From "spy-glass" to "horizon": Tracking the anthropological gaze in Zora Neale Hurston

Karen Jacobs

The "spy-glass of Anthropology," Zora Neale Hurston's telling metaphor for her anthropological training under Franz Boas during her Barnard years, is perhaps the most quoted and least interrogated image in a body of work remarkable for its rich figuration. Used in Hurston's introduction to her first published ethnography, Mules and Men, the image is most obviously meant to signal the enabling distancing of perspective and self-regard which that scientific apparatus afforded her in her efforts to record the African-American folklore of her Southern childhood.

From the earliest rocking of my cradle, I had known about the capers Brer Rabbit is apt to cut and what the Squinch Owl says from the house top. But it was fitting me like a tight chemise. I couldn't see it for wearing it. It was only when I was off in college, away from my native surroundings, that I could see myself like somebody else and stand off and look at my garment. Then I had to have the spy-glass of Anthropology to look through at that. (1)

The "tight chemise" is a revealing trope in which to drape those familiar cultural stories. Hurston chooses an unambiguously female garment which both reveals the form and conceals the surface of the black body beneath through a form of mediation. It's the chemise's decisive mediating function which Barbara Johnson emphasizes when she remarks that "[i]nside the chemise is the other side of the chemise: the side on which the observer can read the nature of his or her own desire to see" (182). But the chemise is not, I think, so easily separable from the body that's wearing it, which at least competes with it and may become the chief, if unspeakable, object of visual interest in the scene.

Hurston is clearly playing on the to-be-looked-at-ness of the female body in all of its erotically charged materiality here. What the phrase, "I couldn't see it for wearing it," sets us up for is striptease-to see the chemise clearly, the logic of the phrase suggests, she'll have to take it off. Heading off this scandalous possibility is another visual feint, in which an objectifying rhetoric of self-reflection ("see[ing] myself like somebody else") is pressed into the service of seeing the garment, neatly displacing Hurston's body and making cultural stories the real object of the gaze. By the time she is peering with proper detachment through the spy-glass, that objective machinery of science, Hurston has managed to dodge the problem of embodiment altogether-her own, and the stories'-with which she confronted us at the start. Given the problematic nature of that embodiment, in which the black female body must stand as both maker and interpreter of cultural meanings against more prevalent significations-the primitive, sexual excess-Hurston's strategy shouldn't surprise.' But the body remains as afterimage, reminding us of the personified nature of cultural materials and of the gendered, voyeuristic, and objectifying underpinnings of the spy-glass as investigative instrument. The spy-glass evokes not just the penetrating male gaze of science, but also the imperial white gaze of colonialism, both of which inform the ambiguous history of anthropology and its consolidation as a discipline in the 1920s and 1930s.2 One might ask, to what varieties of striptease, in the form of identity positions, would the black female viewer be subject when aspiring to organize her world through that lens?

This essay will track the patterns of such divestitures and reappropriations of identity positions, and the problems of embodiment each foregrounds. My point is to demonstrate the path through which Hurston aims to carve out a visionary territory to which she can lay claim in her work. The story I wish to tell highlights two crucial and conflicting aspects of Hurston's most publicly claimed identities-those of social scientist and novelist-which she occupied by turns over the course of her career. It dwells on the challenges that each of these identities posed for Hurston in the context of discourses about African-American cultural development and attainment in circulation in the 1920s and 1930sdiscourses inseparable from conceptions of the primitive which predate and define the terms in which such cultural notions were broadly conceived. Hurston's 1937 novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, positioned as it is chronologically between her two ethnographies, Mules and Men (1935) and Tell My Horse (1938), and written during Hurston's fieldwork in Jamaica, powerfully encodes the intersection of these identities and discourses. The novel thus provides a multilayered "testimony" about African-American cultural forms, both in itself as a species of African-American novel, and through the conflicting discursive trajectories it contains and works precariously to resolve. I frame my reading of Their Eyes between what I argue are the two most prominent of those discourses for Hurston, one of which takes its bearings from the name of science and the other from art.

I begin, as the initial image of the spy-glass may suggest, with Boasian anthropology, whose participant-observer method, theory of cultural relativism, and critique of the comparative method of anthropology cumulatively reframe primitivist discourse in ways which are at once enabling and disabling for Hurston. Boasian theory, that is, provides a fully realized conceptual basis from which to revalue African-American expressive forms, but it requires a problematically objectifying distance from its selected objects of study to do so. Moreover, this theory retains a concept of the primitive still tainted by its derivation from evolutionary biology, however much it was reformed by Boas, and thereby reinscribes the very forms of cultural hierarchy it elsewhere works to discredit. Using this framework, I read Their Eyes as Hurston's attempt to revise anthropological methods in ways that initially privilege active participation in and celebration of African-American folk culture. Janie Crawford's transformation from folk heroine to visionary at the conclusion of the novel, however, demonstrates the ways in which Hurston's revision moves beyond a critique of anthropological methods and towards an idealist model of individual transcendence. I conclude, then, by linking that model to a second, historically anterior, and perhaps unanticipated discursive source, Emersonian Romanticism, through which I delineate the specifically transcendentalist terms in which Janie's transformation from folk heroine to visionary artist is accomplished. Like Boasian anthropology, Emersonian theory figuratively gives and takes away its cultural capital with the same paternalistic hand, as it situates its notion of the primitive within a paradigm of cultural development and aesthetic currency. Emerson's celebration of the picturesque language of "children and savages" provides an alternative and aesthetically particular discourse through which Hurston can reclaim African-American linguistic practices.

Paradoxically, however, her attempt to refashion the dimensions of Universal Being and transcendence associated with cultural and artistic maturity into a viable visionary consciousness for her folk heroine Janie obscures the specific history of black embodiment which prefigures and, for Emerson, disqualifies her from those achievements. We may see the appeal of Emerson's disembodied seer through which Hurston elevates Janie at the end of the novel, therefore, as an imaginary, if not outright false, resolution to the real social contradictions Hurston inhabited, a "solution" which suggests the degree to which the intractability of black embodiment presented an ontological problem for her. Yet, without contradiction, we may equally understand Hurston to be adapting Emersonian paradigms to suit her own needs. Through her appropriation of these paradigms, Hurston arguably exposes Emerson's blindness to the situated nature of embodiment, and complicates his account of "primitive" artistry, at the same time that she reclaims for her own that portion of the American literary inheritance theorized and personified by him.

I. Through a Spy-glass Darkly:

The Participant-Observer of Boasian Anthropology

Unlike Boas's other famous female students, such as Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, whose foreign, exotic fieldwork experiences conformed with disciplinary prestige and expectation, Hurston is unique for pursuing fieldwork not merely in the Southern United States but in her own home town-the first incorporated black township, Eatonville, Florida.3 Even in her second ethnography, Tell My Horse, in which she investigates Voodoo practices on the foreign soil of Jamaica and Haiti, Hurston apparently views those populations as sharing some of the same West African cultural influences as African Americans, a perspective which may explain both her interest in those countries and her willingness to break with anthropological convention by considering two distinct nations together. The spy-glass passage, then, is important for what it reveals about Hurston's equivocal position as both subject and potential object of the anthropological gaze, as she pursued her research into African-American folklore and African-influenced religious and cultural practices. Hurston's facile placement and displacement of her material body in the opening sentences of Mules and Men operates both as a condensed illustration of anthropology's participant-observer method and as a send-up of its detached and neutral pretensions that exposes the ways in which the bodies on either side of the lens are "material" to the insights it is credited with producing.4 I want to consider the principal features of that method here, particularly its complex relations to notions of the primitive, the better to grasp the equivocal rewards anthropology offered Hurston in the early part of her career.

The participant-observer method, the conventions of which, according to James Clifford, had won international acceptance by the mid-thirties, combines general theory with empirical research, cultural analysis with ethnographic description, in a practice through which the personal experience of the ethnographer is framed and filtered through scientific method.- Particularly for Boas, the participant-observer method was meant to produce a wealth of empirical ethnographic data from which theory could only tentatively be derived, and never at the data's expense. There were, of course, numerous unacknowledged limitations to the method. The fieldworker, mythically and presumptively white and male,fi must set aside his own cultural biases and assumptions in order to see from a monolithically conceived "native point of view"; the fruits of this perspectival reorientation could then be translated culturally, linguistically, and generically into the newly standard ethnographic document, the monograph-a form purified by science beyond the subjectivist distortions of the diary, the travelogue, and other degraded narrativizing procedures. A recurrent feature of the monograph, often born of the necessity for efficiency in the face of limited fieldwork time, was the selection of a single individual or institution to represent larger cultural truths; this synecdochical logic clearly exerts a homogenizing force against cultural variety, conflict, and difference. Even bracketing such translations, as a chorus of post-Geertzian anthropologists have made clear, the dirty little secret of the participant-observer method is its masking or denial of the complexity of the intersubjective encounter between fieldworker and native, as well as the power relations that result from this encounter. The participant-observer method seriously proposes what Hurston only burlesques: that cultural assumptions and biases can be taken on and off at will, like clothing. Boas himself, arguably anthropology's most enlightened and methodologically scrupulous early twentieth-century practitioner, makes the tain of this objectivist mirror readily visible in an early, rapturous account of cosmography in which the cosmographer "holds to the phenomenon which is the object of his study... and lovingly tries to penetrate into its secrets until every feature is plain and clear. This occupation with the object of his affection affords him a delight not inferior to that which the physicist enjoys" ("Study" 645). The translation of data into text evidently could be perilous, not to say stimulating.

