Hurston ramps up her discussion of the politics of race in the last few chapters of Their Eyes Were Watching God. As we discussed earlier, she does, in previous chapters, expound ideas about race relations through Janie’s grandmother and through Mrs. Turner; however, each of those instances are, more or less, figures simply talking about racism/colorism while the events of chapters 18-20 display racism in action, with whites and blacks interacting directly with one another in a clearly politically charged dynamic. We see this when white people commandeer the bridge in the middle of the flood, turning desperate black people away to continue searching for safety (164); when the white men bully Tea Cake and other black men into burying the dead (169); in the disturbing fact that the corpses of black people are dumped into a hole while the bodies of white folks are treated dignifiedly to coffins (171); and in the all-white jury at Janie’s trial (185). Yet Hurston’s depiction of race relations is anything but simple– she does not pit blacks against whites in a battle of “good” vs. “evil” but rather complicates the picture through sympathetic white figures like Dr. Simmons (“The white doctor who had been around so long that he was part of the muck” (175)) and unsympathetic black figures like Mrs. Turner and the pack of colored people who attend Janie’s trial with “their tongues cocked and loaded” (185), ready to pull down a member of their own race. It seems, then, that Hurston is not trying to speak politically or to manufacture a narrative that will further some agenda for her race. Her priority is instead to document relations between humans, with issues of race being undeniably present in her chosen setting.

Even with this surge of racial politics at the end, the novel remains largely a story about Janie and the trials of her heart. In this sense, Hurston places the big (racism) side by side with the small (love) in a rather Woolfian maneuver. Zadie Smith, in a beautiful essay about the novel, denounces the idea that Hurston wrote just another simple romantic tale. She writes,

It’s about a girl who takes some time to find the man she really loves. It is about the discovery of self in and through another. It implies that even the dark and terrible banality of racism can recede to a vanishing point when you understand, and are understood by, another human being. Goddammit if it doesn’t claim that love sets you free.

I absolutely love Zadie Smith’s reading of Janie’s love as a sort of transcendental, liberating force. I think Hurston, though writing as a black female, wanted to write about something larger than issues of race, so she wrote about love. She presents Janie not simply as a black female but as a human. I think we might all identify with Janie to some extent, regardless of our race, gender, class, or education. Her experiences of “self-crushing love” (128), of Death with his “huge square toes” (84), and of Doubt, the “fiend from hell” (108), resonate across the entire human condition. Thus, by centering her novel around Janie and her escapades with love, Hurston makes her story universal, refusing to be pigeonholed by the constraints of racial politics.

There are several instances in the text in which Thurman seems to suggest that race is something that can be performed, something that requires an audience, or something that one might try to manipulate by donning a costume or putting on a mask. An early example is Hazel, from USC, whom Emma Lou views as disgracefully playing the role of the primitive Negro. Emma Lou disdains Hazel’s “circus-like appearance” (44) and “darky-like clownishness” (46), feeling ashamed by the way in which Hazel “play[s] the darky for the amused white students” (55). But if Hazel acts out the stereotype of the uncivilized Negro, then Emma Lou plays a role herself, constantly trying to mold herself into the likeness of what she conceives as ‘the right sort of people.’ The way in which she manipulates her appearance to better play this role is rather interesting, for she seems to sheds one mask for another; she uses acids and bleaching creams to “remove this unwelcome black mask from her face” (23) while dousing herself in powder and makeup to construct yet another mask to wear. If she considers her blackness a mask yet her efforts to reject it result in the donning of a new mask, do we ever see her authentic, unmasked self? (Perhaps at the end when she resolves to “begin life anew, always fighting, not so much for acceptance by other people, but for acceptance of herself by herself” (217)?) Other instances of performing race can be seen in the figure of Arline who literally performs as a mulatto in a show about Negro life, coating herself in powder to become darker. Emma Lou can recognize a sense of falsity in this sort of performance, more so than in her own, doubting the veracity of the plot and the characters and considering the show “a mad caricature” (105). Even the colored actresses in the show must make a performance of their race: “Their makeup and the lights gave them an appearance of sameness” (117). At the real cabaret, Emma Lou too senses “a note of artificiality” in the scene, aware that the two female entertainers are so self-consciously performing their race and gender for an audience of both white and black men and women. To her, the audience’s captivation implicates them in the performance: “At last the audience and the actors were as one” (110). Even at the house-rent party, what we might assume would be the closest approximation to authentic Harlem life, the party-goers are transformed into performers. Alva’s guests study the action with fervid interest and amazement, treating the partygoers, presumably, as material for future writings or artworks. However, there does seem to be a certain rawness to the house-rent party; the dancing and the music are more spontaneous, less contrived than the cabaret scenes. Emma Lou feels as though the atmosphere “create[s] another person in her stead” (149). But is this new person a more authentic version of Emma Lou, one that has loosened itself of its many masks, or is it yet another posture that she has assumed to accommodate herself to a new environment? Also, how is it that Emma Lou can detect the performance of race around her yet cannot own up to her own playacting?

