Nanny, Signifying Empowerment: The Evolution of the Dispirited Black Female in Zora Neale Hurston‘s Their Eyes Were Watching God

Abstract

The essay contains a stylistic analysis of the dispirited black female. Hurston uses Their Eyes Were Watching God to deconstruct the negative image of the dispirited black female, a woman who is dogged by a tragic past. True to her commitment to not fall under the constraints of feeling ―tragically colored,‖ Hurston uses Nanny and an empowered sermon to create a warrior woman who struggles to hold on to the remnants of a spirit that had been beaten down by the effects and after effects of slavery. While there are a plethora of articles on Nanny, there are no articles (at least none that were found after quite an exhaustive search) that focus on a stylistic study of Nanny‘s sermon. In an effort to add to the scholarship for Nanny, this paper analyses Nanny‘s sermon—the independent and dependent clauses, the signifiers, and the cohesive ties—all of which help Nanny shed the burdens of her past, whereby freeing her from the burdens of the dispirited black woman.