American Modernism

Has modernness any relevance to the southmost of the world? Black people have always joined together in order to create and maintain positive definitions of Blacks. The most important and jet form of this racial union has been African-American folk goal the musical, oral, and visual artistic expressions of Black identity t get into have been handed d feature from generation to generation. The Harlem Renaissance, whose spirit Hurstons work reflects, was a manifestation of this bonding, although it had many false revolutionaries and failed in some respects to realize its radical potential.The modernist blackened writers who arose in the first leash decades of the twentieth century introduced a new stereotype into American literature. Zora Neale Hurston wrote as a Black cleaning woman about her own experiences and therefore, in some way, spoke to the general Black female experience in America. Hurstons novel Their eyeball Were Watching graven image (1937) offers an excellent so urce for demonstrating the modern Black female literary tradition. A large and chief part of Hurstons career took place during the Harlem Renaissance, which began in the twenties while she was attending Howard.Hurstons best work, especially her novel Their eyeball Were Watching God, is the product of a Black female folk aesthetic and heathenish sensibility that emerged from the best revolutionary ideals of the period. It also anticipates the comparable renaissance in black womens literature. Despite, or perhaps because of, these achievements, Hurston, like many Black women writers, has suffered smart lynching at the hands of white and Black men and white women (Brigham 23).Their Eyes Were Watching God appeared at the tail end of what is termed in American literature as the American Modernism. Roughly surrounded by 1917 the end of World War I and the 1930 stock market crash that marked the beginning of the large(p) Depression, throngs of southern African Americans migrated nor th -a migration that technically began as early as 1910 primarily to the northeast for economic and amicable reasons, escaping much overt and often rough manifestations of tensed black-white race relations.A time when the Negro was in vogue, this was a time of ethnic celebration of blackness black visual arts, black music, black k todaying thought, black performing arts, and black identity (Hemenway 34). Leading voices of the Harlem Renaissance challenged black authors and artists to define African American life beyond the prescribed boundaries of stereotype and caricature, sentimentality, and social assimilation. Arguably a movement among intellectuals, the Harlem Renaissance proved spiritually and aesthetically liberating for African Americans and established global connections with an African past.Hurstons accent on rural common folk of the south both challenged and continued some of the essential tenants of the Harlem Renaissance national and global community, self-determ ination, and race p movement. The most concentrated place of this cultural blowup was Harlem (New York). Published in 1937, Hurston most famous novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, was non immediately famous. In fact, the novel was largely mistreated and greatly criticized by her black male contemporaries, because it allegedly presents blacks in stereotypical ways that white readers enjoyed and encouraged of black writers.This criticism was grumpyly harsh from those who thought that Hurston should be writing more overtly protest pieces about whites as blacks enemies. While Hurston does not center well-nigh white people in the novel, their Jim Crow presence is apparent from the rise through the closing pages. The novel was not printed some thirty years after its initial publication. In 1971, it was reprinted but again was not printed by 1975. In 1977, Hurstons novel was on the top of reading lists among American colleges and universities and continues that even today (Kenner 234) .Their Eyes Were Watching God is the story of Janie, a black woman of mulatto ancestry, in search of spiritual liberation from patriarchal control. The format of the book is Janies telling of her own story in her own voice as she remembers the details of her own life. As the narrator, Janie has an authority that even the readers cannot challenge when they want details, particularly technical details, that Janie does not remember or choose to share.While Janies story is on many levels sexuality and racially related -readers never forget that Janies grandmother was a slave or that the characters are living during Jim Crow segregation in the period of the mid-thirties and 1940s much of Janies social relations within the community