Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston

Zora Neale Hurston's 1937 Their Eyes Were Watching God

Bildungsroman

Often associated with the Harlem Renaissance, but it was published long after. With the 1930s came the Depression and the end of the cultural openness that allowed the Harlem Renaissance to flourish. Social realism; people dismissed Harlem Renaissance bc it was too "bourgeois," and devoid of political content. Richard Wright even wrote a scathing review of it. But Their Eyes is a book that speaks to Harlem Renaissance concerns, and Southern American Literature.

Relationship between man and nature, the dynamics of human relationships, hero's quest for independence.

Often viewed as the first in a succession of great American black women writers that includes Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and Gloria Naylor.

Plot Overview
The book begins with Janie returning back to town--Eatonville, Florida--after a long absence--without her husband, Tea Cake. Then, Janie's friend Pheobe visits and wants her story. The book's frame is the story Janie tells Pheobe.

Janie's grandmother was a slave; her mother was raped, became a drunk, ran off. Because Nanny was a slave her worldview is that she wants to marry Janie off as soon as she can, to someone with money. She marries Logan, who has a lot of money, but after a while starts to treat her poorly. Then Joe Starks comes by and after flirting in secret for a few weeks, Janie travels with him (Jody) to Eatonville, an all-black town--that isn't quite a town yet. It takes Jody, who becomes the mayor and postmaster and storeowner, to make Eatonville an actual town.

Jody doesn't want Janie to have any part in the (hilarious) social life in town. Janie becomes bored, because Jody sees her as an ornament, a vision of "mayor's wife."

Years later, after almost 20 years of marriage, Janie finally says something to him in public when he insults her. He then beats her. Their marriage dissolves, and Jody falls ill and dies.

Jody now loves her newfound independence. Then she meets and starts dating Tea Cake, who is much younger than her. She marries him 9 months after Jody's death, then she sells the store and they leave to go to Jacksonville.

They have a hard week, then move to the Everglades to work during the harvest season and then socialize during the summers. They end up being the center of the super diverse social life in the Everglades. Tea Cake is witty and funny. Then, two years into the marriage, a big hurricane hits the Everglades, and as they flee the water, a rabid dog bites Tea Cake. Three weeks later, he falls ill, and during this madness he is convinced that Janie is cheating on him. He fires a pistol at her, and Janie is forced to kill him to save her life. She is tried for murder, found not guilty.

Then she returns to Eatonville, where her neighbors are ready to spread gossip about her, assume Tea Cake left her and took her money. But Janie feels good after her story is told, feels fine with Tea Cake and at peace with herself.

Themes, Motifs, etc.
The men (Jody and Tea Cake) believe in their own infallibility, infallible power, but come to understand the limits of their power.

Relationships are not the most important thing--Jody is alone and feels great at the end. And partners need to be partners in order to work out--none of that gender bullshit. She is happy without a man, and finally liberated from two unpleasant marriages, and one mostly happy one.

God's presence is all over--in nature, the sea, not Judeo-Christian. Janie's quest is spiritual, not because she seeks God, but because she wants to find her place in the world--which is suffused with God. Hardly mention of organized religion, but there is a spirituality rooted in mythology and folklore. Mysticism--haunting personification of Death, sun-god, horizon as a boundary at the ed of the world.

Janie's hair--her rebelliousness. Townsfolk consider it undignified for older women to wear her hair down, but she refuses (because it's so pretty!). Phallic power of the braids? Masculine power and blurring gender lines? Also her whiteness--straight hair, other slightly caucasian characteristics.

The Pear Tree/Nature: idealized view of nature that Janie is on a quest for the entire novel, basically. The bees/pear tree flowers, a perfect moment, full of erotic energy, passion, connection, harmony. Sexual, but more than that. and reciprocal fulfillment.

Quote(s)
"Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by time. That is the life of men.

Now, women forget all those things they don't want to remember, and remember everything they don't want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly."

"She had an inside and an outside now and suddenly she knew how not to mix them."

"De nigger woman is de mule uh de world so fur as Ah can see."

Bits
Often seen as: women's relationship to community/language, described as a novel about a woman in a folk community, but really more accurately woman outside of the community. And more accurately a woman's being excluded from power, particularly the power of oral speech.

The novel celebrates self-discovery, and that this self-discovery leads her to ultimately a meaningful participation in the black folk tradition (by having this story to tell, to pass on).

After Jody's death she goes to the mirror and takes off her kerchief and lets her hair down. "The weight, the length, the glory was there. She took careful stock of herself, then combed her hair and tied it back up again." She sees herself seeing seeing herself. One she's able to articulate her own division she is able to speak.

Tensions in social order.

"When the narrative resolves itself in the repression of romance and the reassertion of quest, the result is a narrative that is critical of those patriarchal rules that govern women and deny them a role outside the boundaries of patriarchy."

Recording, preserving, analyzing patterns of speech and thought in rural black south and related cultures. Also she deplored appropriation and commodification of black culture in the pre-depression white world. She wanted to show the difference between reified "art" and a living culture in which the distinctions between spectator and spectacle, rehearsal and performance, experience and representation are not fixed.

Search for wholeness, oneness, never put to rest. The sign of an authentic voice is not self-identity but self-difference.She speaks because she learns not to mix inside with outside. AH YES--okay so search for "unification and simplification" very white male privilege, and white in America. If the woman's voice, to be authentic, must incorporate and articulate division and self-difference, so too, has Afro-American literature its double-voicedness.

Reformulation of WEB Dubois's famous image of the "veil" that divides the Black American in two: always looking at one's self through the eyes of other's.

Connection: James Weldon Johnson, Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, "he is forced to take his outlook on all things, not from the view-point of a citizen, or a man, or even a human being, but from the view-point of a colored man...this gives to every colored man, in proportion to his intellectuality, a sort of a dual personality."

(of course both of these assume the black subject is male. the black woman is invisible in the black dilemma.

Janie being acquitted of murder: not out of lack of bitterness toward whites, but out of a knowledge of the standards of male dominance that pervade both the black and white worlds.

Book self divides as it goes down: the first quote, very "man," universal, "every man" to "men" to "women" to "woman" and then even the dialect of her voice. Narrative shifts, free indirect discourse, inside/outside boundaries between narrator and character, standard and individual, impossible to identify or totalize the subject or the nature of discourse.

Paradoxical coexistence: she is both drawn to and dependent on male figures in her life for sex, security, self-definition, etc., but also each encounter with maleness leads her to higher planes of self-realization.

Prioritize independence and self-preservation over marriage and convention.

Comps Question to Write:
How does gender affect the representation of racism in works by Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker? You might think about these author's works in relation to work by African-American men like Wright, Ellison.