The Reality of Fiction: Diagnosing White Culture Through the Lens of Mother/Nature in Zora Neale Hurston’S Seraph on the Suwanee

Home , Left in the Dark, Othermother, Seraph on the Suwanee, The Gilded Six Bits

THE REALITY OF FICTION: DIAGNOSING WHITE CULTURE THROUGH THE LENS OF MOTHER/NATURE IN ZORA NEALE HURSTON’S SERAPH ON THE SUWANEE

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

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.

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.

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 texts simultaneously in view” (Feminist Criticism 34). While Showalter’s comments refer to women writers in general, the idea of the muted story has worked especially well for black women writers who have been socially marginalized not only by gender but also by race. This idea of a dominant versus muted story is essential to understanding Seraph—when the book was first published, readers failed to grasp its muted message and the extent to which Hurston’s sociopolitical stance was embodied in the structure and subject matter

3 of her novel. What appeared to be an amiable story about a white couple at the beginning of the twentieth century (Hurston’s first effort at writing a novel about white people) was in fact an incriminating commentary on Anglo-Saxon culture. An important element of her muted story was the extensive use of irony, “an important linguistic tool for those writing from positions of marginality because it is inherently disruptive and is usually not recognized as such by many who experience it” (Stover

105).

Feminism, as a social movement with a political agenda, requires new systems of knowledge that challenge mainstream assumptions and practices. This knowledge is most likely to emerge as the result of innovative methods of inquiry that go against the traditional grain. As Mary Maynard points out, it is commonly believed by feminists themselves that a feminist method of social inquiry does exist, but a precise description all feminists can agree on is hard to find. Part of the problem of definition can be traced to a misunderstanding of three major terms of the debate: method, methodology, and epistemology. Often the three are conflated but there are differences: while method refers to research gathering techniques, methodology “provides both theory and analysis of the research process.” Epistemology is concerned with the “philosophical grounding for deciding what kinds of knowledge are possible and how can we ensure that they are both adequate and legitimate” (Maynard Researching 10).

Linda Alcoff and Elizabeth Potter point out that “[T]he history of feminist epistemology itself is the history of the clash between the feminist commitment to the struggles of women to have their understandings of the world legitimated and the commitment of traditional philosophy to various accounts of knowledge . . . that have

4 consistently undermined women’s claims to know” (2). These traditional assumptions assume a degree of neutrality that ignores individual experience or what Patricia Hill

Collins refers to as “situated knowledge,” knowledge that emanates from concrete experiences and which historically has been suppressed or subjugated (Thought 17).

The result of this process “has stimulated African-American women to create knowledge that empowers people to resist domination” (Collins Thought 234).

In this paper, I draw on the notion of a specific female-centered epistemology that I refer to as goddess epistemology, a knowledge system that incorporates the idea of a past with different paradigms of power which included both men and women.

These powers were understood as complementary, with each possessing equal social value. My use of goddess epistemology parallels Hurston’s willingness to explore knowledge systems not often of interest to, and generally rejected by, mainstream academics and builds on an understanding of the mythic goddess figure as a representation of female potency as well as “the feminine principle” that can be found in nature as well as in women and men (Caputi Goddesses 316). This approach not only offers a new way for the reader to imagine what Hurston had in mind when writing

Seraph but also serves to suggest an oppositional, muted/female voice that continually breaks through the patriarchal surface of her text. That muted female voice, Hurston’s undeniably black voice, makes use of a gender and racial inflection that reveals a surprisingly intuitive understanding of the different social spaces inhabited by men and women in Anglo-Saxon culture.

Although Robert Hemenway devotes fourteen pages to a discussion of Seraph, he admits that his critique is based mostly on “extratextual evidence” (314). Even

5 though he intuits a hidden message, his use of psychology to understand Hurston’s complex novel is focused on what was going on in her personal life. Janet St. Clair, seeking to rescue Hurston from accusations that she had abandoned her feminist sensibilities, claims that Seraph is actually “a narrative of resistance and self-discovery that exists not between the lines but solidly on every page” (38). While St. Clair is perceptive in seeing Seraph as a novel of resistance, her conclusion that Arvay’s final choice represents a form of feminist agency misses the point I think Hurston was trying to make: it is not a question of doing the best with what you have been forced to accept, as sensible or even courageous as that might seem, but rather of asking why there is no other choice but acquiescence.

Despite their use of psychoanalytic hermeneutics, none of these critics has claimed that Hurston was deliberately depicting the dominant social group in the United

States in terms of an entrenched narcissistic worldview and that her male protagonist exemplifies the type of personality most likely to thrive in such a society. Nor has anyone focused on the way she uses the trope of mother/motherhood/Mother Nature to reveal an intrinsic element of the social pathology she examines in her novel: the exploitation of natural resources and the marginalization of women.

If we assume that Hurston meant for her novel to be a critique of Anglo-Saxon culture, as recent reviews of her book suggest, what role does her female protagonist play in the development of that critique? I argue that Arvay’s position as mother and her relationship with nature emerge as focal points for Hurston’s analysis and anticipates Ellen Rose’s comment that “[W]hatever ‘mother’ means to a given culture will metaphorically infect the meanings it attaches to mother earth” (qtd. in Roach 67).

6 It would be wrong, however, to assume that Hurston is building an argument in favor of white women. Although her female protagonist ultimately achieves a measure of personal enlightenment regarding her own life, she remains oblivious to the economic and racial structures of oppression that make her social position and thus her personal choices possible. Rather, Hurston uses the white woman’s role of wife and mother, a role that constitutes an essential element of the traditional foundation upon which

Anglo-Saxon culture rests, as a means by which to study what she increasingly came to understand as the “pathos” of that culture.

The paper begins with an overview of the history of race as a concept and the development of racial awareness in the United States. This focus on race, which includes a discussion of the social construction of whiteness, is necessary as background/context for understanding the world that Hurston was diagnosing: her analysis implies that the social construction of whiteness contains within its ideology the seeds of its own destruction. In addition, chapter one examines feminist theories of exploitation that make use of the idea of intersectionality, the way that individual differences often overlap to create a matrix of oppression, and finishes with some views of black women writers who have not only challenged the privileging of white culture as the American norm, but who also raise questions about the role that white women have played in maintaining the status quo.

Chapter two introduces the mother/Mother Nature theme that provides a basis for understanding Hurston’s subversive goal of exposing what she saw as the false foundation of Anglo-Saxon culture. Feminist notions of origin, context, and foundation are used to highlight the narcissistic nature of patriarchal social systems that exploit not

7 only the female body but nature as well. Included is a look at Shirley Burggraf’s distinction between “economic man” and the “feminine economy” and a review of

Simone de Beauvoir’s seminal/feminist thoughts on motherhood and the female body.

An analysis of differences between white and black mothering provide additional insight into why Hurston may have chosen a white mother as the focal point of her cultural scrutiny. Finally, a study of the role that Mother Nature plays in Seraph and the way Hurston connects the destinies of nature and her mother-identified protagonist provides additional evidence of the novel’s maternal focus.

Chapter three provides a selective analysis of Hurston’s work leading up to

Seraph. This chapter reveals a sociopolitical agenda in the making and confirms that the theme of social pathology she develops in her last published novel was evident in her work from the beginning of her writing career. Her work evinces an intellectual curiosity that resists thinking in solely “rational” or conventional ways as well as an increasingly penetrating look at the deficiencies of Anglo-Saxon culture. Special attention is paid to Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), the novel traditionally recognized as her literary masterpiece, and the ways it informs Seraph, published eleven years later.

The final chapter presents a close reading and analysis of Hurston’s novel that develops and supports the claim that Seraph constitutes a social critique about life in the

United States. Her commentary is shown to be gender inflected and couched in terms of a cultural pathology inherent in the personal attributes of her white characters. In a society that supposedly honors the maternal and praises the beauty of nature, Hurston’s novel suggests that both are preempted by a patriarchal culture focused on competition

8 and material gain. In addition, by focusing on the narcissism of her male protagonist, who presumably represents a socially admired standard of normality, she undermines the narrative of superiority that privileges whiteness and consolidates her transgressive diagnosis of Anglo-Saxon culture.

Chapter One: Whiteness as a Social Construct

The construction of whiteness refers to the process by which possession of a white skin came to represent an implicit norm that conferred a degree of social privilege upon those whose skin was considered to be white. The result is a society that evaluates people according to characteristics possessed by those already holding power. Is this process more aptly understood as a “social” or as a “sociopolitical” fabrication? Ruth

Frankenberg, emphasizing daily life experiences, uses the term social which she contrasts with the focus on intellectual movements and political systems used by Omi and Winant (White Women n25, 268). For this study, the term social construction of whiteness is employed with the understanding that “social” connotes all aspects of human endeavor. I would argue, however, that social developments usually precede political action, with political leaders moving in to institutionalize what has already been socially constructed. In Seraph on The Suwanee, Zora Neale Hurston is questioning that which has been politically reinforced within a social context marked by racism. Her challenge, then, could be regarded as sociopolitical.

The social construction of whiteness as it exists in the United States embodies a multitude of contradictions. It pervades the culture posing as a norm but its oppressive nature is unacknowledged by those who create it. Although the construction of whiteness relies on a recognition of racial differences, white people, unlike people of color who experience their world through a racial filter, “do not look at the world

10 through this racial awareness, even though they also comprise a race” (Grillo and

Wildman 565); and in a culture that celebrates an ideology of equality, that lack of insight creates inequalities of opportunity.

The Development of Race as a Concept

Understanding the concept of race is a first step toward being able to adequately examine social issues that involve race. For example, an awareness of race as a social construction makes it easier to appreciate the way that “racial identity is assigned and assumed,” as well as “perceive the tacit racial dimensions of everyday experience.” In addition, recognizing that the concept of race is socially and politically malleable makes it easier “to acknowledge or oppose racism” (Omi and Winant, 1994, vii).

Although the concept of “race” has evolved over time, an awareness of differences between groups of people seems to have been present in all human cultures throughout history. Early human writings reveal an awareness of distinct cultures defined in terms of physical appearance, environment, and/or group histories. For example, Hippocrates believed that the people of Greece were superior to those of

Western Asia because the harshness of the Greek landscape had produced a more robust individual, suggesting that differences depend on environment. The Old Testament suggests a different understanding of race when it describes the Hebrews as set apart from other social groups by virtue of their special relationship with God, a view that ignores biology or location (Appiah 274-75).

An early biblical reference to skin color is Jeremiah’s rhetorical question, “Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots?” (Jer.13.23). In contrast, the

Hebrew Bible is silent on the subject despite the authors’ concern with genealogies and

11 tribal purity in an area inhabited by people with various shades of skin color

(Malcomson 134).1 Even though the Bible speaks of human differences, however, it does not seem to attach any importance to skin color or seek to organize people by what has come to be known as “race.” As Malcomson points out, “It would be up to later writers to turn the Red Sea from a highway into a racially significant barrier between black ‘Africa’ and not-so-black ‘Arabia’’’ (135).

However, by the fifth century B. C., writings of Homer, Xenophanes, and

Herodotus suggest the beginnings of a “rudimentary template” that began with a focus on climate: to the north, whiteness; to the south, blackness; with the Mediterranean in- between as the norm. The authors of Western culture saw their own skin as

“unremarkable, indeed colorless” (Malcomson 136). A hint that this view could eventually take on social and political significance can be noted in Aristotle’s Politics where he speaks of a society of superior people living in the temperate zone of the

Mediterranean who embody the virtues but not the vices of either those to the white north or the black south (Malcomson 136).

Most likely, the writings of Origen (A.D.?185-?254), an early Greek Christian living in Egypt, represent a turning point in terms of skin color significance. While arguing for universal equality before God, Origen claimed that, “the mission of the

Church could extend even to the Ethiopians” (Malcomson 136-37). The key word was even which placed Ethiopians, with their dark skin, in a separate category from what was increasingly assumed to be a superior skin tone. Origen seemed unaware of the

1 A century and a half later, Herodotus would also mention the black skin of peoples from Ethiopia as something unusual but without any inherent meaning other than possibly a nearness to the sun (Malcomson 134). 12 paradox embedded in his moralizing assumptions that skin color both did and did not have meaning (Malcomson 137). However, while Mediterranean people saw themselves as neither specifically white nor black in terms of skin color or other personal attributes, the olive-complected writers who recorded early Western history apparently thought of themselves “as more white than not” (Malcomson 143).

By the middle of the nineteenth century, upper-class Victorians believed that people could be classified according to, “. . . fundamental, biologically heritable, moral and intellectual characteristics that they did not share with members of any other race”

(Appiah 276). This was sometimes referred to as the “essence” of a race. Appiah refers to this as “racialism” and states that by the end of the nineteenth century most educated people in the West thought it was the correct way to view differences between groups of people (276). Despite Christian belief in a shared human ancestry and Enlightenment theories of universal reason, the idea that all races had the same potential became a minority view. Over time, the belief that one race might be superior to another evolved into racism, the practice of using perceived differences as justification for the oppression of one group by another (Appiah 280). In the United States, the worldview of those in positions of social and political power came to reflect a mindset that privileged white people in general and white males in particular.

Racial Awareness in the United States

In his 1903 book, The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois explored the meaning of blackness in American society, declaring that “the problem of the Twentieth

Century is the problem of the color-line,” a line that separated black people from white

(1). More recently, when asked about the dominance of race in United States culture,

13 Edward P. Jones, winner of a Pulitzer Prize in 2004 for his novel The Known World, a story of slave-owning blacks in 1850s Virginia, replied, “The black and white thing

[defines] America. It always has been segregated and will be for a long time” (qtd. in

Conroy 13). What explains the endurance of the color-line in U. S. society? What is the nature of the social pathology that constructs and maintains oppressive social divisions based on race, gender, and class? These are questions that haunted Hurston’s work throughout her writing career and form the basis of her intention for writing

Seraph.

As Kirk Wilson points out, Du Bois did not make his famous statement in a vacuum but wrote his book as a response to nineteenth-century racial “science” that was based on an ideology of biological determinism (193) and which fueled an American eugenics movement that lasted until 1940 (Allen 172). I agree with Wilson but believe that both racial science and the resulting eugenics movement developed within an even larger context: a context of socially-constructed whiteness.2

For many Americans, the idea of a “color-blind” society “that has opportunities for all and guarantees success for none” represents an essential feature of their democratic society (Omi and Winant, 1986, 1). A study of American history, however, reveals that “race has been a profound determinant of one’s political rights, one’s location in the labor market, and indeed one’s sense of ‘identity’” (Omi and Winant

1986, 1). In other words, the history of the United States has been and continues to be a history of racism.

2 For a discussion of how the idea of eugenics may have informed Hurston’s intentions in Seraph, see Chuck Jackson’s article, “Waste and Whiteness: Zora Neale Hurston and the Politics of Eugenics.” 14 Omi and Winant propose a definition of race as “a concept which signifies and symbolizes social conflicts and interests by referring to different types of human bodies”

(1994, 55). Thus, the perception of any particular race is always subject to change and represents part of the structure of society and not an “irregularity” within it; they claim that, “we should see race as a dimension of human representation rather than an illusion” (1994, 55). Insisting on the possibility of a color-blind society represents an illusory approach to the understanding of how attitudes about race manifest in society.

On the contrary, only by focusing on race can society begin to address issues of inequality.

The Omi and Winant theory of racial formation imagines race as “an organizing principle of social relations” that works at both an individual and social level to explain the phenomenon of racism in the United States (1986, 68). They use the term racialization to “signify the extension of racial meaning to a previously racially unclassified relationship, social practice or group” (1986, 64). For example, in the

United States, specific African cultures such as Ibo, Yoruba, or Fulani, were conflated into a common identity described as “black” “by an ideology of exploitation based on racial logic—the establishment and maintenance of a ‘color line’” that was essential to the institution of racial slavery (Omi and Winant 1986, 64).

During the nineteenth century, when Irish, Jewish, and Southern European immigrants entered the United States in large numbers, the meaning of whiteness came under question (Omi and Winant, 1986, 64-65). The fact that these new immigrants were allowed a degree of assimilation not possible for Native Americans or blacks reveals the protean nature of racial politics as well as the fact that each subsequent wave

15 of immigrants coming to the United States after the Civil War encountered a society where the “possessive investment in whiteness” had already created a racially- structured society (Lipsitz 2), a society where racism seemed normal. Indeed, the

United States Congress in 1790 had specifically limited citizenship to “white persons,” although it was not always easy to pinpoint exactly what was meant by “white.” Legal determinations of race were often based on “common knowledge,” beliefs that reinforced current notions about races and racial divisions or “scientific” evidence derived from studies of biology or anthropology (Lopez White 626).3

Scott Malcomson states that early Spanish and Portuguese colonizers, whose modus operandi required enslavement of defeated natives and, later, of imported

Africans, set the stage for an American social model characterized by an ethos of domination (22). Although efficient in its administration, this model of conquest was not without its moral dilemma. Robin Blackburn writes that, “[T]he most disturbing thing about the slaves from the slaveholder’s point of view was not cultural difference but the basic similarity between himself and his property” (12-13). In addition to the questionable morality of enslaving another human being, slave owners had to confront the knowledge that “racism is an expression of permanent social war” and that, as humans, slaves were capable of rebellion against their owners if the opportunity arose

(Blackburn 12-13).

3 An example is the 1925 case, United States v. Cartozian, where the U. S. government tried to cancel the certificate of naturalization previously granted to an Armenian immigrant who was determined to not be white, a requisite for American citizenship. Franz Boas, Hurston’s teacher at Barnard, successfully challenged the case with his argument that Armenians were indeed white (United States v. Cartozian, 6.F.2d 919 [D. Ore. 1925]). For a discussion of Boas’s contribution to anthropology, see Smedley 274- 82) 16 Ironically, one solution to the problem of similarity was to emphasize difference. To the extent that skin color became the most important difference between groups of people and “insofar as Whites considered themselves clearly superior to everyone else, then one obvious way of organizing these types hierarchically that occurred to Europeans was from white to black” (Bernasconi 24). As scientists debated the origin of black skin color, prejudice against Africans increasingly focused on the darkness of their skin.

Malcomson claims that England envisioned its colony on Roanoke Island as a multicultural alternative to the Spanish/Portuguese colonial model: Sir Francis Drake was rumored to have Turks and Moors as well as Africans and Indians with him as he set sail in 1586 (27). What happened to the inhabitants of Roanoke after they were apparently ignored by the English remains a mystery. For Malcomson, a “blithe constriction of the imagination when faced with human multiplicity” marks the moment when “the English first became white” (28). The institution of slavery required a racial theory based on notions of skin color and phenotype that would provide definite

“criteria of race, a term which had hitherto had a more ample sense of family or kind, nature or culture” (Blackburn 15).

The process of becoming specifically “white” seems to have been accelerated during the fifteenth century as light-skinned Europeans began to enlarge their area of social and commercial interests. While medieval Europeans had reacted with wonder at the difference among humans with no real importance being attached to dissimilarity, the onset of West African slave trading in the middle of the fifteenth century encouraged a mindset where “white skin became socially valuable as a token of group

17 membership” (Malcomson 278). This was a departure from the medieval belief that

“language and the capacity of communication,” and not physical appearance, was the main criterion for determining humankind (Muldoon 83).

By the eighteenth century, after years of exposure to other cultures, Europeans began to imagine that “at least some” non-European peoples might actually be biologically different from themselves (Muldoon 80). The idea that certain individuals might not even be descended from Adam and Eve gave rise to the idea that perhaps they were some sort of human subspecies, or not even human.4 As James Muldoon states,

“three centuries of experience in Africa, Asia, and the Americas gradually forced

Europeans to reconsider the nature of the Other” (80). This led to the idea that humankind could be divided into distinct biological races, each possessing a variety of intellectual and moral characteristics that could be compared in terms of better or worse.

Muldoon believes that this new idea, bolstered by so-called scientific proof, “created the notion of racism and the consequences that flowed from it” (80).

Bernasconi points out that “the authority which science lent to the concept of race was an invaluable resource for racism, but more significant was the racism that science incorporated and developed.” As long as the concept of race resided in the realm of social or cultural curiosity and was “used only loosely,” the concept of race was not actively contested (2). The Spanish and English exploitation of Jews, Native

Americans, and Africans that began in the fifteenth century would be understood today

4 During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the phenomenon of human diversity precipitated a theological debate that centered on the question of baptism and how to explain such wide-spread diversity in terms of a literal reading of the Bible (Bernasconi 12, 18).

18 as examples of racism “but they were not sustained by a scientific concept of race”

(Bernasconi 11).5

To understand how whiteness came to be a social norm in America, it is necessary to look at what Malcomson refers to as the “psychologically covert fashion” in which that occurred (280). Beginning in the seventeenth century, the idea of race, as indicated by a skin color, was used increasingly by whites to indicate someone different from themselves. Seeing themselves as the norm, they saw no need to give themselves a specific label. When social distinctions required a label, whites described themselves in positive terms, those associated with nationality or religion. As the black population increased, with blackness becoming synonymous with slavery, blacks were increasingly described in negative terms by non-blacks. Eventually, the negative description of blackness created the social necessity for a positive antonym: whiteness. Whiteness, then, was born from a negative reaction to others and not a positive sense of self- identification: whites were not so much white as they were non-black (Malcomson 281-

82).

According to Thomas Nakayama and Robert Krizek, people who engage in this

“negative” definition of white “see white as meaning that they [lack] any other racial or ethnic features” and, therefore, “they must be white by default” (299). This echoes

Kenneth Burke’s idea of man as “inventor of the negative,” suggesting that “in every affirmation there is a negation” (qtd. in Gusfield 62).6 However, “[I]n the case of

5 Bernasconi argues that Kant can be credited with originating the first theory of race in “Of the Different Human Races,” published in 1775 (14).

6 Burke claims that social conflict would not occur in situations of pure identification or absolute separateness. But when identification and division collide and the social boundaries of each overlap, “so 19 whites, that affirmation tends to remain an invisible entity” (Nakayama and Krizer 299).

The idea that “one can only be white by not being anything else” is probably “related to the invisibility of whiteness as a category or a position from which one speaks,” with white appearing as unmarked, neutral, and universal. The use of the qualifier non, as in

“White-non-Hispanic,” reveals a process of elimination where white is what remains when everything else is taken away. Oddly, this process gives a name to those who are oppressed, but the oppressor remains unnamed. The concept of invisibility is an important element in the discursive construction of whiteness and “must be understood as a part of its power and force.” This idea of whiteness as invisible results in a rhetoric that “extends white space to the Universal” (Nakayama and Krizer 299-300).

The racial bifurcation of American society that began to evolve toward the end of the seventeenth century was more concerned with exclusion than self-consolidation.

To sustain the description of themselves as “normal and free,” whites required that the

“abnormal” and the “unfree” be excluded. The eighteenth century saw an increased effort to promote whiteness as the human norm and nonwhites as the exception

(Malcomson 282). The message that Revolutionary America sent to the world was

“that they, white Americans, were not white at all but universal humans.” The fact that nonwhites were excluded, however, resulted in an implicit understanding that the

“universal republic” was, in fact, white (Malcomson 285).

The irony of colonial slave owners demanding their freedom from England was not lost on America’s forefathers. One way to deal with the problem was to view slavery as an offensive practice from the past that had somehow intruded into the New that you cannot know for certain just where one ends and the other begins, . . . you have the characteristic invitation to rhetoric” (qtd. in Gusfield 184). 20 World. But as Robin Blackburn states, “[S]lavery in the New World was not based on an Old World prototype. Its bonds were woven from a variety of materials—ethnic identities, legal codifications, technical resources, economic impulses, and so forth— and all these together comprised something quite new” (34).

Malcomson claims that the colonists’ attempt to absolve themselves of guilt was not disingenuousness so much as desperation. The belief in whiteness as devoid of racial meaning was tenuous: the insistence on whiteness as the human norm meant that white people could only understand themselves as human by “forever distinguishing

[themselves] from other humans” (289). Thus, the uneasy truce between universalism and whiteness came to characterize the American social psyche “as a hybrid of the universal and the particular, the raceless and the white” (Malcomson 291). This idea of a fragmented white psyche is eerily reminiscent of Du Bois’s famous lines, “[O]ne ever feels his two-ness,--an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder” (5), and suggests that the need for whites to create a color line that separated them from blacks resulted not only in a separated society but a dysfunctional, split personality for both whites and blacks.

The “social etiquette of common ignorance,” that regards social discrimination as something normal, derives from an unexamined acceptance of race as an appropriate method of structuring and understanding the world (Lopez Social 165). Clearly, then, race exists as a social construction, and the process of “racial formation” can be seen to have several components: 1) races are created by humans, not by abstract social forces;

2) racial constructs interact with gender and class relations; 3) racial “meaning-systems”

21 are quick to change; and 4) the definition of what constitutes any single race is always relative to one or more other groups (Lopez White 632). Ironically, the creators of mainstream culture who insist on a rigid social paradigm that censures deviation from the white norm become “the deviants in terms of the culture’s expressed ideals” (Kafka

13), in this case, the democratic concept of equality.

Hurston’s work calls into question the validity of those social ideals, and

Nakayama’s and Krizek’s explanation of the difference between tactical rhetoric and strategic rhetoric are useful for understanding the nature of her argument. They draw on Michel de Certeau’s distinction between strategies and tactics in an effort to understand “the larger discursive framework that guides white identity” (295):

I call a strategy the calculation (or manipulation) of power relationships

that becomes possible as soon as a subject with will and power (a

business, an army, a city, a scientific institution) can be isolated. It

postulates a place that can be delimited as its own and serve as the base

from which relations with an exteriority composed of targets or threats

(customers or competitors, enemies, the country surrounding the city,

objectives and objects of research, etc.) can be managed . . . By contrast

with a strategy . . . a tactic is a calculated action determined by the

absence of a proper locus. No delimitation of an exteriority, then,

provides it with the condition necessary for autonomy. The space of a

tactic is the space of the other (my emphasis). Thus, it must play on and

with a terrain imposed on it and organized by the law of a foreign power.

22 It does not have the means to keep to itself, at a distance, in a position of

withdrawal, foresight, and self-collection (35-37).

