Zora Neale Hurstons Novel Their Eyes Were Watching God - Research Paper Example

Starting with the opening ment of Zora Neale Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, where she writes that "ships at a distance have everymans wish on board," desire and passion fuel the narrative, as expressed in the personal relationships of Janie Crawford. The novel is a portrait of African-American womanhood, set in the South during the Jim Crow era, where the legacy effects of racism and slavery were still ever present in the lives of black people at the time. In this context, rape is the first sexuality introduced historically in the novel, and Hurston describes it in the context of slavery to show that it was a regular and repeated aspect of the black woman’s experience in slavery, and occurred in the early formative age of adulthood in the place of a woman’s education. The relation of racist authority to rape in the narrative is that Janie’s father and grandfather are both portrayed as white, and the educational system is equated in lineage with the system of slave ownership. This is a fundamental social and political critique that is introduced through the common dialect of the Southern woman and related through her personal sexual experience. The historical base is expressed by Zora Neale Hurston through sexual relationships, and this interracial sexuality is paradoxical, integral, and structural in her writing throughout the novel. In this context of repression, Hurston presents only a brief glimpse of the hope for genuine love in youth, which is quickly replaced with a black folk tradition that is portrayed as repressive to womanhood in a manner equally to be resisted and run away from as slavery. The repression of family tradition is portrayed through forced marriage, which implied another type of rape and forced servitude of the woman. Janie’s compromise is to arrange a marriage on her own terms that supports her own self materially on her own terms, even if she has to leave everything she knows to do so. Thus she provides for her needs while giving herself a limited economic role in the society at large through her husband’s business. When this ends early through the death of Joe Starks, Janie has the ability to choose any man in her society from a position of independent stature. Rather than the professor or tycoon, Hurston presents Tea Cake as a model of the black male with whom Janie most identifies. Their love also accelerates into death, but in this instance it is from the increased slow burn of passions, rather than their extinguishment. In the end, the gossip of black women themselves is represented as perpetuating the social repression of the woman and furthering racial stereotypes. A key letter exists of Zora Neale Hurston’s private communication that shows that she viewed the entire issue of segregation in terms of sexuality. Segregation is the separation of whites and blacks in the Jim Crow era American South based on racist beliefs by the ruling class that were enshrined in separate education, restaurant facilities, hotels, voting, etc. creating an apartheid type of control system. It is viewed as a tragic aspect of American history, the legacy of the slave era, and Zora Neale Hurston’s characters reflect this historical time in their personal relationships, as a photograph in time. Alice Walker was correct in recognizing the value in Hurston’s work in giving a vital picture of the mind of the African-American woman during that era. For historians, the letter to Countee Cullen in 1943 provides a unique glimpse into the author’s voice behind the characters: “Now, as to segregation, I have no viewpoint on the subject particularly, other than a fierce desire for human justice. The rest of it is up to the individual. Personally, I have no desire for white association except where I am sought and the pleasure is mutual. That feeling grows out of my own self-respect... Countee, I have actually had some of them to get real confidential and point out that I can be provided with a white husband by seeing things right! White wives and husbands have been provided for others, etc.” “I invariably point out that getting hold of white men has always been easy. I don’t need any help to do that. I only wish that I could get everything else so easily as I can get white men. I am utterly indifferent to the joy of other Negroes who feel that a marriage across the line is compensation for all things, even conscience... So I shall probably never become a liberal. Neither shall I ever let myself be persuaded to have my mind made up for me by a political job. I mean to live and die by my own mind.” (Hurston, 1943) The reason this letter is so telling, aside from the absence of depth in source material for historians of Hurston’s life, is that from the political question of repression she immediately goes to a discussion of sexuality. Hurston, and not her character’s expression in fiction, says she only has interest in the white race if it is sexual and beyond the everyday economic relationships of life. She recounts how white liberals view a black woman’s thought inaccurately when they think she will feel rewarded and secure in marrying whites. She goes on to say that she has never had any difficulty seducing white men sexually. In that regard, she stands as an autonomous woman. She knew her sexual power was stronger many ways than white racism or political power, locally, between humans. However, in that realm she was not repressed, but rather in control. In this manner, it is evident how Zora Neale Hurston