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? Bloom's Modern Critical Interpretations Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn All Quiet on the Western Front As You Like It The Ballad of the Sad Café Beloved Beowulf Billy Budd, Benito Cereno, Bartleby the Scrivener, and Other Tales Black Boy The Bluest Eye Cat on a Hot Tin Roof The Catcher in the Rye Catch-22 The Color Purple Crime and Punishment The Crucible Darkness at Noon Death of a Salesman The Death of Artemio Cruz The Divine Comedy Don Quixote Dubliners Emerson’s Essays Emma Fahrenheit 451 Frankenstein The Grapes of Wrath Great Expectations The Great Gatsby Hamlet The Handmaid’s Tale Heart of Darkness I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings The Iliad Jane Eyre The Joy Luck Club The Jungle Long Day’s Journey Into Night Lord of the Flies The Lord of the Rings Love in the Time of Cholera Macbeth The Man Without Qualities The Metamorphosis Miss Lonelyhearts Moby-Dick Night 1984 The Odyssey Oedipus Rex The Old Man and the Sea On the Road One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest One Hundred Years of Solitude The Pardoner’s Tale Persuasion Portnoy’s Complaint A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Pride and Prejudice Ragtime The Red Badge of Courage The Rime of the Ancient Mariner The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám The Scarlet Letter A Separate Peace Silas Marner Song of Solomon The Stranger A Streetcar Named Desire Sula The Sun Also Rises The Tale of Genji A Tale of Two Cities The Tempest Their Eyes Were Watching God Things Fall Apart To Kill a Mockingbird Ulysses Waiting for Godot The Waste Land White Noise Wuthering Heights Young Goodman Brown 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 Copyright © 2008 Infobase Publishing Introduction © 2008 by Harold Bloom All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher. For more information contact: Bloom’s Literary Criticism An imprint of Infobase Publishing 132 West 31st Street New York NY 10001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data 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 literature. I. Title: Their eyes were watching God. II. Bloom, Harold. III. Title. PS3515.U789T639 2008 813’.52—dc22 2007035378 Bloom’s Literary Criticism books are available at special discounts when purchased in bulk quantities for businesses, associations, institutions, or sales promotions. Please call our Special Sales Department in New York at (212) 967-8800 or (800) 322-8755. You can find Bloom’s Literary Criticism on the World Wide Web at http://www.chelseahouse.com Contributing Editor: Amy Sickels Cover designed by Takeshi Takahashi Cover photo Kuzmin Pavel/Shutterstock.com Printed in the United States of America Bang EJB 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 This book is printed on acid-free paper. All links and Web addresses were checked and verified to be correct at the time of publication. Because of the dynamic nature of the Web, some addresses and links may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. 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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