Stover, Johnnie

Zora Neale Hurston is recognized as an important American literary figure,
but the majority of her fiction is overshadowed by the critical attention given to her
most popular novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God. Just as her short stories remain
relatively ignored by critics, little is written about her thoughts regarding nature and
the human relationship with the natural environment. This thesis draws upon the
recent growth of ecocriticism and ecofeminist literary criticism in an attempt to
interpret Hurston's environmental thought as manifested in three of her early short
stories, "John Redding Goes to Sea," "Magnolia Flower," and "Sweat." In this study,
I show that even in her early short stories, Hurston's fiction is ripe with imagery and
narrative that blend the natural with the cultural while effectively illustrating and
engaging the interconnectedness between social inequality and environmental
degradation in the South.

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.

The protagonists in Richard Wright's fiction often face insurmountable obstacles. The environment plays an important role in the actions of the protagonist. Although Wright's fictional settings were often centered in the United States, the specific U.S. location was often integral to the resolution of the story. The protagonists are exposed to similar situations, but depending upon the northern American or southern American environments, they may encounter vastly different outcomes. Neither environment proves itself to be beneficial to Wright's protagonists. The racism in both northern and southern environments is the defining factor in the development of the protagonists. There are differences between the two environments: while the racism is obvious in the southern environment, the northern environment is outwardly more accepting. Even so, the northern environment can also isolate the protagonist. In nearly every piece of Wright's fiction, his protagonists meet unfortunate endings.

A mimetic approach to multicultural texts assumes that literary representations are reflections of real life situations and persons. Moving beyond a mimetic approach, I argue that the multicultural works examined in this thesis present an odyssey: characters travel across cultural, political, spiritual, and imaginative space and readers follow those characters through their journeys. Applying possible worlds theory to literature written by African-American and Caribbean female writers allows a reading which never loses sight of the political or cultural ties to our actual world, but sees them as altered by the authors in all sorts of interesting ways.

Zora Neale Hurston's novel, Moses, Man of the Mountain, is a metaphor of the African-American striving for liberation. It uses the Exodus story from the Hebrew scriptures as a trope of oppression, struggle, and hope. Hurston uses duality and ambiguity to delineate the issues of struggle, allowing the reader to determine the significance of the narrative. Moses emerges as a "two-headed doctor," an African-American term for a powerful conjurer. Moses is presented as an agent of God and at the same time a source of power for the benefit of the people.