"The Tune Is the Unity of the Thing": Power and Vulnerability in Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God
1991; University of North Carolina Press; Volume: 23; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1534-1461
Autores Tópico(s)Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies
ResumoNanny's history, which she tells Janie at the beginning of Their Eyes Were Watching God, establishes the thematic rhythm, or the tune of Zora Neale Hurston's novel. After Nanny gives birth to a baby with a white hue, the slave mistress asks her it came to be. didn't cry, Nanny recounts, But then she kept on astin me come mah baby look white. She asted me maybe twenty-five or thirty times, lak she got tuh sayin' and couldn't help herself. So Ah told her, `Ah don't know nothing but what Ah'm told tuh do, 'cause Ah ain't but uh nigger and uh slave' (34). (1) This speech enrages the mistress. She beats Nanny and arranges to have her whipped by the overseer the next day. Her rage is well founded. Her family owns Nanny. In theory, that should give her complete power over the slave. Indeed, she knows the way in which her husband exercises that control. However, the slave's vulnerability, her abject subservience, turns out here to be a source of a different kind of power. The plantation mistress sees Nanny, lying in bed with her husband's child, as a rival. Look lak you don't know who is Mistis on this plantation, she tells her (33). Hurston's novel presents a series of variations on this theme of power and weakness. Autonomy, in the novel, flows not from overcoming vulnerability but from locating strength within it. In response to threats by her mistress, Nanny finds resources within herself she had never before tapped: knowed mah body wasn't healed, but Ah couldn't consider dat (34-35). She escapes that night, into the swamps and to eventual freedom. Power, in Their Eyes Were Watching God, is rooted in one's sense of vulnerability. Furthermore, it is through the acceptance of the equation of power and vulnerability that Hurston's characters catch the glimpse of God alluded to in the title. In the swamps, Nanny says nothin ever hurt me 'cause de Lawd knew it (35). Nanny's how it is what the novel explores: it is that vulnerability can become a reserve of strength. Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, after some years of abuse and neglect, has made its way into the revised canon of twentieth-century American fiction. This move was accomplished largely due to the advocacy of Afro-American literary critics and feminist scholars. The novel is now found on reading lists in undergraduate survey courses and graduate field exams, and has become the object of interpretations volumes such as those edited by Harold Bloom. (2) Two indications of the worthiness of Hurston's novel for canonical status are that readings of the novel vary widely and that the novel easily withstands critical scrutiny. It is praised for its incorporation of American folk materials, for its use of universal myth patterns, for its presentation of a strong and independent black female protagonist, and for its various affirmations of human dignity and human love. (3) Recently, Hurston's novel has become emblematic of the entire issue of exclusion in canon formation, and Janie's struggle for in the novel emerges (along with others, such as Chopin's The Awakening) as a primary text in understanding current issues in the debates over canon and voice in literary studies. (4) There is no longer any need to argue the importance of Their Eyes Were Watching God to American literature--it is important to myth and folklore studies, to feminist and Afro-American scholarship, and to the establishment of a new, more pluralistic canon of books we all should read. Problems remain, however. Many readers find the ending of the novel unsatisfactory, the frame insufficient, the narrative voice inconsistent. Some go to great lengths to explain, on literary terms, why Hurston includes the flood, the mad dog, and the killing of Tea Cake. (5) The need to explain, especially when the explicator is not quite convinced, only emphasizes the assumption of textual weakness. In this way the novel is allowed into the canon with a wink--the condescending wink of the patriarch. …
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