Author Archives: abao

Becoming a Woman

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In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston embodies the modernist idea of the “new woman” in the character of Janie Crawford. Even in the first few chapters, we sense that Janie is a woman who is inclined to do what she wants and for her own pleasure. Although her two marriages in the first six chapters are ultimately failures, they act more as stepping-stones for Janie to discover herself: “She knew now that marriage did not make love. Janie’s first dream was dead, so she became a woman” (25). Hurston suggests that Janie is learning about herself, learning what she does and does not like, and in that process, she is becoming an independent woman.

Nonetheless, Janie struggles between what she wants and what society expects from a woman. She hates when Joe Starks bosses her around, but she also feels the need to please him and obey him because that is what is expected of a wife:

“Janie made her face laugh after a short pause, but it wasn’t too easy. She had never thought of making a speech, but didn’t know if she cared to make one at all. It must have been the way Joe spoke out without giving her a chance to say anything one way or another that took the bloom off of things. But anyway, she went down the road behind him that night feeling cold.” (43)

Janie’s struggle is reminiscent of Larsen’s Helga in Quicksand: both characters desire something, whether it is sex or independence, but the internalized rules of society prevent either from immediately achieving it. However, Janie’s internal monologue is much more reflective than Helga’s, and we sense that she has the potential to truly become that “new woman.”

Internalized Racism in The Blacker the Berry

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We talked in our last class about W.E.B. Du Bois’ idea of the “Talented Tenth,” and how, as unfair as it may be, it is the talented tenth’s responsibility to uplift African Americans. Wallace Thurman’s characters in The Blacker the Berry seem to believe in a similar ideal, except they have interpreted the talented tenth as becoming as white as possible, to ingratiate themselves into white culture instead of to fight for racial equality. Emma Lou’s own family motto reflects that:

“Whiter and whiter every generation. The nearer white you are the more white people will respect you. Therefore all light Negroes marry light Negroes. Continue to do so generation after generation, and eventually white people will accept this racially bastard aristocracy, thus enabling those Negroes who really matter to escape the social and economic inferiority of the American Negro.” (37)

Naturally, by believing that black people should strive to be whiter in order to be respectable, black people themselves must believe that they are inferior. At one point, Emma Lou refers to her African heritage as “primitive” (44). The extent of the internalized racism is actually astounding. The black community has not only established hierarchies based off of the darkness of one’s skin color (as well as where a person is from, as we see in Emma Lou’s treatment of Hazel Mason), but also treats it like religious dogma. Even amongst college-educated people, the lighter a woman’s skin, the more desirable a woman is as a romantic partner/spouse because, as white society has instilled in everyone, light skin screams intelligence and respectability, while dark skin does just the opposite.

The Language of Death

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As we discussed in class, time plays a large—if subliminal—role in Mrs. Dalloway. Firstly, the structure of the novel is focused on how the characters perceive and experience time; Woolf jumps back and forth between the consciousnesses of various characters living the same moment (i.e. when the car backfires and we see both Clarissa’s and Septimus Warren Smith’s view of it) to show us how elastic time can be. Then there’s the fact that the main protagonist, Clarissa Dalloway, is a woman in her early fifties, which many people would consider her twilight years, so time becomes a fairly obvious metaphor for the process of aging. She’s often reminiscing on the past, a sort of attempt to move back or cling onto her youth and further from the imminence of death, and begins to question her choices in life (reflected in her memories of her former love interest, Peter Walsh) and whether she has lived the life that she actually wants. A passage on page 30 fairly succinctly summarizes my main points:

But she feared time itself, and read on Lady Bruton’s face, as if it had been a dial cut in impassive stone, the dwindling of life; how year by year her share was sliced; how little the margin that remained was capable any longer of stretching, of absorbing, as in the youthful years, the colours, salts, tones of existence, so that she filled the room she entered, and felt often as she stood hesitating one moment on the threshold of her drawing-room, an exquisite suspense, such as might stay a diver before plunging while the sea darkens and brightens beneath him, and the ways which threaten to break, but only gently split their surface, roll and conceal and encrust as they just turn over the weeds with pearl.