The works of Zora Neale Hurston remarked on the power of turbulent, changing forces that supported and influenced the ability of African peoples to thrive under harsh and frequently oppressive circumstances in a world dominated by European colonialist influences.
In Hurston’s works of fiction and non-fiction, new and old worlds come together and often create conflicts between male and female characters who must work hard to develop their spiritual identities and preserve cohesive communities under harsh economic, social and cultural conditions.
The Role of Hurston's Autobiography
Growing up in Eatonville, Florida as the daughter of the all-black town’s preacher, Hurston already had a personal background in the environment she would later study and transform into the setting for her best and most celebrated novel, “Their Eyes Were Watching God.” In her autobiography, “Dust Tracks on a Road,” she describes her childhood in the shadow of John Hurston, both before and after the death of her mother Lucy and his marriage to a hostile stepmother.
Hurston’s first novel, “Jonah’s Gourd Vine” revolves around a character modeled after the author’s father, whom she renames John Pearson and who marries a saintly figure with the name of Lucy also. Lucy, an eternally forgiving, Christian woman who dies after having a voodoo spell cast by one of her husband’s mistresses, takes on an eternally sanctified role in both Hurston’s work and life, modeling a strong female persona who withstands injustice and leaves her dignity and her children’s devotion behind as memorials.
Internal Spiritual Struggles
In the character John Pearson, struggles between African spirituality related to voodoo traditions and the Christian church world of the South dominate the development of his conflicted identity.
Hurston’s fascination with voodoo, which she would study in detail as practiced in the Caribbean for the book “Tell My Horse”, seems to grow from the cultural environment where she grew up.
Barbara Speisman describes Hurston as “no newcomer to the belief that voodoo was definitely a religion and an inherent part of Afro-American folklore.”
For John Pearson, the process of becoming an accomplished and popular poetic preacher oozes with conflict stemming from the differences in religious contexts in his life and, according to Anthony Wilson, the onset of modernity and the pressures it brought to bear on Pearson’s experience of spiritual community.
As Wilson states,
"John’s spirituality encounters two major disruptive forces, each emblematic of modernity’s challenges to traditional African American spirituality: first, the mingling of African religion with Lucy’s orthodox Christianity, which imposes strictures on John’s sexuality and subjectivity even as it empowers him and ‘makes him a man’; and second, the encroachment of the outside world, the enabling of travel, and the destruction of community embodied in the symbol of the train."
As the changes in John’s life take place, he constantly wavers between the man he wants to become in his relationship with Lucy, and the man that he already is, having grown up across the creek from her amid the music and rhythm of natural physicality.
Traditional Powers
The structure of the novel reveals how the language of drumming as used by slaves for communication reveals Hurston’s evocation of what Wilson calls “a link between John’s early plantation community and the spiritual community of an African tribe.”
The conflict between religions is even more clearly illuminated when later, after the couple has moved to Eatonville and while they are raising children, the infusion of Voodoo into their lives empowers a disruptive woman, Hattie Tyson, to take control over John and bring on Lucy’s sickness and death.
References
Brown, Alan. “’DeBeast’ Within: The Role of Nature in Jonah’s Gourd Vine.” In Zora in Florida. Steve Glassman and Kathryn Lee Seidel, eds. Orlando: University of Central Florida Press, 1991.
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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