Student Presentation #4: Jennifer H responds to Carla Kaplan

“The Erotics of Talk: That Oldest Human Longing” by Carla Kaplan takes a different view of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. She argues that that this novel revolves around Janie’s search for a “bee” to her “blossom,” but not necessarily in a sexual sense. Kaplan speaks about “the oldest human longing” as a need for conversation: not sexual attraction or a physical relationship, but more of a friendship than anything else. Here is a key passage from Kaplan’s essay:

Reduced to its basic narrative components, Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God is the story of a young woman in search of an orgasm. From the moment Janie is “summoned to behold a revelation” and witnesses the “panting,” “frothing,” “ecstatic,” “creaming” fulfillment of a blossoming pear tree, her quest is set; she wants, as she puts it, “tuh utilize mahself all over.” The novel was written in a cultural context of multiple sanctions against any representation of black female sexuality. Nonetheless, Hurston’s description of Janie’s “revelation” is one of the sexiest passages in American literature….

Why does she foreground female sexuality only to represent “the oldest human longing” as the longing to talk? Is the figuration of Pheoby as Janie’s “bee” a lesbian alternative to romantic ideology and heterosexual narrative teleology or simply a sororal, asexual bond? Is Hurston participating in the long history of silencing black women’s sexuality by displacing it onto safer, more legitimate, less controversial pleasures? Or is she eroticizing narration and conversation?

 I found this criticism to be very blunt, stating in the first line: “Reduced to its basic narrative components, Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God is the story of a young woman in search of an orgasm.” Kaplan argues that, although not directly stated in the book, this is what the novel is focused around, but in this essay, it is not discrete in any way. Kaplan makes it obvious that Janie’s is searching for a partner of some sort in the very first line. The first few pages of her criticism also focus solely on the vision of the pear tree and “the oldest human longing.”

Additionally, Kaplan contends that Janie and Phoeby are attracted to each other. I did not read the book in this way, but Kaplan addresses the issue that Hurston may have been hinting at the fact that their relationship may have been more than just a friendly one. Kaplan explains how Janie’s vision of the pear tree was not necessarily an orgasmic vision of love, but a symbol of friendship and conversation. Because Pheoby listened to Janie’s story, she is the “bee” to Janie’s blossom.

As a whole, I both enjoyed and respected Kaplan’s reading of the novel because it not only introduced an interesting take on a certain part of the novel that we discussed in class, but also because it revealed a more complex understanding of a controversial part of the novel: Janie’s vision of the pear tree. Although some parts of the criticism brought up positions that I did not necessarily agree with, such as Janie and Phoeby’s intimate bond, Kaplan also touched on aspects of the novel that I did agree with, including “the oldest human longing” was the search for not only conversation, but even more simple than that, a friend.

Works Cited

Carla Kaplan, “The Erotics of Talk: ‘That Oldest Human Longing’ in Their Eyes Were

Watching God,” American Literature 67: 1 (March 1995): 115–142.