A Closer Reading

A Politically Concealed Advantage:

2011-04-13T08:00:00.000-07:00

Presenting Racial and Gender Conflict in Their Eyes

Through a narrow reading of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, the audience is presented with a story that works as an entertaining love song and ultimately results in little revelations of different essential tasks of a strengthened writer. Many critics of the novel have read the novel in a tapered manner. If the reader annotates the novel in an academic setting, they have the ability to view an eclectic stroke of the author’s sword that successfully presents an educational and academic colloquial display of necessary issues. By using entertainment to embody the blues, both as a discourse, and with rhythmic imagery, Hurston produces a presentation of gender and race relations as well as embodies a major cultural theme and mindset of the time.

As a complete novel, Their Eyes provides the audience with a piece of entertainment. This has been criticized as being a negative cause for the novel gaining current popularity in the academic community, in that she “created the minstrel technique that makes the "white folks" laugh” (Wright). Wright criticized Hurston of portraying an African American community in such a way that would entertain the white community. Overlooked greatly in this novel is Hurston’s use of blues as discourse, and how the novel in a holistic sense fits this discourse. When we pick apart the novel’s different metaphors, we can find many instances that represent the blues as a cultural embodiment. A major instance of this is through Hurston framing this first person narrative in an oratory fashion. By telling Phoeby that she “can tell ‘em what Ah say if you wants to” (Hurston 6), Hurston immediately sets the stage for something that is much like a blues song. Blues were often used as a medium for relating a story and those “who sang them did so in a large-scale theatrical style shaped in part by the need to make them- selves heard” (Teachout 68). This also sets the stage for a great historical reference to the blues, as “The first blues musicians to become popular were black and white women singers” (Teachout 68). Janie has set out to relate her story as a way to complete her full circle journey of a blues tale, as well as relate it to her friend and community to fulfill their desire for cultural entertainment. Not only is the blues a way to express, lament, or to release pains of life, it is “also a social music; the blues can be entertainment, it can be music for dancing and drinking by, the music of a class within a segregated group” (Oliver, 6). In regards to the latter, we should take into account that Hurston set out in writing the novel as a means towards an illustration. She wanted to represent a diverse account of social characters and issues through a relation of the blues. The larger social implications result in criticism of her success in academia, yet we must ask if an entertainment tactic is necessarily a bad thing. Hurston used this as a deft political move to bringing issues to a large audience in a subtle but effective way. Is a creation of these issues through something representative of a stage, or a song, potentially more effective than one such as watching violence toward a race on a television? This is why the entertainment of the novel is necessary and important. The structure of the novel as entertainment presents entertainment of the blues, and the novel itself uses blues as discourse to confront different conflicts in the novel.

Hurston successfully composes the blues through her novel in a holistic sense. She produces the blues structure of the novel by breaking it up into many different metaphors and metonyms relation to the blues. Carby mentions, “critics often forget that Janie…can speak on a porch because she owns it” (Carby 86). Carby feels as though Janie’s financial power is a show of Nanny’s desire, and thus loses the ability for Janie to speak to the people and relate to the community because it “permeates it with a bourgeois discourse that differentiates her from the folk as community” (Carby 86). Hurston does indeed separate Janie from the rest of the community, yet attaches her to the community at the same time. It is necessary to separate Janie to justly demonstrate the blues in the empowerment of women. Blues served as a medium in which women could express feelings of hardship, engage in a very typically masculine activity, as well as potentially gain financial independence. This is the same with Janie in that through her journey, a metaphor for a blues song or career, she is able to gain financial independence as well as have the ability to express her voice. Throughout the novel, the community and her masculine counterparts suppress Janie’s voice. Once she meets her dichotomist half, Tea Cake, she is able to finish her cyclical journey through womanhood. Only than, can she express herself fully through her story. Indeed, even in Watson’s study of many female blues lyrics, he states, “it should be kept in mind that not all the lyrics under scrutiny were written by women, but they were sung by women” (341). It seems as though Janie is singing the blues that in part are structured and written by the men in her life. Tea Cake is another perfect example of a representation of the blues, as his name suggests, and their relationship as well. This also allows a chance for Hurston to present a litigious issue of adversarial disputes between gender and race, much opposite of what Carby feels. Through Tea Cake, we see the cyclical coming of Janie’s true love, as well as a complex notion of the blues. Tea Cake is the entertainer, the one who makes everyone laugh on the muck. He is the one who brings Janie directly into nature, as opposed to cutting her working place out of nature like Jodie does. Tea Cake plays the guitar for fun, and money is the last thing on his mind. Tea Cake presents to us the masculine form of what women could hope for, yet is not absent of the abject stereotypes that face gender roles. Tea Cake still beats Janie not “‘cause she done nothin’” but to “show dem Turners who is boss” (Hurston 148). This presents an interesting case of race and gender issues. Tea Cake presented physical violence that plagued and still does plague masculinity although he is the apodictic converse to Jodie. This also presents a case for a confrontation to racial conflict. Mrs. Turner hates her own race, as she is a light skinned African American. She wishes that “de white folks would take us in wid dem” (Hurston 141). Other people in the community are jealous of Tea Cake because beating darker women “can’t make no mark on ‘em at all” (Hurston 148). Through these conversations we see the hierarchy and near caste system of African Americans created by the impact of racism on the lives of these characters. One woman hates her own race, and is racist towards them due to her skin being slightly lighter, as an effect of being brainwashed by a white dominated society. Other characters wish they had a lighter skinned woman due to it being seen as better or more beautiful. Hurston applies a rhythmic tonal pace through her imagery that catalyzes these presentations in her novel.

