Waste and Whiteness: Zora Neale Hurston and the Politics of Eugenics

Faeces ... signif[ies] that the opposition between the clean and the unclean draws on the distinction between the body's inside and its outside. Inside the body, it is the condition of the body's ability to regenerate itself; as expelled and external it is unclean, filthy. The subject is implicated in this waste, for it can never be definitively and permanently externalized; it is the subject; it cannot be completely expelled. (Grosz 91)

If we join Grosz's theory of the fecal with the political semiotics of white trash, then we can see how a particular race and class combination produces an excremental identity category. "Whiteness" as a whole, unfragmented, self-same cultural body must abject its "trash" to re-establish its cleanliness and coherency. And, yet, in doing so, racial whiteness cannot completely expel its degraded white other because of the sameness which figures race based on a visible economy. That is, in racist social formation, the eugenic "white ideal" can only anxiously conceive of itself as "pure" because the contaminating (white) other will never be eliminated by virtue of its structural (white) similarity.

The scene in which Arvay is stuck in the bathroom when one of her eugenically sound children, Kenny, calls to report that he will not be returning home literalizes the excremental metaphor. Arvay's constipation in Chapter 21 works as a double metaphor for her repression of both her poor white heritage and her experience of maternity. The Meserves' new porch functions as Arvay's special annex so that, spatially and psychologically, this territory gives her room to "visit the graveyard of years and dig up dates and examine them cheerfully. It was a long, long way from the turpentine woods to her sleeping-porch" (234). [19]

Before the construction of the porch, Arvay's excretory system functions irregularly. The porch serves as a "private space" in which to "lounge around and wait for the event of her day." The following description provides the reader with more information regarding Arvay's body:

For the last year or so, she had been a little too bound for her usual good health. So her doctor had given her a routine to overcome this.... He was against laxatives and the castor oil mixed with turpentine that Arvay had been raised to. Seven in the morning and eight at night had become hours for her vigil. That gave her a good two hours after supper to enjoy the porch with Jim. (235)

Tranquility acts as a natural laxative for Arvay; it routinizes and orders her day around her body's digestion. Making time for peace on the porch relaxes her body, enabling Arvay to accept the interior "goodness" of excrement. (As Grosz puts it, "Inside the body,... [feces] is the condition of the body's ability to regenerate itself" [91].) When Arvay is in repose, the interior rumblings of her body tell her that she can cleanly eliminate her waste, that her waste will leave her body all in good time.

And so the narrative continues with a hushed calm: