Pierce 1

Jacklyn R. Pierce

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Single Women Finding a Way: Spirituality, Sexuality, and Self-Creation in Southern Literature

The literature of the American South is populated by a character type which I have designated the “Virgin-Ogre.” These are women whose sexual frustration turns them into freakish, usually bitter, and sometimes even dangerous women. For example, William

Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” tells the tale of Miss Emily Grierson whose neighbors discover, after her death, a decomposed body and one of her aged, silver hairs in her bed. Miss Emily, an old maid from a disintegrated Southern aristocratic family, is apparently so distraught when

Homer Barron, her only suitor, plans to leave her that she must resort to murder and many years of implied necrophilia rather that spend her life alone. In Flannery O’Connor’s “Good Country

People,” Joy-Hulga Hopewell’s failure to seduce Bible salesman Manley Pointer leads her to humility, readying her for Christian salvation and grace. Carson McCullers’ Miss Amelia, in

The Ballad of the Sad Café, like Joy-Hulga, is sexually frustrated, but her struggle leads to more psychological than spiritual journeying, placing McCullers’ fiction in the Modernist tradition where the search to reintegrate spirituality into a jaded world is not so obvious a goal, or apparent an outcome, as in O’Connor’s traditionally Christian world view. In these Southern women, however, the single women’s struggles with sexuality, spirituality, and self make interesting statements about the social codes they seem to uphold and subvert, often at the same time. Pierce 2

These “virgin-ogres,” so prevalent in the fiction of white Southern writers, serve as a stark point of contrast and a telling backdrop for a discussion of the role of black Southern female characters in the work of Zora Neale Hurston and Alice Walker. Hurston and Walker, coming out of the African-American tradition, are working within yet another added layer of social codes demanding certain beliefs and modes of behavior. Curiously, being a single woman is not generally portrayed as being so unusual for the African-American character as it is for the young white women who were failures as Southern belles. Indeed, the traditional roles for black women in the South, at least the ones which have always gotten the most literary attention, are those of slave, servant, house-maid, and mammy. While Hurston and Walker, like O’Connor and McCullers, are writing against the stereotypes assigned for African-American women, their stereotypes are not the same as we see in the fiction of white Southerners. One fundamental difference is that the “virgin-ogre” of the white Southern tradition is replaced by a woman who would never be expected to be or given a chance to be an “old maid.” Dating back to slavery when black women were often used as sexual objects by their white, male owners, the women of

Hurston’s and Walker’s world never seem to have an opportunity to become eccentric old maids like Miss Amelia Evans or Joy-Hulga Hopewell. Instead, we see black women’s lives portrayed through a series of sometimes violent, sometimes unfulfilling, sometimes beautiful sexual relationships. Even though the African-American women in Hurston’s and Walker’s fiction often make their sexual and spiritual journeys through relationships with men (and sometimes other women), they typically end up achieving an independence and self-awareness that makes their status as single women a sign of power and strength.

In Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, for example, Janie Crawford endures a series of sometimes painful and sometimes simply unfulfilling relationships before she finally Pierce 3 achieves a real, spiritual and physical bond with Tea Cake, the younger man with whom happiness may not last, but it certainly does exist. On the cover of the Perennial Library edition of Hurston’s best known work, Alice Walker is quoted as saying, “There is no book more important to me than this one.” This statement, typifying the ancestral relationship which has emerged between Hurston and Walker, comes from Walker’s essay entitled “Zora Neale

Hurston: A Cautionary Tale and a Partisan View” from In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens. In this essay, Walker elaborates a bit on one of the reasons Hurston’s masterpiece is so important to her: “. . . I would want to enjoy myself while identifying with the black heroine, Janie Crawford, as she acted out many roles in a variety of settings, and functioned (with spectacular results!) in romantic and sensual love” (86). In Janie Crawford, we see a fascinating character whose romantic relationships do not impede the progress of her growth toward autonomy and wholeness as a woman—and, while she is not “single” in the way O’Connor’s Joy-Hulga

Hopewell is single, Janie’s path is one that she takes very much on her own.