of black people is gender specific. Her plot is mainly based on others opinions of how a woman should live, what a woman and especially a woman her age should and should not be doing. Moreover, Janie in the narration is one of a person who is able to self-d efine and to draw restricted boundaries ultimately through communal storytelling rituals (Lemke 90).One of the new ways in which Hurston demonstrated alternative ways of writing is that she often collapsed the boundaries between fact and fiction. The cultural and contextual situatedness of Their Eyes Were Watching God reflect a Black womans interpretation of social reality in the thought in which the real world is constituted, in terms of personal and cultural experience, is likely to be at variance with the interpretation of these notions by Euro-American males.Central to appreciating Zora Neale Hurstons genius, versatility, and identity politics is knowing the ways in which she often stepped over disciplinary boundaries in her practice of anthropology, intermixing social science with the humanities so many years in advance of what we now call postmodernist practices within anthropology. Hurstons lifelong concern with the self and its limitations (those imposed from without and from within) is, of course, the natural, perhaps even the proper subject of an autobiography. In Their Eyes Were Watching God, the narrator observes that Pheoby is eager to tone of voice and do through Janie and Janie is full of that oldest human longing -self-revelation (18). Pondrom claims that the adoption of myth as a principle of meaning and order is Hurstons most important tie beam to modernism (1986201). For Pondrom, Hurstons utilization of myth links her to the modernist writers approaches of Eliot, Yeats, Joyce, Pound, and Crane. Pondrom writes that Hurstons mythic method links her even more powerfully to the great female modernists, who found myth a means to certification of the self rather than simply a stay against disorder.For Pondrom, Hurston takes a place among H. D. , Stein, and Wolff in a current now mid-1980s universe recognized as perfect to the modernist movement (202). Pondrom discusses overlaps between Their Eyes and Babylonian, Greek, and Egyptian mythol ogies. In Their Eyes Were Watching God, she writes how anyone is drawn on stage in the cross-gender verbal jousting The girls and everybody else help laugh. They know its not courtship. Its acting-out courtship and everybody is in the play.The three girls hold the center of the stage till Daisy Blunt came walking down the stree diagramt in the moonlight. Showing the proximity of entering and recuperation images in Hurstons diasporic underground, the African rhythm infuses the dramatic scene Daisy is walking a drum tune. You can almost hear it by looking at the way she walks (1995229). Janies experiences in Their Eyes Were Watching God take place in relation to Hurstons deepening appreciation of the ordering potential of black coating and its West African underpinnings.Her juxtaposition of sunrise/set images and the chaotic and cosmopolitan experiences of modernity recalls accounts of Yoruba mythology cited early in the twentieth century from divination priests in Badan, Nigeria. In The Religion of the Yoruba Leo Frobenius records a myth invoking this structure Long, long ago, when everything was in confusion and young and old died, Olodu-mare (God) summoned Edshu-ogbe and said Create order in the parting of the sunrise. To Oyako-Medyi Create order in the region of the sunset. Next morning Edshu-ogbe created order in the east and in the evening Oyako-Medyi created order in the west.(197318889) From the external correlatives of some(prenominal) scenes to her explicit invocation of Esu/Elegba, in Their Eyes Were Watching God Hurstons points of reference for Janies emerging consciousness are markedly West African. In ways that reflect the yarns recorded by Frobenius, Hurston uses sunrise and sunset descriptions as a changeable and timeless witness to chaotic developments in the plot of the novel. After Janies initial environ through Eatonville creates a swirl of envy, Phoeby enters through the intimate gate with her heaping plate of mulatto rice (19951 76).As Janie reflects on her experience and prepares to tell her tale, Hurstons sunset provides the backdrop the varicolored blur dust that the sun had stirred up in the sky was settling by slow degrees (178). When Janie tells Phoeby about living under Nannys and Logan Killickss control, Hurston uses the deepening night to emphasise the danger in the tale and the telling the kissing darkness became a monstropolous old thing and Janie saw her life like a great tree withDawn and doom in the branches (181 82).On the