Their Eyes Were Watching God - Two Themes Presented by Zora Neale Hurston - Book Report/Review Example

God has created her, giving her the status of more equal. Nobody can take that right away. It is the mother who gives protection for the initial nine months to the divine creative force of the future-male or female! A female child is victimized at every step of life, from the moment of birth, notwithstanding the fact that it is she who sacrifices at those steps. Women need to be the spiritual and legal equals of men.

Race and racism—the strength of the inner world of the feminine gender
The scale of social justice should weigh in favor of the female gender. What stands women need to take if they are placed in circumstances totally unfavorable to them in life situations? Ask Janie Crawford in the novel, “Their eyes were Watching God” by Zora Neale Hurston. Janie Crawford’s character is introduced thus: “But for most black women readers discovering “Their eyes were Watching God,” for the first time, what was compelling was the figure of Janie Crawford—powerful, articulate, self-reliant, and radically different from any women character they had ever before encountered in literature.”(Foreword. xi) To Janie, the empowerment of black women was not a concession; it was her birthright.

Notwithstanding her remarkable achievements in literature, by the 1950s, she was almost living in incognito, working as a maid in a Florida Hotel. That must have made her remain in constant touch with the ground realities of the people in general, and gave her time to think about the common man. She has her own style of depicting black-white relationships. This particular novel “affirms black cultural traditions while revising them to empower black women.” (p. xii)The greatest tribute to her, and her themes in the novel comes from Alice Walker, who “ describes her going to Florida, and searching through waist-high weeds to find what she thought was Hurston’s grave and laying on it a marker inscribed, “Zora Neale Hurston/ ‘A Genius of the South’ /Novelist/ Folklorist/Anthropologist/ 19012-1960.”( p. xii) This indicates her investigative spirit and inquisitiveness to get at the truth.
She married thrice and that shows the strength of the woman to challenge the male-dominated society. Her husbands were Mr. Kellicks, Mayor Starks, and Tea Cake. The themes she tackled remarkably well in the novel related to the ongoing war of sexes on all the fronts, male-female relations of joy and sorrows, female bonding, identity, and the most important of it all, female empowerment. She wrote more on injustice done within the black community than injustice done to the black community, obviously by the white community. Hurston writes “Here, finally was a woman on a quest for her own identity and, unlike so many other questing figures in black literature, her journey would take her, not away from, but deeper and deeper into blackness, the descent into the Everglades with its rich black soil, with care, and communal life representing immersion into black traditions.”(p. xi)

Dialect as the source of empowerment for black women
Her mastery of the rural Southern black dialect is enviable. Speech and silence are one of the important themes in her novel. Janie excels through her language. She uses it as the source of empowerment for black women. She is aware that she has the ability to score over others through her brilliant conversation; she later realizes the value of silence.

Control over the speech is as important as the speech itself, she feels. Janie makes constant efforts to find her place by embarking on a spiritual journey towards love and self-awareness. Her marrying for the third time needs to be understood in this context and it is not for the sake of passion and bodily pleasures. Her flowery language is the unique feature of her writing and excellence in the language is the product of a good and affectionate heart. Male-female relationships according to Janie are reciprocal and based on mutual respect. The woman is not under the control of a man and the man is not under the control of a woman. It is the relationship of fulfilling. Her relationship with Tea Cake was on those lines. Read More