Beloved Their Eyes Were Watching God Toni Morrison Zora Neale Hurston self-concept resistance slavery
Abstract:
This thesis explores the role of resistance in the creation of a free self-concept in Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) and Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). Both Beloved and Their Eyes Were Watching God illustrate the enduring influence of slavery on the lives of African Americans and how slavery continued to circumscribe the lives of former slaves and their progeny. In order to combat the tenacious grip of slavery, Morrison’s Sethe and Hurston’s Janie Crawford Killicks Starks Woods must resist, both actively and passively, the way that the legacy of slavery continually attempts to shape them in order to create and assert their own independent self-concepts. After examining Sethe’s resistance, characterized by passive memory repression, and Janie’s resistance, characterized by oration, the thesis will conclude with a brief comparison of the novels as neo-slave narratives that attempt to explain how someone can overcome the legacy of slavery through both active and passive resistance. A comparison of Janie’s and Sethe’s quests, and the nature of each woman’s resistance, reveals two distinctly different engagements with the idea of community.