Clarissa’s guiding life philosophy seems to be one that vests the highest value in individual moments and individual people. While she proclaims that it is her gift “to combine, to create” (122), I get the sense that her job of bringing people together resembles more the weaving of connections between individuals rather than the melding of individuals into a single new amalgam. Her party has the same crowd-like feeling of the street: many people united by the circumstance of being in the same place at the same time yet each permitted to retain unique, often contradictory, points of view. Woolf contrasts this idea with the more tyrannical philosophy of Dr. Holmes, Sir William Bradshaw, Lady Bruton, and Miss Kilman. All of these figures worship “Conversion,” who, as we saw last class, “feasts on the wills of the weakly, loving to impress, to impose, adoring her own features stamped on the face of the populace” (100). Clarissa, quite contrarily, refuses to impose any particular vision on the people around her; we see this aversion to forcing people into boxes early on when, walking down the street, Clarissa admits that “she would not say of any one in the world now that they were this or were that…and she would not say of Peter, she would not say of herself, I am this, I am that (8-9). She intentionally keeps things undefined, as with the vagueness of “the thing there was that mattered” (184), for the attempt to find certainty and impose definitions is contrary to the very idea of life.

Clarissa’s philosophy, then, is anti-agenda. She calls Miss Kilman her enemy (174) because Kilman has made it her mission to force her religion upon Elizabeth; she thinks Bradshaw evil because he can use his power to blunt the passions and twist the souls of his patients (184). Clarissa sees value rather in letting life be as it is. Her sort of non-intrusive voyeuristic relationship with the old lady who lives across the way especially illustrates her belief that real life is found where “the privacy of the soul” (126) remains untouched by outside agendas. Woolf beautifully communicates this idea in the following passage, which appears just after Kilman and Elizabeth have left for the Stores:

Why creeds and prayers and mackintoshes?, when, thought Clarissa, that’s the miracle, that’s the mystery; that old lady, she meant, whom she could see going from chest of drawers to dressing-table. She could still see her. And the supreme mystery which Kilman might say she had solved, or Peter might say he had solved, but Clarissa didn’t believe either of them had the ghost of an idea of solving, was simply this: here was one room; there another. Did religion solve that, or love? (127)

It is old women like this, going about their ordinary private business undisturbed and unimposing in their own pockets of the world, that we might think of when Clarissa thinks, “What she liked was simply life” (121).

Though the ending of The House of Mirth is decidedly a tragic one for Lily, I found it oddly satisfying that Wharton chooses not to unite Lily and Selden in the sort of happily-ever-after life together that they just narrowly miss. Their relationship over the course of the novel is frustrating, strewn with moments of intimacy that cannot and do not lead anywhere (e.g. Lily and Selden’s talk at Bellomont in Book 1 Ch. 6) as well as instances in which each character’s pride forms a thick wall around them (e.g. Selden’s visit to Lily at Norma Hatch’s in Book 2 Ch. 9). In the end, when each is finally ready to tear down these self-protective walls and expose their souls to one another, death unjustly imposes the final barrier. The following passage narrates the cruelty of the moment when Selden, finally resolved to express his emotions to Lily, finds that she is no longer poised to receive them:

He felt that the real Lily was still there, close to him, yet invisible and inaccessible; and the tenuity of the barrier between them mocked him with a sense of helplessness. There had never been more than a little impalpable barrier between them–and yet he had suffered it to keep them apart! And now, though it seemed slighter and frailer than ever, it had suddenly hardened to adamant, and he might beat his life out against it in vain.” (320)

But maybe this last, permanent impediment is actually for the best. Perhaps it is Wharton’s way of recognizing that the only way to preserve the sincerity of Lily and Selden’s love is to leave it unrealized. To wrench it out of its subterranean existence and expose it to the light of the cruel real world would be to sully it; to convert it from an ideal to a reality and to give a definition to it would be to kill it. Wharton spares her characters this corruption of feeling by maintaining a barrier between Lily and Selden, between her characters and the reader. Indeed, she leaves the reader hanging by refusing to reveal the all-important “word” (318, 319) that Lily must tell Selden and that Selden rushes to tell Lily. In doing so, Wharton seems to suggest that no bit of measly language can adequately express the deep feeling that Lily and Selden share. Paradoxically, only in silence can this “word” exist, for once it is brought to the surface of one’s lips and made audible, it will only be tarnished by the forces of insincerity that overrun reality. Not allowing us to fully peek beneath the surface of Lily and Selden’s relationship, not allowing Lily and Selden themselves to bring their relationship to fruition is the only way to truly preserve their love.