The Four Horsemen

In Toni Morrison’s Beloved, she starts off a chapter with “the four horsemen came-schoolteacher, one nephew, one slave catcher and a sheriff” (174).  Immediately the imagery that comes to mind is the Four Horsemen from the Bible, who come to Earth as part of the Apocalypse.  And in the book, the events following the four horsemen’s arrival can definitely be seen as apocalyptic and world changing. As the mother of four children, Sethe has to make a horrible, split-second decision: does she want her children to experience the horrors that she went through in slaver, or is there another option?  Readers judge her decision one way or another, but I’m not sure we have the right. We can read about Sethe’s experience and try to imagine it, but most readers have never experienced anything like what she went through and most likely we never will.

Back to the four horsemen, why did Morrison choose to have the reader’s initial impression of this scene from the outsider’s perspective?  One factor was probably timing. You can include these perspectives now and then go back to Sethe’s and other’s later in order to get as much out of the scene as possible.  Another point that was brought up in class is because of emotions. The four outsiders are cruel people who are doing their job and only care about retrieving what they see as property and bringing them back so that they can be paid.  They don’t have emotions and they can look at this scene in a way and describe it and only give us the facts. Other characters that are involved would look at it and be biased by their emotions. The four horsemen can look at the scene, ignore the tragedy, and give us the cold, hard facts.  Seeing this lack of compassion just gives us more reasons to sympathize with Sethe and try to understand her decision.

Janie, Hurston and Angelou

Last week we read “Still I Rise” by Maya Angelou and while discussing it, I started thinking about how it applied to Their Eyes Were Watching God.  In her poem, Angelou’s narrator is a woman who is speaking out strongly against everyone who “wants to see [her] broken.”  We asked the question in class about does this apply to Janie. Overall, it seems she doesn't really. She spends most of the book finding love, or what she thinks it is, and then losing it.  But then after going through all of this we see her how we are introduced to her in the prologue, a woman who walks into town with her hair down and wearing overalls, not caring what all the others sitting on the porch are saying about her.  Although she is not quite at the level of the speaker in “Still I Rise,” she is on her way. Zora Neale Hurston on the other hand is very similar to the speaker. From what we learned about her in the documentary we watched, she is confident and also not afraid to pursue her career.  One of my favorite quotes from her is “Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It's beyond me.”

Thinking about Janie and Hurston as strong characters reminds me of Richard Wright’s criticism.  He writes that “Miss Hurston seems to have no desire whatever to move in the direction of serious fiction” and that her books willingly continue the minstrel tradition.  He doesn’t like that the book is not openly a protest novel, and that it doesn’t have an idea that “lends itself to significant interpretation.” I agree with Wright that this book isn’t a protest novel.  Maybe if Janie gained her confidence a little bit earlier and if she displayed that confidence in front of a white community, like the speaker in “Still I Rise,” but she doesn’t. And while Wright might not agree with that, there is literally no problem with it.  Maybe Hurston didn’t want her book to be explicitly about social problems, maybe she just wanted to focus on the more romantic aspects. And that is perfectly acceptable and led to an amazing novel.