Table of Contents
While Zora Neale Hurston lived through both the Harlem Renaissance and World War I and II, she did not live to see radical change in feminist thought, nor did she even know the term by that name. Zora knew that her thoughts on gender were radically different from the thoughts of mainstream Americans and African Americans at the time, but refused to conform. Subsequently, Zora was shunned and her popularity and writing suffered because of this. THESIS: Zora = ahead of her time and Grandmother of Black Feminism Thought.
Zora’s Creative writing ideas were fostered in the hyper-tense climate of the Harlem Renaissance. Determined to create a new identity as free people with the same ideals of liberty, life, and equality as any other American, people with any creative talent at all flocked to the Harlem Renaissance and gave all they had, and the returns were sometimes fruitful, but, “Most importantly, the Harlem Renaissance instilled in African Americans across the country a new spirit of self-determination and pride, a new social consciousness, and a new commitment to political activism, all of which would provide a foundation for the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s” (NMAAHC). The Harlem Renaissance was the successful platform for many African American writers, including Hurston, and political activists to launch their career. But while Hurston fit into the Modernist Harlem Renaissance Movement, she was not a Modernist writer (Zora Neale Hurston: the book). She was entirely her own kind.
Black Feminist Thought was entirely non-existent during Zora’s time, and because of the lack of female black writers who would take the risk of being ostracized at the expense of losing their writing career, Zora is easily the origin of Black Feminist Thought. The Harlem Renaissance was the expression of freedom and the Black Experience up until that point, but while radical change on the part of males was widely accepted, females were largely stereotyped. While these stereotypes were not characterized until after Zora’s time there is evidence for them during Zora’s time, and even in her writing. Zora interrupted the food chain in a way that was not acceptable, and sought for reform that was not pushed by both white females or African American males, for differing reasons.
127 our experts are availableright now
Outside of fiction, Zora was not an advocator for Black Feminism and supported segregation. Hurston was her own brand politician and feminist. She sided with the whites when it came to politics, and believed what she herself wanted to believe when it came to feminism, only because the sign of the times was not what she wanted to hear (The New Yorker). She didn’t write to satisfy anyone, either in gender or race politics, other than herself. First and foremost, Zora’s work, both as an anthropologist and writer, was funded by wealthy, white patrons. She was restricted on what she could spread to the public and what she could publish without her patron’s permission. While Zora called Charlotte Mason her “God-mother,” writing indicates there relationship was strained near the end, and Zora cut off the agreement when she felt she was in a choke hold.
Their Eyes Were Watching God was a spontaneous affair in which it seems that Zora vented about the feminist restrictions people wanted to place on her over a seven week intense writing period. Zora writes that was she under internal pressure to get the words down into writing, and “It was dammed up inside of me…I wish that I could write it again.” While certain events in the book correspond to event in Zora’s life, for example, her love affair is one of the things she said she actually did vent about in her book, Janie, the books protagonist is clearly not Zora. While Janie finds love and the expression of life in her three husbands, Zora divorced her three husbands because she felt they restricted her.
No matter her outward political views, Zora’s feminist fiction made her a target. Her popularity had spiked after the publication of a few short stories including Seraph on the Suwanee, for example, but Their Eyes almost ended Zora’s writing career with a big bang. While some writers celebrated the author for her choice words and forward thinking (who) others such as Richard Wright:
Miss Hurston can write, but her prose is cloaked in that facile sensuality that has dogged Negro expression since the days of Phillis Wheatley. . . Miss Hurston voluntarily continues in her novel the tradition which was forced upon the Negro in the theatre, that is, the minstrel technique that makes the ‘white folks’ laugh. Her characters eat and laugh and cry and work and kill; they swing like a pendulum eternally in that safe and narrow orbit in which America likes to see the Negro live: between laughter and tears . . . The sensory sweep of her novel carries no theme, no message, no thought. In the main, her novel is not addressed to the Negro, but to a white audience whose chauvinistic tastes she knows how to satisfy.
