「詹妮的旅程」：佐拉．尼爾．賀絲登《他們的眼睛正望著上帝》中之語言、身體和慾望

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(1)⊕ 國立中山大學外國語文學研究所碩士論文 A THESIS SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE INSTITUTE OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES AND LITERATURE NATIONAL SUN YAT-SEN UNIVERSITY. Janie’s Journey: Language, Body and Desire in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God 研究生：李又芬撰 By: Yu-fen Lee 共同指導教授：張錦忠教授 Co-Advisor: Professor Tee Kim Tong 指導教授：張淑麗教授 Advisor: Professor Shuli Chang 中華民國九十七年一月 January, 2007.

(2) Acknowledgments I would like to give my heartfelt and warmest thanks to my advisor, Prof. Shuli Chang, for all the wonderful things that she has done for me since the very moment she calls me her student.. Her illuminating insights, like the bright light shining into my blindness, guide my. feet whenever I get lost in my self-exploration journey.. For me, Prof. Shuli Chang is far. beyond an advisor; in fact, she is the ideal listener who brings my “self-revelation” —the thesis—into being.. Her complete support and endless patience, indeed, enable me to. develop my full potential, to recognize and overcome my limitations; and more crucially, to see the possibilities for what I could be.. I will lay her great love for remembrance.. In. addition, I would also like to express my deep sense of gratitude toward my co-advisor, Prof. Tee Kim Tong, for his valuable advice and deep concern whenever I am poor in need. great favor will be the last thing for me to forget.. His. Furthermore, I also want to express my. deep appreciation for the committee members, Prof. Shiuh-huah Chou and Prof. Su-lin Yu for spending time not only revising my thesis but also listening to my “heart” as it is revealed in my thesis. Their useful insights do broaden my horizon and help me to see what remains unseen.. I would also like to thank my roommates and schoolmates sincerely for their great. love and concern.. Without their company and support, I would never know how to go any. further whenever I fall prey to depression from time to time.. Besides, my special and. grateful thanks go to my parents and my three elder sisters. Without their patience, support and favor, I would almost likely to give up.. My mother, particularly, not only offers me the. endless love so that I could know how to love and be loved but also gives me the full freedom to experience and explore the world around me.. The last but not the least, my biggest. thanks go to my Father in Heaven. During the time when I work on my thesis on Their Eyes Were Watching God, my eyes are also watching Him.. He is worthy of my praise and respect.. The thesis, indeed, is one of the marvelous things that He has done for me..

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(4) Abstract The thesis aims to read Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God to discuss how and why the white male dominant society marginalizes and subordinates black women by means of silencing their voices, restricting their freedom to explore themselves and the world around them, and suppressing their recognition of their sexual desires and bodily needs. The black woman, or in a sense, the mule of the world, could not always do and act according to her own desire. Instead, they are required to keep silence whenever a community’s voice (usually the male one) is generated and furthermore to play the secondary role as a good wife whose sole purpose in life is merely to meet her husbands’ demands. On the one hand, black female body, which has always been brutally beaten, closely examined, and sexually exploited in the hands of white/black men, is the very site of white supremacy and male dominance.. On the one hand, it also serves as an outlet for black men to vent the. humiliation, anger and shame that they have suffered in the predominantly white America. The black woman, therefore, is doubly marginalized in terms of both her race and sex. In the first chapter of this thesis, I argue that Janie’s disturbing silence is the inevitable result of her failure to find an ideal listener. In a male-centered society, not only is Janie denied a voice to articulate her desire, but she also fails to find an empathetic listener. Pheoby’s “hungry listening” unquestionably satisfies Janie’s deep longing for self-revelation. Nonetheless, such a hungry audience is not always available even when a black woman chooses to voice her desire. Black female voice, in this respect, badly needs an ideal listener who is willing to keep his/her ears as well as heart open. The second chapter, moreover, engages with the major issues about why and how the heroine sets off on a quest for love and respect, freedom and possibilities. Janie, on the one hand, has to go to the far horizon not so much in time and space as in soul and spirit. a female quest to redefine herself aside from male definitions.. That is, Janie must embark on On the other hand, Janie also. brings back to the black community what she has experienced and learned in her.

(5) self-fulfillment journey and thus enriches her community with her hard-won knowledge and discovery. Janie’s journey from self-doubt to self-fulfillment, from silence to speech, I would like to suggest, will be continued by anyone who sincerely responds to her life story. The third chapter is concerned with the issues of black female body.. In this chapter, I argue. that black female body has always been the object of oppression and the target of male dominance and white supremacy. Nevertheless, if black female body could be the site on which the patriarchal law is inscribed, it could also be an agent to speak for what remains unspeakable; more crucially, it could also provide the female subject access to experience that which is both pleasured and pleasuring..

(6) 論文名稱: 「詹妮的旅程」：佐拉．尼爾．賀絲登《他們的眼睛正望著上帝》中之語言、身體和慾望校所組別：國立中山大學外國語文學系研究所畢業年度及提要別: 九十六學年度第一學期碩士學位論文提要研究生：李又芬共同指導教授: 張錦忠教授指導教授: 張淑麗教授論文提要：本論文嘗試分析非裔女性作家佐拉．尼爾．賀絲登在其小說《他們的眼睛正望著上帝》非裔女性之語言、身體和慾望。本論文以小說主人翁詹妮自我實現之旅程為其樞紐, 探討詹妮如何打破沉默重新取得發言位置, 重新定義非裔女性之自我價值,進而重劃以男性為中心之社會對非裔女性所設下之藩籬與疆界。筆者擬於本文第一章提出，賀斯登如何以看似衝突,實則互為表裡之敘事美學呈現非裔女性因其種族和性別所面臨之雙重邊緣化之困境。亦即, 賀斯登一方面呈現詹妮如何打破沉默成為言說的主體 (speaking subject) ，另一方面卻又突顯以男性為主導之黑人社群如何藉由消弭女性之聲音來控制女性進而壓抑女性欲建立其主體性之慾望。詹妮的沉默，事實上，正導因於黑人社群對非裔女性聲音的充耳不聞。本文之第二章，筆者進一步探討詹妮自我實現之旅程。詹妮的旅程，不僅僅是空間上之遷徙，更是心靈上的開發與成長。詹妮的旅程，不但代表了詹妮突破社會加諸其身之束縛與限制的勇氣，更體現了詹妮急欲追求愛與親密關係之深層的慾望。更重要的是，詹妮的旅程並非變相的逃避，而是促使詹妮將她在自我發現之旅途上所見所聞帶回黑人社群，進而豐富黑人社群之生命與拓展其視野。本文之第三章將側重分析非裔女性之身體。長久以來，非裔女性之身體，經常淪為白人控制非裔女性之主體性的工具或是供非裔男性展現其男子氣概之場域。然而，賀絲登藉由改寫女性身體為其慾望之主體來重塑非裔女性之主體性及重新定義其自我價值。非裔女性之身體，不僅僅是白(黑)人男性權力和慾望展現之場域；更是非裔女性用語言無法訴盡之慾望表徵。.

(7) Table of Contents. Introduction……………………………………………………………………………1. Chapter One “The Oldest Human Longing”: Female Voice and Self-Revelation…………….10. Chapter Two “Tuh de Horizon and Back”: Female Quest and Self-Fulfillment……………...38. Chapter Three “The Skin Felt Powerful and Human”: Body, Sexual Violence, and Desire……69. Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………94. Works Cited………………………………………………………………………......97.