The rhythmic imagery and mood set by the environment of the everglades provides the reader with an outlook on different tiers of racial prejudice and their cultural impact. Due to Janie marrying and leaving with Tea Cake, we are able to see other instances of the impact of slavery on the community. The community is set with a fast paced rhythm by Hurston’s language of the people eager to earn money. Take for instance the recount from Frederick Douglass in that “It was deemed a disgrace not to get drunk at Christmas; and he was regarded as lazy indeed, who had not provided himself with the necessary means, during the year, to get whisky enough to last him through Christmas.” (Douglass X). This is even seen in a progressed form through Tea Cakes environment. The community on the muck is content with working for the large landowners who were white to make “good money” and “when the work tickets were turned into cash, everybody began to by coon-dick and get drunk” (Hurston 149). Most critics can initially see this as a “feel good” type of atmosphere, but Hurston is taking it further. She is showing the cultural norms of this community set up by the previous peculiar institution of slavery and racism in the country. We also are presented with a separate classification of race when the community deems that the “Indians are dumb anyhow, always were” (Hurston 155), and the folk decide to stay where the white people were and “let the people do the thinking…their decisions were made as always” (Huston 158). This is most certainly not a novel that disregards issues of race. The musically whimsical low land of the muck puts the reader in a heightened mood as well as provides an atmosphere full of contradictions in Janie’s life as well as within the community. Hurston’s rhythmic imagery is apparent throughout Janie’s life, and provides a different look into gender roles. The mule is displayed repetitiously and rhythmically. It is set up as a reflection of Logan and Jodie’s thoughts on Janie. Logan buys a mule in order to work it, as he desires to do to Janie. Jodie purchases a mule as a status symbol, the same way he treats Janie. It is quite interesting, for in contrast, Janie asserts her masculine counterpart’s sexual impotency by describing how “his toe-nails look lak mule foots" (Hurston 42). The sexual potency is related similarly to Tea Cake. Baker annotates “Tea Cake is, in blues terms, Janie’s "easy rider," a phrase used frequently in the blues to connote a good lover by equating sexual motion to the swinging motion of someone riding a mule” (Baker). The imagery works towards an interesting point of Bakers, that Janie’s sexual prowess is not asserted as much as her male counterparts sexuality is undermined in the novel. This allows Hurston to present gender relations in a less stereotypical way (Baker).

Hurston applies different literary techniques in an adept approach that allows many different reads of the novel. Her use of entertainment as well as the blues and rhythmic imagery allows this approach to present different layers of gender and racial relations in the novel without making them a definitive marker for a single theme in the book. This is what creates criticism, yet continuous enjoyment in the annotation of the novel, and gives Hurston success in the academic literary world.

Extrapolated: On the trial scene

Unfortunately I couldn’t fit in my annotations and thoughts on the trial scene of the novel earlier, so I added a bit here. I feel as though I could write quite a bit more on this novel, and that it deserves quite a large extent of critique and concurrent testimony of its strengths and weaknesses, applying research as well as literary commentary. I also feel the need to comment on this particular scene in the book.