Zora, whose name and reputation suffered because of comments such as the one above, was never able to publish another novel of such standard. As a result, she died in obscurity in an unmarked grave. Only decades later, when Alice Walker re-discovered Hurston and her writing, was Zora’s work re-imagined in a new lens, Black Feminism, that was becoming more and more popular in the 1990s, did people such as Patricia Hill Collins, Kimberlye Crenshaw, and even Alice walker herself embrace Zora unconditionally for what she believed in communicated through Their Eyes Were Watching God.
If Zora was the Grandmother of Black Feminism, Alice Walker was certainly the Granddaughter of Black Feminism and the Mother of her own coined literary movement, Womanism. While Zora’s memory was kept alive in African American feminist circles, her legacy was not preserved beyond that, and many African American feminists did not act to continue her legacy until Alice Walker arrived on the scene. Alice Walker recognized that Zora’s book, Their Eyes Were Watching God had futuristic feminist ideas embedded in almost every line of text, and that Zora had been preaching long before she had a congregation in terms of Black Feminist Thought.
For example, Their Eyes opens with the almost biblical references that men’s dreams are ships at sea that may or may not ever reach their destination. Women, however, “Forget all those things they don’t want to remember and remember everything they don’t want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly” (1-2). In a roundabout way, Hurston is saying that women’s dreams are more attainable than men’s because women’s dreams are their reality and much more realistic. A comment such as this would have set white and black males on edge because it is redefining the relationships between a male and a female. In reality, Zora was only beginning to expand her own, unique Black Feminist Thought. In Patricia Hill Collin’s work, Black Feminist Thought, Collins dedicates an entire chapter to defining African American stereotypes.
Collins makes the argument that three stereotypes (Mammie, the Matriarch, and Jezebel) have long been the sexist way of dealing with African American female oppression and are basically just a way of justification for white people about dealing with them. With stereotypes come stereotyped images in which the power transfers from a single word to an image and that image of racism or sexism, such as the figure of a ‘Mammie’ is harder to obliterate from society. The different intersections of oppression meet at various different crossroads, such as the idea of thinking in binaries and their counterparts, however, ‘Whites and Blacks, males and females, thought and feeling are not complementary counterparts – they are fundamentally different entities related only through their definition as opposites (77).’
This is an example of objectification crossing with intersectionality. As objects, as bell hooks points out, our actions are the actions of someone else. Objectifying women proves the point that stereotypes exist not only a woman or man on a sexist status but also a racial one: ‘The treatment afforded Black Women US Domestic workers exemplifies the man forms objectification can take….objectification can be so severe that the object disappears’ (78). Simply, because objectification imposes stereotypical relationships that are unstable because of the objectification itself, this leads back to the crossroads of intersectional oppression.
But because of the objectification of true womanhood and the different traits black females had to uphold, such as the stereotype of Mammy, black females received no help from white females. This reason could be because of the Mammy stereotype of the caregiver, and subordinate house servant. This is also just an example of intersectionality and objectification that is central to racial oppression. During the 1960s, when African Americans were as a whole experiencing political and economic mobility, the image of the Black Matriarch took hold.
May saw it as an outcome of racial oppression, others as the cause. While ‘The Mammy (figures) typifies the Black Mother in White homes, the matriarch (figure) symbolizes the mother figure in Black homes: Just as the Mammy represents the ‘good’ Black mother, the matriarch symbolizes the ‘bad’ black mother’ (83). It is interesting to note that not only white people as a whole, but also African American males opposed the strong stereotype, and insisted that more control on the women’s part over the family contributed to not only social problems during the Black civil rights movement, but also children’s failure at school.
While African American women embraced this stereotype as an ideal of strength, others shunned it because of its strengthen and control, just as other shunned Zora Neale Hurston’s writings because of the strong stereotypical black female character. Influence of gender and lack of feminist thought on the matriarchal stereotype beginning in the 1960s leads to as Patricia Collins puts it, ‘A powerful symbol for both Black and White females of what can go wrong if Patriarchal white power is challenged.’
