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Their Eyes Were Watching God

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Their Eyes Were Watching God, (1937), set in southern Florida in the early 20th century, is the best-known novel by African-American writer Zora Neale Hurston.

Contents

Plot summary

[Spoiler warningSpoiler warning]: Plot and/or ending details follow.
The main character, a black woman in her early forties named Janie Crawford, tells the story of her life and journey via an extended flashback to her best friend, Pheoby. Her life has three major periods corresponding to her marriages to three men.

Janie's grandmother, Nanny, was a slave who was impregnated by a white man (Hurston implies that it was the slaveowner) and gave birth to a daughter. That daughter was raped as a teenager and became pregnant with Janie, but left Janie with Nanny and is not present in the novel. Nanny sees Janie kissing a neighborhood boy and fears that Janie will become a "mule" to some man, so she arranges for Janie to marry Logan Killicks, an older man and farmer who is looking for a wife to keep his home and help on the farm. Janie has the idea that marriage must involve love, forged in a pivotal early scene where she sees bees pollinating a pear tree and believes that marriage is the human equivalent to this natural process. Logan Killicks, however, wants a domestic helper rather than a lover or partner, and after he begins to hit Janie and to try to force her to help him with the hard labor of the farm, Janie runs off with the glib Joe (Jody) Starks, who takes her to Eatonville (which in reality was Hurston's hometown).

Starks arrives in Eatonville (the United States's first all-black community) to find the residents devoid of ambition, so he arranges to buy more land from the neighboring landowner, hires some local residents to build a general store for him to own and run, and has himself appointed mayor. Janie soon realizes that Joe, too, wants her more for her help than for her individuality, as he asks her to run the store but forbids her from participating in the substantial social life that occurs on the store's front porch.

After Starks dies, Janie finds herself financially independent and beset with suitors, some of whom are men of some means or have prestigious occupations, but she falls in love with a drifter and gambler named Tea Cake. She sells the store and the two head to Jacksonville and get married, only to move to the Everglades region soon after for Tea Cake to find work planting and harvesting beans. While their relationship has its ups and downs, including mutual bouts of jealousy, Janie now has the marriage with love that she had wanted.

The area is hit with a hurricane, and while Tea Cake and Janie survive it, Tea Cake is bitten by a rabid dog while saving Janie from drowning, and he contracts the disease himself. He ultimately tries to shoot Janie with his pistol, but she shoots him with a rifle in self-defense. She is charged with murder; at the trial, Tea Cake's black, male friends show up to oppose her, while a group of local white women is there to support her. The all-white jury acquits Janie, and she returns to Eatonville, only to find the residents gossiping about her and assuming (or perhaps wishing) that Tea Cake has run off with her money.

Spoilers end here.

Analysis

Some of the information in this has not been [Verifiabilityverified] and might not be reliable. It should be checked for inaccuracies and modified as needed, [cite sourcesciting sources].
The overarching theme of Their Eyes Were Watching God is the corruption of social interaction and sexuality in an unequal society. Janie is struck at the book's beginning by an image of the perfect "marriage" of bees and the pear tree, each unencumbered by convention, and equally fufilling the needs of the other. Inequality turns the "kissing" of intimate conversation, seen in Janie and Phoebe and Janie and Tea Cake, into the plague of rumor, and social interaction in general into constant competition to become "master" to everyone else's "slave."

Hurston argues that African-American women are lowest on the chain of subjugation, and frequently refers to them as the "mules of the world." This trope, found in many of Hurston's works, was introduced in Of Mules and Men. Here, diverse people, but mainly black women, are used as some might a dumb animal--to increase social and economic standing.

Through Janie's trials, Hurston makes the claim that African-American women are marginalized by their society and admonishes black men and women to reject the materialistic attitudes of their white masters and to obey only God. Hence the title, which suggests submission to the will of the Creator. The title is ambiguous, however, as the "watching" in the book is frequently among petty, jealous townspeople.

The ambiguity as well of God's action in Janie's at once beautiful and terrible world, made up of characters who are in constant struggle to "light" a tiny corner, exemplified in Joe Starks, suggests a certain existential conflict.

Criticism

While today Hurston's book is present on many (if not most) reading lists for African American literature programs in the United States, the book was not universally praised by Hurston's peers, with particular criticism levelled at her use of phonetic spellings of the dialect spoken by blacks of African and Caribbean descent in the South of the early 20th century (for example, "tuh" instead of "to" and "Ah" instead of "I"). Richard Wright called Their Eyes Were Watching God a "minstrel-show turn that makes the white folks laugh" and said it showed "no desire whatever to move in the direction of serious fiction."Burt, Daniel. The Novel 100. Checkmark Books, 2003. p. 365. Ralph Ellison said the book contained a "blight of calculated burlesque."Ibid., p. 366. Many other prominent authors that were a part of the Harlem Renaissance were upset that Hurston exposed divisions between light skinned African-Americans and those that had darker skin, as seen in Mrs. Turner, as well as the more subtle division between black men and women.

The book, written in black southern dialect, has attracted criticism also by those who claim it portrays African-Americans as ignorant (despite the fact that Hurston is, herself, African-American). Similar criticisms have been leveled at Twain's Huckleberry Finn. But while Twain transforms the ministrel into a three-dimensional character, viewed through Huck's revelations, Hurston uses black southern dialect to show that complex social relationships and common feats of metaphoric language are possible in something considered "substandard" to English.

Biblical allusions

Page numbers are from the Perennial version of this novel (ISBN 0060931418)

Film adaptation

The book was adapted into the 2005 film Their Eyes Were Watching God by Suzan-Lori Parks and Misan Sagay was produced by Oprah Winfrey's Harpo Productions. Winfrey served as the host for the broadcast. Halle Berry starred as Janie Crawford. The film aired on ABC on March 16, 2005.

Notes

External links

 

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