(8) Introduction. No one could wish for a more advantageous heritage than that bequeathed to the black writer in the South: a compassion for the earth, a trust in humanity beyond our knowledge of evil, and an abiding love of justice.. We inherit a great. responsibility as well, for we must give voice to centuries not only of silent bitterness and hate but also of neighborly kindness and sustaining love. －Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens. Zora Neale Hurston, the Black Female Writer who “Jumps at de Sun” “I am COLORED but I offer nothing in the way of extenuating circumstances except the fact that I am the only Negro in the United States whose grandfather on the mother’s side was not an Indian chief” (Hurston 114), Zora Neale Hurston says so in one of her essays “How it Feels to Be Colored Me.”. Oddly enough, the essay included by Joyce Carol Oates in The. Best American Essays of the Century, which was published in the year 2000, was never anthologized by Hurston herself into her own memoir or reprinted during her lifetime.. In. fact, belatedly recognized as one of the most valuable clues for the reader to comprehend Hurston’s understanding of racial differences, “How it Feels to Be Colored Me” vividly delineates its author as a black woman who never takes her skin color as cause of shame in the predominantly white America. Refusing to “exist only another tragic unit of the Race” (“Art and Such” 24), Hurston, on the contrary, feels comfortable about, and even proud of, her color, no matter how hard the white-centered society has tried to diminish her self by “coloring” her.1. 1. I would like to argue that Hurston’s “colored me,” on the one hand, could refer to Hurston’s skin color. On the other hand, more importantly, the “colored me” also clearly demonstrates how the white-dominant America marginalizes and subordinates by “coloring” (in this sense, the word “color” is transformed from an adjunct to a verb) black folks and thus by highlighting their difference..

(9) Lee 2. Brought up in the black-built town Eatonville, the young Hurston obtains the freedom to experience and experiment, to explore the world around her and to enjoy what she has found in her creative exploration.. Whereas her father inclines to caution her, a girl of color,. against her boldness, Hurston’s mother helps Hurston to “jump at de sun”: “[w]e might not land on the sun, but at least we would get off the ground” (qtd. in Hemenway 14).. Instead. of refraining Hurston from having too much spirit since “the white folks won’t stand it” (qtd. in Hemenway 14), Hurston’s mother encourages her daughter to live at her full potential and above all to transcend the limitations imposed on black women. Alice Walker thus persuasively argues in her groundbreaking book In Search of Our Mothers’ Garden that Hurston deserves acclaim and recognition for her confidence in laughing and speaking as a black woman, the uniqueness of her narrative voice which does not address to an imagined white readership but speaks to her own people of color, and, finally, her refusal to merely use her work as the tool to build up a positive image of her race. For these reasons, Walker actually praises Hurston as “a cultural revolutionary because she [is] always herself” (89): In her self-acceptance, Zora was more like an uncolonized African than she was like her contemporary American blacks, most of whom believed, at least during their formative years, that their blackness was something wrong with them.. […].. It is impossible to imagine Zora envying anyone (except tongue in cheek), and least of all a white person for being a white.. Which is, after all, if one is black, a clear. and present calamity of the mind. (86) Hurston, the author of four novels Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934), Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939) and Seraph on the Suwanee (1948); two books on folklore Mules and Men (1935) and Tell My Horse (1938); an autobiography Dusts Tracks on a Road (1942), has also written more than fifty short stories, essays, and plays as she pursues her distinguished career as a black female novelist.. Nonetheless, this.

(10) Lee 3. black female novelist, whose work is instrumental in bringing the period of “The New Negro”2 into being and who always speaks her mind, even though by doing so she vexes and frustrates others’ expectations, dies pennilessly without a fund provided for her funeral. Alice Walker, in this respect, suggests a convincing reason why people choose to ignore Hurston’s genius: “though almost everyone agreed [Hurston] was a delight, not everyone agreed such audacious black delight was permissible, or, indeed, quite the proper image of the race” (89). For most of Hurston’s black contemporaries, they endeavor to prove to the white America that the blacks could also make great contributions to the nation as the white folks do as long as they are given the chance to obtain education, participate in politics and acquire social status.. Even so, instead of shaping her characters into the “symbols of everything. American was not” (Osofsky 234), Hurston vividly portrays blacks as a people who laugh, cry, sing, and long for love and respect.. That is, rather than holding onto the white’s values. by accepting the black’s inferiority, Hurston is not so eager to win the white’s recognition by fulfilling the white’s fantasy about “the new negroes.”. Instead, she invites her black readers. to listen to their own powerful and beautiful voices, to recognize their major limitations in white America and thus to explore the possibility of overcoming them. In fact, Hurston’s tendency to delineate her heroes as the arrogant mayor Joe Strakes in Their Eyes Were Watching God or the amorous preacher John Pearson in Jonah’s Gourd Vine, and furthermore, her attempt to present Janie－the heroine of Their Eyes Were Watching God —as a sensual black woman who expresses her deep desire for love and sex indeed break all of rules established by the males and the whites.. That is, Hurston fails to follow the rules— every. black writer is supposed to uphold the positive, not the negative, the strong, not the weak 2. As the title of Booker T. Washington’s book A New Negro for a New Century, published in 1900, has suggested, the twentieth century opens up endless possibilities for black people. Hurston’s short story “Spunk,” which helps her to win the second prize presented by the magazine Opportunity, is also collected in Alain Locke’s anthology The New Negro. Hurston, in this sense, has been recognized as one of the important writers during the period of Harlem Renaissance even though her different writing strategies upset her contemporaries much..

(11) Lee 4. image of his/her race once they are given the chance to express her/him self. Ever since black novelists or writers become more aware of “the standardization of life that resulted from mass production” (Osofsky 230) in early twentieth century, they are eager to reject the negative stereotypes (e.g. the black man is the criminal whereas the black woman is the prostitute) by representing their characters as the pure, kind-hearted and well-behaved ladies and gentlemen.. As Gilbert Osofsky clearly points out, “[s]ome observers, Negro and. white, looked to this outburst of literary and artistic expression as a significant step in the direction of a more general acceptance of Negroes by American society” (231).. A novel or. a poem, in this sense, could not simply be regarded as the novelist or the poet’s self-expression; rather, it should also help black folks to have their voices heard, that is, to obtain the recognition from the white America. Since during the time Hurston was active in the literary world, literature, for most black writers, is both poetics and politics, how could a black female writer trouble herself recording a “nigger” woman’s multi-layered feelings, emotions, motivations and desire, especially when she is expected only to write about kind-hearted and well-behaved black women?. Given that it is not at all easy for a black. female writer like her to acquire a voice in the predominantly white and male literary circle, “jumping at the sun” as Hurston has always craved for doing, is unrealistic, if not impossible. No wonder both her white and black contemporaries found it so difficult to appreciate her writing.. De Mule uh de World As the title of the book All the Women are White, All the Blacks are Men, But Some of us Are Brave suggests, black female writers have almost been viewed as “insufficient women” and “insufficient Black” so that their works fail to represent their gender and race sufficiently. Marginalized both by he race and gender, the “nigger” woman is not allowed to express her sexuality, to dream her dreams and to do and act according to what she has desired, for, as the.

