge amusement of everybody but me.”
Later when she is inside the coach and sees the “glamor of the plush and metal,” she calms
down and begins to enjoy the ride, which, she says “didn’t hurt a bit.” In both Dust Tracks
and Jonah’s Gourd Vine the imagery of the train is clearly sexual, but, while Zora sees the
train as something external to herself, something that is powerful but will not hurt her, John
imagines the train as an extension of his own power.
9. Teresa De Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1984), 143. De Lauretis notes that the movement of narrative
discourse specifies and produces the masculine position as that of mythical subject and
the feminine position as mythical obstacle, or, simply “the space in which that movement
occurs.”
10. I am indebted to Barbara Johnson for this insight which she suggested when I
presented an early version of this paper to her class of Afro-American women writers at
Harvard in the fall of 1985 I was struck by her comment that Jody’s vulnerability makes
him like a woman and therefore subject to this kind of attack.
11. Barbara Johnson, “Metaphor, Metonymy, and Voice in Their Eyes Were Watching
God,” in Black Literature and Literary Theory, ed. Henry-Louis Gates, Jr. (New York:
Methuen, 1984), 204–219. Johnson’s essay probes very carefully the relation between Janie’s
ability to speak and her ability to recognize her own self-division. Once Janie is able “to
assume and articulate the incompatible forces involved in her own division,” she begins to
achieve an authentic voice. Arguing for a more literal reading of Their Eyes, I maintain that
we hear precious little of Janie’s voice even after she makes this pronouncement of knowing
that she has “an inside and an outside self.” A great deal of the “voice” of the text is devoted
to the men in the story even after Janie’s discovery of self-division.
12. Robert Stepto, From Behind the Veil: A Study of Afro-American Narrative (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1979), 164–167.
When Robert Stepto raised this issue at the 1979 Modern Language Association
Meeting, he set off an intense debate. While I do not totally agree with his reading of Their
Eyes and I think he short-changes Hurston by allotting so little space to her in From Behind
the Veil, I do think he is right about Janie’s lack of voice in the courtroom scene.
13. More accurately the style of this section should be called free indirect discourse
because both Janie’s voice and the narrator’s voice are evoked here. In his Introduction to
Poetics: Theory and History of Literature, vol. 1 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1982), Tzvetan Todorov explains Gerard Genette’s definition of free indirect discourse as
a grammatical form that adopts the indirect style but retains the “semantic nuances of the
‘original’ discourse.”
14. Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston, 198.
15. Mary Helen Washington, “Zora Neale Hurston: A Woman Half in Shadow,”
in I Love Myself When I Am Laughing . . . And Then Again When I Am Looking Mean and
Impressive: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader, ed. Alice Walker (Old Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist
Press, 1979), 16. In the original version of this essay, I showed how Joseph Campbell’s
model of the hero, though it had been applied to Ralph Ellison’s invisible man, could more
appropriately be applied to Janie, who defies her status as the mule of the world, and, unlike
Ellison’s antihero, does not end up in an underground hideout.
Zora Neale Hurston’s Emergent Female Hero
21
Following the pattern of the classic mythological hero, defined by Campbell in The
Hero with a Thousand Faces (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968), Janie leaves
her everyday world to proceed to the threshold of adventure (leaves Nanny and Logan to
run off with Jody to Eatonville); she is confronted by a power that threatens her spiritual
life ( Jody Starks and his efforts to make her submissive to him); she goes beyond that
threat to a world of unfamiliar forces some of which threaten her and some of which give
aid (Tea Cake, his wild adventures, and his ability to see her as an equal); she descends into
an underworld where she must undergo the supreme ordeal (the journey to the Everglades;
the killing of Tea Cake and the trial); and the final work is that of the return when the
hero reemerges from the kingdom of dread and brings a gift that restores the world ( Janie
returns to Eatonville and tells her story to her friend Pheoby who recognizes immediately
her communion with Janie’s experience: “Ah done growed ten feet higher from jus’ listenin’
tuh you, Janie”).
16. Anne Jones, “Pheoby’s Hungry Listening: Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were
Watching God” (paper presented at the National Women’s Studies Association, Humboldt
State University, Arcata, California, June 1982).
