In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Callaloo 23.4 (2000) 1440-1448



[Access article in PDF]

False Gods And Black Goddesses In Naylor's Mama Day and Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God

Susan Meisenhelder


As Deborah McDowell, Calvin Hernton, Valerie Smith, and others have discussed, black women writers face formidable discursive difficulties in dealing with gender issues and have often suffered bitter attacks for their treatment of intra-racial conflict between black women and men. 1 Clearly in the tradition of contemporary black women writers who focus on both race and gender oppression in the lives of black women, Gloria Naylor has acknowledged feeling "very self-conscious" about potential reactions to her treatment of black men in her first novel, The Women of Brewster Place:

I bent over backwards not to have a negative message come through about the men. My emotional energy was spent creating a woman's world, telling her side of it because I knew that hadn't been done enough in literature. But I worried about whether or not the problems that were being caused by the men in the women's lives would be interpreted as some bitter statement I had to make about black men. (Naylor and Morrison 579)

In Mama Day Naylor draws on the work of Zora Neale Hurston in ways that allow her to treat contentious issues of intra-group conflict in subtle and indirect ways. Naylor's strong verbal echoes of Hurston's hurricane on the Muck in her description of the one that strikes Willow Springs in Mama Day--in both novels, "their eyes were watching God"--suggest the depth of Naylor's indebtedness to Hurston's novel. 2 The stories of Janie and Tea Cake, Cocoa and George, both centrally concerned with the issues of racial and gender identity, chronicle the female growth possible in relationships with supportive black men and the dangers to black women's identity in relationships with oppressive ones.

Both novels often treat this theme indirectly through rich natural imagery--the fecundity of the Muck and of Willow Springs, the violence and power of the hurricanes that strike are part of complex symbolism surrounding questions of ethnic and gender identities. For instance, both authors make evaluations about characters through the use of tree imagery, specifically depicting those figures secure in their identity as healthy trees. The Days are "all rooted" (285) in Willow Springs, and Mama Day (expert gardener and most culturally secure character in the novel) is repeatedly [End Page 1440] identified with trees. Similarly, in Hurston's novel, Tea Cake (with Woods for a last name) and Janie, who at the chronological end of the novel sees her life as "a great tree in leaf" (20), contrast markedly in their secure sense of ethnic identity with characters like Killicks, whose house is "a stump in the middle of the woods" (39), and Nanny, who is "like the standing roots of some old tree that had been torn away by storm" (26).

Tree imagery also underlies conceptions of the ideal relationship between men and women in both novels. The most extended treatment of this metaphor in Their Eyes Were Watching God is, of course, Janie's vision of the pear tree:

She was stretched on her back beneath the pear tree soaking in the alto chant of the visiting bees, the gold of the sun and the panting breath of the breeze when the inaudible voice of it all came to her. She saw a dust-bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom; the thousand sister-calyxes arch to meet the love embrace and the ecstatic shiver of the tree from root to tiniest branch creaming in every blossom and frothing with delight. So this was a marriage! She had been summoned to behold a revelation. (24)

For Hurston, this image represents the ideal relationship--both sexual and emotional--between women and men. The male bee is not aggressive or rapacious: he gently "sinks" into the blossom, and the female flower is not passive: she "arches to meet the love embrace...

pdf

Share