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

My guess (and it is a guess, after all of the ambiguities and contradictions in the novel) is that, much like Joe's multi-layered joke in the novel's middle, Hurston constructs an ending which confounds the expectations of her readership. Remember that, earlier in the novel, Joe's joke brings an alternative voice to the thematics of natural heredity and psychological/corporeal angst. It loosens narrative tension and introduces a discourse of cultural acquisition. While Hurston's ending is not quite a "joke" (at least, not the easily identifiable joke that Joe makes), perhaps there is a level of facetiousness to it. After all, as I have argued, the novel is about waste and whiteness, an (at times) winking critique of white paranoias about personal and social purity. If Hurston ends the novel with a less than heroic gesture, perhaps she is pointing to something else about whiteness: that the incompletions and dissatisfactions of white (female) behavior are something with which racial Others might want to dis-i dentify. In the last sentence of the novel, Arvay "ma[kes] the sun welcome to come on in" (352). The story ends by letting the sun in where it has, up until this point, not shone (on Arvay). Is this an encoded gesture, troping off of the (anal) joking command "Stick it where the sun don't shine!"? If Hurston's goal was to shed light on folks and attitudes which normally remain in the dark, and to do so by embedding a plethora of excremental and anal signifiers, then by the novel's close, perhaps Hurston could not resist the opportunity to let the sun shine in on Arvay, the synechdochal (white) asshole. [27] Perhaps the point of letting the sun in, at the novel's end, is to show that the anguished transformation from low to high, from destitute to wealthy, from melancholic to affable can never fully complete itself, and that anyone who believes that this is so is, literally, making an ass of him- or herself.

Chuck Jackson is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English at Rice University, where he is completing his dissertation "American Extremes: Violence, Impurity, the South, and the Nation."

Notes

(1.) For an overview of Seraph's critical reception, see St. Clair.

(2.) See the close readings and contextualizations in duCille; Plant; and Lowe.

(3.) For an excellent re-reading of the theoretical complexities of Hurston's non-conformity and her vision of "community," see Kawash.

(4.) Claudia Tate reminds scholars of the importance psychoanalysis had for Harlem Renaissance writers and reads Seraph in conjunction with Freud.

(5.) For a more comprehensive account of these charges, see Hemenway. Note especially the language of abjection that creeps into Hurston's devastated letters (321-22).

(6.) See Doyle for more on eugenics and literary representations of race and gender.

(7.) See Richard Dyer's White (1997), a full-length study which elaborates the connection between the aesthetics of cinematography and racial whiteness. See also hooks; Wray and Newitz. For a comprehensive treatment of the "southern poor white" as a stock character in white U.S. literature, see Cook.