Zora Neale Hurston is the first to discover and identify the wisdom and language buried in the black folklore of black culture. She shows a great regard for her Black folk culture. She uses her knowledge of her folklore not only to liberate women from racial and gender oppression but also inculcates a sense of ethnic pride in her people. In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston infuses the empowering aspects, of traditional African and Afro- American’s folk culture and pastoral, as these are very closely interrelated. Folk culture derives its rootedness from the pastoral. This novel reveals the priceless moral wisdom inherent in the experiences of uneducated rural southern women. A close reading of Their Eyes Were Watching God offers an insight …show more content…
One can understand from the novel that Afro- Americans, though economically poor, but have a rich folk heritage and pastoral ethics. In this novel, Hurston has demonstrated the strength of her folk culture in pastoral setting. Folklores and strong pastoral values keep the Afro-American hopes alive and help them survive and escape even slavery. Blending her anthropological training and literary power she has reiterated her belief in the pastoral life values and established the priceless value of Afro-American folk culture. She asserts that Blacks could survive independent of white society with their asset of both pastoral and folklores. The novel focuses primarily on representations of nature and treatment of pastoral. Her pastoral setting is thus an evidence of black people’s survivability in America. This paper is aimed at exploring the attempts made by Hurston through (re) envisioning the pastoral in her novel by retrieving pastoral ethics and cultural heritage, which the mainstream culture has overlooked and even tried to neglect as irrelevant to the larger national …show more content…
In the Southern pastoral tradition, the land inside the boundaries of the plantation is figured as the ideal middle state, a balance between the howling wilderness and the effete city that provides a stable and static refuge from the chaos of time and the outside world. The act of fencing, particularly in the pastoral tradition, helps man to symbolically domesticate land and nature by delineating boundaries and imposing a sense of order on previously “wild” terrain. It is usually assumed that in the pastoral literary genre celebration of rural provides a structural framework for exploring further binaries. Hurston, however, repeatedly shows us the double nature of fencing: fences disrupt an existing order while signaling the creation of a new order that threatens the wildness of the scrub, as well as the communal values of its inhabitants. The fences symbolize the modern society that Hurston seeks to escape, and their encroachment into the virtually uninhabited scrub region of north central Florida entails, in her view, the threat of subjugation for nature and women alike.
Hurston born in Alabama, in the first year or two of her life, her family moved to Eatonville, Florida, a
What is one’s idea of the perfect marriage? In Zora Neal Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie has a total of three marriages and her best marriage was to Tea Cake. Janie’s worst and longest marriage was to Joe Starks where she lost her dream and was never happy. The key to a strong marriage is equality between each other because in Janie’s marriage to Joe she was not treated equally, lost apart of herself and was emotionally abused, but her and Tea Cake's marriage was based on equality and she was able to fully be herself.
..., she found her identity. It did not come easy for Janie. It took her years to find out who she really was.
Zora Hurston’s novel “Their Eyes Were Watching God” depicts the journey of a young woman named Janie Crawford’s journey to finding real love. Her life begins with a romantic and ideal view on love. After Janie’s grandmother, Nanny, soon grows fearful of Janie’s newfound sexuality and quickly marries Janie off to Logan Killicks, an older land owner with his own farm. Janie quickly grows tired of Logan and how he works her like a slave instead of treating her as a wife and runs away with Joe Starks. Joe is older than Janie but younger than Logan and sweet talks Janie into marring him and soon Joe becomes the mayor of an all African American town called Eatonville. Soon Joe begins to force Janie to hide not only her
Their Eyes Were Watching God is written by Zora Neale Hurston in the year of 1937. In the novel, the main character is Janie Crawford. Janie has been treated differently by others during her life because of how she was raised and the choices she has made throughout her life. The community is quick to judge her actions and listen to any gossip about Janie in the town. Janie is known to be “classed off” from other members in her community in various ways. “Classed off” means to be separate or isolated from other people.
Like Irish oral tradition, storytelling is an incredibly important event in both African and African American communities. Through this storytelling the principles and values of African American culture was depicted. The reader sees the dichotomy between Hurston’s use of the third person narrative
“There are years that ask questions and years that answer.” From the moment one is born, one begins to form their identity through moments and experiences that occur throughout the years. In Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, Janie’s identity of independence arises through her past marriages through the words and actions of her husbands.