17. De Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t, 113. In the chapter “Desire in Narrative,” De Lauretis
refers to Vladimir Propp’s essay “Oedipus in the Light of Folklore,” which studies plot types
and their diachronic or historical transformations.
18. Rachel Blau Du Plessis, Writing Beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of
Twentieth-Century Women Writers (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985). Du
Plessis asserts that “it is the project of twentieth-century women writers to solve the
contradiction between love and quest and to replace the alternate endings in marriage and
death that are their cultural legacy from nineteenth-century life and letters by offering a
different set of choices.”
19. Du Plessis distinguishes between hero and heroine in this way: “the female hero is
a central character whose activities, growth, and insight are given much narrative attention
and authorial interest.” By heroine she means “the object of male attention or rescue”
(Writing Beyond the Ending, n. 22), 200, Hurston oscillates between these two positions,
making Janie at one time a conventional romantic heroine, at other times a woman whose
quest for independence drives the narrative.
20. Lee R. Edwards, Psyche as Hero: Female Heroism and Fictional Form (Middletown,
CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1984), 212.
H azel V . C arby
The Politics of Fiction,
Anthropology, and the Folk:
Zora Neale Hurston
T
he work of Zora Neale Hurston, in particular the novel Their Eyes Were
Watching God, has been the object of more than a decade of critical attention.
But, in addition to the critical consideration of Hurston’s writings, her work
has received the level of institutional support necessary for Hurston to enter
the American literary mainstream. Two examples of this support would be the
special Hurston seminar held at the Modern Language Association annual
conference in 1975 and the award of two grants from the National Endowment
for the Humanities to Robert Hemenway to write Hurston’s biography.
Hurston’s work has also received institutional support from publishers: The
rights to reprint Their Eyes Were Watching God in a paperback edition were
leased to the University of Illinois Press by Harper and Row, but the 1978
Illinois edition has been so profitable that Harper and Row refused to renew
leasing contracts and is reprinting Their Eyes, Jonah’s Gourd Vine, Mules and
Men, and Tell My Horse themselves with Henry Louis Gates as series editor.
During the years between Hemenway’s biography and the new Harper and
Row/Gates monopoly of Hurston, there have been a variety of anthologies and
collections of Hurston’s essays and short stories, and in 1984, a second edition
of Hurston’s autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, was published.1
As academics we are well aware that we work within institutions that
police the boundaries of cultural acceptability and define what is and what
From New Essays on Their Eyes Were Watching God, pp. 71–93. © 1990 by Cambridge University
Press.
23
24
Hazel V. Carby
is not “literature”: Our work as teachers and as critics creates, maintains,
and sometimes challenges boundaries of acceptability. Graduate students tell
me that they teach Their Eyes Were Watching God at least once a semester; it
is a text that is common to a wide variety of courses in African-American
Studies, American Studies, English, or Women’s Studies. It is frequently
the case that undergraduates in the Humanities may be taught the novel
as many as four times, or at least once a year during their undergraduate
careers. Traditions, of course, are temporal, and are constantly being fought
over and renegotiated. Clearly, a womanist- and feminist-inspired desire to
recover the neglected cultural presence of Zora Neale Hurston initiated an
interest in her work, but it is also clear that this original motivation has
become transformed. Hurston is not only a secured presence in the academy;
she is a veritable industry, and an industry that is very profitable. The new
Harper and Row edition of Their Eyes sold its total print run of 75,000 in less
than a month.2 The New York Times of February 4, 1990, published an article
on Hurston called “Renaissance for a Pioneer of Black Pride” in which it
was announced that a play based on Hurston’s life and entitled “Zora Neale
Hurston: A Theatrical Biography” was opening in New York, and that another
play, “Mule Bone,” a collaboration with Langston Hughes, is scheduled to
open this summer.3 On February 14, 1990, the Public Broadcasting System,
in their prestigious American Playhouse series, broadcast “Zora is My Name”
starring Ruby Dee in a dramatization of selections from Mules and Men
and Dust Tracks. Although it could be said that Hurston has “arrived” as a
contemporary, national, cultural presence, I await one further development:
the announcement of a Hollywood movie.
