"Love me like I like to be": the sexual politics of Hurston's 'Their Eyes Were Watching God,' the classic blues and the Black Women's Club movement

African American Review, Summer, 1998 by Carol Batker

Their Eyes engages in early twentieth-century black feminist politics. To develop a context for the sexual politics of earlier writers, critics and historians have turned to the discourses of the black women's club movement, which had its origins in the antilynching campaign, and the classic blues, sung and written in large part by African American women. Pauline Hopkins and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, in particular, have been read as engaged in the political debates of the black women's club movement, as have Hurston's "urban" contemporaries Nella Larsen, Angelina Weld Grimke, and, obliquely, Jessie Fauset (Tate; Carby, Reconstructing; McDowell," 'Nameless' "142).(2) Unaccountably, Hurston has been left out of this investigation, even though Their Eyes clearly took shape within a broad continuum of African American women's writing on sexuality early in this century.(3)

Hurston's biography supports such historical contextualization of her work. She worked for Mary McLeod Bethune just before Bethune founded the National Council of Negro Women in 1935 and traveled in the same circles as Alice Dunbar Nelson, an officer in the Federation of Colored Women's Clubs (Hemenway 19; Hull 90, 166). In addition, the discourse of the anti-lynching campaign must have been particularly visible to a student at Howard just before and during the push for the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill in 1922.(4) Hurston was also an authority on African American folk music, assisting Alan Lomax in his collecting and recording for the Music Division of the Library of Congress in 1935 (Hemenway 211). Although Hazel Carby has read Hurston as opposed to urban or commercialized versions of the blues ("Politics" 75), her relationship to them was complex. Hurston was a friend of Ethel Waters, for example, and attempted to sell her a song on at least one occasion (Hemenway 207, 284).

On a trip with Langston Hughes, she stayed with Bessie Smith (106) and was quite familiar with Harlem cabarets as well as the Southern tent-show and vaudeville tradition which showcased classic blues singers (26-27). In fact, she once joined a traveling theatrical troupe as a wardrobe girl (17).(5)

It is my contention that Hurston has been left out of this debate primarily because her text disrupts neat dichotomies between respectability and desire, middle- and working-class discourses, and club and blues women. Their Eyes alludes to the politics of rape and lynching, as I discuss in detail below, by first charging Janie with sexual misconduct and then by exonerating her, primarily in the trial scene. However, Their Eyes does not reject charges of African American women's libidinousness at the expense of sexual expression, as literary critics have argued of other texts from this period. Critics like Carby and Deborah McDowell have generally read African American women's literature during the Harlem Renaissance as replicating the middle-class conservatism of club discourse and as opposing or suppressing the liberatory sexual discourse of the blues.(6) Hurston's text doesn't fit this critical bifurcation.

Historians, too, claim that club and blues discourses existed to some extent in opposition to one another. They argue that club women attempted to regulate desire (Carby, "Policing" 741) and refute racist ideologies that represented African American women as libidinous (Giddings 85-89). The classic blues, on the other hand, are often read as centrally concerned with expressing desire, with establishing African American women as sexual subjects.(7) However, drawing the opposition between the middle and working class and repressive or expressive sexual discourses too sharply risks oversimplification, as Ann duCille aptly warns in her discussion of the blues:

Such evaluations often erase the contexts and complexities of a wide range of African American historical experiences and replace them with a single, monolithic, if valorized, construction: "authentic" blacks are southern, rural, and sexually uninhibited. Middle class, when applied to black artists and their subjects, becomes pejorative, a sign of having mortgaged one's black aesthetic to the alien conventions of the dominant culture. (71)

Privileging the working class not only dismisses middle-class African American experience, it also masks the complexity within each group. The politics of both the largely middle-class club movement and the largely working-class classic blues were striated. Each discourse struggled with class issues and with legitimating black female sexuality in a racist context which positioned African American women as libidinous. Before arguing for Hurston's political embeddedness, I will create the context for her literary interventions by detailing the various sexual ideologies of club and classic blues discourses, which at times overlap and at times contradict one another. Then, I will argue that Hurston's Their Eyes, like historical discourses, refuses simple dichotomies between respectability and desire, and works with both blues and club discourse to legitimate sexual subjectivity.