When relating to the rhythm and the rhythmic imagery of the novel, the general feeling seemed to be such of something musical and sinuous. It was sinuous in the sense that the discourse flowed together in a way that created climax differently than a standard plot wheel. The flow of the novel felt more like a song, yet seemed slightly hiccuped or interrupted by the trial scene at the end of the novel. The violence and power of the scene of Tea Cakes death left me feeling much relieved almost like at the end of a powerful concerto or jazz song even, yet failed to extrapolate empathy for Janie. It definitely fit in to the journey, the necessity of each character in order to present Janie’s struggle, as well as to reveal certain dilapidated aspects of racial roles at the time. What I did find interesting was Carol Bakers slight comments on the trial scene. Carol says “Their Eyes alludes to the politics of rape and lynching, as I discuss in detail below, by first charging Janie with sexual misconduct and then by exonerating her, primarily in the trial scene.” She also references the trial showing Janie as being thought of as oversexed as through the novel. Was this scene another manifestation of circularity and the cyclical nature of the novel? Lynching and rape was certainly addressed briefly in the oblique manner of Hurston’s novel in the beginning of the novel, relating to both Janie’s mother and her Nanny, both of who were raped. If the trial represents some sort of lynching metaphor, than why does Janie conquer the all white Jury? Is this to show the potential power of femininity, the potential power of true love, even over a racist cultural and social structure? If anything, the trial scene nearly seemed unnecessary for those who read the accounts of circularity in the novel. It even ends with an almost prosaic conceivable comparison when Hurston contrasts “De nigger woman is de mule oh de world” (Hurston 16) with “uh white man and uh nigger woman is de freest thing on earth” (Hurston 189).

Potentially, this hiccough in Hurston’s rhythm shows a sagacious mind in relation to her potential readers. Perhaps it is necessary for her to represent the cyclical nature in her book through more than just a journey of a woman finding love, in order to present the fact that her book does in fact contain elements of a tale involving racial prejudice that is not seditious speaking, but more eloquent in that it could and does reach the masses in a more effective way than a more direct or head on approach to these issues does.

Works Cited

Baker, Carol. "Love Me Like I Like to Be": The Sexual Politics of Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, The Classic Blues, and the Black Women’s Club Movement." African American Review 32.2 (1998): 199-214. Print.

Hurston, Zora Neale. Their Eyes Were Watching God. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2006. Print.

Teachout, Terry. "De-Romanticizing the Blues: The Intellectual’s Creation Myth of the Birth of the Blues." Culture and Civilization (2010): 66-70. Print.

Warson, Greg. "The Bedroom Blues: Love and Lust in the Lyrics of Early Female Blues Artists." Language and Literature 15.4 (2006): 331-56. Print.

Capitalism, Amorality, and the Perversion of the American Dream

2011-04-13T07:53:00.000-07:00

Petry’s Political Commentary in The Street

Ann Petry’s deliberate construct of a hostile environment in The Street allows her to comment on the “democratic institutions” that have formed separate environments in a social hierarchy. The novel is used as a tool to dissect different layers of morality, and to question the demoralizing luxuries that coincide with the American Dream. Petry argues through the aesthetic language that paints the lives of different minority archetypes, that the three “ism’s” proposed by Calvin Hemton, as well as classism are one in the same. This force, fueled by the institutionalized machinations of the unscrupulous system called capitalism, forced the suppressed minority to subvert the non-existent white code of ethics that was idealized as the American Dream. Through this systematic suppression, the characters alternately represent the shameless injustice of the institution by thus silently exploiting the people of their own ethnographic and geographic cluster.

