On The Folkloric Representations In The Fiction Of Zora Neale Hurston

This dissertation offers a tentative analysis of the folkloric representations in Zora Neale Hurston's three novels in terms of their historical and cultural contexts from the theoretical perspectives of cultural anthropology, folkloristics, deconstruction and identity formation.The generic term"culture"is often dichotomized into high culture and low culture, elite culture and mass culture, modern culture and traditional culture. Folklore belongs to the latter of the aforementioned binary oppositions, namely, it is traditional culture popular among the lower classes. Because of its association with the grassroots, folklore is usually condemned by the elite intellectuals as"vulgar, barbaric"and therefore, offensive to the cultured upper classes. Thriving in the cultural ecological system in the world, it, however, becomes a picturesque landscape for its vitality and beauty. African folklore, for instance, has been largely ignored for the limitations of its orality and later denigrated for the rise of slave trade. Since its genesis, African American folklore has been relegated to a periphery for the inferior status of its bearers in the American society, but it grows luxuriantly, rather than withering, in spite of strict constrictions.When the slave trade was waning, the European explorers and missionaries had acquired more knowledge about the African folk culture, which made it possible to examine it from the new perspective of cultural anthropology. However, the serious study of African American folklore began much later. Since the end of the 19th century, African American folklore began to attract attention as it deserves as a result of the prevalence of cultural relativism, which indicated the latest theoretical orientation in the field of cultural anthropology at that time. In the past, African American culture was placed in a disadvantaged position because of the marginal status of its bearers in the political and economical life in the racist American society. It was also much distorted because of the white racists'prejudices and meanwhile, the Negroes often resorted to"a featherbed of resistance"to the inquisitive white anthropologists, so the authentic African American folklore, for a long time, remained a mystery to the outsiders. At the turn of the twentieth century, the rise of Boasian anthropology made it a fashion to study African American folklore. In the mid-twenties, black folklore became a vogue with the promotion of black intellectuals. Within this cultural context, the Harlem Renaissance came into being and flourished.Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960), an African American woman writer, built her literary reputation during the New Negro Movement. As a native Southerner, Hurston had been steeped in black folk traditions since childhood and therefore, developed a passion for them because of her intimate contact with them. What's more, she studied anthropology under the supervision of Franz Boas, father of American anthropology and had undergone two folklore-collecting expeditions in the South. These experiences helped shape Hurston's strong consciousness of black folklore and enhance her sense of responsibility to preserve and perpetuate the authentic African American folk heritages. Biographically speaking, it is quite natural for Hurston to apply black folklore to her fictional creation.Being a productive writer whose literary career lasted for nearly thirty years, Hurston is the author of four novels– Jonah's Gourd Vine (1934), Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939) and Seraph on the Suwanee (1948)– and over fifty literary pieces of other genres such as short story, play and essay. Meanwhile she is also an established folklorist who authored two anthropological works written in literary style: Mules and Men (1935) and Tell My Horse (1938). As she transplanted literary narrative strategies into her anthropological works, Hurston also incorporated folkloric elements into her literary writing and created her unique folklore fiction. Due to time limit, this dissertation takes Hurston's three representative novels as the object of its study and makes a tentative analysis of the historical and social functions of the folkloric elements in them. Among Hurston's four published novels, three are imbued with African American folkloric representations, which is sufficient proof of the importance of black folklore in her fictional creation. However, the Hurston scholarship so far has focused on the feminine consciousness in her masterpiece Their Eyes Were Watching God and ignored the prominent feature of the folkloric representations in her fiction. The author of this dissertation believes that it might be rewarding to make an interpretation of Hurston's fiction within its historical context from the cultural perspective. Hopefully this new approach to Hurston's fiction will lead to new findings, which in turn will cast light on a fuller and better understanding of this unique woman writer.Hurston's fiction had not been well received for a long period of time after its publication. African American writers of"social protest"like Richard Wright and middle-class intellectuals like Alain Locke accused Hurston of"pandering to the white taste,"and having not"come to grips with social document fiction"and so on. These critics made their evaluation of Hurston's fiction according to their own aesthetics and each of them had their reasons. Nevertheless, the author argues that it seems fairer to explore Hurston's fiction within the particular historical and cultural contexts in which it was written. In the early twentieth century, racist ideology was still deeply rooted in the American society. As a college graduate who had personal experiences of racial prejudice and discrimination, Hurston would certainly not keep her eyes shut about the racial injustice, nor would she, as a Southerner, remain indifferent to the race question, a common case of Robert Penn Warren's comment,"You can't be a Southerner and not have the whole race question on your mind in one way or another."Confronted with racial prejudice and discrimination, the methods of resistance vary from individual to individual: some may protest directly, and others may challenge white supremacy indirectly. Wright belongs to the former while Hurston, the latter. Hurston showed her concern toward the racial question by means of representing black folkloric heritages in her fiction. Thus, the rich folkloric representations in Hurston's novels function in two ways: as a survival strategy and as a means of reconstructing black cultural identity.As James Weldon Johnson, one of the Renaissance proponents put it, the African American writers then were faced with the dilemma of a divided audience: the white America and the black America. It was difficult for them to cater to the tastes of a double audience. They must choose either of them, for the two audiences had widely different reading expectations: black readers expected more racial treatment of the subject, such as the racial conflicts and protest against racial injustices while white readers were more interested in the rich and picturesque folk life of the Negroes. Living in a hostile white society, Hurston attempted to keep a balance between the two: she submerged her racial protest behind the veil of black folklore in her fiction so as to have an access to the white mainstream publishing houses. Camouflaged in intoxicating African American folklore, Hurston's novels were more readily accepted by white publishers and thus had a chance to be read by a wider range of white critics and ordinary readers, which itself was a victory in the African American writers'struggle