Thus, the social construction of whiteness represents a strategy used by the dominant white population intent on maintaining a privileged status quo. In contrast, tactical rhetoric opens up the territory of “white” to critique (Nakayama and Krizek 292).7

An example of this type of tactical rhetoric can be seen in W.E.B. Du Bois’s The

Souls of Black Folk, which Robert Stepto claims “is not merely an assembled text, but also an orchestrated one” (52) that “marks a turning point away from biology and towards discursive interaction” (Wilson 194). By placing himself into his discourse as an individual claiming a position of subjectivity, and not as an object or problem to be studied or explained, Du Bois was able to create “a proudly self-conscious (as opposed to ‘double-conscienced’) racial voice” (Stepto 53) that challenged the rhetorical strategies inherent in the social construction of whiteness. Du Bois’s use of the metaphor of the “veil of race,” rooted in a childhood experience with a white classmate, undermines the nineteenth-century ideology of racial essentialism by revealing that

“physical traits are unimportant until they are tied to a specific meaning and until they become the motive of symbolic action” (Wilson 206). In his book, Du Bois not only challenged the strategically constructed rhetoric of whiteness but also claimed that black Americans had the authority to construct their own personal and social identity in ways that would make sense to them. His use of the word “soul” in his title further

7 Hurston’s comment, “The theory behind our tactics: ‘the white man is always trying to know into somebody else’s business. All right, I’ll set something outside the door of my mind for him to play with and handle. He can read my writing but he sho’ can’t read my mind’” (Mules and Men 5), underscores this idea. The white setting of Seraph, a notable departure from her previous focus on black culture, lends credence to the idea that her novel was intended as a subversive critique of Angle-Saxon society, a critique so skillfully executed as to be unnoticed at the time of its publication. 23 challenged a nineteenth-century discourse on race that had centered on the idea of biological determinism by shifting the focus from objective body to subjective personhood.

Strategic rhetoric, then, which utilizes a position of centrality or power to secure its goals, characterizes the type of rhetoric used to create and maintain the social construction of whiteness. Nakayama and Krizek suggest using “everyday discourse as a starting point in the process of marking the territory of whiteness and the power relations it generates,” in contrast to the traditional focus on public speeches as a source of rhetorical study (296-97). The reason for this is the contradictory nature of whiteness which is rendered invisible by its ubiquity. For example, everyday interactions seldom reveal a consciousness of whiteness per se, but when questions about whiteness are put to whites, “a multiplicity of discourses become visible” and this multiplicity “drives the dynamic nature of its power relations or forces, always re-securing the hegemonic position of whiteness” (298). This strategy is one of several that Nakayama and Krizek have uncovered and illustrates the way whiteness, as a majority position, resists analysis, not because it is universal, but because “it is particular to whites” (298). In other words, white people, looking at whiteness from their privileged position in a dominant white culture, often ignore the reality of social hierarchies based on race.

Without that insight, their analyses will remain incomplete. As Cynthia Kaufman points out, “[W]hite culture should not be studied outside of its relation to racism”

(199).

Unacknowledged racism has enabled white people to create and secure a position of centrality while relegating the “Others” to the margin (Nakayama and

24 Krizek 300-01). But those others have their own history, a history that has produced a corpus of tactical rhetoric that exposes and challenges the strategies that have been used to create “the spaces that exist between various groups and whiteness” (Nakayama and

Krizek 295). The literary tradition of black women writers who have questioned the status quo is a good example of this type of tactical rhetoric.

Black Women Writers

An active literary tradition created by black women can be traced back to the

African folk practice of oral storytelling. When black women began to write, they often drew on traditions that reflected their consciousness of an African ancestry that frequently resided in stories that had been handed down through generations. Gay

Wilentz points out that “this is true for both African and African-American women, but since the line between the Americans and their African past was forcibly broken by their dispersion into the Americas, they had to make a larger imaginative leap than their

African sisters” (xi). In addition, the experience of slavery provided a unique social context for the African American writer.8

The literature produced by black women writers in the United States from the colonial era to the beginning of the twentieth century clearly indicates their desire to engage with the public issues of their time. Writers such as Phillis Wheatley (1753-

8 Hurston’s work reflects this tradition and can be seen in the trajectory of her writing, first as an anthropologist gathering African American folk tales, and later as a writer of fiction. Hemenway claims that Hurston “had lived Afro-American folklore before she knew that such a thing existed . . . or had special value as evidence of the adaptive creativity of a unique subculture” (22). She depicts the African tradition of oral story telling as an important part of everyday social discourse in fictional works such as Their Eyes Were Watching God and “Sweat.” Also, comments such as “If Ah never see you no mo’ on earth, Ah’ll meet you in Africa” (Eyes 148) and the description of her reaction to a jazz performance in “How it Feels to be Colored Me,” where she refers to the slavery of her ancestors (153), suggests that she was drawing on “an archetype of history . . . [that] touches the racial memory of Africa” (Hemenway 76). 25 1784), Frances E.W. Harper (1805-1911), and Octavia V. Rogers (1853-c.1890), to name a few, not only challenged negative opinions about themselves, they also focused on reinterpreting the world around them, despite resistance from those in power (Foster

16). Black writers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were ever cognizant of the fact that an important goal of their writing was to influence white Americans (Tate

“Hopkins” 54) and understood that their work was a “part of, not separate from, the politics of oppression” (Carby 162). For example, Toni Morrison makes a political statement about race in her fourth novel Tar Baby (1981) by drawing on a black

American folk tale while spotlighting white characters to an extent not found in her previous novels. On the Isle des Chevaliers, the fictional Caribbean island of her novel, the social world depicted by Morrison reveals a perpetuation of “historically unjust social and economic structures” (Kubitschek 102). Like Hurston in Seraph, Morrison uses the trope of whiteness to illustrate the ways that intersections of race, class, and gender create hierarchies of power that circumscribe human lives.

Black women writers, according to Marjorie Pryse, have used their work to

“challenge the authenticity and accuracy of an American history that failed to record their voices and a literary history—written by black men as well as white—that has compounded the error of that neglect” (4). Writing from the margins of the “mythical

‘neutral’ voice of universal art,” black women took advantage of their outsider status to challenge the status quo by including the specifically black and female in their work

(Bethel 177). Morrison states that “cultural identities are formed and informed by a nation’s literature” (39). Thus, the literary efforts of black women writers can be read as sociopolitical corrections to an incomplete rendition of the American experience.

26 Hurston herself has become a literary foremother to many contemporary black women writers (Wilentz xi). Pryse believes that a defining element of Hurston’s genius can be found in her return to Eatonville, Florida, in order to collect the folktales or

“lies” she remembered from her childhood. Her compilation of black folklore, Mules and Men (1935), a book written not as an academic text but directed toward the general public, explored the effect of black history on folk narratives: “hypothesizing about racial characteristics in traditional communication” (Hemenway 160). The act of writing on the part of black women effectively severed “the mystique of connection between literary authority and patriarchal power.” (Pryse 11-12). Their fiction often draws upon an awareness of how intersections of race, gender, and class create social realities for black women that are different from those of white women, an approach that Hurston uses in Seraph where she critiques white culture by focusing on the subordinated social position of the white mother.

Feminist Review of Intersectionality

As second wave9 feminism gathered steam during the 1960s, the excitement generated among women taking part in the feminist movement tended to overshadow its narrow focus: a social movement with a political agenda aimed at liberating women from oppression seemed to be shaping itself more and more in terms of a white, middle- class, heterosexual orientation rooted in Western thought. Couched primarily in terms of gender equality, concepts like race, ethnicity, class, sexual orientation, nationality

9 In the United States, the term “second wave” refers to the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s that marked the renewal of women’s organized efforts to achieve social equality with men. The “first wave” is generally understood as beginning with the Women’s Rights Convention held in 1848 in Seneca Falls, New York. Following a period of activism focused on voting rights for women that resulted in passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, the feminist movement waned until the social ferment of the 1960s reawakened a new feminist consciousness. 27 and other differences among women were absent from theoretical analyses of women’s lives. This narrow focus led to a sense of marginalization on the part of women who could not identify with the program set forth by mainstream feminists. Over the years, however, an expanding body of feminist research has developed that attempts to explore the specific needs of those previously excluded women and creates a more inclusive theoretical analysis that addresses the needs of all women, not just the elite few.

A major problem is the incomplete theorizing of race on the part of white women who fail to see themselves as racially marked and continue to insist on gender oppression as the principal issue. Trina Grillo and Stephanie Wildman point out that when debates take place among feminists that attempt to make comparisons between racism and sexism, the uniqueness of each and the way they might interact with each other to create a specific locus of oppression tends to be lost. Making analogies also tends to bring any discussion back to center, i.e., the established cultural norm represented by the dominant group (566). In turn, the dominant group believes it understands the situation which confers (in their minds) authority regarding solutions

(569).10

The early second wave feminist focus on gender differences between men and women essentialized the concept of woman as one type of person, ignoring all but a narrow range of problems to be solved. Black feminists have led the way in expanding

10 This is reminiscent of Edward Said’s theory of orientalism, a critique of colonial European studies of Oriental cultures whereby the Other is “designated as a form of cultural projection . . . [that] constructs the identities of cultural subjects through a relationship of power in which the Other is the subjugated element” (Edgar and Sedgwick 266). Thus, the concept of orientalism did not represent a positive sense of identification on the part of “orientals” but rather a “European identity in terms of the oppositions which structured its account” (Edgar and Sedgwick 266). As Said points out, the Orient is “the place of Europe’s greatest and richest and oldest colonies . . . and one of its deepest and most recurring images of the Other” (1). 28 feminist theorizing by pointing out the ways that gender and race together create a more meaningful dialogue about the life experiences of women of color (Johnson-Odim 315).

Women of color in general tend to take a more political stance in their activism because they are dealing with societies that encompass inequalities of a diverse nature, inequalities that are often embedded within cultural practices. The degree to which feminism should be politicized represents another debate within the movement as women of color extend their analyses of oppression beyond the focus of “women’s issues” based solely on gender to include systemic oppression that not only affects women but ultimately men as well (Johnson-Odim 317).

As Maynard points out, acknowledging difference is a good start, but looking at each term separately ignores the underlying political structures that create and maintain a value system which privileges the dominant culture, a culture that embodies racism and a patriarchal disavowal of female/maternal powers. While the focus on difference with “its implications of plurality and multiplicity” is seen by many as an effective countermeasure to a monolithic view of women, Maynard asks us to think about what is meant by difference and how that notion could be used as a constructive part of empirical research or theoretical analysis in order to bring about social change

(Difference 9). In other words, just how useful is the concept of difference in terms of feminist theorizing, especially regarding race and ethnicity?

Maynard believes that while the concept of difference has been important to groups “both in terms of naming their oppressions and in forming identities which can provide the bases for collective struggle,” it has limited value as a stand-alone analytical tool. In her view, merely drawing attention to social differences does not explain the

29 power dynamics of “how this comes to be constructed as inferior and the basis for inequality and subordination” (Difference 20). Thus, it is necessary to investigate how the simple fact of difference translates into oppression. This calls for a feminist analysis of difference that recognizes how differences interact with each other to create what Collins refers to as a matrix of oppression (Thought 274).

Collins has expanded feminist understandings of social diversities by pointing out the ways that differences such as race, class, and gender interact to form systems of oppression that gain support from hegemonic economic, political, and ideological conditions in society. Her conceptual framework addresses Maynard’s concern that merely adding the concept of difference to feminist theorizing results in losing sight of the ways in which differences create a system of power dynamics. While Collins is specifically involved in articulating a black feminist epistemology, her schema sets forth issues that are relevant for all oppressed groups.

Seeking to understand and explain the dynamics of intersecting oppressions and the ways they manifest in individual lives, Collins draws on black feminist thought which she feels “offers two important contributions concerning the significance of knowledge for a politics of empowerment.” These two contributions include the acceptance of “a paradigm of intersecting oppressions of race, class, gender, sexuality, and nation, as well as Black women’s individual and collective agency within them”

(Thought 273) and an understanding of “the power dynamics that underlie what counts as knowledge” (Thought 272). She points out that it is not sufficient to acquire new knowledge about one’s own experience, as empowering as that might be, but to also challenge prevailing knowledge that may not reflect the realities of black women’s

30 lives. These ideas can be understood as guidelines or beginning steps in the project of

“understanding how power is organized and operates” (Thought 274).

Collins structures her overarching matrix of domination in terms of four power locations: structural, where oppression is organized; disciplinary, where oppression is managed; hegemonic, which justifies oppression; and interpersonal, which deals with the individual consciousness that arises from quotidian experience. The structural domain of power features an “emphasis on large-scale, interlocking social institutions” such as legal systems, education, housing and news media that produce social policies designed to ignore minority groups or neutralize their concerns. The result is a mindset that places blame on the person or group that fails to prosper and not on underlying social structures that may have contributed to the failure. Within the domain of power, oppression is embedded in long-standing and difficult-to-change social institutions that marginalize large groups of people and deprive them of full rights as citizens (Thought

277-79).

The disciplinary domain of power regulates by means of “bureaucratic hierarchies and techniques of surveillance” that circumvent legislated equality.

Bureaucratic power structures not only reproduce interconnected systems of oppression, they are also adept at making them difficult to see. Collins sees surveillance as “a major mechanism of bureaucratic control.” Although gaining admittance into bureaucratic entities can constitute a starting point for resistance, the outsider who manages to reach a position of authority may encounter new forms of disciplinary control (Thought 280-83).

31 In contrast to the structural and disciplinary domains of power that rely on social policies, the hegemonic domain works to legitimize practices of discrimination by

“manufacturing ideologies needed to maintain oppression.” Mass media helps to shape public consciousness with its constant barrage of images and hidden ideologies. As

Collins points out, however, it is not enough to simply resist hegemonic ideas emanating from the dominant culture. Oppressive social conditions often unleash a body of subjugated knowledge that can “provide alternatives to the way things are supposed to be” and create a new level of awareness that becomes a source of agency for those who are oppressed (Thought 284-86). While the structural, disciplinary, and hegemonic domains of power work at a macro level to create an overarching social construct of oppression, the interpersonal domain works at an individual or micro level and deals with what Audre Lorde has called, “. . . that piece of the oppressor which is planted deep within each of us” (Lorde 123). This contradictory idea underscores

Collins’s point that a “matrix of domination contains few pure victims or oppressors”

(Thought 287).

In Seraph, Hurston draws on this idea to depict a white culture where the economically dependent wife and mother, occupying a social space that renders her subservient to her husband, nevertheless is needed for her caretaking and emotional mothering, activities that confer a degree of social status. The interpersonal negotiations that are required to maintain a semblance of balance between husband and wife often blur the line between victim and oppressor: is Jim the socially-sanctioned bully or is he justified in his actions because Arvay is so difficult to live with? Is there some explanation for Arvay’s seemingly irrational behavior? To what extent has Arvay

32 internalized the early twentieth-century social expectation of appropriate female behavior that privileged men and left wives feeling guilty if they did not follow the

“rules” that required them to submit to their husbands? Do those rules constitute a

“piece of the oppressor” that Arvay has internalized which might explain her initial frustration and ultimate surrender to a social reality she imagined she had no power to change?

While Maynard examines the concept of difference in terms of its usefulness in shaping feminist rhetoric, pointing out why the concept per se is incomplete, Collins rounds out the discussion by creating a comprehensive framework that illustrates how differences interact to construct a matrix of oppression. Something similar to Collin’s epistemology of social difference is evident in Hurston’s work, whether fiction or non- fiction, and reflects the fact that many of the often sad realities of her life were occasioned by socially-constructed differences over which she had no control. In

Seraph, Hurston proceeds with the same social awareness as Collins but with a slightly different focus. While Collins uses the concepts of race, class, and gender to construct a feminist theory about social hierarchies, Hurston uses her awareness of those same social differences to deconstruct the socially-perceived correctness of a dominant culture based on disparities of race, class, and gender.

Although social scientists in the past have recognized that the distinct concepts of race, class, and gender are factors that shape the way people live their lives, newer studies have begun to investigate the ways that these social constructs work together “as interlocking categories of experience . . .” that create and maintain a particular social structure (Anderson and Collins 3). This synthetic approach is in contrast to what

33 Anderson and Collins refer to as the “additive model” in which race, class, and gender operate as separate elements that “add up” to produce an individual’s or group’s life experience. The additive model also presupposes a static definition of each concept instead of seeing them as social constructs with meanings that change over time (4).

For example, the word “class” first appears in the English language in England during the seventeenth century and was defined as “an order or distribution of people according to their several Degrees” (Calvert 12). Peter Calvert believes that the use of the word class instead of the older terms such as rank, order, or station coincided with the process of classification in the natural sciences. Over time, human beings were seen as one more thing to be classified and the idea of classifying human social groups according to common characteristics led to the idea of different social classes (15-16).

Vanneman and Cannon believe that in the United States, the “caste-like nature of the racial barrier has frequently allowed white social science to ignore variations in social class, lifestyle, life chances, and social differentiations of any sort within the Black community” (225), a practice that ignores the subjugated knowledge that Collins writes about.

In recent years, the concept of multiculturalism has been put forth as a solution to problems arising from perceived differences in the United States. However, multiculturalism, with its emphasis on “diversity,” leaves the social construction of whiteness intact and unexamined while non-dominant groups continue with “the feeling that they are departures from the norm” (Dyer 44). Although the coercive nature of whiteness might appear to be everywhere, “the colourless multi-colouredness of whiteness” makes whiteness difficult to analyze (Dyer 46). But as studies such as that

34 done by Ruth Frankenberg demonstrate, whiteness is not an “‘empty’ cultural space,” but a socially constructed location of privilege based on an ideology of dominance

(Displacing 242-43). The white women she interviewed revealed life experiences shaped by social and political contexts that, together with race privilege, created a specific worldview that was rarely questioned (Displacing 192).

Her work in Women’s Studies led Peggy McIntosh to see that systems of oppression are often invisible because they are deeply embedded in social institutions.

It is important to note, however, that systems of oppression are more visible to those who are being oppressed than to those who are not. She points out that both unacknowledged male privilege based on gender and unearned white privilege based on race constitute systems of oppression that are not seen as such by those so privileged.

Even those few men who admit that institutionalized male privilege does exist are likely to deny that they have been personally advantaged. Making a connection between gender and race, McIntosh reasons that the same could be said of privileges granted on the basis of skin color and could explain why women of color often accuse white women of being oppressive when they deny their unquestioned skin privilege. In both instances, the assumed social entitlement of white men in particular and white people in general often exists on an unconscious level and is taken for granted as the norm (96-

97).

While McIntosh claims that, “[M]any, perhaps most,” white students in the

United States “do not see ‘whiteness’ as a racial identity,” (103) it might be more accurate to say that a specific racial identity is not a part of white consciousness because that awareness is not required for day-to-day living since white people do not

35 experience their lives through a racial filter that implies deviation. Amy Kaminsky claims that race as an unquestioned concept “becomes a receptacle for meaning instead of a locus of the production of signification” (9). This means that as long as white culture sees itself as not having “race,” it will be difficult to conduct a meaningful national dialogue on racial issues.

Embedded systems of oppression create, maintain, and legitimize an unacknowledged source of social capital that is available to white people for use at the expense of those designated as others. However, the sense of entitlement possessed by those in charge tends to blind them to this reality and makes it difficult to effect change.

In Seraph, neither Jim nor Arvay question their social position as privileged whites in early twentieth century segregated Florida. However, Jim, as a white male, goes forth with a greater sense of self-confidence than Arvay whose life is circumscribed by her socially mandated position as stay-at-home wife and mother.

Cornel West states that “blackness has no meaning outside of a system of race- conscious people and practices” (27). Thus, the ultimate irony of whiteness is that it would not exist without the presence of blackness. Indeed, Morrison believes that the use of a “constituted Africanism . . . provided the staging ground and arena for the elaboration of the quintessential American identity” (44). Frankenberg asserts that the idea of whiteness as identity is “almost impossible to separate from racial dominance”

(Displacing 9). In a social system that includes but does not acknowledge oppression, whiteness becomes a defining element. Looking to define their own position in such a society, black women writers have used their literary talents to expose and question the

36 privileging of whites in American society, often focusing on the role that white women have played in helping to create and maintain the status quo.

Black Women Writing About White Women

One of the earliest examples of a black woman writer who included white women in her analysis of white culture is Harriet Jacobs with her book Incidents in the

Life of a Slave Girl, written in 1861. Drawing on her own experience, Jacobs tells the story of Linda Brent, a slave girl struggling to claim her human individuality. Jacobs’s book represents a departure from the slave narratives written by men who often imagined freedom as an act of fleeing to the North. For Jacobs, the act of physical distancing was not as important as maintaining emotional attachments while seeking personal empowerment. She expanded on her subject of the malevolence of slavery to show how the fate of her protagonist revealed a social mindset that devalued all women.

While encouraging the idea of a common sisterhood, she nevertheless asked white women to reflect on the ways that slavery of some women might enhance the lives of others who were free. Frances Foster calls Incidents both “a jubilation and a jeremiad” that reflects “the particular configurations of racism and sexism” that informed the society within which Jacobs was writing (95-96).

For the black women writers who came after Jacobs, her story of resistance with her emphasis on a female interpretation of the experience of slavery became a valuable resource as black women faced the social and political challenges of

Reconstruction. In a literary pre-figurement, Jacobs’s narrative anticipates Hurston’s evolving ecumenical feminism by making white women a part of her focus. More recently, black feminist writers have offered critiques of white women that not only

37 echo insights revealed in studies of racial construction but also employ a specifically woman-centered view that questions the role that white women play in the maintenance of white hegemonic culture.

By the late 1970s, white-dominated feminist theory and praxis with its focus on gender issues was beginning to be questioned. Women of color pointed out that it was necessary to understand how race and class intersected with gender in order to comprehend the reality of their lives. This expanded focus was resisted by many white and class-privileged feminists who thought a shift in focus would weaken the movement

(hooks Feminist Theory xii). Betty Friedan’s book The Feminist Mystique (1963), often cited as a major second-wave feminist text, exemplifies the blinkered approach that characterized a great deal of that epoch’s feminist theorizing. Friedan’s study of upper-class, educated white women who struggled with a malady she dubbed “the problem that has no name,” was accepted by many white feminists as an accurate portrayal of one of the most compelling problems facing American women.

But, as bell hooks points out, “only women with leisure time and money could actually shape their identities on the model of the feminine mystique” (Feminist Theory

2). At a time in history when more than one-third of all women were employed, stay-at- home wives and mothers represented a cultural ideal that was not obtainable for large numbers of working class women, whether black or white, who were forced to work in menial, low-paying jobs. For those women, the idea that employment outside the home constituted liberation for women was laughable.

Women’s Studies courses that emerged in the 1970s also emphasized differences between men and women, leading to overgeneralizations about both.

38 Imagining gender as a “generic category” ignored the impact that differences such as class and race might have on an individual woman’s life (Zinn 170-71). Understanding themselves as oppressed by sexism, white women tended to ignore the ways they were privileged by racism. The language of “isms” served to conceal the social arrangements that created oppression and made possible the privileging of one group over another

(Wildman and Davis 658). Audre Lorde points out that early Women’s Studies courses tended to ignore literature written by women of color, positioning those women as outsiders or “others” whose life experiences and traditions were too difficult to understand (117).11 This absence of recognition makes it easier to position a group as the Other or render it invisible (hooks Black Looks 167).

Although a patriarchal society tends to invalidate all women, in a dominantly white culture “the entrapments used to neutralize Black women and white women are not the same.” Black women are faced with the complicated task of dealing with racial oppression at the same time that they deal with gender conflicts in the black community. The problem facing white women is “the pitfall of being seduced into joining the oppressor under the pretense of sharing power” (Lorde 118; my emphasis).

Lorde claims that being physically attractive, “hating the right people,” and marrying the right man are often requirements for white women who want to “co-exist with patriarchy in relative peace” (119).

Hurston’s description of Arvay Hensen, written 36 years before Lorde’s comment, suggests that she had a similar impression of privileged white women.

11 Lorde notes the hypocrisy of this argument by pointing out that those same women had no difficulty teaching writers such as Shakespeare, Moliere, Dostoyevsky, or Aristophanes whose life experiences were formed by situations vastly different from their own (117). 39 However, Arvay also exhibits signs of resistance to the aggressive and narcissistic personality of Jim resulting in an on-going tension in their marriage that only resolves itself at the end of the novel when she ceases to resist and acquiesces to her husband’s demands. Arvay, in effect, is an “outsider-within,” a term used by Collins to describe individuals or groups who occupy social spaces where power is unequally distributed

(Fighting Words 5). Collins’s individual experience as a black student in a white high school that enabled her to observe and accumulate knowledge about white society

“without gaining the full power accorded to that group” led her to investigate the quandary of black women who, as a group, find themselves in a similar situation

(Fighting Words 6).

Focusing on the history of black women’s domestic employment in white households, she states that their daily incursions into white middle-class homes provided them with a unique “angle of vision” that produced insightful information about white culture that revealed a disconnect between white supremacist ideology and the everyday realities of white peoples’ lives. The message they brought back to their families was that white people were not as superior as imagined (Fighting Words 6-7).

In effect, black domestic workers served as informants, bringing knowledge to black communities—“details, facts, observations, and psychoanalytic readings of the white

Other” (hooks Black Looks 165).

Hurston’s experience of growing up in the self-governing black town of

Eatonville, Florida, set her apart from most of her Harlem Renaissance colleagues whose childhoods had included “an indoctrination in inferiority” as they came of age in a culture dominated by white people who routinely passed judgment on non-whites

40 (Boyd 144). As an adult, however, Hurston entered a world that was very different from Eatonville. At Barnard, where she was the first African American woman to earn a degree in Anthropology, and later as a writer navigating through the world of white publishers, she was often positioned as an outsider-within. Even so, the racial self- confidence engendered in her childhood led her to question what she knew was the myth of white superiority. Free of the internalized self-doubt that many blacks seemed to have, Hurston often threw caution to the winds with her frank comments about the notion of white specialness. In observations that were edited out of her autobiography,

Dust Tracks on a Road, she wrote, “I just think it would be a good thing for the Anglo-

Saxon to get the idea out of his head that everybody else owes him something just for being blond,” a view she felt was held by two-thirds of the white population (Hurston

Dust Tracks, Appendix, 261-62).

Her close observations of white people in action, like those of the domestic workers12 mentioned by Collins and hooks, together with her personal experiences of racial discrimination, led her to ponder the nature of what she referred to as the “false foundation” of Anglo-Saxon culture (“Jim Crow” 164). In Seraph, Hurston becomes the consummate “people watcher,” as she seeks to understand that false foundation.

