An Analysis Of The Blackness In Hurston’s Novels

Known as a novelist, folklorist, and anthropologist, Zora Neale Hurston is one of the most important writers of African-American literature in the20th century. She is also an active member in the Harlem Renaissance. Hurston developed deep affection towards Afro-American culture and a strong sense of national pride, resulting in the fact that she devoted her whole life to preserving Afro-American cultural heritage. Hurston acts as a master who reveals the characteristics of the blackness through literary creation. As a folklorist, based on the national traditional culture, she introduces extensively various folkloric elements of black folk tales, black music, sermons, and other forms of folk culture, as well as literary the narrative techniques into her fictional works. As a writer, she creatively puts unique black folk elements into the literary creation, which endows the text with distinctive local colors.Blackness serves as the most notable feature and fundamental culture matrix of African American literature, which distinguishes itself from the white mainstream literature. The notion that "The beauty is as what the black is" is the theme of the blackness, which emphasizes the maintenance of national dignity and the improvement of the sense of national pride and self-confidence. When it comes to the field of literary creation, the writers who advocate blackness spirits claim that inspiration and themes for literary creation should be drawn from the source of African traditional culture. Demonstrating the glorious black history and spiritual power as well, through which we can finally achieve the goal that black literature can maintain its absolute value in world literature.From different perspectives of folkloric elements, black images, and narrative features, this paper aims to explore the features of blackness represented in several literary works of Hurston, such as Mules and Men, Tell My Horse, Their Eyes Were Watching God,and Jonah’s Gourd Vine, etc.Chapter One is the introduction section, which mainly presents the lifetime and literary works of Zora Neale Hurston. This part mainly exhibits a general view of blackness representation in Hurston’s novels and also simply combs the present research status at home and abroad. Blackness as a cultural phenomenon can never be ignored in the research field of Afro-American literature. Hurston reveals the unique value of black culture through mining the Afro-American culture in fictional creation.Chapter Two focuses on the analysis of folkloric characteristics. The folkloric cultural phenomena involved in her works can be classified into three categories which demonstrated the feature of blackness in Hurston’s novel, including, first, the type of spiritual folklore which lays special stress on analyzing the voodoo rituals and superstitions; second, the linguistic folklore that focuses on the application and representation of black dialects, folk tales, and sermon; thirdly, the behavioral folklore which is embodied by body-movement-related art forms of black music, dance, and folk art, etc. The folkloric representation of Afro-American culture serves not only as the most prominent and remarkable characteristic of Hurston’s novels, but the source of blackness in the Afro-American literature.Chapter Three probes into the representative feature of black images contained in Hurston’s novels. Hurston actively explores the construction of Afro-American cultural identity. She has vividly created many male and female images possessing estimable peculiar personalities and independent self-consciousness in her works, such as the protagonist of Joe in Jonah’s Gourd Vine, Janie and Phoeby in Their Eyes Were Watching God. These new black image-constructions reflect that Hurston shows great concern to the fate of the black race and the rebuilding of black cultural identity.Chapter Four underscores the narrative features of Hurston’s novels. Hurston demonstrates her own unique characteristics in narrative language, narrative structure, and rhetoric strategies. As a litterateur and folklorist, she outstands her fictional texts by applying particular black dialects, and introducing the mode of free indirect discourse and the black narrative into her novels. In addition, Hurston stresses the change of narrative angles, and uses the frame narrative of the story, which gives hints about the life course of the protagonists. The figurative language also adds up to the uniqueness of the texts, such as metaphor, exaggeration, symbol, etc. The rhetorical devices function to show the ordinary black living reality under racial suppression.Chapter Five systematically summarizes the discussion of the blackness characteristics represented in Hurston’s novels from different aspects of folkloric representation, the construction of black images, and the narrative characteristics in Afro-American fiction. It is of great significance to preserve and inherit blackness features under white culture domination, which not only enlightens us on the research practices of Hurston’s novels, but also works as a beneficial survival attempt for Afro-American literature to acquire progressions and show its presence in minority context.