Remembered Rapture

by bell hooks

  Zora Neale Hurston could easily have become a renowned oral storyteller; she chose writing. Their Eyes Were Watching God celebrates storytelling as imaginative work that can serve as the foundation for the development of a written story. It is this fictive art form (oral storytelling in the African-American folk tradition) that most influenced Hurston’s work. Hence the importance of her fictive opposition to black male domination, which precludes female participation in oral storytelling. This critique implies that denying black women access to a mode of artistic expression that is so fundamental a ritual of daily life is an exclusionary practice that eliminates any possibility that females can develop their imaginative skills.

  Suppression of female imagination does not begin in Their Eyes Were Watching God with male domination. Hurston links the realm of fantasy and imagination to the experience of eros (desire) and sexual awakening. At sixteen Janie’s ecological communion with a pollinating pear tree stirs her senses, simultaneously stimulating a desire for knowledge. Intuitively experiencing an erotic metaphysic wherein she witnesses the unity of all life, Janie confronts her ignorance, the absence of an ontological framework that could serve as a basis for the construction of autonomous self and identity. Acknowledging her longing to “struggle with life” she is eager to follow intuition, to become a seeker on the path of self-realization. These longings and her unrepressed imagination are stifled by her grandmother, whose vision of life has been overtly determined by racist and sexist politics of domination. Using a popular folktale (one Hurston did not create) Janie’s grandmother explains the way the convergence of race, class, and gender domination shape the social circumstance of black women. A political commentary that concludes with the statement “De nigger woman is de mule uh de world.” Materialist to her core, Janie’s grandmother confronts the harsh reality of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy and strategically defines the terms of her survival, working within the existing structure. It is this nonoppositional legacy she shares with Janie, forcing her to adopt a similar survival strategy. Her imaginative exploration of the meaning of existence and her sexuality are all suppressed in the interest of material survival.

  Unable to envision new paradigms for black womanhood, Janie conforms. Her marriage to a “good provider” ensures material survival even as it requires sexual and emotional repression. Yet Janie’s erotic imagination is never completely submerged. Throughout the novel Hurston toys with the idea that eros can be a catalyst for self-discovery and transformation, that repression of this inner power leads to acquiescence, submission, domination. It is the convergence of power and desire that informs Janie’s relationships to men. Given her race, class, and gender it is only through an involvement with a male that she can hope to change her circumstance. Hurston assumes that it is a natural outcome of patriarchal socialization that female imagination is most expressed initially within the realm of romantic fantasy. She evokes the “feminine ideal” only to show how it leads to the subjugation and subordination of the “desired” female. Janie is never completely taken in or corrupted by idealized notions of femininity. Though she outwardly conforms, inwardly she resists. Hurston portrays this contradiction sympathetically, though she is more scathing in her fictive social commentary on masculinity.

  Men, Hurston suggests, are psychologically unable to be existentially self-reflective about masculinity. In Their Eyes Were Watching God, masculinity is seldom celebrated and often mocked. Hurston’s focus on Janie’s men is not male-identified, for she exposes and unmasks. Again, there are correlations between her strategy and the literary tactics Woolf employs in A Room of One’s Own. In both works the characterization of men is double-edged and ironic. Hurston’s portrait of Joe Starks is initially flattering, becoming progressively negative as his character unfolds. Despite social superiority, men in Their Eyes Were Watching God look good from afar; close-up their flaws and failings surface. They are preoccupied with representation, obsessed with appearances. Janie hardly notices her long hair and never focuses on physical beauty. She is attracted to men who behave in a manner that appeals. Ultimately, Hurston’s fictional portrayals suggest that men lack substance.

  All of Janie’s loves—Logan Killicks, Joe Starks, and Tea Cake—are insanely egotistical. Each man suffers because he is unable to make full empathic connection with the world and people around him. On his deathbed, Joe is confronted with Janie’s critical assessment of this failing. She tells him, “You was so busy worshippin’ de works of yo’ own hands, and cuffin’ folks around in their minds till you didn’t see uh whole heap up things yuh could have.” Tea Cake’s egotism leads him to ignore the signs and warnings that indicate a hurricane is coming. Risking his life and Janie’s, he places himself above God and nature. A similar concern with image and masculine ego is evoked in the scene where Tea Cake hits Janie to prove to other men that she is “his” woman.