Her novel describes a society where the exploitation of maternal energies in service to patriarchal economic and social goals results in the corruption not only of the personal agency and meaning of women as mothers, but of Mother Nature as well. Her female

12 Hurston herself relied on domestic work during periods of economic need. Thus, she was able to view white culture from more than one socially-positioned point of view (Boyd 59-61, 76; Hemenway 19). In addition, her experience as a writer afforded her opportunities to observe a spectrum of white class positions that ranged from upper- class contacts in the academic and publishing worlds to so-called Cracker or white trash groups she came in contact with during her years of working on the Federal Writers’ Project in 1938-39 Florida (Lowe 265-66; Jackson 643). 41 protagonist, Arvey Henson, is the focal point for her feminist diagnosis of Anglo-Saxon culture, a culture dominated by a psychological mindset based on domination and exclusion where the conditions that confer privilege and power are very narrowly defined. With Seraph, Hurston not only continues the tradition of black women writers who used their writing talents to challenge the social status quo, she also emerges as a prescient foremother in terms of feminist sociopolitical analysis. Her subversive novel makes a potent statement about racial inequality by focusing on the psychological dynamics of a white couple—a clear departure from African American male writers in the 1940s who tended not to make gender distinctions when writing about race.

Chapter Two: Invoking the Maternal to Reveal the False Foundation of Anglo-Saxon Culture

In Seraph, Hurston describes a society based on hierarchies of race, class, and gender that privileges an engaging white male, Jim Meserve. A notable element in his world is a resistant wife, Arvay, who will achieve a degree of subjectivity by adapting to and ultimately embracing and supporting his worldview. Hurston’s tale, however, is not as straightforward as it first appears. Lurking beneath the surface is a subversive sub-text that constitutes an analysis of a society she believed had a false foundation.

Hurston infuses her novel with an ironic tone that works to create two opposing interpretations of her text. At first glance, Jim—depicted as hard-working, racially tolerant, and burdened with Arvay’s seemingly irrational behavior-- appears to be the hero of the story. But Hurston subtly undermines the validity of that interpretation with an opposing theme of maternal exploitation. The structure of her novel, with its two contending stories, mirrors the society she is diagnosing: a white-controlled, male- dominated culture vaguely aware of, but unwilling to admit to, a dependency on Mother

Nature and the female body and the extent to which all living things are connected.

The maternal undercurrents running through Seraph serve to destabilize the dominant discourse that seems to endorse the money-making ventures of her male protagonist. Interestingly, Hurston’s view of what constitutes the shaky foundation of

Anglo-Saxon culture, with its focus on male privilege and female subordination, is in line with more recent feminist scholarship dealing with the concepts of origin, context, 43 and foundation that places women at the center of analysis and aims at creating social balance by restoring the lost mother.

Origin and Context

Symbols, images, and myths represent an alternative source of knowledge for feminist research that seeks to understand the origin and nature of the ongoing subordination or marginalization of women and disempowered groups. What explains negative images and how can positive symbols and myths be employed to re-imagine the past, alter the present, and launch an alternative worldview free of patriarchal beliefs that threaten the delicate relationship that exists among all living things?

Monica Sjoo and Barbara Mor state that “[T]he first symbols did not arise from the mind alone, but from the holistic experiencing of mind, body, sex, heart, soul, and world all moving together, all” (40). Ancient myths of the goddess, understood “not as some woman up in the sky or even down in the earth” (Caputi Goddesses 13), but as

“the deep source of creative integrity in women” (Daly 111), evoke a time in history when the complementarity of male and female powers was the norm. In this balanced worldview, the powers of women were respected and understood as fundamental.

For example, sovereignty goddesses such as Morgan Le Fay of the Arthurian legends were in charge of making sure that rulers would respect the earth (Husain 55).

Another example is the mother power expressed through the myth of Demeter and her daughter, Persephone. Although often depicted as the story of a distraught mother who

“withheld her gifts from the earth” in response to the abduction and rape of her daughter

(Hamilton 49-54), the original version of the story described an Earth Goddess with

44 dual powers of creation and destruction that represented “the necessary cycles of life and death, the cyclic advances and retreats of the life force” (Caputi 400).13

In his study of West African Trickster figures, Robert Pelton describes the

Ashanti, Fon, Yoruba, and Dogon societies in terms of a male-female complementarity that reveals a belief system comfortable with the notion of mutability and the presence of the Goddess. For example, the matrilineal society of the Ashanti “expresses its sense of cosmic doubleness” by recognizing two pre-eminent beings, “Nyame, the male sky- god, and Asase Yaa, ‘old mother earth.’” The Fon, recognizing “maleness and femaleness as twin principles of all life,” and understanding their High God, Mawu-Lisa as androgynous, nevertheless believe that the female element has the upper hand. The

Yoruba, too, have a High God, Olodumare (or Olorun), and an Earth Goddess, Onile, who occupy a realm of “complex grouping and interplay of sacred energies” while the

Dogon people are inspired by a “many-leveled mythology” headed by Ogo-Yuruga, a trickster-like figure, who embodies the idea of transformation (124).

Although modern Africa often appears to be a geographical jigsaw puzzle reflecting the economic and political interests of the colonial powers who imposed religious concepts that did not take into account the traditional differences among

African societies, evidence abounds that the idea of male-female complementarity was common in groups throughout the Continent. For example, a bisexual serpent appears in the creation myths of Benin, southern Africa, and in southern Algeria (Husain 30).

13 Although both versions of the story acknowledge the necessity of respecting the creative powers embodied by the earth goddess, the mother-daughter version denies her sovereignty and dilutes her power by forcing her to accept the compromise required by the male gods that allows her daughter to return to earth for only a portion of each year. Gloria Orenstein makes a connection between the rape of women and the death of nature and claims that the version of the myth that splits the goddess into mother and daughter can be read as a warning of what can happen when patriarchy succeeds at “matricide and goddess murder” (263-64). 45 While most African royalty “trace their ancestry back to culture heroes, or even gods”

(Husain 31), the right of kingly rule is often derived through marriage to a divine bride.

Women are often seen as the original source of a fundamental power that over time has been appropriated by men. The Bapende of Zaire, for example, allow only men to wear the masks used in initiation rites although a woman is believed to have discovered “the secret magic” (Husain 32).14

What all of this suggests is the barely acknowledged consciousness of a time in history when female power was assumed to be as essential to human well-being as that of males. The collective memory of that power can be seen in the rituals and ceremonies of modern African culture. In Western renditions of goddess history, however, that force often appears in a diminished form as an element of white-defined goddess epistemology.

In an essay entitled “An Open Letter to Mary Daly,” Audre Lorde admonishes

Daly for failing to include black women and the tradition of African goddesses such as

Afrekete, Yemanje, Oyo, and Mawulisa or the warrior goddesses of the Vodun, the

Dahomeian Amazons and the warrior-women of Dan in her book Gyn/Ecology. She concludes that Daly “has made a conscious decision to narrow her scope and to deal only with the ecology of western European women” (67). Lorde makes a legitimate point and her thoughts are in line with black African historians who have suggested that ancient rock paintings in the Tassili region of Saharan Africa, which depict “female

14 The idea of male-female duality appears to have been a value in ancient cultures in the Americas as well. Archaeologists in Mexico City have discovered an Aztec emperor’s tomb believed to be that of Ahuizotl, who ruled at the time Columbus landed in the New World. The tomb is located directly below a stone monolith carved with a representation of Tlatecuhti. Although referred to as the Aztec god of the earth , Tlaltecuhti is depicted as a woman giving birth, suggesting that the Aztec civilization recognized some sort of equality or even fusion of male-female power (Stevenson 19A). 46 figures bearing marks . . . that are commonly associated with the goddesses of Egypt and the Near East,” may actually represent “the original black goddess figure, from whom all others derive.” This suggests that Euro-centric conventional readings of

“Black Madonnas” as representatives of “the psychological ‘dark side’ of the [white]

Goddess,” might be more accurately understood as “vestiges of a time when the

Goddess really was black” (Husain 30).

The important point that emerges from discussions about the goddess is the idea

of a balanced approach to understanding humans and their place in the natural world, an approach that includes dualities, ambiguities, and the juxtaposition of creativity with destruction. The result is a way of thinking and feeling that honors the holistic nature and potential powers of the goddess, in contrast to the world depicted in Seraph where women and nature are expected to yield to a patriarchal power fueled by narcissism.

Sjoo and Mor challenge Aristotle’s idea of the passive female body as recipient of that which really matters, the life force of the male contribution, claiming that,

“[T]he female egg, even before it mates with a sperm, generates an electrical field that becomes the shaping energy of the embryo as it develops into an independent being.

The mother field is both the biological environment and the shaper of form within the environment” (230). With the advent of the monotheistic male god, this idea was difficult to sustain since man could neither give birth nor feed a child from his body.

Thus, the relationship between humans and God had to be re-imagined. The sacred/magical link between mother and child was no longer considered primary. The emergence of a male God empowered to create human life meant “the loss between the human and the divine of direct, continuous physical-emotional-spiritual relationship . . .

47 [T]he father is not of the same all-containing, all-infusing, shaping and nourishing substance, and so the relation between humans and the Father God becomes abstract and alienated, distant and moralistic” (Sjoo and Mor 230-31).

Gerda Lerner states that the power to generate involves creativity, “the ability to create something out of nothing” and procreativity, “the capacity to produce offspring.”

Over time, religion has been used to shift the idea of generative activity from a Mother-

Goddess in possession of a universal fertility, to the Mother-Goddess who needs assistance from male gods or human kings, and finally to a “concept of symbolic creativity as expressed in the creation story in Genesis” (180). Procreativity and creativity become separate activities with the creation of monotheism: “God’s blessing of man’s seed which would be planted in the passive receptacle of woman’s womb symbolically defined gender relations under patriarchy” (Lerner 201). However, “men have built a conceptual error of vast proportion into all of their thought” that has enabled them to create and maintain a world in which women are relegated to the margins while men believe themselves to be “the center of discourse” (Lerner 220).

This comment echoes an observation made by Simone de Beauvoir that men describe the world “from their own point of view, which they confuse with absolute truth” (161).

Although Beauvoir’s book, The Second Sex, was initially considered by many to be anti-maternal, more recent analyses of her work reveal ambivalence rather than animosity toward motherhood. As early as the late 1960s, feminist writers began to reassess initial interpretations that had focused on what appeared to be a “male-defined philosophy in general and Sartrean existentialism in particular” that seemed at odds with a woman-centered feminist movement. However, it was the posthumous

48 publication of Beauvoir’s letters and notebooks in 1990 that provided new insights that could be used to challenge traditional interpretations of her work (Simons 9-10).

Kristana Arp, for example, argues that what seem to be Beauvoir’s negative comments about female bodies should be read as an analysis of a socially-constructed concept of biology. To understand the significance of that biology, one needs to look at

Beauvoir’s notion of bodily alienation—the idea that women do, in fact, often experience their bodies in negative ways. In particular, Arp examines what appears to be Beauvoir’s insistence on passivity as a defining feature of the female condition, a passivity that supposedly traps them within their bodies and denies them the possibility of achieving transcendence. As Beauvoir explains:

Now, what peculiarly signalizes the situation of woman is that she—a

free and autonomous being like all human creatures—nevertheless finds

herself living in a world where men compel her to assume the status of

the Other. They propose to stabilize her as object and to doom her to

immanence since her transcendence is to be overshadowed and forever

transcended by another ego (conscience) which is essential and

sovereign (xxxiii).

Arp asks whether the concepts of immanence and transcendence can manifest themselves in biological structures and concludes that the passivity that Beauvoir attributes to the female body at the biological level represents a “socialized body” (164).

In fact, Beauvoir herself declared that while “the body is one of the essential elements in her situation in the world . . . that body is not enough to define her as woman” (41). Indeed, to state otherwise would conflict with her existentialist belief

49 that biology is not destiny (Arp in Simons, Feminist 162-64). Therefore, the alienation experienced by women is the result of culture not biology and the female body should not be an impediment to “. . . achieving the existential ideal of transcendence” (Arp in

Simons Feminist 168). Do Beauvoir’s negative comments about women’s biology constitute either biological reductionism or determinism? Julie Ward believes they do not and she repeats the observation made by Arp that it is difficult to imagine Beauvoir espousing a philosophy “that would preclude the possibility for individual choice and responsibility . . .” (Ward in Simons, Feminist 224).

The structure of The Second Sex provides a point of departure for trying to reconcile what appears to be a contradiction on the part of Beauvoir. By dividing her book into “Facts and Myths” and “Lived Experience,” she used two different but related approaches to her subject.15 Ward calls this a “top-down” approach in which “myths and theories detailed in her first volume are to be regarded as part of the conceptual apparatus presupposed in the lived histories of women in the second volume” (226).

Indeed, Beauvoir begins Volume II by stating that, “[N]o biological, psychological, or economic fate determines the figure that the human female presents in society; it is civilization as a whole that produces this creature . . . which is described as feminine”

(301). Applying this idea to Seraph, one can see that Hurston, too, arrives at the conclusion that the “creature” known as the white woman/mother is a socially- constructed fabrication. Hurston also understands that this social invention, as she is defined by Anglo-Saxon patriarchy, constitutes an essential element in the foundation of that culture.

15 Twenty-seven years later in 1976, Adrienne Rich would employ a similar approach in her analysis of motherhood, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. 50 Beauvoir makes a distinction between woman as the “inevitable (necessary)

Other” and the “historic (contingent) Other.” In her view, the female body is a

“situated” body, created by a patriarchal value system and not the female body per se.

What has been perceived by many as Beauvoir’s negative opinion of female biology becomes instead an argument against a social construction “which is inherent to a . . . situation where women have no active control over their own bodies and lives” (Vintges

56-57).

One of the most controversial aspects of The Second Sex is what appears to be a negative description of pregnancy and maternity. (Ironically, her chapter on motherhood begins with a detailed discussion of contraception and abortion). However, her “biologically based description of maternity” that appears in Volume I is “implicitly modified” in Volume II where she describes motherhood in terms of a social construct that could be changed (Okely 115). What appears to be a negative view of maternity is actually “a sophisticated and underappreciated feminist discursive strategy of defamiliarization . . . .” that juxtaposes the traditional and comforting images of mother- child bonding with the idea of a “dark and repressed underside: men’s desire for and dread of the maternal flesh, that is to say, their infantile fantasies of carnal plenitude and their horror of nondifferentiation” (Zerilli 112).

Hurston draws on an understanding of that underside and the extent to which it informs the patriarchal institution of motherhood. At various points throughout Seraph, she describes the relationship between husband and wife in terms of a mother-child motif with Jim resting in Arvay’s lap with his head on her breast: “All of the agony of his lost mother was gone when he could rest his head on Arvay’s bosom and go to sleep

51 of nights” (105). Jim is portrayed as a person who needs and is happy to exploit the maternal comfort afforded by his wife but who ultimately reacts to that need by periodically treating her in an emotionally and physically abusive manner that serves to re-establish and maintain his control over her.

A large part of Beauvoir’s theorizing on motherhood resides in her discourse on immanence and transcendence, whereby motherhood, as defined by a patriarchal society, is understood as a biological event rooted in nature that creates for women an in-dwelling, constricted existence (Pilardi in Simons, Feminist 34). Accordingly, if transcendence is seen as dynamic movement or an existentialist idea of the “project,” the repetitive, cyclical or random types of activities that characterize so much of women’s existence do not create for her a condition of transcendence (Moi 152).

However, Beauvoir makes comments throughout her book that explicitly reveal her understanding of pregnancy as a holistic experience that embodies the two concepts:

“We can never separate the immanent and the transcendent aspect of living experience”

(182), “the pregnant woman feels the immanence of her body at just the time when it is in transcendence” (553), and “when the reproductive process begins, the flesh becomes root-stock, source, and blossom, it assumes transcendence, a stirring towards the future”

(554).

Working from within a male-dominated philosophical tradition that includes

Heidegger and Sartre, Beauvoir describes a worldview in which the attributes of immanence and transcendence stand in opposition; a world where women are faulted for neglecting their transcendence but men are not rebuked for ignoring their immanence (Strickling 37). This socially-created dichotomy informs her theory of

52 freedom which posits that independence is a basic human desire that can only be fully satisfied by engaging in freely-chosen projects which create further possibilities. The essential factor for Beauvoir is her belief that it is psychologically necessary and morally imperative that humans have freedom of choice. Therefore, the wish for freedom is valued over all other human desires (Strickling 36).

Bonnelle Strickling uses the analogy of a garden to illustrate how immanence and transcendence occur together: the physical act of creating the garden and the emotional state of “respect for and appreciation of the independence and beauty of the natural world” combine to create a complete human experience (41). Interestingly,

Strickling’s comment “I cannot control it, but I can nurture and love it,” (41) is reminiscent of Beauvoir’s observation of pregnancy: “the mother lends herself to this mystery, but she does not control it” (555). Both Beauvoir’s description of pregnancy and Strickling’s comments about her garden imply synthesis and balance, ideas that are implicit in the worldview of cultures that place women on a par with men.

Although creativity often begins with an act of will, original ideas are not always the result of willfulness. Both creativity and understanding require contemplation. As Strickling points out, “. . . doing philosophy, making art, loving one’s friends all depend as much on our capacities for receptivity to deep experience and attentive love as they do on our capacities for active thought and conscious construction” (42). For example, while Beauvoir describes the female artist in terms of escape: “[T]o prevent an inner life that has no useful purpose from sinking into nothingness . . .she must resort to self-expression” (783), Sandra Donaldson, in her study of pregnant women artists, found that motherhood “. . . allowed, demanded, or

53 called up a vision of enlargement and unity in social, spiritual, and universal terms, a transcendent philosophy that is not an escape but an embrace” (227).

Admitting that motherhood can create political and economic limitations of women’s lives, Donaldson found, nevertheless, that the mothers she interviewed extended Beauvoir’s interpretation of transcendence “beyond the bounds of egocentrism” to include a sense of caring for others, a feeling of connection between the material and the spiritual and a feeling of mind/body wholeness and purpose (234). In other words, they found in their “immanent” physicality a new source of transcendence.

Beauvoir’s reflection that both immanence and transcendence are intrinsic to the state of pregnancy effectively negates any claim that she was specifically anti-maternal.

Indeed, her treatise on motherhood intuits the distinction between the patriarchally- defined institution of motherhood and the personal experience of mothering that would be made twenty-seven years later by Adrienne Rich in her book Of Woman Born:

Motherhood as Experience and Institution. In the first sentence of her section on myths,

Beauvoir states that “[H]istory has shown us that men have always kept in their hands all concrete powers” (157). The key word here is “concrete,” leaving open the possibility that there might be something “non-concrete” (abstract, imaginary, intangible) that patriarchy has been unable to totally control and has instead chosen to disregard or scorn, an idea that Hurston draws on in her novel. Pregnancy, then, could be understood as the embodiment of the holistic female power that is celebrated in feminist notions of the goddess.

For example, Sjoo and Mor claim that the Biblical image of creation was stolen from earlier Sumerian and Babylonian creation stories and ignores the role of the

54 female body, “the sacred transformations” of body and psyche such as “the mystery- changes of menstruation, pregnancy, birth, and the production of milk” that make up women’s primordial experience of producing life (50). Indeed, they claim that the ancient Great Mother of All Living gave birth without the help of a male element, containing within herself “the two halves of all polarities or dualisms—the yin/yang of continuity and change” (63).

The idea of a yin/yang symmetry, usually presented visually as complementary halves of a whole, is similar to Paula Gunn Allen’s description of the sacred hoop, a metaphor for the concept of life as a circle that encompasses every living thing. The idea of the sacred hoop invokes the mythical symbol of the ouroboros, a serpent who bites its own tail to create an all-encompassing sphere, an image that challenges the patriarchal impulse to separate and categorize all things (Husain 18). Allen reclaims and retells an alternate history of Native American history, but does so by accentuating the gynocentric orientation of that culture. She points out that over a period of five hundred years of Anglo-European colonization, Native American tribes “have seen a progressive shift from gynocentric, egalitarian, ritual-based social systems to secularized structures closely imitative of the European patriarchal system” (195). The colonizer, in effect, attempted to remake the Indian culture in its own image. She describes four steps in this process: 1) Replacing the female as primary creator;

2) Destroying tribal governing institutions and the philosophies they are based on;

3) Relocating tribes to new territories; and 4) Replacing the clan structure with the nuclear family. Under such an assault, the authentic history of the Indian people slowly

55 disappears and with it the power that comes from cultural memories that provide a positive sense of self (210).16

Allen pays special attention to women’s rituals and traditions, claiming that they

“have never been described or examined in terms of their proper, that is, woman- focused, context” (268). She sees the destruction of that context, which she describes as female and “the source and generator of meaning,” as the primary loss suffered by the

Native American culture because it represents the loss of meaning, the destruction of the race and ultimately “[I]t amounts to Deicide” (268). Allen not only looks at the present but reaches back into the past to recover mythic narratives from Native

American culture that appreciated women and their specifically female power.

Drawing on the idea of myth as a system of reference that gives order and comprehension to perceptions and knowledge of the world, she goes on to say that myth is a way to create “stories of power out of the life we live in imagination” (105).

In Native American culture, these stories rely on the use of symbols (104-05), and the thought process “is essentially mystical and psychic in nature,” distinguished by

“magicalness” (68). Unlike Western cultures where the few images of women as part of the “cultural mythos” are usually sexually charged and passive, Native American cultures recognize female power and grant women a wider range of cultural options that derive from the ways that supernatural, natural, and social worlds interconnect. There are many woman-centered stories to draw on for guidance and inspiration including that of White Buffalo Woman, Tinotzin, Yellow Woman, Coyote Woman, Grandmother

Spider, and Corn Woman, to name a few (44-45).

16 Although Allen often speaks of Native American culture as if it comprised one homogeneous group, she also makes the point that each group, while sharing similarities, also had distinct differences. 56 Allen emphasizes that ritual, not politics or language, form the basis of Native

American culture. This reflects an understanding of the universe as something organic with knowledge to offer and not as something mechanical to be manipulated or a resource to be exploited by those who have the power to do so. This idea of the earth as a living entity, as Mother, is fundamental to Native American life (119). The earth is

“background” or context, “. . . the fundamental agent of all planetary life” (243) and to be viable, that context has to be understood as woman focused (268). The female spirit that Allen describes as infusing all things is also the power of intelligence (13). She explains that female power in her culture goes beyond the idea of biological motherhood to “She Who Thinks.”17 This posits women as creators of thought and defies the strict biological definition of female creativity (15). The power of woman is both heart (womb) and thought (ability to create and transform) and it centers the universe (22), an idea that would be alien to Jim Meserve in Seraph, who believes that

“women folks were not given to thinking nohow. It was not in their make-up to do much thinking. That was what men were made for. Women were made to hover and to feel” (105). In Jim’s worldview, both men and women are expected to adhere to a socially-constructed script based on sexual differences. Privileged by the “concrete powers” his male status confers, Jim is unable to grasp the idea of a yin/yang or sacred hoop philosophy of male/female social equality.

In Seraph, Hurston describes a world defined in terms of a male-centered or male-focused context where the mother is devalued, a world based on what Teresa

Brennan refers to as a “foundational fantasy” that allows men to imagine themselves as

17 See Sara Ruddick for a rebuttal to the idea that mothering constitutes an intellectually passive activity. 57 the center of action and women and nature as passive (Brennan Lacan, 11). Although

Brennan does not explicitly invoke the goddess, her theory of a foundational fantasy is in line with feminists’ use of a woman-centered epistemology that challenges a male- centered understanding of how the world should function. Her work, together with feminist theories of origin and context, suggests a way to analyze Seraph that imagines

Hurston’s much-maligned female protagonist, the subservient wife and mother, as a notable symptom of an unhealthy culture.

Foundation

Brennan outlines her theory of a foundational fantasy in terms that are uncannily descriptive of the world that Arvay and Jim inhabit: a society that seems to be based on the patriarchal enactment of an illusion in which “the ego comes into being and maintains itself partly through the fantasy that it either contains or in other ways controls the mother, [a fantasy that] involves the reversal of the original [i.e. matrifocal or mother-valued] state of affairs, together with the imitation of the original” (History,

167). She acknowledges that this original may be hard to pin down, but believes that we can become more familiar with the way it manifests itself in present-day culture by

“tracing the inverted path of the imitation.” Thus, a society that evinces envy and fragmentation would suggest an original that is unbiased and collaborative (History

196). And in a narcissistic society where those in power imagine (fantasize) themselves as subjects, any suggestion of dependency on something designated as the Other, (in

Jim’s world that would include the nurturing mother, nature, or blacks) would be experienced as a threat (Brennan, Exhausting 26).

58 While Jim’s business acumen and social skills enable him to achieve and maintain control over blacks and lower class whites, as well as obtain financial success with his various business ventures that depend on the exploitation of nature, throughout the novel he exhibits exasperation and frustration as Arvay resists his efforts to shape her into the angelic subservient princess he desires for a wife. By the end of the novel, however, Arvay has given up her struggle, unable to resist the coercive nature of the foundational fantasy. In Seraph, maternal energy, whether expressed in terms of female agency or embodied in nature, does not emerge as a powerful antidote or balance to the rule of the father but as a truncated force corrupted by patriarchy.

Indeed, in contrast to feminist theories that acclaim the idea of a holistic maternal force, Hurston reveals Arvay, the dependent white mother, to be, in many ways, an outsider within, caught in an emotional tug of war between her own lived experience of mothering and the socially-imposed institution of motherhood. Despite her attempts to achieve some degree of maternal authority, she is continually thwarted by Jim. Her contrary stance is especially noteworthy considering that privileged women, “with more resources and status in motherhood,” tend to be less aware of their oppression and thus less likely to mount any opposition (O’Reilly 22). Arvay’s quandary reflects what Andrea O’Reilly believes is a major component of patriarchal motherhood, its dependence “on the very denial of maternal agency” (22), a denial that drives the foundational fantasy.

As Brennan points out, however, the power of a “psychical fantasy” that “allies with the desires encapsulated in commodities” as well as the desire to be waited upon, the envious desire to imitate the original, and the desire to control the mother” (History,

59 101), depends on the way it is either “reinforced or negated by social practice and the language of the times” (History, 173). She posits the need for a new vocabulary that would not only rein in the destructive aspects of the fantasy but also communicate/embody “the relation to maternal origin” (History 174).

