![]() ![]() As a religion which reflects the desires and aspirations of its followers, which functions as an alternate form of power for those that might otherwise feel powerless, and which privileges women’s lives in ways other religious traditions do not, Voodoo is an effective vehicle through which to explore the role and status of black women within modern African American culture. It is the adaptability of the religion and the religion’s historical and social relevance to the unique experiences of black people (especially women) upon which Hurston draws in Their Eyes Were Watching God.Įmploying voodoo as an intertext for her novel, Hurston has at hand a system of beliefs and practices replete with powerful female deities, female leaders and female adherents. Consequently, it is a religion that can be and has been adapted-through the integration of new symbolic materials-to address the changing social and political circumstances of the cultures that practice it. According to scholar of voodoo, Alfred Métraux, the religion has “no national church, no association of priesthood, no written dogma, no code, no missionization” (Métraux 13). Voodoo is a syncretization of African and European religious beliefs and practices, through which its devotees strive for personal and communal power by achieving harmony with their respective individual natures and with the world in which they live. a religion of creation and life” (Tell My Horse 376). That path is Voodoo, a religion which Hurston describes as “the old, old mysticism of the world in African terms. Through her female protagonist, Janie Crawford, Hurston critiques the status of black women and the roles available to them within American and African American cultures and she offers them an alternate frame of reference for their unique experiences within the world and an alternate path to self-determination and autonomy. More specifically, Their Eyes Were Watching God is concerned with a young black woman’s quest for self-discovery beyond the false values imposed on her by a society that allows neither women nor black people to exist naturally and freely. In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston explores the natures of black women and black men the ways in which their natures are shaped by their individual and collective experiences within American and African American cultures and how their experiences inform their self-knowledge, their connection with the world around them and their relationships with others. Close analysis of the novel reveals that voodoo imagery and symbolism is integral to the development of the predominant themes of Hurston’s second novel. However, while many scholars have explored Hurston’s interest in and study of voodoo in her ethnographical texts, such as Mules and Men (1935) and Tell My Horse (1938), only a few have explored the relationship between voodoo and Their Eyes Were Watching God. ![]() In their combined oral and written narrative, Hurston and Janie reinforce Janet Varner Gunn's theory of the autobiographer as self-reader, writing (and speaking) from the “outside in, not inside out – or in other words, from the position of the other side of lived past which the reader-self occupies” at the time of writing.Zora Neale Hurston wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God in seven weeks while she was in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, researching the country’s major voodoo gods and studying as an initiate under the tutelage of Haiti’s most well-known Voodoo hougans (priests) and mambos (priestesses). Thus, Their Eyes Were Watching God offers an opportunity to examine the autobiographical impulse from the perspectives of author Hurston, the writerly self, and fictional Janie, the speakerly self, creating a common text delineating a black female self-in-writing. First, in a continuation of one of the oldest traditions in fiction, Janie tells us the story of how and why her life came to be in the place that it is second, we also know that Hurston invested this narrative with the joy and pain of her own experiences of female development and romantic love, familiar conventions in women's narratives. Yet the novel is autobiographical on two levels. … The man she was leaving … was left hurt and confused, wondering if she was “crying on the inside.” She gave him her answer in Their Eyes Were Watching God.ĮVERYONE who knows anything about Zora Neale Hurston knows that Their Eyes Were Watching God is not her autobiography. What Zora took from this relationship was the quality of its emotion its tenderness, its intensity, and perhaps its sense of ultimate impossibility. ![]()
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