frames sexuality as a means of transcendence from the oppressive system represented by white apartheid. As such, it is a reversal of power rooted in the base senses and emotions, and in many ways more real than the mental fictions of ideas on which white power rested. Henry Louis Gates associates Their Eyes Were Watching God with the tradition of slave narratives, of slaves who were writing about their enslavement, which he contends stands as an independent literary tradition. "Hundreds of ex-slaves felt compelled to tell their tales on the anti-slavery lecture circuit in the North and in the written form of autobiographical narrative. As several scholars have shown, there is an inextricable link in the Afro-American tradition between literacy and freedom." (Gates, 2002) Though neither Hurston nor Janie were slaves, they both told the stories of slavery in their family from the first person perspective. Yet few may have had the courage to tell the story of the sexual oppression of the black woman through rape and slavery, as Hurston did. She told this story in the woman’s own voice and natural dialect, creating a unique body of fiction with her literary characters that earn her a respected place in history. "If you don’t want him, you sho oughta. Heah you is wid de onliest organ in town, amongst colored folks, in yo’ parlor. Got a house bought and paid for and sixty acres uh land right on de big road and…Lawd have mussy! Dat’s de very prong all us black women gits hung on. Dis love! Dat’s just whut’s got us uh pullin’ and haulin’ and sweatin’ and doin’ from can’t see in de mornin’ till can’t see at night." (Hurston, 3.21) In this passage, Hurston clearly associates the black woman’s oppression with her sexual identity. Essentially, she states, all black women are the subject to a phallic male domination, and that is the fundamental cause of the work they must do as women. In this sense however, women are portrayed as black slaves to a male hierarchy that works within their own African-American culture. This is shown in arranged youth marriage and the everyday relations of black women to family in the distribution of labor. Despite this, Janie is not portrayed as a traditional symbol of African-American motherhood but models the cosmopolitan woman as she moves between three main relationships in her life. If Logan Killicks shows at root the problem is based in masculine patriarchy as represented across economic and racial lines, Joe Starks shows the political economics of marriage. As Williams writes in her introduction to the novel, “Logan Killicks and Joe Starks, her first two husbands, represent stolid conventionality.” In contrast, “Tea Cakes nickname is itself a polite play on jelly roll, synonymous in the blues with sexual delight.” (Williams, 1991) Her return to traditional life with Tea Cake in Florida is ill fated, and she is forced to shoot him and be judged for society for her actions. While the white legal system acquits Janie in the end of the novel, the symbolism of the event is in the repeated association of eroticism with death, a theme that was also prevalent in much French literature at the time, including Baudelaire. Zora Neale Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God can be interpreted through the three relationships that she has in her life with men, and also in the relationships she describes in her family’s history. Her depiction of black womanhood is critical and represents the frustration she must have felt as an African-American woman in the Jim Crow era. Hurston describes the class relationships within the African-American community in terms of her sexual relationships and marriage. That is the structure and driving force of the narrative. The mirror to society which the novel represents critically relates the experience of the black woman to American apartheid. This was the quasi-legal, hate-fueled racist swamp of early Jim Crow Florida, where Janie’s relationships take their heat and depth. Critical in this interpretation is that Janie is not a nurturer but an active destroyer of relationships. In a sense, Hurston’s sub-conscious demands the destruction of the male patriarchal system and this overflows in the theme of death as it relates to her marriages. In summary, Janie is neither monogamist nor mother figure in her relationships, pointing to her role as a non-traditional personality using creative means to resist. Returning to the beginning of the novel, eroticism and sexuality can be seen to drive the narrative in Zora Neale Hurston’s own description of the reasoning behind the telling of the story. “‘Pheoby, we been kissin’-friends for twenty years, so Ah depend on you for a good thought. And Ah’m talking to you from dat standpoint.’ Time makes everything old so the kissing, young darkness became a monstropolous old thing while Janie talked.” (Hurston, 1:1) In the context of eroticism in the woman’s experience, age is a terrible threat, carrying with it lack of beauty and with it decrease in power, based upon the ability to seduce. If power is based on the sexual attraction, then women can only wield it properly in their youth, when it is vital. As the woman embraces motherhood, she embraces pregnancy and the transformation of the body it entails. Following the birth of her children, the ability to attract decreases as a function of nature. Cosmetically, the cosmopolitan woman can use her charm, wit, and intelligence to continue to attract and seduce with age. Yet, it is a dangerous psychological basis for a woman to build a self-identity of power upon, as it is transient as youth, and fades with time. Alice Walker quotes a Yale historian who knew her and remembered that, “Zora Hurston was born in 1901, 1902, or 1903 -- depending on how old she felt herself at the time." (Walker, 1973) Yet, historians believe she was born in 1891, building questions as to why Hurston would misrepresent her age unless it is considered in this aspect of women’s sexuality which relates beauty to power through its ability to coerce men and bend to will. That both white and black women shared identity issues related to sexual attractiveness is shown when Hurston writes of Mrs. Turner: “But Mrs. Turner’s shape and features were entirely approved by Mrs. Turner. Her nose was slightly pointed and she was proud. Her thin lips were an ever delight to her eyes. Even her buttocks in bas-relief were a source of pride. To her way of thinking all these things set her aside from Negroes. That was why she sought out Janie to friend with. Janie’s coffee-and-cream complexion and her luxurious hair made Mrs. Turner forgive her for wearing overalls like the other women who worked in the fields. She didn’t forgive her for marrying a man as dark as Tea Cake, but she felt that she could remedy that…her disfavorite subject was Negroes.” (16.5) This issue as much as oppression binds women’s sense of identity across racial lines for Hurston. In comparison to obesity as it is related to African-American women’s identity, and beauty as viewed by men as the key component of sexual power, it is telling again that Janie is not a symbol of African-American motherhood, but of black sexuality. The social relation is not monogamous for the woman and in this manner she can transcend patriarchy through sexual politics, with economics determining class identity within both black and white communities in the characters. In this manner, skin color as it reflects social stereotypes of beauty become significant as power politics within the black community. “"Look at me! Ah ain’t got no flat nose and liver lips. Ah’m uh featured woman. Ah got white folks’ features in mah face. Still and all Ah got tuh be lumped in wid all de rest. It ain’t fair. Even if dey don’t take us in wid de whites, dey oughta make us uh class tuh ourselves." (16.14-20) With Janie being over half white, her mother being a mullato who was also raped in a second generational pattern of slavery, this is critical to Janie’s identity, and as such, patterned as important within the ex-slave community at the time. In a manner, this occurs as a legacy of assimilating the racism of white apartheid into the identity of African-Americans. To be critical of this and simultaneously focusing on superficial aspects of beauty is an important theme for Zora Neale Hurston in the novel, and one that pushes towards the universal in human experience that binds people across racial identities. “Anyone who looked more white folkish than herself was better than she was in her criteria, therefore it was right that they should be cruel to her at times, just as she was cruel to those more negroid than herself in direct ratio to their negroness. Like the pecking-order in a chicken yard. Insensate cruelty to those you can whip, and groveling submission to those you can’t. Once having set up her idols and built altars to them it was inevitable that she would worship there. It was inevitable that she should accept any inconsistency and cruelty from her deity as all good worshippers do from theirs. All gods who receive homage are cruel. All gods dispense suffering without reason. Otherwise they would not be worshipped. Through indiscriminate suffering men know fear and fear is the most divine emotion. It is the stones for altars and the beginning of wisdom. Half gods are worshipped in wine and flowers. Real gods require blood. (Hurston, 16.43) That sexual attraction is the dominant that fuels perception in this instance is important, in that having white skin, or lighter skin, was said to make the person more beautiful or desirable as a mate. Though unspoken, in this passage Hurston is describing “Beauty” in its divine form as being cruel. It is not nor can it be an egalitarian concept. Yet, it is at the basis of sexual attraction as described by Hurston when she began with the analogy of desire between ships passing in the night. At a distance, the mind is unknowable in a stranger. Only the superficial is apparent. Hurston draws a distinction between characters that recognize this and go deeper in understanding, and those characters that remain simply caught in the structural paradigms and stereotypes of racist thinking, white and black. If Hurston identifies personally as a seductress, a cosmopolitan woman, then she is vulnerable in a different manner psychically. She creates her own flaws where none may exist, and commits to a path that can only lead downhill. “For more than a year, Hurston, a divorcee in her mid-forties, had been dating a man twenty years her junior. A graduate student at Columbia University, his name was Percival McGuire Punter. Though she would later identify him only by his initials in her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, Hurston noted that he ‘was tall, dark brown’ and ‘magnificently built.’ But, she hastened to add: "His looks only drew my eyes in the beginning. I did not fall in love with him just for that. He had a fine mind and that intrigued me. When a man keeps beating me to the draw mentally, he begins to get glamorous." In short order, Hurston and Punter were immersed in an intensely passionate, mutually satisfying romance-a relationship that the thrice-married Hurston called ‘the real love affair of my life.’” (Boyd, 2010) Again, the example of a professional woman, academic, writer, activist and intellectual that is divorced and dating a man 20 years younger is not the traditional African-American mother figure. Yet her life is consistent with free Jazz, the birth of the Blues, the Harlem Renaissance, and many other aspects of the 1920’s and 1930’s era America impacting African American identity and women’s issues. "Ah dont know nothin but what Ahm told tuh do, cause Ah aint nothin but uh nigger and uh slave." (Hurston, p.23) In this quote Hurston gives a portrait of black identity that has totally assimilated the ideas of the oppressor in a type of self-hate as identity, which is frightening in its historical portrait. She was criticized by other black intellectuals for expressing these types of black characters, in a sense as perpetuating the racial stereotype progress sought to eliminate. Yet the illiterate, poverty stricken black agriculturalist, in first and second generation liberation from slavery, had a reality that Hurston felt required to document even if obviously opposing with her wit and intelligence. Yet, she herself wrote that she wanted nothing of the white man but sex. In this Hurston displays affinity with black separatist views such as those of Marcus Garvey. “The role and contribution of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) to development and cultivation of the Harlem Renaissance has been mainly confined to the political sphere. Yet, Garvey and the UNIA gave impetus and expanded the cultural atmosphere of the Harlem Renaissance movement which produced a flowering of African American literature, poetry, music and visual arts. Garvey and the UNIA called for a black arts movement which would produce a black aesthetic which would affirm the humanity of African people and advance the race. UNIA along with Garvey provided forums and a vehicle- the Negro World for black artistic.” (Kwanzaa, 2010) Zora Neale Hurston published in Marcus Garvey’s Negro World as part of the Harlem Renaissance movement in African-American artistic identity. Her views on segregation, as illustrated through the letter to Countee Cullen, are consistent with Garvey’s, and in many ways her literature show a great pride in the separate nature of African-American identity under segregation. Key to this is that she does not want de-segregation socially. She loves black culture and identity as it is, despite the repression of racism and male patriarchy. However, she places justice before all, even sexuality in this. Sexuality is the secondary relation following justice for Hurston in her themes, as it must be in idealism related to materialism erotically. Hurston’s depictions of sexuality may be bawdy and raw at times to refined ears, but reflected the speech patterns of the times. “Hurston married and divorced three husbands and, at age forty-four, fell in love with twenty-three-year-old Percy Punter. When he asked her to forsake her career to marry him, she refused because she ‘had things clawing inside [her] that must be said.’ She wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God, trying in its pages ‘to embalm all the tenderness of [her] passion for him.’” (NEA, 2010) If one accepts that Their Eyes Were Watching God is an expression of the feelings inspired by this relationship, then it is clear from the very first line how eroticism and sexuality drive the narrative, as well as its autobiographical aspects. Sexuality in this relationship can be regarded as creative and inspiring to art. Thus, the depiction of Tea Cake in the novel is perhaps best in describing the passionate nature of love and sexuality as Hurston idealized it, and the way that these aspects cross-fertilized creative expression despite poverty, which Hurston herself also experienced, was vital to the narrative. In the dominance of sexual references in the everyday language of the characters, the reader is exposed to an insider community of expression as it is behind the veil of privacy called blackness. Just as she is telling her “kissing-sister” the story, it is a private tale and an intimate story made public through literature. In this manner, it is a study of eroticism as structural critique of legacy racism in pre-civil rights era America. “Janie finally fully awakens when she meets a man named Tea Cake. Tea Cake is much younger than Janie. He begins coming by the general store to chat with Janie on a regular basis. He talks with her and is interested in what she has to say. She had never had anyone actually take an interest in her as a person before Tea Cake. Not even her grandmother had taken the time to learn who Janie was. Tea Cake is everything that Joe and Logan could not have been. He helps her break away from the stiff gender roles of her society, which dictated that women did not participate in the activities of men. He teaches Janie how to play checkers. He teaches her how to hunt and fish. He encourages her to make conversation. She is genuinely herself and genuinely happy when she is with Tea Cake.” (Wiedemer, 2010) Thus, in viewing Tea Cake as the ideal relationship that paralleled the experiences she felt in her own private life, she shares her awakening publicly through the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. Other models of the black male identity are tried in a pragmatic and methodical manner until she finds, and subsequently destroys, what she loves. Thus, Janie and Zora as we know them as literary