  Feminist readers are usually disturbed by what appears to be Hurston’s uncritical acceptance of male physical violence against women, overlooking the way in which the novel portrays violence as an integral part of the black folklife. The first person who slaps Janie is her grandmother. Tea Cake and Janie first struggle physically when she attacks him. Significantly, in the passage describing this conflict initial emphasis is placed on Tea Cake’s efforts to talk with Janie. Her response is to “cut him short with a blow.” Although their fighting ends in lovemaking, this is not a scenario advocating physical abuse of women—Janie is not represented as a victim of domination. Tea Cake restrains her to “keep her from going too far,” suggesting she has the power to hurt him. Hurston was quite familiar with “shoot and cut” relationships where black women physically attacked and killed black men. She did not see black women within the communities of her growing up as passive victims of male abuse. Her uncritical acceptance of violence as a “natural” outcome of conflict should form the basis of feminist critique. There is a distinctly different tone in the novel when Hurston portrays Joe Starks’s slapping Janie to maintain coercive male domination and Tea Cake’s slaps. Starks’s brutality is underscored. Tea Cake appears vulnerable, pathetic, and ridiculous. Hurston is critical of the circumstances and reasons why men are violent towards women. She calls attention to the way in which male notions of female inferiority must be continually reaffirmed by active aggression, thereby challenging notions of innate difference that would support the claim of male superiority.

  Indeed, Hurston’s characterizations of males and females often suggest that women are possibly the superior gender. Janie intervenes in male conversation to challenge the notion of male superiority. Claiming to be on intimate terms with God (who is constantly evoked as a power stronger than men), she asserts, “He tole me how surprised He was ’bout y’all turning out so smart after Him makin’ yuh different.” Divine presence magnified in nature is evoked by Hurston as part of her questioning of sexist defined roles. Using her fiction to denounce expressions of masculinity associated with coercive domination, she challenges the accepted belief that the male who is best able to provide material possessions is the most desirable companion. New paradigms for heterosexual bonding are suggested via the characterization of Tea Cake, in many ways an antimasculinist man with no desire to dominate others. Even though he has sexist attitudes, they are not the basis of his relationship with Janie. From the onset of their romantic bonding, Tea Cake introduces a model of heterosexual bonding based on reciprocity and mutuality. Susan Willis identifies the subversive nature of their relationship:

  Since possession and objectification do not define the dynamic of their union, Tea Cake and Janie are free to devote their energy and attention to maintaining reciprocity. When, at their first meeting, Tea Cake teaches Janie to play checkers, he sets the terms of their relationship in which all endeavor will be defined as sport and shared equality. Heterosexuality is neither a basis for power nor a reason for submission, but a mode in which a man and a woman might equally participate.

  Tea Cake’s altern
ative masculinity is linked to a repudiation of materialist values. Sustaining a nonexploitative relationship to nature, radical disengagement from a market economy, he is not alienated from a realm of expressive feelings and emotions, usually associated with children and women. Tea Cake values “play.” He is able to express a wide range of emotions, to be empathic. Sharing his intuitive trust in the power of feelings and his belief that the desire to experience pleasure can be the organizing principle of daily life, he is able to help Janie recover the “feeling” self she has long repressed.

  Through a shared eros, Janie reconnects with the passionate part of her being experienced in her adolescence. Through this reconnection she is able to heal her wounded psyche—to be born again. Recognizing the gift Tea Cake has given her, she affirms their bonding as they face the possibility of death: “If you kin see de light at daybreak, you don’t keer if you die at dusk. It’s so many people never see de light at all. Ah uz fumblin’ round and God opened de door.” More than an affirmation of her love for Tea Cake, this statement reveals Janie’s belief in a divine force made manifest in human relations. The “light” here is not romantic love, it is spiritual awareness—vision, insight. Experiencing mutual romantic love has been a means for Janie to know divine love, to return to that erotic metaphysic expressed in her girlhood. Connecting with Tea Cake, she experiences anew the unity of all life. Returning to an uncorrupted natural environment—“the muck”—she learns to live in harmony with nature, with a multiethnic diverse community of people. In this world of unrepressed emotions she learns to sing and dance, to tell stories. Tea Cake nurtures Janie’s growth, assuming a maternal role, yet another aspect of his alternative masculinity.

