Joyce
Compton Brown
Professor of English, Gardner-Webb
University
American Women Writers of Color conference, Fall 1999
Zora
Neale Hurston’s Questers:
the Withered Gourd,
the Ripened Pear
In Zora Neale Hurston’s novels of journeying, Jonah’s
Gourd Vine and Their Eyes Were Watching God, she offers a series of images and
symbols which, when regarded comparatively, separate the female from the male, the
spiritual from the sexual, the fecund from the barren, and the triumphant from the
defeated. While the two novels seem to bear similar structures of protagonists seeking
serenity through love, their dominant representative images, the gourd and the pear,
clearly identify the contrasting results of their journey.
The pear tree image establishes Janie’s need for fruition.
As she awaits her "voice and vision" by her grandmother’s gate,
Janie’s three-day vigil culminates in a "pain remorseless sweet" which
leaves her with "glossy leaves" and "bursting buds." This orgasmic
scene may, as stated by Mary Helen Washington and Robert Hemenway, suggest a need for
union with another (Bloom 131; Hemenway 233). However, it is a sweet remorseless solitary
experience revealing Janie's potential for ultimate self-fulfillment. We might also note
Hurston’s foreshadowing of the lack of success in sexuality within itself as a means
of attaining selfhood. When Janie sees "through pollinated air...a glorious being
coming up the road," Hurston points out with irony: "In her former blindness she
had known him as shiftless Johnny Taylor....before the golden dust of pollen had
beglamored his rags and her eyes." Sixteen, confronted with a dying
grandmother’s insistence that "colored folks is branches without roots,"
Janie kills her dream through marriage to Logan Killicks, and becomes a woman. Even Joe
Starks, her second husband, does not represent "pollen and blooming trees," but
he is a means of continuing the quest. Joe Starks is as barren as his name implies, a man
who kills his own soul long before his body has died. Janie is determined to speak
honestly with him about his impending death and his own loss of fulfillment because of his
"worshiping the works of his own hands." Jody has already died, she says, and
the part lying on the death bed is only "what’s left after he died." As
Robert Bone suggests, Janie's honest confrontation with her dying husband is
"unconscious preparation" for the opening of her own dormant vitality (Bloom
18). Indeed, the preparation seems quite conscious, since Janie is determined to have this
talk with the distant Joe, once her husband Jody, "for both our sakes." Her
words, as Cheryl Wall says, are not cruel but are a "step toward
self-reclamation" (Gates and Appiah 93).
With Teacake Woods, Janie, the forty-year old woman, moves toward
fruition. Teacake brings her fruit and marriage, the name Woods implying the fertility of
her new identity. Together they live in the Everglades in the fecundity and freedom of
nature, not a romanticized nature, but a vital one. Truly Janie "ripens" in this
environment of "Big Lake Okechobee, big beans, big cane, big weeds, big
everything." Here, as Michael Cooke points out, Janie "fulfills herself by
surrendering herself" (Bloom 146). Unlike Joe Starks, who died before he was dead,
Tea Cake, though destroyed by rabies, remains alive because of Janie’s love. After
his death, with his living memory, Janie is at peace, the ripened pear, with no need for
distant horizons, with tolerance for the front porch gossips who, she says, are
"parched from not knowing things," with a story which makes her friend Phoebe
feel like a tree: "I done growed ten feet higher."
