"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

Abstract

Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God is a text at once (ac)claimed for its ability to speak to contemporary gender and sexual politics and blamed for its inability to speak to the local, particularized politics of its time. Their Eyes has been used to situate strong, culture-based women at the center of an African American women's literary tradition, on the one hand, and has been read as reinforcing primitivism or as idealizing the folk, on the other.(1) As important as Hurston's critical reception has been, it has mediated against considering her work as politicized in her own historical moment. Just as Claudia Tate notes the invisibility of the politics of early black domestic fiction, I am suggesting that much of the political embeddedness of Hurston's text has been lost. 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 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. …