Solitude can be both empowering and alienating, often at the same time. In both her heroine, Janie Crawford, and in Hurston’s own life, we see a pattern emerge in which women confront life on their own terms, sometimes literally standing alone and sometimes maintaining a sense of independence even in relationships. In its earliest manifestations, this feeling of solitude can be frustrating for a young woman seeking to belong in a society which privileges connection over separation. In Dust Tracks on a Road, Hurston describes her sensations when she first realizes that she is not like those around her: “I studied people all around me, searching for someone to fend it off. But I was told inside myself that there was no one. It gave me a feeling of terrible aloneness. I stood in a world of vanished communion with my kind, which is worse than if it had never been” (43). Pierce 4

The young Janie Crawford, too, experiences loneliness, but her solitude is only a negative feeling after the expectations of her society creep in. As a young woman, Janie has an intense episode alone underneath a pear tree:

She was stretched on her back beneath the pear tree soaking in the alto chant of

the visiting bees, the gold of the sun and the panting breath of the breeze when the

inaudible voice of it all came to her. She saw a dust-bearing bee sink into the

sanctum of a bloom; the thousand sister-calyxes arch to meet the love embrace

and the ecstatic shiver of the tree from root to tiniest branch creaming in every

blossom and frothing with delight. So this was a marriage! She had been

summoned to behold a revelation. Then Janie felt a pain remorseless sweet that

left her limp and languid. (11)

After this erotic/spiritual event which starts Janie’s process into selfhood, she is approached and kissed by “shiftless Johnny Taylor, tall and lean” (11). And it is not long after this sexual awakening in Janie that she is guided into a marriage with Logan Killicks, a marriage which illustrates that no relationship guarantees human communion and ends up heightening Janie’s sense of solitude, the sense that leads her futher on the path to self-awareness.

Hurston asks the questions floating around Janie’s mind as she married Logan Killicks:

“Did marriage end the cosmic loneliness of the unmated? Did marriage compel love like the sun the day?” (20) Janie reasoned, before the marriage, that she would love Logan after they were married, that what her elders had told her had to be true: :Husbands and wives always loved each other, and that was what marriage meant. It was just so. Janie felt glad of the thought,for then it wouldn’t seem so destructive and mouldy. She wouldn’t be lonely anymore” (20). But two months and two weeks into her marriage, a very confused Janie muses, “’. . . you told me Ah Pierce 5 mus goiner love him, and, and Ah don’t. Maybe if somebody was to tell me how, Ah could do it’” (22). In spite of her surprise at the realities of marriage, or perhaps because of the lessons she learns in her marriage, Janie’s early disillusionment with love and marriage leads her one step further along her path to selfhood: “Janie’s first dream was dead, so she became a woman”

(24).

Into this all too real and tedious life comes Joe Starks, a man with a dream, a man promising Janie a future in a town built and governed by other African Americans, and Janie’s dreams are once again brought to life. As she begins a new chapter of her life with Jody, Janie expects more from life: “From now on until death she was going to have flower dust and springtime sprinkled over everything. A bee for her bloom. Her old thoughts were going to come in handy now, but new words would have to be made and said to fit them” (31). Her second marriage, while certainly more fulfilling than her first, makes Janie even more aware of her deep need to find a niche for herself in the world. After Joe is elected mayor of the all-black town in which they settle, one of the townspeople calls for “’uh few words uh encouragement from Mrs. Mayor Sparks,’” but Joe silences her, proclaiming, “’Thank yuh fuh yo’ compliments, but mah wife don’t know nothin’ bout no speech-makin’. Ah never married her for nothin’ lak dat. She’s uh woman and her place is in de home’” (40-1).

While Janie is not entirely sure why Joe’s speaking for her troubles her so much, she is hurt by this incident: “She had never thought of making a speech, and didn’t know if she cared to make one at all. It must have been the way Joe spoke out without giving her a chance to say anything one way or another that took the bloom off of things” (41). In part because of Jody’s high stature and commanding presence in the town and in part because of Janie’s inability to adjust to the tedious realities of life (for instance, she enjoyed working in the store, well, she Pierce 6 would have if she didn’t have to sell things (51)), this relationship too begins to lose its luster for

Janie. By the time she “was twenty-four and seven years married,” Janie found herself in another personally stifling relationship, unable to be her self—a self that wasn’t even able to be articulated because of Joe. His attitude toward her is clear as he states, not maliciously,

“’Somebody got to think for women and chillun and chickens and cows. I god, they sho don’t think none theirselves’” (67). While Janie tries to defend the power of her own mind—“’Ah knows uh few things, and womenfolks thinks sometimes too!’” (67)—all Janie can really do is watch what had been an exciting and edifying relationship degenerate. As Janie begins “thinking about the inside state of her marriage,” she realizes “The spirit of the marriage left the bedroom and took to living in the parlour. . . . The bed was no longer a daisy-field for her and Joe to play in. It was a place where she went and laid down when she was sleepy and tired” (67).

