Tag: Zora Neale Hurston

Book Review: Seraph on the Suwanee, by Zora Neale Hurston

“Putting food on the table” is what both husbands and wives do. In traditional marriages, however, the husband does it figuratively while the wife does it literally. The separateness of these two modes of devotion leads both husbands and wives to feel that they are laboring alone, and both grow resentful.

In Seraph on the Suwanee, the husband, Jim Meserve, makes clear from the outset that his view of marriage is not as an equal partnership. As he conveys “in so many words” to wife-to-be Arvay Henson, “‘Love and marry me and sleep with me. That is all I need you for. Your brains are not sufficient to help me with my work; you can’t think with me. Let’s get this thing straight in the beginning.’” (p. 35) Indeed, Jim’s idea of connubial sex is quite explicit: “‘Sure you was raped, and that ain’t all. You’re going to keep on getting raped.’” (p. 57)

As Arvay is Seraph’s protagonist, the course of her resentment at this type of marriage forms the main thread of the narrative. What’s surprising – or perhaps unsurprising, given a grasp of human nature in all its irony – is how much Jim resents it too:

‘I feel and believe that you do love me, Arvay, but I don’t want that stand-still, hap-hazard kind of love. I’m just as hungry as a dog for a knowing and a doing love. You love like a coward. Don’t take no steps at all. Just stand around and hope for things to happen out right. Unthankful and unknowing like a hog under an accord tree. Eating and grunting with your ears hanging over your eyes, and never even looking up to see where the acorns are coming from. What satisfaction can I get out of that kind of love, Arvay?’ (p. 262)

Adding complexity to this story of resentment is its symbolism, with the “cracker” Arvay representing the Old South and the hustling Jim standing for the New. Perhaps the former, sullen and parochial, can only be dragged forward by the latter, enterprising and propulsive; and perhaps this dragging does not allow for much collaboration or consultation. It’s certainly ironic that a progressive development  – the modernization of the South – should be depicted here in the context of an unprogressive marriage: Arvay finds her liberation in submission, and if any beneficial readjustment of marriage roles takes place, then I must have missed it. It may be that Hurston prizes the social and economic improvement of the South over the raising of the status of women…

…or maybe her point is that the South hasn’t quite changed enough. Otherwise, it’s very strange for Hurston to have painted Jim as such a know-it-all of a husband, only to admit in the end that hubby really does know best.

Book Review: Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston

This book is a story of paradise lost and regained. Janie grows up with a mixed set of playmates, innocent of the awareness of race, including her own. At the first sign of sexual consciousness, Janie is banished by her grandmother into the “protection” of an arranged marriage akin to slavery. This first husband intends to employ her like a donkey before the plow; Janie soon escapes into a second marriage, to a man whose prejudice against women – “Somebody got to think for women and chillun and chickens and cows,” he says (p. 71) – makes her a mere fixture in his store. Then, she tries her luck with a third man and is finally treated as an equal.

Along the way, Janie experiences, and Hurston delineates, a series of razor-sharp truths, such as:

She had found a jewel down inside herself and she had wanted to walk where people could see her and gleam it around. But she had been set in the market-place to sell. Been set for still-bait. When God had made The Man, he made him out of stuff that sung all the time and glittered all over. Then after that some angels got jealous and chopped him into millions of pieces, but still he glittered and hummed. So they beat him down to nothing but sparks but each little spark had a shine and a song. So they covered each one over with mud. And the lonesomeness in the sparks made them hunt for one another, but the mud is deaf and dumb. Like all the other tumbling mud-balls, Janie had tried to show her shine. (p. 90)

On the subject of God, or at least gods:

All gods who receive homage are cruel. All gods dispense suffering without reason. Otherwise they would not be worshipped. Through indiscriminate suffering men know fear and fear is the most divine emotion. It is the stones for altars and the beginning of wisdom. Half gods are worshipped in wine and flowers. Real gods require blood. (p. 145)

And whether or not God is love, Hurston includes a few specimens of the latter – “She hated the old woman who had twisted her so in the name of love.” (p. 89) and “Janie looked down on him and felt a self-crushing love” (p. 128) – that put me in mind of the love on display in Magda Szabó’s The Door, which I recently reviewed.

Hurston’s likening of the freedom or slavery of life to a “horizon” (p. 89) is resonating.

My favorite spoken line is “Dis town is full uh trouble and compellment.” (p. 172)

My favorite name is Stew Beef.

“Say, whut y’all doin’ in heah?”

“Eatin’,” Stew Beef told him. “Dey got beef stew, so you know Ah’d be heah.” (p. 149)