Invisible Man Zora Neale Hurson Character Analysis

The migrant stranger character role is a key component to the migration narrative and is most often a secondary character, foil, or opposing force that a protagonist meets in his or her journey to a new place. But in many migration narratives, most notably Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), and as I argue, the works of Zora Neale Hurston, the migrant stranger functions more as the protagonist and not just as someone with whom the protagonist crosses paths; moreover, this is a character who attempts to remain in or a part of his or her community, even if s/he is unable to do so. German philosopher Georg Simmel’s concept of “The Stranger” definitely applies to my reading of Hurston’s characters, as he contends that the stranger is a person

who stays in a community, rather than the wanderer inherent in most African-American migration narratives. I contend that while Hurston’s characters do, “wander” from place to place on occasion, they still battle with ascension into their community, as they often attempt to assimilate, but are prevented from doing so by outside forces.
According to Simmel, the stranger is someone who can journey no further than the space s/he currently occupies, and the fact that s/he cannot exist within the normal constraints of the community organically places him or her in the community. He states:
If wandering is the liberation from every given point in space, and thus the conceptional opposite to fixation at such a point, the sociological form of the "stranger" presents the unity, as it were, of these two characteristics.

This phenomenon too, however, reveals that spatial relations are only the condition, on the one hand, and the symbol, on the other, of human relations. The stranger is thus being discussed here, not in the sense often touched upon in the past, as the wanderer who comes today and goes tomorrow, but rather as the person who comes today and stays tomorrow. He is, so to speak, the potential wanderer: although he has not moved on, he has not quite overcome the freedom of coming and going. He is fixed within a particular spatial group, or within a group whose boundaries are similar to spatial boundaries. But his position in this group is determined, essentially, by the fact that he has not belonged to it from the beginning, that he imports qualities into it, which do not and cannot stem from the group itself.

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Simmel argues that there is a sense of commonality inherent in any particular social group, and ultimately the only way a person fully achieves that commonality is by being a part of it from the beginning. Therefore, strangers who attempt to assimilate into these groups are never fully accepted because they do not possess the inherent traits of the group and bring to it qualities of their own that are not indigenous to that group; however, they cannot be fully removed from the community because their mere existence on the fringes of society simultaneously includes and excludes them from that society. Moreover, Simmel states that this personality type is most identifiable in the “trader,” a person who comes and goes, interacts/transacts with the community, but never fully immerses him- or herself in that community. This, according to Simmel, is why stayers have the potential to become wanderers.
Farrah Jasmine Griffin draws upon Simmel’s stranger to argue that migration literature is latent with archetypes with whom the migrant interacts, and “who offers (mis)guidance, advice, and a new worldview” (6). But, according to Griffin, the stranger is a “Northern phenomenon” the protagonist meets after having traveled from the South to the North. Hurston’s own life, and the work she produced (as analyzed in later chapters), insist the migrant stranger is more than just a Northern phenomenon, demonstrating that s/he is a phenomenon that occurs in various forms: as a stranger who a protagonist meets on a journey; a wanderer who has traveled to or returned from the North to the South; or the stranger who simply serves as the protagonist of the story. Griffin’s definition of the migrant stranger examines how several of Hurston’s characters, as well as the author herself, conform to this archetype. In Who Set You Flowin’?, Griffin declares:
In relation to the dominant white society, all migrants are strangers—foreigners driven by persecution to wander in search for a new home. However, within the context of the African-American community, the stranger is that figure who possesses no connections to the community. Migrants who seek to be strangers can never occupy that space fully, but those who come closest “change their discomforts into a base of resistance. (7)
Not only do Hurston’s works offer literary examples of both the migrant stranger and the establishment of the migrant community, but her experiences as depicted in biographies, autobiographical accounts, and in her investigations into the folklore of Southern communities also suggest a woman who epitomizes the very nature of the migrant stranger. Hurston tells us in Dust Tracks on a Road that “once I found the use of my feet, they took to wandering” (39). Just as characters such as Janie, Tea Cake, and Joe Starks exhibit the traits of the migrant stranger character, so does their creator, Hurston, who spent much of the prime of her literary career travelling all over the world. According to Lawrence Rodgers, the migration narrative depicts the challenges the migrant stranger faces in assimilating into new communities, in addition to the need of the individual and established communities to develop and flourish—and despite the obstacles faced by both, migration narratives speak “to the strength of the desire to find a promised land” (38).
Hurston’s literature inverts the conventions of the migration narrative to construct and analyze the identities of Southern migrants. Most migration narratives expose the oppressive forces that have forced the migrant from a specific place, while chronicling the journey and opposing forces that attempt to block the migrant’s path of self-fulfillment and ability to establish an identity and community. Griffin addresses these opposing forces:
The degree to which the migrant is successfully disciplined by the efforts of a dominant white society and the Northern black middle class, as well as the degree to which he or she resists, is of a major concern of the migration narrative. Representations of migration suggest that forces which serve to transform the Southern migrant include the disciplinary work of institutions and their accompanying discourses and the balancing and nurturing work of migrant-defined spaces. The relationship of the migrant to any or all of these factors determines his or her fate in the city. This experience is portrayed differently for male and female protagonists and the success of the resisting spaces is portrayed differently over time. In the later narratives, the migrant-defined safe spaces emerge as more powerful in offering the migrant possibilities for resistance. (107)
The migrant stranger must attempt to resist the oppressive forces described by Griffin, and two physical spaces, undoubtedly located in the North, are crucial in aiding the archetype in this resistance: “a domestic ‘homespace’ of women and the street culture space of men” (107). Griffin continues, offering that “because these spaces are created by the power which migrants seek to resist, they are sometimes complicit in oppressing them” (107).
Undoubtedly there were factors that led millions to migrate from Southern communities, such as Eatonville, Florida, and the other aforementioned towns that were established during the half-century after Reconstruction.

The numbers presented earlier in this chapter illustrate how and why large groups of people sought home in a Northern urban environment, and the literary examples provided depict the forces that caused migration, what was encountered by these migrants, and what might lie ahead for them. Authors before Hurston carefully measured the movement of characters in and about the South. Early authors of the migration narrative, such as W.E.B. DuBois inThe Souls of Black Folk, Paul Laurence Dunbar in The Sport of the Gods, and Jean Toomer in Cane, all experimented with a return to the South, but, as Griffin puts it, “the South remained the site of racial horror and shame for black writers” (146). Authors from more recent time periods have experimented with various destinations for their protagonists, including Ellison and Wright, who both experimented with Europe as a possible destination for their strangers. Furthermore, Ellison’s Invisible Man retreats to the underground (for a multitude of reasons) as escape from the conflicts he faces along his literal and figurative journey. Regardless, Hurston’s treatment of her characters eventually led to a rethinking of the migration narrative. As Griffin notes, “the decades of the seventies and eighties found black

writers and literary critics participating in a reconsideration of the South and of black folk culture” and because of Hurston, “writers like Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Maya Angelou, Ernest Gaines, James McPherson, and Albert Murray begin to seriously reconsider the South as a viable option for black people” (146). The next steps of this study will demonstrate how and why Zora Neale Hurston chose the South as a destination for her migrant stranger archetype, what s/he is searching for, the conflict s/he encounters along the way, and what happens when s/he confront oppressive forces head on.