SECTION:
Narrations in Literature and in Writing History
Dilek Direnç (Ege University, Izmir)
Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God : A Representation of Multiple Southern Histories/NarrativesHistory has long been perceived as universal and absolute, which means that it has one incontestable version. However, it is now being treated as having many different versions reflecting diverse experiences and perspectives. Keith Jenkins, in Rethinking History, maintains that history is a competition field of rhetorical or narrative strategies, a discourse which can produce any number of alternative accounts. If history is a narrative that employs rhetorical or narrative strategies, then it will be possible to treat history as a form of novel, and fiction as a form of history. Using this assumption as a starting point, the purpose of this paper is to look at Zora Neale Hurston's now widely acclaimed novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, first published in 1937, as a text which contributes to the historical narrative of the American South. As an African American writer, Hurston, one of the most important women writers of the Harlem Renaissance who studied antropology in New York City in the twenties, was heavily criticized by her fellow writers for not being politically motivated after the publication of Their Eyes Were Watching God.
In Their Eyes Were Watching God Hurston looks back at the rural black South to explore the historical, social, and cultural foundations of the African American experience. As the novel beautifully captures the life of the Southern black community in the early years of the twentieth century, it also presents alternate ways of living as a black woman in the South in various stages of its protagonist Janie's life. Janie's grandmother, on the other hand, born into slavery and led a life of hard work and agony, is clearly a representative of the black Southern past, Hurston's strategy is, first, to provide the "ancestral" text represented by the grandmother, and then, to construct Janie's text of post-slavery black womanhood which rejects the limited and limiting vision of the past.
Writing the experience of the rural African American South at the beginning of the previous century from a woman's point of view, Hurston contributes to the writing of a multivocal, multicultural, multiracial narrative of the American South. Thus, Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God provides one representation of what C. Hugh Holman, toward the end of the century, would call "multi-Souths."
The narrative strategy Hurston employed in this novel, the frame story in which Janie tells the story of her life to her best friend Pheoby, is important in the sense that in this telling Janie narrativizes her experience of the world and constructs "the history" of her people, rural black Southerners, as well as her own personal history, "the life-story" of a black woman. As she challenges the universalizing tendency that still persists in the writing of culture and history, she subverts the male-dominant cultural-therefore inevitably patriarchal-narratives of the Old South.
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