“Writing In white Ink”
Textual strategies of resistance in zora neale hurston’s
Their eyes were watching God and Alice Walker’s The color purple

Lizentiatsarbeit von Bojana Ruf

Universität Basel, Englisches Seminar

Table of Contents 3

1. Introduction ... 4

2. Body Politics in Philosophy, Feminism and Literature – A Theoretical Framework ... 6

2.1 Michel Foucault’s ‘body politic’ and its pertinence to literary analysis ... 6
2.2 A Feminist Approach to the “body politic” ... 10
2.3 The Black Aesthetic Discourse ... 15
2.4 The Emergence of Black Feminist Consciousness in Afro-American Literature ... 18

3. “Pygmalion in Reverse” – The Reconstruction of Female Characters ... 21

3.1 Resisting to Write, Writing to Resist – The Lives of Zora Neale Hurston and Alice Walker ... 21
3.2 The Reconstruction of Black Female Characters in Their Eyes and The Color Purple ... 23

4. “Writing in white ink” – womanist motifs as textual strategies of resistance in Their Eyes and The Color Purple ... 36

4.1 “Lately I feel like me and God make love just fine anyhow” – Female Spirituality as a Technique of Resistance ... 36
4.2 “mah wife don’t know nothin’ ‘bout no speech-makin’” – Female Creativity as a Technique of Resistance ... 44

5. Conclusion ... 59
6. Works cited ... 61

1. Introduction

The first book ever published by an Afro-American, was written by a woman. Since the publication of Phillis Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects, however, the literary discourse in African American literature has been dominated by male writers. Similar to white¹ literature, Afro-American women had only a marginal position in the creation of their writing. At the beginning of the last century, Virginia Woolf wrote about the relationship between woman and fiction in A Room Of One′s Own: “Imaginatively she is of the highest importance; practically she is completely insignificant. She pervades poetry from cover to cover; she is all but absent from history “(66). This practical exclusion from the literary process, or as Abbandonato puts it, “female silencing” (1107), has provoked the emergence of an Afro- American feminist literature. In the last century, writers such as Nella Larsen, Maya Angelou and Toni Morrison, just to name a few, started to write against the grain of dominant racial and gender discourses. In this paper, the breaking down of this gender bias through techniques of resistance will be explored in two novels by their fellow writers, Zora Neale Hurston and Alice Walker.

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston and The Color Purple by Alice Walker bear astonishing similarities. Both narratives depict the coming of age of a black woman in a hostile and suppressive environment and use the communication between two women as a framework. Hurston’s heroine Janie returns home after a long absence and tells her best friend Phoeby the story of her life:

“Phoeby, we been kissin’-friends for twenty years, so Ah depend on you for a good thought. And Ah’m talking to you from dat standpoint.” Time makes everything old, so the kissing, young darkness became a monstropolous old thing while Janie talked. (19)

In an oral style, the protagonist’s struggle to find her voice in Their Eyes is told in retrospect. The metaphor of “time” that “makes everything old” implies that Janie herself has become more mature since the beginning of her story. The Color Purple is narrated through the letters that Walker’s heroine Celie writes to, and receives from, her sister Nettie. The novel begins with a threat that is directed at 14-year- old Celie: “You better not never tell nobody bud God. I’d kill your mammy“(1). Since Celie is forbidden to speak to “nobody bud God,” her letters are addressed to God as her only confidant. Celie and Janie are therefore caught in a system of patriarchal control that makes resistance difficult. Héléne Cixous offers a back door to this situation; in her legendary “The Laugh of the Medusa,” she states that writing is precisely the very possibility of change, the space that can serve as a springboard for subversive thought, the precursory movement of a transformation of social and cultural structures” (879) that finds its roots in the maternal desire for a return to the mother’s breast — ‘white ink’. Using their writing and their language as a springboard, Hurston, Walker and their female protagonists develop individual techniques of resistance towards the power that gets inflicted upon them. These techniques of resistance offer the starting point for the investigation in this paper. How do Hurston and Walker succeed in producing a discourse that resists both gender and racial stereotypes, and how is a female writer of African American origin to address and rewrite a body politic that has been part of a male-dominated and Eurocentric literary discourse for centuries? Or in Irigaray′s words: “What if these commodities refused to go to market” (196)?

This paper argues that Hurston and Walker resist dominant literary discourse by deconstructing its stereotypical black female bodies and, therefore, free them of their normalising functions. It further shows that the novels succeed in providing a powerful alternative discourse because they use motifs of female Afro-American culture as techniques of resistance.

The analytical framework of this paper adapts Hélène Cixous’s notion of “writing in white ink,” which is intimately connected to the female body and, thus, serves as an analytical tool of this paper. Cixous’ metaphor of “white ink”, writing in breast milk, symbolises the reunion with the maternal body. In her essay “The Laugh of the Medusa,” Cixous claims that there has been little or no feminine writing (311). She then confines herself to mentioning poets and writers that are almost exclusively male and French. It is the aim of this paper to demonstrate that Their Eyes Were Watching God and The Color Purple can be read as African American versions of écriture feminine, since their dominant motifs bisexuality, rape, motherhood and spirituality anticipate some of the same concerns as Cixous’. Additionally, Foucault’s notion of the “body politic” proves indispensable in order to highlight the function of the female body in 20th century literature and identify the power that is inflicted on it. Therefore, the question to ask is what techniques are used by Hurston and Walker to resist this power. Their Eyes Were Watching God and The Color Purple seem especially apt material for this analysis, as they not only offer an insight into the psyche and everyday life of Afro American women, but also provide the reader with a social kaleidoscope of 20th century Black America.

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1 The terms “white,” “black” and “coloured” are used here with an awareness of the political and social implications they carried throughout American history.