Zora Neale Hurston was a famous African-American writer who played a leading role in the Harlem Renaissance movement. She was a journalist, folklorist, dramatist, and an influential author. She was a controversial and complex figure. She earned fame mainly for her novel Their Eyes were watching God (1937). She promoted African-American culture ardently. She refused to focus on racism in her works, and for this reason, she was criticized by her peers and contemporaries.
Her contemporary African-American writers wanted to promote black issues, racist problems, and change the unjust representation of African-Americans. But she didn’t want to follow the way they chose and instead paved a new one for herself.
She wanted to overcome stereotypes through her works. Her focus was on the promotion of equality, assimilation, and integration. She had an interest in anthropology, and this is evident from her works, which are reflections of the data that she collected. This researched data is incorporated into both her fictional and non-fictional works.
She wrote short stories, novels, and plays that depict the life of African-Americans in the South. Hurston went against the common trend of African-American writing and opposed desegregation. For this reason, she was alienated by a great number of her friends and acquaintances. She believed that as a result of desegregation, African-Americans would lose their identity.
Her works show the wavering demarcation between reality and art. She was a firm believer in art, and for this reason, she was against the incorporation of any racial politics in it. There are extra-literary factors that she has incorporated into her literary works. She and some other writers’ work is esteemed for the non-aesthetic value that is the secular canonization, which has developed through ages. Through her characters, Zora has created paradigms for women. She, in her works, asserts the own identity of women, which tries to explore non-male consciousness.
Her rhetorical strength is too overt and is often in contrast with her narrative line’s simplicity. We can see the power in her works as potentia, the demand for more life. She had affinities towards Vitalist writers. She, in her works like these writers, exalts beauty. This is a different and difficult type of beauty because it is used to test reality. She also has influences from Nietzsche’s vitalist injunctions. There is a novel sense of possibilities in her works, which is an influence from Janie. She was free of the deprecating ideologies which obscure many writers’ works.
Her sense of power is much different from the traditional sense of it. It doesn’t convey the connotation of politics of persuasion. Feminism, in her works, is different from the contemporary modes of feminism. According to Harold Bloom, she is now the representative image of American literary vitality.
Her own remark, which she gave about Carl Von Vechten, can be befitting for her epigraph, which is, “I love myself when I am laughing. And then again, when I am looking mean and impressive.” Due to her deviation, she has become part of the literary legend. Her works are of the party of American mythology of Exodus. Her power is of the party of Eros, life.
A Short Biography of Zora Neale Hurston
She was born on January 7th, 1891, in Notasulga, Alabama. She was born to two freed African-American slaves John Hurston and Lucy Ann Hurston. Her parents belonged to a family whose members were slaves from the past four generations. Her mother worked as a schoolteacher while her father was a Baptist, sharecropper, and later took the profession of the carpenter.
There is a controversy about her place of birth; some consider it to be Notasulga, Alabama, while others support Eatonville, Florida. Generally, leverage is given to Notasulga. She was the fifth child of her parents. Her family moved to Eatonville when she was a toddler.
Her mother died in 1904, and soon her father remarried. She was sent to a boarding school in Jacksonville, Florida. She was not on good terms with her stepmother, and for this reason, she lived with her relatives instead of coming back home. She came to live with her brother but because of his unwillingness to let her continue her education. She worked on low pay at different places and continued her education.
She graduated from Howard University with an associate degree in 1920. During that period, she wrote and published many short stories. She took admission to Bernard College, New York, and pursued a degree in Anthropology.
She married Herbert Sheen in 1927, but this marriage soon came to an end, and they separated in 1931. She met with Langston Hughes, and they became good friends. They collaborated on some works, but soon their friendship was severed by some misunderstandings.
She was accused by Langston Hughes for trying to reach and influence the white audience instead of the black audience. In contrast to him, she didn’t accuse him because she knew the problems faced by African-Americans. In 1935 she became involved with Percy Punter, who was a graduate student at Howard.
