Abstract
A shame theorist would question the critically popular “multicultural” account of Hurston as an avant-garde Black Nationalist and feminist, a portrait constructed by ignoring, explaining away, or dismissing as “out of character” aspects of her fictions and her life, certain of her works, and her later political positions. Instead of a racial and gender hero, who somehow transcends or escapes the racism and sexism of American culture, Hurston shows up as a multiply shamed identity, but one who might be characterized, in contrast to Stephen Crane, as exhibitionist rather than paranoid. Her love of the public eye, patterns of short intense relationships with men, expeditions as a folklorist to cultures of poverty in the South and the Caribbean, participation in voodoo and animal sacrifice, and reactionary political positions: these can all be understood in terms of an abjection that issues out of her beloved mother’s early death, her father’s abandonment of her, her encounters with sexism, and her experiences of racism and color consciousness as a dark-skinned black child.
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Notes
ZNH followed by page numbers refers to Robert E. Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980). ZNH followed by roman numerals refers to Walker’s foreword in the same book.
See Houston A. Baker Jr., “Workings of the Spirit: Conjure and the Space of Black Women’s Creativity,” in Zora Neale Hurston: Critical Perspectives Past and Present, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and K. A. Appiah (New York: Amistad, 1993), 289, 299, 303–4.
Ibid., 304. More recently, and very similarly, Hortense Spillers has described Hurston as “an enabler” of future black women writers. Hortense J. Spillers, “A Tale of Three Zoras: Barbara Johnson and Black Women Writers,” Diacritics 34, no. 1 (2004): 94.
Alice Walker called Their Eyes one of the “most ‘healthily’ rendered heterosexual love stories in our literature,” and June Jordan called it “the most successful, convincing, and exemplary novel of Blacklove that we have. Period.” Quoted in Carla Kaplan, ed., Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters (New York: Doubleday, 2002), 183.
TE followed by page numbers refers to Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (New York: Harper, 1990). TE followed by roman numerals refers to Mary Helen Washington, foreword to Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Hurston (New York: Harper, 1990).
Deborah E. McDowell, foreword in Moses, Man of the Mountain, by Hurston (New York: Harper, 1991), xi. Hurston, Seraph on the Sewanee (New York: Harper, 1991). SS followed by page numbers refers to this text.
Hurston, Tell My Horse (New York: Harper, 1990). TMH followed by page numbers refers to this text.
More recently, the preferred strategy of recuperating Hurston has begun to switch: and now her whole oeuvre is seen as subtly, ingeniously progressive. Valerie Boyd’s 2003 biography of Hurston, a celebratory and not a critical work, idealizes the younger and older Hurston alike. It takes the deifying, apologist stance to an extreme. Their Eyes is seen as subtly criticizing Tea Cake’s violence toward Janie and so is considered unproblematic “feminist” “protest literature”; it is also seen as subtly “protestfing] white oppression,” through “not confrontation, but affirmation.” Boyd even finds Hurston’s later opposition to Brown v. Board of Education “prescient” because “some contemporary black intellectuals go so far as to say that integration was one of the biggest tactical mistakes in African-American history.” Boyd, Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston (New York: Scribner, 2003), 303–4, 305–6, 425. Some critical work, such as Susan Meisenhelder’s Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick: Race and Gender in the Work of Zora Neale Hurston (Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 1999), adopts a similar recuperative tactic. According to Meisenhelder, as Keith Leonard puts it in review, “Hurston never pandered to white audiences nor did she grow more conservative in her later years, as various critics have suggested. Instead, Hurston consistently ‘hit a straight lick with a crooked stick,’ manipulating patrons and publishers through her ingratiating demeanor in order to get published and then ‘camouflaging’ her racial affirmation and feminist resistance in conventional literary narratives and folk humor.” Keith Leonard, Review, Legacy 18, no. 1 (2001): 118–19.
Hurston, Jonah’s Gourd Vine (New York: Harper, 1990). JGV followed by page numbers refers to this text.
John Berryman, Stephen Crane (Cleveland: Meridian, 1950), 268.
Henry Louis Gates and Sieglinde Lemke, introduction to The Complete Stories, by Hurston (New York: Harper, 1991), xx.
Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror, Leon S. Roudiez, trans. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 8. Emphasis original.
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© 2007 Keith Gandal
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Gandal, K. (2007). A Shameful Look at Zora Neale Hurston. In: Class Representation in Modern Fiction and Film. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230604193_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230604193_3
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