Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Semester of Degree Completion

1988

Thesis Director

Michael Loudon

Abstract

Zora Neale Hurston, Afro-American writer of the 1920s and 1930s, has gained critical recognition for her novels and studies about the Afro-American masses. Hurston, also an anthropologist and folklorist, worked directly with southern Afro-Americans through her research in both of these fields. Her folklore collecting journeys enabled her to see and to capture the cultural traditions and oral heritage of Afro-Americans. It was her search into the cultural traditions, moreover, that led her to find her own identity. Hurston, therefore, depicted her protagonists as searching for an identity in most of her novels, with this quest especially apparent in Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939). In this novel she blends Afro-American traditions--voodoo, hoodoo, and folklore--to help Moses, the Egyptian version of the well-known Biblical figure, end his quest for self-identity. Hurston's own life parallels Moses's; and, in effect, when Moses gains his sense of identity and sense of community, Hurston gains hers also.

Three stages of development exist in Hurston's search for an identity: being raised in a southern but autonomous Afro-American community; studying under anthropologist Franz Boas, leading her to collect folklore and, eventually, to explore hoodoo and voodoo; and her final accomplishment, writing Moses, the novel that incorporates cultural elements from the first two stages in a successful attempt to fuse these elements into the foundation on which Moses's (and Hurston's) identity is based.

Hurston spent much of her career fighting to overcome the obstacles that both white and Afro-American males set up; she fought against prejudicial stereotypes that labeled her derogatorily as an Afro-American woman novelist. She created her own esthetic with which to write, an esthetic that let her portray the masses as she saw them. She found a niche in society through which she could develop her identity by following her esthetic and by incorporating Afro-American traditions into her work. Moses, Hurston's most significantly important book in which she portrays the search for her own identity, contains elements that are culturally traditional, namely elements of folklore, hoodoo, and voodoo. Hoodoo, furthermore, was intimately grounded in Hurston's sense of community and sense of self, leaving her free to incorporate it into Moses. Hurston's Moses, for example, was the greatest hoodoo master who ever lived, yet he still had enough human qualities so that Afro-Americans could easily identify with him. Since Hurston found her identity through Moses, then her writing of this novel was a way for her to find out who she was and to what community she belonged.

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