To the Horizon and Back: Double Consciousness and the Journey to Folk Modernism in Their Eyes Were Watching God, Ollie Miss, and Banana Bottom Open Access

Abstract

Abstract

To the Horizon and Back:

Double Consciousness and the Journey to Folk Modernism in

Their Eyes Were Watching God , Ollie Miss, and Banana Bottom

By Julia J. Cox

There has been a tendency on the part of academic criticism to marginalize African American folklore of the 1930s into an isolated category, a genre separate from both the militant protest fiction of the Harlem Renaissance and the larger movement of American modernism. This project considers how several folklore novels of the 1930s remain buried under this assumption and instead ponders them as complex, experimental, and forward thinking. The thesis postulates a developing "folk modernism" in the 1930s through common themes and concerns in three novels: the lionized Their Eyes Were Watching God (Zora Neale Hurston, 1937) and the unheralded works Ollie Miss (George Henderson, 1935) and Banana Bottom (Claude McKay, 1933). "To the Horizon and Back" brings into conversation these African American modernists who each used folk communities as the setting for a female bildungsroman.

The thesis examines the unfolding of modernity through the concept of double consciousness, as put forth in W.E.B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk. The project argues the three protagonists' journeys to self-realization are predicated on a new, modern freedom to negotiate this dual identity at will. Hurston, Henderson, and McKay cast the Global South as a worthy setting for artistic experimentation and change, bringing the possibility of locating and redefining rural black communities on its terrain. By examining how we might better understand linkages between the theoretical mode of double consciousness and the psychological journeys of these female protagonists, a stronger theorizing of modernism within African American folk writing emerges.

Table of Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction…………………………………………………………………………….……………………........1
Tell About the South

Chapter 1…………………………………………………………………………………………………………...12
Double Consciousness and the Mulatto Heroine: Hurston's Literary Science in
Their Eyes Were Watching God

Chapter 2………………………………………………………………………………………………………......32
Henderson's Forgotten Novel: Reconciling Realism and Romanticism in Ollie Miss

Chapter 3…………………………………………………………………………………………………………...52
McKay's Jamaican Folk: Negotiating Identity and Modernity in Banana Bottom

Conclusion………………………………………………………………………………………………………....69

Works Cited……………………………………………………………………………………………………….74

Appendix…………………………………………………………………………………………………………...78

About this Master's Thesis

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School	Laney Graduate School
Department	English
Degree	MA
Submission	Master's Thesis
Language	English
Research Field	Literature, American
Keyword	folklore African American literature Zora Neale Hurston George Henderson folk modernism double consciousness Claude McKay Banana Bottom Ollie Miss Their Eyes Were Watching God modernism Du Bois 1930s
Committee Chair / Thesis Advisor	Jackson, Lawrence P, Emory University
Committee Members	Roark, James, Emory University Reiss, Benjamin, Emory University

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