Using Brennan’s theories of energetics and maternal origin, Jane Caputi employs a feminist analysis based on myth, which she defines as “living symbols and stories,” to create such a vocabulary.18 Caputi believes that the “energetic” form of language and images embodied in mythology has the potential to not only express the dynamics of the original/the mother/living nature but to also shed light on the destructive nature of the foundational fantasy that distorts the human psyche and threatens to destroy nature (Lap 3). Drawing on the proverbial understanding of necessity as “the mother of invention, that is, of everything that comes into material being” (Lap 8), Caputi, like Brennan, fixes her attention on the ways that present-day capitalist economies utilize both the female body and Mother Nature with a wantonness that threatens to deplete that essential source of energy.

Economist Shirley Burggraf echoes this idea of maternal exploitation with the distinction she makes between “economic man” and the “feminine economy.”

Although Burggraf does not explicitly connect the feminine economy with Mother

Nature, her argument for a philosophical transformation that would re-conceptualize reproductive and caring work as having economic/social value draws on the same awareness of maternal exploitation set forth by Brennan and Caputi.

18 See also Linda Hogan who believes that myths are “a high form of truth” that represent a time in human history when people considered themselves a part of the natural world (51). 60 Posing the question of how it is that the caretaking activities of women, so crucial to the functioning of society, have always been absent from economic theorizing, Burgraff suggests that this absence can be traced to the emergence of an intellectual tradition based on seventeenth-century philosophy that created the modern democratic state. This tradition is rooted in a theoretical separation between public and private spheres, with the new theories of individual freedom being applied only to the inhabitants of the public sphere; women and children were deemed to be too emotional and unruly for a public role (39-40). The theories of Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau and

Kant regarding individual freedom have served men well. But their social-contract theory fails when confronted with the emergence of women into the public marketplace.

Merely extending the social contract to include women will not be enough. In order to make visible the emotional and physical labor associated with women, the contract has to be revised from its original intent (Burggraf 42-43). The framers of social-contract theory, by denigrating the reproduction and domestic activities of women, were able to ignore biology and human feelings and focus instead on the rational, public sphere of society (Burggraf 85).

However, the philosophical devaluation of women’s work did not start in the seventeenth century. The founder of Western political thought, Plato, considered women’s reproductive capacity to be an instinctual, non-intellectual activity. In Plato’s

Republic, women were esteemed only if they separated from their children and their female sexual identity. Aristotle, too, had a rigid opinion of the inferiority of women.

Both saw a clear dichotomy between culture, where rational men moved about in the public sphere, and nature, the appointed place for women and their biological functions.

61 While early Christianity and the writings of St. Augustine created a philosophy that honored the quotidian elements of life, including the caring work of women, during the Middle Ages, St. Thomas Aquinas revived the thoughts of Aristotle and reiterated the belief that the masculine role was superior. During the Renaissance and the

Enlightenment, although men’s obligations to monarchical authority were challenged, neither the Protestant Reformation nor the advent of democracy questioned the expected submission of women to men. Not until the appearance of feminism has the idea of women being able to choose their economic role challenged the deep-seated assumption that the male-dominated public sphere has the right to a “free ride” on a private feminine economy, an assumption that has enabled economic man to maintain the foundational fantasy (Burggraf 182-83).

In Seraph, the privileged white males who prosper see themselves as the principal producers of social progress and are oblivious to the underlying wellsprings of energy that make their exploits possible. The unpaid or poorly paid physical work that women and blacks perform, the natural resources consumed for profit, together with the emotional comfort that men expect from women, constitute important elements of the society Hurston describes. But she provides an ironic counterpoint to the male subjectivity that Jim supposedly embodies. With recurring scenes of Arvay positioned as mother and Jim as passive child, she reveals her understanding of the mother as unacknowledged source. This repeating image that suggests a degree of maternal subjectivity becomes a subtle but important aspect of her social diagnosis, a reminder that any society that believes it can ignore or take for granted the maternal lap of necessity is, in fact, based on a false foundation.

62 Analyzing Seraph through the lens of motherhood, it is not difficult to believe that Hurston would be at home with Burggraf’s claim that an unacknowledged support system helps to maintain an economy dominated by white men. But what led Hurston to use a white mother as an important clue in arriving at a diagnosis of Anglo-Saxon culture? We can begin to imagine the answer to that question by looking at the black mothering experience and the ways it has differed from white mothering.

The Black Mothering Experience

In the United States, black women have occupied a unique social space where their reproductive role as mothers has intersected with the expectation that they will also play a productive role in the male-dominated economy. Historically, the concept of motherhood has been an important part of the philosophy of black culture, reflecting the African notion of the mother as a “spiritual anchor” because of her indispensable role of providing descendants (Christian in Glenn 96). In addition, African women’s economic contributions to their household often gave them a higher social status than their European counterparts. The matrilineal nature of many of these societies also allowed for an on-going connection with their families of birth and provided an additional degree of personal autonomy (Christian in Glenn 96). The black mother is also respected “because the very lineage of ‘Blacks’ in the United States is determined by the status of the mother” (Christian in Glenn 97). Under slavery, any child born to a black slave woman was considered to be black and thus de facto a slave. In contrast, all children born to white women were considered to be white and free. Barbara Christian claims that “it is through the slave mothers that the very concept of the African-

American came into being” (97).

63 The tendency (especially on the part of black male scholars) has been to describe black mothers in sanctifying terms of self-sacrificing devotion. This image, ironically suggestive of the traditional white motherhood ideal, creates a stereotype of the “superstrong Black mother” (Staples; Dance qtd. in Collins Thought 116). Even though this ideal works as a positive rebuttal to the negative image of black mothers usually put forth by white male writers, it ignores the wide range of work and family experiences that have created a distinctive black mothering practice that differs substantially from the typical experience of white mothers.

Three themes that are fundamental to white perspectives on motherhood are: a belief that mothering takes place in a private household with the mother expected to assume most of the responsibility for child care; the presence of a strictly-defined division of labor between mothers and fathers; and the expectation that motherhood will be a full-time, at-home lifestyle that renders mothers economically dependent upon a male provider (Collins Meaning 166). However, the realities of racism have meant that black families often lack the resources needed to maintain private, nuclear family households.19 Likewise, the strict sexual division of labor and the idea that a “good” mother is one who stays at home is not typical of black families (Collins Meaning 166).

Eurocentric views about black motherhood tend to hinge upon the mothering roles black women have played in white families as well as their own. Collins claims that the role of faithful domestic embodied in the “Mammy” image, is considered the

19 This is also true of many low-income white families who need a second wage to survive. However, the idea of the stay-at-home, economically dependent mother was considered to be the social ideal for white women.

64 ideal black mother by whites because “she recognizes her place” (Meaning 166).20

However, when this same woman returns to her own home and family, she becomes (in the eyes of the dominant culture) the “too-strong matriarch who raises weak sons and

‘unnaturally superior’ daughters” (Meaning 166). In addition, the egocentric white culture, narcissistically imagining itself as the ideal and ignoring the economic realities that black mothers face because of limited job opportunities for both herself and the father of her children, is able to use both the “matriarchy thesis” as well as the mammy image to maintain black women’s subordinate social position (Collins Meaning 166).

An especially egregious example is the 1965 Daniel P. Moynihan report, The

Negro Family: The Case for National Action, that concluded, “the black man is not so much a victim of white institutional racism as he is of an abnormal family structure, its main feature being an employed black woman” (12). When it was first published, many mainstream readers tended to accept its conclusions at face value. In time, however, it came to be viewed as a biased report written by white elites who had proceeded from a narcissistic understanding of white families as the only acceptable model of normality.

Although black communities value motherhood, the personal cost to black mothers as they deal with problems of race, class, and gender oppression is high (Jones

3-4). Traditionally, black women in the United States have worked in two separate milieus: their homes and communities and the paid (or slave economy) workplace. In

20 Sau-ling Wong calls this type of activity, with its unacknowledged “power differential,” diverted mothering, a situation where the “time and energy available for mothering are diverted from those who, by kinship or communal ties, are their more rightful recipients” (69). Although most diverted mothering is performed by women, men of color often find themselves in similar situations. In Seraph, the caretaking that Arvay and Jim receive from their black hired help is an unquestioned feature of the world they live in. But as Wong points out, the reality of economic necessity constitutes a hidden story in these types of relationships that white culture would prefer to ignore (80).

65 their private lives, they combined their responsibilities as mothers with community welfare projects. In the paid workplace, they have often been restricted to domestic and institutional service (deemed women’s work) or to strenuous manual labor (usually thought of as men’s work) (Jones 3-4). Even though black women have not experienced the narrow sex-role restrictions of white women, they have faced burdensome wage-earning and child-rearing responsibilities (Jones 7). Black women earn less compared to white men, white women, or black men and as mothers, they are less likely than white mothers to be able to rely on the fathers of their children to help rescue the family from poverty (Jones 25).

One unique aspect of black motherhood is the concept of “othermothers,” women who share with “bloodmothers” the responsibilities of mothering. This concept derives from West African culture and represents a coping strategy against race and gender oppression. Even black women who choose not to become mothers gain respect through the othermother relationships they have with black children (Collins Thought

116-120). The othermother concept challenges the capitalist patriarchal assumption that children are private property by conceptualizing the act of child care as a community project.21 As Collins points out, this makes the othermother idea, which creates women-centered networks and gives nonparents “rights” in child rearing, truly

“revolutionary” (Thought 123). Othermothering activities can also provide black women with a base for political activity. Their sense of responsibility to all black children has created an expanded notion of caring that reaches out into the public sphere

21 Hurston’s innovative 1946 “Block Mothers” plan, that provided daycare for the children of working mothers in Harlem (Boyd 383), is a good example of othermothering in action.

66 of community, challenging traditional concepts of motherhood as a private-sphere-only activity (Collins Thought 129).22

According to Christian, black motherhood in the United States is informed by three contrasting viewpoints: the black community’s view of motherhood; the white

American view of motherhood; and the white American view of black motherhood.

These different perspectives converge to form an ideology of black motherhood that both sanctifies and denigrates black mothers “even as the institution of motherhood is honored in the general society” (98). What is missing from this list is the idea that the black community’s view of white motherhood might constitute a meaningful bit of social knowledge that could be drawn upon by blacks to better understand and thus more effectively counter the hegemonic dictates of white culture. Hurston, undoubtedly, was aware of cultural differences between white and black mothering, but difference per se was not her primary interest. Rather, the awareness of those differences may have led her to consider that a white mother could serve as a starting point for understanding the faulty foundation of the dominant culture that surrounded her.

In Seraph, there are two black mothers, Dessie and her daughter-in-law Janie; but it is the white mother, Arvay, that Hurston uses as a touchstone for her diagnostic project. Unlike white mothers such as Arvay who seems unable to imagine herself as a source of maternal power, Hurston knew that black mothers were likely to experience a type of self-empowered mothering because of their need to deal with issues of

22 See Andrea O’Reilly’s book Toni Morrison and Motherhood: A Politics of the Heart for an analysis of how Morrison uses her fiction to develop a specifically black view of motherhood that emerges as a political enterprise. 67 emotional and economic survival that were not part of the mothering experience of privileged white women. Arvay’s inability to create an empowered subjectivity based on her personal mothering experiences can be explained by the sheer force of the expectation that she adhere to the socially-sanctioned institution of motherhood as dictated by a male-dominated society. Although Hurston understands and to some extent sympathizes with the social constraints that Arvay must contend with, she reveals a barely disguised impatience with Arvay’s inability to understand the world she lives in and the role she plays in helping to perpetuate not only her own subservience but that of anyone else who falls outside the privileged circle of the dominant culture.

Despite the historically-framed differences between white and black mothers, however, Hurston’s juxtaposition of the relationship between Arvay and Jim with a parallel theme that involves Mother Nature suggests that Hurston was imagining not only a bond between mothers and nature but also a bond among all mothers, a shared experience of having female energy corrupted by a patriarchal social order. This awareness of misunderstood and exploited female energy infuses her novel and ultimately forms the basis of her diagnosis of the “false foundation.”

Although Arvay seems to intuit an affinity with nature, neither she nor Jim understands the significance of their primal physical and emotional relationship with the actuality of maternal power. Arvay’s concept of her role as mother is rooted in the idea of service, while Jim imagines nature as a source he is entitled to use. The relationships that Arvay and Jim have with nature reflect the gender-specific roles they play in society: Arvay, the mother, represents the supportive feminine economy that enables

Jim, the economic man, to focus on his pursuit of economic goals. Hurston portrays

68 Arvay’s and Jim’s distinct relationships with nature as emblematic of the distance between original source and resultant misguided philosophy of patriarchal privilege that defines Anglo-Saxon culture.

Mother Nature

In Seraph, Hurston draws on an awareness of how the traditional coupling of women and nature has been used to create and maintain their secondary social position, a tradition that characterizes Anglo-Saxon culture. Her awareness of the folly of separating from the mother source is not only in line with feminist theories of origin, context, and foundation, but it also foreshadows the more recent work of ecofeminists who examine and challenge those ideas from the past while imagining a more positive relationship between women and nature. Indeed, Hurston seems ahead of her time with her realization that the exploitation of women and the utilization of nature for profit derive from a mindset that privileges men or more specifically, white men.

Ecofeminism

Feminism did not invent the idea that women and nature have a special connection. Rather, feminist scholars have questioned how it is that the human relationship with nature was determined to be so different for women than for men. Val

Plumwood comments that historically “feminine ‘closeness to nature’ has hardly been a compliment” (19). A cursory look at traditional sources reveals a history of gender hegemony created by men who imagined themselves as somehow apart from nature and thus superior to women who were understood to be limited by biological constraints connected to childbearing. But as Brennan points out, the “oft-repeated association of women and nature can be explained not by what women and nature have in common,

69 but by the similar fantasmatic denial imposed upon both of them”; women are deprived of the exercise of free will while nature is denied its “inherent direction” (Exhausting

28).

Even in the most ancient of cultures, men were seen as the creators of culture while women remained connected to nature. Rosemary Reuther claims that “generally males situated themselves in work that was both more prestigious and more occasional”

(323), but it is not clear exactly why hunting or clearing fields were deemed more prestigious than giving birth or preparing food. Hebrew scripture describes the domination of women and nature as divinely ordered, but other than the belief that God so ordains, there does not seem to be any special reason why that should be the case.

During the Greco-Roman era, the connection between mother and matter intensified.

By the time Christianity appeared, eternal life was thought of as “disembodied male soul, freed from all material underpinnings in the mortal bodily life, represented by woman and nature” (Ruether 327). However, we owe the first “systematic scientific explanation of women’s imperfection” to Aristotle, who built on the theories of Hesiod and Plato to arrive at a theory of women as a deviation from the “proper” human form, understood as male (Tuana 18-19).

Early church fathers such as Augustine and Aquinas understood women’s role in society as that of a subordinate helpmate to man. Like Aristotle, Augustine believed that the physical nature of women precluded “full development of her rational powers”

(Tuana 58). But that could easily be remedied by letting her husband do all the required thinking, an attitude expressed by Jim when Arvay says she needs time to think about his proposal of marriage: “ . . .so far as making up your mind is concerned, that matters

70 a difference. Women folks don’t have no mind to make up nohow. They wasn’t made for that” (25). Later, Martin Luther, while stating that men and women were created as equals, nevertheless believed that there was a difference between the sexes that rendered women “less perfect” (Tuana 12-13). Aristotle’s theories of female biology, based on the idea of woman as a “misbegotten man,” held sway well into the seventeenth century

(Tuana 21). The Calvinist reformation, which saw nature as debased and shameless, and the Scientific Revolution, that saw nature “as an icon of divine reason manifested in natural law,” marked turning points in the Western understanding of nature.

Exploitation on a global scale could now be justified in the name of rational and scientific thought (Ruether 328).

With a social construct of woman as body so firmly in place, it is easy to see how Descartes’s Rules for the Direction of the Mind (1628), a text “that would dominate Western philosophical and scientific definitions of rationality for centuries” and that separated body from mind, would lend support to the idea of women as intellectually inferior to men (Tuana 61). Descartes’s philosophy of male rationality effectively posits motherhood and maternal care as unthinking human activities.

Motherhood is seen as dealing with the particular and the emotional in contrast to rational concerns with the universal (Tuana 63). Kark Stern claims that “Cartesian rationalism represents ‘a pure masculination of thought’” (qtd. in Sjoo and Mor 324).

Descartes, whose mother died when he was less than one year old, lived a life fraught with health problems and melancholia: “Intense grief was at the core of Cartesian dualism” (Sjoo and Mor 324).

71 Ironically, then, Descartes’s theory of rational thought, which eliminates participation of the female/maternal body from the realm of intellectual inquiry, is most likely rooted in the particulars of his own life, particulars informed by an unresolved loss of the maternal. “I think, therefore I am” could be read as “I think in order not to feel,” an unexamined and ironically irrational idea that grounds the false foundation of

Anglo-Saxon culture. As Rosemary Ruether points out, “[M]ind or consciousness is not something that originates in some transcendent world outside of nature, but is the place where nature itself becomes conscious” (330). A close inspection of socially constructed hierarchies often reveals a disavowed dependency of the “so-called superior pole” on that which is defined as inferior (Reuther 330). That bit of insight represents a starting point and a site of agency that can be tapped into by those who find themselves on the margins, a place that Hurston knew well.

Rachel Stein argues that Hurston’s work reveals an understanding “that the

American formulation of nation out of nature was actually a propriative paradigm in which all that is identified with the natural will be subsidiary . . . it was the conquest of the natural continent that was to be the fundamental ground of American identity” (6).

But as Plumwood points out, “the category of nature is a field of multiple exclusion and control” that includes not just nature per se but anything cast as nature:

To be defined as “nature” in this context is to be defined as passive, as

non-agent and non-subject, as the “environment” or invisible background

conditions against which the “foreground” achievements of reason or

culture (provided typically by the white, western, male expert or

entrepreneur) takes place. It is to be defined as terra nullius, a resource

72 empty of its own purposes or meanings, and hence available to be

annexed for the purposes of those supposedly identified with reason or

intellect, and to be conceived and moulded in relation to these purposes.

It means being seen as part of a sharply separate, even alien lower realm,

whose domination is simply “natural,” flowing from nature itself and the

nature(s) of things (4).

Hurston’s novel reveals a similar idea: that dominant forms of social oppression

represent a “legacy of conquest, reinforced through the continuing negative identification of certain groups of people with nature” (Stein 17). In Seraph, Jim emerges as the prototypical agent of conquest, narcissistically positioning himself as somehow apart from nature and that which has been culturally identified with the natural environment. Unlike her previous novels that foreground black men and women actively coping with life, in Seraph, Hurston places her black characters in the background as part of the nature-identified support system needed to further the male- dominated agenda of white society. This arrangement, based on efforts to separate reason from nature, constitutes what Plumwood calls “the master story of western culture” (196). In Seraph, Hurston shows how irrational and ultimately self-defeating such a story can be.

Mother/Nature in Seraph on The Suwanee

Throughout Hurston’s work, images of nature abound. As a child growing up in an early twentieth century rural environment, she appears to have had an acute awareness and appreciation of the natural beauty she encountered on a daily basis. In her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road (1942), she describes the natural abundance

73 that surrounded her childhood home in Eatonville, Florida: “We lived on a big piece of ground with two big chinaberry trees shading the front gate . . . Cape jasmine bushes with hundreds of blooms on either side of the walks . . . There were plenty of orange, grapefruit, tangerine, and other fruits in our yard” (11-12). Over time, her travels throughout Florida would extend her knowledge of the Sunshine State’s unique plants and animals,23 but the countryside surrounding Eatonville seems to be featured most often in her fiction (Morris and Dunn 2). Seraph, however, marks an interesting departure from the Eatonville-like settings of Hurston’s earlier fiction that recognized

“the fluid relationship between nature and black folk culture” (Levy 86). In Seraph, her choice of locales that are dominated by the commercial and political interests of white people implies a different type of relationship with nature.

The natural settings in Seraph range from the pine woods of west Florida that support a hard-scrabble lifestyle based on turpentine production, to the more affluent citrus growing center of the state where most of the story takes place, and finally the east coast where Jim establishes a commercial shrimping business. Hurston demonstrates not only a detailed knowledge of all three unique ecosystems but also the way each locale produces a distinctive lifestyle that revolves around the exploitation of nature and the expectation that women will play a supportive role in the money-making activities controlled by men. She describes a social reality where “the fates of women and nature are entwined within patriarchal ideology and praxis” (Orenstein 269).

23 See Valerie Levy, “‘That Florida Flavor’: Nature and Culture in Zora Neale Hurston’s Work for the Federal Writers’ Project,” for a description of Hurston’s travels throughout Florida during the year she worked for the FWP. Levy claims that Hurston’s FWP writing “brings nature to the forefront as a main character in the drama of American history and life” (94). 74 Indeed, Hurston signals her understanding of the connection between women and nature with the symbolism of her title, Seraph on the Suwanee.

In April 1947, Hurston signed a contract with her publisher for a new book she called The Sign of the Sun. As she worked on the book between May and November, she changed her title several times: Sang the Suwanee in the Spring, The Queen of the

Golden Hand, Angel in the Bed, Angel with her Man, Seraph with a Man on Hand, So

Said the Sea, Good Morning Sun, Seraph on the Suwanee River, and finally Seraph on the Suwanee (Carby viii). The first three titles suggest a connection with nature: sun, river/springtime, and back to sun. The river, however, is not just any river but the

Suwanee, “which Stephen Foster made famous without ever having looked upon its waters” (Hurston Seraph 1).24 The next three indicate a shift to a male/female relationship with the female gaining in stature as she moves from lowly angel to the higher rank of seraph, reflecting a change in Hurston’s perception of her female protagonist.25 Her final title concisely brings together Seraph and Suwanee.

Interestingly, attempts to interpret Hurston’s title have usually focused on the question of whether the seraph is Arvay or Jim.26 What has been overlooked is the way the two parts, seraph and Suwanee, work together. Her ironic and complex title brings

24 Since 1935, “The Swanee River (Old Folks at Home)” has been the state song of Florida. Recent efforts to replace what many believe to be “an offensive vestige of the antebellum South” resulted in a compromise solution that would allow Foster’s tune to continue as the state’s official song while a new song chosen in a statewide contest, Florida-Where the Sawgrass Meets the Sky, could serve as the state’s anthem (Goldstein 21A, Linda Kleindienst 9B).

25 “Celestial hierarchy n: a hierarchy of angels based upon interpretations of various scriptural references and ranked from those nearest to God into nine orders (as seraphim, cherubim, thrones; dominions, virtues, powers; principalities, archangels, angels)” (Gove 359).

26 For two views written at the time of Seraph’s publication, see Frank Slaughter, who thought Arvay was the seraph and Herschel Brickell, who gave that distinction to Jim. 75 together the socially-constructed ideal, popular in post World War II America, of the white mother as a submissive angel in the house with Foster’s romanticized image of plantation culture based on slavery. The link between the two is the idea that white female bodies and non-white bodies, whether male or female, are more closely related to nature than the white male body and thus can be considered as “less than” the self- empowered white male who imagines himself as somehow above and beyond Mother

Nature. Angels, as well as the fictional world depicted in Foster’s song that imagines former slaves “still longing for de old plantation” (Lamme 10), are figments of the patriarchal imagination. They represent for Hurston symptomatic evidence of the

Anglo-Saxon “madness” she was trying to diagnose: Arvay, restricted to her role as mother and angel of the house, occupies a socially constructed space that is as dysfunctional as the falsely idealistic world of slavery depicted in Foster’s song, and both constitute elements of the foundational fantasy that helps to maintain the world about which Hurston was writing.

From the first page of Seraph to the last, it is obvious that Mother Nature figures prominently in the message that Hurston was crafting. Perhaps the most salient nature- centered symbol in the book is a mulberry tree. As Alexis Devita points out, the symbol of the tree is used in many African religions to represent life, death, and beyond and represents “one of the most frequently recurrent mythatypes in the literature of women in the African Diaspora and on the Continent” (33). From the beginning, when we learn that the hanging branches of the tree created a physical and emotional haven for the young Arvay, to the end of the book, when Arvay is bequeathed ownership of the tree as part of an inheritance from her mother, the mulberry tree plays an important part in

76 the story and remains a constant in her life, marking events and suggesting epiphanies that propel her forward.

Feminist theories of origin, context, and foundation that focus on the mother and

Mother Nature constitute a good starting place for analyzing Hurston’s exploration of the false foundation of Anglo-Saxon culture. A look at some of the distinctive features of black mothering, features that Hurston would have been aware of, and how they differ from white maternal practice, lends credence to the idea that she was imagining a white mother as symptomatic evidence of her belief that white culture was unhealthy. A salient feature of her analysis is a surprisingly modern ecological awareness that recognizes the essential connection between humans and their natural environment. In

many ways, Seraph represents a culmination of Hurston’s work, a masterpiece of social commentary never completely understood by her contemporaries despite the fact that an examination of her work throughout her career reveals a political agenda in the making, something akin to a snowball gathering substance as it rolls along.

Chapter Three: The Sociopolitical Voice of Zora Neale Hurston

David Headon describes four stages in Hurston’s evolution as a writer: 1) her years as a scholar and beginning author; 2) the years when her interest in folklore took precedence over literature; 3) the period when Hurston became aware of “the very nature and operation of Western ‘civilization’”; and 4) the later years of her career, during which she “confirmed and enlarged on the most penetrating aspects of her social critique” (30). Headon claims that Hurston’s early works reveal little more than a comfortable nostalgia with the exception of her short story “Sweat” (1926) in which

“Hurston forcefully establishes an integral part of the political agenda of black literature of this century” (32). In “Sweat,” her subject is exploitation and oppression analyzed from what modern readers would recognize as a feminist, or woman-centered, point of view.

Hurston creates in “Sweat” a tale of domestic abuse and appropriate retribution that takes place within a black community. Delia, who takes in laundry for white people against the wishes of her abusive husband, Sykes, confronts her tormentor with the only weapon she possesses, her voice. As her husband’s verbal and physical abuse escalates, Delia’s personality becomes more assertive and self-confident, evidenced by the increasing power of her voice: “Looka heah, Sykes, you done gone too fur . . . That ole snaggle-toothed black woman you runnin’ with aint comin’ heah to pile up on mah sweat and blood. You aint paid for nothin’ on this place, and Ah’m gointer

78 stay right heah till Ah’m toted out foot foremost.’” To underscore her determination,

Delia strikes a defensive pose with an iron skillet from her stove (“Sweat” 75). Delia’s frying pan takes on a double meaning as both a symbol of female nurturance and a defensive weapon, conjuring up the dual powers of the ancient goddess and contrasts with the destructive masculine power represented by the bullwhip that Sykes has thrown across her shoulders. Over time, Delia achieves a sense of equilibrium and her attitude becomes one of indifference informed by a belief in the ultimate triumph of justice:

“‘Oh well, whatever goes over the Devil’s back, is got to come under his belly.

