Their Eyes Were Watching God By Zora Neale Hurston
Abstract:
The writings of African American women reveal their individual struggles against canonization, imperialism, and sexism. Interestingly, experiences dictated by women contrast sharply with those written by men. The women and their respective works selected for this study have all made significant contributions to the field of literature and as diverse as they are, speak to the heart of the struggles faced by women around the world. Each woman’s unique past is pivotal to understanding its impact on their writing. Zora best represents the transition of power from the past to modern writers like Alice Walker and Toni Morrison. Similarly, Morrison continues the tradition of creating writings that speak for oppressed women and against the …show more content…
misogynistic ideals purported by a patriarchal society.
Keywords: Hurston, Morrison, woman, Afro-American, oppression, culture, cast, gender.
Introduction:
-Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men.
(Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God)
Dating back to the dawn of time and the inception of the first man, the Christian origin of woman, delineates her creation as Eve of Adam “So God created man in His own image, in the image of God created He him; male and female created He them” (Gen. 1:26). Although man and woman are both created of God, they are different. Hurston supports this idea of difference in her novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God. She adds to the aforementioned excerpt stating “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 [women] act and do things accordingly” (1)
Female writers continue to remind us of the differences between males and females and the separate struggles they face. In his book Canonization, Colonization, Decolonization: A Comparative Study of Political and Critical Works by Minority Writers, Seodial Deena discusses the fate of women, more appropriately, women of color who “had no alternative but to discover and define themselves through their writings in order to liberate themselves” (19). The liberating act of writing for women of color is therefore of greater importance and precedence than for women who have not been classified as racial “other”. The tool of writing for women of color, in the past and presently, continues to create “a new territory for postcolonial women” (Deena 19).
Within this “new territory” the postcolonial woman is able to assert an authority, which had previously manifested itself only in their role as caregiver, mother, worker, or servant. The postcolonial woman, as revisited through female writers of color, exposes the ever present strife engendered by imperialism, canonization, and sexism.
By examining selected works, I seek to reveal the unique experiences of African American women, as well as highlight the varying methods in which the works fight against the triangular establishments of imperialism, canonization, and sexism by examining theme, dialogue, characters, settings, etc., in select novels of Hurston and Morrison.
A study of this nature is important today as that now the atmosphere for writings by women is overflowing. This feat is no less miraculous for African American women, or for that matter, women of color whose battle has, on one hand, mirrored that of European descended women. On the other hand, their battle has been plagued by the unique structure established by colonialism. The modern woman of color has been forced to be “the mule of the world” (Hurston Eyes 14). She has carried the weight of the world for some time now, and her story is very significant.
Zora Neale Hurston
Zora Neale Hurston was born in the American south and came of age in the first all-black township of Eatonville, Florida.
Hurston is widely recognized for her contributions to the “New Negro Movement”, affectionately referred to as the Harlem Renaissance. Hurston’s diverse literary portfolio includes: Jonah’s Gourd Vine, Mules and Men, Their Eyes Were Watching God, and Seraph on the Swanee. Of herself, Hurston notes: “I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes... I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background” (Colored 1031). Hurston is a woman whose literary legacy is defined by the idea that a black woman could demand a space in the world; furthermore, she asserts that the woman did not have to do so in fear of her race or …show more content…
femininity.
In perhaps her greatest literary accomplishment, Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God tells the story of one woman’s journey to find the perfect union she witnesses among objects in nature. The central character, Janie is told an important lesson about the life of women by her grandmother, “So de white man throw down de load and tell de nigger man tuh pick it up. He pick it up because he have to but he don’t tote it. He hand it to his womenfolks. De nigger woman is the mule uh de world so fur as Ah can see” (Hurston Eyes 14).
Hurston’s novel most certainly is best discussed when one notes the protagonist’s goal to achieve natural harmony in her life; harmony she witnesses as a teenager while watching bee’s pollinate fruit blossoms. This achievement of harmony is perhaps the central focus of the work, as that Janie’s actions from that moment are an effort to achieve that level of harmony. Janie’s journey takes her through two failed marriages, abuse, societal shame, and eventual happiness in a final marriage. By the work’s end, we find that Janie has come full circle. She has achieved her oneness with nature and gained her own command of the far off horizon; her destiny “[pulling] it from around the waist of the world and [draping it] around her shoulders” (Hurston Eyes 193).
