Zora Neale Hurston's their Eyes were Watching God and the Influence of Jens Peter Jacobsen's Marie Grubbe

Abstract

Despite a great deal of recent interest in writings of Zora Neale Hurston, her work is still not well understood. For instance, Hurston's autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road bas been described by various critics as being problematic, enigmatic, and paradoxical. In same vein, publication of Mule Bone in form of a casebook presents for first time controversy between Hurston and Langston Hughes over authorship of play. Henry Louis Gates has indicated that, . . . we can recreate strange series of events!' surrounding extremely ugly affair, we cannot explain Hurston's motivation for denying Hughes's collaboration, which caused dispute and ending of their friendship (11, 14). Yet, with all of paradoxes and mysteries that surround her, Hurston is widely acclaimed as an innovative and influential novelist of Harlem Renaissance period, a pioneering anthropologist, a resourceful folklorist, an uncompromising feminist, a flamboyant raconteur, and a charismatic, though eccentric, personality. Much of Hurston's appeal has emanated from her close identification with Eatonville, Florida, small black town in which she was born and raised. Because she collected and published folktales from her home town, and based much of her on characters that she had known, it is generally assumed that sources for much of Hurston's work are to be found in African American folklore. For instance, in preface to 1978 edition of Their Eyes Were Watching God, Sherley Anne Williams mentions the use of dialect and folklore materials in that 1937 novel.(1) However, specific tale which may have inspired novel has not been identified. One unvoiced assumption has been that Hurston's experience as a collector may have at some point brought her into contact with a folktale in which a womman successively marries three times. While reiterative simplicity of story of a woman who marries three times is a narrative structure that seems indicative of a folkloric origin, it can also be mm as potentially complex enough to serve formal requirements of a modern novel. Since plot is accented by number three, traditionauy a component of magic spells and other folkloric forms, Their Eyes Were Watching God would seem to possess some of qualities of an authentic folktale. Another theory about origin of plot is that novel was based on Hurston's own life, and M. K. Wainwright has gone so far as to speculate that, like her protagonist Janie, Hurston may have been married to a much older man when she was quite young. In this essay I would like to explore proposition that Hurston's novel may have been influenced from a previously unsuspected direction. My speculation is that, early in process of writing one of lesserknown masterpieces of American fiction (Hemenway, Soul xvi), Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston encountered what is today an obscure but brilliant novel by a European male. It is likely that Hurston took violent opposition to novel which she found offensive because of portrayal of its female protagonist. According to my reading Hurston chose to respond to book by creating her own novel, in which she tried to create a more suitable female heroine. In doing so, Hurston, while retaining general outline of European text, seems to have discarded many of its elements and rearranged others of its components to suit her own milieu, that of an African American town in central Florida. Hurston not only brought her own thoughts and feelings to task of creating a new type of fictional portrayal of life of women, but she also endowed her text with a rich admixture of African American folkways. She had published Mules and Men, her collection of Florida folklore, just prior to writing Their Eyes Were Watching God, and Florida setting, African American vernacular, and small-town folkways that she had been immersed in while asesmbling that collection constitute important components of Their Eyes. …