As African traditions blend with the Christian context of the South, Hurston infuses her portrait of John’s and Lucy’s spiritual struggle with metaphorical images expressed in symbolic events taken from the bible.
Religious Symbolism
In addition to the biblical symbolism in the title, John’s killing of a snake at the beginning of his courtship of Lucy has ambiguous connotations. Not only does it recollect the evil snake from the Garden of Eden, but also the powerful and admired snake deities depicted in Voodoo.
As Barbara Speisman observes, the Voodoo interpretation of the snake symbol, even as the mischievous animal contained in biblical stories, differs greatly from the traditional Christian interpretation: “Moses’ rod, in voodoo belief, turned into a snake, which meant that Moses was the greatest hoodoo man of all time” (88).
Sexual Symbolism
Aside from the phallic symbolism of Moses’ rod, the positive image of the snake in voodoo complicates John’s act of killing the snake for Lucy. When he kills the snake, he doesn’t actually kill, but merely suppresses his instinctual sexual energy, part of himself that continues to haunt him long after he has won Lucy as his wife.
John cannot extricate his need for promiscuity from his concept of himself as a man, and yet in order to fit comfortably in the image of a man expected of him by Lucy and her world, he must continually renounce that need and fight with it, even until his last breath when the winding snake of a railroad train takes his life (Speisman, 90).
Train as 'Beast'
A. Wilson further supports the idea of a link between the symbolism of the snake and that of the train, stating that:
"the music of the train becomes the music of ‘The Beast’… the train comes to signify John’s newly demonized physical self, the aspect of his being that he cannot reconcile with the language-driven religion that Lucy represents – the natural physicality that, morally exiled from John’s language based spirituality, becomes transformed into adulterous urges and destructive carnality” (2).
As one type of beast that is threatening for Lucy, the snake that John kills at the beginning of the story does not die immediately, just as the beast within the man cannot die until he himself does. In the creek, John “snatched the foot-log from its place and, leaning far back to give it purchase, he rammed it home upon the big snake and held it there. The snake bit at the log again and again in its agony, but finally the biting and the thrashing ceased” (34).
Hurston evokes the connection between John’s spirit and the snake most skillfully, as her description of the man’s death echoes that of the snake’s death, set off in its own small paragraph: “The engine struck the car squarely and hurled it about like a toy. John was thrown out and lay perfectly still. Only his foot twitched a little” (200). The twitching of John’s foot resembles the final “biting and thrashing” of the snake, both brought on by a macabre involuntary energy that speaks to the world of the determination for survival of all living things, even against all odds and when all hope is lost.
Cultures Collide
Thusly, religious customs that come from Africa insist on perpetual survival as well, despite all forces to the contrary, which in this case are embodied by a traditional Christian and European-centered society that has dominated African peoples and their cultures with the impact of a deadly collision for centuries.
References:
Hurston, Zora Neale. Jonah’s Gourd Vine. New York: Harper and Row Publishers, Inc., 1934.
Speisman, Barbara. “Voodoo as Symbol in Jonah’s Gourd Vine.” In Zora in Florida. Steve Glassman and Kathryn Lee Seidel, eds. Orlando: University of Central Florida Press, 1991.
Wilson, Anthony. “The Music of God, Man, and Beast: Spirituality and Modernity in Jonah’s Gourd Vine.” Southern Literary Journal. 35.2 (2003): 64-79.
Elizabeth Herman - Elizabeth Herman (Betsy) recently completed a doctorate in Rhetoric and Composition. Her dissertation research investigated possible ...
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