The life of Janie Crawford is a triumph. It indicates the indomitable spirit of the African American woman to survive. Priscilla Wald, in her article “Colored: The Self-Authorized Language of Difference in Zora Neale Hurston” explains that Hurston’s writing exhibits a unique quality that allows her to “speak from the margins” (80). Referencing the fact that as both a woman and an African American, Hurston inter-plays differences to “facilitate an inspection of cultural 31 identity” (81). Unlike the journey of the black man, Hurston is female, and thus her identity is doubly indemnified by the problematic effects of post-colonialism.
Toni Morrison
As the first African American woman to receive a Nobel Prize for Literature, Morrison continues to defy the limits established by the traditional canon.
The crux of Morrison’s writings stem from her prodigious use of mystical elements in conjunction with her detailing of the African American experience to include: “racial, gender and class conflict” (Dipasquale). Morrison details a unique experience; ranging from the slave narrative of Sethe in Beloved, The Cosey Women in Love, and the troubled youth, Pecola, in The Bluest Eye. Morrison explains that each work must "write for people like me, which is to say black people, curious people, demanding people -- people who can't be faked, people who don't need to be patronized, people who have very, very high criteria” (qtd. in Dipasquale). Therefore, the works of Morrison, have helped to establish the black female voice in a world which continues its attempt to silence
it.
Toni Morisson’s seminal work, Beloved, is a work that helps to connect the African, and to an extent, the American community by recounting a period of American history that has often been difficult at times to discuss. It is through the character Sethe, a former slave that one learns of one of the major hardships created by slavery. Essentially this is a hardship that affects women with ferocity unlike that of their male counterparts. The story of the runaway
Sethe is further complicated by her choice to ensure that her children would not have to return to slavery when her former master finds her in hiding. Sethe uses the only method of control she has, that is, control over the lives of her children, and takes it upon herself to spare them from slavery through death. Fortunately, her attempt is foiled, but not before she is successful in murdering her oldest child, a girl whose headstone reads “Beloved”. The “Beloved” one lives on however in spirit and dominates the house on I24, “the ghost that tried them so” (Morrison Beloved 4). It is not until the reappearance of a man in the house and a strange girl that helps one to understand the choices made by Sethe, and for that matter, the other slave women whose heritage is fashioned by colonization.
Sethe is Morrison’s paradoxical character. She is also the quintessential female slave: appeasing the desires of her children; adhering to the governing powers of her white masters. She is so loyal, in fact, that she receives a gift from the mistress of Sweet Home, “a present from the lady I worked for” (Morrison Beloved 58). Unfortunately, the life afforded to Sethe in Kentucky on the Sweet Home plantation is anything but “sweet”. A chance at freedom leads Sethe to strike out; however, she is unsuccessful at first and becomes the victim of a sexual assault by Sweet Home’s patriarchal power: Schoolteacher, and his boys. The men exact their will over the young slave woman and commit an act of theft that forever scars Sethe. Sethe recounts her experience, repeatedly saying: “those boys came in there and took my milk. That’s what they came in there for. Held me down and took it.” (Morrison Beloved 16). The mother’s breast, which bears milk, the gift of life, is the only thing which the poor slave woman can give to her children. It is a rare and precious gift that some slave women are not able to give their children because they are at times responsible for nursing the children of their owners. According to the power structure established by imperialism, the female slave, like her male counterpart, is a thing to be used. In this case, Sethe embodies a role that countless slave women were forced to take part in: one to amuse the master who wields complete power.
It is because of her understanding of this system that Sethe makes her way to freedom and asserts a level of power and authority that had been previously denied to her, and to an extent, her children. Sethe, on the precipice of destruction is able to bring herself back and begins life anew, free with Baby Suggs. Sethe’s new claim to freedom is short-lived when her former master and rapists (Schoolteacher’s boys) find her and desire to return her to the sugary Sweet Home. It is at this moment that Sethe takes her role as a free woman and essentially a mother to a new level. Sethe decides that her children will find more satisfaction in a freedom filled death rather than a freedom-less life.
Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye is a work which continues to proliferate the desire of the female to obtain not only power, but a sense of place in the world. The novel’s introduction includes an explanation from the narrator, Claudia, who notes: “there were no marigolds in the fall of 1941... It was a long time before my sister and I admitted to ourselves that no green was going to spring from our seeds” (Morrison Bluest Eye 5). This is important because it is the understanding of two female children who have come to terms with their existence as black girls in the world. The meaning behind their revelation essentially means they are unable to bring forth an object of beauty in a place where “the earth itself [was] unyielding” (Morrison Bluest Eye 5).
