DJ’s Post on Hurston

While reading The Complete Stories written by Zora Neale Hurston, I did not get a full idea of how interconnected they were when focusing on the topics and themes. Once I started thinking about how the relationships among men and women were portrayed in each of them, I started noticing a recurring theme of relationships between men and women and their roles in relationships with each other. I honestly think Hurston wanted to bring attention to how those roles and relationships are connected.

In relationships found in these stories, some of them were good and showed much love and affection like in “The Gilded Six-Bits.” However, other stories like “Sweat” and “Muttsy” showed relationships that were either abusive or seemingly fated to end poorly. Some roles for men and women were discussed and touched on within those stories also. When discussing these kinds of relationships in class, I noticed that Hurston emphasized how a marriage can change people’s behaviors as the years go on. As a result, it can change the relationship between the spouses.

In “Sweat,” the central focus was on an abusive relationship between Delia and her husband, Sykes, who somehow gets some kind of sick pleasure in seeing Delia suffer. The man beats her, insults her, openly cheats on her, and continues to make her life miserable. Of course, this behavior is inexcusable, and almost every other person in their home village thinks that Sykes should be killed or die to let Delia be free of his abuse. Delia, the provider in the relationship, does her best to get through her life. However, she does stand up to Sykes on several occasions, mainly by telling him off and leaving him dumbfounded at her defiance. Oddly, they remain together very begrudgingly. Why they never leave each other because of their blatant hate for each other remains a mystery to me, but I got the idea that it’s because Sykes refused to work. He saw Delia as his provider, and he refused to do any work to help support their lives. I think this goes against the concept of men being in the role of the family provider. At this time, I think the husband or father’s role in any family was that he provides for the family when it comes to money and food. The wife or mother is believed to stay at home for any work or do small jobs to also provide for the family, but they remain in charge of taking care of them at home. I would speculate that Hurston is trying to illustrate scenarios in which those roles are not what they typically would be at this time. The incidents in “Sweat” resulted from the husband becoming so used to not working that he does everything he can to avoid doing it while also abusing his hard-working spouse.

In “Muttsy,” while the titular character and Pinkie are the primary couple of the story, one thing I want to bring attention to was Ma and her husband’s relationship. This relationship seems to be the inverse of Delia and Sykes’s relationship, and Ma is the abuser. She is the one who is doing most of the work, but she keeps telling him to be quiet and sit down in a corner. “‘Now you jus’ shut up!’ Ma commanded severely. ‘You gointer git yo’ teeth knocked down ya throat yit for runnin’ yo’ tongue. Lemme talk to dis gal-this is mah house. You sets on the stool un do nothin’ too much tuh have anything tuh talk over!'” (Hurston, p. 43). This relationship shows that the roles the husband and wife have in the relationship are not always set in stone.

Muttsy and Pinkie’s marriage appears to be doomed from the start. The pair had different histories, which usually leads to them being unable to mesh together well. Pinkie had a hard life, but she still had her good morals. Muttsy was a gambler, and he made his career by doing it. The relationship would have started when Muttsy told Pinkie to head to leave when she was overwhelmed by the party guests. It seemed to be a nice gesture, but it was most likely part of a plan for Muttsy to get together with her by being nice. He may have been trying to fit a type of masculine role as a man who can fully provide for the woman without expecting anything in return except her attention and love. However, the relationship between these two would not progress too well.

A critical moment in the story where this felt accurate was when Pinkie goes to sleep because she felt dizzy from drinking alcohol. Muttsy went to her room and essentially violated her before declaring that she agreed to marry him. “He blew out the match he had struck and kissed her full in the mouth, kissed her several times and passed his hand over her neck and throat and then hungrily down upon her breast. But here he drew back.” (Hurston, p. 52). Considering that later, Pinkie and Muttsy reunite and somehow get married at the end, it is unclear if their marriage is a good one or not. However, Muttsy’s behavior is a clear indication that it may not exactly be the best one.

Men’s and women’s roles in relationships tend to be blurred because these roles are not anchored to each individual. Everyone in the stories had roles that they were expected to fill, but sometimes that defiance of that role can lead to different results. For certain married couples, this defiance can be met with physical or mental abuse to force conformity, a mutual disliking, or it could lead to a stronger relationship between the couple.