Metaphor, Metonymy and Vioce - 895 Words

Barbara Johnson’s critique focuses on the metaphoric, metonymic and voice in Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston. It focuses on the major character, Janie Crawford’s inner and outer change towards her various relationships. She focuses on the strengths, both vocally and physically, gained after her first slap down by her second husband, Joe Starks. Barbara Johnson focuses on the metaphoric meaning of this transformation which was defined as the substitution based on the resemblance or analogy and then she goes on to the metonymic meaning which she defines as the basis of a relation or association other than that similarity. Paul De Man, a deconstructionist literary critic and theorist, provides a brief summary stating the†¦show more content†¦The sign of an authentic voice is this not self-identity but self-difference. Barbara Johnson speaks of how the women’s voices have attained inferiority as it relates to the situation of Janie’s acquisition of her inner and outer voice. Her opinionated statements were shut down by Joe. Johnson then mentions Auerbach’s urge to unify and simplify is an urge to re-subsume female difference under the category of the universal, which has always been obscurely male. The random, trivial and marginal will simply be added to the list of things all men have in common. Auerbach’s then calls for unification and simplification in the province of the white. If the woman’s voice must be incorporate and articulate division and self-difference, so too has Afro-American literature always had to assume its double-voicedness. Johnson concludes her critique with a brief synopsis of Zora Neale Hurston’s main imitative into writing Their Eyes Were Watching God. She explains that according to her, â€Å"there is no message, no theme, no thought; the full range of questions and experiences of Janie’s life are invisible to a mind steeped in maleness as Ellison’s Invisible Man is to minds steeped in whiteness. Barbara Johnson, Metaphor,