The Boasian professional fieldworker was further distinguishable from his predecessors-the amateur, the tourist, the missionary, the untrained observerby his attitude towards cultural difference. With his theory of cultural relativism, Boas maintained the equality of different cultural formations while detaching them categorically from race, thus countering an overtly racist evolutionary discourse that positioned blacks as atavistic precursors to white civilization. Cultural relativism was thus a blow to the thinking that arranged racial development hierarchically and unchangeably, and to the very idea of primitive culture altogether, whether expressed in the respectable, scholarly form of Freud's Totem and Taboo-with its evolutionist vision of the ways the rituals and prohibitions of "primitive peoples" are reconfigured as "complexes" in modern civilized man-or in the openly racist and jingoistic form of Lothrop Stoddard's The Rising Tide of Color-with its conception, as its title suggests, of successive waves of "savage" colored races swamping white civilized strongholds.7 During a cultural moment when Darwinian and Lamarckian evolutionary theories were vying for adherents (Kuper 129),8 Boas was conducting anthropometric studieshe had Hurston measuring heads on Harlem streets in 1926 (Hemenway 88)which he used to prove that the categories of race and culture were not coextensive and that racial characteristics therefore had no genetic basis?

Beyond its anomalously progressive racial politics (it would take until World War II for cultural relativism to gain wide acceptance as a theory), what is so striking about Boasian anthropology is its retention of an almost positivist insistence on the untainted, unmediated scientific gaze as a tool for producing reliable knowledge. Relative to its contemporaries in the hard sciences, for example, which had to contend with the relativization of observational postures previously conceived of as neutral in such theories as Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, Boasian anthropology kept faith with a doctrine of observable truths made possible by proper fieldwork methodology. Hurston herself celebrates Boas's "genius for pure objectivity" and his passionate allegiance to facts over theory in her autobiography (Dust 127). However, if we are tempted to view Boas himself as a kind of throwback in the evolution of twentieth-century science, Arnold Krupat complicates this portrait. While Boasian anthropology seems to resist what has been characterized as the larger epistemological crisis of 18851915 and its shift toward relativity, Krupat argues, it does not ignore so much as selectively implement relativist discourse:

Boas and his students seemed to find the new relativity not the foreclosure but the promise of objectivity, scientificity, and realism. Relativism, for Boas, was understood primarily to mean cultural relativism, and a stance of cultural relativism (which was not taken as implying a general epistemological relativism) as enabling a satiric method by which to expose the abundant undocumented generalizations indulged in by practitioners of "the comparative method of anthropology." (137)

For Boas, then, exposure to cultural difference had a relativizing impact that would yield a defamiliarized, objective view of culture without impugning the scientific purity of the anthropological gaze itself. However, Boas's insistence that individual cultures be studied on the basis of their distinctiveness and particularity did not insulate him from producing distorting cross-cultural analogies himself, anymore than his adherence to the participant-observer method prevented him from compromising "pure" observation with subjective perspectives. The primary vehicle for such distortions, I am arguing, is Boas's retention of the cultural category of the primitive, the institutional origins of which were inevitably linked to an evolutionary model of cultural and racial development, and which were arguably methodologically imbricated in the objectifying gaze of anthropology's participant-observer practice and its structurally implicit hierarchies as well.

While Boas could argue that the difference between primitive and civilized was more apparent than real in his 1911 work, The Mind of Primitive Man, he nevertheless supplies a wealth of criteria which uphold the distinction. Primitives, he argues, do not properly differentiate between the human and animal, adhering instead to idiosyncratic, irrational classification systems that arise from unconscious processes; they reify attributes as objects and engage in anthropomorphism; and they are the captives of traditional ideas unamenable to advancing civilization through conscious betterment. One hesitates to find a folk literature in any culture that would not match all but the last of these criteria. Boas understood such distinctions to be scientifically derived, and offered them by way of disputing the popular, and implicitly racist, characterization of the primitive as unable to inhibit impulses, and having neither the powers of attention, originality of thought, nor the ability to reason that civilized man enjoys. He concludes that the transition from primitive to civilized is marked by the "lessening of the number of irrational associations, and an improvement of the traditional material that enters into our habitual mental operations" (Mind 114-250)-a definition which endorses the twin virtues of scientific rationality and progress that are the hallmarks of Enlightenment thought and which are subject, therefore, to a bynow familiar critique of the mechanisms of power and repression which underwrite it.10

The grip of evolutionary thinking on the concept of the primitive and its overdetermined spectrum of racialization is evident in a diversity of cultural documents, including Bloomsbury critic Roger Fry's celebration of the superior freedom of expression and formal aesthetic success of the "savage" in an 1920 essay on Negro sculpture;" the assurance Alain Locke found it necessary to provide readers of his classic anthology of the Harlem Renaissance, The New Negro, not to expect represented in its pages "the mind of a savage" but, rather, individuals who have achieved "cultural adolescence and the approach to maturity" (xxvi); and William Stanley Braithwaite's ridicule of the formula of "atavistic race-heredity" as the recurrent plot of fictional depictions of Negroes by whites (Locke 35). (As late as 1950, in one of her last essays, Hurston would herself renew this complaint against "the folklore of reversion to type" ["White Publishers" 953].) In this climate, little wonder that the only way Boas-trained anthropologists could find to implement cultural relativism's presumption of cultural equality and difference with regard to African Americans, according to John Szwed, was to view them as lacking any culture at all, as the victims of cultural stripping accomplished through a legacy of slavery which left them with only a deplorable cultural deficit.12 A glance at the contents page of Newbell Niles Puckett's Folk Beliefs of the Southern Negro, the work of Hurston's leading contemporary in the field, reveals the sedimentation of concepts of the primitive in a formal ethnographic context, in which a version of the Boasian notion of traditional ideas sits side by side with popular notions of uninhibited impulses; among the topics Puckett's table of contents lists are "Laziness, Humor, and Sexuality," "Mutilated English," "Fewer Restrictions upon Self-gratification," and "Fossilized Customs" (xi).

Trained by Boas in anthropological theory and methods, a part of the literary milieu of the Harlem Renaissance and debates about its modernist qualifications, exposed to popular discourses of the primitive, and immersed in AfricanAmerican folk culture by personal history and profession, Hurston was situated in a conflictual vortex of hierarchical discourses involving race, artistry, and cultural attainment. Boas's participant-observer method, his theories of cultural relativism and the independence of racial variables, and his critique of the comparative method of anthropology all clearly helped Hurston gain sufficient purchase on African-American folk materials to revalue them as complex cultural forms worthy of study and record. At the same time, Boas's theories posed special problems for her as a particular African-American woman. First, the participant imagined by the participant-observer method was clearly a guest, not a member, of the community he documented, with a world of tacitly superior cultural differences-including a talent for objectivity-to temporarily suspend; not so, Hurston. Second, the expected translation of oral materials into writing, whether into the monograph of anthropological science or into the novel of Western literature, could only be a vexed one, the division of oral from written expression being inseparable from its historical use as a litmus test to police the boundaries of primitive and civilized.l3 Arguably, to commit folklore to paper in any form was to participate in a hierarchy of cultural representation. Hurston's dilemma, staged over the course of her career, was to choose between the hierarchy of science and ideology of objective knowledge required by the conventions of the monograph, and the hierarchy of individuated high culture epitomized by the novel over and against collective expressive forms.14 To collect, record, and otherwise make use of the folklore of her childhood, then, required Hurston to position herself as both an interloper in the world of anthropology and a potential sell-out of African-American arts-a dilemma exacerbated by the fact that her wealthy, white patron, Mrs. Charlotte Mason, retained legal ownership of her scholarship during the collecting trips that led to Mules and Men?15

Given these pressures, Hurston's preference for rehearsing folk songs, for example, until she learned them by heart, or undergoing Voodoo initiations that involved extended fasts and body marking to learn its mysteries, can appear to be ways of "proving on the flesh" knowledge which had the potential to be reproving once made text.16 Hurston's sporadic sponsorship of folk-oriented theatrical and musical events likewise suggests the attractions embodiment held for her over those of pure textualization. Deborah Gordon explains the much observed absence of interpretation and analysis in Hurston's ethnographies as the result of Hurston's methodological division between two mentors: Mrs. Mason, who herself in her work with Native Americans used a more documentary style of fieldwork collecting that excluded larger cultural references, on the one hand, and Boas on the other (160-61). But it seems possible to speculate that Hurston was simply resistant to what amounted to the self-reflexive interpretive enterprise demanded by Boasian methods and actively preferred to let her subjects speak for themselves. Compared with her white modernist peers-Faulkner, for instance, or West, Nabokov, and Woolf-who presume a subjectively governed visual world and self-consciously explore its consequences, Hurston was initially drawn to Boas's more stable, confident model of visuality, which lent her preoccupations the prestige and validation of science. Nevertheless, her radicalizations of that model, at least in the early part of her career, produce effects that come to resemble those of her white literary contemporaries. It is noteworthy that in her long career, Hurston wrote only one entirely interpretive ethnographic piece-"Characteristics of Negro Expression"-and that in it Hurston makes use of primitivist discourse herself.

