The Role of Trees in Hurston’s Seraph on the Suwanee and Their Eyes Wer

The Role of Trees in Hurstons Seraph on the Suwanee and Their Eyes Were Watching GodTrees play inviolate roles in Seraph on the Suwanee and Their Eyes Were Watching God as sites of inner awakening for Hurstons heroines, providing a space under which dreams bloom into glistening leaf-buds or over-ripen and die like spoiled fruit. Close readings of Janies pear tree tree and Arvays mulberry evoke strikingly disparate images of womanly sexuality despite Hurstons articulation of both experiences as the actualization of a pain remorseless sweet. Depicted within the first take in of each narrative, Hurston places great emphasis on her charactersinitial sexual experiences as shaping the development of Janie and Arvays identities. As suggested by her pensive cling beneath the pear tree (stretched on her back), Janie possesses agency, navigating the course of her have got sexual maturation by searching, inviting, and questioning the tree and herself for voice and vision. Hurstons diction constructs a purely sensual scene, for like the flower gap up and summoning the dust-beari...