TRANSFORMING “SORROW’S KITCHEN” : GENDER AND HYBRIDITY IN TWO NOVELS BY ZORA NEALE HURSTON KEVIN D. HUTCHINGS McMaster University “Ah done been in sorrow’s kitchen and Ah done licked out all de pots. ... Nothin’ kin touch mall soul no mo’.” Lucy Potts/Pearson (Hurston, Jonah’s Gourd Vine 131) “Ah done been tuh de horizon and back and now Ah kin set heah in mah house and live by comparisons.” Janie Crawford/Killicks/Starks/Woods (Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God 182) Z o R A Neale Hurston’s view of the politics of gendered identity is com plex and multi-faceted. On the one hand, as Nellie McKay has argued, it is possible to read Hurston’s most famous novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), as providing a description of Janie Crawford’s “psychological journey from a male-identified female to assertive womanhood” (55). Such a reading — which implies an essential distinction between male and female cultural identities1— would be supported in the novel by the narrative strat egy that Janie adopts for the telling of her tale, for, as a means of actualizing and asserting her new identity and the critical voice that goes with it, Janie chooses to relate her story in a dramatic context that, insofar as it excludes the direct presence of male listeners, suggests at least a tentative subscription to a politics of cultural “separatism.” On the other hand, however, Hurston’s representation of Janie’s self-growth is by no means based, as some critics would have it, on the possibility that Janie may access a discrete and origi nary female “essence.” As Hurston herself once wrote, “It is obvious that to get back to original sources is much too difficult for any group to claim very much as a certainty. What we really mean by originality is the modification of ideas” ( “Characteristics” 181). Hurston’s remark carries important impli cations for the study of cultural difference in her novels, for it suggests that identity, rather than being based on an ideal of cultural “purity,” is always preceded by, and formulated upon, something other than “itself.” It is significant that Hurston’s statement about the possibility of returning to original sources prefigures the kinds of theoretical propositions being made in the 1990s by such prominent thinkers as Homi K. Bhabha, who argues English Stu d ie s in Ca n a d a , 23, 2, June 1997 persuasively that “hierarchical claims to the inherent originality or ‘purity’ of cultures are untenable” (Location 37). For Bhabha, cultural identities can never be essentially discrete, for they are always subject to processes of cross-cultural “hybridization.” In contrast to views that conceptualize identity in terms of an originary cultural “essence,” Bhabha’s theory of hybridity posits an inescapable interrelationship between Self and Other — a constitutive mutuality based on the internal complexity and heterogeneous interconnectedness of cultural identities in the postcolonial world — to the extent that identity itself becomes something akin to Hurston’s “modifica tion of ideas.” Despite this theoretical common ground, however, Hurston and Bhabha part ways, arguably, when it comes to defining specific strate gies of resistance that exploited or marginalized cultural groups may deploy as means of self-empowerment. In Jonah’s Gourd Vine, as I will argue, Hurston demonstrates that, while an undermining of the essentialist myth of masculine self-sufficiency can help to destabilize male authority, this process alone is insufficient for the actualization of female emancipation. Moreover, although Hurston does not advocate a strict female essentialism in Their Eyes, I will argue that her representation of Janie’s strategic need to as sert a kind of cultural autonomy problematizes Bhabha’s assertion that the basic assumptions informing an understanding of cultural hybridity provide “a strong, principled argument against political separatism of any colour” (Location 27; emphasis added). There are other reasons to address Bhabha’s analysis of cultural differ ence and Hurston’s representation of inter-gender relations together in the same essay. Most importantly, although Bhabha frequently gestures toward the category of gender in his theoretical discussions of hybridity, the bulk of his published writings deal with more general issues of postcolonialism and governmentality. Just as critics...