“We Ain’t Nothing but White Trash”. The Ethnography of Poor Whites and the Politics of Stigma in Zora Neale Hurston’s Seraph on the Suwanee.

This article aims to demonstrate the documentary value of Zora Neale, Hurston’s descriptions, in her novel Seraph on the Suwanee, of the condition of the poor white US Southerners known as “crackers.” By, depicting a “cracker” woman’s upward social trajectory through, marriage, Hurston reveals the social and existential reality of this, segment of the white population. Her novel presents an objective, analysis of the crackers as a socio-historical group distinct from other, whites. However, Hurston also explores the subjective side of belonging to this discredited group by offering an account of her heroine’s experience of stigmatization.

An Analysis of Hurston’s Consistency with Her Original Aspiration and Mission in Seraph on the Suwanee

Seraph on the Suwanee, Zora Neale Hurston’s last published long novel in 1948, depicting a white story, attracted almost no scholarly attention but much criticism for her pandering to white readers, betraying her previous characteristic themes in novel writing and abandoning her black cultural tradition and stance. This thesis aims to dig out the themes of the novel Seraph and the blackness behind the whiteness to find out that Seraph, in fact suffering wrong, tells a story by white faces with black voices, which demonstrates that Hurston continues her cultural stance and never changes her idea of not only employing black culture tradition but also insisting on her themes of writing as her previous novels.

An Analysis of Arvay’s Strategies for Love and Self-Actualization in Seraph on the Suwanee Based on Maslow’s Need Hierarchy Theory

Seraph on the Suwanee, the last novel of Zora Neale Hurston, criticized for deviating from resolving oppression, class, race and gender, shapes a white woman protagonist instead of a black woman protagonist. But actually, it depicts the story of Arvay’s attempts to reject both oppression and the mental submission to oppression just as the oppression and resistance of class and gender are greatly concerned in Hurston’s previous works. Arvay Henson, an oppressed and repressed white woman, motivated by a tenacious belief in her own intrinsic worth and in her rights to individual freedom and social respect, attempts to preserve her integrity through withdrawal, resistance in order to seek her love and her independence as well as her self-discovery. This thesis applies Need Hierarchy Theory proposed by an American psychologist Abraham Maslow to study Arvay’s strategies for meeting her deficiency needs and to analyze her persistent efforts for love as well as the satisfactions of her needs at different levels.

From the Suwanee to Egypt, There's No Place like Home

Zora Neale Hurston's Seraph on the Suwanee (1948) and Carolyn Chute's The Beans of Egypt, Maine (1985) feature white working-class women negotiating class hierarchies in rural communities. Despite present-day critics' putative concern with class and demonstrated interest in Hurston's other works, particularly Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), both novels have been largely ignored by the critical establishment, in part because readers lind it difficult to identify with the main characters. Comparing the critical receptions of Seraph, The Beans, and Their Eyes reveals that the mechanism by which readers identify with imaginary characters is constituted by middle-class reading practices. While a sympathetic audience emerged for Their Eyes, one is not likely to appear for the other two novels, which expose the class-bound roots of the literary construction of identity, meaning, and reality. In addition, Seraph and The Beans point, however obliquely, toward a vernacular notion of home that resists middle-class commodification.