Sometime or ruther, Sykes, . . . is gointer reap his sowing.’ After that, she was able to build a spiritual earthworks against her husband. His shells could no longer reach her.

Amen” (“Sweat” 76).

A turning point in the story occurs when Sykes brings home a diamondback rattlesnake in a soap box, knowing that Delia will be upset by its presence. The juxtaposition of the snake with one of the essential elements needed for Delia to earn a living not only represents a symbolic desecration of her work on the part of Sykes but also creates an ironic foreshadowing of the story’s end with Sykes having been cleansed from Delia’s life. When he ignores her request to remove the snake, she attacks him verbally, leaving him speechless when she claims, “‘Ah hates you tuh de same degree dat Ah useter love yuh’” and “‘Ah hates yuh lak uh suck-egg dog’” (“Sweat” 81-82).

She also puts him on notice that further physical abuse will not be tolerated because she has the support of her white clients as protection. Sykes is no match for Delia in this verbal arena as she heaps insult upon insult, “‘Yo’ ole black hide don’t look lak nothin’ tuh me, but uh passel uh wrinkled up rubber …’” (“Sweat” 82). Having lost the verbal

79 fight with Delia, Sykes leaves the house, intent on murder. When Delia discovers several days later that Sykes has let the snake loose in the bedroom, hidden under the laundry, she escapes to her garden and the shelter of a Chinaberry tree to await his arrival, knowing that he anticipates finding her dead from a snake bite. However, it is

Sykes who dies when the snake attacks him instead, and Delia fails to come to his aid.

At the beginning of the story, Delia is seen looking up at Sykes after he has attacked her with his bullwhip. From that graphic moment of submission to the scene of their final encounter, with Sykes looking at Delia as he dies, Hurston develops a story that reveals a keen feminist consciousness that focuses on the rights of women within marriage. Delia’s work, as the main, if not sole, financial support of their household, is perceived by Sykes as a form of emasculation. His use of bullwhips and snakes is a symbolic reassertion of phallic power focused on domination. However, the power inherent in such imagery is turned against Sykes at the end of the story. Hurston uses a similar event in Seraph when Jim, aiming to impress Arvay with a demonstration of male prowess, is overcome by the snake he attempts to control (Seraph 253-56).

Neither Delia nor Arvay can bring themselves to intervene in what turns out to be a life- or-death struggle between male-identified entities. The similarity between the two scenes is intriguing and suggests a degree of mutuality that cuts across distinctions of race and class when women are confronted with the hubristic nature of patriarchal abuse.

Hurston develops her feminist message within a context of community. The male talkers who gather on Joe Clarke’s storefront porch represent a communal voice that helps to narrate the story, and their comments become an important element in the

80 reader’s acceptance of Sykes’s death. We learn that Delia was once young and beautiful and is admired for her decency and hard work. We learn, too, that Sykes is held in low esteem because his brutality toward his wife has gone beyond the bounds of what the community considers to be moral: “‘There oughter be a law about him . . . He aint fit tuh carry guts tuh a bear . . . Taint no law on earth dat kin make a man be decent if it aint in’im’” (“Sweat” 77).

In a patriarchal society where men typically support one another in their oppression of women and wives are often considered to be private property, it is noteworthy that Sykes does not enjoy the support of the men in the community.

Apparently, Sykes has gone beyond what the other men consider an acceptable level of wife beating: “‘Too much knockin’ will ruin any ‘oman’” (“Sweat” 77). Their concern, however, is limited to storefront commentary and fades at the prospect of consuming a juicy, sweet watermelon. As a one-time attractive--but now not so “juicy”--female,

Delia is left alone to cope with Sykes. Although Delia is not aware that she has earned the respect of her community by being a good worker, her new-found level of self- esteem, evidenced by her increasingly spirited verbal ripostes, not only sets in motion a chain of events that results in her freedom, but also restores a degree of social equilibrium by eliminating a source of community embarrassment.

The community setting depicted in “Sweat” represents a social reality of early twentieth-century black towns that were often situated at the edge of prosperous white cities: doing laundry for white folks provided a source of income for many black women who needed to help support their families (Jones 125). Kathryn Lee Seidel claims, however, that Delia’s work “assumes an importance beyond sociological

81 accuracy”; her basket of clean laundry represents an artistic achievement created by the sweat of her body, the only medium of expression available to her (116). Her situation mirrors Hurston’s own dependence on white benefactors who attempted to control the environment within which she worked. Like Hurston, Delia makes the best of a social reality she has no control over and the same could be said of Arvay Henson. Despite differences of class and race, all three women exist within a larger social framework of gender restrictions imposed by patriarchy.

Headon is correct in his assessment of “Sweat” as a high point in Hurston’s literary career. It not only foreshadows her quest for social justice, but it also illustrates an early effort to engage with concepts of race, class, and gender as interrelated systems of oppression, a subject that continues to challenge contemporary feminists. But his claim of “comfortable nostalgia” is not entirely accurate in regard to other works from her early writing career. For example, in 1924, two years before “Sweat,” the emergence of social commentary is evident in her short story “Drenched In Light.”

Hemenway refers to “Drenched” as Hurston’s initial contribution to the Harlem

Renaissance, her “calling card on literary New York, the tangible evidence she could point to that she was indeed a serious writer” (10). He describes “Drenched” as a

“manifesto of selfhood, an affirmation of her origins” due to the many elements of her own life that she incorporated into the story (10-11), elements one can see clearly in her autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road (1942).

In Dust Tracks, that text, Hurston describes how she often perched on a gate post in the front yard to “watch the world go by” (33) and enjoyed climbing a

Chinaberry tree where “the most interesting thing that [she] saw was the horizon” (27).

82 The memory of white travelers who passed the house on their way to Orlando and invited her to ride up the road “for perhaps a half mile,” as well as the disapproval expressed by her grandmother when she found out after the fact, informs her story of

Isis, the fictional incarnation of the young Zora.

Isis Watts, known locally as “little Isis Watts, the joyful” (“Drenched” 17), spends her days sitting on a gatepost in front of her grandmother’s house waving to passing vehicles whenever she can escape from her grandmother’s watchful eye: “That white shell road was her great attraction” (“Drenched” 17). The name Isis, from the ancient Egyptian goddess of fertility, seems appropriate for Hurston’s fictional embodiment of creative exuberance. Isis alternates between moments of high energy and contemplative reveries in which she rides “white horses with flaring pink nostrils to the horizon” (“Drenched” 19), just as Hurston imagined “sitting astride of a fine horse .

. . riding off to look at the belly-band of the world” (Dust Tracks 28).

Using her grandmother’s new tablecloth as a costume, Isis hurries down “the white dusty road” (“Drenched” 19) to a local celebration where she first encounters

Helen, the white woman who will mollify her grandmother’s anger at the unauthorized use of the one-dollar tablecloth by giving her five dollars. The description of Helen as kind but emotionally empty and her “indifferent” male companion with the “short harsh laugh” not only contrasts sharply with the fresh and buoyant nature of Isis, but also suggests an emotional disconnect between the two white visitors. The story ends with

Helen, white and privileged, embracing black Isis so closely she literally feels her breath while looking “hungrily” ahead saying, “‘I want a little of her sunshine to soak into my soul. I need it’” (“Drenched” 25).

83 Helen’s “hunger” for the energy and joy represented by Isis’s sunny nature strikes an ominous note that is reminiscent of the idea bell hook develops in her essay

“Eating the Other,” where she speaks of the “commodification of Otherness” (21) and the desire of white folks for “‘a bit of the Other’ to enhance the blank landscape of whiteness” (29). In Seraph, Hurston draws on this notion by using the subject of music to make an intriguing statement about gender and racial oppression. Arvay’s ability to play the piano, together with the musical talent of the black handyman, Joe, are channeled into a resource for Kenny, Arvay’s son, who is able to imagine a lucrative career in music, something not available to either Arvay or Joe in early twentieth- century patriarchal America.

On the surface, “Drenched” appears to be a lighthearted, folk-oriented story about an irrepressible little girl and her struggle with her grandmother over what constitutes proper behavior for an eleven-year-old. Looking below the surface, however, we see Hurston at work exploring themes and creating images that will emerge in later works: a questioning of traditional social rules that restrict black women, the construct of whiteness as a flawed means of salvation, and the feminist consciousness that intuits a social status for white women that is different from that of white men, a theme she develops fully in Seraph.

One year after “Drenched,” Hurston wrote “Magnolia Flower,” an arguably overly sentimental story described by Hemenway as “less-than-successful” (83, n5), that nevertheless reveals a love of nature and awareness of how nature and humans interconnect that shows up again in Seraph. She mingles social commentary--“Long ago, as men count years, men who were pale of skin held a dark race of men in a

84 bondage” (“Magnolia” 34), with a lyrical personification of nature--“The palms murmured noisily of seasons and centuries, mating and birth and the transplanting of life. Nature knows nothing of death” (33). Hurston depicts nature as possessing both feeling and inherent wisdom, not as a potential resource or static commodity available for achieving commercial goals.

Taken together, “Sweat,” “Drenched,” and “Magnolia Flower,” written from a strongly feminist point of view that identifies with oppression and exploitation of both humans and nature, could be seen as literary precursors to Seraph. They suggest the beginning stages of a social consciousness that Hurston, female and black, could more freely develop under the cover of fiction. In 1928, however, in her non-fictional essay

“How it Feels to be Colored Me,” which created controversy with her assertion that

“Slavery is the price [she] paid for Civilization” (“Colored Me”153), Hurston revisits one of the underlying themes of “Drenched:” the depiction of black people as being happy with their racial identity.

Most readers missed her ironic tone and her reference to the “veneer we call civilization . . .” (154). Alice Walker, for example, states, “We can assume this was not an uncommon sentiment during the early part of this century, among black and white; read today, however, it makes one’s flesh crawl” (Love Myself 151). However, from the first sentence of her essay--“I am colored but I offer nothing in the way of extenuating circumstances except the fact that I am the only Negro in the United States whose grandfather on the mother’s side was not an Indian chief”--it is obvious that

Hurston is in a humorous, possibly sardonic mood. As Headon points out, “Hurston

85 subtly undermines rather than promotes the grand myth of Western culture . . .” (33), a tactic she employs in Seraph.

Indeed the “myth of Western civilization,” which formed the basis of Hurston’s anthropology studies at Barnard, had to be set aside in order to win the confidence of the black population she had set out to study (Headon 34). It helps to remember that at the time Hurston wrote her essay, the underpinnings of “civilization” were widely understood to be firmly rooted or founded in an ethos of whiteness as the desired social norm. However, both the fictional Isis and the non-fictional Zora belie the idea that whiteness is the only source of happiness and constitute subjects of “a belligerent, combative statement of independence, intended to portray the value of an Eatonville memory for Zora . . .” (Hemenway 11). In both cases, her message is presented in a way that made her true intent difficult to see.

Hurston begins her essay with the same autobiographical sketch she used in

“Drenched”: a young girl (in this case, Zora), with the same unrestrainable love of life possessed by Isis, calls out from the gatepost as people drive past her family home.

Growing up in Eatonville, Florida “. . . exclusively a colored town” (“Colored Me”

152), she claims that her childhood was unmarked by racial discrimination until she was sent away to school in Jacksonville at age thirteen, at which time she became “a little colored girl” (“Colored Me” 153). Coming only two years after “Sweat,” a story that revealed some of the economic realities of an early twentieth-century black town, this claim seems somewhat idealistic although it is probably an authentic childhood memory.

86 But Hurston insists, “I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes” (“Colored Me” 153), a comment that exhibits what Alice Walker considers to be characteristic of Hurston’s work: “racial health—a sense of black people as complete, complex, undiminished human beings . . .”

(Hemenway xii). Indeed, she compares herself favorably with Peggy Hopkins Joyce, a well-known wealthy white actress, claiming that she “has nothing on me” (“Colored

Me” 155). Although Hurston ends her essay with a perceptive and appealing metaphor of human beings as multi-hued paper bags, filled at random by “the Great Stuffer of

Bags,” (“Colored Me” 155), her account of a jazz performance enjoyed in the company of a white person makes a statement about racial differences. She compares her uninhibited and soul-felt reaction to the music with her companion’s sang-froid and concludes, “He has only heard what I felt.” The end of the music signals a return to the whiteness of civilization, a place where “[T]he great blobs of purple and red emotion” do not exist, a place devoid of color (“Colored Me” 154).

“Drenched” and “Colored Me” reflect stages in the evolution of a question that intrigued and genuinely mystified Hurston throughout her career: what is the basis for

Anglo-Saxon presumptions that their culture is the preferred norm against which all others should be measured? In her quest to answer that question, she draws on elements from her past, first in her fictional account of Isis and then four years later in a non- fictional essay that develops the topic further. She describes a childhood trip to

Jacksonville as “the Hegira”27 that brings her to a place where she is considered to be

27 Hurston’s use of the word “Hegira” raises some interesting questions. While Hegira can be used to mean simply a trip, the more customary sense of the word is a trip or journey to a more desirable place. This could be one of the more ironic (or more likely sarcastic) comments Hurston ever made given that 87 “colored,” occasioning a shift in self-perception as well as her understanding of the world around her. But she lets her readers know that the buoyant nature of the young

Zora (Isis) has not diminished. That child is now the “cosmic Zora,” gaining in self- confidence to the point where she feels free to write an essay that depicts race-conscious white people as lacking a source of vitality.

Hurston’s short story, “The Gilded Six-Bits” (1933), her collection of folklore

Mules and Men (1935), and her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) all represent what Headon believes is “her most extensive political, moral, and artistic statement” (35). It was during this period that she “discovered ways to combine her literary aspirations and highly individual sense of social commitment” (Headon 35).

In “The Gilded Six-Bits,” Hurston creates an effective message about race, material aspirations, and ultimately what really matters in life by focusing on the idea of motherhood and the female body.

The first lines of the story reveal that Hurston’s tale of love and forgiveness is rooted in a sense of community, specifically the ethos of black culture: “It was a Negro yard around a Negro house in a Negro settlement that looked to the payroll of the G. and G. Fertilizer works for its support. But there was something happy about the place”

(“Guilded” 86). The neatness of the front yard, the whitewashed fence and house, in short, everything including Missie May herself attest to the soundness of the local rural culture despite its financial dependence on a white-owned business. Playfulness is part of this culture and the theme of love is introduced when Missie May’s husband, Joe,

the “Hegira” she is referring to is her trip from Eatonville to Jacksonville, where she first encounters institutionalized racism. Her Hegira, in effect, describes a reversal of the idea of the Biblical journey to a promised land of freedom. 88 with his pockets full of candy kisses, throws nine silver dollars through the front door initiating the weekly ritual of physical play and oral banter between the two so obviously in love. This appears to be a marriage of equals, each one respecting the other’s contribution to their happy household.

However, someone from outside the community, “Mister Otis D. Slemmons of spots and places—Memphis, Chicago, Jacksonville, Philadelphia and so on,” threatens the sanctity of their household (89). Joe is envious of Slemmons’s apparent prosperity but Missie May, demonstrating a common-sense folk wisdom that seems to elude Joe, assures him that Slemmons “don’t look no better in his clothes than you do in yourn”

(89). She also cautions Joe against being taken in by false appearances: “‘His mouf is cut cross-ways, ain’t it? Well, he kin lie jes’ lak anybody else’” (90). Unfortunately,

Missie May, in an effort to acquire something for Joe that would please him, fails to follow her own advice. Hoping to exchange an intimate interlude with Slemmens for a ten-dollar gold watch charm that Joe has admired, she finds, to her sorrow, that not only is the coin false (a gilded half-dollar and not solid gold), but her loving relationship with her husband has been shattered.

One night, having been dismissed earlier than usual from the fertilizer plant, Joe arrives home to find his wife in bed with Slemmens. Expecting the worst, Slemmons begs for his life: “Please, suh, don’t kill me. Sixty-two dollars at de sto’. Gold money”

(93). Too stunned to speak, Joe satisfies himself with a blow that propels Slemmons from the room and out the door, minus his watch charm. Missie May is surprised to find that Joe, polite but not romantic or playful, continues to inhabit the house. Three months later, Joe complains of pains in his back and asks Missie May to give him a

89 back rub. While “‘it all seemed strange’ . . . she rubbed him. Grateful for the chance.

Before morning, youth triumphed and Missie exulted” (95). Happy that the sexual aspect of their relationship seems to be returning to normal, Missie May is nevertheless startled and sad to find the watch charm beneath her pillow and notices for the first time that what she thought was a gold coin is actually a gilded half dollar. The coin turns out to be as false as Slemmons himself.

In time, it becomes apparent that Missie May is pregnant. Ironically, Hurston introduces the idea of pregnancy through the musings of Joe as he makes his way home the night of Missie May’s tryst with Slemmons. With the moon, ancient symbol of fertility and female creative power, shimmering on the lake, Joe’s thoughts turn to family: “Creation obsessed him. He thought about children. They had been married more than a year now. They had money put away. They ought to be making little feet for shoes. A little boy child would be about right” (92). This scene hints at what the passage of time will reveal: that despite Missie May’s mistaken decision to use her body as a means to an end that she imagines will please her husband, pregnancy will constitutes a safeguard that will protect and restore the sanctity of their marriage despite the intrusive perversion represented by Slemmons.

Missie May’s pregnancy initiates a period of cautious anticipation until a baby son is born who strongly resembles Joe. It is Joe’s mother, worried in the past that

Missie May might have inherited from her mother a tendency to “fan her foot round right smart,” who confirms Joe’s paternity: “Dat’s yourn all right, if you never git another one, dat un is yourn” (97). The family matriarch has the final word.

90 With the relationship finally restored, Joe goes shopping for his family, including a stop at the candy store where he uses the half dollar to buy candy kisses and other sweets. In the store, he is careful to maintain the stereotypical image of blacks that is expected by the white store clerk who remarks to a white customer “’Wisht I could be like these darkies. Laughin’ all the time. Nothin’ worries’ em’” (98). This comment not only illustrates a disconnect between black and white, but is ironic when the events of the story are considered: many of the problems blacks have to contend with can actually be traced to the foibles of white culture. Joe goes along with the stereotype, however, understanding how conventional images can provide veiling and thus protection from those who would oppress.

The story ends as it began with Joe tossing coins through the front door, renewing the verbal ritual of courtship with Missie May: “‘ Joe Banks, Ah hear you chunkin’ money in mah do ‘way. You wait till Ah got mah strength back and Ah’m gointer fix you for dat’” (98). But the number of coins has increased from nine to fifteen suggesting that their love has not only been restored but has actually increased and grown richer.28 In contrast to the simplistic understanding of blacks expressed by the white store clerk, there is an inherent strength in the emotional complexity of

28 Hurston’s use of numbers in this story suggests a familiarity with numerology that, together with her interest in voodoo and her belief in mystical forces (Boyd 157), reveals a willingness to explore knowledge systems not often of interest to mainstream academics. Her use of the number nine, which represents “humanitarianism, self-lessness, and dedication . . . to others,” as well as completion and endings (Linn 213), not only establishes the soundness of the black community (represented by Missie May and Joe), but hints at changes to come. Six, the number that relates to compassion, love, and generosity, as well as children and community service (Linn 212), symbolizes the ability of the black community to grow even stronger in the face of adversity. Hurston ends the story by coming full circle with a numerical flourish that makes two points: 1) the flashy five-dollar stickpin and ten-dollar coin that supposedly constitute proof of Slemmons’s affluent status are shown to be false in contrast to the $15 worth of silver coins that Joe throws through the door; and 2) her use of 15, a number that was sacred to Ishtar, the Assyrian and Babylonian goddess of love and war, and which “represents the zenith of lunar power” (Schimmel 213), could be interpreted as confirming the power of the female/maternal body. 91 Hurston’s black characters and she affirms that strength in her story. The complicated reality of black people’s lives remains invisible to the whites at the candy store.

Valerie Boyd claims that Hurston’s “economically written narrative focuses on the relationship between a black man and a black woman, rather than on interracial conflict” (245). She further states that “Hurston breaks ranks with other writers of her day by creating in Missie May a black female character who is sexually aggressive— and transgressive—but who is not a whore” (246)); but while the story does focus on one couple’s experience, I would argue that it derives its real import from an understanding of how the relationship between Joe and Missie May interacts with the dominant white culture. Not only do they rely on the white-owned fertilizer plant for their income, Slemmons, an outsider whose source of wealth (according to him) is the generosity of “de white womens in Chicago [who] give ‘im all dat gold money” (90), represents a source of contamination that threatens to destroy their marriage.

Slemmons, like Sykes who “allus wuz uh ovahbearin’ niggah, but since dat white

‘oman from up north done teached ‘im how to run a automobile . . . done got too biggety to live” (“Sweat” 78), is a black male who has been corrupted by his association with a white culture focused on material gain. Interestingly, in both stories, Hurston pinpoints the white woman as the corrupting agent.

Ultimately, it is the power of the maternal body that heals the wounded relationship. Missie May not only retains her sexual identity as Joe’s wife but is elevated to the status of mother. Her baby son is a reminder of what really matters in life and of what can be lost by an excessive love of money. What might be lacking in the way of material goods is more than compensated for by the richness of genuine love

92 and inherent decency. Hurston’s story affirms the fundamental strength of black culture even when negative influences intrude into the black community and reveal what

Cheryl Wall believes is “a central premise” of Hurston”s work: “material poverty is not tantamount to spiritual poverty or experiential deprivation” (qtd. in Levy 89).

One year after the publication of “The Gilded Six Bits,” Hurston published her first novel, Jonah’s Gourd Vine, “usually dealt with as a fictionalization of her parents’ marriage” (Hemenway 189). It would be another three years before she would return to fiction with Their Eyes Were Watching God, her most famous novel. Until then, her focus would be anthropology and the seventy Negro folk tales she had gathered on a trip through the southern United States. Mules and Men (1935) “part folklore, part hoodoo chronicle, and part immersion journalism” (Boyd 280), received enthusiastic reviews and made, in the words of Franz Boas who had written a preface, “‘an unusual contribution to our knowledge of the true inner life of the Negro’” (Boyd 280).

In 1937, Hurston returned to the subject of love and marriage and social contamination. In TEWWG, she tells the story of a young woman, Janie Crawford, who struggles to validate herself as an individual within a black, male-dominated community that in turn copes with a dominant white world. Unlike Missie May and

Arvay Henson, who achieve their social identity through marriage and motherhood, however, Janie’s three marriages constitute a journey of personal growth from vulnerable young girl to a self-contained adult woman who does not require either a husband or a child to feel complete. While Hurston charts a journey for both Janie and

Arvay that culminates in feelings of self-worth and connection to their respective communities, the trajectories of each woman’s journey and the end results are very

93 different. Janie, black, single, and childless/child-free achieves a state of muliebrity that allows her to exercise her strong “womanly voice” as she rejoins the black community she left years before (Haurykiewicz 45). From this point on, Janie will be the author of her life story. Arvay, white, wife and mother, leaves behind the flawed society of her youth to reconnect with her husband in a newly established community that revolves around his occupation. While Arvay heads off to a new horizon satisfied to conform to someone else’s idea of who and what she should be, Janie, having “done been tuh de horizon and back” (183), is now a fulfilled woman who can stand alone.

In the beginning of TEWWG and Seraph, both Janie and Arvay experience a kiss that prefigures their journey to selfhood. After a day languishing under a blossoming pear tree, Janie allows Johnny Taylor to kiss her over the gatepost:

“Through pollinated air she saw a glorious being coming up the road” (10). Janie’s romantic reverie is short-lived, however, as Nanny, her grandmother, looks out the window and sees “Johnny Taylor lacerating her Janie with a kiss” (11) and springs into action. Despite Janie’s protest to the contrary, Nanny insists that “youse uh ‘oman, now” (12), a fact that necessitates, in Nanny’s mind, immediate action in the form of a marriage to Logan Killicks, a local farmer whose material possessions (including “de onliest organ in town, amongst colored folks” and “a house bought and paid for and sixty acres uh land right on de big road”) (22), suggest he would make a good husband.

Nanny’s insistence on the marriage and her unwillingness to consider Janie’s wishes in the matter reflects her belief that the ideal marriage should resemble that of a “white, southern aristocratic society in which womanhood is viewed as a docile condition and women themselves are regarded as attractive possessions” (Awkward 22), a model of

94 marriage that positions women as protected dependents. As she contemplates a life with someone who looks “‘like some ole skullhead in de grave yard’” (13), Janie intuits a desecration of the pear tree and an end to her childhood.

Arvay, too, is abruptly launched into womanhood as the result of a kiss that sets off a chain of events over which she has no control. Choosing a time of day when he does not expect Arvay’s father to be at home, “‘[O]h hello, there, Mr. Henson! Didn’t expect to find you around home this time of day’” (49), Jim asks Arvay to show him her childhood sanctuary, the mulberry tree. Like Janie, Arvay gives in to a romantic impulse that has unintended consequences. Holding onto two branches of her tree and leaning back, she demonstrates to Jim how she would pass the time as a child gazing through the tree to the sky. What follows is a scene of violence as Arvay is “snatched from the sky to the ground. Her skirts were being roughly jerked upwards, and Jim was fumbling wildly at her thighs . . . Arvay opened her mouth to scream, but no sound emerged. Her mouth was closed by Jim’s passionate kisses . . .” (51).

Interestingly, Hurston uses the same words, “a pain remorseless sweet” (Seraph

51, TEWWG 11) to acknowledge the sensual nature of each woman. However, Janie’s sensuality will lead her on a quest that ends with self-fulfillment while Arvay’s repressed sexuality, awakened in an act of brutality and force, creates anxiety and will remain under the control of Jim. Carla Kaplan claims that Janie does not need to acquire a voice because she already has one (103) and the same could be said about

Arvay. Both women are vocal and resistant in the beginning of each book, but no one is listening as each is manipulated into marriage: Janie, by the grandmother who has arranged a “suitable” marriage; Arvay, by the aggressive nature of her self-involved

95 suitor. But their stories differ from that point on. While Janie becomes increasingly empowered in terms of voice, Arvay slips into despondency and despair as she becomes increasingly alienated from the world around her.