I am as interested in the contemporary cultural process of the inclusion
of Hurston into the academy as I am interested in her writing. I wonder
about the relation between the cultural meanings of her work in the 1920s
and 1930s and the contemporary fascination with Hurston. How is she
being reread, now, to produce cultural meanings that this society wants or
needs to hear? Is there, indeed, an affinity between the two discrete histories
of her work? Certainly, I can see parallels between the situation of black
intellectuals in the 1920s and 1930s, described now as a “Renaissance,”
and the concerns of black humanists in the academy in the 1980s. Literary
histories could doubtless be written about a “renaissance” of black intellectual
productivity within the walls of the academy in the post–civil rights era of
the twentieth century. Their Eyes Were Watching God now, of course, has a
cultural existence outside of the realm of African-American Studies and
independent of scholars of the field, but how tenuous is this presence? Does
the current fascination of the culture industry for the cultural production of
black women parallel the white fascination for African-American peoples as
representatives of the exotic and primitive in the 1920s?4 And will the current
The Politics of Fiction, Anthropology, and the Folk: Zora Neale Hurston
25
thirst for the cultural production of black women evaporate as easily? Will the
economic crisis of the late 1980s and early 1990s be used, in a future literary
history, to mark the demise of the black intellectual presence in the academy
in the same way as the 1929 stock market crash has been used by literary
historians to mark the death of the Harlem Renaissance? If there is a fragile
presence of black peoples in universities, is our cultural presence secure or
only temporarily profitable? With or without reference to our contemporary
economic conditions, it is startlingly obvious that current college enrollment
figures reveal a sharp fall in the numbers of black graduate students, figures
which would seem to confirm the tenuous nature of our critical presence. But
what I find most intriguing is the relation between a crisis of representation
that shaped cultural responses to black urban migration after World War I
and the contemporary crisis of representation in African-American humanist
intellectual work that determines our cultural and critical responses, or the
lack of response, to the contemporary crisis of black urban America.5
However, let me make a theoretical intervention here. Edward Said
has asserted that it is “now almost impossible . . . to remember a time when
people were not talking about a crisis in representation,” and he points to the
enormous difficulties of uncertainty and undecidability that are a consequence
of transformations “in our notions of formerly stable things such as authors,
texts and objects.”6 In an attempt to be as specific as I can about the particular
crisis of representation in black cultural production out of which, I am going
to argue, Hurston’s work emerges, I will try to define some terms.
The subaltern group that is the subject of Hurston’s anthropological and
fictional work is represented as the rural black folk. However, the process of
defining and representing a subaltern group is always a contentious issue, and
is at the heart of the crisis of representation in black intellectual thought in both
historical moments.7 The dominant way of reading the cultural production of
what is called the Harlem Renaissance is that black intellectuals assertively
established a folk heritage as the source of, and inspiration for, authentic
African-American art forms. In African-American studies the Harlem
Renaissance has become a convention particularly for literary critics, but it
is, as is the case with all literary histories, an imagined or created historical
perspective that privileges some cultural developments while rendering other
cultural and political histories invisible. The dominance of this particular
literary history in our work, as opposed to organizing a history around a
Chicago Renaissance, for example, has uncritically reproduced at the center
of its discourse the issue of an authentic folk heritage. The desire of the
Harlem intellectuals to establish and represent African-American cultural
authenticity to a predominantly white audience was a mark of a change from,
and confrontation with, what were seen by them to be externally imposed
cultural representations of black people produced within, and supported
26
Hazel V. Carby
by, a racialized social order. However, what was defined as authentic was a
debate that was not easily resolved and involved confrontation among black
intellectuals themselves. Alain Locke, for example, who attempted to signal
a change or a break in conventions of representation by calling his collection
of the work of some Harlem intellectuals The New Negro, assumed that
the work of African-American intellectuals would be to raise the culture
of the folk to the level of art.8 Locke’s position has been interpreted by
contemporary critics as being very different from, if not antagonistic to, the
dominant interpretation of the work of Hurston, who is thought to reconcile
the division between “high and low culture by becoming Eatonville’s esthetic
representative to the Harlem Renaissance.”9
In 1934, Hurston published an essay called “Spirituals and Neospirituals” in which she argues that there had “never been a presentation of
genuine Negro spirituals to any audience anywhere.” What was “being sung
by the concert artists and glee clubs [were] the works of Negro composers or
adaptors based on the spirituals.”