As a result of many whites and blacks, even some females, shunned this image, not only when Zora Neale Hurston created a character so complex some of its facets could be explained by black matriarchies but also when black women started exemplifying these characteristics after world war 2. While these stereotypes have little or no effect on the political climate, the capitalist economic climate at times suffered because, as people put it, of the image of a working, single mother: in other words, a matriarch. Collins also puts much effort into defining the stereotype of Jezebel, who is a passionate, but aggressive woman.
Patricia Collin’s work is proof that Hurston was forward-thinking concerning feminism and intersectionality, because Hurston’s work contains much of the same thinking behind what Collins said. For example, in Their Eyes Were Watching God, the relationships assert that Janie is an strong, independent woman and a complex yet rounded character by showing how she continues to move on through her failed marriages. QUOTE In this way, Hurston is defying stereotypical relationships. Beyond the Harlem Renaissance, in which Zora Neale Hurston centered her writings, post-world war 1 and 2 held little to no changes regarding the stereotypical objectification of black females. Janie’s physical features are sexualized in an effort to stick a stereotype to her.
QUOTE This is also another example of how objectification can influence not the value of Janie herself. While Hurston encountered racial discrimination on a daily basis in her life (how it feels to be colored me) her characters deal more with stereotypes within their African American community and not beyond. Janie’s beauty stereotypes her because of the restrictions on beauty during the Harlem Renaissance. While Janie’s Grandmother, Nanny, born a slave and now a freedwoman, wanted Janie to marry well and had the best intentions for her, she wanted for Janie what she couldn’t have, a nice big house, and a nice white husband. Janie didn’t want those controlling images, she wanted the freedom to embrace her she was and she wanted a husband who would also embrace her she was.
Unlike other female African American writers of her time, Zora Neale Hurston differed as Janie accepted her social status in society, and rejoiced in the positive side of life. Heroines like Janie don’t emerge again in female black literature until the 1990s more than 70 years later when society is beginning to accept for the first time the independent new black woman. ‘Just as social class difference has become more prominent in Black women’s controlling images overall, images of emergent women in Black women’s literature also reflect social class changes.’ Collins book reference
Being black and female means coming under the jurisdiction of intersectionality, and standing in the setting of where many forms of discrimination overlap. In a Ted Talk labeled, “The Urgency of Intersectionality,” Kimberle Crenshaw reiterates the many times Black females have been discriminated against duly for their race and sex. Zora fought this battle, way before she knew the official term for it, and Janie does too, but in her own way. In Their Eyes Were Watching God, White males, followed by white females are at the top of the food chain.
After this comes, Black males, and then Black females are at the bottom. In her books, Zora compares them to mules, carrying the weight of the world and also the grievances of the world on their backs: ‘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 ud de world so fur as Ah can see’ (). This quote is still relevant in 2019, where African American women suffer a high rate of brutality at the hands of law enforcement. Even though Zora has been preaching for many years, aided by the voices of Patricia Collins and Kimberle Crenshaw, little reform is taking place to embrace intersectional individuals.
Bell Hook and Zora
When Alice Walker discovered Hurston in the early 1990s, Feminism was running rampant. After it went silent in the 60s, woman like Walker and Collins were pushing for the Black Feminist Movement. Walker saw gold in Hurston’s writing, while others saw coal. People, especially African American males and whites, were not ready to accept Hurston’s writing during the Harlem Renaissance and post-war years. Years of servitude and submission had been engrained into the minds of many people.
But after the Civil Rights Movement writers such as Walker and Collins were writing with the same style and feminist ideas Hurston had years before. Zora Neale Hurston unlike any of her counterparts, embraced her feminism and her intersectionality at the same time. Zora took the risk and ran with in, and in doing so, she ostracized herself from her literary colleagues and the literary world during her lifetime. Her work speaks of the power of feminism and intersectionality and reading works by Feminists and Intersectionalists in the 20-21st century proves this point.