John Pearson, the protagonist "gourd vine" of Jonah’s
Gourd Vine, also searches the distant horizon as a means of growth; literally
entangled, vine-like, with woman after woman. On one level John seems to incorporate some
elements of the African-American mythic hero John the Conqueror in his power with words,
his physical strength, his role as comforter and as spiritual sustainer. And as gourd vine
in the Biblical sense, his role is defined as comforter to other sojourners: "And the
Lord God prepared a gourd, and made it to come up over Jonah, that it might be a shadow
over his head, to deliver him from his grief. So Jonah was exceeding glad of the
gourd" (KJV, Jonah 4.6). But, as Eric Sundquist points out, the realities of
John’s life destroy the "redemptive-mythic" aspect of his role ((Gates and
Appiah 57). Instead, he is the gourd-vine, as Hurston states, growing richly, but suddenly
destroyed by his own "act of malice,’ that of slapping his truth-speaking wife,
which then leaves him withered and gone" (Hemenway 192). In John’s destruction,
Hurston parallels the Biblical account of the destruction of the gourd: "But God
prepared a worm when the morning rose the next day, and it smote the gourd vine that it
withered" (KJV Jonah 4.7). The gourd-vine, sent to be a comfort to the prophet Jonah,
is destroyed by the worm as a lesson to Jonah, who is angered by God’s forgiveness of
the people of the wicked town of Ninevah (Alter and Kermode 241-42). The gourd vine
"came up in a night, and perished in a night"(KJV Jonah 4.10). In John Pearson,
the worm may well be a Freudian one, his carnal impulse (Bloom 26; Hemenway 190); however,
Hemenway’s statement that John’s weakness is that he "cannot resist
women" (190) seems a bit simplistic, in the tradition of Benjamin Franklin’s
admonition in Poor Richard's Almanac two hundred years earlier against the sins of
"women and wine," in its failure to address the root character flaw within John
himself. As Rita Dove suggests, the worm may be any or all forms of human failure:
John’s act of hitting his wife, his infidelity, the community malice directed toward
him after his fall, his failure to listen to himself ( Dove in Vine xi-xii).
However, I agree with Theresa Love, who speaks of John’s tragedy as "the sorrow
and hurt which result from one who is incapable of love" (Bloom 58). That failure is
the ultimate worm which gnaws at John, which makes him an empty gourd, similar, in many
ways, to Joe Starks in Their Eyes Were Watching God. In any case, the image of the
gourd is an apt one. In addition to her having heard the story of Jonah in the King James
Version of the Bible many times, in her Florida journeys Hurston must have seen the showy,
pendulous Okechobee gourds which grew on vines climbing and covering cypress, maple, ash,
and hickory, fell into the lake waters, and often rotted in the water or hung dry upon the
dying vines, the same gourds which had so impressed William Bartram two hundred years
earlier (Minno 2-3). Like John, gourds have the potential to rot, to dry up, or to become
containers for the life-giving water. John’s failure is his emptiness of spirit for
all that he is a vessel of God’s word; he is left "searching for a lost
self" and is ultimately destroyed by the worm of mechanistic progress in the form of
a train even as he journeys homeward once again in an automobile purchased by his trusting
third wife. Ironically, his greatest life’s pleasure had been his first ride on that
symbol of the new age, the train; however, he fails to hear "the whistle of the
damnation train" even as he fails to hear his own sermon warning of its approach.
The sexually fertile John dies spiritually barren while,
ironically, the seemingly sexually barren Janie returns to her home, content, no longer in
a desperate quest to find her completion in another being, no longer in need of the
journeying; in contrast, John dies, returning blindly, during the last of several
desperate attempts at self-reclamation through a virtuous wife, his pattern of seeking
outside himself broken only by his death. Janie’s return, however, is successful, a
symbol of her triumph within, where journeying is no longer needed. While the similar
shapes of the gourd and the pear suggest possibilities of fecundity, the gourd vine dries
up; its seed rattles pointlessly; in contrast, the pear blossoms and ripens into
fruitfulness.
What are the factors determining the success or failure of these
two questers? There is some validity in considering the sense of social role assigned each
one as male or female. As noted by critics, Hurston perceived the Afro-American male as
limited in avenues of developing a sense of self-worth; his most likely means of achieving
"manhood," therefore, lay in sexual conquest and female exploitation (Brown
84-85). Thus, John is the "protector" of his females, the strong virile male who
conquers women and congregations and physical antagonists. He achieves recognition in the
traditional ways open to a black man of the century’s turn. His strength frees him
from the physical cruelties of his stepfather; he savors the taste of blood during his
first fist fight; he wants somebody else to hit him; later, he finds enjoyment in swinging
a nine-pound hammer in building the railroad, the means of his own future destruction. As
the "protector," John defines his role as a young man, destroying evil, in the
form of a water moccasin, for the young girl who is to become his wife. Lucy admires and
trusts him, saying, "Ahm so glad you kilt dat ole devil. He been round here
skeerin’ folks since before Ah was borned." But the snake which he cannot
destroy is within himself, his own physical fecundity, or promiscuity, which he cannot
control in terms of his own sexuality. After Lucy’s death, he dreams again of killing
the snake to save Lucy, of carrying Lucy down the white dusty road and yet losing her
again; he awakens to the reality of her death. John’s failure as protector of Lucy
from outside evil and from himself is evident in the loss of the marriage bed, carried off
by her brother while she is left lying on the floor. In contrast, Janie is not
"protected" by Tea Cake, but joins in the work in the fields, becoming a part of
the community at large and learning to tell her own "big stories" as an
individual. Indeed, Tea Cake epitomizes Hurston’s contention that those without
material wealth are most wealthy in spirit and in joy (Gates and Lemke xx); as the bearer
of that philosophy, he leads Janie to the ultimate protection in life, spiritual
tranquility.
