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Chapter V
Summation: Envisioning a Harmonious Future
Our mission is to tell the truth at whatever cost
-Richard Wright
Dreams belong to every writer, everywhere, and it was the desire for
recognition, support and community. The African American writer has, of necessity
an individual sense of story even while writing is fighting. The most important and
crucial lesson one has to learn from the African American writers is all about the
lonely, difficult, rewarding- beyond- measure, dangerous, amazing, misunderstood
endeavor and courage. Courage not only in the face of a society and a world that often
seeks to silence- the silence and complexity and beauty of the face of the far and
narrow-mindedness and orthodoxy that bedevils ones own community. Writing is
fighting. But is also building and loving and confirming and creating. Its a job.
A lifestyle. An honourable and sacred way of living in the world. Zora Neale
Hurston exemplifies all the contradictions, all the peaks and valleys of the writer‟s
life. She made her life, an epitaph, and her spirits remain vivid, combustible,
energizing and inspiring, continually altering the world.
Zora Neale Hurston has led the way in engaging the significances of
identity and experiences within relationships. Her novel‟s literary content is
engaged in elucidating relationships that can help rediscover the significance of
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human values. “She sought to demonstrate the originality and genius of her
people” (Pondrom 201). As a writer, she has the potentials to guide the reader
towards the discovery of how the position of humanity changes with time and
human experiences connect men with one another and with the community at
large. Hurston‟s fiction leaves the readers with “fresh realization that races,
regardless of pigmentation, behave like human beings” (Hurst 7).
The purpose of her writings is to raise the consciousness of man, by learning
to live his life fully and struggle to evolve a free self of his own. The Hurston‟s
analysis of her characters indicate Alice Walker‟s belief: “the quality I feel is most
characteristic of Zora‟a work : racial health – a sense of Black people as – complete,
complex, undiminished human beings”(xii).
Hurston‟s characters choose to fight oppression, proving that they have an
imposing self. To her, novel has been an important vehicle through which race,
class and gender inequalities are exposed paving the way to attain self-identity.
The notion of self-identity is both a psychological and a communication process.
To psychologist Carl Jung “the individualization process brings up the true
personality of a person, it makes him an individual. Individualization generally has
a profound healing effect on the person” (symbols 433). This process of self-discovery
is a search for totality, where an individual comes in terms with his consciousness,
recognizing the significance of building relationship with the whole cosmos. Jung
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called the Self „Imagodei‟. It acts as the source of dreams, with ability to perceive
future or guide the individual in the present.
Erik Erikson proposes that an individual‟s question like “Who am I? What
do I believe in?” reflects his/her crisis of personality development. Erikson‟s
“identity crisis” can be resolved positively, leading to secure sense of security by
constructing optimistic relationships with family and community. In his process to
investigate the formation identity, he affirms:
culture plays a key role in identity in identity formation, one that
goes beyond the simple idea that we view ourselves as belonging to
certain cultural groups. Our cultural upbringing influences the very
way we view concepts such as “self and Identity”. (424)
To G. H. Mead,
The individual experiences himself as such, not directly but only
indirectly, from the particular standpoints of other individual
members of the same social group or from the generalized
standpoint of the group as a whole to which he belongs. For he
enters his own experience as a self . . . not by becoming a subject to
himself, but only in so far as he first becomes an object to himself
just as other individuals are objects to him or are in his experience.
(Mind, Self and Society 138)
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Like psychologists, philosophers too have reflected on the concept of
identity. To begin with Descartes‟ famous mantra is “I am, I exist”. This became
the fundamental element of western philosophy. Descrates believed that doubting
ones own existence serves as the proof of the reality of existence. Construction of
the world begins with the discovery of the self.
Aristotle in The Nichemachean Ethics argues that virtues pervade a life of
self-actualization. He believes that it is the state of character which guides man
towards self-actualization. In turn, self-actualization is attained by ones realization
of his full potential and ability to pursue it. He strictly believes in utilizing positive
potential; potentials that benefit an individual and the society.
