Butler, Rita C.

In Seraph on The Suwanee, Zora Neale Hurston continues a tradition of covert resistance on the part of a black culture struggling to survive within a hostile white society. Her last published novel reveals a talent for combining art and politics and in many ways represents a synthesis of her race, class, and gender consciousness which had grown over the years. Instead of her familiar focus on black culture, however, this paper argues that Hurston uses the story of a conflictive white marriage to create an insightful social critique that challenges a patriarchal society characterized by inequalities of race, class, and gender.

Zora Neale Hurston's last published novel, Seraph on the Suwanee, can be read as a sociopolitical critique of what she once referred to as the false foundation of Anglo-Saxon civilization. An overview of the history of race as a concept and the development of racial awareness in the United States provides a background/context for understanding the world Hurston was diagnosing: her analysis implies that the social construction of whiteness contains within its ideology the seeds of its own destruction. Feminist notions of origin, context, and foundation highlight the narcissistic nature of patriarchal social systems that exploit not only the female body but nature as well. In a society that supposedly honors the maternal and praises the beauty of nature, Hurston's novel suggests that both motherhood and nature are exploited by a patriarchal culture focused on competition and material gain. In addition, by highlighting the narcissism of her male protagonist, who presumably represents a socially admired standard of normalcy, she undermines the narrative of superiority that privileges a white patriarchy.