Petry uses a form of aestheticism throughout her novel that provides the audience with a designated distinction between the different levels of race in America during the early 1900’s. The different characters build the infrastructure in the level system of racial hierarchy. Petry “painstakingly focuses the reader on Lutie’s physical beauty” (Clark 44) as one dimension to set her apart from the rest of the people on the street. This separation is key to understanding Lutie’s process, or lack of, in making decisions relevant to the environment that she is surrounded by. Her slightly higher socioeconomic status background is the aspect of difference that is physically represented by Petry’s constant references to her physical beauty. Lutie’s education is also entangled with this status, and ironically works to deteriorate her progress in the street environment. While in some cases “an opportunity to become a worker rather than a domestic woman has enabled some working-class women to explore the possibility of defining themselves”, in Lutie’s case it is “obvious that the public sphere is implicitly and explicitly racialized as well as gendered--that is, normatively defined as masculine and white” (Park 613). Although Lutie does show some sort of maternal instinct when she immediately feels wary of the Superintendent, wondering why “she had gone up the stairs first” (Petry 13), she lacks what we would label as street smarts when it comes to many other key loci in the progression of the plot. Lutie shows hints of understanding the system in which she is a stepping-stone, yet fails to come fully rounded in making wiser decisions to help herself and her son. She realizes there is a problem, reflecting that “if they hadn’t been so damn poor she and Jim might have stayed married”, yet cannot pinpoint the problem correctly: “no matter at what point she started, she always ended up at the same place” (183). Although Lutie is a part of the hierarchy of racism in America, the hierarchy is separate from a racial caste system. Oliver Cox argues in “Race and Caste” that racism is distinctly different from caste system, as there is no extreme set of rules in racism as there is in caste system (Cox 363). Marked by the immaterial nature of boundaries between different levels of race, the lack of definite boundaries between class acts as a marker for Lutie’s near brainwashed ideology. She does not see the separation of “Ben Franklin and his loaf of bread” (Petry 63) and his writings on work ethic and the American Dream, as well as her own racial, social, and class situation. The racist boundaries that prevent Lutie from ever being able to advance, as a white male would be able to, are shown ironically, as Cox would argue that racism is an ideology created by capitalism. Many anthropologists also agree that race is definitely and purely a social construct, marking the construct of the vague barriers in capitalism, which also are based highly in sexism.

The sexist assaults that are a driving force in Lutie’s ultimate rage that is “an accumulation of her life” (Lattin 70). Petry constructs separate layers of amorality in her character archetypes. Although the white figures in the novel are distinctly amoral, they are also emotionally and morally distant compared to the black figures in the novel. The Chandlers constantly ridicule the black race, saying Lutie will surely throw herself sexually at the husband, as “they’re always making passes at men” (Petry 40). The amorality of this white family comes in with Mrs. Chandler’s actions toward her son, “she never held him on her lap or picked him up and cuddled him” (39), Mr. Chandler’s “first thing he did was to get himself a good-sized drink” (40), and the suicide of the brother. This barely shakes their emotions, showing the dissonance they create for their subverting of an ethical system. They use their power to make it seem like an accident, and feel little to no remorse for their relatives’ death. Although Lutie sees this amorality, she “listens to their talk”, and “absorbed some of the same spirit. The belief that anybody could be rich if he wanted to…” (43). The distanced amorality in white figures is shown through Junto’s delegation of his own power over Boots in order to get near Lutie. Although it is easy for the reader to dislike Junto for this, his figure actually leaves the hotel room when Lutie tells him to. The separation of amorality in the black male figures is painted through their much more violent amoral acts towards Lutie. Both black male figures attempt to assault and rape her, in a misdirected lash out towards societal assaults.

Although Petry has been accused of being separated from the society she writes about, as “Petry’s family was largely able to shelter her youth from the brutal racism ” (qtd in Shockley 4) and “sexism, too, was unfamiliar to the young Petry” (4), she creates an amoral distinction between races to produce scholarly trope. Through assigning a drastically violent mentality in the black male characters, Petry criticizes the effects of capitalism itself. Her criticism is shown through a narrative insight into how “racial oppression is grounded in exploitative and oppressive economic structures, in which a dominant class privately owns the means of production in which wealth is concentrated” (Wilson 20). Although Junto is shown as a less violent figure, the oppressive nature of his dominant position drives Boots Smith toward a more violent attitude. His desire to break free of his oppression and to assert his masculinity is shown through his fanatic car driving, “making up for a lot of things that have happened to him to make him what he is” (Petry 158), as well as his desire to undermine Junto’s grasp –“Junto can get his afterward” (427) – on his masculinity through violent rape. Junto is an empathetic figure towards Mrs. Hedge’s plights, yet we can see through his exploitation of the geographic area that “it can be affirmed without reservations that the white racism which came to pervade the world was an integral part of the capitalist mode of production” (qtd in Marable xxi). The Super is a character who is put on display that presents similar attributes to Boots. The Super is also written as an extremely amorally sexist due to systemized capitalism forcing him into the dungeons of the metaphorical slave cage for “so long you ain’t human no more” (Petry 237). This metaphorical slave cage is a working position only available to him due to Junto’s ownership of the building. It is also a job position in which he cannot seem to escape. The choleric temperament prescribed to his personality is a culmination of years of suppression of his desire to express his masculine prowess, diluted by capitalism. He even realizes that he can’t take Lutie by force as “it’s Mr. Junto who’s interested in Mis’ Johnson.” (238). While we see these extreme roles of gender entailed with the masculine figures in the story, Petry advantageously utilizes the Jungian animus in Mrs. Hedge’s character. Her prescribed masculine characteristics allow her to covert the massive powers of capitalistic towers stacked against her; to exploit what is being exploited and create a habitat for herself to thrive. Mrs. Hedges is the antithesis to Lutie that shows the necessity for amorality and exploitation in the environment of the street.

