. . Here was peace. She pulled in her horizon like a great fish-net. . . . So much of life in its meshes! She called in her soul to come and see (Hurston 231).
Janie is defined by her body, desired by men and resented by women (Hurston 4-5). She is shocked to discover in a photograph that she is "colored" (Hurston 13). Yet there is a transcendent, spiritual, even mystical effect from the encounter of the body and the world of experience and matter: "This singing . . . followed her . . . and connected itself with other vaguely felt matters that . . . buried themselves in her flesh" (Hurston 15). Janie, like Kingston, wins her identity, her consciousness, her character, even her salvation, through her body---the same body that brings her suffering as it marks her as a woman and a minority. The body in both novels, for both protagonists, is both prison and savior: "The women come to work whether sick or well. 'I can't die,' they say, 'I'm supporting fifty'" (Kingston 206). The strength of the female body sustains the family, but for the woman herself the body means hard work and great suffering. Nevertheless, the suffering of the body in these two novels is the means to the protagonists' identity and salvation.
Hurston, Zora Neale. Their Eyes Were Watching God. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991.
Kingston, Maxine Hong. The Woman Warrior. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1989.
An important image in both Kim Ronyoung's Clay Walls and Alice Walker's The Color Purple is reading. In both novels th
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