(12) Lee 5. old Nanny in Their Eyes Were Watching God has said onto her mulatto granddaughter: “De nigger woman is de mule uh de world” (14).. Deborah E. McDowell furthermore. convincingly argues that the burden of elevating “the image of entire black race” (95) actually thwarts black female writes’ attempts to articulate their sufferings and pleasures being a “nigger” and a woman: Largely because degraded images of black women have persisted throughout history, both in and out of literature, black women novelists have assumed throughout their tradition a revisionist mission aimed at substituting reality for stereotypes.. In so doing, they natively believed, they could eliminate caste. injustice. They would manifest in literature the movement of racial uplift led by a widespread network of black club women of the nineteenth century whose motto was ‘Lifting as we climb.’ (94-95) Ironically, whereas some eagerly join this “movement of racial uplift,” other black female writer retreated into silence since their different voices have become the objects of oppression in the service of a “united” race. Black female writes, therefore, always find it difficult to express themselves fully.. While the white women tend to ignore the racial issues with. respect to gender troubles, black men sometimes even hold hostile attitudes toward black women’s different voices.. After all, for most black men, they consider the expression of. voices of dissidence a violation of their hope to articulate a single and united (undoubtedly the male one) voice to speak for their nationalism. Even so, Hurston undoubtedly is one of the black female writers who are brave enough to redraw the boundary imposed on black women. Published in 1937, Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God does help black women to embark on a self-discovery journey, to redefine who they are aside from male definitions and furthermore to reinvent who they could be in the white-male dominant world.. Full of the richness of the black’s vernaculars and. humor, Their Eyes Were Watching God is a novel teeming with bodily passion and with the.

(13) Lee 6. deep desire to love and to be loved as a “nigger” woman.. Rather than painting her heroine. as an asexual woman who plays the role as a kind mammy, Hurston delineates her Janie as the “nigger” woman who abandons her first husband, verbally castrates her second one and eventually kills her third and most beloved husband.. Nonetheless, most of Hurston’s. “prominent and leading” black male contemporaries do not appreciate Hurston’s great efforts. Richard Wright, on the contrary, bitterly criticized Hurston for her failure to “move in the right direction of serious fiction” (16).. In Wright’s opinions, Hurston’s novel “carries no. theme, no message and no thought” since Hurston portrays her characters as those who “eat and laugh and cry and work and kill” as if they were the pendulums swinging between “laughers and tears” (17). While Wright dismisses Hurston’s novel as a piece which only satisfies the White’s fantasy for funny Negros, Otis Ferguson feels quite uncomfortable about Hurston’s preference for black dialects and vernacular for “although the spoken is remembered, it is not passed on” (23).. Sterling Brown ,furthermore, also seriously doubt. that if Hurston still bears the racial issues in mind as a black writer is always supposed to do since “living in an all-colored town, these people escape the worst pressures of class and caste” (20).. As if receiving Brown’s comments, Alain Locke, though greatly admires. Hurston’s “cradle gift” for “telling a story convincingly,” also blames Hurston for her failure to “grip with motive fiction and social document fiction” (18). All these charges, indeed, are indicative of the vulnerable position in which Hurston is put as a black female writer.. Like her heroine Janie, Hurston also has to face “the trial” for. transgressing the established boundaries set for black female writers: her tendency to show the beauty of black dialects, her boldness to express black female’s pleasures, sufferings and sexuality; above all, her insistence to demonstrate how the key issues of race, gender and class are closely intertwined in her “all-black” town.. “The challenge of Hurston’s. character,” as Mae Gwendolyn Henderson strongly argues, “is that of a black woman writer—to speak at once to a diverse audience about her experience in a racist and sexist.

(14) Lee 7. where to be black and female is to be, so to speak, ‘on trial’” (21). Their Eyes Were Watching God, indeed, is a novel not only about a “nigger” woman’s struggle with the negative stereotype of being the mule of the world, but also about her continuous efforts to articulate herself, to voice her desire, and to (re)define her identity.. In her attempt to find. her “self” and her identity, Janie sets out for a self-fulfillment journey, while allowing her body to “express the inexpressible” (103). This thesis, which attempts to delineate Hurston’s struggles with the textual, gender, and body politics of her time, is divided into three chapters, with each of which focusing on different but interlocking topics: black female’s language, quest and body.. In chapter one. “‘The Oldest Human Longing’: Female Voice and Self-Revelation,” I suggest that Janie’s disturbing silence—or her failure to be a speaking subject— actually stems from the lack of an ideal listener.. In addition, from time to time, keeping silence is also the way for Janie to. survive as a “nigger” women for the male-dominant society offers black women no freedom to express herself fully; instead, it demands black women’s silence to maintain male authority. Janie’s backtalk, in this sense, would not always do her good but instead offer her husbands good excuses to hurt and humiliate her.. Moreover, Nanny, Logan, Jody and Tea Cake all. fail to express themselves fully since they could not be the empathetic listeners learning from what they have heard; therefore, they also fail to exactly know when and how to voice themselves properly. Black female writers, indeed, desperately need “the hungry listening,” that is to say, the addressable other who makes the intimate conversation between the self and the other possible. In chapter two “‘Tuh de Horizon and Back’”: Female Quest and Self-Fulfillment,” I would like to argue that rather than being told what a “nigger” woman is and what she is supposed to do, Janie must make a journey to the far horizon so as to know how far it is, to find people as they find her, and to show around the “jewelry” that is buried deep inside her. The “horizon motif,” as Hemenway persuasively argues, “illustrates the distance one must.

(15) Lee 8. travel in order to distinguish between illusion and reality, dream and truth, role and self” (235).. As a young girl, she is told to find shelter and protection in marriage, for most people. believe that marriage offers a “nigger” woman the protection she badly needs in the male-centered society. However, Janie finds out that marriage without love might bring about social status and material success but it fails to provide her with the freedom to explore the world around her, to develop her potential and most crucially to be her self.. Janie’s. journey, in fact, is a journey from self-doubt to self-fulfillment, from silence to speech, from limitation to possibilities.. In addition, that Janie, after having gone to “the far horizon,”. decides to come back to Eatonville, her own people, is also a symbolically significant act. Her return is as important as her departure. As Barbara Christian convincingly argues, “Janie does not see her life as tragic; she sees it as full and rich.. It is necessarily this. message that she brings back to her community, that self-fulfillment rather than security and status is the gift of life” (“Black” 59).. In returning to share with her own people what she. has experienced in her self-discovery journey, Janie sets herself up as, in the words of Lee Edwars, “a compelling model of possibility for anyone who hears her tale” (qtd. in Washington “Hero” 107).. In this sense, Janie’s journey would never come to an end but. instead would be continued by anyone who generously replies to Janie’s call. In Chapter Three: “‘The Skin Felt Powerful and Human’: Body, Sexual Violence, and Desire,” I argue that black female body, as a site of male dominance on account of the devaluation of black womanhood, is subject to white supremacy and male violence. Nevertheless, the black female body could be something more than the object of inspection for the white to examine and define or the outlet for black males to vent their humiliations, anger and shame.. Janie’s glossy hair, for example, is undoubtedly an object of oppression. for Jody uses it as the tool to control Janie’s sexuality. Nonetheless, Janie’s hair also signifies Janie’s agency and her desire of being pleasuring and pleasured; more crucially, it also bears the powerful symbol of Janie’s self which deeply desires to be touched and.

(16) Lee 9. fingered. Hence, the black female body, I suggest, could also be an agent, capable of speaking for black female’s desire, pleasure and fulfillment, and, above all, it also embodies a subject always worthy of love and respect. As a “nigger” girl, Hurston always likes to “climb to the top of one of the huge cheery tree which [guard] the front gate” (Hemenway 15-16) so as to search for the horizon and furthermore to imagine what the end of the world might be like.. Regarded as one of the. most influential and distinguished African American female writers in the twentieth century, Hurston indeed leads her people (especially those African American female writers who claim themselves to be Hurston’s kin daughters) to entertain a new vision both for themselves and for the next generations..

