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Wednesday, March 20, 2019

Female Spirituality and Sexuality Explored Through Zora Neale Hurston’s

Zora Neale Hurston, while living in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, was researching glamour on the most scholarly level. She was studying with Haitis most good known hougans and mambos, or priests and priestesses. At this while she was gathering knowledge slightly fetich so she could write the text, Tell My Horse. Also, at this same time Hurston had finished writing, Their Eyes Were Watching God in only seven-spot short weeks. A close reading of this romance provides the reader with a relationship between voodoo and the text. Hurston not only explores female apparitionalty and sexuality in, Their Eyes Were Watching God, but weaves the two together unveil that voodoo culture plays an important role within the novel oddly in the comparisons between the voodoo goddess Erzulie and the texts main character Janie Crawford.Hurston exploits the society in which Janie Crawford lives in. Hers is a society in which she is not allowed to live freely and articulate herself freely. She is suppr essed in her society because she is a woman and because she is Afro-American. Hurston understands this oppression and she uncovers the honor on the status of black females at this time. There were no stringy roles available to them in their American culture or in their African-American culture. Women were looked down on and they were not seen as potentially strong spiritual and sexual people. Hurston opens the door for her protagonist, Janie Crawford, to create a more substantial and empowering behavior for herself after the many hardships she faces. She leads her down a highway to self-determination and this path is embodied by the spirituality of voodoo. The old, old mysticism of the world in African terms...a religion of creation and life (Tell My Horse 376).This i... ...oodoo, which stands in the novel to tie in the value of self-discovery is integral to the storys comparisons between Janie and Erzulie. Voodoo is believed to have played a shapely role in the Haitian revolu tion in which Haiti won its independence from France. The integration of voodoo imagery and symbolism throughout, Their Eyes Were Watching God, reflects Hurstons belief that self-discovery for African-American women lies not in their male dominated society, but rather in their understanding of their own sexual and spiritual strength. Hurston achieves this idea greatly by linking the female goddess Erzulie with Janie Crawford. Works CitedTell My Horse. 1938. rptd. in Hurston Folklore, Memoirs and Other Writings. ed. Cheryl A Wall. unseasoned York Library of America, 1995. 269-555.Their Eyes Were Watching God. 1937. New York Harper & Row, 1990.

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