“Her personal life, her own realization of herself, was almost a subconscious existence; like an underground river that came to the surface only here and there, at intervals months apart, and then sank again to flow on under her own fields.” (172)
A Human Tragedy
Another element of greatness in this novel is its elegant treatment of the tragic love story. Juxtaposed on this grand saga of pioneering is the very human tragedy that plays out between Alexandra’s brother, Emil, and the Bohemian girl, Marie. Cather’s sweet, compassionate portrayal of the lovers and their dilemma refuses to make a villain of any participant. The stumbles and falls of its individual inhabitants balance the great strides taken in colonizing the new land. Yet Cather does not leave us feeling discouraged by human weakness, but rather encouraged by the strength of those who strive to overcome, and the continuity of the new life they build. “We come and go,” she reflects, “but the land is always there.”
Alexandra Bergson is a woman I am glad to know. Cather closes the novel by saying of her and her beloved land, “fortunate country that is one day to receive hearts like Alexandra’s into its bosom, to give them out again in the yellow wheat, in the rustling corn, in the shining eyes of youth!” (210) As the fortunate descendant of courageous pioneers like Alexandra, I marvel at the vision and courage they displayed in a world as different from their own as the moon is from mine. Cather’s novels offer an insight into the hearts that first fashioned the life we take for granted. The pioneers of our nation worked a great labor of love, and Willa Cather recaptures their passion in a tribute worthy of their sacrifice.
Quotations taken from O, Pioneer! 1st Vintage Classics Edition, New York. 1992.
Talk About It
Alexandra is unusual; a woman and a landowner in the West. In what ways have the contributions of women been ignored by history, and why?
About the Author: Willa Cather
In 1873, Wilella Siebert Cather was born in Back Creek, Virginia, where her family had lived on the land for six generations. Her own repeated “relation with the earth itself,” stems from her early experience in rural Virginia. When Cather was nine years old, her family moved northwest of Red Cloud, Nebraska, where her first impressions of the prairie filled her with awe and fear: “ . . . I felt a good deal as if we had come to the end of everything—it was a kind of erasure of personality. I would not know how much a child’s life is bound up in the woods and hills . . . if I had not been jerked away . . . and thrown out into a country as bare as a piece of sheet iron.”
A “genius child,” Cather took advantage of frontier life to meet immigrants and other pioneers who spoke different languages. After prairie farming did not take, the family moved into Red Cloud where Cather had access to their neighbor’s substantial library. She showed interest in medicine and graduated from high school with two other boys.
At the University of Nebraska in Lincoln she chose to write; after graduation Cather moved to Pittsburgh to work for a magazine and teach English. She came to the attention of the editor S.S. McClure and moved to New York to work at McClure’s Magazine, finding herself in 1906 at the nexus of professional literary life in the United States. Her “real” first novel, O Pioneers!, was published in 1913. The more personal My Antonía, followed six years later. She enjoyed an excellent publishing relationship with Alfred Knopf. The watershed novel, One of Ours, won Cather the Pulitzer Prize in 1923. She died in 1947 from a cerebral hemorrhage.
Sources:
www.willacather.org
Beauty in a Beastly World:
Their Eyes Were Watching God,
by Zora Neale Hurston
Recently we sold our home and needed to find a place to live for a year. Our agent found a home to rent and sent us to see it, but when we drove by it, I dismissed it right away without bothering to go inside. It was too far away from our business, too small, too this, too that; obviously not the house for us. The next day I got another call from her. “Just come and stand in this home, and tell me you don’t want it,” she said. So I did. I’m sitting here now, at my desk, in this cozy home that is just perfect for our needs, and I’m so glad she made me step inside the door before I passed it by.
I’m telling you all this because I want you to step inside this little book with me before you pass it by. You might have heard of Zora Neale Hurston’s novel, or it might be unfamiliar to you. It might not be a book you would normally select, but then again, it might be one you will never forget. You’ll have to step inside to see.
Synopsis
Like most poor blacks in the years following the Civil War, Janie Thompson’s life is filled with trial and sorrow. Raised by a grandmother and mother who were both victims of rape, Janie is pushed into marriage with an unfeeling man who works her but does not really care for her. Eventually she leaves him and makes a life with another, more successful, but equally insensitive man. Finally, after his death, she meets Tea Cake, the love of her life. Their story ends tragically as well, as he is bitten rescuing her from a rabid dog, and eventually dies by her hand. She tells her story twenty years later, in the peace and wisdom of older age, and comes to terms with the difficulties and beauties of her life.
What Makes it Great
When I read the first two paragraphs of this book, they startled me with the way they combined homely wisdom with pure poetry, and I read them over and over with delight. If you have some experience with literary devices, notice the use of internal rhyme (ships, distance, wish) and repetition (never, never, remember, remember.) The first line rolls out in perfect iambic pentameter, worthy of a Shakespearean sonnet. Here they are:
“Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men.
