Date of Award

Spring 2023

Document Type

Thesis

Department

Language, Literature and Writing

First Advisor

Dr. Kerry Hasler-Brooks

Abstract

Author Zora Neale Hurston once claimed that “the Negro is not a Christian really” (Harvey 191). Yet she not only wrote a novel with “God” in the title, but multiple stories that echo specific biblical themes and motifs of salvation, judgment, violence, and pilgrimage. English scholar and professor Glenda Weathers has explored in depth one such parallel, the motif of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in her article, “Biblical Trees, Biblical Deliverance.” With Weather’s analysis, Janie is a Black Eve who is not saved by a male descendant but starts to experience echoes of paradise once she begins to understand herself and gain her personhood. Hurston has taken a biblical theme and creatively rewritten it. Many other scholars have explored similar cases. Jenny Hyest, an academic from Lehigh University, names this type of motif work within Hurston’s literary canon “reinvented religious imagery” (27). The pattern of invigorated Biblical folklore, originally claimed by the White American community and reinvented by Hurston to empower Black American women, is expansive. Beyond the feminist viewpoint, such reinvention has been identified by Marcus Harvey within Their Eyes Were Watching God to reveal two aspects of Black religious experience emerging from the Judeo-Christian tradition. However, scholars have not explored the distinctly Old Testament characterization of God in Their Eyes and how it extends a long tradition of borrowing Israelite stories to relate to the Black American experience. Hurston’s use of Old Testament motifs in Their Eyes Were Watching God characterizes God as judgmentally destructive and silent, but this depiction begins to shift with Janie’s deepening understanding of herself and her acceptance of unanswerable questions about who God is. Hurston reinvents distinctly Old Testament imagery of violence and judgment in Their Eyes....

Comments

Written for: Introduction to English Studies II (ENGL 202)

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