An independent voice to (re)member : the importance of self-revelation and recreation in Zora Neale Hurston's rhetorical strategies

Abstract

"This is what black feminism is all about; articulating ourselves, our needs and our resistances as women, and as women within our particular environments. We don't exist in abstract." Black women's writing seeks to move beyond boundaries, which are erected to impede movement, activity and self-articulation of the female identity. These restrictions curtail the necessary growth of womanhood, and interfere with the realization of freedom and expression. Zora Neale Hurston was a woman ahead of her time who had a great impact on history and left her imprint in the field of African American studies due to her insightful perceptions on human behaviour, her rich use of metaphor and imagery, and her dynamic personality. My aim in this thesis is to explore how Hurston manages to create new literary forms of portraying black cultural identity in her texts. I will attempt to show the manipulative strategies employed by Hurston to affirm blackness in a black-denying society, and to trace the emergence of the female voice in a community, which denies female expression, creation and self discovery. In order to establish Hurston as an artistic creator, I shall firstly attempt to analyze the oppressed and divided consciousness of black females who are daily confronted with a society full of institutionalized and violent hatred for both their black skins and their female bodies. I will refer to Hurston' s social settings, influences and beliefs which moulded her narrative style, and give importance to the ways in which she explores the quest for identity, femaleness and voice in her novels Seraph on the Suwanee, Sweat and Their Eyes Were Watching God. I shall also attempt to elucidate how rather than why, she manages to reconcile the voiceless past and slavery of Afro-American women, to her narrative strategies, as best portrayed in her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. As Daisy Cocco de Filippis shows in her poem, in the preface of this chapter, women seem to crave for voice and self-expression in a world of corruption and illusions "which is lit by creation's saddest light." They are deceived by the dominant culture, which drives them away from self-love and traps them in the sterile prison of the "useless word." The female existence is nullified because she is deprived of change, knowledge and experience, and is stripped of any opportunity for self-definition. She is left empty, "naked" and vulnerable to her savage environment, which only allows the presence of a "weeping voice" in a submissive absence. Women become brainwashed victims of a warped and manipulated "truth," which veils their reality, and enslaves them to their dreams and ideals. However, it seems that Hurston attempted to re-define this ruthless past through memory and self-articulation, by giving a purpose to female aloneness and fragmentation, and, by transforming self-hatred into self-respect, which instills strength, growth and understanding within the feminine consciousness.