Ironically, though John wades in the water many times, he cannot
be purified, cannot be purged. Throughout the novel he crosses the water time and time
again, but he is never spiritually immersed; he is never purified because his purification
must come from within. At one point he is nearly destroyed by the raging waters and
remains unconscious, coming home in his dreams to a returning consciousness of the crying
Lucy, the empty household gourd dipper (in itself a symbol of his failure), and pots and
pans. Yet, his near-death experience does not serve as a rebirth. Janie, in contrast, is
immersed in the powerful watery forces of Lake Okechobee. Nearly drowned, she rises out of
the murky waters a strong woman, strong enough to kill Tea Cake’s body when she sees
his spirit has already gone.
Finally, John is destroyed by mechanistic forces as he journeys
once more toward a likely self-deceptive repentance. Destroyed by his own blindness, a
blindness toward self-destruction which has characterized his entire existence, he is hit
by the train as he crosses the tracks in his car, an obvious modern-day instance of deux
ex machina (Dove in Vine xiv); Janie, however, having lost Tea Cake but having
thanked him for giving her life and love, walks away from the scene of destruction
homeward, serene, satisfied at having found fruition in life. Although Janie’s great
strength has been called her persistence (Bloom 3), in reality it is the courage act on
decisions, to continue in the search, to speak the truth, to take the existential leap,
that enables her to return at peace with what she had to do to save her life.
Is Janie more or less hampered by social expectation of her role
as woman than is John Pearson by his role as man? Mary Helen Washington notes that
Janie’s voice, as the voice of a woman, is never really heard; instead, it becomes
lost in the story of Teacake and his vindication (Gates and Appiah 102). In creating a
woman as "questing hero," Hurston, according to Washington, has created an
unsolvable problem. Janie’s quest is not her own; she is, instead, a follower of male
horizons (Gates and Appiah 106). However, if we look at Tea Cake not as an end within
himself but as catalyst, we can see him as the means to Janie’s growth rather than as
a displacing central figure. He is the sweet communion wafer of her new life. Through Tea
Cake Janie learns to yield to self-respect, even healthy self-love; through him, she
learns to drink life to the lees: "Ah been a delegate to de big association of
life." Having learned self-love and love of another and that the two are not at odds,
she is prepared to tell her story to her "kissing friend," to welcome
friendships, "to kiss and be kissed." She can become a symbol, as Addison Gayle
says, of rebellion against the expected (Bloom 42), but she is a symbol of serene
rebellion.
Thus, her act of killing Tea Cake, tragic as it is, is a
statement of her fruition; hers is a strong, pure love, not a self-destructive one. Her
love does not have to be the instrument of her own death in direct contrast to that of
Lucy, in Jonah’s Gourd Vine, whose love is self destructive. On her deathbed,
Lucy tells her daughter, "Don’t you love nobody better’n you love
yo’self. Do, you’ll be dying befo yo’ time is out." But Lucy has
learned this lesson too late; she is not Hurston’s "woman of the future";
nor is she "the black woman come to maturity in a new South and a new age," as
Addison Gayle states (Bloom 37). The traits Gayle attributes to his new woman of the South
are "fidelity, courage...willingness to suffer for her man and her children."
(Bloom 37). These qualities which, according to Gayle, present a "positive
image" are the age-old qualities of masochistic womanhood based on the age-old
masculine (and self-degrading feminine) definition of virtue in subjugation, even to the
point of self destruction. It is worth noting that Gayle describes Hattie, John’s
second wife and also victim of his infidelity and physical abuse, as "deserting"
him (38). Janie is the new woman, who can return from her life with Tea Cake in overalls,
ripe with her own vitality: "her firm buttocks like she had grape fruits in her hip
pockets; the great rope of black hair swinging to her waist and unraveling in the wind
like a plum;...her pugnacious breasts trying to bore holes in her shirt."
