The limits of lovemaking and community: infertility in "Their eyes were watching God"

Janie Crawford, the protagonist in Zora Neale Hurston‟s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), never fully grows up or integrates completely into any of the communities of which she is a part in the novel. She therefore remains “infertile” in several relationships and communities that showcase diverse kinds of “fertility,” whether that fertility is Logan Killicks‟s productivity with his farmland, Jody Starks‟s successes in building Eatonville, or even Tea Cake‟s skills at gambling and guitar-playing. No matter her environment, Janie remains outside of systems of fertility, more child-like than adult, which means that the blossoming pear tree image that surrounds her, and which seems to epitomize sexuality and fertility, is wasted on Janie, because she refuses to grow up and become fertile either by procreating or by contributing creatively to the communities in which she lives.Janie Crawford, la protagonista de Sus ojos miraban a Dios (1937), de Zora Neale Hurston, nunca se hace del todo adulta ni se integra completamente en ninguna de las comunidades de las que forma parte en la novela. Por tanto, permanece “estéril” en varias relaciones y comunidades que son emblemáticas de diferentes tipos de “fertilidad,” sea esta fertilidad la productividad de Logan Killicks con su granja, los éxitos de Jody Starks en la construcción de Eatonville, o incluso las habilidades de Tea Cake para el juego y la guitarra. En cualquiera que sea su entorno, Janie permanece fuera de los sistemas de fertilidad, más infantil que adulta, lo que significa que la imagen del peral en flor que la acompaña, y que parece ser el epítome de la sexualidad y la fertilidad, se desperdicia en el caso de Janie, ya que ella se niega a crecer y a convertirse en fértil ya sea procreando o contribuyendo de forma creativa a las comunidades en las que vive

Reflections on the 'History and Historians' of the black woman's role in the community of slaves: enslaved women and intimate partner sexual violence

Taking as points of inspiration Peter Parish’s 1989 book, Slavery: History and Historians, and Angela Davis’s seminal 1971 article, “Reflections on the black woman’s role in the community of slaves,” this probes both historiographically and methodologically some of the challenges faced by historians writing about the lives of enslaved women through a case study of intimate partner violence among enslaved people in the antebellum South. Because rape and sexual assault have been defined in the past as non-consensual sexual acts supported by surviving legal evidence (generally testimony from court trials), it is hard for historians to research rape and sexual violence under slavery (especially marital rape) as there was no legal standing for the rape of enslaved women or the rape of any woman within marriage. This article suggests enslaved women recognized that black men could both be perpetrators of sexual violence and simultaneously be victims of the system of slavery. It also argues women stoically tolerated being forced into intimate relationships, sometimes even staying with “husbands” imposed upon them after emancipation

Christianity’s Last Stand: Visions of Spirituality in Post-1970 African American Women’s Literature

Christianity appealed to writers of African descent from the moment they set foot on New World soil. That attraction, perhaps as a result of the professed mission of slaveholders to “Christianize the heathen African,” held sway in African American letters well into the twentieth century. While African American male writers joined their female counterparts in expressing an attraction to Christianity, black women writers, beginning in the mid-twentieth century, consistently began to express doubts about the assumed altruistic nature of a religion that had been used as justification for enslaving their ancestors. Lorraine Hansberry’s Beneatha Younger in A Raisin in the Sun (1959) initiated a questioning mode in relation to Christianity that continues into the present day. It was especially after 1970 that black women writers turned their attention to other ways of knowing, other kinds of spirituality, other ways of being in the world. Consequently, they enable their characters to find divinity within themselves or within communities of extra-natural individuals of which they are a part, such as vampires. As this questioning and re-conceptualization of spirituality and divinity continue into the twenty-first century, African American women writers make it clear that their characters, in pushing against traditional renderings of religion and spirituality, envision worlds that their contemporary historical counterparts cannot begin to imagine

Setting his house in order: the crisis of paternity in James Baldwin's Giovanni's room

