Essential Question:“There are years that ask questions and years that answer.”—Hurston

How do our experiences shape our journey of self-discovery?

Overview/Focus of Unit: In this unit students will explore how the protagonist, Janie Crawford, journeys in self-discovery and independence in the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. Through a study of language students will understand voice and how artists use their voice to communicate in various mediums.

1/30 Homework—read/annotate pgs. 1-9 and take notes on the Matthew Winkler’s TED Talk: “What makes a hero?”

Mon. 1/26 / Tues. 1/27 / Wed. 1/28 / Thurs. 1/29 / Fri. 1/30
Begin Their Eyes
Dickinson
HW—Ch. 1/2 / HW—Ch. 3/4 / HW—Ch. 5 / HW—Ch. 6 / HW—7, 8, 9
Mon. 2/2 / Tues. 2/3 / Wed. 2/4 / Thurs. 2/5 / Fri. 2/6
HW—Ch. 10/11 / HW—Ch. 12/13 / HW—Ch. 14/15 / HW—Ch. 16/17 / HW—18-20
Mon. 2/9 / Tues. 2/10 / Wed. 2/11 / Thurs. 2/12 / Fri. 2/13
Their Eyes—Test

The values stressed in this novel are as follows:

  • the importance of choosing life, being involved in life, rather than being a bystander
  • the growth of inner strength with one's advance in self-knowledge, as one realizes that self-awareness and detachment are both necessary qualities
  • the contrast between a practical business outlook and the independence of a creative spirit
  • three special human concepts
  • resilience helps one cope with loss and disaster
  • men and women are of equal worth
  • one needs to be valued and accepted as oneself
  • the profit gained from the guidance of others, but the necessity of not being unduly subservient to others
  • theimportanceofhavingafulllifebutalso ofexperiencing something more, "touching the horizon"
  • the spiritual relationship of individuals to the natural world
  • the presence of God in people's lives

The bildungsroman (novel of education) is a type of novel originating in Germany which presents the development of a character mostly from childhood to maturity. This process typically contains conflicts and struggles, which are ideally overcome in the end so that the protagonist can become a valid and valuable member of society. The term bildungsroman denotes a novel of all-around self-development.

1. A bildungsroman is, most generally, the story of a single individual's moral, psychological, and intellectual development within the context of a defined social order. The growth process, at its roots a quest story, has been described as both "an apprenticeship to life" and a "search for meaningful existence within society."

2. To spur the hero or heroine on to their journey, some form of loss or discontent must jar them at an early stage away from the home or family setting.

3. The process of maturity is long, arduous, and gradual, consisting of repeated clashes between the protagonist's needs and desires and the views and judgments enforced by an unbending social order.

4. Growth usually results in alienation from traditional roles imposed by family, church and other social institutions at an early age; often the protagonist has suffered loss at a young age and must search for identity.

5. Eventually, the spirit and values of the social order become manifest in the protagonist, who is then accommodated into society. The novel ends with an assessment by the protagonist of himself and his new place in that society.

The Heroic Pattern: Archetypal Elements and Events

Element 1: Early Life

  • The hero’s mother is a royal virgin
  • His father is a king
  • The circumstances of his conception and birth are unusual, and
  • He is reputed to be the son of a god
  • At birth an attempt is made, often by his father or maternal grandfather, to kill him, but
  • He is spirited away, and
  • He is reared by foster parents in a far country

Element 2: Young Adulthood

  • On reaching manhood, he returns or goes to his future kingdom.
  • He falls under the control of an enemy.
  • He often makes a journey to the Underworld, or the shapes of the deadmay visit him.

Element 3: Journey or Quest

  • Has a purpose for his journey
  • Travels to the end of the earth
  • Seeks directions and/or advice
  • Finds women a danger to his success
  • Gains a guide
  • Is given weapons or talismans with magical powers
  • Crosses water
  • Confronts the powers of death in the form of shapes and/or monsters
  • Tries to bring back to earth an item or person from the Underworld, but
  • Is at best only partly successful.

Element 4: The Return Home

  • After victory over the king and/or a giant, dragon, or wild beast
  • He marries a princess, often the daughter of his predecessor, and becomes king.
  • Eventually, he loses favor with the gods and/or his subjects, and
  • He meets a mysterious death.
  • His children do not succeed him.
  • His body is not buried, but
  • He has one or more holy sepulchers.

Element 5: Major Themes often associated with the hero

  • The human quest: a journey of discovery about himself, his society, and his universe
  • Isolation: essentially alone, the hero’s courage, strength, and wisdom are tested
  • The quest as a dual struggle, both physical and psychological (a struggle to resolve the conflict between the body and the soul, between duty and desire, between the animal urges and divine aspirations, etc.)
  • The cycle of life, death, and rebirth
  • The hero as redeemer: often restores the kingdom to health and fertility
  • The hero as model: "by his half-divine nature, his glorious deeds, his relentless pursuit of immortality, the hero uplifts humanity from its dismal condition and reminds us of our godlike potential" (Powell 230)
  • The hero as protector of civilization: kills beasts and other enemies that threaten the kingdom; adds to the fund of knowledge
  • The dual nature of man: intellect/wisdom versus savagery/violence/ambition/primal urges

Harris, Stephen L. and Gloria Platner, Classical Mythology: Images and Insights, 2nd.