Glee clubs and concert singers put on their tuxedos, bow prettily
to the audience, get the pitch and burst into magnificent song—
but not Negro song. . . . let no one imagine that they are the songs
of the people, as sung by them.10
Hurston was concerned to establish authenticity in the representation of
popular forms of folk culture and to expose the disregard for the aesthetics
of that culture through inappropriate forms of representation. She had
no problem in using the term “the people” to register that she knew just
who they were. But critics are incorrect to think that Hurston reconciled
“high” and “low” forms of cultural production. Hurston’s criticisms were not
reserved for the elitist manner in which she thought the authentic culture of
the people was reproduced. The people she wanted to represent she defined
as a rural folk, and she measured them and their cultural forms against an
urban, mass culture. She recognized that the people whose culture she rewrote
were not the majority of the population, and that the cultural forms she was
most interested in reproducing were not being maintained. She complained
bitterly about how “the bulk of the population now spends its leisure in the
motion picture theatres or with the phonograph and its blues.” To Hurston,
“race records” were nothing more than a commercialization of traditional
forms of music, and she wanted nothing more to do with them.11
Understanding these two aspects of Hurston’s theory of folk culture is
important. When Hurston complained about the ways in which intellectuals
transformed folk culture by reproducing and reinterpreting it as high culture,
she identified a class contradiction. Most African-American intellectuals
The Politics of Fiction, Anthropology, and the Folk: Zora Neale Hurston
27
were generations removed from the “folk” they tried to represent. Their
dilemma was little different from debates over proletarian fiction in the
Soviet Union, in Europe, in the Caribbean, and in North America generally:
debates that raged over the question of how and by whom should “the
people,” the masses of ordinary people, be portrayed.12 Hurston identified
herself as both an intellectual and as a representative figure from the folk
culture she reproduced and made authentic in her work. However, asserting
that she was both did not resolve the contradictions embedded in the social
meanings of each category. When Hurston complained about “race records”
and the commercialization of the blues, she failed to apply her own analysis
of processes of cultural transformation. On the one hand, she could argue that
forms of folk culture were constantly reworked and remade when she stated
that “the folk tales” like “the spirituals are being made and forgotten every
day.”13 But, on the other hand, Hurston did not take seriously the possibility
that African-American culture was being transformed as African-American
peoples migrated from rural to urban areas.
The creation of a discourse of “the folk” as a rural people in Hurston’s
work in the 1920s and 1930s displaces the migration of black people to cities.
Her representation of African-American culture as primarily rural and oral
is Hurston’s particular response to the dramatic transformations within black
culture. It is these two processes that I am going to refer to as Hurston’s
discursive displacement of contemporary social crises in her writing. Hurston
could not entirely escape the intellectual practice that she so despised, a
practice that reinterpreted and redefined a folk consciousness in its own elitist
terms. Hurston may not have dressed the spirituals in tuxedos but her attitude
toward folk culture was not unmediated; she did have a clear framework
of interpretation, a construct that enabled her particular representation of a
black, rural consciousness.
Gayatri Spivak has pointed to an important dilemma in the issue of
representing the subaltern. She sees “the radical intellectual in the West” as
being caught either “in a deliberate choice of subalternity, granting to the
oppressed . . . that very expressive subjectivity which s/he criticizes (in a
post-structuralist theoretical world)” or, instead she faces the possibility of
a total unrepresentability.14 I don’t know if the choice is always as bleak as
Spivak claims, or is quite so simple and polarized. Langston Hughes, for
example, in his use of the blues to structure poetry, represented a communal
sensibility embedded in cultural forms and reproduced social meaning
rather than individual subjectivity. In his blues poetry, the reader has access
to a social consciousness through the reconstruction and representation of
nonliterary, contemporary cultural forms that embodied the conditions of
social transformation. Hurston, by contrast, assumed that she could obtain
access to, and authenticate, an individualized social consciousness through
28
Hazel V. Carby
a utopian reconstruction of the historical moment of her childhood in an
attempt to stabilize and displace the social contradictions and disruption of
her contemporary moment.