Man can gain happiness (eudomania) by discovering his virtue. His excellence
lies in his ability to attain self-realization through reasoning. Aristotle explains:
…virtue, then is a state of character concerned with choice, lying in
a mean, i.e., the mean relative to us this being determined by a
rational principle, and by that principle by which the man of
practical wisdom would determine it. (Aristotle 25)
David Hume says, “It must be some one impression that gives rise to every
real idea. But self or person is not any one impression, but that to which are several
impressions and ideas are supposed to have a reference” (Hume 251). To him, the
self exists in relation to other objects and environments. He believes that imagination is
the best avenue to self-discovery. The creative spark or imagination of a person
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allows that freedom to come in terms with their true self. Thus, to Hume
imagination takes individuals to the true knowledge of themselves. To quote:
The identity, which we ascribe to the mind of man, is only a
fictitious one, and of a like kind with that which we ascribe to
vegetables and animal bodies. It cannot, therefore, have a different
origin, but must proceed from a like operation of the imagination
upon its objects. (Hume 259)
The idea is also found in the writings of many religious philosophers.
The significance of self-discovery is quite widespread, it is found in various
forms. Kant believed in the idea of noumenal self, Hegel‟s idea of development of
self-consciousness from consciousness and realization of absolute spirit and
T.H. Green‟s self-perfection through relationship with fellow-citizens. These
philosophers believed that man‟s life is better understood through his realization
of his potentials in accordance with the laws of native.
A probe into great psychologists and philosophers views on the significance
of man‟s attainment of self-discovery does not in any way underrate Hurston‟s
idea of peace and harmony in the world through self-discovery.
Hurston‟s novel emphasizes the experiences of individuals as the means to
self-dicovery. To quote Janie‟s words:
It‟s uh known fact, you got tuh go there tuh know there. Yo‟ papa
and yo‟ mama and nobody else can‟t tell yuh and show yuh. Two
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things everybody‟s got tuh do fuh theyselves. They got tuh go tuh
God, and they got tuh find out about livin‟ fuh theyselves.
(TEWWG 332)
Analysis of Hurston‟s novels proves that her writings comprise a broad and
diverse literary tradition including a narrative of the characters personal growth
directed towards discovering the self. Hurston like any other black female writer
was involved in imagining the black women as a „whole‟ character or „self‟.
As Cyrena N.Pondrom in The Role of Myth declares, “Black folklore itself
was the specific, concrete – and personal-way in which Hurston could demonstrate
and celebrate black cultural expression of basic human patterns” (201). Hurston‟s
interest in the basic southern folklore became the basis for her first novel Jonah’s
Gourd Vine. Hurston through the novel traces the cultural insights that brought back
the cultural traditions which was fading under a homogeneous and dominating
Western tradition. Virginia M. Burke in her essay Zora Neale Hurston and Fannie
Hurst As They Saw Each Other writes, “Hurston‟s skill in delineation reveals her
characters simultaneously as Negroes and people” (445).
Hurston with the help of her anthropological training makes use of its
scientific devices to include traditional African-American tradition with its roots in
ancient Africa, into contemporary literary arena. Her celebration of John‟s
involvement in Black communal culture represents her objection to the Western
attempts to universalize its practices. John‟s active participation in his
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community's tradition presents him as a forbearer to maintain the community by
providing a suitable model for preserving its culture. Hurston promoted an appreciation
of black cultural assessments and an end to an aesthetic that considered blacks as
bizarre issue.
Hurston‟s use of folklore and orality shows the ways, in which her characters
speak, echoes the ways in they navigate a place for the culture amidst a dominant
one. The characters use of black folklore as the perspective from which the story is
told presents them as real and full of life sharing their experiences in their journey
of self-discovery. The narrator in fact regularly breaks the rules of the third person‟s
point of view, by becoming the insider and outsider of the community. Many a
times “Jonah’s Gourd Vine has typically been criticized because Hurston‟s love of
language overwhelms her plot and characterization” (Ciuba 120). However the
search for identity of the characters along with the various forms, black folklore
acts as the foundation, which helps the characters find their voice.