Mayfield Publishing Company. Mountain View, California: London: Toronto. 1998.

Powell, Barry B.Greek Myth, 4th.Prentice Hall.Upper Saddle River, NJ. 2001.

How It Feels to Be Colored Me –by Zora Neal Hurston

I AM COLORED but I offer nothing in the way of extenuating circumstances except the fact that I am the only Negro in the United States whose grandfather on the mother's side was not an Indian chief.

I remember the very day that I became colored. Up to my thirteenth year I lived in the little Negro town of Eatonville, Florida. It is exclusively a colored town. The only white people I knew passed through the town going to or coming from Orlando. The native whites rode dusty horses, the Northern tourists chugged down the sandy village road in automobiles. The town knew the Southerners and never stopped cane chewing when they passed. But the Northerners were something else again. They were peered at cautiously from behind curtains by the timid. The more venturesome would come out on the porch to watch them go past and got just as much pleasure out of the tourists as the tourists got out of the village.

The front porch might seem a daring place for the rest of the town, but it was a gallery seat for me. My favorite place was atop the gate-post. Proscenium box for a born first-nighter. Not only did I enjoy the show, but I didn't mind the actors knowing that I liked it. I usually spoke to them in passing. I'd wave at them and when they returned my salute, I would say something like this: "Howdy-do-well-I-thank-you-where-yougoin'?" Usually automobile or the horse paused at this, and after a queer exchange of compliments, I would probably "go a piece of the way" with them, as we say in farthest Florida. If one of my family happened to come to the front in time to see me, of course negotiations would be rudely broken off. But even so, it is clear that I was the first "welcome-to-ourstate" Floridian, and I hope the Miami Chamber of Commerce will please take notice.

During this period, white people differed from colored to me only in that they rode through town and never lived there. They liked to hear me I I speak pieces" and sing and wanted to see me dance the parse-me-la, and gave me generously of their small silver for doing these things, which seemed strange to me for I wanted to do them so much that I needed bribing to stop, only they didn't know it. The colored people gave no dimes. They deplored any joyful tendencies in me, but I was their Zora nevertheless. I belonged to them, to the nearby hotels, to the county-everybody's Zora.

But changes came in the family when I was thirteen, and I was sent to school in Jacksonville. I left Eatonville, the town of the oleanders, a Zora. When I disembarked from the river-boat at Jacksonville, she was no more. It seemed that I had suffered a sea change. I was not Zora of Orange County any more, I was now a little colored girl. I found it out in certain ways. In my heart as well as in the mirror, I became a fast brown - warranted not to rub nor run.

BUT I AM NOT tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all. I do not be long to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are all but about it. Even in the helter-skelter skirmish that is my life, I have seer that the world is to the strong regardless of a little pigmentation more of less. No, I do not weep at the world??I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.

Someone is always at my elbow reminding me that I am the grand daughter of slaves. It fails to register depression with me. Slavery is sixty years in the past. The operation was successful and the patient is doing well, thank you. The terrible struggle that made me an American out of a potential slave said "On the line! " The Reconstruction said "Get set! " and the generation before said "Go! " I am off to a flying start and I must not halt in the stretch to look behind and weep. Slavery is the price I paid for civilization, and the choice was not with me. It is a bully adventure and worth it all that I have paid through my ancestors for it. No one on earth ever had a greater chance for glory. The world to be won and nothing to be lost. It is thrilling to think-to know that for any act of mine, I shall get twice as much praise or twice as much blame. It is quite exciting to hold the center of the national stage, with the spectators not knowing whether to laugh or to weep.

The position of my white neighbor is much more difficult. No brown specter pulls up a chair beside me when I sit down to eat. No dark ghost thrusts its leg against mine in bed. The game of keeping what one has is never so exciting as the game of getting.

I do not always feel colored. Even now ? I often achieve the unconscious Zora of Eatonville before the Hegira. I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background.

For instance at Barnard. "Beside the waters of the Hudson" I feel my race. Among the thousand white persons, I am a dark rock surged upon, and overswept, but through it all, I remain myself. When covered by the waters, I am; and the ebb but reveals me again.