"Characteristics of Negro Expression" is a curious document for many reasons, not least because it combines something like aesthetic theory with an essentialist compendium of racial features, some of which, like Hurston's speculation on the relationship between Negro lip form and dialect, literally link the black body with types of expressivity. What makes "Characteristics of Negro Expression" a difficult and perhaps undecidable text are the ways in which it attempts simultaneously to deploy and to rehabilitate the category of the primitive and its corollary, the imitative, as artistic resources. The essay opens by developing an analogy between the evolution of language as a medium of exchange and monetary systems. "Language," Hurston tells us "is like money." She offers three equations presumably of ascending complexity between the two terms. She links "primitive" descriptive language with the bartering of goods in comparably "primitive communities." Highly developed languages, replete with "words for detached ideas," correspond to the "legal tender" of a money system based on abstract equivalence. "Cheque words, like 'ideation' and 'pleonastic," which take abstraction to the next stage, Hurston associates with a specifically literary language, exemplified by the Milton of Paradise Lost. She concludes that "the white man thinks in a written language and the Negro thinks in hieroglyphics" (175). Now, this analogy lends itself most obviously to a progressive narrative in which Negro hieroglyphics, however affectively colorful and rich, are manifestly backward, indeed "primitive," when compared to the elevated language of literature-represented, ironically enough, by personification.l17

But this hierarchical ordering is less innocent and straightforward than it first appears, shaped as it inevitably is by larger discourses about monetary and aesthetic currency in circulation from the 1910s through the 1930s. Published in 1934, five years into the Great Depression, the appeal of abstract monetary systems over barter was arguably no longer self-evident; as Melchior Palyi points out in a book about the collapsing gold standard, "more than one half of the 30,000 banks operating in 1921 had closed by the end of 1933, more than 8,000 between December 1930 and June 1933, wiping out $14 billion of deposits in those two and a half years" (217). Indeed, it is on grounds of its abstracted detachment from concrete standards of value that Ezra Pound would condemn the apparently autonomous power of money in the practice of usury, first in "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley" and later, in the Usury Cantos and the 1935 polemic, Jefferson and/or Mussolini. The new aesthetic "currency" of simplified language use that Pound developed with H.D. as the Imagiste movement could be construed as merely a poetic correlative to Pound's insistence on the integrity of concrete objects and the dangers of abstraction in the monetary sphere. Imagism advocated "direct treatment of the thing" that proceeded "in fear of abstractions," while privileging the Image that famously presented "an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time" (Flint 198-200; Pound 200-06). Pound's later preoccupation with the Chinese ideogram in the Cantos, understood as a "thought-picture," and H.D.'s poetic hieroglyphs and palimpsests, resemble Hurston's hieroglyphic more closely in spirit than does the writing of Milton.18 Moreover, the hieroglyphic itself is a richly suggestive figure, evoking complexity, poetic condensation, and cultural and historical depth through its allusion to Egyptian civilization.

Although no one, to my knowledge, has identified Hurston as a devotee of Imagism, such a discourse on the image, complete with its rhetorical repudiation of the literary habits of the past, was certainly available to her and to the Harlem Renaissance milieu of which she was a part. Yet I would hesitate to maintain that Hurston's endorsement of the hieroglyphic as the quintessence of Negro expression is all an elaborate ruse meant to deconstruct hierarchical categories at the moment they are invoked by capitalizing on its high culture cachet and the suspicion now arrogated to abstract monetary systems.19 That sort of reclamation strategy seems more convoluted than it is worth. With all the recent attention Hurston has received recuperating her as an advocate of African-American cultural traditions, it is, I believe, important not to idealize her contributions at the expense of understanding the historical constraints under which she wrote. I would suggest, however, that such counter-currents operate in the passage to complicate and potentially revalue the status of the "primitive" and its aesthetic currency against "the stark, trimmed phrases of the Occident" which make up the alleged standard ("Characteristics" 178). That these counter-currents should remain counter-currents is made clear by Hurston's very reliance on the sort of cultural evolutionary theory Boas worked to discredit, by her attempt to distinguish "primitive" from "highly developed" languages in the first place.

The same kinds of contradictory valuations are at work in Hurston's discussion of originality and imitation. At first redefining imitation as fundamental to artistic process, Hurston stresses Negroes' facility for adapting white cultural forms for their own use, thereby stressing their innate artistic resourcefulness. She then points out that Negro interpretations of white musical instruments have been re-interpreted by whites themselves, transitively shifting the imitative burden to whites, while draining it of its primitivist connotations: "Thus," she determines, "has arisen a new art in the civilized world, and thus has our so-called civilization come." But ultimately, Hurston restricts the black imitation of white culture to a self-despising middle class, that "apes," as she puts it, "all the mediocrities of the white brother," in a phrase that both strips imitation of its artistic endowment and reinscribes its primitive associations, on the basis that it repudiates a now-authentic black culture ("Characteristics" 181-82).20 What emerges in Hurston's treatment of the concepts of the "primitive" and "imitation" in "Characteristics of Negro Expression" is an overt concession to perceived white standards of aesthetic value, contradicted by a covert endorsement of black practices as the crude but infinitely more vital form of cultural expression. Like "the truly cultured Negro" and the "Negro 'farthest down"' whom she celebrates in the essay, Hurston means to "like her own things best"; she only lacks an agreed upon, sanctioned aesthetic standard through which to validate her preferences. What remains in suspension to the end of the essay is whether Hurston is arguing that Negro people and Negro arts really are primitive but nonetheless powerful and compelling, or that beneath the face of the so-called primitive lies an unlooked-for, alternative standard of civilization and aesthetic accomplishment.

Hurston's reliance on racial, cultural, and aesthetic hierarchies, here and elsewhere, is as striking as its overall instability in her thought. Reading across her ethnographies and autobiography, numerous contradictory statements implicating those hierarchies emerge which arguably testify as much to Hurston's internal conflicts and divisions as to her elusive, editorially shaped and culturally constrained position as a speaking subject.21 For the purposes of my argument, I am primarily interested in how Hurston locates herself as a participant and observer in these works, because of what these locations reveal about her relationship to hierarchical positioning. As many readers of her ethnographies have noted, Hurston breaks with the conventions of the monograph in ways that anticipate postmodern methods and assumptions by foregrounding her membership and participation in the communities under her consideration and parading the often intrusive means through which she managed to collect materials.22 Beyond this crucial issue of how she positions herself, Hurston's statements reveal an inconsistent relationship to her methods and materials. In Mules and Men, for example, one of her opening moves consists in reassuring the reader that her return to her home town of Eatonville isn't motivated by her desire "for the home folks [to] make admiration over me because I had been up North to college and come back with a diploma and a Chevrolet" (2). Hurston revisits this scene in her autobiography with quite a different eye, conceding that "I did not have the right approach. The glamor (sic) of Barnard College was still upon me" (127), interfering, she explains, with her ability to represent herself as one of the folk and easily collect materials. Whereas in Mules and Men she makes solemn pronouncements about the efficacy of hoodoo rites and expresses her sorrow at the necessity of refusing a "two-headed doctor's" offer to remain as his partner, both of which would indicate her belief in hoodoo practices (211, 205), Hurston adopts the decidedly detached, secular perspective of a scientific observer in Dust Tracks, where she explains that "[f]eeling a weakness in the face of great forces, men seek an alliance with omnipotence to bolster up their feeling of weakness, even though the omnipotence they rely upon is a creature of their own minds" (201). In Tell My Horse, she excoriates Haitians as liars and thieves in one breath, and then ends her chapters in apparent cultural solidarity with the exclamation, "Ah Bo Bo!" in the next (101).

In every case, Hurston uneasily vacillates between speaking as and speaking for the given group, as insider and outsider, participant and observer, divisions which are inevitably laced with implicit standards of cultural value. Significantly, the most memorable images from the two ethnographies are those which enact a predatory or ventriloquizing relationship to cultural materials. Hurston closes Mules and Men with the story of Sis Cat, who is tricked out of dinner by a lecture on table manners delivered by her main course, a rat, which teaches her to eat first and wash later. Hurston concludes the tale and her ethnography "sitting here like Sis Cat, washing my face and usin' my manners" (246). She has dined, we must imagine, on a banquet of folk tales and songs, the proverbial rat in the analogy. Hurston's allusion to her "manners" here, I should add, invites us to reconsider her consumption of those materials as mediated by conventions which mask, perhaps, the essential violence of the encounter. Hurston's second ethnography, Tell My Horse, gets its name from the Haitian god Guede's habit of "mounting" human visitants or "horses" through whom or to whom he speaks, frequently in a spirit of social criticism. Guede instructs his listeners to "tell my horse" a message which, in Hurston's view, should be understood as a selective opportunity for the masses to criticize their social betters in an otherwise rigid class structure. She represents this practice of borrowing an authoritative voice to express otherwise inarticulable truths about social hierarchy as an enabling rather than violent relation, and clearly it held for her sufficient resonance and power to inspire the book's title (219-21). Arguably, the two halves of the relation together epitomize Hurston's own position relative to black culture, as the borrower and representative of an anthropological authority used alternatively to maintain and dispute the cultural divide between high and low.

II. The Road to Horizon: The Turn from Boas in Their Eyes Were Watching God

It is in the light of Hurston's hierarchical preoccupations and their origins in the anthropological gaze of the participant-observer that I want to reread Their Eyes Were Watching God. While much has been written about the centrality of voice in the novel, little attention has been paid to its visual registers, a striking neglect in a text featuring "eyes" and "watching" in its title, one that ends with the word "see" signaling a new, visionary consciousness for its protagonist. That Their Eyes is concerned with hierarchy has been more frequently noted, an observation based on its apparently celebratory depiction of the rural life of the AfricanAmerican folk. My own reading is most indebted to those of Hazel Carby, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Sharon Davie, each of whom foregrounds Hurston's struggle with hierarchical structures, while coming to quite different conclusions about their larger significance. For Carby, the substance of the novel is rooted in hierarchy, so that "critics are incorrect to think that Hurston reconciled 'high' and 1ow' forms of cultural production." Instead, Carby reasons, "Hurston could not entirely escape the intellectual practice that she so despised, a practice that reinterpreted and redefined a folk consciousness in its own elitist terms" (75-76). Through readings particularly of its folk materials, Davie describes Hurston's "explosion of societal, narrative and linguistic hierarchies in Their Eyes," arguing that the novel "not only inverts the terms of accepted hierarchies (black over white, female over male) but-more significantly-allows readers to question, if only for a moment, the hierarchical mode itself" (447). To be sure, many materials work to complicate and destabilize hierarchy in the novel, but Davie's portrayal of its inversion, I would argue, is more utopian than the case warrants. For instance, while Davie characterizes Gates's powerful reading of Hurston's formal innovations in Their Eyes as "upsetting a linguistic hierarchy" (448), Gates himself describes Hurston's "speakerly text"-one in which free indirect discourse mediates between dialect and standard speech in the novel-as merely "resolv[ing] the implicit tension" between two hierarchical terms (Signifying 192). This is an important difference, one that points to the contradictory character of Their Eyes.

