Zora Neale Hurstons Metonymy - Essay Example

Zora Neale Hurston’s Metonymy It has been widely recognized that Zora Neale Hurston is a master storyteller with a fine command of language and the linguistic tools commonly available to authors. This is particularly evident in her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, published in 1937. The book was published at a time in which black people in America were no longer slaves and many of the young people, including Hurston herself, had no memory of being a slave, however the laws in America made living conditions for black people not much better than slavery, especially in the southern regions. They were struggling to gain recognition within the greater community as fully intelligent and equally capable human beings and a book of Hurston’s style, in which the black dialect has been preserved through a phonetic spelling of much of the actual conversation that could be heard among people sitting and talking on the porch steps, created a great deal of controversy. However, Hurston’s use of this diction does not indicate a lower form of communication used by her characters. Instead, her inclusion of literary tools, particularly her inventive use of metonymy, demonstrates a different but equally or perhaps more expressive form of communication within this community of people. Once a definition of metonymy has been established, the richness of its employment in Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God will be evident in representations such as the porch, the mule and the use of Tea Cake as a descriptive. Metonymy is a literary tool that is very similar, yet still different from, metaphor. Metaphors are identified as a suggested comparison between two things, wherein one thing can be replaced with another thing in an almost identical relationship. An example of this would be would be the way Janie saw her life at the beginning of Chapter 2: “Janie saw her life like a great tree in leaf with the things suffered, things enjoyed, things done and undone. Dawn and doom was in the branches” (Hurston, 2006: 8). One can made a relation between the tree of reality and the tree of life, each growing and branching, one providing a material image for the metaphysical concept of the other. This metaphor is extended throughout the book as a means of describing each stage of life and existence. Metonymy, on the other hand, suggests a relationship between the object and a portion of it. In other words, the expression of one aspect of an idea is used to represent the whole, requiring cognitive input into the idea in order to understand the idea being presented. When this same pear tree emerges slightly later in the book, it is given a metonymical reference: “The vision of Logan Killicks was desecrating the pear tree, but Janie didn’t know how to tell Nanny that” (Hurston, 2006: 14). This type of metonym is typically referred to as a nonconventional metonym because it bases its understanding upon knowledge of the context in which it is used, in this case the knowledge of the use of the pear tree as a metaphor for the young girl’s life (Deignan, 2005). The metonym is introduced in the concept that one must also be aware of the various elements that are important characteristics of the tree at this particular time in its development and how that relates back to the girl. The metonyms to be examined here are more conventional than this example in that they use specific words to stand for the group of individuals or elements that are involved. The porch is a metonymical device in that it is used frequently to refer not just to the physical location of the porch, but also to refer to all the individuals who gather upon the porch who, collectively, represent the entire community and the power they represent together. This concept is first given shape in the opening scene of the novel: The people all saw her come because it was sundown … It was the time for sitting on porches beside the road. It was the time to hear things and talk. These sitters had been tongueless, earless, eyeless conveniences all day long. Mules and other brutes had occupied their skins. But now, the sun and the bossman were gone, so the skins felt powerful and human … They passed nations through their mouths. They sat in judgment” (Hurston, 2006: 1). In this excerpt, it is shown how ‘the people’, a term used even within the Declaration of the United States as a metonym for the entire race of man living within a specified region – i.e. the community, could be found on the porches, passing “nations through their mouths” as a metonym for the myths and values that make up the building blocks of community. With the porch taking on this metonymic identity, it now becomes easy for Hurston to refer to the interactions or relationship of Janie to her community through her access to the porch. To participate in the community, Jody “wanders out to the porch of the general store whenever he wants to enjoy the perpetual storytelling which takes place there … As Janie tells a friend years later, Jody ‘classed me off.’ He does so by silencing her” (Caplan, 2000). The concept that her marriage to Teacake might have a happier outcome than that found in either of her first two marriages is hinted at in the fact that she met him on the porch as a full-fledged, independent member of the community who can enter or leave the porch as she sees fit and under her own inclination. The above excerpt also introduces the concept of the mule, which is the metonymic identification of all those individuals forced to work at menial tasks or constrained in their actions in some other way. Although this is most strongly related to the position of the black woman, it is also frequently used to refer to black men as well. “Mules and other brutes had occupied their skins. But now, the sun and the bossman were gone, so the skins felt powerful and human” (Hurston, 2006: 1). In this statement, Hurston presents the concept in terms of