Other Women of Colour
Jumping across racial lines, the stories of Janie, Celie, and Sethe bear a disturbing resemblance to those of characters in works written by other women of color who are not African American. Strange it seems that these parallels exist despite the differences in race, history, cultural association, and socio-economic status.
Aruhdhati Roy’s The God of Small Things is an interesting novel that outlines the subtle truths of life for Indian women, more appropriately, the lives of all women of color. The female character Ammu is Roy’s representation of the Indian woman whose failure in marriage equals a failed existence for the woman. After all, a “Man-less woman”, moreover, a woman in this predicament due to a divorce “had no position anywhere at all” (Roy 45).
Like Roy, Maxine Hong Kingston discusses the situation of the woman less favored by society. In her collection The Warrior Woman: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, Kingston describes in her first story “No Name Woman” the life of one of her father’s sisters whose presence has been completely erased from the family “We say that your father has all brothers because it is as if she had never been born” (3).
Boundaries become important when discussing the novel Fasting, Feasting by Anita Desai. The work illuminates very real boundaries which control the female within the patriarchal family structure; furthermore, one is able to learn of the peculiarities relating to the female valuation of worth as constructed by society. Desai’s relation of the character Uma reveals that a daughter within the Indian family structure has a role to play. Furthermore, if she is unable to successfully meet the challenges presented by that role, she becomes a burden to her family
Diana Garcia’s book of poetry When Living Was A Labor Camp, revisits the power of bonds between women of color. Through these relationships with other women, García emphasizes that her experience as a Chicana is not singular but shared.
Conclusion
Fundamentally, time is forever bound with change. As time passes so too does change occurs. In relation to the social sphere and women, time has changed much. It is unfortunate that these changes have not equally affected all women. As changes have surfaced within the global community perhaps now is the time to begin the true development of a new multicultural feminism. It is a fact that all women suffer from societal oppression, have been abused and work harder than men to establish their place. The writings of black women continue to provide evidence of the far reaching effects of colonialism. The battle is not over. The battlefield has changed and the warriors have acquired new levels of strength, yet the battle rages on.
The writings of African American women reveal their individual struggles against canonization, imperialism, and sexism. Interestingly, experiences dictated by women contrast sharply with those written by men. The women and their respective works selected for this study have all made significant contributions to the field of literature and as diverse as they are, speak to the heart of the struggles faced by women around the world. Each woman’s unique past is pivotal to understanding its impact on their writing. Zora best represents the transition of power from the past to modern writers like Alice Walker and Toni Morrison. Similarly, Morrison continues the tradition of creating writings that speak for oppressed women and against the …show more content…
misogynistic ideals purported by a patriarchal society.
Keywords: Hurston, Morrison, woman, Afro-American, oppression, culture, cast, gender.
Introduction:
-Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men.
(Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God)
Dating back to the dawn of time and the inception of the first man, the Christian origin of woman, delineates her creation as Eve of Adam “So God created man in His own image, in the image of God created He him; male and female created He them” (Gen. 1:26). Although man and woman are both created of God, they are different. Hurston supports this idea of difference in her novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God. She adds to the aforementioned excerpt stating “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 [women] act and do things accordingly” (1)
Female writers continue to remind us of the differences between males and females and the separate struggles they face. In his book Canonization, Colonization, Decolonization: A Comparative Study of Political and Critical Works by Minority Writers, Seodial Deena discusses the fate of women, more appropriately, women of color who “had no alternative but to discover and define themselves through their writings in order to liberate themselves” (19). The liberating act of writing for women of color is therefore of greater importance and precedence than for women who have not been classified as racial “other”. The tool of writing for women of color, in the past and presently, continues to create “a new territory for postcolonial women” (Deena 19).
Within this “new territory” the postcolonial woman is able to assert an authority, which had previously manifested itself only in their role as caregiver, mother, worker, or servant. The postcolonial woman, as revisited through female writers of color, exposes the ever present strife engendered by imperialism, canonization, and sexism.
By examining selected works, I seek to reveal the unique experiences of African American women, as well as highlight the varying methods in which the works fight against the triangular establishments of imperialism, canonization, and sexism by examining theme, dialogue, characters, settings, etc., in select novels of Hurston and Morrison.