What I hope to suggest, through a reading of the visual metaphors of cultural hierarchy in Their Eyes and Janie's positioning within them, are the ways in which the novel engages with anti-hierarchical fantasy despite its larger constitution through hierarchical structures. Through such structures, vertical hierarchical forms intersect with horizontal democratizing figures in uneasy co-existence, thereby spatializing Janie's equivocal posture at both the center and the margin of the folk community, as well as her evolution from object of the gaze to visionary figure. Such intersecting structures point also to Hurston's unstable position as cultural participant and observer, and as the producer and collector of oral stories who ultimately reifies them in print. Through its resolution of these myriad instabilities and conflicts, the novel can be read as a repudiation of the rationalized language of visuality of the anthropological gaze and a retreat from the problems of objectification and embodiment its empirical methods pose. Instead, Hurston favors a Romantic idealism that reestablishes her artistic project on new, seemingly universalist foundations. The American representative of that Romantic idealism is Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose notions of subjective transparency and poetic language help us to comprehend Janie's transformations at the end of Their Eyes.

I want to begin with Janie's retrospective narrative that occupies the body of the novel, first, because it introduces a set of hierarchical problems that the materials within the frame device are designed to resolve. The largest formal, organizational, and figurative structures the novel employs are hierarchical, and Janie is persistently presented in hierarchical terms as well. Again, formally, as Gates describes it in his argument about free indirect discourse, the novel negotiates a discursive path between dialect and standard English. Organizationally, it is unavoidable that the division of Janie's life into relational stages should be interpreted hierarchically, since Janie provides such a commentary herself when she repudiates Nanny's high chair and community custom to live her own way (108). We may chart the novel's progress through Janie's acquisition of a voice, through her discovery of a genuine romantic love represented by the pear tree, as the ascension of racial authenticity over a false white bourgeois ethos, or as the emergence of democratic over autocratic forms of social organization. In each case, the novel inescapably charts a descent from or an ascent to an identifiable ranking of values, at least until the complicating reversals of the hurricane and its aftermath.23 Excluding its frame, the novel can also be read as a triumph of participation over observation, if we track Janie's descent from Nanny's "high chair," associated with white women's privilege, detached observation, and abstract contemplation, to the democratized space of the muck, where land and water, male and female, dark and light skins meet and co-mingle. There, Janie shares in work and storytelling against the expectations, raised by the combination of her money, light skin, and femininity, of her "class[ing] off" (135). From her initial positioning in the novel at her grandmother's front gate, "gaz[ing] up and down the road" and "[w]aiting for the world to be made" (11), to her ultimate self-identification as a "delegate to de big 'ssociation of life" (6), Janie's development and increasing freedom is marked by the broadening range of her participation in activities initially cordoned off by racial, gender, and class hierarchies.

Similarly, the novel's two central images, the horizon and the pear tree, seem designed to foreground issues of hierarchy. As the place where "ships carrying wishes" sail in the novel's opening (1), the horizon remains a transcendental image of freedom and possibility in the text-"the biggest thing God ever made" (85)-which defines the outer limits of vision literally, and figuratively suggests it through the homonym "her-eyes-on." The horizon's proverbial horizontal axis represents a leveling democratic force, a spatialized equilibrium in the novel. But the horizon is frequently cut across by the vertical figure of the road or highway which may promise to lead to the horizon and its possibilities but in fact points to the obstacles of hierarchy instead. Hurston employs the road this way when she adapts the Exodus story to narrate Nanny's flight from slavery to freedom, when she describes the way she tried to "throw up a highway through de wilderness" for her daughter, but "got lost" (15), en route, one imagines, to the horizon as promised land. Horizons and roads, it seems, may work at cross purposes.24 The pear tree, a visionary figure of self-discovery and eroticism in the novel, also spatializes the intersection of horizontal and vertical forces through its network of branches and roots. Hurston employs it as a tree of life with "dawn and doom ... in the branches" (8), and as a genealogical tree, when Nanny describes "colored folks [as] branches without roots" (15). In both images, vertical and horizontal axes are in conflict, with life threatened by doom, and the branches of the present cut off from their past. The tree also isolates Nanny from the branches' horizontal promise, as the novel describes her head as "the standing roots of some old tree ... torn away by storm" (12), a Medusan image both vertical and inverted, the very image of destructive hierarchy to which she will be linked elsewhere in the novel, particularly through the vertical iconography of the "high chair." As figures constituted through visual condensation, the horizon and the pear tree can be understood as a species of hieroglyphic that encapsulates the larger cross-currents in the text. These figures recall the "primitive" hieroglyphics Hurston linked with black expressivity in "Characteristics of Negro Expression." Ultimately, I will argue, they forge a link between the strictly visual and a visionary epistemology in the novel.

The intersection and obstruction of horizontal with vertical structures also tells a larger story of Janie's positioning within her marriages and communities in Their Eyes. The novel is endlessly engaged in reshuffling Janie's social status and its nominal causes, suggesting the significance of that instability as a key to her social relations. Because it is framed through a heterosexual romance plot, the hierarchical structure most overtly foregrounded is that of gender, with the traditional couple functioning as a primary space of power. This hierarchical structure is inseparable from the inflections of race and class as they are defined by the community as well. By making the free wheeling, gambling, box-picking folk hero Tea Cake the culmination of Janie's romantic career, Hurston would seem to be positioning Janie to evolve into a corresponding folk heroine. But her inability to sustain that posture reveals Hurston's own ambivalent relationship to the folk, as its sometime member and chronicler, and exposes her treatment of the folk as far more critical than the idealized love relationship at first indicates. Hurston's two apparent aims in Their Eyes-to make a heroine of Janie and to celebrate the folk-run parallel only briefly because the two projects fundamentally conflict. Following the hurricane's exposure of the folk ideal as predicated on egalitarian fantasy, Hurston's efforts to produce Janie as a folk heroine collapse in a sequence of irreconcilable divisions: poor versus middle class, black versus mulatto, male versus female, collective versus individual, and finally, embodied folk versus disembodied visionary.

Although Janie is the bastard child of a mother who has been raped by a white. man and turned to drink, and although she ends her story in a pair of dirty overalls, Janie is a folk heroine who won't stay folk. True, her early life with her grandmother living in "de white folks' back-yard" leads schoolchildren to regard her as "low," but the whites' hand-me-downs she wears make her seem too "high" as well (9). After her first marriage, her husband Logan Killicks says much the same thing, noting that she was "born in a carriage 'thout no top to it" but still thinks she's "white folks" (29). In some sense, this is quite literally true, as Janie's childhood misrecognition of herself in a group photograph would indicate. The "truth" that the objective, technological medium produces-that she's "colored" (9)-is not one she recognizes. Indeed, it seems to instigate an alienated sense of identity or even its loss, as one of the white children's remarks makes clear: "DaYs you, Alphabet, don't you know yo' ownself?"Zs Among other things, this moment underscores the enormity of what the objective camera eye (or any other objective apparatus) cannot see, just as the name "Alphabet," standing in for the many names Janie is sometimes called, conveys the scope of what language cannot say in its abstracted attempts to name the self. The moment draws attention to Janie's belief that she occupies a recognizably "white" position as universal subject, a position that her discovery of being "colored" necessarily destabilizes. The continuity of Killicks' observation that Janie thinks she's "white folks" is worth noticing in the novel. When Janie returns to the community in the frame narrative which marks the end of her story, for example, a neighbor sums her up: "She sits high, but she looks low" (3).

The novel equivocates about how she got up there. As a black woman, at least as her grandmother tells it, Janie occupies the very bottom of the social order, as "mule uh de world" (14), and is therefore obliged to try to raise her status through the traditional means of marriage and property. Nanny attests to how Janie's marriage to Logan Killicks secures her respectability ("everybody got tuh tip dey hat tuh you and call you Mis' Killicks" [22]), one which is substantially enhanced by his much touted organ and sixty acres. Hurston works to distance Janie from Nanny's materialism by depicting Janie's indifference to Killicks' land, but other details suggest her immersion in her grandmother's standard of values. At the end of the novel, on the muck, she may interpret her husband's invitation to share the spheres of work and domesticity as an opportunity for gender and class parity, but she greets Killick's intention to buy her a mule of her own as a violation of her newly won status as a woman who does not have to work. When Killicks asks her to help in the fields, she counters, "Youse in yo' place and Ah'm in mine" (30). Her decision to leave Killicks for the prosperous Joe Starks can be attributed in part to Joe's vision of a future in which she rocks on the front porch and eats "p'taters dat other folks plant just special for you" (28), putting her back on the high chair of which Killicks deprived her. At the moment of her departure from her marriage and property, even en route to more of the same, the status Janie could be said to derive from her husband would seem to be moot. Hurston nevertheless makes it clear that Janie continues to be perceived in elevated terms, confronting us with an underlying standard of value which the novel, at some level of consciousness, endorses.

That the first men Janie and Joe encounter in Eatonville instantly recognize Janie's high status suggests that her appearance is decisive, since Joe has yet to prove himself as an economic and political force. Though the men are not sufficiently in awe of marital sanctity to reject the idea of stealing another man's wife, they recognize they have little chance of nabbing Janie, since, as Lee Coker explains to Hicks, "There's some women dat jus' ain't for you tuh broach. You can't git her wid no fish sandwich" (37). Separate from her share in her husbands' property, Janie's value is made legible in the text through her "heavy," "plentiful," long hair, a marker not merely of female eroticism but of her mixed racial heritage as well (26, 28). This is the asset Joe attempts to bank through Janie's enforced restriction from community life, safe in her ornamental capacity as the "bell-cow" (39). As Janie's chief currency, the hair must be tied up in the store to keep other men from spending it and so diminishing its value. Joe's possession of Janie and her physical assets means control of their circulation, and such control predictably issues in Janie's exclusion from the public sphere-from speech-making and porch "lying sessions," the dragging out of Matt Bonner's mule, and games of checkers. In her marriage to Joe, in short, Janie does not acquire new property so much as become property herself, the value of which is legible only through an imposed hierarchy of racial characteristics. As the prized object in her conventional marriage, Janie is highly valued and totally devalued. Her association with Joe strengthens the linkage between the materialism and whiteness which contributes to Janie's value in this part of the novel. Joe's habits and preferences are identified as white, from the imperious "I god" which punctuates his speech to the plantation-style "big house" surrounded by "servants' quarters" that he builds, and his style of compulsion which reminds townspeople of slavery days (44-45).

