A Feminist Reading of a Regional Novel: Zora Neale Hurston’s <i>Jonah’s Gourd Vine</i>

Abstract

The novel, Jonah’s Gourd Vine, comprises a search for self-identity for the black man and the black woman in America, as well as a search for new roles for each of the sexes during that period of transition in the African-American history just after the Slave Emancipation. Using the sociological framework qualified by the feminist critical theory and practice, this study attempts to explore the double victimization of woman in an oppressed condition, and the novel’s linguistic elements to determine how they have been put together to achieve the desired effect of communicating folkloric and gender issues in a changing African-American environment. This novel is a celebration of the ethos of rural black life in the south to authenticate the existence of a black culture. Hurston makes use of her African-American dialect as is evident both in the lexical and syntactical patterns to document her people’s peculiar tongue in order to emphasize the positivism in the African-American life in spite of racial and capitalist oppression by the whites, and in order to instil confidence into all African-Americans so that they might become proud of their culture. This is with a view to liberating the African-Americans from the American social legislative system that often convicts them for their supposed deviant behaviours. This confidencebuilding is also intended to empower women, in particular, to assume more responsible roles other than the restrictive ones socially prescribed for them in the family and the society.