Hurston‟s of black folklore is enhanced by her using of characters from
her Eatonville Anthology a collection of stories and anecdotes shared within the
community. Some of these characters like Hambo, Mrs. Pearson, Mayor Joe
Clarke among others were real and were considered as models valid for the
community. Application of folklore through sermons and folk-rhymes celebrates
the rich heritage of African American culture without distorting the purpose of the
narrator. Hurston‟s narrative becomes texts as they “take as their subject their life
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of a community . . . and portray the minute and quite ordinary processes through
which the community maintains itself as an entity” (Zagarell 499). At the same
time the community replicates the joy by becoming artist, participating in the
narrative construction of the text. The narrative in Jonah’s gourd Vine is parallel
to the real-life of the community, as the major storyline is the replica of Hurston‟s
parent‟s story and the secondary characters resemble the characters in Eatonville
Anthology.
Hurston‟s use of dialect and folk speech drew praise from Alain Locke, he
praises her “gift for poetic phrase and rare dialect” and Sherley Anne Williams
writes,
to characterize [Hurston‟s] diction solely in terms of exotic „dialect
spellings is to miss her deftness with language. In the speech of her
characters, black voices – whether rural or urban, northern or
southern – come alive. Her fidelity to diction, metaphor and syntax. .
. rings, even after forty years, with an aching familiarity that is a
testament to Hurston‟s skill and to the durability of black speech.
(Their eyes ix)
Their Eyes Were Watching God is a self-conscious effort by Hurston not
only to subvert patriarchal discourse but also to give voice to African-American
women. Janie Crawford in the novel is certainly one of the earliest heroic black
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women in the African American literary tradition. Hurston gives Janie as Booth
coins “freedom from” external dominating forces, and the “freedom to” voice
against such restraints.
This is certainly a reversal of an almost universal patriarchal
historical and literary tradition, a reversal that transcends the
boundaries of Janie‟s ethnic community the subversion of a tradition
that comes from the mouth of the author herself. (Johnson 49)
Janie unlike women created within the confines of the “cult of true womanhood”
is never submissive or a passive victim of male domination. Janie‟s story is
presented as “a model of black female development” (Meese 61).
The narrative strategy employed by Hurston, with Janie telling her story to
her friend Pheoby, has become vital as Janie narrates to her people, the rural black
Southerners the attainment of her self-identity. To Elizabeth Mease it is an outcome
of “colour consciousness of the storyteller-writer‟s role in constructing the history
of a people through language” (61).
Their Eyes Were Watching God incorporates two narrators, one the public
narrator addressing the reader and the other a private narrator addressing a specific
audience the public narrator as Cyrenna N.Pondrom in The Role of Myth states, is
a person of folk wisdom and rich black experience who is able to represent the
minds and speech of Pheoby, Janie, Nanny and „Old Buzzard Parson‟ in turn
integrating all into a vision of experience that is finally mythic (188).
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Thus the public narrator becomes a multi voiced creator, obviously
speaking from a female perspective as the narrator‟s voice revolves around the
experiences of Janie Crawford.
Hurston‟s use of free indirect discourse, where the narrator adopts
the tone or phraseology of a character, incorporating it within the
narrator‟s own speech infiltrates the character‟s discourse . . . where
the thoughts, words or perceptions represented are those of the
character, but the syntax is that of the narrative voice. (Lanser 186)
The use of free indirect discourse in Their Eyes were watching God remains
as an important means of revealing the central theme, serving as a bridge between
the author and the readers. The narrator speaks through the minds of the characters,
becoming an “involved observer” (Johnson 64). The involved observer‟s narration
takes the form of psychonarration, which Doritt Cohn defines as “the narrators
discourse about a character‟s consciousness” (Transparent minds 14). The narration
reflects Janie‟s innate comprehension and ingenious capacity.