While the changes in Janie’s relationship with Joe were certainly negative, they did lead

Janie one step closer to self-awareness. She becomes more in touch with the differences between the Janie in her soul versus the Janie that functions in the outside world, and this awareness of her own interiority is a sign of Janie’s personal growth:

She had no more blossomy openings dusting pollen over her man, neither any

glistening young fruit where the petals used to be. She found that she had a host

of thoughts she had never expressed to him, and numerous emotions she had

never let Jody know about. Things packed up and put away in parts of her heart

where he could never find them. She had an inside and an outside now and

suddenly she knew how not to mix them. (68)

Even though this separation of self and the separation between Janie and Joe can be read as negative, they also form necessary parts of Janie’s final triumph of self, spirit, and sexuality. For Pierce 7 before she can be whole, she must know who and what she is, and this difficult and lonely period teaches her these valuable lessons.

Before Jody dies, Janie is strong enough to force him to listen to her, declaring how it hurt her to be silenced by him (82). After his death, Janie feels genuine sympathy for him, having made her peace with him and coming to an understanding of how he became what he was: “’Dis sittin’ in de rulin’ chair is been hard on Jody,’ she muttered out loud. She was full of pity for the first time in years. Jody had been hard on her and others, but life had mishandled him too. Poor Joe! Maybe if she had known some other way to try, she might have made his face different” (83). And before she calls the others in to where Jody has just died, Janie symbolically rediscovers the woman that she has become by examining her loosened hair in the mirror—the same hair Jody had forced her to hide from others out of jealousy—and she likes what she sees: “The young girl was gone, but a handsome woman had taken her place” (83).

As a widow, Janie finds herself under the same pressure that she had felt as a young woman when she was steered toward marrying Logan Killicks—the pressure to marry or otherwise define herself through a relationship with a man. But, knowing herself better and being stronger and more self-aware by this point, she knows that this is not what she needs or wants yet: “Janie laughed at these well-wishers because they knew that she knew plenty of women alone; that she was not the first one that they had ever seen. But most of the others were poor. Besides she liked being lonesome for a change. This freedom feeling was fine” (86).

When she does get involved again, this time with Tea Cake, it is more on her terms and on her schedule than any of her previous relationships had been. When she falls in love with Tea Cake, and fall in love with him she does, it is because she is ready—she knows herself; she knows what Pierce 8 she wants; and she knows that while she doesn’t need a man to complete her, she can share herself on equal terms with Tea Cake.

Janie resists her feelings for Tea Cake at first, doubting that he’ll ever return after they first get together: “the fiend from hell specially sent to lovers arrived at Janie’s ear. Doubt”

(103), “ador[ing] him and hat[ing] him at the same time” (103). And even after they run away together and get married, Janie’s fears, imposed upon her by the people who questioned Tea

Cake’s intentions toward her and her money, cause her to doubt him. But, in spite of the fears and the gambling and the wilder lifestyle she shared during her time with Tea Cake. It is in this relationship that Janie Crawford comes fully into her own. When their lives are threatened by a hurricane, Janie voices her total lack of regret for anything that has happened with Tea Cake. He asks her, “’sposin’ you wuz tuh die now. You wouldn’t git mad at me for draggin’ you heah?’”

Janie’s reply: “’Naw. We been tuhgether round two years. If you kin see de light at daybreak, you don’t keer if you die at dusk. It’s so many people never seen de light at all. Ah wuz fumblin’ round and God opened de door’” (151).

The depth of Janie’s love for Tea Cake and the complete integration of self, sexuality, and soul that Janie achieves through her relationship with him becomes most apparent after Tea

Cake’s death. Circumstances cause Janie to have to kill the best thing that ever happened to her, and this action does not come easily for her. Surprisingly, his death does not destroy Janie, and this is a further testament to the depth of Janie’s self-awareness—this was, in part, a product of this intense relationship, but the real growth is in Janie’s soul and is exemplified by her peace and independence at the end of Their Eyes Were Watching God. As Janie finishes relating her tale of love to Phoeby, she sums up the lesson that she has learned: “’Two things everybody’s got tuh do fuh theyselves. They got tuh go tuh God, and they got tuh find out about livin’ fuh Pierce 9 theyselves’” (183). And this is the journey that Janie’s story illustrates. And at the end of the journey: “Here was peace. She pulled in her horizon like a great fish-net. Pulled it from around the waist of the world and draped it over her shoulder. So much of life in its meshes! She called in her soul to come and see” (184).