  Hurston does not sustain the portrait of Tea Cake as symbol of oppositional, reconstructed, potentially feminist masculinity. His radical transgression of gender norms is undermined by sexist attitudes and behavior surfacing whenever he feels jealousy. During these times Tea Cake is obsessed by the desire to show others that he “possesses” Janie. Just as jealousy prompts his slapping her, it leads him to attack her when he is sick. After Tea Cake battles the mad dog, he completely reverts to a sexist masculine posture. Confiding in Janie the belief that his rescue of her affirms his masculinity, he asserts: “Ah want yuh tuh know it’s uh man heah.” Just as Janie has been a divided soul, passively submitting to sexist, defined female roles while alternately rebelling against those roles, Tea Cake both embraces and rejects aspects of traditional masculinity. His inability to disengage fully from sexist norms undermines the transformative power of feminist aspects of their heterosexual bonding. Attacking Janie, Tea Cake employs violent rhetoric similar to the verbal assaults of Janie’s previous husbands, Logan Killicks and Joe Starks. Commanding her to “answer me when ah speak,” Tea Cake assumes a dominating, threatening stance.

  Ironically, Janie can effectively oppose the reinscription of a life-threatening male domination by using skills Tea Cake helped her to acquire. Their life-and-death confrontation is the ultimate test of her newly found self-regard. If she had become a whole person through loving and sharing life with Tea Cake, a person capable of autonomous individuation, she must shatter the illusion that “Tea Cake wouldn’t hurt her”—facing reality. Acknowledging conflicting identities, the courageous self within “fighting for its life” and the “sacrificing self,” Janie confidently chooses. No longer victimized by passivity and fearful inability to exercise autonomous resistance in the face of male domination, she reveals a decisive mindset. It is this climactic moment in the novel more so than any act of storytelling that indicates that Janie has constructed an autonomous self.

  Janie’s killing of Tea Cake subverts traditional notions of romantic love, which encourage female masochism; she is not willing to die for love. Earlier in the novel Janie has called attention to distortions and perversions in relationships enacted in the name of love, sharing her insight that “most humans didn’t love one another.” Hurston offers a different version of romantic love, one that repudiates female masochism. Though the two lovers initially experience a temporary loss of ego boundaries—Janie describes her feelings as “a self-crushing love” and Tea Cake expresses the depth of his surrender by declaring that she has “got de keys tuh de kingdom”—mutual growth and sharing leads to enhanced individuation. Despite Tea Cake’s jealous fear that he will lose Janie, he encourages her to be self-sufficient. Though longing to assume the role of protector, he understands that she must learn to protect herself. At times both lovers don the mantle of androgyny, displaying characteristics commonly associated with the opposite sex. In an uncorrupted world of gender relations, Tea Cake can be a nurturer, can express vulnerability and fear; Janie can work and shoot like a man, she can even dress like a man. Through most of the novel, Janie’s long hair is her distinguishing feature, the mark of her idealized femininity. On the muck it is no longer an important signifier. Their androgyny is represented as a utopian ideal.

  A central idea in Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own is the assertion that great writing is created by an androgynous mind, that women and men must be able to transcend limited sex roles if the imagination, the source of a writer’s power, is to have full expressive range. Woolf emphasizes that writers must be able to travel, to fully explore and experience life, stressing the way the female imagination suffers because women lack complete freedom of movement. In Their Eyes Were Watching God Janie longs to travel, to move freely. Her passionate desire to “journey to the horizon,” to transcend boundaries, to be an adventurer is a repudiation of the traditional female role. Hurston’s fictive characterization of the ease with which Janie flaunts convention, leaving marriage and comfortable material circumstances, having a love affair with a younger man, were daring authorial gestures for her time. Sensibly, Hurston does not suggest that Janie can wander alone; that would have given the novel less credibility. Witnessing Janie’s various attempts to conform to societal norms, the containment and repression of her passionate adventurous nature, readers in the 1930s could sympathize with her plight and applaud her rebellion.