a literal replacement of some entity other than the individual within the skin during the working day, only to be taken back by their proper owners at night when they had the freedom to be themselves. Whenever the mule is mentioned, Hurston is referring to this concept of a bestial or mindless existence, completely under the control of another: “De nigger woman is de mule uh de world so fur as Ah can see. Ah been prayin’ fuh it tuh be different wid you” (Hurston, 2006: 14). However, the way that her grandmother forces her to marry Logan Killicks is placed in terms of a bargaining much like that undertaken in the trading of mule and the life she lives with Jody becomes similarly constrained, referred to in terms of Janie’s behaving as his mule despite the fact that she is not engaged in hard labor in the fields. Ironically, when she does begin working at tasks that might equate her physically with the tasks for which a mule might be employed, she is seen in her most independent context. “To all appearances as Janie works beside her husband in the fields, she would seem to be the ‘mule of the world’ that her grandmother decried. The difference is that Janie works in the fields not because she has to, but because she and Tea Cake prefer to be together as much as possible” (Shields, 1997). With this distinction, the play with the word ‘mule’ becomes more evident just as the meaning that has been attached to it becomes deeper, questioning just where the mulish identity originates – is it a matter of the impressions of the white man imposing it upon the black or the concept of the black man adopting a cultural attitude they have learned from their forebears, who truly had no choice? Finally, while Tea Cake is used as a name to describe the man that Janie eventually falls in love with, the name itself is a descriptive replacing the man’s name and used to refer to all those attributes that the tea cake represents. “This tiny wafer tastes like fond memories and sweet dreams, and as such is a watermark on the page of Southern literature … Zora’s seductive name for Jamie’s lover is layered in cultural meaning” (Hood, 2007: 78-79). Using the sweet treat as a name imbues this character with the metonymical concepts of affluent hospitality, general good will and the ultimate product of the hard labor of the south. Sugar was produced by a long process that typically entailed the labor of the black man. “It was produced by the sweat of those living close to the earth. The process for making syrup from sugar cane demanded planting, harvesting, hauling, cooking, squeezing, condensing and saving the sugar cane’s essence” (Hood, 2007: 79). Therefore, life with Tea Cake could not be completely blissful, but was marked with occasional troubles and strong disagreements. He was not a perfect man, as is demonstrated in his action of stealing Janie’s money a week after they are married and gambling it, then spending his winnings on a party she wasn’t even invited to. As they work in the cane fields, Janie fights with Tea Cake over his improper behavior with Nunkie, but make up in each others arms in full understanding: “The next morning Janie asked like a woman, ‘You still love ole Nunkie?’ ‘Naw, never did, and you know it too. Ah didn’t want her.’ ‘Yeah, you did.’ She didn’t say this because she believed it. She wanted to hear his denial. She had to crow over the fallen Nunkie” (Hurston, 2006: 138). Demonstrating his own understanding, Tea Cake complies. As the tea cake is a treat typically served to company and therefore indicating a social visit, it is also significant that it is while she is with Tea Cake that Janie finally finds acceptance within the community. Her house becomes one of the primary gathering places in the community when she lives down on the muck and she returns to near isolation following Tea Cake’s death. By referring to Janie’s true love as Tea Cake, Hurston provides her story with metonymic meaning that moves beyond the text of the story. She pulls in ideas that relate to both her black audience as well as her white audience using concepts and ideas that both can relate to and in such context as to illuminate those aspects of the idea that might not be immediately obvious. At the same time, other metonymic concepts, such as the idea of the term ‘porch’ rather than community and ‘mule’ rather than mindless work begin to explore the meanings of Hurston’s story to similar depth. The porch becomes a physical space in which Janie is allowed or disallowed to act, inclined or disinclined to participate and on which it is illustrated how her current status in the general society should be understood. The mule indicates the hard work of the people, but also the mind-set in which they undertake their work, whether they feel they are working on their own volition, to their own specifications or whether they feel they are constrained within unseen trappings set by others. Who those others might be is also called into question through the use of this term, indicating that it may be the black man himself enforcing such controls. Through the use of these metonymic meanings, Hurston demonstrates through example how the black diction of the South is far from the ignorant, uninformed and nearly bestial bleating of a lesser spirit but is instead full of all the depth and nuance language has to offer. Works Cited Deignan, Alice. “A Corpus Linguistic Perspective on the Relationship between Metonymy and Metaphor.” Style. Vol. 39, I. 1, (Spring 2005). Hood, Judy. “Born with a Skillet in her Hands.” Southern Quarterly. Vol. 44, I. 2, (Winter 2007). Hurston, Zora Neale. Their Eyes Were Watching God. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, (1937, reprint 2006). Kaplan, Deborah. “Zora Neale Hurston.” Critical Survey of Long Fiction. (2nd Ed.). Salem Press, 2000. Shields, Agnes A. “Their Eyes Were Watching God: An Analysis.” Masterplots II: Juvenile and Young Adult Literature Series. Supplement. Salem Press, 1997. Read More