earticle

영어

This paper analyzes Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston’s most famous novel, focusing on the process of deconstructing Christian authority, as well as male authority. As black women writers have attracted public attention, and methods of literary assessment have changed and varied, the works of Hurston have been reevaluated by the recent authors and critics, after years of unfair critical evaluation. Published in 1937, Their Eyes Were Watching God has been misunderstood by a patriarchal and racist literary culture. Thus, it has been the center of both acclaim and criticism, because it is a novel of a black woman who has a powerful sexuality and the ability to speak out in a white, male-dominated society. Contrary to former scholarship that paid attention to the growth of Janie, the main female character of this novel, recent scholarship finds that, despite the affirmation of black life in the text, Hurston subverts the surface text by using a subtext and a feminist narrative. Zora Neale Hurston showed an ongoing interest in the areas of myth and folklore throughout her life, and her fascination with myth was central to the development of this work. In this novel, Hurston uses the Isis-Osiris myth, one of the most popular Egyptian myths. She effectively deconstructs not only the male-centered patriarchal system but also western thought based on Greek-Roman myths. Janie takes the figure and characteristics of Isis, who finds her husband’s mutilated corpse and finally revives it. Likewise Janie’s third husband Tea Cake takes the similar characteristics of Osiris. In addition, Janie’s lifetime friend Pheoby is the figure of Nephthys, Isis’ sister, who helps Isis to embalm the corpse of Osiris. Even though Janie achieves power and authority after she kills Jody Starks using words, and Tea Cake using a gun, at the end of the novel she represents herself as a grown and prolific woman full of knowledge and power, and she can live her own life without any help. These features of Their Eyes Were Watching God subvert the widespread social belief of female weakness and male authority, and allow Janie to achieve her female identity at the same time. Zora Neale Hurston creates a visionary myth through the figure of Janie, who sets out on a quest to fulfill the promise of the pear tree, her Tree of Life. Hurston defines femininity by making Janie a figure of a goddess, and the author also proposes that the god whom we are watching at the level of subtext is an African-American woman.