![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
heyiya.livejournal.com posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
50books_pocThis is a book I’ve been meaning to read for ages, one of those that I'm a little ashamed to admit it's taken me till now to get to. I read it faster than I would have liked, and I am certain that I will be rereading it in the future in order to savor its language.
For a recommendation, I don’t think I could do better than quoting the famous opening lines.
The opening aphorisms struck me even more powerfully when I return to them now after reading the rest of the book. It is the story of the life and growth of a black woman named Janie, who remembers love and uses it to find herself and her own meanings in the landscape of men’s wishes. Her first dreams of what that might be are cut off by her grandmother’s insistence that she get married to a local rich man; then she leaves her first husband to go off with another man following his dream to the first wholly black town in the south. His ship comes in and Janie is shoved into the background, the Mayor’s wife in a life of enforced respectability that bores her; she goes off again with a younger man to a joyful and precarious life doing seasonal labor with him, and I won’t give away the end but it made me cry and yet I left the book uplifted, not depressed at all.
The introduction and afterword talk about Hurston’s style which merges first and third person, her use of folklore and dialect, her representation of black female subjectivity in and of itself and not as some kind of symptom of social problems. What I loved most was the complexity of the person at the book’s heart: the way Janie’s individuality is the whole book's focus without its being separated from her relationships. Sexual desire is central to the narrative’s movements, and her material circumstances—including economic independence—come from her relationships with men just as her grandma said they would, but that never means that her own self as a woman is not at the center of things. Her life isn’t, in the end, about dreams of things unfulfilled, or about a future imagined through children or for posterity: it’s moments and memories and what she creates with them.
For a recommendation, I don’t think I could do better than quoting the famous opening lines.
Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men.
Now, women forget all those things they don’t want to remember, and remember everything they don’t want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and and do things accordingly.
The opening aphorisms struck me even more powerfully when I return to them now after reading the rest of the book. It is the story of the life and growth of a black woman named Janie, who remembers love and uses it to find herself and her own meanings in the landscape of men’s wishes. Her first dreams of what that might be are cut off by her grandmother’s insistence that she get married to a local rich man; then she leaves her first husband to go off with another man following his dream to the first wholly black town in the south. His ship comes in and Janie is shoved into the background, the Mayor’s wife in a life of enforced respectability that bores her; she goes off again with a younger man to a joyful and precarious life doing seasonal labor with him, and I won’t give away the end but it made me cry and yet I left the book uplifted, not depressed at all.
The introduction and afterword talk about Hurston’s style which merges first and third person, her use of folklore and dialect, her representation of black female subjectivity in and of itself and not as some kind of symptom of social problems. What I loved most was the complexity of the person at the book’s heart: the way Janie’s individuality is the whole book's focus without its being separated from her relationships. Sexual desire is central to the narrative’s movements, and her material circumstances—including economic independence—come from her relationships with men just as her grandma said they would, but that never means that her own self as a woman is not at the center of things. Her life isn’t, in the end, about dreams of things unfulfilled, or about a future imagined through children or for posterity: it’s moments and memories and what she creates with them.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2009-03-13 06:40 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-13 04:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-13 07:35 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-13 04:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-13 05:57 pm (UTC)