Hurston isn’t an author who is attempting to cater to a white audience in this novel. As a woman who grew up in the town she features in her novel and who studied the vernacular and oral traditions of people she writes about. Her story mimics the type of oral folktales that I myself grew up with. The type of comedic interactions in between people are very reminiscent of interactions between Brer Possum and Brer Rabbit, Little Eight John and his mother and many other people in stories that have been passed down. The comedy seems to me to be a tool to connect with what may be familiar to a lot of black readers and it seems that this is a work of familiarity and love rather than one of mocking.
Friday, November 4, 2016
Laughter or Love
Richard Wright’s critique of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God is centered around the fact that Hurston’s characters and method of telling a story could be a continuation of minstrelsy. I understand that Wright sees the comedic dialogue between townspeople as something playing on stereotypes of southern black people just to entertain a white audience. Similarly, the concept of the happy field worker, which is seen in Hurston’s depiction of life in the Everglades, is a trope found often throughout the history of minstrel shows. For Wright to see her work through this lense makes sense, especially because as a protest writer, Wright was very concerned with his audience and their perception of his characters. However, I don’t think that this criticism is applicable to Their Eyes Were Watching God.
Hurston isn’t an author who is attempting to cater to a white audience in this novel. As a woman who grew up in the town she features in her novel and who studied the vernacular and oral traditions of people she writes about. Her story mimics the type of oral folktales that I myself grew up with. The type of comedic interactions in between people are very reminiscent of interactions between Brer Possum and Brer Rabbit, Little Eight John and his mother and many other people in stories that have been passed down. The comedy seems to me to be a tool to connect with what may be familiar to a lot of black readers and it seems that this is a work of familiarity and love rather than one of mocking.
Hurston isn’t an author who is attempting to cater to a white audience in this novel. As a woman who grew up in the town she features in her novel and who studied the vernacular and oral traditions of people she writes about. Her story mimics the type of oral folktales that I myself grew up with. The type of comedic interactions in between people are very reminiscent of interactions between Brer Possum and Brer Rabbit, Little Eight John and his mother and many other people in stories that have been passed down. The comedy seems to me to be a tool to connect with what may be familiar to a lot of black readers and it seems that this is a work of familiarity and love rather than one of mocking.
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I agree with your interpretation. It think that if anything, Hurston is almost separating the culture she is describing from minstrelsy. Minstrelsy is based on the culture, not the other way around, so she is calling attention to the original inspiration for the minstrel dances as a way to define the difference between the minstrel shows and the culture they are based upon.
ReplyDeleteWhile I do think that Wright's critique falters due to the fact that Hurston can choose to write about whatever she wants, I still think that we must give Wright credit in his criticism of Hurston's novel supporting the racist beliefs of white supremacists during the time. Even if Hurston had no intention of pandering to white audiences and simply wanted to provide a genuine depiction of the beauty of black life, we must take into consideration the effect that her scenes had on the biased white readers during the time. It is likely that several white supremacists of the time used Hurston's realistic depiction of Janie and Tea Cake's lives as fuel to establish a gap between white life and the supposedly simplistic lives of black people, arguing that the scenes Hurston writes in her novel only further their claims of superiority. From an outsider's perspective, it may seem logical to think that since Hurston wrote truthfully about black life, her novel did nothing to influence racism and misconceptions of black life. However, if we take into account the biased perspectives of so many white readers during the time, we can see that this isn't the case, and Hurston's writing did have an impact on white readers, albeit inadvertently, by supporting their claims of superiority and false presumptions about the simplicity of black life.
ReplyDeleteDo you think on any lower levels that Hurston might be showing a white audience that African Americans are indeed able to efficiently create and run their own town without the help of whites? If they can do this well in a black community they could also perform political roles in a white community. Do you believe this book is written for a certain racial audience or can we see it as a oral history put on paper of a culturally rich time period for all?
ReplyDeleteMaybe Zora is protesting not catering to a white audience as Richard Wright and other black authors expect. While I believe novels like Wright's are important, I think Zora's is equally significant. I mentioned this in class, but she is showing that she is a person who wants to tell her story, like white authors would be allowed to without complaint. I think she recognizes that it is not necessarily her responsibility to change the mindset of her readers (and also may have found that it is a difficult task). I wonder how much she considered how people would interpret her work.
ReplyDeleteOne way to think about Hurston's projected audience would be to look at her representation of dialect, which doesn't cater to a reader unfamiliar with the culture and language being depicted. As we talked about in class, most readers have to learn the language of this text, and we acclimate to Hurston's depictions of speech as we read (as the free-indirect-discourse narrator also seems to be learning this language, and integrating it into her narration). The "outside" reader is welcome to immerse herself in this culture, but there isn't the sense of the author presenting it in a way that makes it easy to do so. The people in Eatonville aren't "performing" for a white reader, either within the narrative itself (their "audience" is citizens of Eatonville) or in the novel more generally. We laugh with them, not at them. (And this seems like a significant departure from the minstrel dynamic, to me.)
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