ABSTRACT “‘Making a Way Out of No Way’: Zora Neale Hurston’s Hidden Discourse of Resistance” explores how Hurston used techniques she derived from the trickster tradition of African American folk culture in her narratives in order to resist and undermine the racism of the dominant discourse found in popular literature published during her lifetime. Critics have condemned her perceived willingness to use racist stereotypes in her work in order to pander to a white reading audience. This project asserts that Hurston did, indeed, don a “mask of minstrelsy” to play into her reading public’s often racist expectations in order to succeed as an academic and as a creative writer. At the same time, however, she crafted her narratives in a way that destabilized those expectations through use of sometimes subtle and sometimes blatant points of resistance. In this way, she was able to participate in a system that was rigged against her, as a woman and as an African American, by playing into the expectations of her audiences for economic and professional advantages while simultaneously undermining aspects of those expectations through rhetorical “winks,” exaggeration, sarcasm, and other forms of humor that enabled her to stay true to her personal values. While other scholars have examined Hurston’s discourse of resistance, this project takes a different approach by placing Hurston’s material in relation to the publishing climate at the time. Chapter One examines Mules and Men in the context of the revisions Hurston made to her scholarly work to transform her collection of folktales into a cohesive book marketed to a popular reading audience. Chapter Two focuses on Hurston’s often-maligned anthropological travel book, Tell My Horse, as it forms a counter-narrative to the sensational and surreal travelogue by William Seabrook, The Magic Island. Chapter Three analyzes Their Eyes Were Watching God alongside DuBose Heyward’s Porgy to demonstrate how Hurston resists the dominant narrative of black womanhood by creating a strong and self-affirming female role model. ©Copyright by Elizabeth A. Kalos-Kaplan, 2016 All Rights Reserved ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank the individuals who have helped me persist in this journey and gave me the guidance to write a dissertation that reflects the best of my capabilities. First and foremost, I would like to thank my dissertation director, Felipe Smith. His feedback has been invaluable in shaping and strengthening my argument and my voice, and his kind encouragement helped me keep my chin up when the challenges of this project brought me low. I would also like to thank Supriya Nair, my second reader, for her influential guidance in shaping and narrowing down what began as a disparate and impossibly large idea into a manageable dissertation topic. I am incredibly grateful to Rebecca Mark, the third member of my dissertation committee, for her practical feedback and advice throughout this process that helped me keep everything in perspective. Both Molly Travis and Molly Rothenberg of the Tulane University English Department have taught me a tremendous amount and have given me great encouragement throughout my years in the graduate program, and I thank them for their support. I could not have completed this dissertation without the persistent feedback and advice from my friend and former colleague, Lauren Cardon. I would also like to thank Anne-Marie Womack for her help in narrowing my topic early on in my writing process and Andrew and Yelani Feldman for supporting me during the writing retreat that signaled a turning point in my project. Thank you to my mother and father, Mary and ii Alan Kalos, for believing in me and trusting me to finish what I started. And finally, thank you to my husband, Michael Kaplan, whose unbounded love, support, and patience have kept me grounded and always focused on moving forward. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ................................................................................................ ii INTRODUCTION .............................................................................................................. 1 CHAPTER 1 Visions and Revisions: The Shaping of Mules and Men .............................................. 28 CHAPTER 2 Conjure and Colonialism: Hurston in Haiti .................................................................. 76 CHAPTER 3 “You got tuh go there tuh know there”: Authenticity and the Audacity of Hope in Their Eyes Were Watching God ............................................................................................ 129 CONCLUSION “Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick”: The Legacy of Zora Neale Hurston 177 WORKS CITED ............................................................................................................. 