The position of observer to which Janie is restricted, in this section of the novel at least, could not be less like a masterful gaze, save in the entirely self-reflexive way in which Janie is herself her only possible object. Only white women, Janie argues, have a natural occupation in the high chair, presumably because their elevated cultural position enables them to be subjects of the sovereign view it affords them (107). Hurston stresses Janie's formal compliance but internal resistance to her objectification and subordination by multiplying images of her selfdivision. Janie develops "an inside and outside now and suddenly she knew how not to mix them" (68); a "shadow of herself" comes to "prostrat[el itself before Jody, while all the time she herself sat under a shady tree" (73). Such images of her "inside" are clearly meant to suggest her development of an alternative, selfgenerated standard of value, but they also curiously interiorize the subject/object relations now disrupted between her and her husband. As Janie acquires a form of autonomy through these mechanisms, she initiates a reversal of subject/object relations, significantly, through the subjective prerogative of the gaze. That is to say, she objectifies and feminizes Joe's aging body through the apparently fatal pronouncement "When you pull down yo' britches, you look lak de change uh life" (75)?6 When Joe seems uncomprehending of the insult, Hurston signals the conflation of visual and verbal registers with Walter's phrase, "'You heard her, you ain't blind"' (75).27 Janie follows up this emasculating image of Joe with a speech explicitly condemning his autocratic rule (82). We must not, however, let these various signs of Janie's emerging subjectivity-her expanding interiority, and her brandishing of the gaze and voice-allow us to forget that Janie has also internalized herself as object. After Joe's death, in a scene clearly intended to affirm Janie's new status as a subject, she appropriately turns to the mirror in a moment of self-reflection:

The young girl was gone, but a handsome woman had taken her place. She tore off the kerchief from her head and let down her plentiful hair. The weight, the length, the glory was there. She took careful stock of herself, then combed her hair and tied it back up again. (83)

As Janie takes "stock" of her material assets here in order to claim ownership of them, her primary standard of value in her own eyes as well as others seems unchanged-the "glory" of her hair remains a signifier of her elevated place in a racial hierarchy, for the moment eclipsing the economic status derived from her husband that she now enjoys in a class hierarchy.

Interestingly, we find that folk materials make their presence most keenly felt in the Joe Starks section of the novel, the section presided over by precisely the sort of self-despising, middle-class black whom Hurston condemns in "Characteristics of Negro Expression."28 The section features mule stories, the self-contained buzzard fable, seemingly gratuitous depictions of courting rituals among dispensable characters, and a caution/nurture debate. It culminates in Joe's dark hints about Janie's involvement with voodoo rites. While the materials are more or less subsumed within the fabric of the larger fiction, their presence and content raise larger questions about their function in the text. To the extent that the mule is explicitly identified with the labor of black women and is implicitly identified with black folk tales through the numerous stories it inspires, it can be understood as a rough symbol of the larger folk community. Davie stresses the influence of the eighteenth-century derived discourse of black animality on the mule's meaning as well (449). Joe's perch atop the distended belly of the dead mule, which he has freed, "like Lincoln," and over which he is delivering a mock funeral oration, literally dramatizes his position above the lowly folk through an iconic and parodic enactment of the chain of being. Joe leads off his oration with a eulogy of the town's "most distinguished citizen," and Sam Watson preaches a sermon articulating for the first time the novel's fantasy of hierarchical inversion through a vision of mule-heaven in which "mule-angels would have people to ride on" (57). But if we are tempted to take that vision seriously, we should remember that Hurston frames the scene by assessing its value for consolidating Joe's status; his oration on the mule makes him "more solid than building the schoolhouse had done" (57). When the world is really turned upside-down in the novel, I will argue, it only reveals hierarchy. The folk materials in the Joe Starks section serve both as yardsticks against which to measure Joe's greater power and prestige and, through their native interest and complexity, as indicators of possible alternative standards, standards which Their Eyes works to elevate through the world of the muck. In the Tea Cake section particularly concerned with the muck, Janie's identification with the folk becomes most intimate, despite the instability of that association. Ultimately, her positioning relative to the folk will be virtually indistinguishable from Joe's.

The hierarchical positioning of the Tea Cake section is complicated initially by its connection with the visionary, specifically with Janie's vision under the pear tree and the spiritual transcendence with which it is associated. As Gates notes, Tea Cake's full name, Ver ible Woods, or veritable woods, identifies him as the incarnation of the pear tree's promise (Signifying 191). Their affiliation thus elevates them: Tea Cake is named "a glance from god" (102), while Janie has the "keys to de kingdom" (104). But the spiritual elevation in this section is counterbalanced by the physical movement southward, and it is mediated by a material and social leveling between Janie, Tea Cake, and the agricultural workers whom they join on the muck, all of which spatially and conceptually average out into a kind of social mean. In this section, the now well-off Janie blames her former "classing off" on Joe (107), and the novel dives headlong into a fantasy of a posthierarchical world, in which the social strata Janie classed off from in Eatonville-the story-telling, gambling, dwellers in the present-emerge as the ubiquitous standard. Differences of age, gender, class, and race are here dismissed as purely conventional. Youth is redefined as a state of mind. Janie is invited to partake and becomes adept at male-defined activities like checkers, fishing, hunting, and story-telling. After Tea Cake's impromptu feast, she tells him she will kill him if he "classes her off" from a good time again. She turns her back on her money to take her place in the fields, thereby quelling concerns "that she thought herself too good to work like the rest of the women" (127), and she discovers the beauty of Bahaman drumming despite the scorn with which others regard it (133). After a season on the heterogeneous muck, Janie can answer the "color struck" Mrs. Turner's denunciation of dark-skinned Negroes, and her call for a separate light-skinned class, with color blind indifference, claiming that the mixing of such racial classes "don't worry me atall" (136). Instead, Janie sees Mrs. Turner's "groveling submission" to the idol of the material white body and its approximations as a contemptible parody of true visionary consciousness (138). Janie's new, "classless" identity is strengthened through her alliance with Tea Cake. Compared with Joe Starks's official and autocratic hold over the black community, Tea Cake's undisputed leadership on the muck is never formalized but maintains itself through democratic affections and shared activities. Even the jealous blows through which Tea Cake proves his "possession" of Janie are preceded and matched by blows she gives him when she drives off the persistent Nunkie. The muck, then, emerges as a truly utopian, anti-hierarchical space in which Janie comes into her own as a folk heroine.

The hurricane exposes the myriad fractures in this fantasy of what turns out to be an antediluvian world. The first and deepest of these fractures is racial, and is initiated by Tea Cake's low-rating of the Seminole's warnings of hurricane danger. By depending on the knowledge of the white bossman, Tea Cake reminds us that whites ultimately own the muck, thus bracketing and undermining his own authority. Significantly, the scene of hierarchical reversal accomplished through this act of God is prefaced by a visionary moment that indicates faith in a redemptive material sphere was after all misplaced: "The time was past for asking the whites folks what to look for through that door. Six eyes were questioning God.... They seemed to be staring at the dark, but their eyes were watching God" (151). As wind and water give "life to lots of things that folks think of as dead" and "death to so much that had been living" (151-52), the hurricane instigates a full-scale return of repressed hierarchical relations in the novel. Compared with the moving images of inter-species harmony Hurston offers, wherein disaster inspires snakes and wild animals to a temporary hilltop truce, she shows a bleaker picture where people are concerned, of another hilltop on which "[w]hite people had preempted that point of elevation" (156). Tea Cake is not only coerced by whites into burying the dead but also, as he glibly observes, helping God enforce the Jim Crow law through segregated burial and the provision of coffins for whites corpses alone (163). A rabid dog's bite transforms Tea Cake himself from a loving partner into a virtual animal, reversing the humanizing and elevating tendency of the muck section of the novel. (With his eyes filled with "pure hate," the rabid dog can be understood as an icon of white racism, mounted on the broad back of the placid symbol of the rural folk, the cow [158].) Janie is forced to kill the animal Tea Cake has become and with him her dream of gender equality made flesh. This in turn paves the way for the further exposure of gender divisions at the trial, where white women provide Janie with the sympathy so conspicuously lacking in the response of the black men. The men conclude, revealingly enough, upon her acquittal: "Aw you know dem white mens wuzn't gointuh do nothin' tuh no woman dat look lak her" (179). The final return of the repressed, then, is our confrontation with the species of value that has always fundamentally distinguished Janie from the folk-her mulatto features, and the social status they both signify and allow.