The issue of representing the subaltern, then, not only involves the
relation of the intellectual to the represented, but also the relation of the
intellectual to history. In Hurston’s work, the rural black folk become an
aesthetic principle, a means by which to embody a rich oral culture. Hurston’s
representation of the folk is not only a discursive displacement of the historical
and cultural transformation of migration, but also is a creation of a folk who
are outside of history. Hurston aggressively asserted that she was not of the
“sobbing school of Negrohood”—in particular, to distinguish her work from
that of Richard Wright—but she also places her version of authentic black
cultural forms outside of the culture and history of contestation that informs
his work. What the New York Times has recently called Hurston’s “strong
African-American sensibility” and is generally agreed to be her positive,
holistic celebration of black life, also needs to be seen as a representation of
“Negroness” as an unchanging, essential entity, an essence so distilled that it
is an aesthetic position of blackness.
Hurston was a central figure in the cultural struggle among black
intellectuals to define exactly who the people were that were going to become
the representatives of the folk. Langston Hughes shaped his discursive category
of the folk in direct response to the social conditions of transformation,
including the newly forming urban working class and “socially dispossessed,”
whereas Hurston constructed a discourse of nostalgia for a rural community.15
In her autobiographical writings, Hurston referenced the contradictory nature
of the response of the black middle class and urban intellectuals to the presence
of rural migrants to cities. In an extract written six months after completion of
Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston describes this response:
Say that a brown young woman, fresh from the classic halls of
Barnard College and escorted by a black boy from Yale, enters
the subway at 50th Street. They are well-dressed, well-mannered
and good to look at. . ..
. . . the train pulls into 72nd Street. Two scabby-looking
Negroes come scrambling into the coach. . . . but no matter how
many vacant seats there are, no other place will do, except side
by side with the Yale–Barnard couple. No, indeed! Being dirty
and smelly, do they keep quiet otherwise? A thousand times, No!
They woof, bookoo, broadcast. . . .
Barnard and Yale sit there and dwindle and dwindle. They do
not look around the coach to see what is in the faces of the white
passengers. They know too well what is there. . . . That’s just like
The Politics of Fiction, Anthropology, and the Folk: Zora Neale Hurston
29
a Negro.” Not just like some Negroes, mind you, no, like all. Only
difference is some Negroes are better dressed. Feeling all of this
like rock-salt under the skin, Yale and Barnard shake their heads
and moan, “My People, My People!”. . .
Certain of My People have come to dread railway day coaches
for this same reason. They dread such scenes more than they do
the dirty upholstery and other inconveniences of a Jim Crow
coach. They detest the forced grouping. . . . So when sensitive
souls are forced to travel that way they sit there numb and when
some free soul takes off his shoes and socks, they mutter, “My
race but not My taste.” When somebody else eats fried fish,
bananas, and a mess of peanuts and throws all the leavings on the
floor, they gasp, “My skinfolks but not my kinfolks.” And sadly
over all, they keep sighing, “My People, My People!”16
This is a confrontation of class that signifies the division that the writer as
intellectual has to recognize and bridge in the process of representing the
people. It is a confrontation that was not unique to Hurston as intellectual,
but it was one that she chose to displace in her decision to recreate Eatonville
as the center of her representation of the rural folk.
The Eatonville of Their Eyes Were Watching God occupies a similar
imaginative space to the mountain village of Banana Bottom in Claude
McKay’s novel of the same name published four years earlier.17 McKay’s
Jamaican novel, set in the early 1900s, recreates the village where he grew up.
Much of the argument of Banana Bottom emerges in the tension between
attempts by missionaries to eradicate black cultural forms and the gentler
forms of abuse present in white patronage of black culture. Against these
forms of exploitation McKay reconstructs black culture as sustaining a whole
way of life. But it is a way of life of the past, of his formative years, a place that
the intellectual had to leave to become an intellectual and to which he does
not return except in this Utopian moment. Eatonville, likewise, is the place
of Hurston’s childhood, a place to which she returns as an anthropologist. As
she states in her introduction to Mules and Men, she consciously returns to
the familiar,18 and she recognizes that the stories she is going to collect, the
ones she heard as a child, are a cultural form that is disappearing.19
In returning to and recreating the moment of her childhood, Hurston
privileges the nostalgic and freezes it in time. Richard Wright, in his review
of Their Eyes Were Watching God, accused Hurston of recreating minstrelsy.