The Narrator‟s observation by probing into Janie‟s mind presents her in the
process of categorizing her feelings and values, liberating her from both internal
and external oppression and espousal of those facets of culture and tradition that
authorize her own voice. Hurston verbalizes an opposition between Janie‟s thinking
and those externally forced. The oppositions between the inside-personal, female
and individual feelings of Janie, which associated in her search for identity and the
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outside – male domination, familial influences and communal experiences hindering
her self-discovery, is all exemplified by Hurston‟s rhetorical constructs and
linguistic devices While discussing Hurston‟s style, it is worth mentioning Gordon
E. Thompson‟s assertion that “personification appears to be a major component of
Hurston‟s literary style as witnessed by its presence and function in her four
novels” (741). Hurston uses personification by making her characters project their
intention, qualms and needs on inanimate things or even other characters.
Henderson states that for a long time,
black women have been discounted or unaccounted for in the
„traditions‟ of black, women‟s and American Literature as well as in
the contemporary literary-critical dialogue…. Black women writers
have begun to receive token recognition as they are subsumed under
the category of women in the feminist critique. (343)
Despite this Cheryl Wall acknowledges that “What makes Hurston‟s life so
emblematic is the capacity for self-invention . . . at a time when the terms „black‟,
„women‟ and „artist‟ were never complimentary (Women 201).
As Stephen Butterfield in Black Autobiography in America explains the period
from 1901 to 1961, known as the second phase of the African-American writing,
in which writers including Hurston searched for their unified self. The autobiographies
produced by the writers of this period “are more literary and introspective, the
styles and sharply individualized, and the identity more alienated, not only from
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white America, but from other blacks” (Butterfield 7). Hurston‟s Their Eyes Were
Watching God partly autobiographical with the use of a dual discourse, the
narrative voice and the authorial voice speaks of both Janie‟s and Hurston‟s
ultimate quest for identity. A discovery of the self accomplished through their
relationships in life.
Hurston‟s, Moses, Man of the Mountain incorporates the ecclesiastical and
biblical diction which indicate the ways in which folk sermon influence the
narrative. The text is written in the language of the folk with similes, metaphors,
proverbs and aphorisms as an integral and important part of the narrative.
Moses got up early next morning and took the stones and went up to
the top of the mountain and kept company with God again. And when
he came down with the law in his hands, the skin of his face was
iridescent and shining, but Moses didn‟t know it himself, that is,
until the people gazed at him in awe and talked about his shining
face. So they knew that God had covered Moses with His hand in the
cleft of the rock and passed His Glory by Moses. (MMM 554)
This passage is abundant in Biblical imagery, rhetoric and conjures up a picture of
God. The narrative and the dramatic expressions together render a poetic quality.
The novel with innumerable passages like this heightens the narrative, creating
sermonic effect. James Weldon Johnson states that a sermon is “a progression of
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rhythmic words” (5). The narrative of Moses, Man of the Mountain with messages
and testimonials is rhythmic in structure.
The lines:
Oh, Miriam played the cymbal over the Red Sea
Oh, Miriam played the cymbal over the Red Sea
Oh, Miriam played the cymbal over the Red Sea
Oh, Miriam played the cymbal over. (513)
Shows that the rhythm of a sermon is reinforced by repetition. As Rosenberg
asserts, “Repetition not only comforts, ofcourse, but it adds to the mounting
emotional intensity nearly as much as does rhythm” (106).
The text is enriched with many narrative techniques but the ecclesiastical
and Biblical structures certainly underscore the major themes. The narrator and
Moses, as the preacher emphasize the values of individualism and stresses that an
individual should look at and follow the inner urge to direct his own destiny.
Likewise, Hurston‟s characters explore unconscious patterns, motivations
and goals that instruct their conscious attitudes and actions which they exhibit
through communication with others. The nature of the psyche and human traits
hinder the actualization of the in been urge for fulfillment in a man. To mend this
damage caused discovering and dealing with what lies beneath the surface of the
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consciousness becomes imperative. The journey of personal growth, actualization
and maturation involves time, confidence audacity.
Hurston believes that it is imprudent to despair of the human race. She believes
that good life can be achieved through positive thinking and realization of the self.