“Now, women forget all those things they don’t want to remember, and remember everything they don’t want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly.” (1)
Hurston writes differently than most authors who are telling a story using occasional images for emphasis. For Hurston, the images are the story; the language gives life to the characters in a way I have seldom encountered in literature. There is no distinction in this novel between imagery and reality, between the spiritual and the temporal: it’s all one. This woman’s writing makes my heart pound. I’ll just throw a few more sentences at you:
“Janie saw her life like a great tree in leaf with the things suffered, things enjoyed, things done and undone. Dawn and doom was in the branches.” (8)
“There are years that ask questions and years that answer.” (20)
“Janie turned from the door without answering, and stood still in the middle of the floor without knowing it. She turned wrongside out just standing there and feeling.” (30)
Out of Step
Zora Neale Hurston was out of step with her time. She lived in Harlem in the early 1920’s and was educated at a university under the patronage of some sympathetic white women. She worked as an anthropologist and a teacher, and eventually wrote two novels that were harshly criticized because they lacked the angry political stance that both the black and white literati felt were essential to a “black novel.”
Did You Know?
In the early 1970s, the great Alice Walker used a secondhand copy of Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) as a text for her literature students. She loved the novel, and was dismayed to learn that Hurston was buried in an unmarked grave, so she traveled to Florida to correct this insult to her memory. Wading through waist-high grass in the segregated cemetery, she found what she thought was Hurston’s grave and placed a marker on it which read, “Zora Neale Hurston/A Genius of the South/ Novelist / Folklorist / Anthropologist / 1901-1960.” Walker’s personal essay about this experience for a national magazine brought the book to the attention of a new generation. The book ha
s been in print continually since then.
Hurston’s sweet evocation of the illiterate black working folk seemed to these critics to be a kind of concession to white supremacy in the South. Her quiet, independent heroine, Janie, held no appeal for the angry generation that first read this book. It went quickly out of print, and Zora Hurston ended her life working as a maid, impoverished and defeated by those dreams she so eloquently described. Decades later, when she was “rediscovered” by novelist Alice Walker, critics took a fresh look at Hurston’s work, and found a treasure trove of poetic prose, wisdom and insight that, though not politically correct, was spiritually and emotionally full of power.
One of the themes of this beautiful story is the influence of nature. Janie experiences a moment reminiscent of Wordsworth as she watches the union of flower and bee and moves from girlish dreams to womanly understanding. This ecstatic moment (almost graphic in its sexual imagery) creates an ideal of human love for her that she seeks throughout her life:
“[Janie] was stretched on her back beneath the pear tree soaking in the alto chant of the visiting bees, the gold of the sun and the panting breath of the breeze when the inaudible voice of it all came to her. She saw a dust-bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom; the thousand sister-calyxes arch to meet the love embrace and the ecstatic shiver of the tree from root to tiniest branch creaming in every blossom and frothing with delight. So this was a marriage! She had been summoned to behold a revelation. Then Janie felt a pain remorseless sweet that left her limp and languid.”
In another take on “nature” Janie and her lover discuss whether it is “natural” for people to be cautious, or whether it is in their nature to move toward danger:
“Listen, Sam, if it was nature, nobody wouldn’t have tuh look out for babies touchin’ stoves, would they? ‘Cause dey just naturally wouldn’t touch it. But dey sho will. So it’s caution.” “Naw it ain’t, it’s nature, cause nature makes caution. It’s de strongest thing dat God ever made, now. Fact is it’s de onliest thing God every made. He made nature and nature made everything else.”
The title of the novel refers to the helplessness of these post-Civil war black people, caught between slavery and freedom, with few rights and terrible trials to face. Their eyes are watching God, not with simple trust, but with a cautious suspicion. It would be understandable to view a Deity that would allow such suffering as a God to be feared:
“It was inevitable that she should accept any inconsistency and cruelty from her deity as all good worshippers do from theirs. All gods who receive homage are cruel. All gods dispense suffering without reason. Otherwise they would not be worshipped. Through indiscriminate suffering men know fear and fear is the most divine emotion. It is the stones for altars and the beginning of wisdom. Half gods are worshipped in wine and flowers. Real gods require blood . . .
The wind came back with triple fury, and put out the light for the last time. They sat in company with the others in other shanties, their eyes straining against crude walls and their souls asking if He meant to measure their puny might against His. They seemed to be staring at the dark, but their eyes were watching God.”(151)
Hurston’s characters speak in the dialect of the Deep South, and though the world they inhabit is completely different from our own, she makes us feel that we are part of that world. I love to feel that, through a book, I have entered the essence of another kind of life, and this book offers that experience. Hurston doesn’t romanticize these characters; these people are not saints. They are simple folk trying to find the right way. Mistakes are made, but the overwhelming feeling the author invokes is one of faith in the resilience of the human spirit. Here, with timeless wisdom shining through the vernacular, is Janie’s philosophy of life:
“Talkin’ don’t amount tuh uh hill uh beans when yuh can’t do nothin’ else . . . you got tuh go there tuh know there. Yo papa and yo moma and nobody else can’t tell yuh and show yuh. Two things everybody’s got tuh do fuh theyselves. They got tuh go tuh God, and they got tuh find out about livin’ fuh theyselves.”