(17) Lee 10. Chapter One “The Oldest Human Longing”: Female Voice and Self-Revelation. Nay, ’tis woman’s strongest vindication for speaking that the world needs to hear her voice. […]. Woman in stepping from the pedestal of status-like inactivity in the domestic shrine and daring to think and move and speak,— to undertake to help shape, mold, and direct the thought of her age, is merely completing the circle of the world’s vision.. [The world] sees a circle where before it saw a segment. The. darkened eyes restored, every member rejoices with it. — Anna J. Copper, A Voice from the South by a Black Woman of the South. Hurston’s story begins with an end.. It is the end of a day.. The setting sun forms the. background and casts its last glance on the earth before it disappears from the horizon. [is] the time for sitting on porch, it [is] the time to hear things and talk” (1).3. “It. Although the. day has come to an end, yet its end also marks a new beginning for the black folks. Those black folks, having been “tongueless, earless and eyeless” during the daytime, are right now passing “the nation through their mouths” (1). It is the sundown that enables the blacks to talk, hear and see; most crucially, to be human again after a hard day’s toil as if they were mules.. While the white upper class people may show bitter regret for the end of the day, the. blacks welcome the sunset for it sets themselves free from the bridles and yokes of a day’s toils so that, at the end of the day, they could come to be alive again by means of singing, talking and gossiping. The porch-sitters, in this sense, are no longer the niggers who carry the heavy loads for. 3. Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God.. will be incorporated parenthetically in the text.. New York: Perennial, 1999.. All further references.

(18) Lee 11. their white masters.. Instead, they are the “lords of sounds and lesser things” (1). Some of. “the lords” are mule-tellers such as Sam and Lige (49) while the others may be the preachers like Brother David who asks “uh blesin’ on de town” (45).. The porch, being alive with. in/audible sound and in/distinctive voices, is transformed into another court for its black folks to sit “in judgment” (1).. As Hazelwood Joycelyn Donlon clearly points out, the porch. indeed serves the function of generating a community voice: “the porch ideology is one of leisure apart from work; of freedom in imagination and humor; and of letting words walk ‘without masters’ (2) so that a community voice could be generated” (102).. Hurston’s. porch, in this regard, is not only a place where her people sit and watch; it is also a place where they could voice themselves and simultaneously have their voice be heard. Hurston’s porch, therefore, “is the center of the community, the totem representing black cultural tradition; it is where the values of the group are manifested in verbal behavior” (Hemenway 239). “So the beginning of this [is] a woman and she [has] come back from burying the dead” (1).. Moreover, it is also the very beginning of a black woman’s struggle for humanity and. power, a struggle that is marked by her control over her voices as well as by her desire to talk and to listen.. And “the people all saw her come because it [is] sundown” (1).. woman approaching, those watchers are hushed with their ears “full of hope” (2).. Seeing the In fact,. they are not only burning with questions but also hope that “the answers [are] cruel and strange” (4).. In watching Janie approaching them, indeed, they are seeing in the silent body. of Janie a multitude of meanings, all of which have to do with what they want to hear Janie say rather than what Janie actually would like to tell.. Nonetheless, against their. expectations, the heroine’s very silence irritates her people so much for “she ain’t got manners enough to stop and let folks know how she been makin’ out” (3). Since the “porch couldn’t talk for looking” (2), the watchers could do nothing but use “killing tools out of laughter” (2) to relieve their discomfort.. Actually, Janie’s silence.

(19) Lee 12. bothers her people much since she keeps silent especially when “she is supposed” to say something.. Although the black folks’ eyes are busy, they become dumb for the woman’s. silence says more than what they could say. This time, the black folks are not tongueless for the “mules and other brutes [that] had occupied their skins” (1) but for a colored woman whose appearance arouses their innermost dread as well as desire.. “‘You Heard Her, You Ain’t Blind”: Voices and Vision Hurston, furthermore, invites the reader not only to listen to her porch talk but also enables the reader to “see beyond seeing” (170).. Indeed, the vision of “seeing” represents. the kind of understanding that we have to acquire since “we don’t know nothin’ but what we see” (14). As Janie tells her best friend Pheoby, “unless you see de fur, a mink skin ain’t no different from a coon hide” (7). we have seen and vice versa.. In this sense, what we know is deeply involved with what Nonetheless, to see is not merely a physical act of seeing;. more importantly, to see is also the very act of recognizing and furthermore understanding what we have already seen.. Perceptions of sight may only require one’s ability to see while. visual literacy necessarily entails one’s full and deep understanding; that is, vision develops one’s ability to “see beyond seeing” (170).. Hence, “in order for vision to become. knowledge we must not only see but understand what we are seeing. We must see what we see, that is, in terms of something else” (Burrow 444). Growing up with other white children, Janie could not fully realize who she is until she sees her image shown on the pictures.. One day, a man comes to Eatonville and takes a. picture of Janie and other white children. When the photograph is developed and shown to everybody, Janie does take a close look at it but she fails to really see it; that is, she fails to recognize and understand what she has seen. Instead of seeing her “self,” what Janie sees are other cultural parts: her dress and hair (9). Exclaiming loudly “Aw, aw, Ah’m colored” (9), Janie sees who she is not — having looks and color different from others’.. Obviously, it.

(20) Lee 13. is not the sameness but the difference that helps Janie to tell her self from others. Janie’s acute awareness of her different color, furthermore, represents “a way of negotiating the alienating experience of being identified by appearance rather than by family or by history” (Burrow 438).. Standing out against the white background, Janie becomes colored.. In this. sense, “recognizing visual difference, Hurston suggests, is crucial to understanding how identity is constructed: by skin and color” (Clarke 599). Nevertheless, from time to time, what we see may fool us once we fail to see beyond seeing.. In other words, “one must see outwardly as well as inwardly” (Clarke 604) or the. very act of seeing may become unreliable and even dangerous if we lack the full understanding of what we have seen. The old Nanny could see the farm and mules that Logan has, but she fails to see the barren desert buried deep in the heart of Logan’s sixty acres.. As for Nanny, Logan looks different from other “trashy niggers like John Taylor” (13). for, as a wealthy black man who has “a house, mules and his often-mentioned sixty-acres,” he embodies whiteness; that is, material possessions that may bring happiness to their life.. Yet. Nanny is blind to the truth that Logan’s fat neck or his mule-foot-like toe nails (24) does repel her granddaughter very much. Hence, seeing may be believing, but what we see may lead us to misunderstanding or to view the lie as truth. On the train to Eatonville, Janie takes a long look at Jody and she is thus proud of what she sees—the apples and candies that Jody buys her; above all, her well-dressed and portly husband who “looks like” rich white folks” (34).. For Janie, Jody’s poverty in self-expression becomes invisible due to what is. visible—Jody’s portly body or silk shirt. Jody’s refusal to “make many speeches with rhymes” (34),4 indeed, foreshadows the inevitable end of his close relationship with his newly-wed wife. 4. Jody’s weakness in voicing himself, furthermore, reveals the naked truth. Janie’s first husband, Logan, also makes the costly mistake about stopping “talking in rhymes” to Janie (27). Logan and Jody, making great efforts to perform their identities all their life (one is the owner of sixty acres while the other is a mayor of an all-black town), are unable to be the kind of husbands who are willing to talk in rhymes to their wives. In this regard, Logan and Jody’s inabilities to voice their deep emotion and anxieties toward Janie also handicap themselves from listening to Janie’s voice..

