Dialect and Dichotomy: Literary Representations of African American Speech

7. Community in Conflict: Saying and Doing in Their Eyes Were Watching God

7 Community in Conflict Saying and Doing in Their Eyes "Were Watching God For all literary authors, it is axiomatic that their linguistic choices create plot, evoke setting, and define characters. In Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes ~re Watching God (1937), the author's linguistic choices are particularly striking, especially in terms of the language and speech produced by the characters who people the text. Henry Louis Gates Jr. in his influential treatment of Their Eyes ~re Watching God in his book The Signifying Monkey, aptly describes Their Eyes as a "speakerly text" because of the "privileging of oral speech and its inherent linguistic features" that distinguishes the novel (181). Dialectal features associated with Mrican American English figure extensively in the speech of nearly every character in the novel as well as in a number of nonspeech segments of the narration, a unique application of, to use Gates's term, "dialect-informed" free indirect discourse. The remainder of the narration is represented in standard English, and at times the boundaries between exposition and dialogue are far from being as sharply defined as they are in most other works of fiction. The direct speech of the characters and the free indirect discourse that distinguishes the dialectally represented narration, which blends narrative omniscience with the personalized thought-language of characters, are as striking for their lyrical and poetic expressions as for their reliance on distinctly dialectal grammatical and phonological features. Gates argues that Hurston's reliance on dialectal features as key structural elements of her text indicates the importance not only of the story itself but also of the actual telling of the story, with her narrative design deliberately "imitating one of the numerous forms of oral narration to be found in classical Mro-American vernacular literature" (Signifying181 ). Gates's definition of Their Eyes ~re Watching God as a "speakerly" text helps to point the way to a combined linguistic and literary approach to analyzing the novel and its linguistic and artistic components. The text is Saying and Doing in Their Eyes ~re Watching God / 123 not only "speakerly" in the critical sense outlined by Gates, but it is quite literally speakerly in its high proportion of direct speech to exposition. In this approximately 60,ooo-word novel, nearly half of those words are represented as the direct speech of characters. For half of the entire novel to be related in direct speech, not even counting the substantial additional sections of dialect-enhanced narration, marks a highly unusual and innovative authorial strategy, and it makes a linguistic analysis of the speech instrumental to a broad understanding of the novel. Using computational methods as well as qualitative analysis, it is possible to mine the rich linguistic resources of the novel with the goals of using the linguistic data as a means for analyzing the literary text itself and for determining whether the data can provide answers to important linguistic questions that exist beyond the text. For Their Eyes were Watching God, an analysis of the use of dialectal features yields interesting results with respect to the functions of the dialectal representations , but this complex "speakerly" text demands an approach including , but not limited to, a features analysis in an attempt to study the wider functions of spoken language as Hurston used it in her novel. Such functions include illustrating societal and novelistic political expectations, demonstrating the links between speech community and community itself, and exploring the power of speech to constitute, not simply to impersonate or generate, action. In addition to an exploration of the distribution and frequencies of features in the speech of various characters, then, this chapter also addresses the consequences of class, gender, and other intracommunity conflict as they impact linguistic behavior and help to forge the meanings and themes contained in the novel. Gates's notion of the "speakerly" text, even while his analysis focuses more specifically on Hurston's use of dialectal free indirect discourse, compared to this chapter's concern with direct speech, will continue to be a useful paradigm within which to examine the power spoken language has, and is represented as having in this novel, a text in which words quite often speak louder than actions. An interesting and, in some ways, unexpected finding of the features analysis conducted on the direct speech in the novel is that there is relatively little interspeaker variation with respect both to the specific dialectal features of AAE present in the speech of a given character, and in...