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Woman-Identified: Women in Pairs in Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes

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Woman-Identified: Women in Pairs in Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Iowa State University Capstones, Theses and Retrospective Theses and Dissertations Dissertations 1996 Woman-identified: women in pairs in Zora Neale Hurston's Their yE es Were Watching God and Gloria Naylor's The omeW n of Brewster Place Allison Kathleen Brimmer Iowa State University Follow this and additional works at: https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/rtd Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Brimmer, Allison Kathleen, "Woman-identified: women in pairs in Zora Neale Hurston's Their yE es Were Watching God and Gloria Naylor's The omeW n of Brewster Place" (1996). Retrospective Theses and Dissertations. 7082. https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/rtd/7082 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Iowa State University Capstones, Theses and Dissertations at Iowa State University Digital Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Retrospective Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Iowa State University Digital Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Woman-Identified: Women in Pairs in Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eves Were Watching God and Gloria Naylor's The Women of Brewster Place by Allison Kathleen Brimmer A thesis submitted to the graduate faculty in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS Department: English Major: English (Literature) Major Professor: Kathleen K. Hickok Iowa State University Ames, Iowa 1996 11 Graduate College Iowa State University This is to certify that the Master's thesis of Allison Kathleen Brimmer has met the thesis requirements of Iowa State University Major Professor For the Major Department For the Graduate College Ill TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS iv INTRODUCTION 1 FEMALE FRAMEWORKING: JANIE AND PHEOBY IN THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD 16 DREAMS OF UNITY: WOMAN-IDENTIFICATION IN THE WOMEN OF BREWSTER PLACE 36 CONCLUSION 69 BIBLIOGRAPHY 74 IV ACKNOWLEDGMENTS There are many individuals I would like to thank for helping me to create this thesis. First and foremost I acknowledge and give my loving thanks to my mother, Sharon Kenyon. Mom, you have been the guiding inspiration in my life. It is because of your unwavering support, encouragement, and love that I am writing this today. Paper and ink cannot convey the deep appreciation I have for our loving bond. Thank you. To my father-, Doug, and Jane, thank you for your supportive comments and encouragement throughout the writing of this document; it meant so much. I love you both. Also to Wendy and Joel, thank you for being the wonderful sister and brother-in law that you are. When I was down you lifted me up, especially by being so impressed by the length of this paper! And to my very special Grandma and Grandpa Kenyon, without my laptop computer and your love, I would have been a mess! In addition to my wonderful and supportive family, I thank many friends who have helped me along the way. Allison Hughes-Maldonado - you told me I could do it and that you knew I would finish with flying colors. Your and Ivan's support, friendship, dinner invitations, etc. have meant so much. Thank you for being such special friends. Amy Selha, thank you for talking me through the theory and giving -me even more stuff to readl Your daily assurance (and quiet worrying) kept me going. Last but not least I'd like to thank my thesis committee. To'Marie Lathers, thank you so much for taking the time to read the texts and help me with my paper, even though you were so busy with your own work. And to Brenda Daly, without you I might not have even known about Zora Neale Hurston. Your class in teaching of literature helped me learn about myself as well as sparked my interest for future work on my thesis. Finally, to my major professor Kathleen Hickok; Kathy, you have been wonderful in helping and encouraging me along the road that has led to this thesis- Thank you for the time you spent and the insightful comments you made while working with me. INTRODUCTION Over the past thirty years, feminist critics have consistently debated the definition of the term lesbian. What does it mean to be a lesbian? Who is a lesbian? What can be identified as lesbian in literature? And furthermore, what is woman-identified? How do we determine woman-identified content in literary works? How or do we distinguish between the terms lesbian and woman-identified? What is the value of doing so? The questions are many and the answers are few. But it seems only correct that to write a paper about woman-identified pairs in Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eves Were Watching God and Gloria Naylor's The Women of Brewster Place, I must first explore some current theory and create my own definitions of what it means both