Can literary works help to memorialize natural disasters? Zora Neal Hurston’s their eyes were watching God

Resum

Although relatively little critical attention has been paid to the closing chapters of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, the representation of the 1928 cyclone that struck the Everglades in Florida can be seen to have left a profound —and traumatic— impact on both the relations among different human groups and the author’s narrative technique. Not only is the title of the book extracted from this section of the book, but faced with the “monstropolous beast” (239) of a Caribbean hurricane, the main characters of the novel realize that interracial attitudes and social structures begin to change shape and lose stability. This article shows that questions of class and race rise in both structural and figurative importance in the closing chapters of the book, and that Hurston was genuinely committed to memorializing the losses and mental wounds of those who have generally been forgotten in official records.