(21) Lee 14. that “there is nothing there to see” (Clarke 606).. Without voicing his self fully and properly,. Jody eventually loses his power both as a mayor and as a husband when what is visible (e.g. his big paunch) is decayed with time.. In this sense, it is not one’s self that gives one a voice ;. on the contrary, it is one’s voice that makes self-making possible. Janie, spending almost twenty years seeing what is seen, suffers a lot for she “does not know what she has seen and therefore cannot be certain of what she has heard” (Burrow 441). Hence, instead of privileging vision over voice as the novel’s title has suggested, Hurston in fact puts emphasis on the interrelationship between voice and vision. When the fierce wind blew and swept through the muck, Tea Cake, Janie and many other inhabitants they heard voices and made silent prayers to God as their “eyes were watching God.” Actually, they were not only watching; “their souls [were] asking if He meant to measure their puny might against His” (160 emphasis added).. Hence, they were voicing their serious. doubts about God through the very act of watching Him.. In this respect, to see is to speak. since voice has already been intricately woven into vision. Shocked by Janie’s powerful and penetrating voice when Janie taunts his aging body in public, Jody is not certain of (or he prefers not to) what he has heard (79).. Walter, one of the big tellers in Eatonville, destroys. Jody’s vain hope that his ears might fool him by telling him that, “you heard her, you ain’t blind” (79).. Therefore, to hear is also to see. In this sense, Hurston invites her readers to. “use voice visually” (Clarke 600) so as to realize that vision alone is not enough since what we see might be only “skin deep” whereas voice embodies the power to see what remains unseen.. Voices That Matter: To Speak as a Woman of Color As a “nigger woman,” Janie is seen and thereby defined by her visual difference (her interracial looks and colored skin). On their first day coming to Eatonville, “Joe was on the porch talking to a small group of men” while Janie “could be seen through the bedroom.

(22) Lee 15. window getting settled” (36).. Not being allowed to tell stories or to participate in porch talk. as a black woman, Janie is greatly reduced into the object of inspection just like one of the commodity displayed in Jody’s grocery store. Jody, articulating his “big voice” by silencing Janie’s, indeed needs Janie’s subordination badly so that he can maintain his unchallenged supremacy as “Mr. Mayor.” Janie’s visibility such as her light skin and long hair, in this sense, makes her “self” as well as her womanhood become transparent and invisible.. Michelle Wallace thus. convincingly argues that black women are left vulnerable for they have to speak for their own sake due to their visibility: “[b]lack women are more visualized in mainstream American culture […] than they are allowed to speak their own words or speak about their condition as women of color” (3). As far as Janie is concerned, being seen as a “nigger” woman is not enough.. More crucially, she has to speak as a woman of color.. Otherwise, she could never. be a subject who can voice her self; instead, she could only be displayed, observed and then defined as an object of inspection. Visual difference, therefore, could only tell who Janie is according to how others view her. However, Janie’s voice, on the one hand, declares what Janie could be; on the other hand, it also enables Janie to reinvent her self identity whenever she needs one. All the time, given that African Americans are marked by their thus are restricted to what is visible (their different looks and color) since “racial difference creates a constant, if unspoken, distortion of vision” (Lorde 42).. A distorted vision, indeed, often turns out to be. a greater disaster than blindness. With the distortion of her vision, Mrs. Turner would never blame anyone “who looked more white folkish than her self” for being cruel to her (144, emphasis added).. As for Mrs. Turner, the blackness to which her self could anchor is in fact. completely distorted because of her vision of whiteness. Mrs. Turner, therefore, greatly admires Janie not for her lighter skin but for the whiteness it embodies. Nonetheless, although visual difference has always been taken as the crucial key with respect to racial.

(23) Lee 16. issues in the predominantly white America, Hurston crowns her black people as the lords of sounds and voices rather than as lords of visions. Hurston begins her story with a “porch” full of voices and sounds, where black folks gather to while away their time as well as to retrieve their humanity, a humanity that remains unseen by their white masters. come to be refreshed again by means of what is said and heard (1).. That is, they. In this regard, voice. makes the conventional doctrine that “one is defined by how one is seen” becomes questionable (Clarke 602).. Samira Kawash also closely questions the role that visibility. plays in racial issues: “The modern concept of race is therefore predicated on an epistemology of visibility, but the visible becomes an insufficient guarantee of knowledge” (130).. Without seeing Mrs. Turner’s looks, one may, according to what she has said,. suppose her to be a white who is racially biased against blacks. looks black but she sounds and acts like a white.. In other words, Mrs. Turner. What is housed in her black body, indeed,. is “the White alter” that she is eager to bow to and to worship. Hurston’s mule tellers, undoubtedly, bring the porch back to life by filling it with laughter, cries, songs and stories. The voices of black people telling stories or big lies actually not only expand their horizon but also foresee what they could not see yet. In this sense, “voice announced that visual difference was only skin deep, that black bodies housed souls that were, in essence, no different from those residing in white bodies” (Clarke 599). Therefore, the voice enables the black to be speaking subjects—the speaking subject who is able to voice his/her deep desire to speak, to be heard, to love and be loved. As far as Joe Starks is concerned, all he wants and desires is to be “a big voice” in the all-blacks community and “he loves obedience out of everybody under de sound of his voice” (49). Thus, having one’s voice be heard can be regarded as another way of displaying one’s power. Jody’s voice, in this sense, bears not merely the symbol of self-expression but represents for “the wind blowing over the grass and to force people to bow down for it (49). On the contrary, once one fails to have his/her voice be heard, he/she loses the power of being a.

(24) Lee 17. subject speaking for his/her own sake.. When Jody forecloses Janie’s opportunity to give a. speech in public without even asking Janie whether she wants to do it or not, Janie is left wordless and powerless (43) since she could not exactly do what she wants—either to keep silent or to give a talk. Obviously, as for Janie, Jody takes the “bloom off of things” since he denies her desire— the deep desire to determine when and how to voice herself. Maria J. Racine has strongly argued that one’s voice cannot simply be dismissed as a physical act of articulating oneself because that “having a voice means owning one’s self and living as an independent person who makes her own decisions and determines her own life” (290). Janie’s self, in this sense, is somehow diminished and belittled by Jody’s big voice.. “Being too busy. listening to his own big voice” (87), Jody is blind to (or scared to see) the real and simple truth: Janie is more than a “bell-cow among the gangs” (41), one of the goods displayed in his store for nobody but for him to “look at” (55). Nor is Janie simply a “major’s wife” (59). She is a woman; most importantly, she is a human being like himself with a voice of her own and a self which she can give voice to.. Janie’s Disturbing Silence However, whether Janie has deployed her “voice” to articulate her emotion, passion, feelings and desire is still an issue open to considerable debate.. As Mary Helen Washington. has persuasively argued, “[a]s object in that text, Janie is often passive when she should be active, deprived of speech when she should be in command of language, made powerless by her three husbands and by Hurston’s narrative strategies” (“Hero” 99).. Another critic,. Robert Stepto, also argues that “Janie has not really won her voice and self after all” (166). In the court scene, when Janie is accused of committing the awful crime of murdering her third husband Tea Cake, she is voiceless and her voice is overwhelmed by both white and black’s voices even if she has ever expressed any.. Instead of having Janie voicing herself.