Like Janie Crawford, Celie, in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, must also endure a long path of sometimes troubled and sometimes beautiful relationships before achieving this level of self-awareness and peace we see at the end of Their Eyes Were Watching God. Celie, like Janie, has to endure a lot before reaching this level, and we see a measure of what she must endure in the opening of the novel. Celie’s very first letter to God reveals that the man she knows as her father has sexually abused her. Celie’s negative physical relationships with men lead to her spiritual and sexual awakening through her lesbian relationship with blues singer Shug Avery.

The spiritual awakening that Celie undergoes is not at all traditional given the South’s Christian heritage, but it is of the same kind that we see in Celie’s sister, Nettie, and, indeed, throughout

African-American literature. Both Celie and Nettie, living on different continents, and with

Nettie living as a Christian missionary, both arrive at a nature-centered, transcendent religion that leads back to African tradition rather than specifically Christian mythologies.

Celie’s journey toward self-awareness is exemplified in the epistolary form of The Color

Purple. Her letter writing, first to God and later to her sister Nettie, takes on the intimate feel of a journal chronicling the maturing process of a young girl growing into a woman under difficult circumstances. By giving us this intimate portrait of Celie in this manner, Walker keeps the reader on the same path as Celie—only discovering things about her as she discovers them herself. Celie’s account of her sexual abuse and her marriage is often matter of fact in tone. She writes her story with a coolness that one would not expect from a young girl in Celie’s position. Pierce 10

Even as she begins her long journey toward self-fulfillment, she does so with a composure which speaks to the inner strength and independence her situation has fostered. For example, on her wedding day, Celie’s head is cut open by one of her husband’s children, but she goes on about her life: “So after I bandage my head best I can and cook dinner—they have a spring, not a well, and a wood stove look like a truck—I start trying to untangle hair” (13). And her description of her wedding night also reveals a detachment already present in Celie: “I lay there thinking about

Nettie while he on top of me, wonder if she safe. And then I think bout Shug Avery. I know what he doing to me he done to Shug Avery and maybe she like it. I put my arm around him”

(13).

Celie’s marriage to Albert is neither happy nor fulfilling for her, but she is able to make her peace with him after it is all over. The marriage, therefore, becomes a necessary step in

Celie’s self-development. In fact, without Albert, Celie’s life would have never been touched by

Shug Avery, and Shug is the catalyst for Celie’s extensive growth throughout the novel. Celie’s emotional attachment to Shug is apparent even before they meet: “The first [picture] of a real person I ever seen. . . . Shug Avery was a woman. The most beautiful woman I ever saw. She more pretty. She bout ten thousand times more prettier than me. . . . An all night long I stare at it. An now when I dream, I dream of Shug Avery” (7). Celie’s first reaction to Shug, coupled with her reaction to men due to her experiences with her father and other men (“I don’t even look at mens. That’s the truth. I look at women, tho, cause I’m not scared of them” (6)) are early signals that point to the type of sexual awakening that Celie will have in her journey.

After she and Albert take the ill Shug into their home, Celie has direct access to the incredible woman who has been the main source of her fantasy life, and her reaction is not surprising to the reader given her earlier observations: “First time I got the full sight of Shug Pierce 11

Avery long black body with it black plum nipples, look like her mouth, I thought I had turned into a man” (51). This first glimpse of Celie’s lesbian sexual awakening also reveals how intensely Celie'’ sexual growth is tied to her spiritual changes as well. She explains, “I was her body, it feel like I’m praying. My hands tremble and my breath short” (51). And even though

Shug is aloof toward Celie at first, it is clear that she is a woman completely in touch with her own sexual nature—discussing her affair with Albert with Celie and instructing Celie on the physical pleasures of sex and her own body, basically teaching Celie how to masturbate (80-83).

