| Lecture 10: Janie’s
Blues An Introduction to Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (Chapters1-4) |
| With our next novel, we move from the
Hawaiian plantations of the 1930s and early 40s of Milton Murayama’s All
I Asking for Is My Body across the country to the all-black township
of Eatonville in the heart of rural Florida in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their
Eyes Were Watching God, also set in the 1930s. Despite apparent
differences between the novels, there are significant parallels: both
focus on the protagonist’s quest for selfhood in an environment
hostile to such yearnings. Both rely extensively on the use of
non-standard English in order to capture the voice of their characters
and the particular ethnic community in which they live. Hurston’s
background as an anthropologist (she was a student of the famed Franz
Boas) and her interest in collecting folklore from her native Florida
provided her rich material for her creative work. Language in these
novels is a carrier of culture, a way for us to enter the community life
and understand, through their stories and conversations, the way folks
see the world and what they value. As Mary Helen Washington says, in her
introduction to the novel, the themes of selfhood and community life are
inextricably linked in the novel: "Here [is] a woman on a quest for
her own identity and, unlike so may other questing figures in black
literature, her journey would take her, not away from, but deeper and
deeper into blackness, the descent into the Everglades with its rich
black soil, wild cane, and communal life representing immersion into
black traditions" (ix).
Perhaps because of their focus on community life—communities so different from those of mainstream, white America—both novels have received mixed responses from readers and critics. Hawaiian or Asian-American readers see Murayama as a literary pioneer, one of the first to portray their experiences and heritage in print, demonstrating that the lives of "mere" immigrant plantation workers are legitimate sources for literature. But these readers wouldn’t have gotten a chance to read his books if the publishing houses of New York had had their way—they said no one would be interested in reading about such characters, so Murayama and his wife first self-published All I Asking for Is My Body before it was picked up and reissued by the University of Hawaii press. Hurston’s novel, too, had a rocky publishing history and was both praised and vilified by critics. In a review from the Saturday Review, writer Doris Grumbach called Hurston’s book "the finest black novel of its time" and "one of the finest of all time" (qtd. in Washington vii). Ironically, this praise came after the novel had been out of print for thirty years. When it was originally published, the novel was dismissed by some critics, such as novelist Richard Wright, who claimed it "carries no theme, no message, no thought" (qtd. in Washington viii). Wright and other critics felt Hurston "exploited those ‘quaint’ aspects of Negro life that satisfied the tastes of a white audience" (Washington viii). Contemporary women like writer Alice Walker, however, found Hurston’s novel speaking to them in ways that novels by black males hadn’t. Largely responsible for "rediscovering" Hurston in the 1970’s, Walker writes:
For many readers, the character of Janie Crawford "spoke to them" because she represented a woman who had a vision for her life and was willing to break society’s rules in pursuit of that dream. The novel begins with a reflection on dreams and the difficulty of reaching them: "Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board" (Hurston 1). We read that for women "the dream is the truth" (Hurston1). But such dreams aren’t easy to achieve, we are to discover. Life throws all kinds of obstacles in a woman’s way. She meets all kinds of tragedies along her journey. In fact, we first meet our protagonist, Janie Crawford, when "she had come back from burying the dead . . . . the sudden dead, their eyes flung wide open in judgment" (Hurston 1). And she returns to a town where the community is ready to judge her harshly for whatever she has done. So little power did they have by day, when "mules and other brutes had occupied their skins," that when evening comes and "the sun and the bossman were gone, so the skins felt powerful and human. They became lords of sounds and lesser things. They passed nations through their mouths. They sat in judgment" (Hurston 2). Considering how ready the community is to condemn her, Janie feels the need to tell her own story in self-defense. Think about the way some people in your community use gossip or innuendo to condemn others. The effect of such judgment, often, is to warn others not to make the same mistakes or they’ll be ostracized in the same way. Gossip can be used to punish the risk-takers, those who transgress the current social norms. What would such norms be for a black, Southern woman in the 1930s? Janie’s grandma, Nanny, probably expresses such expectations best: a woman can’t do better than to marry a man who provides her with "uh prop tuh lean on all [her] bawn days and big protection," not to mention "sixty acres uh land right on de big road . . . ." (Hurston 22). Such a secure, respectable life looks like heaven to Nanny, born a slave and quite knowledgeable about how men with power, such as the plantation owner and later her daughter’s schoolteacher, use (and abuse) women. She tells Janie, "Ah didn’t want to be used for a work-ox and a brood sow and Ah didn’t want mah daughter used dat way neither" (Hurston 15). Naïve Janie, raised in somewhat more hospitable times, dreams of something more. One afternoon, her vision takes shape as she lies under a pear tree one spring afternoon, watching the blooms that "had called her to come and gaze on a mystery" (Hurston 10). Observing a "dust-bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom," Janie realizes "this was a marriage! She had been summoned to behold a revelation" (Hurston 10-11). Once having seen this revelation, she will spend her life searching for such a marriage of unity and harmony. In my eyes, the novel you will read represents Janie’s "blues," the sometimes tragic but always yearning story of her search for the perfect marriage that Janie tells to a sympathetic friend. In African-American communities, blues songs often told of lonely journeys, the search to find a better life. For many, traveling north or "riding the rails" was a bittersweet journey: blacks wanted to get out of hostile, racist Southern towns, but such a path could be lonely and dangerous, taking them away from the love and security of family. You’ll see that Janie’s journey is lonely too, at times. Her community and some of the important people in her life—Nanny and Joe Starks, for example—don’t understand her dreams. At the end of her journey, wanting finally to be understood, telling her story to a trusted friend, Phoeby, Janie is "full of that oldest human longing—self revelation" (Hurston 6). Considering how controversial Janie is upon her return to her community, I guess we shouldn’t be surprised that her story raised so much controversy among readers. You may judge her story for yourself. |
|