While Their Eyes, I am arguing, is thus unable to sustain an unwaveringly level gaze at the folk, it makes one further attempt to subvert hierarchical relations through its strategy of Janie's embodiment. As we saw in Hurston's placement and displacement of her own body in relation to the "Spy-glass of anthropology" and its objectifying lens, and as we later observed about her evasion of the potential distortions endemic to textualization through her preference for cultural enactment, embodiment and its power served as a recurrent and important resource for Hurston. Although embodiment, too, risks the perils of objectification, those perils may be obviated by the body's potential to reassert itself as experiential subject. Yet another way to track Janie's development in the novel, then, is by observing the ways in which she attempts such a reassertion against the objectifying impulses of other characters, who typically deprive Janie of her coherence as a subject through a fragmenting and synecdochical gaze. From Nanny's reproach of Janie for turning her body into a "spit cup" (19), to Joe's fetishization of her hair and criticism of her "hanging rump" (74), to Tea Cake's loving regard for Janie's lips and eyes (99), through the attention paid by the occupants of the Eatonville porch to her "pugnacious breasts" and "firm buttocks" (2), the community of the novel consistently sees Janie in parts. Janie in turn resists this fragmenting vision through her resolute attempts to reassert bodily integrity. She responds to Joe's criticism of her rump, for example, by insisting he "Stop mixin' up mah doings wid mah looks" (74). She concludes, as we have seen, by turning the objectifying gaze on him, when she says, "When you pull down yo' britches, you look lak de change uh life." Her first act after Joe's funeral is to burn the head rags by which he defined her as property and asserted that ownership over her parts (85). When Tea Cake jeopardizes her bodily integrity by waving his gun at her, she kills him and takes his "seeds." Janie responds to the anatomizing vision of the porch by redefining it as "Mouth-Almighty" (5).

But just as the novel's evasion of hierarchy proves only temporarily sustainable, Janie's resistance to the objectifying gaze through bodily reassertion does not turn out to be especially long-lasting and effective either. The final moment of its efficacy comes in what Carby has called the "gauntlet" scene, where Janie's progress down the street upon returning to Eatonville is marked by a tribunal of witnesses on the porch who "couldn't talk for looking"' (2). "[T]he porch" shortly finds its voice, its initial verbal reticence yielding to its articulation of the hierarchical standards that were momentarily submerged on the muck: "why don't she stay in her class?" This is what the tribunal wants to know, while the women hope "she might fall to their level some day." Their questions are "burning statements" and their laughs are "killing tools" (2). Carby reads Janie's refusal to narrate her story publicly through "the directly told and shared oral tale" as exemplifying the division and antagonism between Janie as a species of intellectual and the porch as folk (82-84). I would agree that the novel draws attention to Janie's superior positioning here relative to the folk, as I have suggested it does all along; but I would argue that Janie's refusal to speak, taken together with the violent terms in which the porch's willingness to speculatively (and falsely) interpret is rendered, suggests the novel's indictment and gradual withdrawal from textualization altogether, just as Janie's refusal to pause before the porch's gaze and her sequestration inside her house indicates her retreat from embodiment as a method of resistance. Granted, Janie tells her story to Pheoby and includes an interpretive apparatus along with that telling to guarantee its proper "understandin"' (7), but she declines the job of conveying it to the community herself. She retreats further into the privacy of the house and into her "visions," delegating the job of translation to her friend. It is at this point in the novel that Janie openly criticizes language as a substitute for experience when she argues that "talkin' don't amount tuh uh hill uh beans when yuh can't do nothin' else" and concludes with her most explicit endorsement yet of empiricism as the key to knowledge: "you got tuh go there tuh know there" (183).

The place to which Janie embarks after expressing this bold epistemology is not out into the world in search of an empirical horizon, but up a flight of stairs where, like Diogenes, she carries a lamp "like a spark of sun-stuff washing her face in fire." This movement spatially and symbolically constitutes her as the ultimate visionary subject, ascendant over the degraded material world below and illuminated with visionary power. Janie's ascent is pedestalled upon material-` ity-after all, she owns those stairs. But reminders of that fact are nowhere in evidence. Janie, furthermore, seems to divide from her own materiality as a black body in this scene, when "[hier shadow behind fell black and headlong down the stairs" (183); she gains the top of the stairs, then, as blackness drops to the bottom, so that she achieves both elevation and a kind of transparency. Janie is thus disembodied and dematerialized at the end of the novel, a state which allows her to transcend the difficulties and limitations of the material body altogether. She is now free-free to enjoy the "pictures of love and light against the wall" incarnating Tea Cake (184). Further, I am suggesting, she is free from the problems of hierarchy and embodiment that have dogged her throughout her journey as an aspiring, empirically constituted seer.

That freedom has been purchased, however, through the very hierarchical divisions that her new status as visionary conceals. Janie cuts loose not only from her blackness here, but also from the voluntary poverty and association with black collectivity which were part of her heterosexual contract with Tea Cake. Instead, she takes on a new identity as a single, middle-class individual. Significantly, the imagery that describes Janie's conceptual dominion over her black identity recalls and selectively modifies the Boasian anthropological project. Their Eyes ends on this note: "She pulled in her horizon like a great fishnet. 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). The horizon, revealed here as an unequivocally visionary figure, is at once fashioned into a tool of collection, sifting, and selecting the materials of life for meditation and analysis and reclaimed in the service of defining the self as world. The first set of meanings suggests a revision of the participant-observer method through the mechanism of the second set. In other words, Janie will assuredly reconsider observed materials through a secondary stage of interpretation, but here her interpretive lens seems specifically introspective and subjective, rather than empirical and objective. By reimagining the materials of Janie's life as a store of resources reserved for the uses of the sovereign self, Hurston uniquely yokes anthropological method to an idealist project by draining it of its empiricist assumptions.

III. Emerson and the Language of Primitive Artistry

It is tempting to view Janie's turn away from empirical observation, experience, and the material body in favor of a dematerialized visionary posture as her-and Hurston's-precipitous flight from the African-American folk she so equivocally represents in Their Eyes. But I want to suggest that this visionary turn is not only a turning away through which, as Carby critiques it, the "discourse of the folk... is irrevocably displaced in the figuration of a discourse of individualized autonomy existing only for the pleasure of the self" (Carby 88). Through the visionary, I would argue, Hurston is also turning back to a Romantic discourse of language and self that enables her to redefine the "primitive" language of the folk as constitutive of a specifically artistic practice, one whose conceptual rewards apparently exceed the bounds of individual pleasure. Hurston's first flirtation with such a discourse goes back to "Characteristics of Negro Expression," in which she reproduces in her theory of the evolution of languages a symbolic paradigm popular in nineteenth-century Romanticism, sometimes referred to as the "superceded" theory of language (Baym, et al., 1002n3). Like a variety of eighteenth and nineteenth-century figures, from Vico and Shelley to Herder, Ralph Waldo Emerson took up the question of the origins of language through a sentimentalization of the "primitive," equating the language of "savages" with a poetic purity, affective power, and an unmediated linkage to nature, the return to which would revivify the linguistic resources of the modern poet.29 I am interested here in the version of this paradigm articulated by Emerson in "Nature" for its uncannily numerous correspondences with Hurston's conceptual language-beginning with the origins of poetic language in "Characteristics," extending to the rhetorics of Universal Being and transcendence present in Their Eyes, and culminating in the novel's use of "thought pictures," particularly through the central figure, the horizon. If individually, the points of intersection between Hurston and Emerson's concepts and language appear merely suggestive, then cumulatively they point irresistibly in the direction of discursive confluence. While it is impossible to know for certain whether or how widely Hurston actually read Emerson, juxtaposing the two writers on these shared issues, I am arguing, helps to expose a dimension of a discourse on primitivism and artistic authenticity indisputably present in her work whose historical indebtedness is otherwise hidden from view. The constellation of primitivism, artistic authenticity, and individual possibility and transcendence epitomized by Emersonian thought was certainly available to Hurston, perhaps uniquely so as a student of anthropological discourses of the primitive. Nor would she be the first modernist writer to engage with such discourses, though equipped with limited awareness of their historical roots.30

There are, to be sure, ironies implicit in turning to Emerson to isolate one of Hurston's most distinctive discursive moves. As readers attentive to Emerson's racial politics have noted, his notions of individual potential and transcendence did not extend to those of African origins, despite his eventual sympathy with abolitionism and his sporadically progressive racial views. As Cornel West has demonstrated through a reading of Emerson's journals and essays, Emerson evinced an early belief in a racial "scale of being" and its sometime corollary, racial obsolescence theory (which predicted the eventual extinction, like the dodo, of the "lesser" races). This theory persisted even into the late, canonical essay "Fate" (West 37). Moreover, Emerson's conceptual program for selfexpansion can be understood as a blueprint for a far more material program of imperialist expansion and conquest.31 Such views, needless to say, would seem to make Emerson complicit with race scientists and other precursors of American anthropology's roots in racial determinism, and hardly an antidote to them. But to ignore Hurston's potential involvement with Emersonian discourse on such grounds is to presume her incapacity to occupy conflicting discursive locations on race, a presumption which even a cursory reading of "Characteristics" or Tell My Horse, to take only the most obvious examples, would dispute.

Just as Boasian anthropology offered Hurston a cultural relativism presuming equal complexity across cultural and racial difference through which to reclaim the category of the primitive, Emersonian Romanticism offered a theory and method of reclaiming the primitive too. Indeed, the Emersonian narrative of artistic authenticity may well have held more resonance for a writer like Hurston than Boas's cultural authenticity, since her commitments ultimately tended more towards literature than social science. Interestingly, Emerson himself is often viewed as writing against the objectifying view of nature he ascribed to natural science, thus anticipating up to a point the difficulties Hurston would experience in relation to Boasian positivism.32Although I am not claiming that Hurston so self-consciously traded one looming white male figure for another as the basis for her own intellectual architecture, I am suggesting that Emersonian concepts function-however schematically in Hurston's piecemeal appropriation of them-as a temporary palliative to the problems of self-reflexivity and racial embodiment that came with Boasian anthropology. Her appropriation of such concepts did not obviate the real conflicts which the adoption of Emersonian notions of artistry would pose for Hurston as a black woman so much as offer as an imaginary solution to the myriad social contradictions she inhabited. As much as do Boas's anthropological methods, Emerson's primitivist aesthetics depend on the suppression or transcendence of the body to function, though the body imagined to be capable of such decorporealization in the service of achieving merger with the All was neither female nor black. Nevertheless, disembodiment achieves a positive valence in Emerson through its linkage to Universal Being that necessarily overshadows its merely instrumental value in Boas as a means to objectivity. The disembodied seer at the basis of Emersonian thought, then, offered Hurston substantial payoffs in the form of artistic valorization and spiritual communion.

