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Mobility and the Literary Imagination of Zora Neale Hurston and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

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Mobility and the Literary Imagination of Zora Neale Hurston and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings University of Mississippi eGrove Electronic Theses and Dissertations Graduate School 2013 Narratives Of Southern Contact Zones: Mobility And The Literary Imagination Of Zora Neale Hurston And Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Kyoko Shoji Hearn University of Mississippi Follow this and additional works at: https://egrove.olemiss.edu/etd Part of the American Literature Commons Recommended Citation Hearn, Kyoko Shoji, "Narratives Of Southern Contact Zones: Mobility And The Literary Imagination Of Zora Neale Hurston And Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings" (2013). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 552. https://egrove.olemiss.edu/etd/552 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at eGrove. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of eGrove. For more information, please contact [email protected]. NARRATIVES OF SOUTHERN CONTACT ZONES: MOBILITY AND THE LITERARY IMAGINATION OF ZORA NEALE HURSTON AND MARJORIE KINNAN RAWLINGS A Dissertation Presented in partial fulfillment of requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English The University of Mississippi by KYOKO SHOJI HEARN December 2013 Copyright Kyoko Shoji Hearn 2013 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ABSTRACT This dissertation examines the literary works of the two Southern women writers, Zora Neale Hurston and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, based on the cultural contexts of the 1930s and the 1940s. It discusses how the two writers’ works are in dialogue with each other, and with the particular historical period in which the South had gone through many social, economical, and cultural changes. Hurston and Rawlings, who became friends with each other beyond their racial background in the segregated South, shared physical and social mobility and the interest in the Southern folk cultures. They wrote fiction about the region and its folk cultures while continuously moving back and forth between their Southern homes and Northern big cities. I argue that the two writers’ mobility and their personal friendship enabled them to present the South from the Depression through the post-war years not necessarily as a site of racial oppression and segregation but as a type of contact zone where people with different cultural backgrounds meet and interact. Pairing the representative work of Hurston and Rawlings in each chapter, I examine how each text depict different shades of cultural contact zones found and created in the contemporary South despite of segregation and rigid social boundaries. ii DEDICATION This dissertation is dedicated to my husband and daughter Eddie and Rie Hearn. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First of all, I would like to thank my director Dr. Annette Trefzer, whose encouragement and suggestions enabled me to complete this project. I certainly could not have finished this dissertation without her continuous help and advice over the long years of my doctoral study. I am extremely grateful to my committee members as well: Drs. Kathryn McKee, Jaime Harker, and Kirsten A. Dellinger. I would like to thank Drs. Takaki Hiraishi and Motoyuki Shibata at the University of Tokyo, who first introduced me to the Southern literature. I am also deeply grateful to all my friends and colleagues in Oxford, MS, and Tokyo, Japan, especially Dr. Yuki Watanabe Namiki with whom I shared my academic and personal thoughts and concerns at different life stages. My special thanks also go to George Atkins and Rachel Cason, for proofreading the dissertation manuscript for me. I am greatly indebted to all of my family members, especially my parents Reiichiro and Yoko Shoji who taught me the pleasure of reading at the earliest stage of my life, and have always been supportive and encouraging throughout my graduate study. Lastly, I would express my deepest gratitude to my husband Eddie, who not only read all my iv manuscripts and made helpful suggestions but also provided the immense emotional support that I needed. I would also like to thank our daughter Rie Hearn who, when I was stressed out in front of the computer screen, always reminded me that there is more to life than this. Without their constant love and support, this dissertation would not have been possible. v TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT……………………………………………………………………………………....ii DEDICATION……………………………………………………………………………………iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS…………………………………………………………………...….iv INTRODUCTION….……………………………………………………………………………..1 CHAPTER ONE Re-Visioning Nature : Jonah’s Gourd Vine , South Moon Under, and the Modern South as Ecological Contact Zone………………………………………………………………………….………....21 CHAPTER TWO Masterworks: Their Eyes Were Watching God , The Yearling , and the 1930s Literary Culture………………......................................................................................................68 CHAPTER THREE Self as Contact Zone: Autobiographical Writings.………………………………………….......110 CHAPTER FOUR Seraph on the Suwanee , “Lord Bill of the Suwannee River,” and the Shifting Dynamics of Race in the Segregated South………….……………………………………………………………..161 CONCLUSION…….…………………………………………………………………………...204 BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………………………………214 VITA……………………………………………………………………………………………232 vi INTRODUCTION The term “sense of place” has long and pervasively been used to account for the most emblematic characteristics of the fiction and thoughts of the US South. Writers and critics of Southern literature have repeatedly addressed the significance of geographical attachment for Southerners in shaping their collective cultural identities. While thinking about self in relation to place became the staple of Southern literary imagination, the thus imagined South’s tendency to overemphasize stasis, rootedness, cultural homogeneity, Southern exceptionalism, and a sense of unchanging tradition also led to exclusionism, political conservatism and uncritical nostalgia, as in the case of the Agrarian manifesto I’ll Take My Stand (1930). Southern studies scholarship since the 1990s has thoroughly critiqued the Twelve Southerners’ version of sense of place both by challenging their romanticized view of Southern history, and by reexamining the way earlier Southern literary critics framed the Agrarian thoughts at the basis of the region’s modern literary history. 1 As a part of such efforts, they provided extensive studies on the social subjects largely ignored thus far, such as women, non-whites, and working class. Examining these historical presences, they claimed, could change our perception of Southern space. 2 In addition to this revisionist move in Southern studies, discourses of cultural anthropology, comparative literary, 1 and cultural studies have provided new ways to examine cultural identity in terms of mobility, migration, travel, cultural diaspora, and globalism. 3 Scholars such as James Clifford and Mary Louise Pratt, to name a few, have provided key critical concepts that are applicable in refiguring the Southern sense of place. In his seminal work Routes (1997), Clifford notes the common assumption about culture that dwelling is “the local ground of collective life” while travel is its supplement. He then goes on to ask, “What would happen . if travel were untethered, seen as a complex and pervasive spectrum of human experiences? Practices of displacement might emerge as constitutive of cultural meaning rather than as their simple transfer or extension.” 4 By resetting our critical focus from peoples’ roots to their routes, from where they live to how they get there, Clifford’s discussion on travel helps us reconsider our cultural identity less as something unchanging, essential, and strictly tied with particular geographical spaces than as something relational, socially and culturally constructed, and always on the move. Pratt’s idea of “contact zones” provides a similar perspective concerning our spatial perception. In Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (1992), Pratt defines “contact zones” as “social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination—like colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out across the globe today.” 5 Pratt emphasizes the role of a geographical space as a site for social and cultural (sometimes peaceful, at other times coercive) interaction and 2 negotiation, and in so doing unsettles our perception about colonial and postcolonial relations which have conventionally been binarized into those of the oppressor and the oppressed. Pratt’s’ idea of “contact” invokes “the spatial and temporal copresence of subjects” and reveals how these subjects continuously construct and reconstruct their identities in relation to each other. 6 Both Clifford and Pratt practice comparative cultural studies which incorporate varying perspectives of multiple historical subjects encountering each other in a particular geographical space, while carefully avoiding to create a simple binary between cultural center and margin. In so doing they also foreground cultural contacts by those who travel through the boundaries between metropolis and periphery, and their efforts to mediate and interpret different cultures. Clifford’s and Pratt’s concepts of space and mobility are very useful in reframing the history of the US South. Since the days of Spanish explorers, the South had historically been a contact zone of multiple cultures and its social spaces were continuously constructed through the movement of peoples who traveled through the region and encountered
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