morning of the conflict with Logan Killicks, the sun from ambush was threatening the world with red daggers (199). In the scene in which Janie awakes after having worn-out(a) the night alone, wondering, while afternoon tea Cake spent her money on a party, the sunrise is paranoid, sending up spies ahead of him to mark out the pathway through the dark (272). Hurston images the false calm before the final storm even before the sun gave light dead day was creeping from bus h to bush watching man (301).The first moments of Janies excavation are imaged as she connects the mysteries of her emerging consciousness to the eternal rhythms of movement and variability mostly she lived between her hat and her heels, with her emotional disturbances like shade patterns in the woodscome and gone with the sun (236). Hurstons new technique in Their Eyes combined the excavation of consciousness with an improvised relationship to a living tradition that she encountered during her research in New Orleans and Haiti. Central to her mythic method is Hurstons brilliant use of Esu/Elegba in relation to the patterns of Janies descent and emergence.Hurstons novel Their Eyes offers an excellent source for demonstrating the value of an interdisciplinary approach to Black womens culture in general and American Modernismin particular (Awkward 23). Hurston locates her fiction strongly in Black womens traditional culture as developed and displayed through music and song. In present ing Janies story as a narrative related by herself to her best Black woman friend, Pheoby, Hurston is able to draw upon the bountiful oral legacy of Black female storytelling and mythmaking that has its roots in Afro-American culture.The reader who is aware of this tradition will understand the story as an overheard conversation as well as a literary text. The struggle between communal relationships and modern institutions is the core of Hurstons blues critique in Their Eyes. Janie appreciates Starkss store as a social center (Baker 98). But she is chronically inept at the tasks that relate to the business. Is Hurston implying that Janie is stupid? Unlikely. Instead, for Janie, selling things in the store distracts her from the essential rhythms of nature and the homegrown power of stories that take place on the porch.In Hurstons narration, the natural beauty of the South and the communal cool squeeze the business of the store from both sides Every morning the world flung itself ov er and exposed the town to the sun. So Janie had another day. And every day had a store in it, except Sundays. The store itself was a pleasant place if only she didnt have to sell things. When people sat rough on the porch and passed around the pictures of their thoughts for the others to look at and see, it was nice. (Hurston 1995215)As the sense of social decay and the power of modern economics increases their hold on peoples lives and as Janie moves outside of her bourgeoisie economic position in Eatonville, Hurstons blues images become collective, intensify, and grapple openly with the forces of fragmentation. As a new season opens on the flub, Hurston images the economically and existentially threadbare workforce and the hard times Permanent transients with no attachments and tired looking men with their families and dogs in flivvers. All night, all day, hurrying in to pick beans.Skillets, beds, patched up spare inner tubes all hanging and dangling from the ancient cars on the outside and hopeful humanity, herded and hovered on the inside, chugging on to the muck. People ugly from ignorance and broken from being poor. (282) But heeding Pounds warning to devise an adequate technique or bear false witness, Hurston depicts the economic dehumanization in relation to the humanizing forces of living cultural traditions colour made and used right on the spot. On the muck the blues voices pierce through the mud which is deaf and dumb as the jooks clanged and clamored.Pianos living three lives in one. Blues made and used right on the spot. Dancing, fighting, singing, crying, laughing, winning, and losing every hour. Instead of the urban realists trope of ever-warm boardinghouse beds used three shifts per day, in Hurstons mountain the keys never get cold, pianoslive three lives in one. Refusing to resolve the struggle between the deaf mud and live muck, she concludes the passage with an asymmetrical image of rich black earth clinging to bodies and biting the skin like ants (282).Ambiguous and improvised, impulses swirl through Hurstons modernist schema of the mud and the muck. She leaves no fixed path, no pro-forma method for descent. Permanent transients ride the crest of the wave where Wrights walleyed yokels are long since washed over and