Zora's Moses, Man of the Mountain

Abstract

This dissertation reconsiders Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939), arguing for its central place in Zora Neale Hurston’s corpus, and its importance to the literary history of American modernism. Best known for her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) and ethnographies of the American South and the Caribbean, Hurston received less attention for writings that do not fit neatly in these fields; of her major works, Moses has received the least. Yet it should be seen as the culmination of her early work in several disciplines, and the decisive point of departure for her later works. Hurston’s version of the Moses story draws on many religious sources, from the King James Bible to the Talmud, Qur’an, Hellenistic writings, and oral tales from Africa and its diaspora. Zora’s Moses examines how this hybridity affects theological issues: charisma, destiny, evil, freedom, revelation, sacrifice, sacrilege, transcendence. This hybridity also effects aesthetic form: Moses holds religious fragments in a rigorous pastiche, parodying genres like allegory, pastoral, tragedy, and fable. Such generic burlesque marks the novel as modernist. Zora’s Moses explores the process of revision by which Hurston shaped and transformed these diverse materials to fit the demands of the novel. The introduction briefly reconstructs her research, tracing mentions of Moses in her other works. Multiple drafts of the novel are compared to show how plot and prose evolved through revision. Four chapters analyze specific textual aspects: Chapter 1 traces the use of dialect in the novel’s polyphonic structure; Chapter 2 surveys the role of allegory and personification in representations of Egypt; Chapter 3 scrutinizes failed ethical encounters within the novel’s pastoral landscapes; Chapter 4 examines Moses’ curious penchant for soliloquy. The conclusion compares Hurston’s textual persona “Zora” — from her memoir Dust Tracks on a Road (1942) — with the version of Moses whose theological position most closely matches her own: “Zora’s Moses.”