against racism. At the same time, beneath the fascinating mask Hurston deconstructed the negative stereotyped Negro images and made a scathing criticism of the traumatic effects of the internalization of white cultural values on African Americans.Hurston's folklore fiction did not simply aim to satisfy the curiosity of the white readers towards the"primitive"culture of African Americans, but to reconstruct black cultural identity, to deconstruct the white cultural hegemony, to demystify the melting-pot myth and to articulate African Americans'desire to build their national identity as Americans. The reconstruction of black cultural identity has great significance in the life of African Americans. Black cultural identity is the basis upon which their individual identity may be adequately constructed, and the source of their pride and the bedrock upon which they may wage their struggle for racial equality. By means of reconstructing their cultural identity, African Americans can possibly reunify their fractured identity (double consciousness in Du Bois'term), both an African and an American. Neither do they desire to"Africanize America"nor do they want to"bleach their souls"and be assimilated into the white American culture and thus lose their African heritages. By celebrating the unique African American folk culture, Hurston sings a song for African Americans to enhance their pride and reinforce their sense of community. In this sense, Hurston has created a spiritual habitat for the hopeless and helpless African Americans in a hostile white world. Meanwhile, Hurston's fiction might waken white America to reevaluate African American culture and ponder over the cultural differences between the races and ultimately take more effective measures to tackle with the racial question in the American society and endeavor to make America an ideal country as described in its constitution:"That all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."The dissertation consists of five chapters.Chapter One is an introduction. First of all, this part gives a brief introduction to the resurrection of Zora Neale Hurston and a review of the previous critical responses to Hurston's literary texts. The life of the African American woman writer Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) is quite legendary. During the heyday of the Harlem Renaissance, she shone like the bright morning star, but in the final years of her life she had to work as a maid for subsistence, with her novels out of print. More than a decade after her death, she, however, was rediscovered by Alice Walker and began to attract an enormous amount of attention thereafter. Her folklore fiction has since become the focus of attention of the reading public and the critical circle alike, and as a result, the research on Hurston abroad has been vigorous and fruitful. In stark contrast, Hurston has been to a great extent neglected until recently in China. What is more, Chinese scholars focus their attention mainly on the feminist consciousness in her masterpiece Their Eyes Were Watching God while neglecting the prominent folkloric representations in her fiction. The next section introduces Hurston's folklore novels and the representative negative critical responses to them. Out of her four published novels, three are replete with black folkloric representations, and hence the term"folklore fiction."Arranged in chronological order, these three folklore novels are: Jonah's Gourd Vine (1934), Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), and Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939). Since their publication, Hurston's folklore novels have been condemned by"social protest"writers such as Richard Wright as lacking overt political messages, but as a matter of fact, the absence of overt political messages does not mean that Hurston is indifferent to the racial question. The last section points out that literary texts are not self-contained autonomous aesthetic objects because context plays an important role in the appropriate understanding of Hurston's novels. The anti-racism implicit in Hurston's folklore novels can not be revealed unless they are placed within the historical and cultural contexts in which they were written.Chapter Two explores the prominence of folkloric representations in Hurston's fiction. The first section points out the legitimacy of the entry of black folklore into Hurston's fiction. The next discusses the definition and categorization of folklore. Subsequently the diverse folkloric representations in Hurston's novels are combed and exemplified according to the definition and classification system stated above. The folkloric representation in Hurston's novels fall into four categories: literary types, consisting of folktale, myth and legend; linguistic types, sermons, proverbs and idiomatic expressions; religious types, hoodoo practices and some"superstitious"beliefs; and action types, folk music and dance.Chapter Three discusses the historical function of black folklore as a survival strategy of Hurston's fiction. The first section introduces briefly the vogue of black culture during the Harlem Renaissance. The next elaborates on the dilemma of African American writers and Hurston's strategy to deal with a divided audience. The last section focuses on the criticism of white cultural values and the deconstruction of the negative stereotyped Negro images in Hurston's folklore fiction by means of close reading. Living in a racist world at the turn of the twentieth century, Hurston compromised part of her writing freedom to gain access to the mainstream white publishing houses by arousing white readers'interest with her presentation of the"primitive"African American culture and meanwhile articulated her protest against white supremacy through characterization. Considering the cost of open defiance within the historical context of her time, we believe it was wise for Hurston to take a roundabout path as a survival strategy of her fiction.Chapter Four elaborates on folklore as a means of reconstructing black cultural identity in Hurston's fiction. First of all, the complex relationship between American culture, African American culture and African American folklore is discussed. The next section is about the close association of racism and black cultural identity, and the historical context within which the black cultural identity was reconstructed: the identity crisis of African Americans in the 1920s and the prevalence of cultural relativism. The last section deals with the reconstruction of black cultural identity by means of representing the unique African American folk culture in Hurston's fiction: the employment of black English vernacular, the celebration of black religion, the conservation of the oral tradition, and the promotion of African American songs and dances. America is not a unified homogeneous entity, but rather is inherently heterogeneous in terms of culture as a nation of immigrants. African American culture is a beautiful piece of the American mosaic, and a valuable contribution African Americans have made to the American culture. This subculture also provides the basis upon which the national identity of the black Americans can be adequately constructed. By means of representing the unique African American folk culture, Hurston attempted to impart upon Americans the value of it and thus boost the pride of its bearers for the well-being of them as American citizens.Chapter Five is conclusion, summarizing the entire dissertation with a conclusion that the accusation of the absence of political messages in Hurston's folklore fiction is a misinterpretation. Historical and cultural contexts can shed light on the thematic concern of anti-racism implicit in Hurston's folklore fiction.