Though this remark is dismissed out of hand by contemporary critics, what it
does register is Wright’s reaction to what appears to him to be an outmoded
form of historical consciousness. Whereas Wright attempted to explode the
discursive category of the Negro as being formed, historically, in the culture
30
Hazel V. Carby
of minstrelsy, and as being the product of a society structured in dominance
through concepts of race, Hurston wanted to preserve the concept of
Negroness, to negotiate and rewrite its cultural meanings, and, finally, to
reclaim an aesthetically purified version of blackness. The consequences
for the creation of subaltern subject positions in each of their works are
dramatically different. The antagonism between them reveals Wright to be a
modernist and leaves Hurston embedded in the politics of Negro identity.
Eatonville, as an anthropological and fictional space, appears in
Hurston’s work before her first anthropological expedition in 1927.20 Not all
the stories and anecdotes in Mules and Men originated from her research, and
many appeared in different versions in different texts.21 Rather than being
valued primarily as a mode of scholarly inquiry, anthropology was important
to Hurston because it enabled her to view the familiar and the known from a
position of scientific objectivity, if not distance. She could not see her culture
for wearing it, she said: “It was only when I was off in college, away from my
native surroundings, that I could see myself like somebody else and stand off
and look at my garment. Then I had to have the spyglass of Anthropology to
look through at that.”22 Anthropology, then, is seen by Hurston as providing
a professional point of view. Ethnography becomes a tool in the creation
of her discourse of the rural folk that displaces the antagonistic relations of
cultural transformation.23
George Marcus and Michael Fischer have described the ways in which
anthropology “developed the ethnographic paradigm” in the 1920s and
1930s. “Ethnographies as a genre,” they argue, “had similarities with traveler
and explorer accounts, in which the main narrative motif was the romantic
discovery by the writer of people and places unknown to the reader.”24
Hurston shares this romantic and, it must be said, colonial imagination. Her
representation of Eatonville in Mules and Men and in Their Eyes Were Watching
God is both an attempt to make the unknown known and a nostalgic attempt
to preserve a disappearing form of folk culture.25 Marcus and Fischer argue
that there are three dimensions to the criticism that ethnography offered of
Western civilization:
[T]hey—primitive man—have retained a respect for nature, and
we have lost it (the ecological Eden); they have sustained close,
intimate, satisfying communal lives, and we have lost this way
of life (the experience of community); and they have retained
a sense of the sacred in everyday life, and we have lost this
(spiritual vision).26
Whereas the other students of Franz Boas, Margaret Mead and Ruth
Benedict, turned to societies outside of Europe and North America to point
The Politics of Fiction, Anthropology, and the Folk: Zora Neale Hurston
31
to what the West had lost but the cultural “other” still retained, Hurston’s
anthropological work concentrated upon the cultural “other” that existed
within the racist order of North America.
In 1935, Ruth Benedict published Patterns of Culture, in which she
asserted that black Americans were an example of what happens “when
entire peoples in a couple of generations shake off their traditional culture
and put on the customs of the alien group. The culture of the American
Negro in northern cities,” she continued, “has come to approximate in detail
that of the whites in the same cities.”27 With this emphasis in the school
of anthropological thought that most influenced Hurston, anthropology
provided her with not only a “spyglass” but with a theoretical paradigm that
directed her toward rural, not urban, black culture and folk forms of the past,
not the present.
Hurston, like Benedict, was concerned with the relationships among the
lives and cultures that she reconstructed and her own search for a construction
of the self.28 She lived the contradictions of the various constructions of
her social identity and rewrote them in Their Eyes Were Watching God. Her
anthropological “spyglass,” which she trained on the society that produced
her, allowed her to return to that society in the guise of being a listener and
a reporter. In her fictional return, Hurston represents the tensions inherent
in her position as an intellectual—in particular as a writer—in antagonistic
relation to her construction of the folk as community. It is in this sense that
I think Hurston is as concerned with the production of a sense of self as
she is with the representation of a folk consciousness through its cultural
forms. Both, I would argue, are the motivating forces behind the use of
anthropological paradigms in Hurston’s work. But it is the relation and
tension between the two, particularly the intellectual consciousness and the
consciousness of the folk, that is present in the fictional world of Their Eyes
Were Watching God, which is written between her two books of anthropology,
Mules and Men and Tell My Horse. In this novel, we can see how Hurston
brings into being a folk consciousness that is actually in a contradictory
relation to her sense of herself as an intellectual.
