According to her autobiography, Zora Neale Hurston wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God in seven weeks while she was conducting ethnographic fieldwork in Haiti and recovering from a failed romance. The circumstances were hardly promising, but the novel, published in September 1937, almost exactly a year after she arrived in Port-au-Prince, is her masterpiece. While it presents diverse oral performances-personal narratives, folktales, courtship rituals, speeches, and sermons-the folk material fuses seamlessly with a formal narrative that charts a woman's coming to voice and to selfhood. The protagonist, Janie Crawford, begins a quest for romance but achieves spiritual fulfillment.
During a plot spanning twenty-odd years, Janie grows from a diffident teenager to a woman in possession of herself. She learns to resist the definitions of “what a woman should be” imposed on her by her grandmother, Nanny, and by the three men she marries. Nanny chooses Janie's first husband, Logan Kil-licks, because he can provide protection and support. Janie dreams of love. Joe Starks becomes “a big ruler of things,” who dominates his community and his wife. Tea Cake (Vergible) Woods is a bluesman who guides Janie to a deeper understanding of African American culture even as he betrays its sexism. Through Janie's struggles with and against her husbands, the novel explores the relationship between voice and self-knowledge.
Janie is a master of metaphor. As a girl, she figures her life as a “tree in bloom.” Dreaming of a man who will be “bee to her blossom,” Janie rejects bourgeois marriage as an ideal. After Joe Starks's death frees her to dream again, she dreams of journeying to the horizon in search of people. She realizes both dreams through Tea Cake.
In the novel's frame tale, Janie returns to Eatonville after completing her quest. Townspeople sit on porches exchanging words full of drama and metaphor. For reasons of gender and class, Janie is excluded from this community; she is the object of its ridicule. Not only is storytelling mainly the province of men in Eatonville, but Mayor Starks has ordered Janie to remain aloof from other women and has forbidden her participation in their verbal rituals. With Tea Cake, Janie has learned the culture's expressive codes, however, and when she tells her story to her friend Pheoby it transforms teller and auditor.
Beginning with an early review by Richard Wright, critics have faulted Their Eyes for its alleged lack of racial militancy. Some find the attacks on racism, present throughout the novel but especially in the scenes on the “muck,” too indirect. Others contend that the novel's idealized representation of Tea Cake undercuts its critique of sexism. But Hurston's great accomplishment is the creation of a literary language equivalent to the oral performances she admired as a child and studied as an ethnographer. Vernacular voices speak in and through the novel, informing both its dialogue and narration. Like the oral performances it celebrates and critiques, the novel's words “[walk] without masters.” Their Eyes is a singular achievement.
Bibliography
- Barbara Johnson, “Metaphor, Metonymy, and Voice in Their Eyes Were Watching God,” in A World of Difference, 1987.
- Michael Awkward, ed., New Essays on Their Eyes Were Watching God, 1990.
- Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Anthony Appiah, eds., Zora Neale Hurston: Critical Perspectives Past and Present, 1993
Cheryl A. Wall