(25) Lee 18. for her own sake, Hurston invents the third person narrator to speak for Janie. In this respect, Janie’s individuality is somehow lost in Hurston’s voice since Janie’s voice is embedded in Hurston’s.. Rachel Blau Duplessis thus defends Hurston for her strategy of. having the narrator to speak for Janie: “if the narrator’s voice and Janie’s voice have melded throughout the novel, then perhaps there is no need for Janie to speak to the reader; her voice is evident through the narrator’s” (qtd. in Racine 283). Hence, only through the “full and non-judgmental” narrator could the reader learn of “the internal consciousness” of Janie as the trial progresses (Racine 283).. Janie’s voice, though evident and unquestionable as it is. filtered through the narrator’s is, in one way or another, thwarting the reader’s attempt to view her as a speaking as well as a self-evident subject. By the same token, when Janie’s first husband Logan decides to buy another mule so that he can push Janie to work for him, he has anticipated receiving bitter complaint from his young wife for “he studies Janie’s face and waited for her say something” (27).. Yet Janie. stays silent, without even voicing a complaint. Once again, Janie is speechless and remains weak in defending herself without allowing her own voice to be heard.. Consequently,. Janie’s silence is somehow disturbing and even intolerable since her very act of retreating into silence could probably be regarded as another way to acquiesce in the face of malice directed toward her.. Some critics like Ann duCille and Elliott Butler-Evans feel quite. uncomfortable about Hurston’s narrative voice since Hurston seems to “allow” her heroine to be a tamable black woman who is submissive to men’s violent love.. After all, Janie remains. silent about Tea Cake’s physical violence as if she were ready to expect, accept and forgive brutalization imposed on her (147).. As Elliott Butler-Evans clearly points out, Hurston. seems to “trivialize the incident in the text (‘No brutal beating at all. He just slapped her around a bit to show he was boss,’); furthermore, “[t]he description of the community’s approval and envy would indicate that Hurston is describing a culture in which violence against women was normal” (53-54).. Ann duCille, in this sense, brings up the fundamental.

(26) Lee 19. but controversial question: “Is Hurston demonstrating that yet again how even independent-minded women can be captured, bound, diminished, and domesticated by patriarchal ideology and romantic mythology that suborn abuse in the name of ‘true love’” (122)? Unquestionably, Janie is an independent-minded black woman; otherwise, she would not “choose” to stand her ground and to get ready to fight for her self when Tea Cake becomes crazy. Hurston does represent her Janie as a heroine who would like to speak for her own sake, to go the far horizon showing people her “jewel down inside herself” (90) and to love and be loved as a black woman.. Nonetheless, Huston goes further beyond this. representation; that is, she also attempts to show the reader how the male-centre society devalues her heroine’s womanhood by limiting her inner growth, reducing her body into the very site of male dominance by silencing her voice.. As duCille puts it so well, “[Their Eyes]. is a text as much about submission as about self-fulfillment, as much about silence as about voice” (123).. Hurston, indeed, tries to point out that the devaluation of black womanhood,. which is manifested in so many forms such as sexual violence or the misrepresentation of black women’s sexual desire, is the main reason why black women always find it very difficult to be the desiring subjects. While Hurston’s readers tend to put their emphasis on racial matters, Hurston is not interested in encouraging her reader to become “color-blind” but, instead, she wants them to “look inwardly,” that is, to reconsider how black men handle their shame and anger to their women folks in the predominantly white America and furthermore to reexamine how black community acquires a “single and unified” voice (generally, the male one) by silencing black female voice. Janie’s disturbing silence, furthermore, also highlights some other crucial issues: can it be fully guaranteed that Janie is not an object to be seen but a speaking subject merely because she refuses to be silent whenever she is supposed to do so? Janie prefer to stay silent rather than articulate herself?. Or, why does. As Nanny has told her.

(27) Lee 20. granddaughter that “De nigger woman is de mule uh de world” (14), the “nigger” woman is in this sense dehumanized by her color and gender, and thus is excluded from the White- and male-centered discourse.. Given that the “nigger” woman is not even considered as human,. would anybody listen to her?. Or, does a “nigger” woman’s silence stem from her own. choice or from others’ dull of hearing? If the “nigger” woman were the mule that totes the heavy load due to her double-marginalized situation, could any human being bother himself listening to a mule’s talk?. What the Lack of an Ideal Listener got to do with a Black Woman’s Silence The fundamental questions such as “can a yellow mule talk or furthermore can a ‘nigger’ woman talk” would not be questions themselves for nobody has ever raised such questions. As Nanny has said, she “wanted to preach a great sermon about colored woman sittin’ on high, but they weren’t no pulpit for me (16). In this regard, Nanny does want to voice herself yet she has no other choice but subside to silence for, even if she does say anything, nobody would listen to her anyway.. Both Nanny and Janie’s missing mother,. Leafy, are raped by the whites, but no one knows (or feels curious about) what tragic fate has befallen them.. Silence, as Carol Gilligan astutely points out, is not merely an objective. phenomenon; it is also an act of oppression: A silencing enforced by the wish not to hurt others but also by the fear that, in speaking, her voice will not be heard […].. [There is a] mysterious disappearance. of the female self in adolescence […]. [It becomes] an underground world kept secret because it is branded by others as selfish and wrong. (qtd. in Reich 164) In the same vein, Janie falls into silence not only because she does not want to hurt others but also because to speak is a useless act, as there is no one who is willing to listen. Hence, instead of fighting hard against her arranged marriage as she is assumed to do, she does not talk back to her grandmother much after hearing her suffering and pain.. After all,.

(28) Lee 21. how could Janie say anything more especially when her old nanny begs her to “have some sympathy”?. How could she harm a person who is like “a cracked plate” (20)? In other. words, Janie chooses to remain silent for Janie feels it is the only way for her to show respect (or sympathy) for her grandmother.. Articulating her self in the presence of her grandmother,. in this sense, would be regarded as selfishness. Thus, Janie could not talk back any more but obey what she is told to do since she would be the last one to hurt her nanny.. Inevitably,. Janie’s selfhood is somehow sacrificed since she does not want to be a selfish and ungrateful girl who would not take into consideration what her grandmother has done for her. At the same time, Janie is voiceless, for others always turn deaf ears to what she says. That is, Janie’s grandmother and her three husbands who have ears to hear are actually dull of hearing.. They do hear yet hear nothing else expect for their own big voices. Before the. day Janie runs off with Jody, Janie does try hard to express her true and real feelings to Logan. Yet, he asks her to “talk no more” and pretends to sleep (30).. Logan, in this regard, fails to. be her wife’ addressable other and let alone be her ideal listener. In fact, Logan knows well that “Janie had put words in his held-in fears” (30) yet he plugs his inner ears with anger, shame and fear－the deep fear that is not only about losing his wife but about her learning that he is scared of losing her. Thus, Logan has Janie hushed for Janie’s exact words conjures up his great fear and that is why Logan cannot stand listening to them. words, indeed, are true and powerful.. Janie’s. However, Logan could not put up with Janie’s words. since they would force him to realize the plain yet dreadful truth: Janie is not a mule that he can buy from the market or a plow used for farming; she is a human being like himself who has a voice and the deep desire to desire. So Logan pretends to be blind to the painful truth for fear that what he sees would make him blind totally. Undoubtedly, if Janie were not an object like a mule or a tool, then Logan would lose control of her and thus could not own her anymore.. Therefore, Logan must have Janie hushed for the words put in Janie’s tongue. prove Janie to be a speaking subject. Moreover, could Janie make herself be understood.

