Double-Voiced Dialogue And Dual Racial Consciousness:the Metaphorical Representation Of Their Eyes Were Watching God

Zora Neale Hurston (19037-1960) was one of the most prominent literary figures in and after the1920’s Harlem Renaissance. She is renowned as folklorist, anthropologist, journalist, critic and novelist. As the most prolific black woman writer in America between1920and1950, Hurston published four novels, two collections of folklore, a collection of short stories, an autobiography, numerous essays and journal articles, and several musical and dramatic productions. Her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) is now recognized as her most outstanding novel and one of the most studied works in the American literary canon.For the present, the academic world at home and abroad is focusing the attention on the following perspectives considering Their Eyes Were Watching God:the perspective of feminism to probe into the awakening and construction of the female identity of the protagonist Janie, the perspective of cultural anthropology to seek folklore representations of African Americans in the text, or from narratology to explore the narrative strategy and narrative language of the text. These researches have yielded valuable insights into Their Eyes Were Watching God from different angles. The foci of these researches are on the construct of protagonist’s cultural identity, the presentation and pursuit of the black voice and the discussion on textual representation of the black folkloric traditions. However, the author’s intention and racial awareness are rarely referred to. What is original of this thesis is the combination of formal value of the text and its socio-cultural implications. In other words, the thesis interprets Their Eyes Were Watching God from "socio-historical and aesthetical angles", and finally it explores what Hurston wants to tell the readership about her view on race issue.From the perspective of narrative structure and narrative discourse, the thesis is to analyze the text of Their Eyes Were Watching God, based on the theories of Bakhtin’s "Dialogism" and Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s "Speakerly Text", along with Hurston’s racial view demonstrated from other literatures. In Their Eyes Were Watching God, the double-voiced dialogue of its frame narrative mode and its oscillation and fusion between the characters’discourse and the narrator’s discourse metaphorically represent Hurston’s expectation on equal dialogue between blacks and whites and her dual racial consciousness. The dual racial consciousness that Hurston holds is a kind of strategy that African Americans employ to construct their cultural identity. It stresses the "duality", namely the simultaneity of black traditions and white cultural realities that can be embodied in the life of African American people; it stresses a dialogical oneness between the cultural consciousnesses of the two races. This dialogical and open racial philosophy praises the creativity and inclusiveness of African American culture, and it is an alternative strategy for American blacks to resolve their identity crisis. This crisis is defined by W. E. B. Du Bois as a contradictory and irreconcilable "double consciousness" of American blacks. This double consciousness denies the African Americans a positive interaction with themselves as well as with American society.Hurston’s dual racial consciousness is a positive and healthy racial view on black-white relationships. As Alice Walker commented, Hurston and her works are of "racial health".This thesis is to demonstrate what this racial health is about and how it is showed in Their Eyes. Hopefully, it will contribute to the explication that Zora Neale Hurston is racially specific. She is not only capable as a writer, but responsible in uplifting her race in a racially hostile society like America. In the day when Hurston was active, her efforts along with her racial views were denied and forgotten. But at present, her works are long hailed as classics, and her views on literary creation and her racial standpoint have predicted that open, pluralistic and inclusive dialogic communication should be employed in interracial interactions in this multicultural world of today. Just through constant integration and dialogue but not conflict and separation as Hurston has predicted, American blacks have claimed their own position in American society of "patchwork quilt"; and their cultural traditions have also been preserved and inherited.