By utilizing her strong humanist heritage, she provides a better understanding of
human problems and their possible solutions. Hurston‟s are vibrant, and stimulating,
persistently alter the world. Hurston through her novels redefines power and
envisions a society based on individual worth and equal prospects. She makes
incisive cultural critiques of her society, deconstructing conventions ideas of
power. Her representation of rural characters offer by penetrating insight into the
nuances of human relationships, the psychological dynamics of the exploited
people. Thus, provides a commentary on the universal human determination to
survive and resist oppression, in order to attain self-realisation.
The African American novel maintains its desire for innovations in the field
of linguistics and rhetoric; re-inventing narrative strategies and creating new social
meanings. Probing into the boundaries of literary achievements of African
American literary tradition, emerges the truth that novel writing is an open one –
comprising traditions of both past and present, exhibiting a serious relationship
between oral and written forms of discourse.
The use of culturally specific African-American oral language and its
euphonic sound-transcription creates a flowing language style, very musical in
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sound. The narrative language challenges American assumptions, as the text itself
represents a relationship to time, language and history.
As Lillie P. Howard states,
It is true that all of the major characters [in Seraph on the Suwanee]
are white, but as in her other novels, Hurston simply seems to be
writing about people, about individuals coming to terms with
themselves, regardless of their color. (147)
To the same Deborah G. Plant agrees by saying, “Hurston perceived the
individual, not the group, as the basic social and political unit and the point of
origin for socio-political change” (Every Tub 13).
Hurston‟s use of the traditional blues into her novels the “blues” refers to a
technique, a musical form and an emotion leaving behind an impressionistic effect.
In Hurston‟s fictional works it rather becomes a “creative celebration of not only
the overcoming of hardship but of the nature of human existence in an imperfect
world ” (Tracy 123). With the influence of the blues, emotions like loneliness,
frustration and isolation find their ways into Hurston‟s Seraph on the Suwanee.
The novel is primarily about voice, the emergence of a women‟s voice, a women
discovering her self and expressing her freely in a language of idioms. Lowe
asserts that Hurston abstained from the “careful, measured Cadences of Du Bois‟s
talented tenth” for an unpretentious discourse (Lowe 3). He further states that
“In this sense alone she altered the terms of black-white literary discourse” (Lowe 3).
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Seraph on the Suwanee basically dealing with a women‟s search for „self‟
through its language reflects Mikhail Bakhtin‟s idea of double-voiced discourse.
Bakhtin in his Discourse Typology discusses the double-voiced discourse used by
specifically women writers of Black literature. Discourse is double-voiced; it means
that the text has yet another function than just to describe of the real world. This
meaning simply reveals the author‟s intention in the text he wrote. Bakhtin understands
parody as a double-voiced discourse where the critical voice of the writer is heard
simultaneously with the text itself. As Simon Dentith puts it, in a double-voiced
discourse, “we can hear [...] simultaneous traces both of the characters‟ speech and
the author‟s attitude towards it” (Dentith 8). Likewise Hurston conceptualizes
reality, giving freedom to the individual character allowing them to be subversive.
Seraph on the Suwanee is “a dense and shifting rhetorical texture that
challenges readers to abandon preconceptions concerning the desirability of a
unified or theoretically consistent narrative voice” (Werner 230 -31).
Claudia Tate observes that on the outset the novel,
seems to support the dominant culture‟s presumptions about
whiteness and patriarchal virtue… But if we probe Seraph‟s
transgression of the expected black‟s social setting and its
repudiations of machosistic female desire that sustains patriarchal
constructions of romantic love, we will find that a more subversive
story emerges from the novel‟s conservative surface…the text
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undermines the conservative plot by subverting or carnivalizing the
racial and gender politics that the plot explicitly supports (151).
Through stylistic language and structural elements the text instead of
looking at Arvay as a helpless and submissive woman suggests a double voiced
discourse. A discourse when probed deeply shows that Arvay attains self-definition.
The last lines of the novel “the look of the sun with confidence. Yes, she was
doing what the big light had told her to do. She was serving and meant to serve.
She made the sun welcome to come on in, then snuggled down beside her
husband” (SS 920).