SOMETIMES IT IS the other way around. A white person is set down in our midst, but the contrast is just as sharp for me. For instance, when I sit in the drafty basement that is The New World Cabaret with a white person, my color comes. We enter chatting about any little nothing that we have in common and are seated by the jazz waiters. In the abrupt way that jazz orchestras have, this one plunges into a number. It loses no time in circumlocutions, but gets right down to business. It constricts the thorax and splits the heart with its tempo and narcotic harmonies. This orchestra grows rambunctious, rears on its hind legs and attacks the tonal veil with primitive fury, rending it, clawing it until it breaks through to the jungle beyond. I follow those heathen-follow them exultingly. I dance wildly inside myself; I yell within, I whoop; I shake my assegai above my head, I hurl it true to the mark yeeeeooww! I am in the jungle and living in the jungle way. My face is painted red and yellow and my body is painted blue, My pulse is throbbing like a war drum. I want to slaughter something-give pain, give death to what, I do not know. But the piece ends. The men of the orchestra wipe their lips and rest their fingers. I creep back slowly to the veneer we call civilization with the last tone and find the white friend sitting motionless in his seat, smoking calmly.

"Good music they have here," he remarks, drumming the table with his fingertips.

Music. The great blobs of purple and red emotion have not touched him. He has only heard what I felt. He is far away and I see him but dimly across the ocean and the continent that have fallen between us. He is so pale with his whiteness then and I am so colored.

AT CERTAIN TIMES I have no race, I am me. When I set my hat at a certain angle and saunter down Seventh Avenue, Harlem City, feeling as snooty as the lions in front of the Forty-Second Street Library, for instance. So far as my feelings are concerned, Peggy Hopkins Joyce on the Boule Mich with her gorgeous raiment, stately carriage, knees knocking together in a most aristocratic manner, has nothing on me. The cosmic Zora emerges. I belong to no race nor time. I am the eternal feminine with its string of beads.

I have no separate feeling about being an American citizen and colored. I am merely a fragment of the Great Soul that surges within the boundaries. My country, right or wrong.

Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It's beyond me.

But in the main, I feel like a brown bag of miscellany propped against a wall. Against a wall In company with other bags, white, red and yellow. Pour out the contents, and there is discovered a jumble of small, things priceless and worthless. A first-water diamond, an empty spool bits of broken glass, lengths of string, a key to a door long since crumbled away, a rusty knife-blade, old shoes saved for a road that never was and never will be, a nail bent under the weight of things too heavy for any nail, a dried flower or two still a little fragrant. In your hand is the brown bag. On the ground before you is the jumble it held-so much like the jumble in the bags could they be emptied that all might be dumped in a single heap and the bags refilled without altering the content of any greatly. A bit of colored glass more or less would not matter. Perhaps that is how the Great Stuffer of Bags filled them in the first place-who knows?

Their Eyes Were Watching God—Zora Neale Hurston

Introduction

When Their Eyes Were Watching God first appeared in 1937, it was well-received by white critics as an intimate portrait of southern blacks, but African-American reviewers rejected the novel as pandering to white audiences and perpetuating stereotypes of blacks as happy-go-lucky and ignorant. Unfortunately, the novel and its author, Zora Neale Hurston, were quickly forgotten. But within the last twenty years it has received renewed attention from scholars who praise its unique contribution to African-American literature, and it has become one of the newest and most original works to consistently appear in college courses across the country and to be included in updated versions of the American literary canon. The book has been admired by African-Americanists for its celebration of black culture and dialect and by feminists for its depiction of a woman's progress towards self-awareness and fulfillment. But the novel continues to receive criticism for what some see as its lack of engagement with racial prejudice and its ambivalent treatment of relations between the sexes. No one disputes, though, its impressive use of metaphor, dialect, and folklore of southern rural blacks, which Hurston studied as an anthropologist, to reflect the rich cultural heritage of African-Americans.

The Life and Work of Zora Neale Hurston :Author Biography

Zora Neale Hurston's colorful life was a strange mixture of acclaim and censure, success and poverty, pride and shame. But her varied life, insatiable curiosity, and profound wit made her one of the most fascinating writers America has known. Even her date of birth remains a mystery. She claimed in her autobiography to have been born on January 7, 1903. but family members swore she was born anywhere from 1891 to 1902. Nevertheless, it is known that she was born in Eatonville, Florida, which was to become the setting for most of her fiction and was the first all-black incorporated town in the nation. Growing up there, where her father was mayor, Hurston was largely sheltered from the racial prejudice African-Americans experienced elsewhere in America. She was the daughter of John Hurston, a Baptist preacher, and Lucy Potts Hurston, a schoolteacher. Zora was the fifth of eight children, and in her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, Hurston fondly remembers growing up in an eight-room house with “...two big chinaberry trees shading the front gate.” Eatonville was a self-governing, independent, all-black town. Her father was mayor for three terms and helped codify the town laws. Hurston grew up believing that blacks were equal, if not superior to whites, and was very proud of her heritage. Hurston used her hometown as a basis for the fictional Eatonville in Their Eyes Were Watching God and even borrowed some real names for her characters.