In this thesis, I argue that James Baldwin's critically neglected second novel, Giovanni's Room (1956), constitutes a necessary and proper addition to the literature that is recognized more widely as part of the author's personal canon. Perhaps the biggest area of scholarly research on Baldwin's writings is his mapping of paternity, yet critics consistently fail to realize the many ways in which Giovanni's Room contributes to this scholarly discussion. I argue that Baldwin consciously embeds a homoerotic subtext in the character of David's father, suggesting that the character is by no means as purely and uncomplicatedly straight as critics have read him heretofore, and that Giovanni's Room, while necessarily a product of its generally homophobic social moment, serves as a sustained critique of the ideological system that queer theorist Lee Edelman calls reproductive futurism. In this system, parenthood becomes the true marker of an individual's subjectivity and worth, and the figure of The Child (different from actual, individual children) becomes the ultimate symbol of societal value; I suggest that the mental, physical, and emotional crises of the novel's main and supporting characters are caused by their failure to fully participate in this system, which shapes the values of the world in which they live. I further suggest that the many autobiographical resonances present in the novel indicate that Baldwin might have looked on Giovanni's Room as a chance to continue working out in writing his complicated relationship with his late stepfather, David Baldwin, Sr. I contend that throughout the text, Baldwin employs literary strategies designed to call attention to the pronounced role that paternity plays in the novel, suggesting that in at least one key way, Giovanni's Room fits squarely within the traditions that shape Baldwin's canonical work. (Published By University of Alabama Libraries

Elsie Dinsmore revisited: the utility of an outcast series

In this thesis, I argue that Martha Finley's Elsie Dinsmore series (1867-1905) deserves to be reconsidered for its potential utility in the broader arena of American literature. The series, popular during the latter half of the nineteenth century, is the special object of critical scorn amongst modern scholars despite having experienced a revival in popular circles. While other formerly-sidelined books, such as Susan Warner's The Wide, Wide World (1850) and Maria Susanna Cummins' The Lamplighter (1854), have been reclaimed through sustained feminist scholarship, the Elsie series remains largely blacklisted from academic conversations. Scholars such as Nina Baym and Jane Tompkins, who worked to bring respect to female writings from the 1850s and 1860s, drew a sharp distinction between fictions written for adult audiences, like The Wide, Wide World and those written for adolescents, like Elsie Dinsmore and Little Women (1867) - a distinction that has caused juvenile fiction to be largely omitted from canon expansions benefitting adult domestic fiction. I argue that the Elsie Dinsmore series has a value within the American canon by acting as the best example of transitional literature between adult domestic fiction and the girls' series books that dominated the end of the century. To develop this argument, I first examine the textual and cultural factors that have contributed to Elsie's omission from academic conversations. I then examine the extent to which the Elsie series participates in tropes of adult domestic fiction and in tropes of girls' fiction to situate the series within the progression of American female writing in the nineteenth century. I contend that the Elsie series can make a valuable addition to courses on the development of female writing in America by acting as prime examples of texts that participate in both adult and juvenile genres. (Published By University of Alabama Libraries

Tracing Zora's Janie: reimagining Janie as an archetypal character in 20th and 21st century contemporary literature

Since the publication of Their Eyes Were Watching God in 1937, African American women authors, consciously or subconsciously, have re-imagined Zora Neale Hurston’s Janie Mae Crawford character in various settings with conflicts pertinent to their respective era. Hurston’s Janie is an archetype for African American women characters who are involved in quest fiction. Janie’s primary objective is to experience romantic love and sexual expression. During her quests she combats intense influences in her life that threaten to ruin her dream, influences such as her Nanny’s Victorian principles of respectability and loveless marriages. Despite her struggles, Janie is successful in her quest; therefore, she is a self-actualized character. A guiding question for this project is what becomes of Hurston’s once-self-actualized Janie? I address this question by examining Ann Petry’s The Street (1946), and Sister Souljah’s The Coldest Winter Ever (1999) and A Deeper Love Inside: The Porsche Santiaga Story (2012). These three texts by African American authors each feature a Black woman protagonist at the helm of the story. I read the main women characters as literary reiterations of Archetypal Janie. Petry’s and Souljah’s texts, which span more than eight decades, and emphasize realistic social, cultural and political issues, can be read as modernized versions of Archetypal Janie’s quest story. This project does the following through literary and cultural analyses: 1) provides background on and justification for the pairing of street literature with canonical texts; 2) establishes a “Self-Actualized Janie” or a “Tragic Janie” as the two particular categories for Black women characters since Hurston’s Janie; 3) analyzes the internal and external factors that contribute to the character’s self-actualization or tragic outcome; and 4) emphasizes the importance of community and ancestral guides to the character’s development and actualization. (Published By University of Alabama Libraries