Author Archives: aeverett

Interplay of dialect and descriptive prose

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As I read Hurston for this time, as with the short story of hers that we read, the novel’s parallel regional dialect and more formal descriptive prose struck me. It occurred to me that reading these two tones of language alongside each other is like listening to a symphony: first, you might hear the more expressive, upbeat, jolty part of the music, and then it slows to a flowing, more pensive section that somehow seems to explain or contextualize the first. For example, Janie’s utterance to her grandmother that “‘Ah wants things sweet wid mah marriage lak when you sit under a pear tree and think. Ah…'” is very evocative of her sense of mourning in and of itself (24). However, this feeling of mourning and disappointment is enriched by the text that follows shortly after, which I find absolutely transcendent:

“She knew things that nobody had ever told her. For instance, the words of the trees and the wind….She knew the world was a stallion rolling in the blue pasture of ether. She knew that God tore down the old world every evening and built a new one by sun-up. It was wonderful to see it take form with the sun and emerge from the gray dust of its making….She knew now that marriage did not make love. Janie’s first dream was dead, so she became a woman” (25).

Janie “knew” all of the above, but she couldn’t say it all to her grandmother; neither would her grandmother want to hear it, nor might Janie be able to communicate this newly acquired wisdom to anyone other than herself. I love the way Hurston lets us into Janie’s conscience here, without necessarily breaking down that divide that still exists for her between her inner self and the characters around her.

Parallel to internalized homophobia

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I had a very negative reaction to the opening pages of The Blacker the Berry in that the depiction of self-hate was so vivid. Emma Lou’s own as well as her grandmother Maria Lightfoot’s self-hate for traits that mark them as having Black heritage reminds me of the internalized homophobia that queer people experience.

Emma Lou’s mother and uncle both do not marry “mulatto” people, and in Maria Lightfoot’s mind, “Joe’s wife was not as undesirable as Emma Lou’s father, for she was almost three-quarters Indian, and there was scant possibility that her children would have revolting dark skins, thick lips, spreading nostrils, and kinky hair” (30). The fiercely subjective language used to describe Black phenotypes, especially the word “revolting,” show a viscerally negative reaction in Maria toward some typical features of her Black ancestors. Like internalized homophobia, this internalized racism stems purely from society’s arbitrary norms about what is attractive and socially acceptable, such as straight hair, lighter skins, thin lips, and small noses. Because society devalues non-white physical attributes, this person of color herself believes that “whiter” looking people of color are superior, and she passes this anti-Black notion on to her granddaughter.

Also, I just wanted to note that Maria’s last name surely has some kind of connection to her preference for those whose bodies are lighter; I wonder what the significance of a lighter-colored foot might mean? Figuratively more carefree because of white privilege perhaps?

Lady Bruton’s Gender Ambivalence

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Lady Bruton’s apathetic, and perhaps even antagonistic, attitude toward the wives of her male friends, such as Clarissa Dalloway, reminds me of the attitude Gertrude Stein takes toward her partner Alice B. Toklas and the “genius’ wives” who she expects Alice to entertain while she talks to the male geniuses in Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas:

“Thus, when [Lady Bruton] said in her offhand way ‘How’s Clarissa?’ husbands had difficulty in persuading their wives and indeed themselves, of her interest in women who often got in their husbands’ way, prevented them from accepting posts abroad, and had to be taken to the seaside in the middle of the session to recover from influenza. Nevertheless her inquiry, ‘How’s Clarissa?’ was known by women infallibly, to be a signal from a well-wisher, from an almost silent companion, whose utterances…signified recognition of some feminine comradeship which went beneath masculine lunch parties and united Lady Bruton and Mrs. Dalloway” (106)

We sense at the end of this passage, however, that Lady Bruton is also a self-identified, card-carrying woman, and her loyalties lie with women as well as, and apart from, her bonds to their husbands, “beneath masculine lunch parties.” Lady Bruton, like Gertrude Stein, insists on creating a female-mediated space, where she holds authority, even if the other most powerful people in the room are all men; in Stein’s case, those men are artists like Picasso, and in Lady Bruton’s, they are men like Dalloway and Whitbread. It’s an odd in-between place that Lady Bruton holds, between feeling a kinship to her female “comrade[s]” and dismissing them in favor of their husbands, considering them to be mere accessories to their husbands’ more important trajectories. Nevertheless, her unmarried, self-empowering, gender-ambivalent societal status is certainly radical.