In her short story “Sweat,” Zora Neale Hurton uses character and metaphor to apply moral certitude in an uncertain universe. Her character Delia Jones is a lonely figure of moral correctness in the face of evil, in this case, her husband Sykes, who represents the temptations she has been fighting in her battle against good and evil.
The story’s plot is straightforward. Delia’s husband Sykes wants to kill her in order to open the way for a second marriage to another woman in town. He does this by trying to frighten her to death with a snake he has let loose in the cabin they share. Delia has an extreme fear of snakes, exemplified in the beginning of the story when Sykes frightens Delia with his bullwhip, which resembles a snake. The story becomes a test of wills between Delia, her husband, and the snake as Delia tries to survive the frightful experience.
Delia’s ability to tackle her husband’s sinful nature is exemplified in her character, for there is no one more fit to do battle with evil than she. Though Delia is presented as a simple washerwoman, her work defines her moral certainty and is a representation of her designation on the side of good in Hurston’s quiet, epic battle. Our first introduction to Delia is through her work. She squats on the kitchen floor to sort out the pile of clothes she has collected and intends to wash. She takes a great deal of pride and pleasure in her work, as revealed in the way she sorts the clothes “according to color,” while “humming a song in a mournful key” (883). Her work also reveals her desire for neatness and cleanliness. She has a hamper in the bedroom in which she keeps the clothes, making her work far “neater than [having] a number of bundles lying around” (ibid). Her cleanliness and her work provide her with the kind of orderliness that her marriage lacks. Delia is haunted by the “debris that cluttered [Sykes and Delia’s] matrimonial trail” (885), a fact which she knows she will never be able to keep in order with Sykes’s womanizing and abusiveness. Sykes’s behavior is beyond her control, but her work as a washerwoman is and she devotes as much energy toward it as she does her religious beliefs.
Delia’s religious devotion also signals her as a significant player in the battle of good and evil. Here, her religious fidelity in the face of so many temptations, her hatred toward her husband for instance, balances her and gives her stability and strength. She uses faith as a means of justice as she states after a particularly cruel episode of her husband’s abuse: “‘Oh well, whatever goes over the Devil’s back, is got to come under his belly. Sometime or ruther, Sykes, like everybody else, is gointer reap his sowing'” (ibid). It is her faith in the equanimity of the moral universe (what one puts out in the world gets back twofold) that gives her moral strength and certitude. Delia’s suffering is even given the iconographic imagery of Christ bearing his cross to the Calvary to further paint her as a figure of religious faith and conviction. In Delia’s efforts to avoid her husband’s lover Bertha, she crawled her “work-worn knees…over the earth in Gethsemane and up the rocks of calvary many, many times during these months” (887). By placing Delia’s marital woes within the same context as Christ’s, Hurston reveals that a Black woman’s sacrifices and sufferings are just as striking. While Delia is not necessarily a Christ-like figure, her ability to endure suffering puts her within a context that shapes the story’s moral and religious themes. Delia is a character well-suited for the battle of good vs. evil because her goodness is located in her ability to withstand her husband’s abuse and maintain her moral certainty through her work and her faith.
Sykes, on the other hand, is as evil as Delia is good. This is never more apparent when he answers Delia’s question as to why he enjoys making her suffer: “‘If you such a big fool dat you got to have a fit over a earth worm or a string, Ah don’t keer how bad Ah skeer you'” (883). Unempathetic to the hardships and fears his wife endures, Sykes sees sport in all aspects of life, including frightening his wife. Abusive and unfaithful, Sykes doesn’t care how his infidelity is seen not only by his wife but by the townspeople as well. His lack of morality and faith, his rejection in the belief of the same moral equanimity that Delia fosters in, frees him from the constraints of personal or communal responsibility. When the men around Joe Clarke’s store porch gossip about Delia and Sykes, they all agree that men like Sykes operate on a law of morality that is all their own. As Clarke expostulates: “Taint no law on earth dat kin make a man be decent if it aint in ‘im” (886). Syke’s flouting of these “laws” locates him as a character of supreme evil, for, like the devil who also flouted God’s law, Sykes pursues sex and women with equal fearlessness. His mistreatment of Delia also reveals his contempt for his wife and what she represents. Delia’s goodness is an affront to Syke’s evil, one that is an obstacle as much as it is a reminder of the moral universe that Sykes must answer to eventually. By ridding himself of his wife, he rids himself of that moral certitude. When Delia challenges Sykes’s abuse, “seiz(ing) the iron skillet from the stove and [striking] a defense pose” (884), Sykes is a “little awed by this new Delia” (885), and sets in motion his plan to kill her.
Hurston further locates her story within this moral universe through her careful use of metaphorical imagery that has Biblical and religious connotations. The snake which taunts Delia is easily an obvious connotation, hailing from Genesis with Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden. As that story goes, the snake represents evil and its seduction of both Eve and Adam leads to the fall of man. In Biblical text, the snake is closely aligned with women, particularly in Jewish myths of man’s fall from grace with Adam’s original wife Lilith, who colluded with Satan to overthrow Adam and God from Eden. Yet, ironically, in “Sweat,” the snake’s alignment is not with Delia, but her husband Sykes, whose close affiliation with the beast suggests Syke’s own fall from grace. Rather, for Delia, her fear of snakes represents her own fear of evil and temptation. By overcoming the terror she faces when Sykes locks Delia in the cabin with the snake, she overcomes the forces of evil.
The snake’s evil parallels other imagery that is taken from Biblical text. After Delia discovers the snake in the basket, a “wind from the open door blew out the light and darkness added to her terror” (890). Light and darkness, two imagistic and metaphorical devices familiar in religious texts, creates the context in which Delia does her battle against evil. The snake’s appearance heralds the absence of light, or religious faith, and introduces darkness, or evil. The dark cabin becomes an obstacle for Delia in her effort to survive her terror. Delia flees her cabin and takes refuge in the hay barn. While there, she comes to realize the imbalance Sykes and the snake has brought to her world: “‘Well, Ah done de bes’ Ah could. If things aint right, Gawd knows taint mah fault” (890). Here, Delia acknowledges her own powerlessness and humility in the face of this moral equanimity. Rather, the moral certitude with which she has placed her faith will align itself aright in its own fashion. Delia gets this certitude, ironically, from the snake itself when it bites and kills Sykes with its poison.
Delia’s complete faith in this certitude reveals itself when Sykes lay dying and crying for God and Delia. Here, ironically, the tables have been turned. The snake’s bite engenders a moral shift in Syke’s perspective as he realizes that the moral certitude he has flouted for so long has now come back for its due. And though Delia comes to “pity” her husband, she realizes that by interfering with Sykes’s fate, she interferes with this moral balance. And she is aware that Sykes is aware of this too: “A surge of pity too strong to support bore her away from that eye that must, could not, fail to see the tubs….[s]he could scarcely reach the Chinaberry tree, where she waited in the growing heart while inside she knew the cold river was creeping up and up to extinguish that eye which must know by now that she knew” (891). What “the eye” has come to know is that Delia has sacrificed her husband to right the imbalance of the universe and return the moral certitude of her faith.
Through the use of character and metaphor, Zora Neale Hurston is able to fashion a chilling tale of faith and suffering, unsparing in its judgment of male and female relations and the way they fit within religious context. By allowing Sykes to be the one to be sacrificed for his sins rather than Delia for his, Hurston questions the way in which women, particularly Black women, are presented in literature as long-suffering and abused and returns a balance that provides an equal representation in her tale.
Reference:
- Martin, Wendy. The Art of the Short Story. Houghton Mifflin: New York. 2006.
