The Reality of Fiction: Diagnosing White Culture Through the Lens of Mother/Nature in Zora Neale Hurston’S Seraph on the Suwanee
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THE REALITY OF FICTION: DIAGNOSING WHITE CULTURE THROUGH THE LENS OF MOTHER/NATURE IN ZORA NEALE HURSTON’S SERAPH ON THE SUWANEE by Rita C. Butler A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of The Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Florida Atlantic University Boca Raton, Florida December 2008 Copyright by Rita C. Butler 2008 ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Many thanks to Dr. Kit Johnson for her continued interest and support as well as her willingness to share professional knowledge of personality disorders. I am also grateful to Dr. Jane Caputi and Dr. Susan L. Brown for agreeing to take on the extra work involved in this type of project and their insightful suggestions. Thanks are also due to my son, Jeffrey, who was willing to be drawn into the special world that Hurston represents and offer meaningful comments and observations. I want to especially extend my thanks to Dr. Johnnie Stover who was willing to take on the task of Committee Chair despite an already heavy work schedule and whose patience, helpful comments, and unfailing encouragement kept me on track. iv ABSTRACT Author: Rita C. Butler Title: The Reality of Fiction: Diagnosing White Culture Through The Lens of Mother/Nature in Zora Neale Hurston’s Seraph on the Suwanee Institution: Florida Atlantic University Dissertation Advisor: Dr. Johnnie M. Stover Degree: Doctor of Philosophy Year: 2008 Zora Neale Hurston’s last published novel, Seraph on the Suwanee, can be read as a sociopolitical critique of what she once referred to as the false foundation of Anglo- Saxon civilization. An overview of the history of race as a concept and the development of racial awareness in the United States provides a background/context for understanding the world Hurston was diagnosing: her analysis implies that the social construction of whiteness contains within its ideology the seeds of its own destruction. Feminist notions of origin, context, and foundation highlight the narcissistic nature of patriarchal social systems that exploit not only the female body but nature as well. In a society that supposedly honors the maternal and praises the beauty of nature, Hurston’s novel suggests that both motherhood and nature are exploited by a patriarchal culture focused on competition and material gain. In addition, by highlighting the narcissism of v her male protagonist, who presumably represents a socially admired standard of normalcy, she undermines the narrative of superiority that privileges a white patriarchy. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION........................................................................................................ 1 CHAPTER ONE: WHITENESS AS A SOCIAL CONSTRUCT.............................. 10 The Development of Race as a Concept.......................................................... 11 Racial Awareness in the United States............................................................ 13 Black Women Writers ..................................................................................... 25 Feminist Review of Intersectionality............................................................... 27 Black Women Writing About White Women ................................................. 37 CHAPTER TWO: INVOKING THE MATERNAL TO REVEAL THE FALSE FOUNDATION OF ANGLO-SAXON CULTURE ................. 43 Origin and Context .......................................................................................... 44 Foundation....................................................................................................... 58 The Black Mothering Experience.................................................................... 63 Mother Nature ................................................................................................. 69 Ecofeminism........................................................................................ 69 Mother/Nature in Seraph on The Suwanee ......................................... 73 CHAPTER THREE: THE SOCIOPOLITICAL VOICE OF ZORA NEALE HURSTON ........................................................................................ 78 CHAPTER FOUR: DIAGNOSING WHITE CULTURE...........................................104 Preempting The Maternal: Mother/Nature Under Siege .................................109 Patriarchal Illusions: His Majesty The Baby...................................................125 Reconciliation/Capitulation.............................................................................132 vii CONCLUSION ...........................................................................................................145 BIBLIOGRAPHY .......................................................................................................150 viii Introduction Feminist scholars, focused on their project of constructing a woman-centered corrective to traditional scholarship, have changed the face of academia. Their revision of canonical texts and beliefs is iconoclastic as well as politically oriented. They have challenged traditional ideas about the family, the way power is distributed within society, and questioned the way economic systems work. In this paper, I argue that Zora Neale Hurston’s last published novel, Seraph on The Suwanee (1948), is such a work and constitutes a social critique about race, class, and gender in the United States. More specifically, I claim that Hurston’s portrayal of a white couple was intended to reveal the nature of a social pathology that shapes and ultimately weakens United States culture but endures because of a deep-seated ethos of narcissism. This mindset unconsciously privileges a white patriarchy that relies on the labor of working class people, the reproductive and caretaking labors of women, and the natural resources found in nature. I further argue that her social diagnosis is informed by the narcissistic personality traits of her leading male character. This analysis differs significantly from previous studies that have tended to focus on what are presumed to be positive attributes of Jim, her male protagonist, and the ways that Arvay, her female protagonist, struggles to live up to the social standards he represents. Recent discourse dealing with Seraph suggests not only a renewal of interest in Hurston’s novel but a willingness to challenge prior assumptions of its literary 1 inferiority. Alice Walker’s comment that Hurston’s later work was “reactionary, static, shockingly misguided and timid” (Gardens 89) is in line with many literary scholars in the past who felt that she had disconnected from her black cultural roots, the source of her literary power. Indeed, Bernard Bell felt that Hurston’s focus on whites disqualified Seraph from his book about the Afro-American novel (1987). The misguided notion that race is not a major issue in Seraph has led some critics to concentrate on the “deficiencies” of Arvay (Dubek 1996, Lowe 1994, Howard 1980, Davis 1974). While earlier commentary focused on Seraph as a literary disappointment (McDowell 1985, Wall 1982, Washington 1979), more recent scholarship reveals an awareness of Hurston’s novel as a complicated, multi-layered work with hidden meanings; a “deeply dystopic novel about white people” (Meisenhelder 1999). The sense of something going on below the “white” surface has encouraged the use of psychoanalysis as a means to investigate Hurston’s text. Both John Lowe and Claudia Tate use their knowledge of psychoanalytical theories to investigate and explain the text, although each has a different aim. Lowe focuses on Hurston’s use of humor and the way it structures and (in Lowe’s view) explains the psychological disharmony that exists between Arvay and Jim. Lowe believes that Arvay’s inability to understand and appreciate “Jim’s joking, cross-racial fellowship” is at the heart of their difficult relationship (260). What Lowe seems to ignore is that a great deal of Jim’s humor, presented often as affectionate teasing, is frequently revealed to be mean- spirited bullying, not only when it is aimed at Arvay, but also at others who do not possess his degree of social capital. 2 Tate’s focus on using psychoanalysis to illuminate “the complicated social workings of race in the United States and the representations of these workings in the literature of African Americans,” together with an understanding of Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the carnivalesque masquerade, theorizes Seraph as an “implicit joke on both black and white readers,” that makes a statement about race and romantic love (“Hitting” and Psychoanalysis 1988). The idea that Hurston was playing a joke on her readers regarding “the love game” is also suggested by Ann DuCille who claims that the story ends “not only with a bang, but with a wink” (142). Given the “Trickster” tradition that evolved as a rhetorical tactic in African-American literature, it is not difficult to believe that Hurston imagined her novel as some sort of artifice. In fact, her use of irony and contradiction throughout the novel fits the definition of the trickster as a comical figure who causes laughter by profaning central social beliefs while focusing attention “precisely on the nature of such beliefs” (Hynes 1-2). Another way to understand Hurston’s methodology is to consider Elaine Showalter’s concept of gynocritics, the idea that “women’s fiction can be read as a double-voice discourse, containing a ‘dominant’ and a ‘muted’ story. This “object/field problem” requires that the reader “keep two alternative oscillating