Their Eyes Were Watching God chronicles one woman’s journey toward a good life, awakening to her own place in the world and learning how to love herself after years of oppression. Having endured abandonment, betrayal, powerlessness, and entrapment, Janie achieves independence and a sense of fulfillment. Even after her one true loving relationship ends with the death of her companion, she finds peace in the memory of their love and in the rightness of her choices. It reminds us that the definition of a good life is not the absence of misery, or even of mistakes, but the journey toward integrity and peace. The novel closes with lines as beautiful as those that opened it:
“Here was peace. She pulled in her horizon like a great fish net. Pulled it from around the waist of the world and draped it over her shoulder. So much of life in its meshes! She called in her soul to come and see.” (184)
Quotations taken from Their Eyes Were Watching God. Harper Collins, Inc. USA. 1991.
Talk About It
Is Janie an immoral woman? Are the things that happen her fault? Why do you think Hurston’s novel was unpopular with black people of her day?
About the Author:
Zora Neale Hurston
Zora Neale Hurston was born in 1891 and lived in Eatonville, Florida, a town founded by African Americans and the nation’s first incorporated black township. It was, as Hurston described it, “a city of five lakes, three croquet courts, three hundred brown skins, three hundred good swimmers, plenty guavas, two schools, and no jailhouse.” Her idyllic childhood came to an end in 1904 when her mother died. “That hour began my wanderings,” she later wrote. “Not so much in geography, but in time. Then not so much in time as in spirit.”
In the early 1920s, she lived in Harlem’s Renaissance. She studied anthropology at Howard University, Barnard College, and Columbia University. Hurston recognized the significance of the folklore of the southern United States and the Caribbean countries. She worked as an anthropologist, a librarian, a teacher, and a maid.
Hurston also wrote three other novels and an autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road. Each work of fiction shows her interest in Southern black folk customs, her metaphorical language, and her sense of humor.
Sources:
www.zoranealehurston.com
Hemenway, Robert E. Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography. Urbana, Ill: University of Illinois Press, 1977.
Chick-lit for Grown-ups:
Take it Personally
Perhaps the problem with our love lives is not in ourselves, but in the men we are choosing as partners, and then what we are expecting from those partners after we are together. On this issue, novels have a great deal to say. In fact, just about every novel ever written contains one or more love stories: boy meets girl, gets girl, loses girl, etc. Over the course of your life you have probably read scores, maybe hundreds of novels, and each of these has affected the way you look at your own life story. Could it be that the stories you read gradually shape the story you live? If you are what you eat, can it be true that you are also what you read?
We call certain books “classics” because they are popular, well written, stand the test of time and offer us wisdom about the human condition. Yet, because these books are also more difficult, most of us choose instead to pick up a bestseller and leave the classics on the shelf. In doing so we may be missing an important component of intelligent living. A classic teaches us to expect complexity, embrace diversity, and mistrust the simplistic solutions. And it might even affect our expectations when it comes to the opposite sex.
No one has more to say about how to find the man of your dreams than Jane Austen, and what she has to say is that the man of your dreams will inevitably turn out to be a nightmare! We’ve seen so much of Austen onscreen that we may feel that we understand her, but in fact the television and movie versions of her works often portray a very different message than the novels themselves.
So take Jane Austen off the
shelf, blow the dust off the cover and peer inside. There you will find a complex, fascinating world of brothers, sisters, parents, lovers and, above all, friends. One of the most important themes of Austen’s novels, for me, is her emphasis on friendship, and how our friends can support and influence us for good or evil. You will find a world where marriage is only one component in a fulfilling life. You will discover the intricacies of communication where a glance, or the press of a hand, can convey more meaning than hours of screaming on talk shows. And somewhere between the first meeting of Darcy and Elizabeth and their last muted interview on the walk to Merriton, you may find some wisdom that will impact your next relationship.
Chapter Ten
A Good Man is Hard to Find
Great and good are seldom in the same man.
Thomas Fuller, M.D.
Few will have the greatness to bend history itself; but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation.
Robert Kennedy
What is the value of one good man? These works by Victor Hugo, Anthony Trollope and A. J. Cronin, imply that it requires some connection with divine grace to raise a man from his natural self-centeredness to something finer. Each of these men is unique: eccentric, sometimes myopic in his focus on an objective, and not always likeable. None of them achieve the greatness attained by leaders in politics or business. But the simple, shining goodness exemplified in the lives of Jean Val Jean, Septimus Harding and Father Chisolm changes lives, and continues to offer inspiration to generation after generation of readers.
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