Tate affirms this by stating,
Heterosexual pleasure gratifies the novels conscious narrative, and
the pleasure of the gaze of the lost mother, symbolized as the sun
satisfies and terminates unconscious textual desire [and probably
Hurston‟s too]. (175)
Hurston generates an individual voice and style thoroughly rooted in
African-American tradition, extending communal concerns through the voice of an
individual member of the community. As Hutchison states, Hurston‟s greatest
accomplishment remains her extraordinary command of language, her success in
dramatically transforming the uses of literary “dialect” and its relation to narrative
voice. (60)
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Henry Louis Gates Jr. in his The Signifying Monkey argues that paying
attention to the vernacular language of the African Americans is the best way to
understand their literature. Based on this, he classifies Hurston‟s Their Eyes Were
Watching God as a “Speakerly text”. A “speakerly text” he says is “a text whose
rhetorical strategy is designed to represent an oral tradition” (181). Adhering to
this quality of her text, her characters play the role of preachers reflecting a preacherly
rhetoric. The preachers in her works give voice to the marginalized and oppressed
dispossessed of their own voices.
Hurston in her essay The Sanctified Church explores the rhetorical nature
of black churches, which through their worship suggests that the expression of self
is achieved through the interaction with a community.
Beneath the seeming informality of religious worship there is a set
formality. Sermons, prayers, moans and testimonies have their
definite forms. The individual may hang as many new ornaments
upon the traditional forms as he likes, but the audience would be
disagreeably surprised if the form were abandoned. (83)
This was the connection between the individual as a preacher and the community.
Hurston‟s works provide a world view of how things are or should be in the
world of human life. Its global concepts that construct values, morals and rules of
how individuals or groups should act and relate within their world. Hurston subverts
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the common notion that the life is made of a set of rules and guidelines. She avers
that man should make an active process of creating an outlook of life using his
own intellect, analyzing through balanced and conscious decisions.
As an anthropologist, Hurston has most frequently employed the term „identity‟
to refer to the idea of selfhood based on the uniqueness and individuality which
makes a person different from others. She believes that the construction of an
individual sense of self is a personal choice of considering who and what to associate
with. Her approach to self discovery liberates an individual in his recognition of his
role in social interaction and the construction of identity. Her characters struggle
to survive until they attain a self-realisation of their intrinsic personal worth and
determination to resist oppressive forces coming in their way. Hurston‟s Lucy,
John, Janie and Arvay‟s in the process of construction of the self consider their
personal choice of who or what to relate with.
In Black Feminist Criticism: Perspectives on Black Women Writers,
Barbara Christian points out that “a persistent and major theme throughout Afro
American women‟s literature [is an] attempt to define and express our totality
rather than being defined by others” (139). Through this attempt, Hurston has
become the foremother to many African American women writers. As a writer,
Hurston finds perception that can transform personal and communal relations
Hurston‟s novels and folklorists collections are glowing examples of the rich
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cultural legacy of the south. They are a testament to her artistic skills and concern
to preserve her culture and tradition.
Mary Ellen B. Lewis declares that Hurston is an,
extraordinary individual- in advance of her time as independent
woman and as vociferous advocate of her own culture. Belligerent,
dogmatic, dynamic both in her work-fiction, drama, journalism,
social science- and in her interactions with others, she knew who she
was and what mattered. (Review 73)
She was a Black women who “followed her own road, believed in her own
Gods, pursued her own dreams and refused to separate herself from „common
people‟ (Collins 267). Thus, in her mission to “redefine what it means to be
human”, Hurston along with her other artistic quality depends mainly on religion,
as a universal form of human expression (West 33).
Analyses of Hurston‟s novels prove that her writings comprise a broad and
diverse literary tradition including a narrative of the characters personal growth
directed towards discovering the self. Hurston like any other black female writer
was involved in imagining the black women as a „whole‟ character or „self‟.
According to Kimberly Rae Connor,
Every age and culture displays various degrees of continuity and
discontinuity in religious expression with respect to certain historical
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200
trends, and any examination into religious modes of being must
accept these particularities in order to gain an understanding of the
universal forms and feelings that underlie them. Once one becomes
aware of the forces of oppression that operate both within and
without to deny people full humanity and recovers a sense of the
sacrality of each life, one begins to realize that the movement of the
human agenda is inclusive and that all spiritual seekers are the same
in the eyes of God. (Conversions viii)
Along the same lines Hurston created characters who to achieve selfhood
turns to one‟s self and religious tradition. They develop self-identity through the
religious consciousness of their culture. To her this mingling of religion and art is
that “the religious service is a conscious art expression” (Sanctified Church 81).