  Hurston seizes every opportunity to reiterate the conviction that transgressive behavior that promotes and encourages self-exploration is essential for the development of an artistic sensibility. Critically reflecting about her past when Joe Starks dies, Janie laments the loss of intense creative impulses. Recalling her intuitive awareness of the importance of creativity in girlhood, she remembers thinking “she had found a jewel down inside herself.” Then Janie saw herself as gifted. Falling in love with another gifted person, Tea Cake, she regains the power to imagine, to dream, to create. Bohemian in style, Tea Cake is both musician and composer. Art is an integral part of daily life, never separate or fetishized. Burying him with a new guitar, Janie imagines he resides in a realm beyond death, “thinking of new songs to play to her.” Writing Their Eyes Were Watching God at a time in life when she was struggling with the issue of commitment to art and fidelity to romantic relationships, Hurston could not have made Janie a writer, for the novel would have seemed too much like autobiography. Even so, Janie is not an artist without an art form. She consciously approaches life as though it were a creative project, making no separation between life and art. In her life with Tea Cake, storytelling becomes the medium for the expression of her creativity. Like Tea Cake’s music it is represented as a part of the dailiness of life.

  Significantly, when Janie tells her story to Pheoby, it is as though she is painting a portrait. This story begins with uncertainty about representation. Janie cannot recognize her own image. Defined and named by others in childhood, Alphabet (as Janie is called then) cannot know or name herself. Ultimately her triumph in womanhood is that she acquires the ability to name and define her reality. Choosing to return to the house she owns, and the community she knows, after Tea Cake’s death, Janie acknowledges that the muck was really his place. Bringing with her seeds to plant, a memento of her life with Tea Cake, a symbol of her love, she plants to nurtu
re new life. Janie returns to her old community with new vision and insight. She is able to see the folks around her through the eyes of awareness. Self-realized, she need not experience interiority as confinement nor the outside world as threatening.

  The courtroom scene was a crucial rite of passage for Janie. Just as she must privately prove that she has claimed her life by killing Tea Cake, she must be able to discursively defend her actions in public space. Publicly naming the radical subversive nature of her life and love with Tea Cake, Janie again risks her life. In the courtroom she is the ultimate outsider. Cut off by a blaming, unsupportive black community, she must confront a jury of “strange” white men. Janie stands alone. At the end of the trial Hurston incorporates a popular folk expression which claims that “Uh white man and uh nigger woman is de freest thing on earth” as an ironic gesture, highlighting all that Janie endures and suffers to be free. Of course the black men sharing this sentiment fail to understand her experience. Janie can survive the courtroom scene and Tea Cake’s death because she has acquired an ontological framework on which to base the construction of self and identity. She can both speak the truth and live the truth of her experience. Sharing with Pheoby the importance of experience she bears witness:

  ’Course talkin’ don’t amount tuh uh hill uh beans when yuh can’t do nothing else. And listenin’ tuh dat kind uh talk is jus’ lak openin’ yo mouth and lettin’ de moon shine down yo’ throat. It’s uh known fact, Pheoby, yo got tuh go there. Yo’ papa and yo’ mama and nobody else can’t tell yuh and show yuh. Two things everybody’s tuh do fuh theyselves. They got tuh go tuh God, and they got tuh find out about livin’ fuh theyselves.

  Heterosexual bonding with Tea Cake enables Janie to fulfill her longing for romantic love and her quest for self-realization. Without embarrassment, Hurston suggests that poor black women victimized by gender discrimination must learn from men. She then suggests that having acquired necessary knowledge and skill, women can not only survive without men; we can flourish. The ending of Their Eyes Were Watching God would be problematic if Janie had returned home depressed and isolated. Though weary from her journey, she returns and reunites with her friend Pheoby. Mutually nourishing each other, Pheoby gives Janie food for the body and she gives her sustenance for the soul. When Pheoby tells Janie, “Ah done growed ten feet higher jus listenin’ tuh you,” the primacy of female bonding based on sharing knowledge is affirmed. Janie’s quest for experience and knowledge does not lead her to abandon Pheoby. Hence just as Hurston rewrites the script of heterosexual romantic love, she insists that women need not be rivals as sexist norms suggest; instead, they can share power, reinforcing one another’s autonomy. Janie shares her newfound “ideology of liberation” so that it can also have a transformative impact on Pheoby’s life. Offered a new paradigm for heterosexual bonding, Pheoby can evaluate her life with Sam and suggest a new direction. Janie’s power lies both in the ability to tell her story and the didactic impact of that telling.