Womanism As the Key to Understanding Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God

Womanism as the key to understanding Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God and Alice Walker's The Color Purple.

Publication: Hollins Critic

Publication Date: 01-OCT-88

Author: Saunders, James Robert

COPYRIGHT 1988 The Hollins Critic

Referring to Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), Alice Walker asserts, "There is no book more important to me than this one." Added to that statement of memorial is a poem composed by Walker dedicated to the main protagonist of that Hurston novel, a work that has rapidly become recognized as a modern classic. Included in her collection of poems entitled Good Night, Willie Lee, I'll See You in the Morning (1977), Walker writes:

I love the way Janie Crawford

left her husbands

the one who wanted to change her

into a mule

and the other who tried to interest her

in being a queen.

A woman, unless she submits,

is neither a mule

nor a queen

though like a mule she may suffer

and like a queen pace the floor.

Within the context of that poem, Walker has accurately interpreted much of the message in Hurston's novel. Understandably, Janie is not satisfied in her marriage to Logan Killicks, especially once she discovers that he plans to work her in the fields. Yet the more subtle psychological brutality exercised by Janie's second husband Joe is equally offensive: just after having been elected mayor of Eatonville, he can be found proclaiming, "She's uh woman and her place is in de home." Upon having just met Janie, one of his initial responses to her cascading hair and light skin had been to say that "a pretty doll-baby lak you is made to sit on de front porch and rock and fan yo'self and eat p'taters dat other folks plant just special for you." It would become Starks' intention to make a lady out of one who had in his estimation been gifted with physical beauty and, hopefully, a submissive disposition.
It is worth noting that in her poem Walker indicates Hurston's heroine "left her husbands." Yet while Janie does actually leave Killicks, she forsakes Joe Starks in a much different way. Having traveled some distance to take advantage of the newly developing all-black town, that second husband soon finds himself holding all of the town's most prominent positions, including those of storekeeper, postmaster, and mayor. However, as his responsibilities begin to mount, he finally is forced to let his wife help him operate the general store. Before long, Steve Mixon, from the Eatonville community, comes into that store to get some chewing tobacco, whereupon Janie finds herself in the position of having to cut out a plug for him. She fails to do this properly, whereupon Joe issues scathing criticism and then orders, "Don't stand dere rollin' yo' pop eyes at me wid yo' rump hangin' nearly to yo' knees!" Janie is personally humiliated, but as Hurston further writes, there was in addition "laughter at the expense of women." Men milling about the store begin desecrating womanhood in general, insinuating through their hideous laughter that no woman can do things as well as men. This marks a turning point in the novel because it is the point at which Janie decides to relinquish what had been loyalty to Joe and stand up for herself. It is as though the author herself became a character in her fiction as "Janie took to the middle of the floor to talk right into Jody's face, and that was something that hadn't been done before." Thus Janie retaliates:
"Stop mixin' up mah doings wid mah looks, Jody. When you git through tellin' me how tuh cut uh plug uh tobacco, then you kin tell me whether mah behind is on straight or not."
"Wha--whut's dat you say, Janie? You must be out yo' head."
"Naw, Ah ain't outa mah head neither."
"You must be. Talkin" any such language as dat."
"You de one started talkin' under people's clothes. Not me."
"Whut's de matter wid you, nohow? You ain't no young girl to be gettin' all insulted 'bout yo' looks. You ain't no young courtin' gal. You'se uh ole woman, nearly forty."
"Yeah, Ah'm nearly forty and you'se already fifty. How come you can't talk about dat sometimes instead of always pointin' at me?"
"T'ain't no use in gettin' all mad, Janie, 'cause Ah mention you ain't no young gal no mo'. Nobody in heah ain't lookin' for no wife outa yuh. Old as you is."
"Naw, Ah ain't no young gal no too' but den Ah ain't no old woman neither. Ah reckon Ah looks mah age too. But Ah'm a woman every inch of me, and Ah know it. Dat's uh whole lot more'n you kin say. You big-bellies round here and put out a lot of brag, but 'tain't nothin' to it but yo' big voice. Humph! Talkin' 'bout me lookin' old! When you pull down yo' britches, you look lak de change uh life."
In this verbal exchange much of our attention is drawn to the unorthodox spellings, double negatives, and folk expressions making up black dialect. But the most important point Hurston wishes to make has to do with the manner in which Janie has responded to Joe's efforts to confine her to "her place." After twenty years of his mental abuse, she finally rejects the premise upon which he had conceived their marriage. Only in this sense has Janie actually left him, and unable ever to recover from the shock of her assertiveness, he dies from what the author tells us is some kind of kidney trouble.
We will be reminded here of a more recent version of what has happened in that Hurston novel. But instead of Janie, this time the protagonist is Celie in Alice Walker's phenomenal bestseller The Color Purple, and instead of rural Florida, this time the setting is rural Georgia. Yet, between the pages of both novels are the circumstances of women pitted against predominant attitudes and against individuals who would control their very lives. Having, as a child, been regularly raped by her stepfather and later sold as so much chattel property, Celie subsequently winds up in the hands of another man who continues brutal treatment and is known to her as simply "Mr.--." For years, Celie maintains this man's household, raises his children, and is the passive party in their sexual relationship until she has had enough. Preparing to go to Memphis with two other women, Celie first listens and then joins in once Shug delivers the ultimatum.