to write as woman-identified and to interpret certain literature as woman-identified. The original term "woman-identified" was created in 1970 by a group of women in New York called the Radicalesbians. The Radicalesbians insisted that the term woman-identified identifies women who relate to other women in a primary way. Based on the correct assumption that we live in a male-dominated heteropatriarchy, the Radicalesbians called for an end to women's internalization of oppressive male strategies- They wrote: It is the primacy of women relating to women, of women creating a new consciousness of and with each other which is at the heart of women's liberation, and the basis for the cultural revolution. Together we must find, reinforce and validate our authentic selves. As we do this, we confirm in each other that struggling incipient sense of pride and strength, the divisive barriers begin to melt, we feel this growing solidarity with our sisters, (emphasis mine^ 5) Since the publication of this manifesto, many feminist critics have borrowed from and revised the Radicalesbians' term woman- identified. For example, in 1983 Alice Walker entered the dialogue and created her own dictionary-style definition of the term '^womanist"; her definition reads, in part: A woman who loves other women, sexually and/or nonsexually. Appreciates and prefers women's culture, women's emotional flexibility (values tears as natural counterbalance of laughter), and women's strength. (In Search, xi) Today in 1996 there are as many theories about the terms woman- identified and lesbian as there are theorists. In this paper, I will argue for a hybrid of theories which do not necessarily disagree but instead intersect to form a frame through which we may read and understand two pieces of woman-identified literature written by African American women in the United States - In her landmark essay, "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence" (1979), Adrienne Rich created and defined the term "lesbian continuum": I mean the term "lesbian continuum" to include a range - through each woman's life and throughout history - of woman-identified experience, not simply the fact that a woman has had or consciously desired genital sexual experience with another woman. If we expand it to embrace many more forms of primary intensity between and among women, including the sharing of a rich inner life, the bonding against male tyranny, the giving and receiving of practical and political support.... (Rich, 217) "Lesbian continuum" as defined by Rich is a broad and encompassing term exploring connections between women. Rich explains her interpretation of the term woman-identified when she writes; If we consider the possibility that all women - from the infant suckling at her mother's breast, to... the woman dying at ninety, touched and handled by women - exist on a lesbian continuum, we can see ourselves as moving in and out of this continuum, whether we identify ourselves as lesbian or not....(Rich, 219) Rich's lesbian continuum is a very useful concept when one encounters woman-identified content in literature that is not specifically labeled or considered by mainstream readers as lesbian. Many theorists take issue with Rich's lesbian continuum for being too general and thus reductionist of the term lesbian. In her book The. Safe Sea of Women, Bonnie Zimmerman creates a set of standards by which one may consider a literary text lesbian. For Zimmerman a text is lesbian only if it can be designated so through a "cluster of factors" (Safe Sea, 14). First, the writer must be self-identified as lesbian: Lesbian writers, unlike those writers who incorporate a lesbian character or lesbian scene in a novel, are women who identify themselves in some way with the lesbian community- They may identify themselves as lesbians in their creative writing (by stressing autobiographical elements, for example) or in biographies or interviews. They may do so through their choice of publisher..-give readings at lesbian bookstores and centers, or attend lesbian panels at conferences. (Zimmerman, 15) According to Zimmerman, along with having a lesbian writer, a lesbian text must also have a "central lesbian character who understands herself to be a lesbian" (15). Furthermore, the lesbian text must be "read by lesbians in order to affirm [its] lesbian existence" (15). Zimmerman considers lesbian texts to be woman-identified but does not support the opposite view, that all woman-identified texts are lesbian texts. In other words, a text that is woman-identified ("encompassing lesbians and all other women who value and bond with women" [129]) is not necessarily lesbian. Again, based on Zimmerman's parameters, a text is lesbian only if its author(s), main characters, and readers identify themselves as lesbian. Zimmerman's theory is much more limiting and restrictive than Rich's continuum. It is true that the United States is a patriarchal society that has historically been threatened by and thus has worked to deny the notion of lesbianism.
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