In time, Janie does what Arvay is unable to do: she leaves her husband. Janie escapes the prospect of becoming, in effect, a mule-like beast of burden by leaving

Logan Killicks to marry Jody Starks. This second marriage, however, proves disappointing as Jody attempts to control every aspect of Janie’s life. He prevents Janie from taking part in the communal voice represented by the gatherings on his store porch: “Janie loved the conversation and sometimes she thought up good stories on the mule, but Joe had forbidden her to indulge. He didn’t want her talking after such trash people. ‘You’se Mrs. Mayor Starks, Janie’” (50). Further, he attempts to control her sexuality as well by insisting that she cover her hair while in public: “Her hair was NOT going to show in the store” (51).

A turning point occurs when Janie mocks Jody’s “freeing” of the celebrated town mule. Not only does she dare to speak, but her words are admired by the storefront talkers (but not by Jody who is stunned into silence). With this public vocal act, she has taken a giant step toward achieving a sense of self-worth. After Jody’s death, her marriage with Tea Cake, while providing her with the sexual fulfillment and companionship she longs for, nevertheless ends in tragedy as a result of events that follow a hurricane.

Eva Birch claims that Janie’s first two marriages “represent Hurston’s rejection of the taint of white influence,” while her marriage to Teacake offers a “vision of a black alternative” (78). Not only do Janie and Teacake live a life of shared experiences,

96 but the playfulness between the two represents “a sense of fun and pleasure emphatically denied by the Puritan ethic which had been foisted onto the Afro-

American” (Birch 78). The good-natured teasing between the two echoes the lighthearted banter and high spirits that characterize the relationship between Missy May and Joe and stand in contrast to the adversarial model of marriage she describes in

Seraph. For Hurston, “what is seen by white society as evidence of the indolent, irresponsible nature of laughter-loving blacks” is a demonstration of black vitality

(Birch 78). Arvay, too, moves from one location to another, but always to follow her husband’s upwardly mobile employment opportunities. Like Janie’s first two marriages, Arvay’s marriage is marked by patriarchal privilege that allows her husband to control her in ways that diminish her sense of self.

Each woman experiences a trial of sorts: Janie, a literal trial for the murder of

Tea Cake in self-defense; Arvay, a trial of conscience during which she comes to terms with her past and formulates a plan for her future. Although Janie never actually speaks in the courtroom, she is acquitted and returns to Eatonville. Arvay, maneuvering through the emotional detritus of her past, experiences the kindness of people after her mother’s death and comes to understand that she has “changed inside” (298). She decides to join Jim in a new community by the ocean where he now makes a living harvesting shrimp.

St. Clair claims that “Arvay affirms her separate identity by choosing her own direction . . .” and that she “submits to the power of love” (55); in other words, that

Arvay’s decision could be considered as an act of female agency. In truth, Arvay does exhibit a degree of self-determination. She has made choices and reconnected with the

97 community. If bell hooks can say of Janie, “Ultimately her triumph in womanhood is that she acquires the ability to name and define her reality” (“Zora” 19-20), we could say the same of Arvay. Arvay’s reality, however, remains within the confines of a social tradition rooted in domination. While Arvay’s social connections derive from her relationship with her husband, Janie returns to her community as a separate entity— complete within herself, with her own story to share with her friend, Pheoby, who will pass it on to the communal “Mouth-Almighty” (5).

TEWWG concludes with Janie pulling in “her horizon like a great fish-net.

Pulled it from around the waist of the world and draped it over her shoulder” (184); as

Kathleen Davies points out, over “her own shoulders, rather than over a man’s” (157).

Michael Awkward believes this represents “an act of consolidation” whereby Janie, insisting on the right to define herself on her own terms, resolves “a double consciousness into a unified, black sensibility” (56). In contrast, at the end of Seraph,

Arvay talks herself into believing that her happiness lies in submitting to a socially- constructed identity that positions her as wife and mother. While Janie’s fish net is a symbol of her subjectivity and independence, the fish net imagery used in Seraph represents a tool of patriarchal entrapment. Although both Janie and Arvay establish a voice, demonstrate a feeling of self-worth, and achieve a sense of place in their communities, Janie’s accomplishment seems more authentic in terms of self-realization and raises the question of why Hurston did not allow her white protagonist an equivalent degree of self-empowerment.

One year after TEWWG, Hurston’s focus again shifted to anthropology with her book about Jamaica and Haiti, Tell My Horse. Although the book did not sell well, the

98 sections on voodoo “are vivid and exciting, despite the confusing accumulation of ceremonies and gods” (Hemenway 248-49). Interestingly, it was far more successful in

England with the title Voodoo Gods: An Inquiry Into Native Myths and Magic in

Jamaica and Haiti (Boyd 322). Nineteen thirty-nine saw the publication of Moses, Man of the Mountain, a book Hurston had been working on for at least five years. Her interpretation of the Biblical story “attempts nothing less than to kidnap Moses from

Judeo-Christian tradition, claiming that his true birthright is African,” a view held by other scholars, including Freud who had published two essays on the subject in 1937

(Hemenway 257). While Hemenway describes Moses as “one of the more interesting minor works in American literary history” (260), Boyd believes it to be Hurston’s

“second masterpiece” (329). However, lukewarm reviews from mainstream critics, together with mostly negative comments from Hurston’s “growing gang of black male critics” (Boyd 336), as well as Hurston’s own sense of not having achieved what she had intended, led to Moses fading from public view.29

Unlike Tell My Horse and Moses, Man of the Mountain, Hurston’s autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, published in November of 1942, received favorable reviews. Despite the positive reception, however, the inconsistencies inherent in her claim not to see the world along racial lines while extolling her unique childhood in an all-black town (Hemenway 276), together with her white editors’ injunction to leave out her more outspoken political views, results in a book that falls short of its potential. In addition, in a book “that deliberately disguised as much as it disclosed”

29 The Bible story of Moses, with its themes of deliverance and the Promised Land, continues to occupy a special place in African American folklore. For a discussion of Hurston’s treatment of the Moses legend, see Timothy P. Caron’s “’Tell Ole Pharaoh to Let My People go’: Communal Deliverance in Zora Neale Hurston’s Moses, Man of the Mountain.” 99 (Boyd 361), an image of Hurston emerges that is “not as politically astute, outspoken, irreverent, or complex as the real Zora was” (Boyd 360). For that more authentic Zora, one has to look at her essays.

While Hurston’s fiction often encodes political messages in the form of literary tropes and a focus on quotidian activities that belie the complicated underpinnings of her stories, her essays, especially the ones she wrote for a black audience, are more openly aggressive. In the early 1940s, she wrote three essays that reveal an increasing level of impatience with the social anomalies inherent in a culture dominated by the social construction of whiteness.

In “The Pet Negro System,” published in 1943 in The American Mercury, she describes a social phenomenon that serves to disguise the power imbalance between whites and blacks, a subject she brings up again in Seraph: “‘Joe is your, pet, I’ll bound you . . . Every Southern white man has his pet Negro’” (60-61). Posing as evidence of racial equality, the pet Negro tradition helps to maintain the status quo by giving a few blacks the illusion of social parity. Hurston points out that this practice differs from attitudes in the North: “[T]he North has no interest in the particular Negro, but talks of justice for the whole. The South has no interest, and pretends none, in the mass of

Negroes but is very much concerned about the individual” (“Pet Negro” 157). The fact of its existence, however, reveals an inherent contradiction: the interracial relationships that result from the pet Negro system both violate and maintain the color line (Posnock

209). Hurston emphasizes the duplicity of this arrangement with her comment that the pet Negro system “is a great and heartening tribute to human nature” (Pet Negro” 162), because it reveals the contrived nature of Jim Crow legislation which imposes an

100 unnatural social segregation. But as Hemenway points out, in her role of “an obliging author” whose work supposedly provided a black perspective for Mercury readers,

“Hurston condemns only faintly” (292), opining that this social phenomenon might indicate that “[T]here are some people in every community who can always talk things over. It may be the proof that this race situation in America is not entirely hopeless and may even be worked out eventually” (160), a comment that may or may not have represented her true thoughts.

Hurston’s opinions are more forcefully expressed in two articles she wrote for

Negro Digest in 1944 and 1945: “My Most Humiliating Jim Crow Experience” and

“Crazy for This Democracy,” where she draws on some of the ideas that her editors had removed from her autobiography. In 1931, Hurston had experienced an embarrassing incident in a white doctor’s office where she was made to wait in what seemed to be a closet for dirty laundry. In “My Most Humiliating Jim Crow Experience” she recounts that event in terms that call into question the privileging of Anglo-Saxon culture: “I went away feeling the pathos of Anglo-Saxon civilization. And I still mean pathos, for

I know that anything with such a false foundation cannot last” (“Jim Crow” 164). She salvaged a degree of self-respect, however, by refusing to pay the doctor.

Boyd claims that “Crazy for This Democracy” is Hurston’s “most politically honest piece of journalism of the 1940s” (380). With the War at an end, “there was no longer a need to cloak feelings in the flag” (Hemenway 292) and Hurston, speaking from her own unique position, and tapping into the “democratic frenzy that accompanied the U. S. victories in 1945” (Ritchie and Ronald 248), wrote a humorous but aggressive petition for the repeal of Jim Crow laws. Hurston not only expressed her

101 thoughts about racism but also demanded that some sort of political action be initiated that would address the problem.

In a mocking tone, she questions President Roosevelt’s allusion to the United

States as “the arsenal of democracy.” Referring to the large number of people who are denied access to “this idea of Democracy,” she wonders if maybe she misunderstood and perhaps the President actually said “arse-and-all” of democracy (“Crazy” 166).

Hurston’s negative reaction to Roosevelt’s comments is supported by the reality of postwar Western colonialism sanctioned by the United States in places such as Africa,

Indo-China, Indonesia, Burma, and Malaysia: “The Ass-and-All of Democracy has shouldered the load of subjugating the dark world completely” (“Crazy” 126).

Hurston points out that Jim Crow legislation is designed not only to physically separate black from white but also to maintain a social mind-set that posits white as ideal. With her call for the “complete repeal of All Jim Crow Laws in the United States once and for all, and right now. For the benefit of this nation and as a precedent to the world” (“Crazy” 168), Hurston places herself in the front lines of racial struggle as she challenges the privileging of whiteness and also demonstrates an acute political sensibility by addressing her message to a world-wide audience.

Close inspection of Hurston’s work reveals that throughout her career as a writer, whether openly in her essays or covertly in her fiction, her writing was informed by an acute sociopolitical awareness. As Lynda Marion Hill states, “ . . . her work constantly reminds us of unresolved tensions surrounding any mention of racial, cultural, social, and sexual differences and of the power struggles they engender in

American society” (xxxi). Despite Alice Walker’s comment that “we are better off if

102 we think of Zora Neale Hurston as an artist, period—rather than as the artist/politician most black writers have been required to be,” (Love Myself 3) a review of Hurston’s work reveals that she was, in her own ingenious way, both an artist and a political writer.

Joy Ritchie and Kate Ronald claim that “many of the writers who collapse theory and practice are women of color,” who explore the reality of their social marginalization by means of their writing. Although white women may find themselves denied equal power vis-à-vis white men, “the rhetorical situation is sometimes more naturalized, invisible, and thus not as available for reflection, problematizing, or analysis” (xxxix). If, as Lloyd Bitzer claims, “rhetoric is situational” (218), the social construction of patriarchal whiteness describes both the cultural context within which

Hurston was writing and the rhetorical situation that inspired her work.

Scholarly analyses of the social construction of whiteness and sociological studies such as that undertaken by Frankenberg create an open forum for approaching sociopolitical problems related to racism in the United States. They stand in contrast to the guarded and often covert manner in which Hurston approached the subject beginning with her early work and culminating in Seraph. Hurston’s last published novel, a synthesis of art and political commentary that reflects her acute awareness of social realities, her specifically feminist orientation, and her creative talents as a writer, stands as a penetrating interrogation of the pattern of social inequalities based on race, class, and gender differences that she observed in the world of whiteness that surrounded her.

103

Chapter Four: Diagnosing White Culture

In chapter one of Seraph, we learn that Arvay Henson, convinced she was not appreciated as a child--“. . . the general preference for Larraine, Arvay’s more robust and aggressive sister, had done something to Arvay’s soul across the years” (9)--and disappointed because the man she thought she loved married her sister instead, had announced five years earlier her decision to live a life of religious service. This intention, however, is about to be thwarted by the aggressive Jim Meserve, a newcomer in town whose family had owned plantations along the Alabama River before the Civil

War. Despite the loss of his family fortune, however, “Jim had a flavor about him. He was like a hamstring. He was not meat any longer, but he smelled of what he had once been associated with” (7).

Jim’s impressive social antecedents set him apart from the citizens of Sawley

“who had always been of the poor whites who had scratched out some kind of an existence in the scrub oaks and pines, far removed from the ease of the big estates” (7).

The social capital that he derives from his past--“Why, even the Cary’s had heard mention of his folks” (24)--his beguiling good looks--“This was the prettiest man that she had ever laid eyes on” (24)--together with an aggressive personality that exudes an unquestioned sense of entitlement--“Jim had the nerve of a brass monkey, everybody agreed” (8)--combine to create what appears to be the irresistible force that will finally

104 overcome Arvay, the immoveable object, who has steadfastly rebuffed all local attempts at any type of romantic liaison.

Arvay resists, but her resistance is no match for the brute force employed by Jim as he gains control by “accidentally” putting a drop of turpentine in her eye during one of Arvay’s episodes of hysteria, as well as raping her under her childhood sanctuary, the mulberry tree. When Arvay protests, “All I know is that I been raped” (56), Jim agrees and adds, “You’re going to keep on getting raped” (57), thereby confirming that theirs will be a marriage defined by confrontation. Nine months later their first child, a son, is born mentally disturbed and physically deformed--a child destined to die a violent death.

Hurston maintains a tense opposition between Arvay and Jim throughout the novel: Jim, the man of vision looking to the future and Arvay, the nervous wreck rooted in a dysfunctional past; Jim, the manly voice of reason—“She was a woman and women folks were not given to thinking nohow” (105) -- and Arvay, all emotion -- “Arvay lived by her feelings and not by conscious reasoning . . .” (113). Jim’s frustration with

Arvay’s apparent inability to see things from his point of view creates on-going stress in the relationship. The tension between Jim and Arvay periodically resolves itself through a repeating mother/child motif where Arvay becomes the beatific mother to the husband she describes in God-like terms -- “She might come to win this great and perfect man some day” (114); “this was a miracle right out of the Bible. For some reason . . . this miracle of a man had married her” (168)--and where the unresisting Jim surrenders to a comforting maternal force he takes for granted--“All of the agony of his lost mother was gone when he could rest his head on Arvay’s bosom and go to sleep of

105 nights” (105). This psychologically intriguing image prefigures their final reconciliation and constitutes a major element of Hurston’s social critique.

Throughout Seraph, Hurston makes use of what seems to be a familiarity with

Freud’s psychoanalytical theories.30 While Freud explored the hidden underlayers of the human psyche, Hurston looks below the surface of white culture and finds there a locus of social pathology. Like the meteorological phenomenon of “whiteout” that occurs when a heavy snow creates a condition of impaired vision, the predominant white culture strives to blanket the social landscape under a white “cover” of uniformity that is assumed to be the desired norm. This idea is captured by Hurston in the scene where an overwrought Arvay, who once imagined herself as a soul-saving missionary, rails against Felicia and Felicia’s mother, who had nothing whatsoever to do with the situation, as she vents her frustration at being unable to speak to her son before he has to catch a train:

The poor suffering missionaries had not come right out with certain

words, but they made it plain enough for anybody to understand that

their sad duty was mostly in looking conditions over, praying over

conditions, and then telling the benighted heathens for Christ’s sake, to

cover conditions up. Every letter that the missionary society got from

the missionaries had a plea in it for more covers (242).

30 While Hurston‘s first exposure to Freud probably occurred as a result of her work with Franz Boas, the fact that “Freud was a favorite topic during the Harlem Renaissance and in New York intellectual society in general during the twenties and thirties” (Lowe 271) most likely intensified what seems to be an interest in “uncovering” or looking below the surface of what she later referred to as “Anglo-Saxon civilization.” 106 The hyperbole is comic, but Hurston’s message, with its echoes of colonial imperialism, a subject she addressed in her essay, “Crazy For This Democracy,” is clear: dominant groups feel they have the right to “look conditions over” and forcibly change anything that does not conform to their idea of how things should be.

Seraph seems structured in the form of a polemic between the narrative voice which “. . . speaks at times more in the nature of a typical male narrator . . .” that supports Jim’s point of view (Lowe 267) and the actual events of the story which subvert that position. St. Clair claims that “. . . the yarn unravels as fast as Hurston spins it” (40). For example, Jim’s plan to impress Arvay by picking up an eight-foot diamondback rattlesnake clearly illustrates the arrogant and narcissistic nature of a worldview that is based on male physical prowess and a sense of entitlement that validates dominion over “lesser” creatures. The irrationality of his stunt is apparent to

Arvay: “. . . this was nothing to be fooling with. Supposing that thing got aloose” (254).

When his exhibitionist caper goes awry and he loses control of the snake, Arvay is unable to move, paralyzed with fear, “her standard and predictable reaction, as Jim well knows, to snakes” (St. Clair 50): “Arvay had a deep-seated fear and dislike of snakes.

Any kind of snake. She shrank from worms even because they reminded her of snakes”

(253).

After Jeff, the black handyman, rescues Jim and wants to kill the snake, Jim refuses, declaring the snake to be “a perfect gentleman in every way” because he put up a fight (259). The reader is left to ponder the irony of a man who can admire the resistance of a (supposedly) male snake, yet not tolerate protest from his wife: “Two people ain’t never married until they come to the same point of view” (266). Jim’s

107 subsequent boasts of wanting “to do something big and brave and full of manhood”

(261) are unconvincing to both Arvay and the reader. Blind to his self-serving point of view, he leaves Arvay to ponder what he claims are her past and present shortcomings.

But as St. Clair points out, “There is little reason to trust the narrative voice that insistently reiterates Arvay’s responsibility for Jim’s dissatisfaction: the apparent complicity serves only to reveal the insidious duplicity of the situation” (45). What appears to be one narrative turns out to be two opposing stories that “constantly clash, each struggling to take control of the text” (St. Clair 42). Jim’s story represents the privileged, patriarchal status quo while Arvay’s struggle represents an attempt to resist oppression and erasure of self. The male/female dichotomy running through her novel suggests that Hurston had found a way to use her feminist consciousness to elaborate on the flawed nature of white, patriarchal society: her narrative of opposition describes a social system at war with itself.

In TEWWG, Janie’s grandmother, Nanny, describes a social hierarchy that includes white men, black men, and black women, but with no mention of white women:

Honey, de white man is de ruler of everything as fur as Ah been able tuh

find out. Maybe it’s some place way off in de ocean where de black man

is in power, but we don’t know nothin’ but what we see. So de white

man throw down de load and tell de nigger man tuh pick it up. He pick it

up because he have to, but he don’t tote it. He hand it to his womenfolks

(14).

108 As a former slave, Nanny saw “white” period, with no gender distinction in terms of social power. In a passage toward the end of that book, however, Hurston expresses an awareness of white gender differences when Janie, on trial for killing Tea Cake in self- defense, believes it would be better if she could make her appeal to the white women in the courtroom instead of the “strange” white men of the jury (176). In Seraph, Hurston expands on this idea by articulating a place in society for white women that is apart from and subservient to white men, and in the process she not only subverts the notion of a monolithic white culture but calls into question the validity of social hierarchies based on such concepts as race, class, and gender.

Preempting the Maternal: Mother/Nature Under Siege

In a letter to her editor, Hurston once wrote, “I get sick of her [Arvay] at times myself. Have you ever been tied in close contact with a person who had a strong sense of inferiority? I have, and it is hell” (Qtd. in Hemenway 312). In truth, Arvay is annoying. A non-feminist reading of Seraph suggests a whining, neurotic, spoiled woman who is unable to appreciate her good fortune. Instead of accepting Arvay’s psychological flaws at face value, or as proof of her inherently flawed nature, however, a feminist analysis would investigate the social context within which those flaws have developed. Phyllis Chesler states that “the basic psychological dimensions of female personality in our culture” often include such characteristics as self-sacrifice, masochism, “‘compassionate maternality,’” dependency and unhappiness (38).

Arvay has these qualities as did the women that Betty Friedan studied in her book, The Feminine Mystique (1963), a study of how an imposed ideology of dependent femininity “became the cherished and self-perpetuating core of

109 contemporary American culture” (18) during the fifteen years after World War II, the period during which Hurston was writing Seraph. As Friedan points out, men had no problem with the feminine mystique: “It promised them mothers for the rest of their lives, both as a reason for their being and as an excuse for their failures” (204). While not referring to it as such, Hurston’s work reveals an awareness of a feminine mystique, an existing framework of beliefs that makes possible a patriarchal society where a particular group of men have license to dominate those who they understand as different from and inferior to themselves. What made the feminine mystique possible was the socially-embedded idea that what women needed in order to acquire and maintain a degree of mental health was different from what men required.

Society’s understanding of mental health rests on a sexual double standard that posits a different set of acceptable behaviors for men than for women, with the range of

“acceptable” behavior being much broader for men. Thus, women are more frequently found to be out-of-bounds in terms of “normal” behavior (Chesler 78). But what constitutes normal behavior? Theodore Millon et al. state that, “normality and abnormality cannot be distinguished on a completely objective basis. All such distinctions, including the diagnostic categories of the DSM-IV,31 are in part social constructions and cultural artifacts.” Consequently, “all definitions of pathology . . . are ultimately value-laden and circular” (11). It would seem, therefore, that the definition of normal could be whatever those with power to make such decisions deem it to be.

Thus, in a patriarchal culture, we could expect to see normalcy defined in terms that favor the behavior of men. As Jane Ussher states, “What is mad within patriarchy is

31 The American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition 110 that which is at odds with the dictates of the patriarchs” (170). In Seraph, Hurston undermines the validity of that definition of madness by exposing the weaknesses of the very person who supposedly personifies the cultural ideal a critique that was informed by her own life experiences.

Hurston’s personal life was marked by a degree of education, independence, and social mobility that set her apart from most women of her era. Hemenway claims that

Arvay embodies the shortcomings of the men Hurston had known in her own life (312).

This gender transposition on the part of Hemenway, however, ignores the social agenda that Hurston was pursuing in Seraph: Arvay’s supposed flaws exist within a context of patriarchal disorder where Jim’s dysfunctional behavior is considered to be normal. As a white, upwardly mobile male, Jim possesses the socially correct attributes of race, class, and gender that enable him to move through life expecting to prevail in every situation he encounters. The failure of Arvay to immediately capitulate and her ongoing resistance to Jim’s expectation of total control in their marriage structure the course of

Hurston’s novel.

Arvay’s intention to devote her life to religion has not been taken seriously by many of the young men in Sawley who continue to pursue her despite episodes of “fits and spasms” like the ones her mother had in her youth: “No one thought too much about the seizures. Fits were things that happened to some young girls, but they grew out of them sooner or later. It was usually taken as a sign of a girl being ‘highstrung.’

Marriage would straighten her out” (6). These episodes usually occurred when a young man insisted on seeing Arvay home after church: “After the long walk in almost

111 complete silence on Arvay’s part, the venture invariably ended in an hysterical display as soon as the young man got inside the Henson parlor” (6).

Although Arvay’s hysteria works to discourage her unwanted suitors, it would be wrong to see her actions as some form of female power. The “female antilanguage of hysteria” (Showalter Female 157) or the feminist idea of madness as a “metaphor of resistance” (Carminero-Santangelo 9), describe a problem, not a solution. As Shoshana

Felman points out, “. . . madness is the impasse confronting those whom cultural conditioning has deprived of the very means of protest or self-affirmation. Far from being a form of contestation, ‘mental illness’ is a request for help, a manifestation both of cultural impotence and of political castration” (21-22). Thus, a circular process takes place: a social ethos of oppression requires survival tactics on the part of the oppressed that are defined by those in power as dysfunctional. This has the effect of confirming the rationale for oppression in the first place. What might help to break the cycle is a shift in focus from individual behavior to social context, a context that includes “class exploitation, racial stratification, and patriarchy” (Lerman 148).

Jim is not so easily put off, however, and “cures” Arvay’s fits by putting a drop of turpentine in her eye: “Then a hurricane struck the over-crowded parlor. Arvay gave a yell from the very bottom of her lungs and catapulted her body from that sofa” (32).

While Arvay rushes off to wash out her eye, “Jim and Brock Henson stood face to face and looked each dead in the eye for a long moment. ‘We’ll give what aid we can in washing out her pretty eye.’ With a dry grin smothering in his face, Jim led the way to the back porch” (32-33). As Arvay washes her eye with water, her father comments,

112 “‘Jim, you sure done worked a miracle,’” to which Jim responds, “‘A woman knows who her master is all right, and she answers to his commands’” (33).

This scene, indeed Seraph as a whole, hints at a familiarity with Shakespeare’s

The Taming of the Shrew. At the end of that play, the persistent suitor Petruchio, having brought the defiant Katherina under control, is praised by Baptista, her father, in terms that seem similar to those used by Arvay’s father:

Bap: Now fair befall thee, good Petruchio!

The wager thou hast won, and I will add . . .

For she is chang’d, as she had never been.

Pet: Nay, I will win my wager better yet.

And show more sign of her obedience,

Her new-built virtue and obedience. (Act v, sc.2, 111-18)

In his comedies, Shakespeare maintains a focus on women who overstep the bounds of patriarchal gender rules to challenge society. Like Arvay, the woman in question may lack political power but she nevertheless is a force that has to be dealt with (Gay 3). Shrew is the story of one such woman’s attempt to rebel and the efforts to bring her under control by means of starvation and emotional cruelty. Her rebellion is treated comically, the ending is a happy one, and there is no censure from the community, it being implicitly understood that she will be a happier person when she has become a submissive member of the patriarchal society (Gay 86). Shrew, like

Seraph, portrays a society dominated by male lust, not only for women but also for territory, where relations between men are defined in terms of competition (Andresen-

Thom 125). There is a lack of female bonding in the play: there appear to be no

113 mothers, female servants or female friends in Padua and the two sisters, Katherina and

Bianca, compete with each other for the approval of their father. This lack of female support necessitates bonding with men for friendship and love. Outside the male- female bond there exists a life of social isolation where women are unprotected and rendered insignificant (Andersen-Thom 127-28).

