Feminine Marriage

Onto the next book -- wow this year is going fast. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston has been a new kind of book in context of this class so far. The language is more phonetic, the perspective is from a woman and feels like it’s claiming a feminine portrait in a way, etc. As we were talking in class today, I couldn’t help but think about my own views on marriage and how they tie into what Janie has felt throughout her two (failed?) marriages.

Janie’s grandmother, Nanny, recounts the stories of her earlier life. She was raped by her master in slavery, and ran away with her child, Leafy, so that they could live a better life. Leafy ends up being raped by her school teacher, and runs away from home eventually. It seems that after all this hardship, it is so natural for Nanny to be skeptical about love or marriage or truth. What role do men have in her life so far besides to rape her or the people she cares about. And even if that is an irrational fear she has, it is all she knows.

From the generational pattern of events that Nanny describes, it seems inescapable that Janie will suffer from the men that she encounters or marries. False hope is prevalent; first in that she thinks after her marriage to Logan, their love will come naturally, and second in that she sees Johnny as a positive get away from a deteriorating life. This is like Nanny’s life -- running away from a rape to only find another rape. I think Hurston gives us these plot patterns to show the type of place a black women is in. Their role may not be invisible, but it seems to carry much less hope than a black man’s plight does.

Rinehart

We’ve talked about it before, we’ll talk about it in the future. But I want to talk about it now: What’s up with this Rinehart character. Rinehart is never met in the book - we just know him through our narrator as he’s walking the streets of Harlem. Everyone recognizes the narrator as Rinehart, but sees him in many different forms: a pimp, a preacher, etc. This imagery seems kind of obvious -- playing off the idea of our narrator questioning his own identity and working through his atmospherical and inner changes as well as the misconceptions that other people have of him. It also seems to show that people are so easy to accept our narrator as completely invisible -- not even being the wind or the water -- just being nothing. That’s scary in a way. But I think the Rinehart character stands for more than just an obvious metaphor reflecting our narrator’s life. I think he serves as an example of a  character that is consciously invisible.

Our narrator seems to be struggling to be this, and by the end of the book he realizes he has been invisible throughout his whole story . But then the book is over, and he is still underground, so we, as the reader, don’t completely see his understanding of his conscious invisibility. Rinehart is a consciously individual character, but isn’t given much space to show himself in the book, in the same way. So, in a way, Ellison is telling the reader that he has to restrict this space so that we can understand the plight of our narrator. If there was a character that was strong, central, and constant in the book that also exhibited conscious invisibility, our narrator wouldn’t have to fight or struggle in the same way that he does. And also, that character might not be so invisible anyway.

Perhaps Ellison is deceiving us throughout the book -- in the same way our narrator is constantly being deceived. We don’t really get to taste what our narrator’s success looks like (if it is “success), and so we have to see our narrator through other eyes.