A study of this nature is important today as that now the atmosphere for writings by women is overflowing. This feat is no less miraculous for African American women, or for that matter, women of color whose battle has, on one hand, mirrored that of European descended women. On the other hand, their battle has been plagued by the unique structure established by colonialism. The modern woman of color has been forced to be “the mule of the world” (Hurston Eyes 14). She has carried the weight of the world for some time now, and her story is very significant.
Zora Neale Hurston
Zora Neale Hurston was born in the American south and came of age in the first all-black township of Eatonville, Florida.
Hurston is widely recognized for her contributions to the “New Negro Movement”, affectionately referred to as the Harlem Renaissance. Hurston’s diverse literary portfolio includes: Jonah’s Gourd Vine, Mules and Men, Their Eyes Were Watching God, and Seraph on the Swanee. Of herself, Hurston notes: “I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes... I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background” (Colored 1031). Hurston is a woman whose literary legacy is defined by the idea that a black woman could demand a space in the world; furthermore, she asserts that the woman did not have to do so in fear of her race or …show more content…
femininity.
In perhaps her greatest literary accomplishment, Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God tells the story of one woman’s journey to find the perfect union she witnesses among objects in nature. The central character, Janie is told an important lesson about the life of women by her grandmother, “So de white man throw down de load and tell de nigger man tuh pick it up. He pick it up because he have to but he don’t tote it. He hand it to his womenfolks. De nigger woman is the mule uh de world so fur as Ah can see” (Hurston Eyes 14).
Hurston’s novel most certainly is best discussed when one notes the protagonist’s goal to achieve natural harmony in her life; harmony she witnesses as a teenager while watching bee’s pollinate fruit blossoms. This achievement of harmony is perhaps the central focus of the work, as that Janie’s actions from that moment are an effort to achieve that level of harmony. Janie’s journey takes her through two failed marriages, abuse, societal shame, and eventual happiness in a final marriage. By the work’s end, we find that Janie has come full circle. She has achieved her oneness with nature and gained her own command of the far off horizon; her destiny “[pulling] it from around the waist of the world and [draping it] around her shoulders” (Hurston Eyes 193).
The life of Janie Crawford is a triumph. It indicates the indomitable spirit of the African American woman to survive. Priscilla Wald, in her article “Colored: The Self-Authorized Language of Difference in Zora Neale Hurston” explains that Hurston’s writing exhibits a unique quality that allows her to “speak from the margins” (80). Referencing the fact that as both a woman and an African American, Hurston inter-plays differences to “facilitate an inspection of cultural 31 identity” (81). Unlike the journey of the black man, Hurston is female, and thus her identity is doubly indemnified by the problematic effects of post-colonialism.
Toni Morrison
As the first African American woman to receive a Nobel Prize for Literature, Morrison continues to defy the limits established by the traditional canon.
The crux of Morrison’s writings stem from her prodigious use of mystical elements in conjunction with her detailing of the African American experience to include: “racial, gender and class conflict” (Dipasquale). Morrison details a unique experience; ranging from the slave narrative of Sethe in Beloved, The Cosey Women in Love, and the troubled youth, Pecola, in The Bluest Eye. Morrison explains that each work must "write for people like me, which is to say black people, curious people, demanding people -- people who can't be faked, people who don't need to be patronized, people who have very, very high criteria” (qtd. in Dipasquale). Therefore, the works of Morrison, have helped to establish the black female voice in a world which continues its attempt to silence
it.
Toni Morisson’s seminal work, Beloved, is a work that helps to connect the African, and to an extent, the American community by recounting a period of American history that has often been difficult at times to discuss. It is through the character Sethe, a former slave that one learns of one of the major hardships created by slavery. Essentially this is a hardship that affects women with ferocity unlike that of their male counterparts. The story of the runaway
Sethe is further complicated by her choice to ensure that her children would not have to return to slavery when her former master finds her in hiding. Sethe uses the only method of control she has, that is, control over the lives of her children, and takes it upon herself to spare them from slavery through death. Fortunately, her attempt is foiled, but not before she is successful in murdering her oldest child, a girl whose headstone reads “Beloved”. The “Beloved” one lives on however in spirit and dominates the house on I24, “the ghost that tried them so” (Morrison Beloved 4). It is not until the reappearance of a man in the house and a strange girl that helps one to understand the choices made by Sethe, and for that matter, the other slave women whose heritage is fashioned by colonization.