Throughout the 1930s, Hurston is in search of a variety of formal
possibilities for the representation of black rural folk culture. She produced
three musicals—From Sun to Sun, The Great Day, and Singing Steel—because
she was convinced that folk culture should be dramatized. She returned to
fiction as a form after a gap of six years when she wrote “The Gilded Six Bits”
in 1933, and Jonah’s Gourd Vine, which was published in 1934. Then Hurston
seriously considered pursuing a Ph.D. degree at Columbia in anthropology
and folklore. After finalizing all the arrangements for the publication of
Mules and Men, however, Hurston accompanied Alan Lomax on a trip to
collect folk music for the Library of Congress in 1935. That fall she joined
32
Hazel V. Carby
the Federal Theatre Project and was prominent in organizing its Harlem
unit as well as producing a one-act play, “The Fiery Chariot.” Between
1936 and 1938, Hurston spent a major part of her time in the Caribbean
collecting material on voodoo practices. She spent six months in Jamaica, and
Their Eyes Were Watching God was written while she was in Haiti.29 In Their
Eyes she reproduces Eatonville from a distance which is both geographical
and metaphorical and politically inscribed with issues of gender and class.
Hurston’s work during this period, then, involves an intellectual’s search for
the appropriate forms in which to represent the folk and a decision to rewrite
the geographical boundaries of representation by situating the southern, rural
folk and patterns of migration in relation to the Caribbean rather than the
northern states.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. has explored the great detail matters of voice in
Their Eyes Were Watching God in relation to a politics of identity by tracing
Hurston’s construction of a protagonist engaged in a search “to become a
speaking black subject.”30 On the other hand, Mary Helen Washington and
Robert Stepto have both raised intriguing questions about Janie’s lack of
voice in the text. Washington relates this silencing of a female protagonist to
her reading of Jonah’s Gourd Vine and concludes that “Hurston was indeed
ambivalent about giving a powerful voice to a woman like Janie who is already
in rebellion against male authority and against the roles prescribed for women
in a male dominated society.”31 However, both sides of this debate about the
speaking or silent subject exist within the same paradigm of voice. I wish to
introduce an alternative paradigm that suggests ways in which Their Eyes Were
Watching God is a text concerned with the tensions arising from Hurston’s
position as writer in relation to the folk as community that she produces in
her writing. In other words, I want to concentrate upon the contradictions
that arise in the relation between writer, as woman and intellectual, and her
construction of subaltern subject positions rather than remain within critical
paradigms that celebrate black identity.
The two chapters that frame the story of Janie’s life and are central to
arguments about the ways in which Hurston prepares the fictional space in
which Janie can tell her own story actually detail the antagonistic relation
between Janie, as a woman alone, and the folk as community. The community
sits “in judgment” as the figure of Janie, the protagonist, walks through
the town to her house. This walk can be seen as analogous to crossing a
stage and “running the gauntlet.” Oral language, as it was embodied in the
folktale in Mules and Men, was a sign of an authentic culture that enabled a
people to survive and even triumph spiritually over their oppression. In the
opening chapter of Their Eyes Were Watching God, however, oral language is
represented as a “weapon,” a means for the destruction and fragmentation
of the self rather than a cultural form that preserves a holistic personal and
The Politics of Fiction, Anthropology, and the Folk: Zora Neale Hurston
33
social identity. Questions become “burning statements,” and laughs are
“killing tools” (2). Janie has broken the boundaries of social convention and
becomes the accused. She doesn’t act appropriately for her age, which is “way
past forty” (3). (Hurston was forty-five years old at the time the text was
written, but on various occasions took between seven and nineteen years
off her age.)32 Also inappropriate are the class codes that Janie threatens
in her behavior and in her dress: As a middle-class widow she should not
have associated with the itinerant Tea Cake; and as a middle-class woman,
her “faded shirt and muddy overalls” are a comforting sign to the folk as
community who can ease their antagonism and resentment with the thought
that maybe she will “fall to their level someday” (11).