Junto exploits a niche in which he can have massive power and be an economic giant. He is given a negative appearance through his desire for Lutie, and his rejection of his true love Mrs. Hedges. He is capitalism’s essence, denying truth-value for use-value. His power is directly linked to his whiteness, as students of Cohen describe their sense of power being directly linked to “growing up in the white middle-class world” (Cohen 90). Junto truly sees Mrs. Hedges as admirable, lovable. Yet he cannot over come the aesthetic distinction between her and Lutie, so he proscribes Mrs. Hedges a simple use-value in his calculative ascent in a “free market” society. Classism was not created by capitalism, but was given a mask, a façade, in order to create classism and the extreme divisions of economic, social, and political power to seem a positive thing. Lutie, aware of the effects of racism that is tied into positions of power…”damn the white people”…fails to exploit her environment as other characters do. Petry even shows her to hold diametrically opposite views to those who do exploit their environments. Janie reflects on the super in that “he looked like Satan --- black and evil” (Petry 114), reflecting values that were intrinsic to white interpretations of the bible, while Min scrutinizes that “It’s better to have a dark skin…[light skinned people] look like they’ve been marked by the Devil’s fingertips” (125). This ironic contrast shows two extremes that are both laughably untrue, yet the latter is required to exploit the environment that white capitalism creates. Janie upholds her ideals of hard work ethics in a nearly brainwashed fashion. Capitalism thus forces a perversion of individuation on Lutie, becoming her “true” self, which is that such as those who subvert classical morals. Thus, the only way for Lutie to embrace any ideology such as Mrs. Hedges and Min who “embody what I see as a history of black women subverting the vacuous Dream myth” (Clark 42), is through extreme violence and a physical flee. Capitalists constructs as well as Lutie’s mysterious inability to subvert the system such as the other female characters, ends in tragedy.

Through Petry’s construct of an environment that paints the rigidity of class positions in America during the 1900’s, we are able to see the effects of capitalism on a slew of different archetypes. Although she gives characters stereotypical characteristics, her social commentary points to these characteristics as being adventitious, and a product of social forces. The separation of Lutie from the rest of the characters in the novel is done to show the negative effects of not utilizing necessitating amoral aspects in a capitalistic society, which Petry argues to be necessary for survival. We see, as well, in effect, that capitalism’s demand for inherent amorality works as a catalyst to subduing the social class that one must take part in. Petry argues that capitalism forces this amorality, and forces it in a way that it elicits exploitation of one’s own surroundings, and the individuals that are a part of the same plight.

Works Cited

Clark, Kieth. "A Distaff Dream Deferred? Ann Petry and the Art of Subversion." African American Review 26.3 (92): 495-506. Print.

Cohen, Lorraine. "Facilitating the Critique of Racism and Classism: An Experiential Model for Euro-American Middle-Class Students." Teaching about Inequality and Diversity: Age, Class, Gender, and Race/Ethnicity 23.2 (1995): 87-93. Print.

Cox, Oliver A. "Race and Caste: A Distinction." The American Journal of Sociology 50.5 (1945): 360-68. Print.

Lattin, Vernon E. "Ann Petry and the American Dream." Black American Literature Forum 12.2 (1978): 69-72. Print.

Marable, Manning. How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America: Problems in Race, Political Economy, and Society. Boston, MA: South End, 1983. Print.

Park, You-Me, and Gayle Wald. "Native Daughters in the Promised Land: Gender, Race, and the Question of Separate Spheres." American Literature 70.3 (1998): 607-33. Print.

Petry, Ann. The Street. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1946. Print.

Shockley, Evie. "Buried Alive: Gothic Homelessness, Black Women's Sexuality, and (Living) Death in Ann Petry's "The Street"" African American Review 40.3 (2006): 439-60. Print.

Wilson, Carter A. Racism: from Slavery to Advanced Capitalism. Vol. 17. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1996. Print.