Critical Essays: Zora Neale Hurston. - Review - book review

African American Review, Winter, 2000 by Deborah G. Plant

Gloria L. Cronin. Critical Essays: Zora Neale Hurston. New York: G. K. Hall, 1998. 271 pp. $49.00.

Critical Essays on Zora Neale Hurston is one volume in the Critical Essays on American Literature Series published by G. K. Hall, with James Nagel as General Editor. The volume on Hurston, edited by Gloria L. Cronin, is a collection of book reviews and articles which address Hurston's four novels, Jonah's Gourd Vine (1934), Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939), and Seraph on the Suwanee (1948); her autobiography Dust Tracks On a Road (1942); three collections of folklore, Mules and Men (1935), Tell My Horse (1938), and Sanctified Church (1983); the play Mule Bone (1991); and selected short stories from The Complete Stories (1995). With the exception of two commissioned articles, the critical essays collected are reprints. These essays are framed by Cronin's introduction and a primary-source bibliography of published and unpublished materials compiled by Blaine L. Hall. The general editor's note purports this volume to be "the most comprehensive gathering of essays ever publis hed" on Hurston.

Critical Essays on Zora Neale Hurston is organized chronologically, in accordance with the publication dates of the ten works addressed, and these works are treated in separate sections which contain reviews and/or essays. The section on Jonah's Gourd Vine contains only two book reviews; no critique of the work is offered. Three book reviews constitute the section on Tell My Horse. Their Eyes Were Watching Cod receives more attention, with three reviews and four articles. Ironically, although Cronin bemoans the lack of scholarly interest in Jonah's Gourd Vine and, along with other scholars, seems troubled by the "relatively little critical attention" that has been given to Hurston's other works, she helps to perpetuate the imbalance. In other instances, however, this imbalance is addressed, particularly with the inclusion of reviews and essays on Moses, Man of the Mountain and Seraph on the Suwanee.

The discursivity determining the contours of Critical Essays derives from Cronin's perception of Hurston as a "feminocentric pantheist" who, "from her first novel to her last, ... was engaged in a serious 'womanist,' ethnological critique of the social and political foundations of Western culture and, more specifically, of Christianity." Most of Cronin's selected essays reflect this perception of Hurston. In "Literary Objective: Hurston's Use of Personal Narrative in Mules and Men," Sandra Dolby-Stahl makes apparent the authorial intent which casts Mules and Men as a literary rather than a scientific, ethnographic report. Dolby-Stahl cogently argues that Hurston's desire to elicit an appreciation for authentic folkloristic contexts and material dictated her preference for a literary framework and the use of personal narrative account in presenting her material. Hurston's integration of conventional fieldwork reportage into a literary performance piece demonstrates Hurston's valuation and celebration of the f olk and African American folklore. Cheryl Wall's essay "Mules and Men and Women: Zora Neale Hurston's Strategies of Narration and Visions of Feminist Empowerment" identifies Mules and Men as "a mother text." The quest for female empowerment, Wall states, is inscribed in the narrative's subtext and the "between-story conversation," the space in which Hurston privileges the voices of the women in her text. Wall situates this ritual act within the matrix of Black vernacular culture, where women gain possession of the word and, thus, power.

In a feminist cultural studies approach to Their Eyes Were Watching God, Rachel Duplessis analyzes the interplay of multiple social determinants and their textual configurations. Hurston's narrative choices and structures in the text, suggests Duplessis, reinforce the notion of (Black) "women's culture" as "a binding force." Dolan Hubbard's article explores Hurston's uses of "church and extrachurch" modes of expression to narrate "the emergence of a female self in a male-dominated world." As Janie Crawford, the protagonist, appropriates sermonic language and the authority inherent in it, Hubbard claims that she emancipates herself, converts and empowers her friend Pheoby, and achieves communal intimacy. The power Janie acquires through appropriating homiletical discourse is comparable to the autonomy she gains through the practice of naming, unnaming, and renaming described in Sigrid King's "Power, Naming, and Their Eyes Were Watching God." From one "patronymically defined identity" to the next, Janie Crawfo rd Killicks Starks Woods is objectified, dehumanized, disempowered, and circumscribed. King recounts Janie's resistance to and survival of white and male discourses of domination and her command over language--which is initiated in her relationship with Tea Cake. Though King considers Tea Cake's use of language as creative and inclusive, he points out that Janie does not achieve true autonomy and self-definition until she is "once again unnamed" by Tea Cake's death. At the novel's end, Janie's experiences have created within her a psychic space for the resurrection of the self, for true autonomy.