The God in the Snake, the Devil in the Phallus: Biblical Revision and Radical Conservatism in Hurston's "Sweat"

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. 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.