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Women + Snakes

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1. (Hugo Van Der Goes)-http://mmanninoarthist.tumblr.com/search/snake

2. (Michelangelo)-http://jewishchristianlit.com/Topics/AdamNeve/michel06.html

I have always been completely terrified by snakes, so Zora Neale Hurston's "Sweat" really put me on edge. After some thought, it seems as though I fit a certain stereotype -- one that consistently defines women as being afraid of snakes. I've been confronted with this theme in literature and in visual arts. The Bible set this precedent with the Creation story, where Eve is tempted by the snake and eats forbidden fruit from the Tree of Knowledge, an act that dooms all of mankind. After this major transgression, man and woman are expelled from paradise, punished with mortality. Suddenly, after losing their innocence, they feel naked for the first time.

The fact that the snake (probably a form of the Devil?) choose to tempt Eve over Adam reiterates age-old conventions about female "frailty" and "impressionability." After contemplating this image, I wonder : what is it about snakes that makes them so terrifying to women? (Of course not terrifying to all women, but definitely to me and to other women in literature like Eve and Delia)

In "Sweat" Delia is mortified by the snake that Sykes brings home. It is not fear in the conventional sense (not a fear of death, injury, or physical pain), but a fear that she says "Kilt all mah insides"(3). Hurston describes Delia as afraid in a way that makes her mad. She stands in "a red fury that grew bloodier for every second that she regarded the creature that was her torment"(4). I think the snake targets something internal, she is not afraid of its violent physicality, but more of its "awful beauty" and artful "sound illusion" (the way in which the snake manipulates its prey with noises that do not betray its location).

Given these descriptions, I think Delia is afraid of a snake that represents not a lethal beast, but her own feminine weaknesses. Delia's inability to leave her incompetent, adulterous husband is, in a sense, like the frailty of Eve targeted by the snake in the Biblical story. The snake in "Sweat" tests Delia, and it is the last straw in her relationship with Sykes.

When Delia escapes from the snake, into the tree, she faces "a period of introspection, a space of retrospection, then a mixture of both"(5). Only after this self-evaluation is she able to let her husband die.

 Michelangelo and Van Der Goes both interpret the Biblical scene with a snake bearing the face of a woman, visually reiterating that what Eve, Delia, and women are most afraid of is themselves. Perhaps this is also what Charlotte Perkins Gilman sought to express with "The Yellow Wallpaper"-- a story in which a woman is driven insane by her own mind.