(29) Lee 22. even if she breaks silence by articulating herself in the absence of an addressable other? After all, what is the difference between silence and monologue without an addressable other? As Mikhail Bakhtin has claimed: This orientation toward the listener is usually considered the basic constitutive feature of rhetorical discourse […].. Every word is directed toward an answer and. cannot escape the profound influence of the answering word that is anticipates […]. All rhetorical form, […], are oriented toward the listener and his answer.. (qtd. in. Kaplan 103, emphasis original) In this sense, it is the lack of an addressable other that makes Janie to opt for silence over speech. Hence, Janie would rather stay silent than break it if giving a monologue is all that she can do; instead, Janie desires to enter into a two-way conversation that only takes place when there is an emphatic and responsive listener.. However, it is not always easy for Janie,. as a colored woman who is like “the branches without roots,” to have an ideal listener.. Thus,. Janie prefers to stay silent rather than articulating herself when there is not an addressee present. Instead of talking to Logan who embodies a vision “desecrating the pear tree” (14), Janie would rather talk to the falling seeds (25). In addition, the “nigger” men are not only the ones who would be hostile to Janie’s speech.. In fact, Nanny’s warnings that Janie should give up her youthful dream and get. married with a wealthy man lest she should replicate the tragic fate that has befallen Nanny— do set up the major barriers in Janie’s self-fulfillment journeys.. To protect her. granddaughter from harm and danger, Nanny actually denies Janie’ right to express her self, even though Nanny’s warning ends up nearly “chok[ing] her to death” (89). In order to silence Janie, the old Nanny “slapped the girl’s face violent, and forced her head back so that their eyes met in struggle” (14).. Janie does want to tell Nanny her blooming pear tree as. well as the dust-bearing bee, but she does not know how (14).. Nanny’s very act of slapping. her granddaughter, therefore, undoubtedly foils Janie’s attempt to carry on an intimate.

(30) Lee 23. conversation with her grandmother.. As Julie A Haurykiewicz convincingly argues, Nanny. not only fails to be Janie’s ideal listener but also becomes another accomplice who accepts the “nigger” woman’s position of inferiority by silencing her granddaughter: It seemed that, despite her best intentions, Nanny does not know how to free her self and Janie from the restrictions of a world which seeks to silence them.. […],. Nanny is concerned only with her own views. She doesn’t listen to Janie in order to find out what she wants, to hear what she hopes and dreams include.. (53). Ironically, even though Nanny has suffered a lot from the silence imposed on herself on account of her color and gender, yet she silences Janie in the same way without having any idea about it.. Neither a black man nor a white woman, Janie thus becomes a “nigger”. woman who could not voice her desires, hopes, dreams and above all her self without others’ permission.. Janie, the Born Orator In fact, Janie is far from dumb.5. On the contrary, Janie is a “born orator” (58) because. she definitely knows when and how to express her voice. When Jody frees Mat Bonner’s yellow mule, Janie praises and admires her husband for his generosity as well as consideration and furthermore compares him with Abraham Lincoln who has the power to free “niggers” (58).. Being surprised by Janie’s well-chosen words, one of the black folks,. Hambo, sings praise of Janie since she puts “de right words tuh our [their] thoughts” (58). Moreover, Janie prefers to stay silent rather than voicing herself in order to prevent herself from getting into trouble or violent quarrels.. From time to time, keeping silent is one of the. ways for Janie to secure herself against men’s attempt to hurt her: Time came when she [Janie] fought back with her tongue as best she could, but it. 5. The word “dumb”, as Julia Haurykiewicz points out, “in addition to meaning stupid, is frequently used as a colloquial expression for a non-speaking person, a person who is silent or silenced ” (54)..

(31) Lee 24. didn’t do her good.. It just made Jody do more.. He wanted her submission and. he’d keep on fighting until he felt he had it. So gradually, she pressed her teeth together and learned to hush.. (71). Obviously, Janie “had learned how to talk some and leave some”; after all, “she was a rut in the road and in this way she also learned to survive beneath the wheels” (76).. In this respect,. Janie would be the last one to suffer the “inability to express herself to anyone” (Racine 285). Instead, she is the one who takes good advantage of being silent in order to survive in the male-centered world whenever she needs to do so.. In this sense, Janie’s silence does not. announce that Janie won’t fight back for her own sake; on the contrary, she precisely knows how to save her energy so as to launch an all-out and surprise attack. Aged and weak both in body and soul, Jody humiliates Janie by “badmouthing” her looks in front of the community so as to redirect others’ attention from his aging body to Janie’s bad manners.. This time, Janie, the “born orator,” breaks silence and expresses her. thoughts efficiently: “Talkin’ about me lookin’ old! When you put down yo’ britches, you look lak de change of life” (79 emphasis added)!. Greatly shocked by Janie’s very act of. talking back to him, Jody at first cannot accept what he hears and thinks that Janie must be out of her head for she is “talkin’ any such language as dat”(79). Janie’s strong yet bitter words, for Jody, are hanging in the air as if they were the foreign languages that he has never heard.. Like Logan, Janie’s words vividly evoke his deep fear: he is getting old and his. young and beautiful wife would abandon him sooner or later; most importantly, she is no longer one of the goods displayed in his store window.. In fact, Jody is mad not because. Janie makes up or invents something new that he doesn’t know but because Janie is telling him what he has already known all the while: her wife is a speaking subject whose words have considerable and mystical power.. Janie’s voice, booming and penetrating, enacts a. speech act of putting down Jody’s britches.. That is, Janie’s voice exactly emasculates Jody. and in this way leaves him helpless, powerless and impotent..

(32) Lee 25. Visiting Jody’s deathbed, Janie makes up her mind to release her true and real feelings toward her husband and once again has her voice heard even if Jody asks her to shut up as he has always done since Janie becomes her wife.. Janie tells the big-voice Jody:. Ah knowed you wasn’t gointuh lissen tuh me. You changes everything but nothi’ don’t change you—not even death. gointuh hush. […].. […].. But Ah ain’t goin’ outa here and Ah ain’t. Listen, Jody, you ain’t de Jody ah run off down de road wid.. Ah run off tuh keep house wid you in uh wonderful way.. But you wasn’t. satisfied wid me de way Ah was (86). Long before Jody could think up something to defend himself, Death finds out where he is and then takes away his decayed body along with his big yet hollow voice forever.. While. Jody’s voice is fading away as the bell tolls for him, Janie’s voice, in this regard, directly and eventually leads to Jody’s inevitable death.. One Speaks as a Listener6 All the time, Jody is always too busy articulating his big voice to listen to Janie’s; actually, it never occurs to him that a “nigger” woman like Janie could ever talk and furthermore use her voice as a deadly weapon against her husband. When Janie asks his permission for taking part in the mule’s funeral, Jody even feels “surprised at her for asking” (60).. In this sense, at least for Jody, Janie is not even allowed to ask a question, let alone. express her feelings and thoughts. After all, in Jody’s opinions, “somebody got to think for women and chillum and chickens and cows” since “they sho don’t think none theirselves” (71).. Women, once again, are dehumanized as a chicken, a cow, or an “it” that is. thoughtless and voiceless in the men-dominated society.. Oddly, the “nigger” men have been. taken as the brutes carrying heavy burden for white folks but, once at home, they shift 6. In this section, I would like to argue that one could not express him/ her self fully as a speaking subject until h/she keeps his or her ear and mind open so as to learn from what h/she has heard..