Early feminist critics of Shakespeare, while attempting to look beyond the traditional emphasis on the world of men and focus on what the women were doing, thought they detected evidence of a challenge to patriarchy, especially in the comedies.

But later critics pointed out that the plays are structured on patriarchal values that tend to push aside or entrap the vitality of women (McEachern 269-70). The headstrong and recalcitrant behavior displayed by some of Shakespeare’s female characters can be seen as evidence of social struggle, but that struggle never results in an organized effort on the part of women to contest the patriarchal structure (Erickson 29). Both Arvay and

Katherina are forced to deal with a society over which they have very little control.

Although Arvay has agreed to marry him, Jim detects “a hold-back to her love”

(45) that bothers him. Joe Kelsey, destined to become Jim’s pet Negro, gives him “one shine of hope” by advising that “‘Most women folks will love you plenty if you take and see to it that they do. Make ‘em knuckle under. From the very first jump, get the bridle in they mouth and ride ‘em hard and stop ‘em short. They’s all alike, Boss. Take

‘em and break ‘em.’” Later that night, Jim goes to bed “thinking hard” (45-46). The subsequent rape that takes place under the mulberry tree and the precipitous wedding that follows set the stage for a relationship based on coercion and submission.

114 As Caputi points out, “there are, in fact, two experiences of rape—that of the rapist and that of the one who is raped” (Goddesses 31). Jim’s understanding of the situation, couched in terms of dismissal, humor, and ultimately even romance--“‘Arvay

Henson!’ Jim hailed oratorically, ‘The apostle to the heathens!’ Then he chuckled some more”-- is very different from Arvay’s--“Arvay looked at him with quickly troubled eyes. Look like Jim was making fun of her. Something closed up inside of her.” While

Jim is claiming that rape implies marriage, “‘Why, sure you’re married, Arvay. Under that mulberry tree . . . and the job was done up brown’”--Arvay is thinking that “she had paid under that mulberry tree” (56).

Lowe’s claim that “the text seems clear enough that the desire is mutual” (282) not only ignores the fact that both Jim and Arvay, albeit with different interpretations, understand the encounter under the mulberry tree as a rape, but also hints at an oft- repeated “rape myth” that “the woman really wanted it” (Caputi Goddesses 93). He bases his argument on a passage that Hurston removed from her manuscript that describes Arvay in a celebratory mood as she comes down the steps of the courthouse after her wedding, a passage that seems at odds with the “expression of a rape victim”

(284). Lowe is correct in questioning the reliability of this passage in terms of it being an accurate description of any woman’s reaction to a rape, but the important thing to note is that Hurston did remove the passage and it seems obvious that she did so because she did not want to trivialize an important theme that would appear again in her book.

Chesler states that women are raped because they cannot defend themselves

“like men.” She goes on to say that “rape existed long before modern industrial

115 capitalism, yet it seems an appropriate metaphor for that behavior (or social system) in which one’s man’s pleasure or profit occurs only when someone else directly experiences physical pain and psychological humiliation” (312). In Seraph, Hurston both explicitly and implicitly uses the idea of rape not only to draw a connection between women and nature, but also to make a statement about the pathology and false foundation of a culture that objectifies both.

Six weeks after the graphically described encounter under the mulberry tree,

Arvay discovers that she is pregnant. Although Hurston does not specifically link the rape with the pregnancy, subsequent events suggest that she wants the reader to assume such a connection. Significantly, it is Dessie, the black maid, who informs Arvay of the coming event: “Dessie looked at her very hard and began to chuckle. ‘What’s wrong,

Dessie?’ ‘I declare! That husband you done married is all parts of a man.’ ‘What do you mean by that, Dessie?’ Youse knocked up, that’s what.’ ‘Knocked up?’ Arvay had heard the term too many times to misunderstand what was meant by it. Arvay just did not want to hear it. ‘Going to have a young ‘un, just as sure as youse born to die.’

‘No, Dessie. I’m sure that you’re mistaken. I, I ain’t noticed a thing’” (62).

Two things are notable in this passage: 1) It is Dessie, the black woman/mother who first notices the signs of pregnancy while Arvay seems out of touch with her own body; and 2) Dessie’s comments about Jim seem to imply that he is the source/creator of the pregnancy—that the pregnancy is something that happened because he is what a man should be. As she does throughout the novel, Hurston makes use of irony to create a complicated “double-voice discourse” that gives the reader several contradictory ideas to ponder. Dessie’s seemingly straightforward remark is, in fact, a subversive

116 commentary on the part of a black woman who has spent considerable time observing white culture.

Taken at face value, Dessie’s “what a guy!” comment could be read as a testament to Jim’s virility. However, Arvay’s emotional disengagement from the obvious changes taking place in her body, together with what we know will be the outcome of a pregnancy most likely the result of a rape, suggests a social critique of white culture on the part of Hurston: while white men feel free to employ violence, understood often as an appropriate demonstration of masculinity, to achieve their goals, white women, having internalized male definitions of femininity that cast them in a subservient role, are out of touch with the power that the maternal body represents.

This results in a situation where white women are both vulnerable to but also complicit in the patriarchal narcissism that characterizes white society.

When the baby is born, Arvay is stunned by what she sees: “‘Dessie! Dessie!

What is the matter with my child’s hands?’ ‘It would take a God to tell, Miz’ Arvay.

Them don’t look much like fingers, do they?’ ‘Good gracious! They look more like strings’ . . . There was practically no forehead nor backhead on her child. The head narrowed like an egg on top . . . [T]he feet were long, and the toes well formed, but they looked too long for a new-born baby to have” (67-68). Arvay is further pained to notice that the baby boy resembles a relative from her father’s side of the family, Uncle

Chester, “the one who was sort of queer in his head” (68).

In contrast, Jim’s reaction to the baby is low-keyed and restrained: “He did not enthuse at all” and in response to Arvay’s question “What must we name him?” answers

“Oh, no rush about that at all . . . We got plenty time to figger that out,” and “in a sort of

117 a slow hurry” he leaves Arvay alone with their child (68). Two weeks later, the baby is still unnamed and Arvay is left to choose a name by herself: “Jim made no objections to the choice of a name [Earl] at all. Said it was very pretty, and a whole lot better than plain Jim Meserve. He didn’t know as he wanted a child named after himself anyway.

Let every man have a name all to himself” (70).

These and subsequent scenes have echoes of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, a text that Hurston would certainly have known about. Usually understood as a male- centered story, a cautionary tale about an ambitious scientist whose attempts to create life in a laboratory result in disaster, I would argue that Shelley’s book is actually gynocentric and derives its real meaning from an understanding of the female body as the legitimate source of life. Different analyses of her book have focused on such social and psychological themes as physical deformity, failure to properly nurture progeny, and gender identity (Halberstam, Mellor, Day in Nardo 2000). One of the most persistent ideas is that of the out-of-control male scientist (Madigan, Patterson in

Nardo 2000, Easlea 1983, Daly 1990), although Patterson claims that “the warning is less against the dangers of tampering with the secrets of life than against allowing one’s inner drives and desires to dominate one’s life and the lives of others” (90).

Although Patterson is correct when he identifies “relational narcissism,” i.e.,

“[using] others as a means of loving themselves” (96), as one of the key themes, he fails to recognize the centrality of the maternal body in Shelley’s text. The characters in both

Frankenstein and Seraph occupy worlds where the maternal context has been thrown out of kilter; worlds becoming dangerously unbalanced as they slip and slide on a false foundation of patriarchal hubris. Shelley invokes the Greek and Roman myths of

118 Prometheus (the full title of her book is Frankenstein: Or The Modern Prometheus) to create a meditation on the creative powers of the female body and the social denial of that power. While Prometheus animates his piece of clay with fire stolen from the gods,

Frankenstein seeks to create life by bypassing Mother Nature and the maternal body. A compelling element of Shelley’s maternal subtext is expressed through a motif of loss that appears throughout the novel as all of the main female characters are eliminated one by one.

This theme is dramatically expressed in the scene where Frankenstein destroys the partially-constructed female creature. Acquiescing to the original creature’s demand that he create a female companion, Frankenstein, overcome by disgust and fear, aborts the project. The destruction of his potential female partner enrages the creature, setting him off on a mission of vengeance. What is it that Frankenstein fears?

Schoene-Harwood claims that fear of an independent female whose desires and opinions cannot be controlled by a male, and the possibility that those desires might be sadistic, together with the threat of an unbridled female sexuality, cause Frankenstein to reclaim control over the female body, “penetrating and mutilating the female creature at his feet in an image that suggests a violent rape” (97). Mary Daly claims that Shelley’s novel was prescient in “foretelling the technological fathers’ fusion of male-mother miming and necrophilia in a boundary violation that ultimately points toward the total elimination of women” (70). As the product of a “boundary violation,” Earl, like

Frankenstein’s unnamed creature, is fated to live at the margins of a society that exploits the maternal and will become, in time, both a victim and an agent of the destructive energies that helped to create him.

119 Jim’s dream of having his “new young ‘un . . . born on his Daddy’s place,” instead of on “borrowed land,” (78) comes true two years later when he buys five acres of land and makes plans to build a house. When Arvay, two months pregnant, recoils at the proximity of their land to a swamp, describing it as “dark and haunted-looking and too big and strong to overcome,” as well as a potential threat to Earl who might wander in that direction, Jim laughs “harshly”: “‘That scary thing ain’t apt to stray nowhere at all. If that’s all you got to worry about, you can put your mind at rest. He’s scared to death of even a baby chicken and then he ain’t all that active’” (80). Jim’s comments not only serve to dehumanize Earl but also underscore the reality of his emotional distancing from the son who was born in Sawley, Arvay’s hometown. In addition, they affirm that any children born in the future will be more closely tied to him. What neither Arvay nor Jim can know is that the son who was born on ”borrowed land” is also living on borrowed time. Arvay’s perception that the swamp represents a danger to

Earl seems prescient in view of subsequent events.

When their second child is born, Arvay “found out what Jim was like as a father.” Coming into the room with his baby in his arms, he tells Arvay: “A damn fine baby you had for me, honey . . . I’m naming her Angeline, after my mother, too” (85).

In contrast to his lack of involvement with Earl, “he never played with him at all” (76),

Jim “was hanging over the baby’s crib practically all the time that he was in the house.

He had to look at the child and touch it before he could leave for work in the morning.

He came bolting in from work and made for wherever the baby was” (85-86). When

Arvay becomes pregnant for a third time, “Dessie caught onto the signs right away, and

120 Arvay saw them confirmed in her body” (96). When that child is born, Jim “promptly” names the baby boy James Kenneth Meserve who will be known as Kenny (106).

Over the years, it becomes apparent that Earl not only has physical flaws but psychological abnormalities as well. From the beginning of his life, “the child seemed to be very much afraid. Any sudden movement, any strange object introduced into his presence brought screams of terror” (70). An on-going argument arises between Jim, who believes Earl should be “put away” (124) and Arvay who insists there is “‘Nothing much wrong with Earl’” (125). The full extent of his mental shortcomings is made shockingly clear when he attempts to rape Lucy Ann Corregio, the daughter of Jim’s employee. As people gather around the injured Lucy, a call rings out to form a posse

“‘to run the so-and-so down and string him up’” (144). Jim joins the group of “around a hundred men and they tramped off to search for her son” (149). Hurston’s use of the pronoun “her” underscores the rift that has grown in the marriage over the years: Earl, in effect, is Arvay’s child while Jim distances himself from the son he would rather not think about. With the aid of bloodhounds, Earl is pursued “to a place deep in the swamp” where he is killed (150).

Lowe poses the question of why Hurston included such a “powerful and grim episode” and concludes that maybe she “wanted to demonstrate to white people what a lynching might be like for a white mother if her son were accused of rape” (309). But

Lowe is more concerned with what the swamp symbolizes in terms of Arvay’s mental health, claiming that Earl’s “final flight into the swamp equals [Arvay’s] frantic repression of the truth” about the sexual fantasies she has had in the past about her sister’s husband (309). This is in line with Hemenway’s description of the swamp as “a

121 dark and murky wilderness that symbolizes the fearful tangle of Arvay’s subconscious”

(309). However, the fact that swamps were often depicted as a refuge in many slave narratives and stories that involved flight from white lynch mobs (Lowe 309), gives rise to another line of interpretation that seems more congruent with the mother/nature theme that Hurston features so heavily throughout Seraph, and it centers on the defining characteristic of any swamp, the female element of water.

Every swamp is basically a “wet spongy land saturated and sometimes partially or intermittently covered with water” (Gove 2306). Thus, every swamp owes its existence to the presence of water, understood since ancient times as the mythical

“watery womb of chaos or ‘formlessness’ representing the Great Mother . . . and subconsciously remembered throughout life as an archetypal image” (Barbara Walker

1066). Michael Dames states that “when the female principle is subjected to sustained attack . . . it often quietly submerges. Under the water (where organic life began) it swims through the subconscious of the dominant male society, occasionally bobbing to the surface to offer a glimpse of the rejected harmony” (152-53). This comment by

Dames suggests a way to understand the symbolic meaning of the swamp that, while incorporating the ideas of Lowe and Hemenway, nevertheless is more sweeping in scope and more in concert with the idea of social analysis that prompted Hurston to write Seraph in the first place.

Hurston uses the image of a swamp to illustrate what she considered to be one of the primary flaws of Anglo-Saxon culture: the tendency to see nature as an exploitable resource rather than understanding the natural world as the essential context of human life. Further, just as she explicitly connects Arvay with a watery element in the title of

122 her book, she implicitly portrays Arvay, the mother, as being in concert with the swamp’s natural state in contrast to Jim’s focus on the way the swamp could be used to make a monetary profit. Arvay’s initial reaction to the swamp had been one of fear: “‘I don’t want no parts of that awful place. It’s dark and haunted-looking and too big and strong to overcome. It’s frightening!’” As usual, Jim’s is the voice of reason as he patiently explains, “‘Why, honey, that ain’t nothing but a lot of big trees and stuff growing together. Nothing to hurt you at all. They grows so thick and big and plentiful because the land is wet and rich. Some underground water breaking to the surface in spots along in there. Ain’t never been disturbed and been growing like that for maybe thousands of years. That’s what makes the land so rich” (80).

But Arvay is understandably worried about Earl, who might wander off “and get snake-bit, or tore to pieces by some varmint or other’” (80). This maternal concern reappears later in the book after Arvay has left Earl in Sawley for a visit with her mother and she worries that the presence of the near-by Suwanne river represents a danger to her son: “It was ever so deep and treacherous. In her dream, she had seen poor Earl following some boys down to the river and being over-persuaded to go in swimming, and getting drowned.” Jim dismisses Arvay’s worries, claiming the dream was the result of indigestion (138).

Jim’s hope of one day realizing a financial profit from the swamp comes true when Angeline elopes with Hatton Howland, who has acquired a considerable nest egg by selling tickets for the illegal Numbers business. Jim proposes that Hatton “hide all that money you make on Numbers in land,” specifically the swamp. As Jim points out,

“‘There’s a great big fortune hid in that dark old swamp. All it needs is the brains and

123 the nerve to get it out. I been wanting to tackle it for nearly twenty years. Ever since I bought this place’” (191-92). For Jim, the swamp is “like Miami Beach before that guy from Indianapolis come along and filled it in and made it worth plenty millions” (192).

Hurston makes a clear distinction between Jim’s relationship to the swamp and that of Arvay. While Jim sees the swamp in terms of economic profit as well as a way to distance himself emotionally from the memory of Earl’s death, Arvay has a more empathic reaction to the clearing of the swamp: “She and the swamp had a generation of life together and memories to keep. She hated to see it go . . . it seemed a pity and a shame for those trees to be destroyed” (195). Arvay is powerless to do anything but watch from her front porch as “gangs of husky black roustabouts rumbling past in truck loads” set to work in the swamp “swinging shining axes to rhythm, felling the giant trees. Gnawing at the feet of the forest to make way for the setting sun.” The activity progresses “until one day Arvay saw the sun setting behind the horizon of the world”

(195). Hurston packs a lot of discerning commentary about social hierarchies, race, and the exploitation of nature into this passage. In short order, black bodies, modern equipment, illegally acquired cash, and “influence” are utilized to transform the long- standing, primordial swamp into a housing development that will create a social stratification of the town and provide “the comforts of civilization” for the “right people” (196).

Over the years, the fecund, exuberantly fertile swamp that Arvay, the mother, once perceived as a threat to her son has become a comforting space where she can start to heal from her grief. In contrast, Jim has remained resolute in his desire to use the swamp to actualize a profitable business venture. Jim, too, has come to associate Earl

124 with the swamp, but, unlike Arvay who sees the swamp as a way to be closer to the memory of her son, Jim seeks to obliterate any memories of the child he would prefer to forget. Neither Arvay nor Jim has any clear idea of what the other is thinking or feeling, and their psychological disconnect, present from the beginning of the relationship, continues to characterize their marriage in the years that follow.

Patriarchal Illusions: His Majesty the Baby

The rape that takes place under the mulberry tree and the hurried wedding that follows would seem to place Jim firmly in control of the relationship. In addition, Jim’s comment that, “‘woman folks don’t have no mind to make up nohow. They wasn’t made for that’” (25), appears to set forth the terms of the marriage: Jim will be the privileged head of the household while Arvay will be the subordinate “handmaiden around the house” (199). However, Arvay continues her pattern of resistance until the end of the book.

Establishing a pattern that continues throughout their marriage, Jim withholds information about his work from Arvay and then blames her for what seems to be a lack of interest: “. . . Arvay knew nothing about the desperate struggle Jim was going through for their very existence” (74); “Arvay just had no idea. She never asked anything, and so Jim never volunteered to tell her” (63); “‘Maybe you will see into my reasons some day, Arvay. It ain’t for me to point out some things for your information’

‘. . . Seeing that I don’t catch on to what you mean, Jim, look like you would tell me’ . .

. ‘Naw, Arvay. That way wouldn’t do me no good’” (203).

Left in the dark about Jim’s intentions, Arvay concludes that her marginalized position is due to the class differences she imagines between herself and Jim: “The very

125 air of the home was charged with opposition . . . He had never taken her for his equal.

He was the same James Kenneth Meserve of the great plantations, and looked down on her as the backwoods Cracker, the piney-woods rooter . . .” (130). Coming to the conclusion that “she could not hold up her end against what she had to contend with.

The great river plantations were too powerful for the piney woods,” she plans a trip back to Sawley to be with “her own kind” (131).

Intending to start a new life without Jim, Arvay is startled by the “poor and shabby and mean” appearance of her hometown in comparison to “the bright flourishing look of Citrabelle” (132), where she lives with Jim. She briefly considers a career giving music lessons or sewing, but upon reflection, both options are seen as impractical.32 What finally sends her back to Jim, however, is an awareness couched in terms of slavery, that she is powerless to separate from her husband: “God, please have mercy on her poor soul, but she was a slave to that man! How? Why? Those were answers that were hidden away from her poor knowledge. All that she knew was that it was so” (134). Arvay’s lack of self-awareness mirrors the emotional state of the women studied by Freidan: “Even women themselves, who felt the misery, the helplessness of their lack of self, did not understand the feeling; it became the problem that has no name” (203). And like those women, Arvay chooses to return to Citrabelle

“to live by sex alone, trading in her individuality for security” (Freidan 204).

32 Susan Ostrander, surprised by the gender stratification she noticed in upper class marriages, explains that phenomenon in terms of tradition: “ . . .women—at least White women—of every social class are taught to believe that men are the major economic providers and decision-makers” (151). Unlike the women Ostrander studied who belonged to the upper class before marriage, Arvay acquires her social position through her association with Jim. Thus, within her marriage, class and gender intersect to doubly limit her options. 126 Jim’s habit of making decisions and taking action without consulting Arvay reaches a zenith of emotional cruelty when he facilitates the runaway wedding of their underage daughter without telling Arvay. When he eventually admits, “I was there,”

Arvay’s reaction to being excluded from such an important family event is to retreat

“within herself to her temple of refuge” where she ponders the isolation she feels in her own family: “She had married a Meserve and borned Meserves, but she was not one of them” (199). The marital crisis is resolved when “Jim came and carried her back across that hall by main force” (200).

Arvay’s feelings of inferiority and guilt, tempered by a passionate nature that seeks expression, constantly conflict with and are exacerbated by Jim’s narcissistic demands. Lowe claims that Hurston might be using her knowledge of psychoanalytic theory, in particular Freud’s essay Mourning and Melancholia, to develop the psychology of Arvay (271). Her portrayal of Jim suggests she may also have been familiar with On Narcissism: An Introduction, Freud’s only paper devoted exclusively to that subject. Indeed, Jim’s behavior seems to exhibit characteristics of a Narcissistic

Personality Disorder as set forth by the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM): “The essential feature of

Narcissistic Personality Disorder is a pervasive pattern of grandiosity, need for admiration, and lack of empathy that begins by early adulthood and is present in a variety of contexts” (714). His exaggerated sense of self-importance--“. . . you don’t understand your ownself, Miss Arvay, and somebody stronger than you, and that can see further than you . . . will have to be on hand to look after you” (17)--together with a pretentious manner--“[H]e came parading like a king down the aisle behind her . . .”

127 (21)--reveal Jim’s narcissistic nature. His comment, “‘See that, Arvay? That shows the difference between me and you. I see one thing and can understand ten. You see ten things and can’t even understand one” (261), further illustrates the arrogant attitude with which Jim approaches life. These traits also resemble many aspects of white patriarchal culture that assumes a degree of unquestioned entitlement on the part of those in power.

Christopher Lasch, in his book The Culture of Narcissism (1979), claims that

“every society reproduces its culture—its norms, its underlying assumptions, its modes of organizing experience—in the individual, in the form of personality” (34), a personality that is “suited to the requirements of that culture” (238).33 Hurston’s focus on the narcissistic personality of her male protagonist and the support he seems to enjoy from the society he prospers in anticipates by 35 years, albeit in a more indirect, fictional form, many of the same observations made by Lasch. Further, by placing the events of her novel “in the first decade of the new century” Seraph 1), like Lasch, who claims the violence against Indians and nature that characterized the nineteenth-century conquest of the West “originated . . . in the white Anglo-Saxon superego” (10), she recognizes that American culture has a history that is marked by narcissism.

An even earlier example can be seen in the case of John and Susannah Wheatley who not only encouraged their slave, Phillis, to write poetry but also imagined that her published book of poems would serve as an “ambassador of their own benevolence”

(Johnson 100). To their surprise, however, instead of praise, they received reproachful

33 A useful definition of personality is proposed by Theodore Millon and George Everly who believe it “ represents a pattern of deeply embedded and broadly exhibited cognitive, affective, and overt behavioral traits that persist over extended periods of time” (4). 128 queries asking why she was still a slave. The Wheatleys “caught in the trap of their own self-image [granted] Phillis her freedom upon her return from England. And

Phillis Wheatley thus becomes the first in a long line of successful manipulators and demystifers of the narcissism inherent in white liberalism” (Johnson 100) and Seraph emerges as one more contribution to that tradition.

While narcissists often function exceptionally well in the world at large, they are extremely difficult to live with. Jim’s command to Arvay, “‘You’re my damn property, and I want you right where you are, and I want you naked’” (216), illustrates how their sense of entitlement merges into a lack of empathy as they lay claim to the personal identity, the physical body, and the time of others. Thus, intimate relationships are problematical because companions are seen as appendages, never as equals (Millon

308). Lorna Benjamin, like Freud, refers to the narcissist as “His Majesty, the Baby”

(Freud 556, Benjamin 141). Benjamin believes that a childhood marked by “adoring devotion” produces a “child [who] becomes ‘hooked’ on false glory.” The result is a person who “has no idea what his or her behaviors mean to others, and thus becomes insensitive and inconsiderate” (145). It is interesting to note, however, that while the development of a Narcissistic Personality Disorder can be traced to parents who were overly indulgent, it could also result from a family environment that was neglectful or authoritarian (Millon 308).

Lacking details, we can only speculate about Jim’s childhood family relations.

However, we do know that the death of his mother represents a great loss and seems to have a curious effect on his relationship with Arvay: “There was something about

Arvay that put him in mind of his mother. They didn’t favor each other in the face, but

129 there was something there that was the same” (105). Their mutual physical attraction seems to represent the only area of the relationship where there exists some degree of parity: “Arvay’s eyes had some strange power to change like that when she was stirred for him . . . It warmed him, it burned him and bound him” (106). But Arvay is unaware of her effect on Jim and he is reluctant to let her know: “The strange thing was that she did not know her own strength. Maybe it was just as well. Knowing more, she might not have been so contented where she was. Twenty to twenty-five years later on, he could afford to let her know. No sense in crowding his luck” (106). Jim’s self-serving conclusion can be explained by Millon’s comment that “emotional intimacy requires that two people strip away the illusion of power and status differences between them, creating a vulnerability intolerable to the narcissist” (292-93).

As St. Clair points out, Jim “feels free to take comfort from Arvay but denies her the solace of knowing that he depends upon her” (46). Throughout Seraph, every effort on the part of Arvay at self-assertion is contested and eventually defeated in some way by Jim. In a scene half way through the novel, Hurston uses the subject of rape once more to illustrate just how mean Jim can be when his wishes are thwarted. Arvay, upset after learning that once again she has been left out of something that “the rest of the family seemed to know” (209), insists on leaving early from a football celebration in

Gainesville. In a rage at having to accommodate Arvay, Jim proceeds to drive recklessly back to Citrabelle where, in an especially cruel and dehumanizing scene, he reasserts his control by confronting her in their bedroom with the comment “‘Where I made my big mistake was in not starting you off with a good beating just as soon as I married you . . . Get up from there and get out of those clothes . . . Up with that

130 petticoat and down with them pants before you make me hurt you. Move!’” (215-16).

After standing “like a statue of authority beside the bed” and looking Arvay over “in a very cool way for awhile,” Jim “stretched himself full length upon her, but in the same way that he might have laid himself down on a couch” (217). Afterwards, all rage dissipated and apparently satisfied at having confirmed his control by physically intimidating Arvay while completely ignoring her attempts to explain her feelings, Jim kisses Arvay “with a kind of happy arrogance” and “then [snuggles] his head down on her breast in that way he had that Arvay thought was so much like a helpless child”

(219).

