Finding
Hurston presents Janie's journey to selfhood as a process of sorting out her own feelings and values, freeing herself from the
Paper
"The World in a Jug and the Stopper in (Her) Hand": 'Their Eyes' as Blues Performance
Abstract
n her essays and autobiography as well as in her fiction, Zora Neale Hurston used the aesthetic principles, language, character, and structure of the blues to challenge socially prescribed roles of African American women. Like Bessie Smith and other vaudeville blues singers of the 1920s and '30s, Hurston also used blues means to present new images and to celebrate the individual voices of African American women. Hurston's most extended blues critique and celebration of blues creativity is her acclaimed novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, which chronicles Janie Crawford's journey to selfhood and fulfillment. We follow Janie from her sexual awakening through three marriages. As she moves from marriage to marriage, she gradually sheds the white and male definitions of selfhood given to her by her grandmother, her community, and society, and comes to find her own voice. Many scholars have demonstrated the process through which Janie's voice emerges in the novell; my purpose here is to illuminate the ways in which the blues inform Hurston's rendering of this process. The blues operate on many levels in Their Eyes. The novel's focus on love and relationship, Janie's pursuit of sexual satisfaction and self-fulfillment, and Hurston's celebration of female sexuality are themes, in particular, of vaudeville blues. The novel's sequence of three marriages provides a blues structure and presents the many-sidedness of love and relationship in much the same way that a series of blues stanzas does in performance. Janie's three marriages suggest the tripartite aa'b stanzaic structure of the standard blues piece, in which the second line (a') is a variation of the first, while the third line (b) marks some sort of resolution or contrast. Janie's relationship with Tea Cake, himself a blues singer/guitarist, is itself the love of many blues, with its pain and pleasure, jealousy and passion, short life and sudden end.2 In Their Eyes, Janie's marriage relationships become a structural vehicle through which Hurston explores a wide range of issues and experiences of struggle. Like the blues singer, Hurston "personifies" struggle by projecting Janie's journey to selfhood vis-a-vis relationship dynamics. By voicing Janie's responses to the oppressive conditions of each subsequent marriage, Hurston exposes underlying conflicts between prescribed beliefs and what she knows to be true from her own experience. Like the blues performer, Hurston uses contrast and oppositional structures in conjunction with repetition and variation to highlight paradoxical elements and to heighten dramatic intensity. Hurston presents Janie's journey to selfhood as a process of sorting out her own feelings and values, freeing herself from the
Authors
Maria V. Johnson
Journal
African American Review