(33) Lee 26. whatever burden they have born onto their woman folks and thus dehumanize them without having any idea about it.. Like Jody, he “had always wanted to be a big voice, but de white. folks had all de sayso” (28).. Yet when he had found a big voice both in his community and. in his family, he dehumanized “nigger” women by silencing them in the same way.. All the. time, Jody has made great efforts to silence Janie whenever his “I god” is articulated. Either used as a way to show emotions or merely deployed as an expletive, the very phrase “I god” seems to openly declares Jody’s burning and urgent desire to be a god—a god who has the ultimate power to make every knee bow down to him whenever his voice is heard.. When. Jody comes to be the mayor of Eatonville, the first thing he does is to light up the town.. In. inviting every inhabitant to behold the lamp-lighting ceremony, what Jody really wants to do is to announce that he is the creator of light despite that the Creator extinguishes His at night. Jody acts as if he were God by dividing the light from the darkness just like He has done on the first day of creating earth and heaven. However, failing to be a listener, Jody makes his big voice become less efficient than it could be for he does not know how to articulate his voice as Janie does. In fact, what Jody can do is only to talk and walk with his big belly putting out lots of brag for he amounts to nothing but his big voice (79). In addition, Jody’s voice fails to win his people’s heart and respect no matter how big it is.. People say “our beloved mayor” whenever the occasion. demands, though “it [is] one of the statements that everybody says but nobody actually believes like ‘God is everywhere’ (48).. Obviously, people might identify him as “Jody, our. mayor or our lord” with their mouths but they hardly believe him to be their lord from the bottoms of their hearts. After all, Jody’s big voice is established by silencing others; that is, he makes himself sound like a God by stepping on “baby chickens” (75). Standing on the distended belly of the mule for a platform, Jody preaches a sermon and makes gestures (60). In this sense, Jody has his big voice be heard at the expense of others’.. Nonetheless,. although Jody’s big voice helps him to be a mayor, to be a black running his own store and.

(34) Lee 27. post office; it fails to enable Jody to articulate his self.. “Like Logan, even the outgoing Joe. Starks with his big, powerful voice that shapes a community cannot express his inner emotions and insecurities to his wife” (Racine 286).. Out of bitter jealousy, Jody has Janie. tied her hair since he could not stand other men’s eyes lingering on it. Yet he never tells Janie how jealous or anxious he feels, for articulating his deep emotion toward Janie is not something that he has the courage in him to do (55). Jody, being extremely and outstandingly successful in the so-called the material life, is comparatively and fundamentally weak in his soul for his self is lost in his big voice.. Jody. has no self to talk about but he even has no idea about it; instead, he can only exercise his power by “straining nothing but women and chickens” (75).. After entering into their. marriage, Jody always wants Janie to do what he has told her, to feel appreciated of his efforts for he makes her become a “big woman”(46), and to have Janie obey his voice (87). Above all, what Jody desperately wants is to have Janie be his Janie and furthermore to be an “it” without a voice so that he can tightly control her.. Jody must let Janie know who her. God is by silencing Janie’s voice and thus dehumanizing her since one’s voice is undoubtedly one of the ways for one to claim one’s humanity and personhood.. After all, although a mule. and a cow might make sounds, yet they are not able to express their voice.7. It is the very. voice that one articulates, its tone, tenor and intensity that proves one’s flesh and blood to be real and true.. While being limited to (or even fooled by) what he has seen (Janie is nothing. but a “nigger” woman), Jody fails to listen to Janie’s voice, which is a voice with an undertone announcing what she could be. In this sense, Jody is shocked to death by Janie’s powerful words just like a master would have felt hearing his mule talk. 7. Janie does talk since she is not an “it” and it is also. I would like to suggest that the word “voice” does not merely refer to the sounds made when one is singing or speaking. Contrary to a sound without flesh and blood, the voice expresses one’s ideas, thoughts and feelings; above all, it is attached to a face and a subject who (re)establishes a self by having his or her voice be heard. Nevertheless, voicing oneself is not simply giving a speech or preaching a sermon as Jody tends to do; it is because that “voice is more than speech; it is a state of mind—a positive sense of mind” (Racine 291)..

(35) Lee 28. the dreadful truth that Jody has refused to see for more than twenty years.. Obviously, the. truth becomes dreadful for it is too true to be bearable. There is no denying that, as a husband, Jody offers Janie a decent life.. While other puny humans “don’t even own de. house they sleep in” or play “around de toes uh time” (54), Jody provides Janie with food and shelter.. Yet he is not able to (or prefers not to) face the truth that Janie is equal to him.. That is, Janie is a desiring subject who has the desire to express her voice, to reestablish herself by having a dream, to provoke face-to-face confrontation with him both as a “nigger” and as a woman.. Janie is not the cow or the mule whose hunger and thirst could be. quenched as long as she is fed well; she is a human being whose desire could hardly be satisfied; above all, she does “want to do the wantin’” (23). Among Janie’s three husbands, Tea Cake might be the only one who loves Janie for who she is.. Unlike Logan and Jody, Tea Cake teaches Janie how to play checkers and how to use. guns for haunting; most importantly, it is Tea Cake who enables Janie to talk, to laugh, to enjoy her life in her own way and to help Janie to realize what she could be.. Inviting Janie. to go out for fishing, to have a picnic even if folks get their tongues about it, Tea Cake does not treat Janie as an object such as the mule or goods.. Instead, he wants Janie to know that. she is the only one (or the subject) who gets “de keys to de kingdom” (109).. While Jody. speaks for far horizon as well as for the change and chance (29), Tea Cake represents for “a bee to a blossom, a glance from God” (106), and a true love that Janie has desired for all the time.. Nonetheless, when it comes to be an ideal listener whom Janie could address to, Tea. Cake is far from as satisfied as he is supposed to be.. After the devastating flood eventually. subsides, Tea Cake begins to think about where to go so as to find a more comfortable place for him and Janie to stay.. Although Janie tries hard to voice her ideas as well as thoughts,. her voice is frequently interrupted and thus weaken by Tea Cake’s: ‘Maybe, we could go back up de state, if yuh want tuh to go’. ‘Ah didn’t say that, but if dat is whut yuh—’.

(36) Lee 29. ‘Naw, Ah ain’t said nothin’ uh de kind.. Ah wuz tryin’ not tuh keep you outa yo’. comfortable no longer’n you wanted tuh stay.’ ‘If Ah’m in yo’way—’ ‘Will you lissen at dis woman? Me ‘bout tuh bust mah britches tryin’ tuh stay wid her and she heah－she oughta be shot wid tacks’! (168) In this sense, “though Janie’s voice has become broader and more powerful through the years, she has not become truly independent.…[Janie] expresses herself, but only after receiving permission to do so” (Racine 289). Janie’s voice, therefore, could not still be articulated clearly and fully without Tea Cake’s permission.. Failing to be Janie’s ideal listener, Tea. Cake gets himself into trouble, when he, not heeding Janie’s warning, is caught by white folks and thus is forced to help burying those who have died from the flood (169). In fact, after Tea Cake has been bitten by the crazy dog during the flood, Janie has tentatively suggested that Tea Cake should see the doctor, but Tea Cake refuses to consider Janie’s suggestion. In so doing, Tea Cake proves himself still too arrogant and self-centered to be Janie’s ideal listener. At the end, he dies of rabies when he fails to take Janie’s advice into consideration (167). Moreover, even if Tea Cake does show his deep emotion toward Janie, Tea Cake is still weak voicing his deep anxiety as well as his fear about losing Janie some day.. Since Mrs.. Turner approaches Janie with the chief aim of setting up a date for Janie and her younger brother, Tea Cake cannot repress “the awful fear inside him” but he acts it out by slapping Janie around (145).. Racine has rightly pointed out that such act of physical violence is. symptomatic of Tea Cake’s failure to “voice” his innermost feelings: The slap also represents for the inability to articulate－or a lack of voice.. Tea. Cake beats Janie because he does not know how to verbalize his fear of losing her to someone else－someone who is a lighter skinned African American like Janie, someone of innately greater value in white society. (290).