Reading Zola Neale Hurston's racial consciousness in representation of masculinity in Their eyes were watching God

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  • Their eyes were watching God の男性性表象に見る Zora Neale Hurston の人種意識
  • Their Eyes Were Watching God ノ ダンセイセイ ヒョウショウ ニ ミル Zora Neale Hurston ノ ジンシュ イシキ

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Abstract

Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zola Neale Hurston’s second novel published in 1937, was reconsidered in the 1980s and 90s as a story about a black woman’s pursuit of selfhood. Though this reevaluation distracted readers from the heroine’s mixed blood and light-colored skin, recent critics reexamined this issue in terms of hybridity. This critical trend allows us to shed light on the question of whiteness in black characters in this novel as well as Hurston’s relationship with Franz Boas, her white mentor as an anthropologist. Yet undue emphasis on hybridity, I argue, incurs the possibility of making us blind to the difficulties the author of the novel had in elaborating Janie’s growth as a black woman with her hybrid whiteness in the background.

With this view in mind, this paper examines the representation of black masculinity and its complicated relationship with Hurston’s racial consciousness in Their Eyes Were Watching God. Hurston uses the image of white people to criticize black characters when they express a blind belief in the values of white middle class. Though the image is sometimes imposed upon Janie and her grandmother as a foil to her growth as a black woman, it is mainly associated with black male characters of a possessive nature. We can find this symbolism not only in the description of Joe Starks, Janie’s second husband whose imitation of a white way of life makes him insistent on possession of property and respectability, but also in a peculiar episode about Tea Cake. At first he appears as an ideal black man in contrast to Janie’s earlier oppressive husbands, but Tea Cake conforms to the white people’s judgment about the impending hurricane under the influence of the “brainstorm” he has due to the jealousy toward Mrs. Turner’s brother.

The fact that this unmarked nameless black man plays a significant role in the episodes concerning Tea Cake’s rabies and death allows us to consider Hurston’s racial consciousness in terms of contemporary black masculinity. Hurston makes an insinuation against W.E.B. DuBois’ persistence of manhood in his criticism of Booker T. Washington when she shows us that Mrs. Turner, a woman of mixed blood who worships the values of whites and adores Janie due to her light-colored skin, incongruously repeats her brother’s charge of Washington as “uh white folks’ nigger.” In a sense this is an inadvertent innuendo if Hurston makes Mrs. Turner a mouthpiece of her brother’s black nationalism and reversely superimposes the image of “uh white folks’ nigger” upon DuBois, for it betrays a contradiction on the part of Hurston. As Hurston imposes the image of whites upon black male characters to highlight the theme of a black woman’s growth, the very use of the image mirrors Janie’s hybrid whiteness equivocated through the novel. This kind of flaw in Hurston’s narrative strategy enables us to find a forgotten yet indelible memory of violent masculinity and whiteness in the heroine’s story of love, thus representing the author’s attitude toward the question of hybrid whiteness inseparable from blackness.

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