Toppled from a Shrine: Hurston's First Novel Jonathan Wallace College

For hundreds of years, the dominant culture in America has categorically underestimated black southern culture and vernacular, mistaking these segments of American life as largely simple, vulgar, and uneducated; Zora Neale Hurston sought to change those perceptions. One of her most significant attempts to do so is her first novel, Jonah’s Gourd Vine. Here, Hurston often changes the style of her narrative voice, going from a biblical tone in one moment to dry, journalistic writing in the next. She uses this technique to great effect during John’s divorce trial, creating a grand sense of tension that is immediately dashed in the eyes of the prejudiced white judge and jury. Furthermore, she is able to use John Pearson as a trickster from African folklore, putting the same judge and jury at the butt of a joke and making them look like fools for minimizing the complexity and depth of John and Hattie’s relationship. In a novel operating almost entirely within black communities, John’s divorce trial provides the largest and most significant interaction with white society. With this scene, Hurston uses metaphor, varying levels of diction, and the trickster archetype to demonstrate that white society has categorically underestimated the...