Sethe is Morrison’s paradoxical character. She is also the quintessential female slave: appeasing the desires of her children; adhering to the governing powers of her white masters. She is so loyal, in fact, that she receives a gift from the mistress of Sweet Home, “a present from the lady I worked for” (Morrison Beloved 58). Unfortunately, the life afforded to Sethe in Kentucky on the Sweet Home plantation is anything but “sweet”. A chance at freedom leads Sethe to strike out; however, she is unsuccessful at first and becomes the victim of a sexual assault by Sweet Home’s patriarchal power: Schoolteacher, and his boys. The men exact their will over the young slave woman and commit an act of theft that forever scars Sethe. Sethe recounts her experience, repeatedly saying: “those boys came in there and took my milk. That’s what they came in there for. Held me down and took it.” (Morrison Beloved 16). The mother’s breast, which bears milk, the gift of life, is the only thing which the poor slave woman can give to her children. It is a rare and precious gift that some slave women are not able to give their children because they are at times responsible for nursing the children of their owners. According to the power structure established by imperialism, the female slave, like her male counterpart, is a thing to be used. In this case, Sethe embodies a role that countless slave women were forced to take part in: one to amuse the master who wields complete power.
It is because of her understanding of this system that Sethe makes her way to freedom and asserts a level of power and authority that had been previously denied to her, and to an extent, her children. Sethe, on the precipice of destruction is able to bring herself back and begins life anew, free with Baby Suggs. Sethe’s new claim to freedom is short-lived when her former master and rapists (Schoolteacher’s boys) find her and desire to return her to the sugary Sweet Home. It is at this moment that Sethe takes her role as a free woman and essentially a mother to a new level. Sethe decides that her children will find more satisfaction in a freedom filled death rather than a freedom-less life.
Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye is a work which continues to proliferate the desire of the female to obtain not only power, but a sense of place in the world. The novel’s introduction includes an explanation from the narrator, Claudia, who notes: “there were no marigolds in the fall of 1941... It was a long time before my sister and I admitted to ourselves that no green was going to spring from our seeds” (Morrison Bluest Eye 5). This is important because it is the understanding of two female children who have come to terms with their existence as black girls in the world. The meaning behind their revelation essentially means they are unable to bring forth an object of beauty in a place where “the earth itself [was] unyielding” (Morrison Bluest Eye 5).
Other Women of Colour
Jumping across racial lines, the stories of Janie, Celie, and Sethe bear a disturbing resemblance to those of characters in works written by other women of color who are not African American. Strange it seems that these parallels exist despite the differences in race, history, cultural association, and socio-economic status.
Aruhdhati Roy’s The God of Small Things is an interesting novel that outlines the subtle truths of life for Indian women, more appropriately, the lives of all women of color. The female character Ammu is Roy’s representation of the Indian woman whose failure in marriage equals a failed existence for the woman. After all, a “Man-less woman”, moreover, a woman in this predicament due to a divorce “had no position anywhere at all” (Roy 45).
Like Roy, Maxine Hong Kingston discusses the situation of the woman less favored by society. In her collection The Warrior Woman: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, Kingston describes in her first story “No Name Woman” the life of one of her father’s sisters whose presence has been completely erased from the family “We say that your father has all brothers because it is as if she had never been born” (3).
Boundaries become important when discussing the novel Fasting, Feasting by Anita Desai. The work illuminates very real boundaries which control the female within the patriarchal family structure; furthermore, one is able to learn of the peculiarities relating to the female valuation of worth as constructed by society. Desai’s relation of the character Uma reveals that a daughter within the Indian family structure has a role to play. Furthermore, if she is unable to successfully meet the challenges presented by that role, she becomes a burden to her family
Diana Garcia’s book of poetry When Living Was A Labor Camp, revisits the power of bonds between women of color. Through these relationships with other women, García emphasizes that her experience as a Chicana is not singular but shared.
Conclusion
Fundamentally, time is forever bound with change. As time passes so too does change occurs. In relation to the social sphere and women, time has changed much. It is unfortunate that these changes have not equally affected all women. As changes have surfaced within the global community perhaps now is the time to begin the true development of a new multicultural feminism. It is a fact that all women suffer from societal oppression, have been abused and work harder than men to establish their place. The writings of black women continue to provide evidence of the far reaching effects of colonialism. The battle is not over. The battlefield has changed and the warriors have acquired new levels of strength, yet the battle rages on.