With such qualifications in mind, let me turn to the theory of language Emerson articulates in his 1836 essay, "Nature."

Every word which is used to express a moral or intellectual fact, if traced to its root, is found to be borrowed from some material appearance.... We say the heart to express emotion, the head to denote thought; and thought and emotion are, in their turn, words borrowed from sensible things, and now appropriated to spiritual nature. Most of the process by which this transformation is made, is hidden from us in the remote time when language was framed; but the same tendency may be daily observed in children. Children and savages use only nouns or names of things, which they continually convert into verbs, and apply to analogous mental acts.... As we go back in history, language becomes more picturesque, until its infancy, when it is all poetry. (13-14)

Emerson's formulation prefigures Hurston's in surprising detail, describing the language of "children and savages" in the same terms in which she theorizes Negro hieroglyphics as tied to "sensible things" or objects; she even has a linguistic category in "Characteristics" entitled "Verbal Nouns" ("Characteristics" 177). Emerson's linguistic hierarchy, moreover, makes explicit what remains a suggestive implication in Hurston-that primitive language is the language of poetry, conceived of as high art. Such a sublimation of primitive technique is doubly useful to Hurston, as it helps to frame Janie's thought pictures of Tea Cake-the "pictures of love and light against the wall" through which he is made manifest in the novel's final images-specifically as forms of artistic expression, at the same time that it serves broadly to stamp Hurston's figural language in the novel with the seal of artistic prestige and purity.

Both Hurston and Emerson, furthermore, make use of an analogy between language and money to establish a stable grounding in verifiable values for their preferred linguistic practices, encompassed by the intimate linking of word and thing. For Emerson, corrupt language consists in language which has lost its gold standard of value in the world of objects and thus, the guarantee of its linkage with "natural facts":

When simplicity of character and the sovereignty of ideas is broken up by the prevalence of secondary desires... new imagery ceases to be created, and old words are perverted to stand for things which are not; a paper currency is employed when there is no bullion in the vaults. (15-16)

One can read here Emerson's desire to ground both subjective and linguistic purity in the objective and stable value of bullion, thereby preserving its simplicity from the "perversions" of desire and abstraction. The poet's goal, as Emerson puts it later, should be to "pierce this rotten diction and fasten words again to visible things; so that picturesque language is ... a commanding certificate," or fully underwritten currency (16). This conception of a "picturesque language" with its value guaranteed finds a parallel in Hurston's celebration of barter in "primitive communities," which likewise functions to secure an inherent linguistic value and meaning through the yoking of word and thing in the condensed proximity of the hieroglyphic. We can observe numerous reworkings of this linguistic genealogy and standard of values in Their Eyes, in which Hurston's hieroglyphics, or "thought pictures" as they are called in the novel, serve as intermediary terms between the theory of language and a transcendental model of visuality. Not only the culminating images of Janie's vision of Tea Cake in the novel's final scene, but also the earlier images of the horizon and pear tree, can be understood as exemplars of the picturesque language of hieroglyphics Hurston first described in "Characteristics." These images are developed, I am suggesting, beyond the crude "crayon enlargements of life" (48) which characterized the folk expressions of thought pictures, to a greater degree of refinement, measurable through their pronounced disembodiment. If words are signs of natural facts in Emerson, natural facts are themselves the symbols of particular spiritual phenomena (13). The trajectory of thought pictures in Their Eyes draws on this method of authenticating artistry through the merger of the particular into the universal.

While the horizon and pear tree still derive part of their meaning from their presence in the phenomenal world of objects, Tea Cake has been liberated from that world as ghost or spirit. This privileging of dematerialization is consistent with another dimension of Emersonian thought which likewise imagines visionary possibility in a disembodied form. Thought pictures can be said to evolve in the text apace with Janie's development in-and out of-her material body, so that the physicality of the pear tree matches Janie's sexually awakening body, while her ephemeral projections of Tea Cake mirror Janie's own incipient dematerialization. Such an evolution echoes the path charted for Emerson's poet in the most famous lines of "Nature":

Standing on the bare ground,-my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, -all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball. I am nothing. see all. The currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part and particle of God. (6)

As Janie ascends the staircase at the end of Their Eyes and divides from her black "shadow," she comes to approximate the uplifted "transparent eye-ball" and its universal purview. She thereby recovers the position of universal subject she lost when the objectifying visual medium of the photograph taught her she was "colored." She thus recalls Emerson's rhetoric of Universal Being in "Nature," part of his larger argument about the essential oneness of the natural world: "A leaf, a drop, a crystal, a moment of time is related to the whole, and partakes of the perfection of the whole. Each particle is a microcosm, and faithfully renders the likeness of the world" (22). Hurston echoes this conception in Their Eyes, at first negatively, when Janie is described as too uneducated to know that she is "the world and the heavens boiled down to a drop" (72) and later positively when, in the closing image, Janie takes the horizon from "the waist of the world" and drapes it over her own shoulders.

The image of the horizon is itself a recurring figure of visionary possibility in Emerson. As he puts it in a phrase which draws together the several parts of his theory: "There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet" (5). The visionary artist who can claim that property, then, is an individual rather than a collective force, one whose heightened powers of vision at once win him title to the horizon and must elevate him above the sights of the folk whose origins he may nonetheless claim. At the close of Their Eyes, Janie closely corresponds to this Emersonian ideal of the poetic seer. She, too, has laid claim to her "property in the horizon," both in the visionary and material sense, however under-acknowledged the latter may be in the novel; she likewise owns the "eye [which] can integrate all the parts" since she herself now personifies Universal Being with its vision of interconnectedness; and finally she, and by extension Hurston, takes on the mantel of the poet, having distilled a savage picture language into the medium of art.

Yet, as is perhaps fitting in Hurston's chosen medium of artistic expression, the novel, Janie's transcendence appears to be mitigated by its social and interpersonal construction. It is framed and circumscribed, that is, both by the very material encumbrances which have made it possible, as well as by the persistently hierarchical love relation that at once forms its motive and its chief substance of expression. That Janie cannot fully achieve the status of "he whose eye can integrate all the parts" (emphasis added) is further suggested by her apparent confinement to her house as emblem of the curtailed and feminized private and domestic sphere. Such a narrow, hemmed-in version of her "property in the horizon" may remind us of the distinction Hurston's narrator draws in the novel's opening lines, when she suggests that, unlike men, women must restrict themselves to surveying exclusively imaginative horizons (1). Furthermore, Janie's "shadow," the metaphor of blackness of which she attempts to divest herself in the final scene, is arguably not so easy to dispense with. Certainly Emerson would not have regarded it so, but would have seen it, rather, as an inescapably atavistic impediment. If we take the metaphor seriously, moreover, shadows are among those nagging consequences of embodiment from which we proverbially can never escape. Far from completely autonomous, then, Janie's transcendence more closely resembles what might be called an embedded individualism, or what Christopher Newfield has described as the conflict between the subject's constitution through external structures and its potential for autonomy-a pressing contradiction explored in Emerson's negotiations of the poet's imitative and inventive obligations, but which takes on added urgency in relation to the black woman artist who has worked to define herself, elsewhere, within that rubric?

To the extent that she succeeds in burying the immediate historical and cultural consequences of Janie's materiality under a transcendentalist mantel, Hurston's manipulation of Emersonian tropes may be taken as a measure of her own ambivalence about representing and celebrating African-American culture. Yet, her identification with that mantel is destabilized by her divergence from Emerson's relation to the term that joins their projects-namely, the primitive. Whereas Emerson understands the primitive nostalgically as a model and the means to preserve a language the purity of which will secure for his poet a transcendental merger, Hurston's relation to the term is at once less instrumental, more personal, and more firmly anchored in the immediate problem of reconceptualizing and reclaiming the artistic expression of the black community. These material interests so manifestly represented by African-American bodies and communities, including Hurston's own, bring to the surface a second irony entailed by her use of Emersonian tropes. Beyond the fact that she functions by definition as a trespasser in Emersonian territory, that is, her presence there works to expose the idealist limitations of a theory blind to the situated nature of embodiment. Precisely because Janie can recast herself in the mold of Emersonian seer, in other words, Hurston is able to demonstrate the ways in which the transcendentalist ethos is an expression of cultural isolation and privilege, since the very availability of that identity is predicated upon Janie's physical and psychic detachment from her community, through a financial independence that has been purchased, furthermore, through the exploitation of its labor.

Just as Hurston's construction of Janie the visionary operates reflexively as both an adoption and adaptation of Emersonian terms, her stylistic practices also refer to and revise Emerson's notions of poetic language. Hurston complicates Emerson's account of primitive artistry by assimilating the picturesque language of "children and savages" into the high cultural linguistic container of the novel. She thus historically telescopes, in Emerson's terms, the linguistic practices of early and advanced stages of cultural development into a hybridized simultaneity, effectively overturning them as discrete forms of evidence for an evolutionary model of culture. As a consequence of the new contexts in which these several Emersonian paradigms are pressed into service and the revisionary effects they entail, then, Hurston may be seen not simply as a writer retreating from the consequences of black embodiment, but equally as one advancing to reclaim some lost territory, when she actively appropriates a discourse whose spoils include a means of reorienting black female subjectivity both at the center of aesthetic and visionary possibility and within the dominant trajectory of American literary history described and presided over by Emerson. Yet, we risk obscuring the underlying conflict between these alternatives if we overlook the ways in which the universality proffered by Emerson's poetic genealogy necessarily elides the specificity and materiality of the body, Hurston's revisionary efforts notwithstanding. Through Janie's transformation, then, Hurston accomplishes a reorientation of the visual economy, the outcome of which is equally distant from the objective and objectifying empirical observation of the orthodox anthropological gaze, and from the subjective revisions of that gaze of which Hurston made use when she foregrounded herself as material participant in her ethnographies. Unlike her white modernist peers who were content to explore the varieties and limits of subjective visuality left over from the collapse of objective forms, Hurston turns to a visionary model through which she attempts to redefine and revalue her art.

