Brittany Osbourne (University of Central Florida)
In Hurston’s, Their Eyes Were Watching God the privileged black becomes the physical manifestation of the divine through the protagonist, Janie Crawford. This paper analyzes Janie’s outsider status as indicative of her role as goddess. She is the earthly embodiment of Erzulie Freida, the voodoo goddess of love as presented in Hurston’s ethnographic work Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica. My paper will perform a comparative study of Janie Crawford with Erzulie Freida to gain further insight into Janie’s resistance against her goddess station in order to evade societal ostracism. Of central focus is the deconstruction of how the color scheme among blacks attributes divinity to the lightest in the color hierarchical system. I will analyze how Hurston through Janie, asserts that the goddess pedestal black women—who are phenotypically closest to the European—occupy must be toppled if communal solidarity is to flourish; to do otherwise would result in community dissension. I will utilize Mrs. Turner, Janie’s foil, to explicate the inevitable discord a color hierarchy promotes. Unlike Mrs. Turner, Janie must reject—rather than embrace—her goddess role in order to experience what she has continuously craved, a love that is not shunning but embracive of her the person, rather than the subliminal ideal of her, the goddess.