Celie is coming with us, say Shug.

Mr.--'s head swivel back straight. Say what? he ast.

Celie is coming to Memphis with me.

Over my dead body, Mr.--say.

You satisfied that what you want, Shug say, cool as clabber.

Mr.-- start up from his seat, look at Shug, plop back down

again.

He look over at me. I thought you was finally happy, he say. What

wrong now?

You a low down dog is what's wrong, I say. It's time to leave you

and enter into the Creation. And your dead body just the welcome

mat I need.

As was the case with Joe Starks, Mr.-- is humiliated. In fact, absolute shock is registered on the faces of all who sit at the dinner table. "Everybody look at her like they surprise she there," Walker has Celie write, describing what has happened in a letter to her long lost sister, Nettle. However, Celie has an answer for their stares.

You was all rotten children, I say. You made my life a hell on earth.

And your daddy here ain't dead horse's shit.

Mr.-- reach over to slap me. I jab my case knife in his hand.

This reaction might seem unnecessarily harsh; indeed quite a few black male critics have insisted that the novel should be dismissed for what they consider its too narrow presentation of black life. From a certain perspective, those male critics have a point. In Walker's novel, little if any attention is accorded the black middle class or the fact that some black men do treat their wives with great respect. Furthermore, it must be considered whether or not the exposure of Mr.--'s treatment toward Celie does more harm than good in a society where opportunities already have been taken advantage of to classify blacks as inferior. Still, it must be admitted that when violence, be it physical or psychological, threatens to destroy the very essence of an individual, extreme reactions are quite warranted.
Sociologist Miriam Hirsch, in her book Women and Violence (1981), examines the various types of violence that have been perpetrated against women since the beginning of time, reminding us that even such brilliant philosophers as Socrates and Aristotle readily concluded that women were inferior human beings. That pattern of thought, as Hirsch explains it, continued its development in the theories of even so heralded a thinker as Sigmund Freud, who declared "biological determinism" to be the cause of female inferiority. When one considers that some of our most enlightened predecessors held such biased views, it is not too hard to understand how the masses of humanity reached similar conclusions.
To a large extent the problem was one of who controlled the definitions. Having been denied this role for centuries, women have begun, especially in recent decades, to insist that control over their own lives belongs to them. In her controversial book entitled The Natural Superiority of Women (1974), Ashley Montagu writes, "The origin of the English word 'woman' indicates that the female's very right to social existence was determined in the light of her secondary relationship to the male, for the word was originally 'wifman,' that is, 'wife-man,' the wife of the man; in the fourteenth century the f was dropped and the word became 'wiman'."
II
At the beginning of her collection of essays entitled In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens, Walker astutely offers her own list of alternative definitions for the term "womanist." The most essential explanation is that the word refers to "outrageous, audacious, courageous or willful behavior." The emphasis is on "willful" because for so long, so many black women have not been considered to be in possession of their own free wills, and no small part of the problem has resided in the psyche of black men. While many of her attitudes about the role of women in society are indeed outdated, Janie's grandmother, in Their Eyes Were Watching God, is not wholly out of date when she tells her ward:

Honey, de white man is de ruler of everything as fur as Ah been able

tuh find out. Maybe it's some place off in de ocean where de black

man is in power, but we don't know nothin' but what we see. So de

white man throw down de load and tell de nigger man tuh pick it up.

He pick it up because he have to, but he don't tote it. He hand it

to his womenfolks. De nigger woman is de mule uh de world so fur as

Ah can see.

