Inheritance And Development: A Comparative Study On Their Eyes Were Watching God And Mama Day

Zora Neale Hurston went deep into the African Americans and praised African Americans' greatness, spirit and psychological health of ancestry through excavation of the roots of culture which illuminates the fact that African culture is unsubstitutable. She established a literary tradition in her Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), which another African American woman writer, Gloria Naylor inherited and developed in novels. Gloria Naylor's Mama Day (1988) is also about a story of the protagonist's self-discovery and self-growth in an African American community. So, a study on contrasting and comparing the two novels can be further beneficial not only to our understanding of African tradition but also to valuing the significance of African tradition in the society today.Like Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, Gloria Naylor focused on African Americans, African American literary traditions and their rich ancestral heritage in Mama Day. Naylor also adopted a large number of African American vernacular languages as well as Free Indirect Discourse to narrate the story like Hurston. This discourse conformed to the development of African Americans and played key roles in preserving African American culture and reinforcing their self-confidence.Unlike the traditional narrative in Their Eyes Were Watching God, Mama Day is in a more post-modernist narrative. The entire story stitches all of the discourses belonging to different narrators like a quilt, which symbolizes the art and tradition in African black culture. Naylor literally stitches together numerous individual "pieces" to create a unified whole in her narrative. In fact, the quilt in the novel symbolizes "patterned" history of the Day family. And there is no limitation on time, place, or even on the living and the dead. In addition, Naylor went deep into African American culture in Mama Day than Hurston in Their Eyes Were Watching God. In Mama Day, Naylor makes the best use of the African tradition of magic, voodoo and the supernatural which proves the formidable power of African American culture. At the same time, Gloria Naylor expressed her wish to live on the harmoniously relationship between the individual and the community, the reality and the supernatural, western culture and African traditional culture, and so on.All in all, owning to their similar female life experiences, both Hurston and Naylor caught the opportunity to express their own thoughts and feelings through combining their own life experiences with their literary tradition although they were from different time periods. In order to appreciate the African American culture and demonstrate their pride, they delved into African American cultural tradition in their works, and exposed the value of African culture for the African Americans today. Hurston set a good example in this respect and Gloria Naylor inherited and developed this tradition and made contributions to black aesthetics by holding far more extensive views on the world as what Toni Morrison has said. To strengthen the sense of pride of African American nationalism, African Americans still need to implant themselves into the soil of their tradition. Only when the old tradition is handed down generation by generation, can African American strengthen the ethnic self-esteem and sense of pride, and enable them to establish an unassailable position forever.