and historical characters intertwine in identity in the work. Her previous marriages show the upper and lower class models of male patriarchy, with its economic slavery in various kinds of work, both agricultural and urban. She rejects them for the bohemian existence of life with Tea Cup in a kind of Rousseau-inspired utopia that ends in rabid madness and murder in self-defense. The ending is so intense and in many ways unexpected that it recalls the association in French eroticism between orgasm and death. “Zora was funny, irreverent (she was the first to call the Harlem Renaissance literati the niggerati), good-looking, and sexy. She once sold hot dogs in a Washington park just to record accurately how the black people who bought them talked. She would o anywhere she had to go - Halrem, Jamaica, Haiti, Bermuda - to find out anything she simply had to know. She loved to give parties. Loved to dance. Would wrap her head in scarves as black women in Africa, Haiti, and everywhere have done for centuries... Her critics disliked even the rags on her head. (They seemed curiously incapable of telling the difference between an African American queen and Aunt Jemima.) They disliked her apparent sensuality: the way she tended to marry or not marry men, but enjoyed them anyway, while never missing a beat in her work.” (Hemenway, 1980) However Zora Neale Hurston is critically and literarily appraised by readers, she was an example of the liberal views on sexuality that were represented in avant-garde culture in the 1920-30’s. Using this biographical force of sensuality and eroticism as related with her love affair with Percy Punter, which she states inspired Their Eyes Were Watching God in her life, it is evident from the very first line the novel is one of desire. Her heroine Janie models the cosmopolitan ideal in a very realistic way, indeed in a much more common manner compared to the relative success and stature enjoyed by Hurston herself. Yet it is important to view Janie in the context of not only racial stereotypes, which she transcends even in depicting them, but also with regard to racial stereotypes as perpetuated by black women themselves, through ignorance and gossip. Whether Hurston’s female characters have the ability to go beyond superficial sexuality and attain deeper states of meaning within a relationship largely depends on political factors and the degree to which they are willing to resist or evade public knowledge. Through reversal, Hurston makes the very private public, as in a book whispered into the ears of a lover. It is an intimate novel that approaches historical, structural critique through the context of eroticism. Zora Neale Hurston’s concept of the feminine in the context of Jim Crow African-American identity shows the manner in which sexuality can be used for transcendence, but how it is also bound by the political rules of power structures. That Hurston interprets the historical legacy of institutional racism and American apartheid through the lens of black feminist sexuality makes her a heroine in post-modern multiculturalism, black history, American literature, sociology, and many other fields. That she could speak of these issues in the temporal and historical context in a way that they would be remembered as source texts is prescient, and she also speaks to the eroticism and sexuality that fuels the modern woman. Her portrait of a cosmopolitan, polygamous woman battling the structural racism, male patriarchies, and economic control systems of the time is an insightful critique that uses sexuality and the politics of personal relationship to deconstruct the era. As she wrote, “I do not attempt to solve any problems. I know I cannot straighten out with a few pen-strokes what God and men took centuries to mess up. So I tried to deal with life as we actually live it-not as the sociologists imagine it.” (Hurston, 1977) Sources Cited: American Masters (2008). Zora Neale Hurston - Jump at the Sun. PBS. Retrieved from http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/episodes/zora-neale-hurston/jump-at-the-sun/93/ Boyd, Valerie (2010). A Protofeminist Postcard from Haiti. The Official Zora Neale Hurston Website. Retrieved from http://www.zoranealehurston.com/books/their_eyes_ps.html Gates, Henry Louis (2002). The Classic Slave Narratives. Signet Classic: Penguin, 2002. Retrieved from http://books.google.co.in/books?hl=en&lr=&id=NhBEGK4vqkUC Hemenway, Robert E. (1980). Zora Neale Hurston: a literary biography. University of Illinois Press. Retrieved from http://books.google.co.in/books?id=Gzta3iHgiQ8C Hurston, Zora Neale & Pinkney, Jerry (1991). Their eyes were watching God. University of Illinois Press, 1991 - 231 pages. Retrieved from http://books.google.co.in/books?id=_0GCRtuk63EC Kwanzaa Guide (2010). The Role of Marcus Garvey and the UNIA in Creating the Harlem Renaissance Movement. The Kwanzaa Teacher’s Guide. Retrieved from http://kwanzaaguide.com/2010/04/the-role-of-marcus-garvey-and-the-unia-in-creating-the-harlem-renaissance-movement/ National Endowment of the Arts (2010). Their Eyes Were Watching God: About the Author. The Big Read. Retrieved from http://www.neabigread.org/books/theireyes/theireyes04.php Walker, Alice (1973). Looking for Zora. Reprint: Scribd. Retrieved from http://www.scribd.com/doc/3275022/Looking-for-Zora-296-313 Wiedemer, Erin K. (2010). Literary analysis: Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston. Helium. Retrieved from http://www.helium.com/items/854506-literary-analysis-their-eyes-were-watching-god-by-zora-neale-hurston Read More