193 iv 1 INTRODUCTION Shortly after the publication of Zora Neale Hurston’s most well-known novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Richard Wright penned a scathing review in which he accused Hurston of “voluntarily continu[ing] in her novel the tradition which was forced upon the Negro in the theater, that is, the minstrel technique that makes the ‘white folks’ laugh” (Wright 25). He denies any complexity in Hurston’s work, claiming that the “sensory sweep of her novel carries no theme, no message, no thought. In the main, her novel is not addressed to the Negro, but to a white audience whose chauvinistic tastes she knows how to satisfy. She exploits that phase of Negro life which is ‘quaint,’ the phase which evokes a piteous smile on the lips of the ‘superior’ race” (25). Wright criticized Hurston’s writing because the material she did choose to include—themes of a woman searching to find her own voice and sexual identity, and a storyline set in rural, Southern, mostly all-black communities—did not deal directly in the bitterness of racial oppression that Wright himself made a central theme of much of his work, a bitterness that Hurston found distasteful, calling the stories of Uncle Tom’s Children “so grim that the Dismal Swamp of race hatred must be where they live” (“Stories” 32). Wright saw no message in Hurston’s work because she did not replicate the anger that dwelled in his own work, and she appeared to him to favor laughter over rage. He also found fault with Hurston’s choice to focus on the “quaint” aspects of 2 African-American culture, an implicit reference both to the Southern folk culture she spent her life living in, studying, and writing about and to her focus on a woman’s quest for self-fulfillment. To call this folk culture “quaint” suggests that such traditions and practices were old-fashioned, and definitively not of the modern world of the “New Negro.” Furthermore, his dismissal of her central theme as “quaint” because it involved a woman’s quest underscores the attitude that women’s concerns were “domestic issues” and inappropriate material for serious literature. Wright was not the only of Hurston’s black male contemporaries to find fault in her writing for her perceived focus on the “quaint” aspects of life. Alain Locke expressed a similar view in his 1938 review of Their Eyes in the Urban League’s journal, Opportunity, in which he called Hurston’s focus on folklore a condescending oversimplification of African American culture (Boyd 307). Several years earlier, Sterling Brown had critiqued Mules and Men for being “socially unconscious” and portraying Southern blacks as “easy-going and carefree” when they should have been “more bitter” to be “nearer the total truth” (qtd. in Hemenway 219). Taken together, these critiques of Hurston’s material show the common disregard that many of her (largely male) contemporaries had for her voice and her vision. Hurston’s willingness to use what many of her contemporaries saw as racist stereotypes of African American culture formed the basis of much of the criticism leveled against her during her career. Wright’s accusations set the tone for decades of Hurston criticism, which have focused on the role of white patronage in her work and her reputation as a lively and humorous guest at many Harlem social functions—a character trait that helped her make a name for herself early in her career and at the height of the 3 Harlem Renaissance. As Susan Meisenhelder notes, both Wallace Thurman and Langston Hughes memorialized this aspect of Hurston’s personality in their memoirs of the Harlem milieu. Thurman depicted Hurston in his satirical novel Infants of the Spring as Sweetie Mae Carr, a woman who is popular with white audiences and patrons because she “lives up to their conception of what a typical Negro should be” (qtd. Meisenhelder 1). Likewise, Hughes wrote of her in his autobiography, The Big Sea, as being paid by whites “just to sit around and represent the Negro race for them…. To many of her white friends, no doubt, she was a perfect ‘darkie,’ in the nice meaning they give the term—that is a naïve, childlike, sweetly humorous, and highly colored Negro” (185). These depictions helped to solidify Hurston’s legacy as a carefree entertainer who easily performed blackness for an enthusiastic but naïve white audience. The result, as Meisenhelder argues, has been the persistence of the belief that Hurston was “a flamboyant rather than a meticulous writer, a scribe of cultural conditions rather than a social critic” (2). Serious consideration of her work as carefully crafted social critique has been a relatively recent phenomenon in Hurston studies.1 The thrust of these criticisms is threefold. Firstly, they fault Hurston’s concentration on folk culture and, specifically, the tradition of humor she employed both in her lively storytelling sessions as well as in her writing. Secondly, they dismiss her emphasis on issues central to a woman’s perspective as “quaint” and peripheral to the 1 Hurston’s work had fallen out of favor during her lifetime, leaving her to die in relative obscurity while working as a maid. She was buried in an unmarked grave as a welfare recipient of the state of Florida, and countless private papers were lost or destroyed when her home was cleaned out.