The Hours

It's human nature to know our lineage, as well as the lineages of others. We learn often about how vital family crests and histories were (and still are) in many cultures. We hear about Rockefellers and Carnegie-Mellons, about Sally Hemings and about scads of others who have begotten history. Human nature is to know your roots. The same can be said for books. We’ve discussed in other classes the lineage of some books, most recently Things Fall Apart giving birth to Purple Hibiscus, and how one novel picked up where the other left off.

Of course I understood that we were to look for parallels between The Hours and Mrs. Dalloway, because obviously you wouldn’t have one without the other. Even with the parental shadow of Mrs. Dalloway casting itself over The Hours I feel it is a separate from its mother. We talk often about the parallels between the two books, but I think that trying to tie The Hours too tightly to Mrs. Dalloway is almost unfair. It is a child respectful of its lineage, in full adoration of its mother, and yet the text is a child that knows itself well enough to have its own voice outside of its mother.

I was taken almost immediately by the Prologue with Virginia Woolf and her suicide, it is shocking and profound. The clear of the novel is to set an outright tone of sadness, of despair. These feelings seem to come slower with Mrs. Dalloway, only after some pages is the reader aware of the shocking feeling of swirling downward in a funnel. Using the direct image of Virginia Woolf putting the pig-head sized rock in her pocket, of walking into the river, is immediately a signal to the reader that this will not be a book like he or she has read before. I stand by the opinion that perhaps we sometimes try too hard to push The Hours into a place in which it will never fit, while it has undeniable traces of the preceding novel we are forgetting how much it is representative of Virginia Woolf. The Hours seems not so much a child of Mrs. Dalloway, rather it is a reminder of Woof, the true mother in this situation.

I am a great supporter of research. It is something I value and relish in, reading accounts of events and about the lives of people is intriguing. After a brief bit of research I found a collection of articles by I.M. Ingram, a psychiatrist in Glasgow who has put his research about Virginia Woolf’s psychiatric illness on the internet. In the article on her suicide he writes of what is now believed to be her bipolar disorder and creates an extensive, intense timeline leading up to her death. What is most interesting in reading this particular article is how her body was discovered. On April 18, 1941 her body was found in the river by children.

The section in the first part of this book that is most fascinating is when the Bell children find the dying thrush. It was compelling to me, the children’s innocence and Virginia’s fixation. I found myself thinking after about two or three pages that it was a gem that I hadn’t appraised properly. No author writes about the funeral of a dead bird for six pages without it having some special meaning. The soft bed of grass and the yellow roses in a oval around the small animal put me in the mind of Catholic medals, somehow I pictured it as some variation of a medal of the Blessed Mother. The children paid such close attention for a time, then sped so quickly onto the next moment. It was Virginia who kept going back, Cunningham shows her kindred spirit with the bird through their moments together.

Ingram’s writing about Woolf’s illness and suicide made the thrush funeral suddenly make sense. The Bells found the basically dead thrush, and I feel that the attention they pay to it is a beautiful juxtapositioning of childhood innocence next to death. Cunningham shows through the Bells the kind of reverence we should have for Virginia Woolf, we should lay her sweetly and gently into the grass bed and surround her with flowers, she deserved that respect if not more. Her writings and records of her death show us that even with her own tortures she was a woman of innocence in her own way, with a keen mind for the rights of everyone, with the curiosity of a child and the mind of a genius. This book is not an homage to Mrs. Dalloway, rather it is an homage to Virginia Woolf, the thrush of a woman lying in the leaves of grass.

Tell My Horse, or Why I Love Zora

I've decided to use this website to do some mildly academic writing about literature. Below is an essay I wrote for my World Literature class at Juniata College, taught by Judy Katz. Feel free to discuss in comments!

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I remember reading Zora Neale Hurston’s novels for the first time many years ago, the first, obviously, Their Eyes Were Watching God and after that I read Seraph on the Suwanee. While reading Seraph I decided to do some research on Hurston because I didn’t know much about her other than Oprah loved her and that many scholars considered her one of the greatest writers of her time. What I was surprised to learn was that Zora led an astoundingly interesting yet somehow depressing life. Thinking about it now I know she would not appreciate the sympathy that seems to well up in my chest; she did not seem like that kind of woman.

She was born in Alabama in 1891, but it wasn’t long after that her family moved to Eatonville, Florida and that was the home she remembers and writes about in “How It Feels to Be Colored Me.” When her mother died in 1904 Zora and her siblings were split up, sent to live in boarding schools and when that money ran out they were sent to live with family. She didn’t get along with her stepmother, and it wasn’t long until Zora left for the north to get her high school education. She went to Barnard College, worked with Anthropology professor Franz Boaz, and became immersed in the Harlem Renaissance. Hurston was a strong willed woman who didn’t seem to care much about people’s opinions, and was not always a darling of the Harlem Renaissance. Hurston and Langston Hughes wrote the play Mule Bone which became a point of contention, each author claimed rights to the script, and it ended their friendship. Richard Wright and other black writers criticized her work for not dealing more with racial issues, as well as her having white patrons like Charlotte Mason (who actually held the rights to Hurston’s work). At the end of her life Hurston was working as a maid and school teacher, dying poor and alone in a state home for the elderly. The biography on her official website said that a collection actually had to be taken up by the community to bury Hurston; her grave was unmarked until Alice Walker found it, lost among the weeds, and bought Hurston a proper headstone.

Hurston’s revival in the 1970s was what led me to believe she had been favored among her peers. It wasn’t until I had done the research that I had learned about how she was shunned by her peers for not wanting to engage the color issues of the times. With that in mind I thought it interesting that her short essay be placed next to Wright’s “The Library Card” in my World Literature course, it truly showed how different they were in mindset. Hurston’s essays completely exude her spunk and I think that she should be admired for not letting the racial tensions of her time hinder her love for life. Despite this I wonder if she is a caricature of herself at times, utilizing at times the “minstrel technique” that Wright accused her of. She talks in “How It Feels…” about her “gallery seat” of a front porch, and how she perched atop the front gate and talked to strangers. At one point she even acknowledges how the other people in her town didn’t appreciate her southern hospitality. “The colored people gave no dimes,” she wrote, “They deplored any joyful tendencies in me, but I was their Zora nevertheless.” The same could be said for her place in Harlem: she sat atop the gate and while her peers didn’t encourage her antics, they couldn’t disown her completely.

It’s easy, after reading the articles on her, to dismiss Hurston as a suck-up, as a traitor to her race, a white-lover. In her essay she wrote: “Among the thousand white persons, I am a dark rock surged upon, and overswept, but through it all, I remain myself. When covered by the waters, I am; and the ebb but reveals me again.” To me this proves that in Hurston’s eyes, race did not matter, it was the self that mattered. As a child she talked to anyone because she saw no color lines, and as an adult she was exactly the same. In Mary Crow Dog’s piece “Civilize Them With A Stick,” she wrote that “racism breeds racism in reverse,” racism breeds suspicion not only of others but of one another. Hurston embraced people, it seemed, no matter their color. She transcended the hate that hate breeds, while her peers fell into the pit. She loved life, no matter what the colors.

I’m torn apart by Zora Neale Hurston. On one hand, I crown her the Queen of Forward Motion. She wrote that “slavery was the price I paid for civilization, and the choice was not with me. It is a bully adventure and worth all that I have paid through my ancestors for it.” At the same time I guess I can’t help but wonder how she can so easily shrug off her plight. That’s when I remind myself of her spirit. Wright wrote in “The Library Card” that reading got him down, that he “felt trapped,” and that feeling would halt his reading. I think we all understand this feeling, but it takes a special person to overcome that feeling, to take in what they read and then put it to use. Wright was obviously special, but I love Hurston more because she was able to move past the hard feelings and lead a life. She died poor but at least she made her life worth it.

Copyright Katie Cibort 2009