This paper examines the drastic differences in literary themes and styles of Richard Wright and Zora Neale Hurston, two African--American writers from the early 1900's. The portrayals of African-American women by each author are contrasted based on specific examples from their two most prominent novels, Native Son by Wright, and Their Eyes Were Watching God by Hurston. With the intent to explain this divergence, the autobiographies of both authors (Black Boy and Dust Tracks on a Road) are also analyzed. Particular examples from the lives of each author are cited to demonstrate the contrasting lifestyles and experiences that created these disparities, drawing parallels between the authors’ lives and creative endeavors. It becomes apparent that Wright's traumatic experiences involving females and Hurston's identity as a strong, independent and successful Black artist contributed significantly to the ways in which they chose to depict African-American women and what goals they adhered to in reaching and touching a specific audience with the messages contained in their writing.
Campbell, Josie P. Student Companion to Zora Neale Hurston. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2001. 63-68. Print.
Zora Neale Hurston once said, “Happiness is nothing but everyday living seen through a veil.” In post-slavery African American society, this statement was unusual, as society was focused on materialistic values. The “veil” Hurston mentions is a lens used to sift through one’s beliefs; to help one understand that what they have is more important than what they don’t. Hurston alludes the veil in her novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, in the form of a fish-net, saying “She pulled in her horizon like a great fish-net. Pulled it in from around the waist of the world and draped it over her shoulders" (193). Just like the veil, the “fish-net” allows one to sift through one’s beliefs, deciding what is important and what is not. Essentially, Hurston
Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God is greatly praised by most critics today but was held in a different light when first published. Popular black authors during Hurston’s era held the most disdain for Hurston’s novel. Famous writer Richard Wright harshly criticized the book as a “minstrel technique that makes the ‘white folks’ laugh. Her characters eat and laugh and cry and work and kill; they swing like a pendulum eternally in that safe and narrow orbit in which America likes to see the Negro live: between laughter and tears” (Wright, Between Laughter and Tears). Wright dominated the 40’s decade of writing for blacks (Washington, Foreword). His review explains Hurston book is feeding the whites additional reasons why black are the “lower” race. This was the complete opposite idea of what blacks strived to be seen as and as such Hurston’s novel would be unread by the black culture. This made Wright’s review the most crippling towards Hurston because it was intensely harsh and his influence greatly urge the readers to dismiss Their Eyes Were Watching God leading to its disappearance.
In Zora Neale Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, the character of Janie Crawford experiences severe ideological conflicts with her grandmother, and the effects of these conflicts are far-reaching indeed. Hurston’s novel of manners, noted for its exploration of the black female experience, fully shows how a conflict with one’s elders can alter one’s self image. In the case of Janie and Nanny, it is Janie’s perception of men that is altered, as well as her perception of self. The conflict between the two women is largely generational in nature, and appears heart-breakingly inevitable.
Within her article, A Society of One: Zora Neale Hurston, American Contrarian, Claudia R. Pierpont, a writer and journalist for The New Yorker, tells, analyzes, and gives foundation to Zora Neale Hurston’s backstory and works. Throughout her piece, as she gives her biography of Hurston, she deeply analyzes the significance of Richard Wright, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, as he accuses Hurston of “cynically perpetuating a minstrel tradition meant to make white audiences laugh”(Pierpont 3). By doing so, Wright challenges Hurston’s authority to speak for the “black race” as he claims that her works do not take a stance, rather she only writes to please the “white audience. ”As his critiques show to be oppressive, Pierpont reminds the reader the
Appiah, K.A. and Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. eds. Zora Neale Hurston: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. New York: Amistad Press, Inc., 1993.
In the case of Zora Neale Hurston even though she was born in Alabama on January 7, 1891 she always referred to the rural community of Eatonville, Florida where she moved with her family as a toddler as her hometown. Coincidently Eatonville was the nation’s first incorporated black township which was probably a contributing factor to Hurston’s lack of feeling of inferiority during a time in which racism was rampant. During her years growing up in Eatonville she was able to see the world from a totally different perspective than most African Americans during that period. Instead of segregation, inequality, and poverty she witnessed her elders as being productive and revered members of society. She lived a happy childhood until...
In conclusion, Hurston was a modernist writer who dealt with societal themes of racism, and social and racial identity. She steps away from the folk-oriented style of writing other African American authors, such as Langston Hughes, and she addresses modern topics and issues that relate to her people. She embraces pride in her color and who she is. She does not hate the label of “colored” that has been placed upon her. She embraces who she is and by example, she teaches others to love themselves and the color of their skin. She is very modern. She is everybody’s Zora.