Zora Neale Hurston is almost certainly a very well-read
author. Her seminal work, Their Eyes Were Watching God breaks new ground
in its subject matter and location, but it uses themes and modes common to many
previous canon works. One prime example of this is the somewhat Romantic theme
of true love in a marriage as opposed to marriage by necessity. Janie Starks
marries a man at the very young age of 16, and due to the awakening of the
desire for true passion within her, is unhappy in her marriage. She feels that
romance and a man she loves is vital for a marriage, while her grandmother
believes that stability and safety is the most important part of a marriage.
Based on this ideological difference, Janie runs away from her husband and goes
through the events depicted in the novel. Yet for some reason, even though such
themes are commonly accepted as standard fare for a Romantic novel, I have
never liked Romantic novels like this, and for the same reason I so far dislike
Their Eyes Were Watching God.
My distaste for novels like this
began in Sophomore English. The broad subject was British literature, and of
course the Romantic era covered a large part of British literature, so we read
several books from this time. Some of them, such as Frankenstein, were
alright, and I read these with some difficulty but got through them. However,
others, such as Wuthering Heights, were just not to my liking at all. I
am pretty good at struggling through books that I don’t like when I need to,
but this book just stood like a brick wall before me. Heathcliff and Catherine’s
eternal love was supposed to be the driving force of the whole book, but it
never seemed important to me, and the novel just seemed so small. There
was so little happening, so little in the characters that I could identify
with, that I just couldn’t finish the book. Maybe I am not particularly
romantic, but the theme of lost love was not enough for me to work with.
The "quest for love" as an abstract literary theme may indeed seem limited (although when you add the much more rich and consequential subject of gender and its place in the social order into the equation, there's potential for any love story to be about way more than an individual looking to hook up with that perfect someone). But what (for many readers) will save a book like Hurston's has to do with the individual distinctiveness of the love relationship she explores: Janie and Tea Cake don't have a lot of precedents--or antecedents--in American literature. We see Janie falling in love not with the possibility of change or social movement, but with a unique individual, a kind of person she's never even thought of before. And there's a surprising downward mobility happening here--she digs Tea Cake not only *despite* the fact that he's from a different class than her, but really *because* of it. And that's pretty unusual in what you're calling "romantic" fiction, African American or otherwise.
ReplyDeleteBut, then, it's always possible that I'm kinda crushing on Tea Cake a little bit myself!