She married Albert Price in 1939. This marriage also wasn’t successful, and it ended soon in a few months. They formally separated in 1943. In the last years of her life, she faced financial problems and wasn’t able to live a normal life. Especially, the last ten years of her life were the hardest.
She worked at different petty positions in those days because of the lack of patrons and the failure of her works. She worked as a librarian, teacher, and a maid to make ends meet. She couldn’t stand these hardships at old age and shifted to Lucie County Welfare Home. There she suffered from a stroke and became terminally ill.
Hypertensive heart disease became fatal for her, and she died on January 28th, 1960. She was buried at Garden of Heavenly Rest, Florida. Her grave was unnamed, and this remained so until 1973. Charlotte D. Hunt and Alice Walker found an unmarked grave in their area where she was buried and confirmed that it was hers. At her death, her papers were ordered to be burned, but friend Patrick DuVal came to their rescue. Due to his efforts, these documents were donated to the University of Florida.
Zora Neale Hurston’s Writing Style
Zora Neale Hurston was the renovator of the narrative strategy of African-American works. Being the lead writer in the Harlem movement, her works are an example of the typical style which these writers chose. The main characteristic of her works is ‘free indirect discourse.’ This term is employed to refer to the narrative style, which is a mix of the primary narrator whose language is standard English.
The secondary narrator uses black vernacular. In her works, there are colloquialisms, spellings based on phonetics rather than following the standard spellings. There are regional aphorisms and uninterrupted passages of dialogue.
There is a sophisticated use of figurative language by the omniscient narrator in some of her works. The style of her novels is ‘split,’ and this shows two different modes of storytelling. The storytelling is made intimate by the use of the Southern vernacular. This use of vernacular also shows the authenticity of her works.
Other techniques on which her distinct style relies are rhythm and choice of her words. Metaphors, personification, and the use of biblical imagery enrich her works. Her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God is a typical example of these writing features.
Folk Preacher and Sermon Form
Though she was educated at different places, her works were greatly influenced by the background from which she came. The religious folk tradition and its impacts are clearly seen in her works. Her fictional and non-fiction works show a great inclination towards Baptist religious tradition. An example is Dust Tracks on a Road which where the persona is close to the preacher. The narrative adopted by the persona looks like a sermon. She not only incorporated oratorical skills of the preacher in this work but the histrionic skills as well.
There is an oral quality in her works, and that is a feature essential to sermons. Much of the action in her works is described through dialogue, and these renditions are close to the performance. Her works have humorous quality, and this shows the vital relationship of her works with preaching. There are specific preaching conventions used in her works. These include conversions and visions. The motifs in her works are parallel to religious tradition. In short, her works are a reflection of her religious background.
Ambivalence
There is a clear ambivalence in Zora’s most famous work, Their Eyes Were Watching God. The discrepancy appears between the first reading of the text and the current idolization. There are suspicions based on ideological agendas and strained elaborations. This novel is provocatively compelling, original, and inventive, but still, the text is not fully realized and completely finished. Due to no rigorous editing, there are technical uncertainties, fertilely ambivalent thinking, and self-contradictions.
The contradictions are mainly due to her personal life. The polarities lead to a tug of war between different ideas. This makes the novel complicated and creatively enriched. This ambivalence is named by feminist critics as the modern black feminist masterpiece because of the war between female individual and society.
Critics disagree over the consequences of the ending of the novel. Some see Janie’s (the protagonist) step as liberating, while others see it as losing her independence. Some critics see her ambivalence as the dissociation from her native culture and community.
Projecting Gender and Use of Personification
From the third-person narrator in her work, Their Eyes Watching God, it is evident that the protagonist has not yet achieved her freedom. The single recurrent rhetorical convention in this work is personification. She has attained her literary voice through the use of the techniques of projection and personification.
In her works, she tried to subvert the male storytelling tradition with the use of a female voice. She depicts the politics of gender in a non-didactic way using the exposition of the inner self. Through her use of personification, she has changed the usual perception of things and places.
In contrast to other African-American writers, she has treated gender issues unorthodoxly and non-conventionally. Influenced by her folklorist inclination, the only mission that she pursues in the self-determination of black women. Critics believe that her work, Dust Tracks on a Road, gives an incomplete representation of her views. This is a quasi-autobiographical work and gives glimpses of her life and assertions.