Hurston increases the tension between her protagonist and the
community to which she returns through a series of binary oppositions
between the intellect, or mind, and speech. The process of the analysis by the
anthropological self in Mules and Men is reversed by the creator of fiction
in Their Eyes Were Watching God. In the former, the oral tale is a sign of a
whole healthy culture and community; in the latter, the individual functions
of speaking are isolated and lack a center. Janie responds to her victimization
through synecdoche. The community is indicted as a “Mouth Almighty,” a
powerful voice that lacks intellectual direction. Far from being spiritually
whole, the folk who are gathered on the porch are reduced to their various
body parts: In each, an “envious heart makes a treacherous ear” (5).33 This
is the context that determines Janie’s refusal to tell her story directly to the
community, a refusal that distinguishes her story from the directly told and
shared folktale. In the process of transmitting Janie’s story, Hurston requires
an instrument of mediation between her protagonist and the folk, and it is
Janie’s friend Pheoby who becomes this mediator. When Janie decides to tell
her story through her friend—“Mah tongue is in mah friend’s mouf” (5), she
says—Hurston creates a figure for the form of the novel, a fictional world
that can mediate and perhaps resolve the tension that exists in the difference
between the socially constructed identities of “woman” and “intellectual” and
the act of representing the folk.34
Hurston’s particular form of mediation appears to be an alternative
version of the anthropological spyglass that she needed to create a professional
point of view between her consciousness of self and the subjects she was
reproducing. Janie’s definite refusal to tell her tale directly, as in a folktale,
distinguishes not only her story from other stories that are communally
shared, but also her position from that of the folk as community. Hurston’s
position as intellectual is reproduced as a relation of difference, as an
antagonistic relationship between Janie and the folk. The lack in the folk
figures, the absence of mind, or intellectual direction in the porch sitters, is
symbolically present when Janie mounts her own porch.
34
Hazel V. Carby
In Mules and Men, the porch is the site for the expression of the folktale
as an evocation of an authentic black culture. In Their Eyes Were Watching
God, the porch is split and transformed. Whereas in Mules and Men the
anthropological self is positioned on a figuratively unified porch, primarily as
a listener and a recorder, in Their Eyes Were Watching God the anthropological
role of listener is embedded in the folk as community and the role of recorder
situated in the mediator—Pheoby/the text. In the novel, then, a listening
audience is established for the narrative self, whereas in Mules and Men
Hurston constructs a listening anthropological subject. It is Janie who can
address and augment the lack in the folk as community and Janie who can
unify the division between mind and mouth. Janie, of course, is placed in the
subject position of intellectual and has the desire to “sit down and tell [the
folk] things.” Janie, as intellectual, has traveled outside of the community
and defines herself as “a delegate to de big ’ssociation of life” (6); her journey
is the means by which knowledge can be brought into the community. As
intellectual she creates subjects, grants individual consciousness, and produces
understanding—the cultural meanings without which the tale is useless to
the community—“taint no use in me telling you somethin’ unless Ah give
you de understandin’ to go ’long wid it,” Janie tells Pheoby. The conscious
way in which subjectivity is shaped and directed is the act of mediation of the
writer; it is this sense in which Pheoby becomes both Hurston’s instrument
of mediation and her text in an act of fictionalization.
The second part of the frame in the last chapter of Their Eyes Were
Watching God opens with the resolution of the tension, division, and
antagonism that are the subject of the opening chapter. The pattern of
division of the first part of the frame is repeated: Janie is verbally condemned
by the folk as community because she killed Tea Cake. The folk “lack” the
understanding of the reasoning behind Janie’s actions, but this deficiency
is compensated for only through Janie’s defense of herself in a court of law.
The folk on the muck finally end their hostility to Janie when Sop explains
that Tea Cake went crazy and Janie acted to protect herself. Reconciliation,
then, between the position of intellectual and the folk as community takes
place through acts of narration. The discursive unity that is maintained in the
framing of the text prefigures the possibility for reconci...
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