Jim’s narcissistic behavior reaches a pinnacle when he tries to impress Arvay by picking up the rattlesnake. When he loses control and Arvay fails to come to his aid because of her great fear of snakes, Jeff steps in to rescue his boss. Jim subsequently rages at Arvay: “‘You had the biggest chance in the world to make a great woman out of yourself . . . but you crapped out on it’” (260), and blames her for the failure of his stunt. His response illustrates a tactic used frequently by narcissists who “use rationalization to construct alternative realities that draw on the actual substance of events but change their significance to excuse blunders and exploitations. Once a scenario is found that not only saves face but puts the narcissist in the best possible light, it replaces the previous version of events and becomes the working model of reality on which the narcissist proceeds” (Millon 284). Jim’s behavior perfectly exemplifies this tactic as he brushes aside Arvay’s comments and, in an attempt to salvage his damaged self-image, ignores the reality of what actually occurred, reconstructing events in a way that places the blame on Arvay: “‘Naw, Arvay. You’ve

131 had your time to talk and you didn’t do it. Let me finish what I got to say’” (264), and after enumerating his many sacrifices on her behalf and her lack of appreciation, announces his plans to leave in the morning: “‘I’m tired of waiting for you to meet me on some high place and locking arms with me and going my way’” (266).34

Reconciliation/Capitulation

With Jim gone, Arvay barely has time to reflect before she is called back to

Sawley to see her dying mother. Equipped with her expensive Mark Cross luggage, a gift from Kenny, and excited at the prospect of returning to the site of an imagined ideal childhood, Arvay arrives in Sawley with the idea of re-starting her life. Her initial impression is favorable as she listens to the taxi driver describe such improvements as the new and modern hotel, two self-service grocery stores, and a national highway that comes through town. The lumber industry and the turpentine camp that once represented the “life” of Sawley, have disappeared along with the “folks, white and colored, that follows that kind of work [and] don’t have the kind of money to spend to make good business” (273). No further mention is made of the black population, and, in fact, the “new” Sawley appears to be energized by an ascendant white affluence exemplified by the physical structure of the Stephen Foster hotel and the personage of

Bradford Cary. Indeed, the political ambitions of Cary reflect and are driven by the same kind of false and self-serving idealization of social reality that informs Stephen

Foster’s song about the good old days of slavery down along the Suwanee River.

34 Jim’s creation of a self-serving alternate reality that allows him to avoid any responsibility for what actually happened demonstrates what Barbara Walker claims is “a universal characteristic of patriarchal societies: namely, the idea that guilt is readily transferred to the innocent” (11). 132 Upon arriving at her old home, it becomes obvious to Arvay that the local economic boom has bypassed the Henson family. The shabby house of her childhood,

“too awful to contemplate” (274), is a reminder of what she left behind when she married Jim and the thought that “[M]aybe she was not as bad off as she had thought she was” (298) begins to take shape in her mind. But first, she must deal with the situation at hand: her mother has things to tell her and a death-bed request. Maria surprises Arvay with details of what she describes as a genuine friendship with Cary:

“‘Set right down in my parlor and talked with me. Everytime he seen anything in the paper about Kenny, he come out and read it to me.’” To which Arvay replies, “‘I never would of thought it of Bradford Cary, but I sure think it was mighty white of him to do it’” (278).

What neither Arvay nor Maria realize is that Cary’s friendship is a carefully thought out strategy aimed at making him “look like a man of the people” instead of the

“monied aristocrat” (296) he actually is in order to increase his chances of being elected to public office. The general impression in Sawley seems to be that “he was a big man who made himself one of them. That was ever so much better than one of them trying to make a big man of himself” (297). Hurston’s irony borders on cynicism as she effectively exposes Cary’s perfidious motives and the gullibility of the general population. She also gets in a dig at the credulous passivity of white women like Maria and Arvay who acquiesce to the white male agenda that gives form to the false foundation of Anglo-Saxon culture: “But even if Arvay had known about the skillful manipulation, she would not have cared any more than Maria would have . . . Arvay was moved to her foundations and satisfied” (297).

133 In a passage that seems inspired by Hurston’s experience with the death of her own mother, whose final desire she was unable to fulfill, Arvay makes sure her mother’s death-bed request that she “be put away nice, with a heap of flowers on my coffin and church full of folks marching around to say me ‘farewell’” is honored (280).

All expenses are paid by Cary, the much admired “public spirited citizen” (289), who is also in charge of executing Maria’s will which designates Arvay as sole heir to the broken-down family house and the surrounding land.

After her mother’s funeral, Arvay returns to the house to find it ransacked by her sister and brother-in-law. Retreating to the shelter of her beloved mulberry tree, she contemplates her situation. Just as the rat-infested house, symbol of her dysfunctional past, blocks the view of the highway from the mulberry tree, it also represents that which she feels stands “between her sign of light and the seeing world” (306). She sets fire to the house and in so doing imagines herself set free: “She had always felt like an imperfect ball restlessly bumping and rolling and rolling and bumping. Now, she felt that she had come to a dead and absolute rest . . . She had made a peace and was in harmony with her life” (307, 308). This passage marks the moment of Arvay’s surrender to the social forces over which she has little, if any, control. Her epiphany, while suggesting peace and harmony, is expressed by Hurston in terms of death. Arvay will no longer resist the patriarchal narrative that has shaped her life.

Interestingly, Hurston allows Arvay a moment of grace—the recognition that if given the chance, she is capable of high-mindedness and unselfish acts. When, for the first time in her life, she becomes the owner of a valuable piece of real estate, she makes the decision to donate the mulberry tree and surrounding land to the city of Sawley to be

134 used for a public park. This works as a counter-point to the encroaching commercialization that is changing the face of Sawley and stands in stark contrast to

Jim’s desire to exploit the swamp in Citrabelle for personal financial gain. Further, by insisting that the tree not be disturbed, she does for it what she cannot do for herself: she creates an environment where it can flourish on its own terms. Not only does her gift symbolize the free will of Arvay, what she might be able to accomplish if she were free to act on her own, it ties her to Sawley in a positive way. She has created a space that honors the best of what she can salvage from her past. Hurston, adept at understanding the nuances of discrimination that can begin at an early age in one’s own family,35 suggests that Arvay is neither weak nor inherently mean but rather that her undesirable behavior in the past reflected a lack of insight into the deep-seated insecurities she harbored about herself and her place in the world. In contrast to a paternal legacy that includes emotional abuse and a dormant genetic flaw that ultimately causes havoc,

Maria, the long-suffering mother, becomes the force that enables Arvay to experience a degree of self-esteem and social power.

While the mulberry tree, in sync with the energy of Mother Nature, prepares to bloom after the cold winter, Arvay, bowing to the inevitability of a socially-constructed reality that derives its meaning from a patriarchal narrative favoring a particular type of person, contemplates her return to Citrabelle. Thinking of the man she believes has brought sunshine into her otherwise dark world, she muses that “‘my husband come along and took me off from that place and planned and fixed bigger things for me to enjoy. Look like I ought to have sense enough to appreciate what he’s done . . .’” (309).

35 Like Arvay, Hurston’s childhood was shadowed by the obvious preference of her father for her older sister. 135 Lowe claims that “Arvay . . . has neither the aspiration, training, or inherent talent to be anything else” (263) except a housewife. But Lowe ignores the fact of

Arvay’s musical talent and the way Hurston repeatedly brings up the subject--first, as something that sets her apart: “Arvay had one comforting advantage over Larraine.

Arvay could play music and Larraine just couldn’t learn it” (9); and later as a possible means of support: “If she was to give music lessons, she would need a piano” (134); and, most importantly, as the source of her son’s facility with music, a source augmented by the talents of Joe: “‘Between me and you, Miss Arvie, we sure pulled that boy through, didn’t us?’ Arvay shook her head slowly. ‘You mean you did, Joe.

You learnt Kenny all that your ownself. I don’t know the first pick on a box.’ ‘That’s where you’se ever so wrong, Miss Arvay. ‘Tain’t everybody that can learn music like that . . . He got that part from you’” (250). When Arvay comments that “‘only different from Kenny, I had small chance to learn much of it. I ever wanted to learn more though. I know that I could of learnt a lot more than I know if I had of had a chance.’”

Joe responds “‘It’s a shame and a pity that you didn’t have more chance’” (251).

Although Arvay is aware of and readily admits to the important role that Joe played in the musical development of her son, she fails to notice that perhaps Joe, too, could have benefited from having “more chance.”

As a girl, returning from a summer visit with an aunt who plays the organ,

Arvay had “surprised the family on her return to Sawley in the fall, by being able to pick out melodies, and to play a few songs with full harmony all the way through . . .

She showed herself very apt with music” (9). Her interest in music continues to grow after marriage: “Arvay played much better than she did when he married her” (98).

136 Kenny, “bold and even more self-assured than Angie” and “bossy like his father” (108), displays an interest in music from early childhood. His precocious musical talent takes flight under the tutelage of Joe’s musicality, introduced early in the book as a disembodied voice singing the blues: “‘Hands full of nothing, mouth full of ‘much obliged’” (43). Joe introduces Kenny to bottle-necking and shows him how “to make that weeping sound on the guitar” (139).

Kenny’s plans to make music his career are met with skepticism by Arvay: “‘I been hearing the darkies picking boxes ever since I been old enough to know anything, and I got my first time to see any of ‘em make a living at it.’” Jim has a different point of view, telling Arvay that Kenny “‘claims that white bands up North and in different places like New Orleans are taking over darky music and making more money at it than the darkies used to . . .it is just a matter of time when white artists will take it all over.’”

He adds, “‘It’s American, and belongs to everybody. Just like that swamp’” (202).

Jim’s comment reveals the acquisitive nature of Anglo-Saxon patriarchy: Jim and

Kenny, possessing the social attributes that confer power in such a culture, feel free to exploit whatever is at hand in order to satisfy their own desires. Whether “darkie” music, or the swamp, really “belongs to everybody” could be debated. However, in

Jim’s world, only a few are entitled to actually take possession. Kenny does in fact accept an offer to perform in New York and appears to be on his way to a successful career. At the end of the novel, we learn that Kenny has been successful enough to purchase a boat for his father, the Kenny M., that has a “husky Negro around twenty- five” (roughly Kenny’s age) as captain (323).

137 In a letter to her editor regarding a chapter she wrote on Kenny’s success in New

York, Hurston claimed “There is no more Negro music in the U. S. It has been fused and merged and become the national expression . . .” (qtd in Carby x). Hazel Carby claims that in this chapter, which was later removed by Hurston’s editor, Hurston was thinking in terms of a “cultural exchange” (ix). But given the polemical nature of her text, it seems more likely that the deleted chapter was intended to be an elaboration on cultural appropriation or what bell hooks calls the “commodification of Otherness”

(hooks Black Looks 21). As a privileged white male, Kenny has access to sources of self-realization that elude both Arvay and Joe who are socially positioned as patriarchal pets. Indeed, their social reality seems to fit Hurston’s definition of slavery: “Real slavery is couched in the desire and the efforts of any man or community to live and advance their interests at the expense of the lives and interests of others” (Dust Tracks

230).

Hurston uses the subject of musical talent and the idea of it passing from Arvay

(the pet angel) and Joe Kelsey (the pet Negro), to Kenny (white male) in order to construct a message about race, class, and gender oppression that is in line with feminist theories of intersection put forth by Collins. Moving like a subliminal message through the novel, this theme works to reinforce her subversive text as an example of how different types of social oppression work together in white patriarchal society to privilege the white upper-class male.

Arriving back home after her mother’s funeral in Sawley, Arvay’s transformation is immediately noticed by Jeff and his wife Janie as she steps through their front door and affably shoves Jeff and smacks Janie on her hips: “‘Just like Mister

138 Jim, ain’t she, Janie? And everybody knows that Mister Jim is quality first-class . . .

Miss Arvay’s done come to be just like him.’” Having come “to prefer Jim’s way of handling things,” from this point on, she will exist as a reliable appendage to her husband (314). They agree to drive her to the coast where Jim now owns a shrimping business.

This section of the novel, Arvay’s return to Citrabelle and the subsequent trip to the coast, beautifully illustrates Hurston’s double-voice technique. In case the reader may have missed the message implicit in her description of Arvay’s overly familiar greeting (try to imagine Janie stepping through the Meserve front door and shoving Jim or slapping Arvay on the rear end), her narration of the ride out to the coast and their arrival leaves no doubt. Settled in the back seat, Arvay takes note of Janie’s appearance: “Janie now, that mixture of colors that she had on. Nothing that Angeline would have thought about picking out to wear at all. But strangely, they did not look funny on Janie. That cheap silk dress became her looks very well indeed. Her short hair was as straight as anybody’s today . . . it improved her looks” (317). Arvay, preoccupied with thoughts of her reunion with Jim, feigns interest as Jeff points out remnants of previous cultures along the route “of a people who had disappeared ages before the coming of the Spaniards; rusting old iron pots left over from the indigo industry of the Minorcans; foundations of an old fort left by the Spaniards” (318).

Hurston’s goal here is two-fold: not only does she suggest that blacks are more in tune with their environment and its history than whites, there is also a message about the transitory nature of societies that recalls her previous comments about Anglo-Saxon civilization and the inevitable demise of any culture built on a false foundation.

139 Arriving at the shrimping docks, Jeff offers to “ask if our boats is in” (319). But any idea that Arvay’s transformation implies a new era of social equality between her and her black employees is soon dispelled by the arrival of Mrs. Toomer, Jim’s white secretary, whose comment to Arvay that her “chauffeur had told her that Captain

Meserve’s madam was present” confirms the social realities of race and class distinctions (319).

The initial encounter between Jim and Arvay is friendly but guarded and reveals the inherent inequality that continues to exist between them: “‘Oh, hello, Jim!’

Arvay tried to be brisk and offhanded, but flushed and faltered. Her eyes could not stay where she wanted them to. ‘Hello, Arvay,’ Jim said casually, but looked her over boldly” (320). Later, in a scene reminiscent of one of their earliest encounters, Jim takes hold of her arm “very firmly” (323) and leads her across the deck of his boat, the

Arvay Henson. Dressed in clothes, purchased by Jim, that are identical to the fishermen, Arvay agrees to accompany him on a fishing trip. This highly-symbolic scene speaks directly to Hurston’s on-going theme of patriarchal co-option. Not only has Arvay become “just like Mister Jim” in terms of performance, even her gender identity has been preempted by patriarchal forces.

Once again, as he did with the snake, Jim courts disaster by trying to impress

Arvay with a potentially dangerous exploit as he forces his boat over a sand bar before the tide is high enough: “The Mate came plunging up from below. ‘Captain! My

Captain! You gone crazy? Turn back! This bar is too rough to cross right now. Oh,

Captain!’” (328). In contrast to the snake incident, however, Arvay springs into action

140 when the terrified Mate grabs hold of Jim’s leg: “‘Let go my husband’s leg!’” (329) enabling Jim to bring the boat safely over the bar.

This event epitomizes the ethos of exploitation and domination of nature that pervades life aboard the boat. When the first shrimp net of the day is emptied on deck full of sea life, “Turtles, numerous kinds of fish, a leopard shark, strange unimaginable- shaped things from the bottom of the sea . . .” (335), the men, frustrated by the lack of shrimp “went in killing things. First that astonishingly limber-bodied shark . . . With shovels and the axe, they fell upon it . . . Arvay watched the slaughter with pity” (336).

Later in the day when a successful haul is made, a shark is once again caught in the net:

“With shouts of vengeful joy the three men fell upon it with the axe, shovel and gig . . . they hacked through the tough hide and ripped open the belly . . . There were little live sharks inside enclosed in transparent sacs” (338). When Jim tells his crew to “heave the whole she-bang over the side and let the little bastards drown!” the men are “put out to see the baby sharks free themselves of their envelopes and swim off. The men expressed the shame and the pity that they had gotten away, and, Arvay thought, carried on like little boys” (339). Their mood improves immediately, however, as they contemplate the pile of shrimp. With Jim “sitting on the hutch cover and looking as male as a coconut tree,” the Mate calls out, “‘Just look at the money piled up there!’”

(339).

While the men happily clean the shrimp, “Arvay looked on and noted how like little boys they acted. Didn’t men ever get grown?’” (341). Hurston balances the raucous and commercially-oriented events of the day with a nighttime scene that suggests a gentle female ascendancy: “The white, white, Florida moon rose up and

141 began to guild the ocean. The calm surface rose and fell like the breast of a sleeping woman” (343). But the cool grace of the female moon is about to give way to the unbridled energy of the male sun.

Arvay sets the stage for her reconciliation with Jim by leaving her cabin door open and calling out to him. Her carefully thought out comments waver when confronted with “that look that Jim was giving her.” As Jim moves toward the bunk

“like he was stalking a prey,” Arvay flinches. But as he tears off his clothes, Arvay has

“a moment of great revelation” as she imagines that “Jim, Jim Meserve, Lord, had his doubts about holding her as she had hers about him . . . [T]his was a wonderful and powerful thing to know, but she must not let him know what she had perceived” (347-

48). This is an interesting reversal of a previous scene where Jim came to the same conclusion about Arvay. Thus, the reunion is flawed, with both Arvay and Jim feeling the need to harbor survival strategies for possible use in the future. The sexual attraction that has always existed between them brings the relationship full circle with

Jim setting forth the rules that Arvay is expected to follow: “‘You’re going to do just what I say do, and you had better not let me hear you part your lips in a grumble. Do you hear me, Arvay?’” with Arvay answering “‘Yes, Jim, I hear you’” (349). Once again, we hear an echo of Shakespeare’s Katherina:

Kath: Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper,

Thy head, thy sovereign; one that cares for thee,

And for thy maintenance; commits his body

To painful labor, both by sea and land . . .

And craves no other tribute at thy hands

142 But love, fair looks, and true obedience—

Too little payment for so great a debt

Such duty as the subject owes the prince,

Even such a woman oweth to her husband

(Act V, sc. 2, 146-56)).

The novel’s end suggests resolution and a new beginning. But what has changed? Jim is basically the same; Arvay, however, is altered. As Jim sighs deeply and snuggles his head on Arvay’s breast before going “off into a deep and peaceful sleep” (349), Arvay is left with her thoughts. She imagines herself purified and made noble by her suffering: “She had been purged out, and the way was cleared for better things” (350). No longer enslaved by her tortured past, she is “free” to bask in the warmth and energy of the rising sun, mythical symbol of male power and energy (Linn

262): “Yes, she was doing what the big light had told her to do. She was serving and meant to serve. She made the sun welcome to come on in”; mother/angel with her little boy/God at her breast, “. . . he was nothing but a little boy to take care of, and he hungered for her hovering. Look at him now! Snuggled down and clutching onto her like Kenny when he wore diapers” (351). The language that Hurston uses here is virtually identical to what she used after the marital rape scene and reinforces the image of “Big Jim” (the proposed name of Jim’s sixth boat) as “His Majesty the Baby.”

Hemenway could have had this passage in mind when he wrote, “Seraph does contain a statement about the sexual mythology of American culture: that this civilization produces very few adult human beings, even fewer adult marriages” (314).

143 Indeed, Hurston makes it very clear that Arvay and Jim do not have an “adult” marriage, i.e. a relationship between equals. While Jim requires that Arvay submit to what he assumes is his better judgment, Hurston undermines that assumption by repeatedly describing him as a little boy involved in dubious activities or immature behavior and ultimately in need of “motherly” emotional nurturance. On the other hand, Arvay’s status as angel of the house guarantees that she will be kept in bounds by her financial dependency.

What appears to be an idyllic ending is made possible by Arvay’s transformation which enables her to submit to the cultural definition of appropriate womanhood, a definition that confines her to the role of dependent wife and mother, the angel of the house, an image that echoes a comment made earlier in the book by Jim: “‘Look,

Little-Bits, I think as much of you as God does of Gabriel, and you know that’s His pet angel’” (113). Thus, Jim and Arvay constitute and are constituted by the social values embedded in the social construction of whiteness which is driven by the narcissistic demands of an irrational patriarchal system. The careful reader of Seraph will intuit

Hurston’s invitation to look below her skillfully-crafted white “veneer” of Anglo-Saxon civilization and ponder her transgressive message: How is it that a “civilization” with such a false foundation came to be considered the desired norm?

144

Conclusion

The central claim of this paper is that Zora Neale Hurston’s last published novel,

Seraph on the Suwanee, represents a gender-inflected critique of Anglo-Saxon culture by means of a diagnostic methodology that uses psychological insights into the personalities of her two major characters, Jim and Arvay Meserve. Despite Alice

Walker’s comment that Seraph is a book about “white people for whom it is impossible to care,” a literary crime in her view (Gardens 90), the time seems right to reconsider

Hurston’s literary outcast which actually has a great deal to say to those willing to listen. What Hurston offers her readers is a tale that is rich with symbolism, psychological insight, and political commentary.

Starting with an overview of how racial awareness evolved in general and the particular way it manifested as an indisputable feature of United States culture, the paper went on to look at more specific components of the social construction of whiteness. A look at the work of black women writers who have challenged the dominant culture’s belief in whiteness as the preferred social norm, together with some views of black women contemplating the social position of white women, were presented in order to illuminate relevant aspects of the world that Hurston was seeking to understand, a world she believed was based on a “false foundation.”

Chapter two introduced and developed the idea of a mother/Mother Nature theme that forms an important element in the diagnostic process Hurston employs as

145 she ponders the nature of the false foundation and the symptoms of social pathology she attributes to Anglo-Saxon civilization. Brennan’s theories of a “foundational fantasy” and its “patriarchal enactment” that seeks to contain or control the mother (History

167), Caputi’s claim that the mother’s lap “represents the original, the intelligent matrix or cosmic womb” (Goddesses 298), along with Allen’s theories of mother-powered context and its connection to Mother Nature were some of the writers used to support the argument that Hurston’s novel contains a maternal theme that constitutes an integral part of her story. These feminist theories of origin, context, and foundation were shown to be in harmony with Hurston’s view that the false foundation rests on the assumption of patriarchal whiteness as the privileged cultural norm against which all others are to be measured. A look at differences between white and black mothering and the way

Hurston creates a relationship between her female protagonist and nature, beginning with her title, further underscores the maternal theme that energizes Seraph.

Chapter three made the case that Seraph, a complex, sophisticated critique of white culture, represents the full-blown expression of ideas such as race, patriarchy, narcissism, and maternal forces that have always been present in her work and reveal a political agenda in the making.

The first three chapters of the paper represent essential elements of a framework that was used to inform the close reading and analysis of Seraph that takes place in chapter four. The argument was made that Jim exhibits distinct symptoms of a narcissistic personality disorder, a condition which allows him to function successfully in a narcissistic society that privileges white males and devalues the female/maternal presence. The hierarchal society Hurston deconstructs not only takes advantage of

146 women as mothers, but also views nature as a legitimate source of material that can be used indiscriminately to further the economic pursuits of those in power. The on-going exploitation of nature parallels the reliance on and consumption of maternal energies.

Once the mother has been rendered powerless by the patriarchal insistence on a sentimentalized version of mother as angelic caregiver, patriarchy can exercise control in ways that serve the ends of the foundational fantasy. Hurston’s diagnostic approach posits Arvay, the wife and mother, as a symptom of what is wrong with Anglo-Saxon culture: she may be complicit but does not possess enough power to be the root cause.

As O’Reilly points out, in a patriarchal society “[M]others do not make the rules . . . they simply enforce them” (44). Jim is the means through which Arvay can understand herself as worthwhile. Because he is so highly valued by society, she, as his wife, shares in and benefits from his privileged social position. But, they do not share that privileged social space as equals.

Hurston’s diagnosis centers on a close analysis of the stormy relationship that exists between Arvay and Jim. Arvay’s task is to figure out a way to survive in a narcissistic patriarchal society that is dominated by white men who presume superiority but who cannot survive without the maternal resources they habitually exploit. In actuality, Jim, the seemingly privileged hero of the novel, is revealed to be emotionally immature, often acting like an impetuous self-centered little boy who has never completely grown up—in short, he bears more than a passing resemblance to Freud and

Smith’s depiction of the narcissist as His Majesty the Baby. By the end of her novel,

Hurston’s implicit question hangs in the air and constitutes her diagnosis: what are the implications of having such an obviously flawed person in charge?

147 Recent years have seen a renewed interest in Hurston’s work, including Seraph, her least understood novel. This dissertation offers an original interpretation of

Hurston’s last published novel and expands the possibilities of future analyses of her work. Except to note the biological facts of Hurston’s brief relationship with her own mother who died when she was nine, and the fact that she herself was never a mother, scholars have failed to see the extent to which the topic of motherhood and its relationship with nature informs her oeuvre. A question for future study might include asking how Hurston’s relationship with her mother did or did not inform the idea of motherhood in her work. In Seraph, the lens of mother/nature becomes a diagnostic tool in service to a life-long endeavor: trying to comprehend the rational that grounds white culture.

Hurston understood that Anglo-Saxon culture is weakened by an inability to understand the negative consequences of an ideology of narcissism that privileges a few at the expense of the many. A defining element of that ideology is the exploitation of women and nature. Understanding that Hurston was indeed mother-focused adds a new interpretive dimension to the study of her work and expands the sphere of her relevance.

Thus, this dissertation not only adds to the body of academic literature on Hurston, it increases knowledge of someone whose full measure as a public intellectual has yet to be fully comprehended and whose work offers a nuanced approach to public conversations about the nature of social oppression.

In Seraph, Hurston continues a tradition of covert resistance on the part of a black culture struggling to survive within a hostile white society. Her last published novel reveals a talent for combining art and politics and in many ways represents a

148 synthesis of her race, class, and gender consciousness that had grown over the years.

Instead of her familiar focus on black culture, however, she creates an insightful social critique by using the story of a conflictive white marriage, a marriage that embodies characteristics of a larger, troubled world weakened by fault lines of race, class, and gender inequalities. As ironic as it may seem, she used her complex novel to reveal the oppressive nature of white culture by focusing on the inequality in a white marriage.

By locating blacks at the margins of Seraph, Hurston mirrors the position she saw blacks occupying in a dominant white society, while her focus on whites represents a bold assertion of self-worth. As slaves, blacks “could be brutally punished for looking, for appearing to observe the whites they were serving” (hooks Black Looks

168). In Seraph, Hurston claims subjectivity (and thus social power) by assuming the privilege of looking closely at white culture. She challenges the social construction of whiteness as the social norm and deconstructs white patriarchal society as she reveals its inherent flaws. In the process, she creates a forceful political message about personal freedoms that is compelling and relevant years after it was written.

149

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