She has used a language of concealment, which paradoxically is a language of revelation. According to critics, her technique of concealment is prosopopoeia. This technique is evident in her autobiography, four novels, anthropological treatises, and short fiction. There are metaphors of judgment and retribution in her works, which are again an assertion against the dominant patriarchy.
Conflict and Resistance
She has offered a complex analysis of gender and race in her work, Mules and Men. In her works, there is a consistent struggle shown against her rich patrons who tried to control the content of her works. Even in her anthropological research, her supervisor Boas tried to influence the data she had collected.
He tried to make her an instrument for collecting data rather than letting her be a researcher. She has her anthropological views, which she expressed in Mules and Men. The views are clearly conflicting with the norms of society and non-conformist.
She used humour to present the analysis of society. She used it to protect the critical commentary and social analysis from the eyes of her patrons and unsympathetic white readers. Through her laugh, she represents the suppressed emotions, and this works as a symbol of resistance. She changed the traditional forms of reaction and made everyday things symbolic of reaction. Thus the subtlety of this reaction doesn’t offend the reader and conveys a complete message.
In her short stories, she has used the same technique where the protagonist doesn’t openly defy their masters. Instead, they use cues and clues to refer to oppression. Some of her stories appear racist, but in fact, these are subversive social commentary.
Whiteface Novel
Zora’s last novel Seraph on the Suwanee (1948), is one of her most marginalized works. This work explores the reasons for what makes a man or woman do specific things, regardless of their colour. In this work, she has abandoned the source of her unique esthetic, which is the black cultural tradition.
This work is an attempt to please the white readership by portraying a romantic patriarchal narrative. In this novel, the milieu is white, and this seems a backdrop of the defiance of oppression of black females.
In contrast to her other writings, she deviates from her usual course in this novel. The Freudian concept of jokes and their explication can be used in this novel to understand its meaning. In this work, the tendentious joke exploits the loopholes in the enemy that she wants to expose. Thus, the joke is used as a source of ridicule in this whiteface novel. This novel was a failure in the market because it mixed black and white in American society, which was not much acceptable then.
Voodoo Imagery
During her research in Haiti, Zora became interested in Voodoo culture, and its influences are evident in subsequent works. There are various symbols, rituals, and signs which represent the Voodoo. Their Eyes Were Watching God is the work that has the most significant number of Voodoo influences. Through the use of Voodoo imagery, she has analyzed the relationship between migration, identity, and culture of the African diaspora in the American continent.
Her use of Voodoo folklore mixed with fiction makes her work a unique creative black expression. Drums and jungle were the stereotypical representatives of Voodoo culture, but she extended the Voodoo imagery beyond these two. In her essay How It Feels to be Colored Me, she makes use of the drum as a metaphor to refer to African-American culture’s origins in ancient African culture. In Their Eyes Were Watching God, she makes use of African goddess Ezili in the form of a character named Ezili Freda.
Influenced by Voodoo, this novel starts with the invocation of Legba and affirms the strong impact of Voodoo culture in her works. The protagonist’s sexual desires and that for sweet coincide with the aforementioned goddess. Voodoo is used as a reminder of black independence in Their Eyes Were Watching God.
Voice and Vision
There is a metaphor of vision used in Their Eyes, where the protagonist not only intends ‘to tell the story’ but create ‘an understanding’ as well. Voice is made an empowering trope in the definition of African-American culture. Their Eyes is a part of this tradition where voice is used as a symbol of freedom. Through the use of a third-person narrator, it is implied that the protagonist hasn’t won her freedom. There are many crucial places where Janie is silenced.
There is not only reliance on voice; rather, there is the use of mental pictures in Their Eyes. Through the use of visual imagery, the dominant theories about power hierarchies. Through the control of vision, political freedom is envisioned. She has adopted a sexless and raceless vision and associated it with objectivity. Thus this vision of identity reinforces the post-structuralist argument that identity is mainly a work of construction.