The Aesthetics of Healing in the Sacredness of the African American Female’s Bible: Zora Neale Hurston’s Moses, Man of the Mountain

Vicent Cucarella-Ramon

doi:10.14198/raei.2016.29.04

Abstract

Zora Neale Hurston’s Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939) stands in the tradition of African American use of the biblical musings that aims to relativize and yet uphold a new version of the sacred story under the gaze of a black woman that manipulates and admonishes the characters of the gospel to offer a feminist side of the Bible. The novel discloses Hurston’s mastering of the aesthetics that black folklore infused to the African American cultural experience and her accommodation to bring to the fore the needed voice of black women. Rejecting the role of religion as a reductive mode of social protest, the novel extends its jeremiadic ethos and evolves into a black feminist manifesto in which a world without women equates disruption and instability. Hurston showcases the importance of an inclusive and ethic sacred femininity to reclaim a new type of womanhood both socially and aesthetically. Three decades before the post-colonial era, Hurston’s bold representation of the sacred femininity recasts the jeremiad tradition to pin down notions of humanitarianism, social justice and the recognition of politics of art. All in all, in an era of a manly social protest literature Hurston opts for portraying the folkloric aesthetics of spirituality as creative agency simply to acknowledge the leadership of the sacred femininity that black women could remodel into art.

Highlights

In her classic essay “Characteristics of Negro Expression” Zora Neale Hurston sarcastically claimed that “(t)he Negro is not a Christian really” (1997: 56), her third novel, Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939), stands in the tradition of a long history of African American use of the biblical musings that aims to relativize and yet uphold a new version of the sacred story under the gaze of a black woman that manipulates and admonishes the characters of the gospel to offer a feminist side of the Bible
With Moses, Man of the Mountain, Zora Neale Hurston’s narrative endeavor demonstrated that “it was viable for the Afro-American writer to acknowledge the folkloric oral tradition as the foundation of a genuine Afro-American writing tradition” (1997: 29) in Ana María Fraile Marcos’ words, and warranted the importance of black women’s sacred aesthetic within the inclusionary nature of an egalitarian nation
Rejecting the role of religion as a reductive mode of social protest and a technical assault of black people’s miseries– it is not in vain that she declared not to “belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood” (1979: 153) - Hurston’s mastering of sacred femininity attends to tog up black female subjectivity with the aesthetics that revolve around the vernacular ethos and the folkloric schemes “ carrying art to the altitudes of folk-gif” (Fraile Marcos 1997: 30)

Summary

Introduction

In her classic essay “Characteristics of Negro Expression” Zora Neale Hurston sarcastically claimed that “(t)he Negro is not a Christian really” (1997: 56), her third novel, Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939), stands in the tradition of a long history of African American use of the biblical musings that aims to relativize and yet uphold a new version of the sacred story under the gaze of a black woman that manipulates and admonishes the characters of the gospel to offer a feminist side of the Bible. Zora Neale Hurston’s linking of spirituality and epistemology brings forth a feminist cosmology in which black women, even if they or apparently, frame the text –as it is the case of Moses, Man of the Mountain- play a central role in the stylistic, cultural and thematic elements of the novel.

Results

Conclusion