That John is more acted-upon in life than decision-making seems
evident in the means of his death. His death, as Hurston says earlier of his train ride to
a new town and a new identity, is "purely accidental." While the novel may be
labeled a bildungsroman as Dove suggests (Vine vii), it is difficult to
perceive that John develops as a character or learns anything about himself; rather, even
after his wife’s death and his fall from grace in the community, he sees himself as
restored, squeaky-clean, with a new wife, as saintly as Lucy but richer, and he heads once
again to a "quicky" infidelity. While we might well see John as carrying the
"burden and temptation of human existence," (Neale in Bloom 37), it is difficult
to see him as destroyed by "social demands"(Neale in Bloom 26) or being in a
more vulnerable position regarding those social demands than is Janie. And Hemenway’s
suggestion that the gift of words such as John has "may indicate a life of
profound wisdom despite observable human failings" (195) brings to mind Janie’s
own words. John, like the front porch people, may well be " putting they mouf on
things they don’t know nothin’ bout." Indeed, that John cannot hear his own
message is one of the great ironies of his life and of the life of church people in
general as often portrayed by Hurston. Hurston reiterates the separateness of the message
and the messenger when, in Their Eyes Were Watching God, she describes Joe Stark as
preaching the mock-funeral sermon of a dead mule: "Then he set his hat like John
Pearson and imitated his preaching. He spoke of the joys of mule-heaven to which the
dear brother had departed this valley of sorrow; the miles of green corn and cool water, a
pasture of pure bran with a river of molasses running through it"(57). Jody’s
mockery of John Pearson is a dual indictment of the vast gap between the speaker’s
understanding and his own words.
Both Janie and John violate the codes of gender propriety; both
become the objects of malicious gossip; both are measured against the expected pattern,
the norms of male as macho, of woman as mule. To some extent, however, John succumbs to
society’s views of maleness, brute strength, self-centeredness, and virility. Janie,
however, in violating the "moral" code of woman’s role, finds in that
violation the means of ultimate spiritual purity. In Janie’s lone journey, she finds
serenity, fruition; she becomes the ripened pear. While Janie walks away from one husband
to another "for change and chance," hers is not a random promiscuity.
John’s insatiable thirst for overt sexuality always leads to his return to his long
suffering wife; his is an infidelity of immediate gratification. He is left the withered
gourd, hollow and empty, barren of spirit.
From the time of their publication, Hurston’s Their Eyes
Were Watching God and Jonah’s Gourd Vine have brought conflicting
reactions. From Richard Wright’s famous declaration that her novel lacks "a
basic idea or theme that lends itself to significant interpretation"(Gates and Appiah
17) to Nick Ford’s declaration that in Jonah’s Gourd Vine Hurston
"had every opportunity of creating a masterpiece of this age" but failed (Bloom
10), Hurston has, while living and posthumously, been given mighty suggestions as to what
she should or should not have done with her talent. Jonah’s Gourd Vine, Robert
Bone says, "is not carried forward to a suitable denouement"(Bloom 16). To some
extent, Hurston offered her own defense. To the charge of John Pearson [Person] as comic
fodder for racists, she states that she tried to portray a black preacher "who is
neither funny nor an imitation" (Bloom 25). In her insistence on not portraying
herself as the suffering African-American, she proclaimed that other black novelists
"confuse art with sociology"(Ford in Bloom 8).
In any case, her questers, and her work, are now canonized, as
Gates says, "in the black, the American, and the feminist traditions"(Eyes
Afterword 190). Whatever life experience we as readers and questers bring to her portraits
of John Pearson and Janie Woods, we can find universality there. Whatever we lack as
readers and questers, we can find through her work at least the beginning of recognition
of existence apart from our own limited experiences. John’s story is a tragedy in
picaresque guise, I suspect that Hurston sees his as a human tragedy, a tragedy of the
inner self, made all the more poignant because of social factors which pushed him toward
his fate. Janie’s story, in contrast, is a bildungsroman, a story of ripening
life. She seems to validate Addison Gayle’s comment: "Salvation for black people
can come...only when they have taken the existential plunge" (Bloom 43). Perhaps that
plunge may be the means, in Hurston’s eyes, to all human salvation. For Hurston will
remain, as Fannie Hurst said, "a figure in bas relief, only partially emerging"
(Bloom 23) , like her works, offering possibilities for us all.
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