Female Spirituality and Sexuality Explored Through Zora Neale Hurston’s

Zora Neale Hurston, while living in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, was researching fetish on the most scholarly level. She was studying with Haitis most well cognize hougans and mambos, or priests and priestesses. At this time she was gathering knowledge about hoodoo so she could write the text, Tell My Horse. Also, at this same time Hurston had completed writing, Their Eyes Were Watching God in only seven scant(p) weeks. A close reading of this novel provides the reader with a affinity between voodoo and the text. Hurston non only explores egg-producing(prenominal) spirituality and cozy urge in, Their Eyes Were Watching God, but weaves the two together revealing that voodoo culture plays an important role within the novel especially in the comparisons between the voodoo goddess Erzulie and the texts main character Janie Crawford.Hurston exploits the society in which Janie Crawford lives in. Hers is a society in which she is not allowed to live freely and express herself freely. She is stifled in her society because she is a woman and because she is African-American. Hurston understands this oppression and she uncovers the truth on the status of black females at this time. There were no powerful roles procurable to them in their American culture or in their African-American culture. Women were looked exhaust on and they were not seen as potentially strong spiritual and sexual people. Hurston opens the door for her protagonist, Janie Crawford, to create a more substantial and empowering life for herself afterwards the many hardships she faces. She leads her down a path to self-determination and this path is embody by the spirituality of voodoo. The old, old mysticism of the world in African terms...a religion of creation and life (Tell My Horse 376).This i... ...oodoo, which stands in the novel to railroad tie in the value of self-discovery is integral to the storys comparisons between Janie and Erzulie. juju is believed to have played a shapely role in t he Haitian revolution in which Haiti won its independence from France. The integration of voodoo mental imagery and symbolism throughout, Their Eyes Were Watching God, reflects Hurstons belief that self-discovery for African-American women lies not in their male dominated society, but rather in their taste of their own sexual and spiritual strength. Hurston achieves this idea greatly by linking the female goddess Erzulie with Janie Crawford. Works CitedTell My Horse. 1938. rptd. in Hurston Folklore, Memoirs and Other Writings. ed. Cheryl A Wall. New York program library of America, 1995. 269-555.Their Eyes Were Watching God. 1937. New York Harper & Row, 1990.