Zora Neale Hurston: A Universal Voice Far Removed From the Orgasms of Harlem

In recent years, knowingly having had my confidence increased in gender scholarship, I find myself prepared to argue against Carla Kaplan's position that "reduced to its basic narrative component, Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God is a story of a young woman in search of an orgasm" (Kaplan 99). To even state such a preposterous notion undermines how well Hurston's anthropological acumen took issue with the setting(s) she placed her protagonist in. Hurston understood her intentions well. Hurston knew she wanted her black female bodies independent of the colonial rites that once enslaved them of their sensuous liberties. On the contrary, the sexual liberation of black bodies and souls, not sex itself, is at the core of the narrative and cultural components in Hurston's novel, and the merging of that "double self into a better and truer self" (DuBois 3) is at the epicenter of Hurston's mission to discover the voices of herself, Janie, and God