Hurston‟s intimate and deep personal recognition of religious faith, as a means for
an individual‟s search for self expression and identity is emphasized in all her
novels. Her recording of the journey of self-discovery of each of her characters
focuses on their struggle to gain individuality and self-expression.
Contrary to the charges leveled against Hurston, for her not paying
attention on the socially oppressed condition of the African Americans,
Hemenway acknowledges her literary worth as,
Even in the face of a historically brutal experience, black people
affirmed their humanity by creating an expressive communication
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system that fostered self-pride and taught techniques of transformation,
adaptation and survival. The tales of Mules and Men [and her
novels] prove that human beings are not able to live without some
sense of cultural cohesion and individual self-worth, no matter how
hard their circumstances. (Mules and Men xx)
Valerie Boyd‟s in her assessment of Hurston‟s novels and their characters
states that in “Jonah’s Gourd Vine, Zora unabashedly paid homage to the John
Hurston of the world, the men and women who served not only as God‟s trombones
but as the booming bardic voices of an often-silenced people” (Boyd 259).
Her debut novel Jonah’s Gourd Vine presents the “demographics of migrant
labour” (761).
Martyn Bone in The Extended South of Black Folk asserts that Through
Pearson‟s frequent changes of location and employment, Hurston constructs a
detailed narrative cartography of migrant labour patterns around the rural South –
patterns more localized but no less “monumental” than those including the more
familiar Great Migration to the Urban North” (761).
Their Eyes Were Watching God – in its critique of black male-female
relationships – is also protest literature. Hurston was not wailing White man,
Listen! . . . but she was sounding a wakeup call, just as urgent for her own people.
In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston raised crucial feminist questions
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202
concerning the intimidation and oppression inherent in too many relationships –
and she challenged black men (and everyone else) to listen and then to act and do
things accordingly” (Boyd 304).
Moses, Man of the Mountain is about “largely a self-made man. Nothing
has been given to him; he has attained divine power from his own efforts, from his
own questioning, from his own inner urge to seek and to know” (Boyd 333). It “is
full of ongoing, passionate debate about the very nature of freedom. Moses gives
up his personal freedom to lead the Israelites out of bondage” (335).
Seraph on the Suwanee “is full of rich language that readers had come to
expect of Hurston, though she renders the white rural idiom slightly different fron
the black idiom of her previous books” (Boyd 391). It “has moments of breathtaking
brilliance” (394).
The novels analyzed here reveal a recurring theme. The theme connected
to share human experiences deal with an awareness of the self. Her exploration of
“who we are as a people, to reveal to us not only how far we had come in our
treatment of one another but how far we have to go” (Campbell 20). Her characters
remarkable facility with narrative and dialogue seek to discover who they are and
their relation to the world at large. Human experiences of love and betrayal,
separation and union play a vital role leading the characters towards growth and
self-discovery. At the end of their journey of self-discovery Hurston‟s characters
realize that:
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203
no man may make another free. Freedom was something internal.
The outside signs were just signs and symbols of the man inside. All
you could do was to give the opportunity for freedom and the man
himself must make his own emancipation. (MMM 590)
Hurston was a strong believer of the legitimacy of folk culture and this of
course is evident in all her works. Hemenway in his biography argues in support
of Hurston by comparing Shakespeare and Hurston. He writes: “Shakespeare
depended heavily on English tradition, [and] that midsummer-night observances
were just as much a part of English folklore and folkways as hoodoo practices in
Brer-Rabbit are part of Afro-American folkways. She repudiated the psychologically
captive blacks who thought that acquiring degrees and losing black dialect would
be marks of intelligence (Hemenway 206).