Even though the sexual connection that Celie forms with Shug doesn’t last forever—

Shug leaving for a man—the process Shug’s love begins in Celie makes her a stronger woman, both in terms of self-knowledge and spiritually. When Celie and Shug first sleep together, Celie describes her feelings as those of a “lost little baby” (118). This image of rebirth is consistent with the spiritual overtones present form the start of the relationship—her bathing Shug as a baptismal symbol, for example. Like Hurston’s Janie Crawford, Celie comes away from the most positive and complete relationship of her life more independent and more secure. For me, this strength is a direct result of the spiritual path that Celie finds in, through, and away from her relationship with Shug Avery.

One interesting development we see in Celie’s spiritual life is the lesson that Shug teaches her about how sexuality and God are not mutually exclusive. Given Celie’s status as a victim of sexual abuse and her unfulfilling sexual relationship with her husband, it is not surprising at all that she sees sex as something bad. In fact, this attitude is not surprising since it is a view supported by the society in which Celie lives. Once Celie comes into sexual fruition, she separates herself from the previous relationship she had enjoyed with God in her letters, choosing instead to write to her sister Nettie (even though she doesn’t know where Nettie is or if Pierce 12 she can contact her) (199). One reason Celie gives for not writing her letters to God anymore is the fact that “the God I been praying to and writing to is a man. And acting just like all the other mens I know. Trifling, forgitful and lowdown” (199). Shug Avery, however, shares quite a different conception of God, an entity she claims “ain’t a he or a she, but a It”:

Here’s the thing, say Shug. The thing I believe. God is inside you and inside

everybody else. You come into the world with God. But only them that search

for it inside find it. And sometimes it manifest itself even if you not looking, or

don’t know what you looking for. Trouble do it for most folks, I think. Sorrow,

lord. Feeling like shit. (202)

In describing her religious beliefs, Shug offers up images of nature—“trees,” “air,” “birds,”

“other people”—and a feeling of intense communion with everyone and everything, even going so far as to suggest sex as a spiritual experience (“It sort of like you know what, she say, grinning and rubbing high up on my thigh”) (203).

At first, Celie has a difficult time getting “the old white man” image of God out of her head, but eventually she does, learning to believe instead in the God Shug already knew and that

Nettie discovered while in Africa, a God who, as Shug says, “love everything you love—and a mess of stuff you don’t,” a God who “love admiration,” who gets “pisse[d] . . . off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it,” a God who is “always trying to please us back” (203). Celie’s spiritual journey, quite appropriately, is obvious to the reader in her final letter which both brings her full circle and propels her toward a higher and more personally meaningful relationship with God, the world, and herself. Her final letter is addressed: “Dear

God. Dear stars, dear trees, dear sky, dear peoples. Dear Everything. Dear God” (292). Pierce 13

While neither Hurston’s Janie nor Walker’s Celie are “single” women in the same sense that the white women which populate O’Connor’s and McCullers’ fiction, in these rich characters of the equally rich Southern literary tradition, we see the eternal questions faced by human beings regarding solitude and communion. Whether these literary women are forced by circumstances to stand alone, as O’Connor’s and McCullers’ characters often are, or driven by relationships—both good and bad—toward a greater understanding of self, these women and their stories speak to some of the most fundamental questions of humanity. In Janie and Celie, we see triumphant stories of growth. Two women—alienated by race from large portions of their societies and isolated from others of their kind by difficult and unfulfilling relationships— manage to offer hope through their successful journeys toward self-awareness and actualization.

In both cases, a positive relationship imbued with sexual and spiritual fulfillment assists them on their path, but their real accomplishment, for me, is how these intense connections with other human beings lead to greater independence and self-sufficiency, making Janie’s and Celie’s stories remarkably hopeful ones. Pierce 14

Works Cited

Hurston, Zora Neale. Dust Tracks on a Road. 1942. New York: Harper Perennial, 1996. Print.

---. Their Eyes Were Watching God. 1937. New York: Harper Perennial, 1990. Print.

McCullers. The Ballad of the Sad Café. 1943. The Ballad of the Sad Café and Other Stories.

New York: Bantam, 1971. 3-72. Print.

O’Connor, Flannery. “Good Country People.” 1955. A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other

Stories. New York: Harcourt, 1983. 9-29. Print.

Walker, Alice. The Color Purple. 1982. New York: Pocket Books, 1985. Print.

---. “Zora Neale Hurston: A Cautionary Tale and a Partisan View.” 1977. In Search of Our

Mothers’ Gardens. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1983. 83-92. Print.