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Zora Neale Hurston's short story "Sweat," first published in 1926 in Fire!!, is both supremely readable and beautifully teachable: short, accessible at the literal level, satisfactory in its "eye for an eye" justice, and rich in revisionary Biblical symbolism, the radical nature of which can sometimes pass unremarked. Scholars have noted that a Biblical framework is established by the story of a man and woman locked in struggle and blame, by the story's setting (a house and garden whose equilibrium is shattered by the arrival of a snake), and by references explicitly associating Delia with Christ. Mary Jane Lupton calls "Sweat" "an Adam and Eve in reverse, a very unblissful bower which is made peaceful when the snake . . . bites the man" (50-51). Barbara Williams adds, "Neither the failures of the villains [nor] the hardships of the victimized can be attributed to a simple, single cause, such as slavery, or modern American society; these ills exist because of original sin." Fred Fetrow devotes his entire essay to an examination of the Biblical parallels in "Sweat," concluding that
Hurston's retelling of the Paradise Lost myth shifts the blame from the female temptress in league with the serpent to the oppressive male who would use the snake for his own evil purposes. . . . She seems to say that both sexes are guilty of cruelty to the other, but men have more power to be cruel and therefore are more guilty by default. (277)
This scholarship does not fully explore the implications of the story's Biblical paradigms, or the extent to which they render "Sweat" at once startlingly radical and ultimately conservative in its attribution of responsibility for domestic violence, first to masculine sexuality and ultimately to original sin.
Such an exploration has implications not only for a fully developed critical reading of "Sweat" but also for the ways in which we teach this story to inexperienced critical readers. Student readers, after all, often bring to the table a host of opinions about Biblical stories and how they are to be read. For such students, the tension in which radical values and conservative ones remain throughout the story-neither canceling the other-can change what initially appears to be a validation of divine justice and human...