Article Details

Emergence of Black Woman’s Identity: Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God | Original Article

Shahin Fatma*, Saroj Kumar Kaibratta, in Journal of Advances and Scholarly Researches in Allied Education | Multidisciplinary Academic Research

ABSTRACT:

The most distinguished Afro-American writer of 20th century, Zora Neale Hurston, becomes a voice of Black dignity and self-fulfillment. Her writings depict the wretched condition of subjugated Black women who undergo various trials and tribulations in the (white) patriarchal society. Being a Black writer, Race and racism is the dominant feature of her creative venture. In her most acclaimed novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, she portrays a poignant expedition of an innocent “nigger” girl who looks forward for the fulfillment of her innermost desire to love and to be loved as a woman. but within the patriarchal framework she is treated as the other. In fact the Afro-American Literature represents the psyche of Black women suffering from trauma within the traumatized societal set up, and marginalized within the framework of gender and race .The author has voiced that how male dominance in society silences the voice of females. How they make the woman of color , tongue less, eyeless, and earless .Hurston through her writing depicts the plight of Afro American women and the huge oppression and mistreatment they are subjected to especially after marriage. Hurston‟s aim as a writer is not only to free her community from external prejudices but also from internal menaces. Their Eyes Were Watching God portrays not only the negative side of “nigger” woman‟s struggle but it also depicts her incessant struggle to form herself , to voice her desire and to reshape her identity .The protagonist starts her journey from self-doubt to self-fulfillment from speechless to speech and from impossibilities to possibilities .