In a 1943 interview with the New York World Telegram, Hurston maintained: "I don't see life through the eyes of a Negro, but those of a person" (qtd. in Hemenway 289). In the wake of the repositioning of her character Janie from spokeswoman of the folk to transcendent seer, Hurston's self-description emerges as far more significant than either a grand ahistorical evasion or the expression of the political conservatism widely seen as typical of her later years. We need to comprehend her authorial position as the outcome of a philosophical tradeoff-the casting off of a black, female body whose cultural meanings she could not control, even through the optical apparatus of science, in exchange for an artistic vision poised on the brink of a universal transparency, however much that alleged transparency was actually underpinned by a white male body, fixed but concealed like a watermark below its surface. Perhaps Hurston grasped the terms of that tradeoff when, in her autobiography, she recalled her affection for Odin, the hero of a Norse tale known from childhood, who plucked out one eye in exchange for knowledge (Dust 39).

I would like to thank Jane Garrity, Dorothy Hale, Lori Merish and Susan Zemka for invaluable comments on earlier drafts of this essay. For a history of the ways the black female body was viewed as a site of atavistic sexual difference and excess, see G For an account of anthropology's roots in imperialism, charges of its indifference to the exploitation of subject peoples, its use of knowledge to benefit whites, and its complicity as an instrument of white role, see Willis and Caulfield IT In light of this institutional context, what critics beginning with Richard Wright have seen as Hurston'sneglectof the issue of blacks' exploitation by whites can perhaps be understood as a discipline-wide subordination of issues of exploitation to culture; see Caulfield 184-45.

3 Melville Herskovitz later joined this company, but I am concerned here with the problematic positioning of the black and female gaze.

Hurston's research on an indigenous subculture experienced as deviant by some arguably places her project doser to sociology than social anthropology in key ways, and makes her version of the participant-observer method appear more mainstream; the naturalist method pioneered by the Chicago School of sociology in the 1920s and 1930s, for example, placed lem emphasis on objective study and greater stress on the interaction between the observer and observed But Hurston clearly allied herself with Boasian methods, as her request that he write the foreward to Ms and Men suggests. See Roberts. For a full ciscussion of the history of the participant-observer method In anthropology, see Clifford, "Authority." Torgovnick offers a compelling analogy for the gendering of civilized/savage relations in anthropology, comparing the mythk model of the Odysseus/Polyphemus relationship in Homer's Odyssey with the male anthropologist/native Other. See also Sontag.

See Freud's account, for example, of the transmutations encompassed in the literal killing of the primal father by "savages" compared with the psychically contained Oedipus complex (140-51). 8 Kuper stresses the influence of German debates about Darwin and Lamarck on Boas's thinking. 9 Another Boas student Otto Klineberg, whomHurstonassisted informally in the 1930s, published Characteristicsris of thc Am Negro In 1944, which set forth the same conclusions.

10 By dwelling on Boas's engagement with the category of the primitive here, I by no means intend to identify him as an especially pernicious voice in the history of primitivist discourse. Indeed, even a recent and avowedly progressive thinker like Torgovnick makes a case for the ongoing utility of the concept, and the futility of substituting more value-free terms (20-21). Kuper notes the remarkable persistence of the concept despite such contributions as Boas's, and its rapid dissemination beyond

the preserves of social anthropology to infuse "the political and historical consciousness of several generations" (14). Torgovnick explains the immense attraction of the concept to be its chameleon-like, dialectical ability to represent the Other for the cultural imaginary in positive and negative terms, as Edenic social palliative or "barbarian at the gate" as the cultural moment warrants. North makes a similar observation about the attractions that racial masquerading and the appropriation of black dialect held for white modernist writers, demonstrating the latitude it afforded them "to play at self-fashioning" through rebellion against linguistic and cultural standardization, while at the same time underscoring the conceptual slide between primitivism and blackness in the discourse (11).

For an extended discussion of Fry's primitivist aesthetics, see Torgovnick, chapter 4. 12 As Szwed points out, Melville Herskovits was an exception to this trend, but his perspective was largely ignored at the time.

13 Clifford describes the allegorical dimension of the transformation of experience and oral expression into text, and its collusion with an "allegory of salvage casting the lone ethnographer as the anguished custodian of a fragile, disappearing culture (*Allegory" 112-13). Interestingly, Hurston herself is not exempt from such allegorizing impulses, sometimes depicting African-American folklore as an endangered form requiring immediate transcription, while elsewhere suggesting that, far from dying out, it is a vital and evolving art; see Hurston, "Characteristics" 180. 14 As Hurston's biographer, Robert Hemenway, encapsulates the conflict, Hurston "had known both written and oral traditions, had participated in American civilization at the levels of both 'high' and 'low' culture, and her commitment to folklore as a field of study was an inchoate challenge to the cultural imperialism that could declare these vertical judgments.... Yet even the sophisticated social science of anthropology was a part of 'high' culture, a discipline whose methods suggested periodic sorties among primitive folk followed by a return to the Heights for analysis and evaluation" (l OD). I am suggesting that the novelistic for was an equally vexed avenue of expression for Hurston.

15 For a discussion of the intricacies of the Mason/Hurston relationship, see Hemenway, chapter 5. 16 For accounts of Hurston's music collecting and of her initiation into Voodoo rites, see Mu/s and Men

17 This theory oflinguistic development hardly ot with Hutton. It is, rather, a commonplace of Romantic thought from Emerson to Shelley. I wil have more to say about Hurston's debt to Romanticism in theconcluding section of this essay.

IS The conceptual resemblance works, of course, both ways; as Pound's use of the Chinese ideogram indicates, there is plenty of room for an analysis of white modernist Orientalist and primitivist appropriation here, as well as black modernist assimilation of high-culture aesthetic standards

19 North offers such a reading of a primitivist moment in an earlier Hurston essay, "How It Feels To Be Colored Me,' in which he interprets Hurston's employment of jungle imagery as a purely strategic opportunity for her to undercut its cultural meanings (17S79). Such a reading, I would argue, suppresses Hurston's complex attachments to such imagery, which I am arguing lead to competing rather than consistent motives and effects, and help explain her choice to borrow it at all

That Hurston felt it necessary to confront the charge of black imitation of white culture seems especially ironic given North's argument about the pervasive mimicry of black dialect by white writers in literature produced from the 1880s on. See North 21-22.

21 Mules and Men went through a series of drafts and revisions before its ultimate publication, and the editorial interventions into Dust Tracks on a Road substantially excised Hurston's sharp political criticisms of United States foreign policy, of Anglo-Saxons superiority complex, and more, transforming it into a nearly pandering, unreliable text. For detailed accounts of the publication histories of Hurston's texts, see Hemenway. To my knowledge Reynaud's Is the most detailed account of editorial intervention in Dust Tracks on a Road .

For recent, detailed readings of Hurston's ethnographies, see HernAndez; Wall, Women; Dolby-Stahl; Sinchez-Eppler and Boxwell

While I am aiming to invoke some of the most readily available readings of the novel's trajectories here, this is intended neither as an exhaustive list, nor to dispute the many factors which complicate such trajectories' unidirectionality. 24 The image of the horizon is clearly a resonant one for Hurston and she returns to it in her description of a favorite teacher as 'a pilgrim to the horizon" (Dust 107).

25 Johnson similarly reads Hurston's discovery of her blackness in the Jacksonville sectton of her autobiography as a loss of identity(Johnson175; Dust 68).

See abo Wo 241.

I am indebted to GaSs reading of thb anis moment as an in of sy (Gates Signifying 2IW.

Like the middle-class Negroes of Hurston's essay, Joe appears to distance himself from black entertainments he privately enjoys. For instance, he refuses to participate in the porch "lying sessions"but he laughs "his big heh, heh laugh" at them just the same (Thor Eyes 51).

A dominant model of historiography in Europe in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries conceived an elaborate analogybetween the development of civilizations and the life cycles of malL An early and highly influential articulator of this idea is Giambattista Vico, for whom all nations pass cyclically through childhood to maturity, with each stage of their development being marked by a corresponding linguistic stage. Thus, poetry is portrayed as the definitive genre of primitive civilizations, tragic drama the genre of young adulthood, and non-fiction prose the genre of civilizations in full maturity.

Vico's model is cyclic, positing a return; the late eighteenth century adopted the model and altered it to reflect a linear pattern of growth. The notion of correspondences between linguistic, individual, and national growth was popular among German intellectuals such as Herder and Niebuhr; it was an assumption which gave rise to the discipline of philology. Among British poets of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the belief that cultures in an early stage of growth spoke a more metaphorically vibrant language was a source of some dismay; it forms the basis upon which Thomas Love Peacock and Percy Bysshe Shelley carried out their famous (and partly ironic) debate upon the history and modern viability of poetry. Blake, Carlyle, and Macaulay all explored, modified, and felt the influence of Vico's "developmental" historical/linguistic paradigm. See Steiner 75-80; Said passim; and Ruth Roberts 63ff.

For two convincing, book-length arguments on white modernists' seemingly unconscious deployments of nineteenth-century discourses of the primitive, see Torgovnick and North. For additional accounts of Emerson and race, see also Lee and Nicoloff.

See Whicher on Emerson's critique of natural science.

Newfield explores the relative values of invention and imitation in Emerson's vision of the poet in terms which clary have resonance forHurston's anxieties about black artistry as expressed for instance, in "Cheri" (see Newfield 43ff.

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