Slave Narratives and Hurston

1. U.S. Minority LiteratureWeek 3b“People ought to have some regard for helpless things” (Hurston, 57)

3. Slave Narratives and Hurston • Consider for a moment the similarities and differences between the slave narrative and Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. • Make a list of any literary, thematic, formal changes in the texts. Make a list of the similarities between the texts.

4. What are some similarities?

5. What are some differences?

6. Harlem Renaissance 1919-early 1930s

7. The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line” – Du Bois

9. Language and class in Hurston • The internalized gaze of double consciousness in WEB Du Bois makes it way indirectly through what Hurston calls the “self-despisement” of the middle class in the 1930s. • She talks about African Americans in three classes in her “Characteristics of Negro Expression:” the average negro, the middle class, the truly cultured negro.

10. Henry Louis Gates calls Hurston’s novel the first “speakerly text,” or as “a text whose rhetorical strategy is designed to represent an oral literary tradition” (181) • Hurston relies on anthropological fieldwork that she conducted in Florida to represent some of the characters in the text.

11. How does the way the speakers are talking inform the meaning of the text? What examples are there of black people using class to define another person?

12. Language and Class in Hurston • What differentiates class/race in Hurston is the attitudes towards race and the attitudes that come with it. Racism is internalized. • Pg. 12-13: “Whut Ah seen just now is plenty for me, honey, Ah don’t want no trashy nigger, no breath-and briches, lak Johnny Taylor usin’ yo’ body to wipe his foots on” (11).

13. Joe Starks • obsessed with racial “defects.” “He didn’t want her talking after such trashy people. ‘You’seMrs. Mayor Starks, Janie. I god, Ah can’t see what uh woman uh yo’ stability would want tuh be treasurin’ all dat gum-grease from folks dat don’t even own de house dey sleep in’” (54). • What is happening in this passage?

14. “You’seMrs. Mayor Starks, Janie. I god, Ah can’t see what uh woman uh yo’ stability would want tuh be treasurin’ all dat gum-grease from folks dat don’t even own de house dey sleep in” (54) • Joe Starks names her Mrs. Mayor Starks (because he is the Mayor). She is named by her associated class, and by her association to her husband. • Do we see versions of this naming in the slave narratives?

15. Janie • Does she believe that black people should be divided according to their class? • You can think of this novel as a bildungsroman novel. Janie comes to a certain maturity by the end of the novel. You might use this in your essays.

16. Class and women • Because of emphasis on class distinctions between African Americans, women are considered as commodities as well. This is much like the slave tradition. • “Her hair was NOT going to show in the store. It didn’t seem sensible at all. […] She was there in the store for him to look at, not those others” (55).

17. “Joe returned to the store full of pleasure and good humor but he didn’t want Janie to notice it because he saw that she was sullen and he resented that. She had no right to be, the way he thought things out. She wasn’t even appreciative of his efforts and she had plenty cause to be. Here he was just pouring honor all over here; building a high chair for her to sit in and overlook the world and she here pouting over it!” (62)

18. Race and Form The novel combines two distinct narrative structures: • First person oral frame narrative, spoken in dialect by Janie to Phoebe (p 8-10 and 191-92). • Third person omniscient narration laced with free indirect discourse and characterized by a mixture of high and low diction.

19. Frame Narration Why switch from the first to third personin the text? First Person Frame narration is important because: • It presents Janie’s story as SPOKEN rather than WRITTEN. A novel obsessed with black oral transmission rather than written. This provides continuity between the oral storytellers in the book and Janie. It is also in dialect, which links it to the story which is mostly in dialect. • Oral literature is always a story told to one or more people, so the text dramatizes this collective fashion.Phoebyhas to be present so that her response is registered in the story.

20. Third Person Omniscient narrator “Dawn and doom” (8) • fairly elevated speech “Dawn and doom was in the branches” (8) • “Was” is grammatically incorrect—represents elevated speech in dialect. The narrator has incorporated Janie’s voice into the narration. This is FREE INDIRECT DISCOURSE.

21. Free Indirect Discourse A manner of presenting the thoughts or utterances of a fictional character as if from that character’s point of view by combining grammatical and other features of the character’s “direct speech” with features of the narrator’s “indirect” report. Direct discourse: “I will stay here tomorrow” Indirect discourse: She thought that she would stay there the next the next day. Free indirect style: Combines the person and tense of indirect discourse (“she would stay”) with the indications of time and place appropriate to direct discourse (here tomorrow), to form a different kind of sentence: She would stay here tomorrow. This form of statement allows a third-person narrative to exploit a first-person point of view. (pioneered by Jane Austin).

22. Practice • The evening after the ceremonial lighting of the town’s first street light, Joe Starks and his wife Janie are in bed together. When they speak to each other in black vernacular. What would you call this speech? “Well, honey, how yuhlakbein’ Mrs. Mayor?” “It’s all right Ah reckon, but don’t yuh think it keeps us in a kinda strain?” (Their Eyes 43)

23. After their conversation ends, the narrator enters and speaks about Janie in ________ discourse: ‘A feeling of coldness and fear took hold of her. She felt far away from things and lonely” (44). • Following a white space in the text, the narrator continues in _______ discourse: “Janie soon began to feel the impact of awe and envy against her sensibilities” (44).

24. Following a white space in the text, the narrator continues in ________discourse: “Janie soon began to feel the impact of awe and envy against her sensibilities” (44). But as one continues to read, the narrator’s language makes a subtle shift as Hurston begins her ________ discourse. In the following excerpt, the narrator shows how the townspeople feel about the fancy spittoon that Joe Starks bought for his wife: He bought a little lady-size spitting pot for Janie to spit in. Had it right in the parlor with little sprigs of flowers painted all around the sides. . . . It sort of made the rest of them feel that they had been taken advantage of. Like things had been kept from them. Maybe more things in the world besides spitting pots had been hid from them, when they wasn’t told no better than to spit in tomato cans. It was bad enough for white people, but when one of your own color could be so different it put you on a wonder. It was like seeing your sister turn into a ‘gator. A familiar strangeness. You keep seeing your sister in the ‘gator and the ‘gator in your sister, and you’d rather not. There was no doubt that the town respected him and even admired him in a way. But any man who walks in the way of power and property is bound to meet hate. (45)

25. The juxtaposition of language styles as evident in the excerpt of free indirect discourse given above proved irksome for many of the earlier critics. It proved difficult to accept a sentence such as “Maybe more things in the world besides spitting pots had been hid from them, when they wasn’t told no better than to spit in tomato cans” in the same paragraph with a sentence such as “But any man who walks in the way of power and property is bound to meet hate.”

26. What’s the point?

27. 1) Hurston foregrounds this style in a way that hasn’t been done before. In Hurston, there is no friction between the narrator’s perspective and Janie’s. There is no friction between the elevated diction and the dialect. 2) Free indirect discourse combines Hurston, the “talented 10th” writer and anthropologist from Barnard college, with the folk tradition represented through Janie. So she unites the “truly cultured” negro that uses words like “cloak and journey” with the language of the average negro “who use gleam as a transitive verb” and in “gleam it around.

28. What is the impact of this?

29. 1) The novel’s narrative method identifies the difference between the classes, but also embodies the love of the negro that unites both classes. • E.g. Joe and other characters place social hierarchies above true identity, but the location of identity should be racial not in class. 2) The third person narrator allows Hurston to dramatize that bond in a way that Janie can’t because she doesn’t have that heightened language. Hurston needs free indirect discourse to make her claims.

30. Tomorrow: • We’ll focus on women in the novel. Think about why Janie gets together with Logan, and Joe, and Tea Cake.