Nanny warns Janie about racism and sexism, but the grandmother is more specifically concerned about the position of black women at the bottom of the totem pole. In spite of this entreaty, though, Janie has to learn the lesson for herself, experiencing two marriages that resemble what life would be like in a prison. In Walker's novel we similarly observe Celie functioning as the object of control, deprived of the very letters that her sister, Nettie, had composed to answer Celie's own communications from behind the marriage wall. As was the case with Hurston's Janie, it is only after Celie has absorbed all she can take that she is compelled to stand up for herself and finally assert, "I'm pore, I'm black, I may be ugly and can't cook ... But I'm here."
It is rather difficult to believe that the similarities in these two authors' works are mere coincidence. Born in Eatonville, Florida, at some unidentified point near the turn of the century, Hurston describes in her autobiographical Dust Tracks on a Road (1942) how she "used to climb to the top of one of the huge chinaberry trees which guarded our front gate, and look out over the world." Young Zora Neale was anxious to behold all that a full life might afford the individual. Further on in that autobiography the author tells us, "It grew upon me that I ought to walk out to the horizon and see what the end of the world was like." Similarly, in the very first line of her novel we are provided with the reflection that "Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board." Hurston then goes on to explain how some of those ships come in with the tide while others "sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight." Even those men who do not attain their dreams have at least at some point in their lives been able to envision themselves fulfilling their fantasies. At sixteen, that age when the search for identity is most profound, Janie slips out of her grandmother's house and imagines, "Oh to be a pear tree--any tree in bloom!" Janie envisions complete fulfillment; however, it must be noted that she identifies not with another person, but with a part of nature. As a "tree" she will be in possession of great strength, awesome beauty, and communion with the natural world.
While perhaps not as autobiographical as Hurston was in the writing of her fictional masterpiece, Walker does project through the pages of The Color Purple a sense that she has found solutions that can be applied by women in general. Speaking through the voice of Shug, Walker advises:

The thing I believe. God is inside you and inside everybody else.

You come into the world with God. But only them that search for it

inside find it. And sometimes it just manifest itself even if you

not looking, or don't know what you looking for. Trouble do it for

most folks, I think.

As we learn of such things as the fact that Mary Agnes also was raped as a child, and that even women in Africa are oppressed by men, it necessarily follows that we must view the advice being offered in the book as having been designed to make women think about themselves in a manner different from former perceptions. Shug concludes, "I knew that if I cut a tree, my arm would bleed." Improbable as that might sound, we as readers do give it some thought, for when Celie retaliates against Mr.-- it does indeed appear that she has relied upon the supernatural both to guide and give her strength. She herself is now brutal in her admonitions as she "give it to him straight ... And it seem to come to me from the trees." If it can be said that The Color Purple is a book that is mainly about the oppression of women, then it can also be said that it is a work that maintains women's link to nature as a major element for freedom.
III
Born in rural Eatonton, Georgia, in 1944, Walker is well aware of the great impact that her southern heritage has had on her writing. More precisely, she has come to grips with a legacy that has been passed on by the earlier writer who serves as the later artist's spiritual predecessor. Posing as Hurston's niece, Walker actually ventured, in August of 1973, to central Florida, first to Eatonville and then to Fort Pierce, where Hurston is buried. In a heartwrenching and most bizarre essay written for Ms. magazine and entitled "Looking for Zora," Walker reports on the visit to Eatonville and tells of her encounters with several of the local townspeople who knew both Hurston and her family. Walker was surprised to learn that Hurston wasn't buried at her home. Instead she had been laid to rest at Fort Pierce in what Walker discovered as a cemetery that looked "more like an abandoned field." The "niece" goes on to describe how "weeds choke the dirt road and scrape against the sides" of her car. And then we are shocked by the stunning information that Walker is "used to the haphazard cemetery-keeping that is traditional in most Southern black communities, but this neglect is staggering." We will be struck by the unfortunate circumstances of Hurston's demise, but Walker, perhaps more than most, can feel the agonizing pain of knowing that this writer in particular was buried in an unmarked grave.
Walker has been justly critical of those who would suggest that this is no disturbing fate. Poor people frequently have received far less respect than that when earthly time has ended for them. But for one who is quite possibly the greatest black woman writer that this world has ever known, such circumstances do seem out of place. In the foreword to Robert Hemenway's Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography, Walker writes of her efforts to locate and mark Hurston's grave. "It was, rather, a duty I accepted as naturally mine--as a black person, a woman, and a writer--because Zora was dead and I, for the time being, was alive." Walker's action in finding and marking Hurston's grave is comparable to the dead artist's own devotion to her craft in spite of many obstacles. As Walker was destined to be later, Hurston already had been a woman who was both black and an artist. Barriers to be overcome are prominent in Hurston's autobiography where, for example, she writes of "the real love affair of my life." Hurston confides: