Sweat By Zora Neale Hurston: The Emphasis Of Femininity As A Symbol In Literature

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Femininity is a powerful symbol in literature. From Genesis to Mark Antony, the contrast between husband and wife, between the feminine and the masculine, has persisted throughout history. At the turn of the last century, however, African American literature had begun a deconstruction of this stock symbol, a re-examination of the relationship between husband and wife, what was expected from them, and how it changed them. In particular, Zora Neale Hurston focused on this problem, putting into words the hopeful idealism and crushing reality in novels like Their Eyes Were Watching God, and on the other end of the spectrum, the slogging and tyrannical abuse of Sykes in Sweat. While both stories present marriage in a starkly different light, both use it as a frame to show the powerful independence of their female protagonists, and explore how marriage was transitioning from a requirement, something that a woman needs to participate in society in a meaningful way, to an optional construct with its own pitfalls that is not entirely needed.

Zora Neale Hurston’s earlier short story, Sweat, transcends the typical foibles of feminist fiction. At a glance, it presents a troubling façade: a story of a troubled marriage, where Delia toils, submissive, beneath the restless and sadistic Sykes, her husband, until his eventual death. A closer examination, however, reveals a deeper narrative. It is only ever Delia who remains empowered throughout the story; she is the backbone of the household, supporting Sykes, remaining faithful through his abuse, and defending herself from his abuse when he goes too far. Even in the history that Delia relates to the audience, it is clear that while she hasn’t been quite independent of Sykes, she has certainly never been dependent on him. Through this “quiet feminism”, Hurston models Delia, ostensibly the character with the least amount of power in the story, into a pillar of empowerment.

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First, some background. Zora Neale Hurston was a distinguished African American writer who was a major figure in the Harlem Renaissance. She was born in Florida in 1891 – a place and time when poverty, racism, and sexism stalked the land. (Norwood) Throughout most of her fiction, she channels these themes into the same setting, writing what could almost be called autobiographical accounts. Her short story, Sweat, begins with our protagonist, Delia, washing the clothes taken from her church. Her husband, Sykes, is an unkind man, who abuses Delia mentally and physically, tipping over her tub and grinding dirt into the clothes she was washing, and using Delia’s deep fear of snakes to startle her for his own amusement. Sykes is having an affair with another woman and spending the money Delia makes as a washerwoman on his mistress. Eventually, Sykes, in a twisted practical joke, brings a live rattlesnake into the house. When Delia begs him to kill it, he refuses; eventually, the snake escapes and bites him. As Sykes lays dying, Delia, instead of helping him, watches him die.

It is at this point that one may assume that the ending is the source of the feminist theme of the short story. Surely, the submissive washerwoman passively killing her abusive husband is a striking image, but rather than the source, it is an overt continuation of a theme that pervades Hurston’s work: Delia is submissive, on all accounts tries her best to be a good wife despite Sykes’ abuse – and yet, she is presented as a feminist symbol. Delia’s empowerment is a subtle thing, but one which is pivotal for the understanding of the purpose behind the work. She, as a woman, is self-sufficient; more than that, she is the breadwinner of the household, a stereotypically, and, in this period predominantly, male role. Hurston leaves us several clues to this: Delia hard at work on a Sunday evening, despite her being a devout Christian, Sykes with his whip being driven off by a pan-wielding Delia, an instrument of femininity, and her perseverance in the face of his abuse. This, in turn, is the source of Sykes’ anger: his inability to provide for Delia makes him feel like less than a man. Unable to seize what he sees as his station in life, his anger is channeled toward what caused this perceived slight, Delia, motivating him to humiliate her. His mistress is another manifestation of this; he senses that he is superfluous to Delia, and searches for someone who would need him, and depend on him to provide for them.

While Sykes’ insecurity about his position in his own marriage is understandable, he is still easily held in contempt. His treatment of Delia is best summarized by one of the towns folk: “[He] takes a wife lak dey do a joint uh sugar-cane. It’s round, juicy an’ sweet when dey gits it. But dey squeeze an’ grind, squeeze an’ grind an’ wring tell dey wring every drop uh pleasure dat’s in ‘em out. When dey’s satisfied dat dey is wrung dry, dey treats ‘em jes lak dey do a cane-chew. Dey throws ‘em away.” It is Sykes effort to drive Delia off, to “throw her away”, that convinces him to bring the rattlesnake into the house; he is directly responsible for his own death.

Sykes’ mistress, Bertha, on the other hand, is at the diametric opposite of this spectrum; if Sykes is casting Delia aside after squeezing her dry, he is just beginning to enjoy Bertha. While she does not appear for long in the text, from what we can see, she is almost a foil to Delia – most obviously physically, as where Delia is thin and wiry, Bertha is a large woman, something that is explicitly stated to be Sykes’ preference, contributing to his humiliation of Delia. Where Delia is hard-working, diligent, and self-sufficient, Bertha depends on Sykes as he spends Delia’s washerwoman wages on showering her with gifts (presumably, this is part of the appeal for him). Where Delia stays home working, Bertha is constantly seen at “stomps”, parties which Sykes enjoys taking her to.

On a deeper level of interpretation, the interplay between the feminine aspect of the story – Delia – and the masculine, Sykes, can be seen as a sort of foreshadowing for Hurston’s next published work, Their Eyes Were Watching God. The trope of the difficult marriage is prevalent throughout Hurston’s works, and here is explored through Janie, who marries three men. Of note are her relationships with Joe Starks and Tea Cake, between which parallels can be drawn with the events of Sweat, specifically, the striking similarities in how the husband dies. (Howard)

Immediately, the similarities are prominent; while in Sweat, it is a snake bite that kills Sykes, it is a dog bite that is Tea Cake’s undoing. The last line of Sweat, where the “cold river was creeping up and up”, seems to reference the flood of Their Eyes; likewise, Hurston’s descriptions of the oppressive summer heat, where “snakes went blind in shedding and men and dogs went mad” seem to point to Tea Cake’s cause of death. Janie’s quiet submissiveness and growing disillusionment throughout her marriage with Jody mirrors Delia’s own attitude towards Sykes, whom she loved at first, but slowly grew to hate. Janie’s final reckoning with Jody on his deathbed similarly bears a resemblance to Delia’s hate-filled wake with Sykes as he lay dying and snake-bit, where both stand at their husband’s side, not helpless, but doing nothing to help them. Tea Cake too has some Sykes-esque moments; his frivolity and easy come easy go nature and his frustration of Janie being the main financial partner in their relationship led to his taking her money and having a night on the town. (Jordan)

A certain Old Testament symbolism is present in both books as well; Sweat with its serpent symbols, both of Sykes trying to scare Delia with his whip, and the rattlesnake killing him. This also constitutes a subversion of the Adam and Eve archetype; Delia, who is terrified of snakes, sits beneath the Chinaberry tree, while it is Sykes who is bitten. The symbol of snakes throughout the short story is significant; snakes are typically a representation of the Devil in Christian iconography, and Delia, a God-fearing woman who attends church regularly, cannot stand them, while Sykes, who shows open contempt for religion, brings a snake into Delia’s household, symbolic of the strife that he himself brings evil into Delia’s life. Similarly, as an extension of the reversal of the Adam and Eve allusion, it was the serpent that tempted Eve to commit the original sin; here, it is Sykes who has the snake, and who claims he will never get bitten, and never suffer the consequences. The more overt allusions to the New Testament, such as the reference to Delia crawling “over the earth in Gethsemane and up the rocks of Calvary many, many times…” again invokes biblical imagery of Delia as a virtuous, Christ-like figure in her endurance of Sykes, and perhaps implies that Sykes himself is comparable to Judas in his betrayal of Delia. Their Eyes Were Watching God also apes Genesis, in its own way: the flood that drowns the Muck during the hurricane is reminiscent of the Biblical disaster. (Lupton)

Zora Neale Hurston uses both Sweat and Their Eyes Were Watching God to explore marriage from the perspective of those trapped within it, wishing to escape to what was once their ideals of marriage. Delia, who of her own admission loved Sykes when she married him, and often reminisces about this time, now despises him, and lets him die of the snake bite. Janie, desperate to escape the plodding regularity and unromantic-ness of Logan Killicks, runs away with Jody – yet when he dies, she feels freer than ever before. Both of these women, these protagonists, desire something unattainable: Janie, to retain her autonomy and independence in marriage, and Delia, to return to a Sykes who loves her like she once did him. In a way, both works are derivative of one another; Their Eyes is a full picture to Sweat’s snapshot, Sweat the depressive alternate ending to Eyes’ empowerment. But both, in the end, realize the ultimate goal of each protagonist: the self-discovery, the self-definition, to understand what they want from life instead of their idealized dream.

Works Cited

  1. Howard, Lillie P. “MARRIAGE: ZORA NEALE HURSTON’S SYSTEM OF VALUES.” CLA Journal, vol. 21, no. 2, 1977, pp. 256–268. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/44329351.
  2. Lupton, Mary Jane. “Zora Neale Hurston and the Survival of the Female.” The Southern Literary Journal, vol. 15, no. 1, 1982, pp. 45–54. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/20077687.
  3. Jeremiah, Milford A. “LINGUISTIC INSIGHTS FROM SLAVE NARRATIVES.” CLA Journal, vol. 52, no. 1, 2008, pp. 38–54. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/44325452.
  4. Jordan, Jennifer. “Feminist Fantasies: Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, vol. 7, no. 1, 1988, pp. 105–117. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/464063.
  5. Walker, S. Jay. “ZORA NEALE HURSTON’S ‘THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD’: BLACK NOVEL OF SEXISM.” Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 20, no. 4, 1974, pp. 519–527. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/26279990.
  6. Norwood, Arlisha R. “Zora Neale Hurston.” National Women’s History Museum, www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/zora-hurston.

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