submerged by his ideological approach to the blues horrors in his memory. Instead, Hurstons excavation of the muck explores uncharted personal and communal territory. Janies improvised diasporic modernist quest advances with the mantra that new words would have to be made and said (200, 268).At the end of Their Eyes Were Watching God Hurston describes Janie in a space of continuing diasporic modernist process. In connection to various relationships, Janie explored the patterns of inner and interpersonal experience and met many of Esu/Elegbas challenges at the communal and personal gate (Pavlic 234). She excavated new depths in her consciousness and from these depths she examined her relationship to social space with deepened insight. In death, tea leaf Cake becomes an ancestor and joins the patterns of Janies consciousness.Alone in her house again, Janie opens the window to allow Tea Cakes presence to come to mind. Hurston emphasizes the modernist dimensions of ancestry. They inform the combination of communal and solitary processes and present guidance which, at best, can mitigate against the pitfalls of Afro-modernist seclusion. Hurston describes Tea Cakes ancestral presence now combined with her own energy (the wind) and with Janies asymmetrical space of communal loneliness The wind through the open windows had broomed all the fetid feeling of absence and nothingness.She unopen in and sat down. Combing road-dust out of her hair. Thinking (1995333). As an ancestor, Tea Cake will continue to live in the images of Janies mind but, possibly in tribute to Tea Cakes performative skill, Janies telling of the story to Phoeby demonstrates she is not isolated in Afro-modernist seclusion. Unlike Hurstons other characters, Janie is capable of articulating the depths of her experience in interpersonal terms. Hurston emphasizes how the combination of sense impression and thought prevent abstraction of the ancestors Of course he wasnt dead.He could never be dead until she herself had finished feeling and thinking (333). The close of the novel seems amorous and resolved however, Tea Cake continued ancestral presence will disrupt the resolution. Esu/Elegbas role doesnt cease in death. Janie will have to pursue the patterns and enable Tea Cake to overcome the dogged stasis that caused his demise. Janie will have to feel the wind and share the thunder. The descendant becomes part of the redemption of the ancestor, because Esu/Elegba will return (Pavlic 243).In Their Eyes, Zora Neale Hurston, is using modernism to bring her intellectual characters out of their isolation and into contact with the needs, concerns, and traditions of black people generally. Zora Neale Hurstons fiction, especially her novels, leads us to examine ourselves in relation to the world around us. Without exaggeration, her novels enlarge both our minds and our hearts. Hurston, however, would not make such a claim instead, she would keep moving towards some goal to be reached, some project to be started.Her anxious restlessness about herself and her work makes her a very contemporary writer, a modernist who tried to enlarge the very notion of what it is to be American. She wrote about traditional subjectslove and loss, displacement and home, failure and triumphat the same time she attempted to redefine our notion of American culture. Their Eyes Were Watching God offers us the same vital contrasts and the same struggle to reconcile the harp and the sword.Works CitedAwkward, Michael, ed. New Essays on Their Eyes Were Watching God. New York Cambridge University Press, 1990.Baker, Houston. Blues Ideology and Afro-American lit A Vernacular Theory. Chicago University of Chica go Press, 1984.Brigham, Cathy. The Talking Frame of Zora Neale Hurstons Talking Book Storytelling as Dialectic in Their Eyes Were Watching God. College Literature link 37, no. 4, 1994.Frobenius, Leo. The Religion of the Yoruba. In Leo Frobenius An Anthology, ed. E. Naberland, Wiesbaden Franz Steiner Verlag, 1973.Hemenway, Robert E. Zora Neale Hurston A Literary Biography. Urbana University of Illinois Press, 1977.Hurston, Zora Neale. Novels and Stories. New York Library of America, 1995.Kenner, Hugh. A Homemade World The American Modernist Writers. Baltimore Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975.Lemke, Sieglinde. Primitivist Modernism Black kitchen-gardening and the Origins of Transatlantic Modernism. New York Oxford University Press, 1999.Pavlic, Edward M. Crossroads Modernism Descent and Emergence in African-American Literary Culture. University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis, 2002.Pondrom, Cyrena. The Role of Myth in Hurstons Their Eyes Were Watching God. American Literature 58, no. 2, 1986.