The plot construction in Hurston‟s novels is chronological, often dealing
with the character‟s development in their journey of self-discovery. “As refreshing
in its rhetorical style as it is in its focus” (Rohrbach 426). They move from ignorance to
knowledge recognizing their own identity. To a certain extent, the plot
incorporates Bildungsroman - a term,
Widely used by German critics, it refers to a novel which is an
account of the youthful development of a hero or a heroine (usually
the former). It describes the process by which maturity is achieved
through the various ups and downs of life. (Cuddon 88)
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204
John in Jonah’s Gourd Vine discovers his weakness and resolves to change
but it takes him a lifetime to realize this. Janie in Their Eyes Were Watching God
comes to an awareness of her self after her three marriages. Moses in Moses, Man
of the Mountain understands his relationship with his community and with God.
Finally, Arvay in Seraph on the Suwanee matures into a woman gaining her voice
to resist oppression and to make her own choices in life. John Ernest in his book
review states that “Hurston‟s work demands intimacy, a reader engaged in a
personal relationship with author and text” (637).
Portrayal of these major characters showing their gradual development
from their state of confusion regarding the goals in life to a matured state of a
whole individual; experiencing the various emotional and physical conflicts in life
reflects Hurston‟s universal concept that self progresses as one that has a past, a
present and a future with relationship to others.
As Mary Helen Washington describes Hurston as a writer who,
believed wholeheartedly in the beauty of black expression and
traditions and in the psychological wholeness in black life. With
little to guide her except fidelity to her own experience, she
documented the survival of love, loyalty, joy, humor and affirmation
as well as tragedy in black life. (I Love Myself 23)
Dust Tracts on a Road, an autobiography exposes Hurston as a writer with
a purpose. Her personal experiences become the source behind her development
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205
as an artist. Her outlook on life, guided by her sense of humanity, deviates her
from the usual trend of the African American writers. “In re-creating her relationship
to Hurston as a reciprocal and interactive one, Walker dramatizes Hurston‟s
literary role as the undoes of inessential and decisive hierarchies” (273). Instead of
speaking on race problems of her days, Hurston was focused towards a better
purpose, a purpose of revealing to man ways to liberate him self from oppression
of any kind and attain self-identity. In her own words:
I found that I had no need of either class or race prejudice, those
scourges of humanity. The solace of easy generalization was taken
from me, but I received the richer gift of individualism. When I
have been made to suffer or when I have been made happy by
others. I have known that individuals are responsible for that, and
not races. All clumps of people to turn out to be individuals close
inspection. (DTOR 323)
Hurston‟s autobiographical impulses in her fictional works, explains her
continuous need to assert her „self‟ in a world which has denied her the existence
of the „self‟. Paradoxical in nature her novels grant her the freedom to create a
sustained vision challenging conflicting ideals and visions the result being,
“humanistic formation of cultural memory”, and discovery of the self (Graham 5).
Hurston as a humanist emphasizes an individuals positive qualities, the
capacity for positive growth and the freedom to choose any destiny. She stresses
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206
on the idea that an individual has the ability to control his/her own life rather than
being manipulated by others. Hurston as Alice Gambrell affirms is “perhaps
designed, to generate resistance and ambivalence rather than invitation or
consolation” to her readers (Reviews 243). This tremendous potential for selfawareness is achieved by being loving, nurturing and helpful. Self is a product of a
person‟s interaction with others. “Just as a man considers his reflection in a mirror
and uses the reflection to acquire information about his physical nature, so he uses
other people‟s attitudes to him as a measure of what he is really like” (Hargreaves 5).
Hurston‟s notion of self echoes the above mentioned Charles Horton Cooley‟s
idea of self. Hurston‟s understanding of the true value of human relationships is
that they serve as cursor to unconditional love. Her belief in forgiveness and
acceptance of all parts of oneself will ultimately lead to love for all other human
beings. Improving internal relationships with one‟s own thoughts, beliefs and
purpose is the path to envision a harmonious living.
Scope for Further Study
1. Autobiographical Elements
2. Folklore and Oral Tradition
3. Characterisations
4. Affirmation of Culture and Tradition
5. Style and Technique
6. Humanism
7. Feministic Perspectives
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207
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