The Book Their Eyes Were Watching God - Essay Example

A Critical Analysis of ‘Their Eyes Were Watching God’ Introduction The book ‘Their Eyes Were Watching God’ written by Zora Neale Hurston was first published in the year 1937. This book was completed within 7 weeks, while Hurston was doing her research work on anthropology in Haiti. At that time, this book was not received well, mainly by the black population, who felt that her book was too frivolous and could not correctly capture the true sufferings of the African-Americans. In fact, a well-known African-American writer of the 1930’s Richard Wright, went as far as to say that, in the book, the eyes were both meaningless and theme less, and further added, “Miss Hurston voluntarily continues in her role the tradition which was forced upon the negro in the theater, that is, the minstrel technique that makes the ‘white folks’ laugh” (cited in Lester, 3). It was regarded by many that Hurston had exploited the cause of her own people by not correctly portraying the picture of the injustice and sufferings meted out to the blacks by their white owners. It was only in the 1970’s after another African-American writer Alice Walker of ‘The Color Purple’ fame, took an interest in Hurston and championed her cause, did the literary world of that age sit up and take notice. After Walker published an essay in Ms. Magazine “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston,” it pushed Hurston’s works back into the limelight, and soon there were many prints and reprints of her writings. This article will review the book ‘Their Eyes Were Watching God’ by Hurston and will present a critical analysis on it by discussing her writing style and her manner of representing the novel’s chief protagonist. It will also review other authors’ reviews and analysis on Hurston and her novel ‘Their Eyes Were Watching God’. Body Analysis of Zora Neale Hurston and her writing style: Zora Neale Hurston was born on 7th January 1891 in Notasulga, Alabama. Her father, John Hurston was a preacher and a carpenter, while her mother Lucy Hurston, was a schoolteacher. Soon, the family moved to Eatonville in Florida, a town famous for having the first black incorporated Municipality. Hurston completed her graduation from Harvard University and it is from here that she embarked on her writing career in 1921. Soon she moved to New York and became a prominent figure in the then famous ‘Harlem Renaissance’ writing group. Hurston was also an anthropologist, and in fact, her experiences in Eatonville and her researches into old folktales of the black population which influenced much of her writings. Hurston’s novel ‘Their Eyes Were Watching God’ came a little late into the day, for a ‘Harlem Renaissance’ novel. It was already into the late thirties when the art of experimenting and the sense of freedom from literary works, had disappeared. Depression had set in and with it brought forth a sense of stark reality, which is noticed in the then writings mostly marked by radical leftist thoughts and strong socialist ideas. Thus, it was imperative that Hurston’s novel which did not send out any strong political message would be dismissed as a writing of the bourgeois genre. Hurston’s writing did not overtly speak against race consciousness; instead, it spoke of the chief protagonist’s relationships with other human beings, and her search for freedom of mind and soul. In her story, the southern way of life forms the background and there are hints of consciousness of the feminist mind and African-American sentiments. This is because as Fox and Kloppenberg points out “ Hurston, a committed individualist, believed that the artist’s unfettered self-expression would do more to promote interracial understanding, and thereby combat racism, than the programmatic art advocated by Du Bois” (Fox and Kloppenberg, 322). This novel, though, not an autobiography in a true sense, speaks of the author’s own feelings and her own experiences as an African woman. As Awkward frames it “Their Eyes Were Watching God offers an opportunity to examine the autobiographical impulse from the perspectives of author Hurston, the writerly self, and fictional Janie, the speakerly self, creating a common text delineating a black female self-in-writing. In their combined oral and written narrative, Hurston and Janie reinforce Janet Varner Gunn’s theory of the autobiographer as self-reader, writing (and speaking) from the ‘outside in, not inside out- or in other words, from the position of the other side of the lived past which the reader self occupies’ at the time writing” (Awkward, 51). Analysis of the book ‘Their Eyes Were Watching God’- In this book Hurston uses a particularly interesting style of narration using southern dialects, giving each character their own tone, vocabulary and individuality. This is a story of Janie, an African-American woman who is proud of her bearing and individuality. In the first chapter, we find that Janie has returned to her hometown after many years. Thus, the novel starts from the end, and in retrospective tells us the story of the chief protagonist’s life. The first two chapters show us an old Janie who is telling stories to Phoeby, an ardent admirer and friend. Here Janie by refusing to tell the whole world her story makes it stand apart from the other common and shared folk tales. As Carby tells us “ when Janie decides to tell her story through her friend…Hurston creates a figure for the form of the novel, a fictional world that can mediate and perhaps resolve the tension that exists in the difference between the socially constructed identities of ‘woman’ and ‘intellectual’ and the act of representing the folk”(Carby, 128). Even before Janie appears on the scene, we hear the murmurs and disapproving whispers that float around. Hurston here represents the community as an entity that lacks intellect, and to show their lack of spirituality she refers to them in terms of their body parts like “envious heart” or “treacherous ear.” Thus, right from the beginning we notice how Hurston wields magic with the language; and makes it sound more like a story telling, than writing. This control of speech by the author is noticed throughout the entire novel and there is an extremely important yet complex role of language and speech throughout the book. In the first two chapters itself, we notice the split style narration that makes this novel stand out. The story begins in the voice of an outsider or a third person who is omnipresent. This voice is the main anchor of the novel and is the intellectual one, who speaks in metaphors and uses poetic languages. It is distinctly different from that of Janie’s style of speaking. So the entire novel is a wonderful play in speech and language, where we find there are long dialogues taking place in a highly colorful colloquial language filled with adages from folklores, like, “Unless you see de fur, a mink skin ain’t no different from a coon hide”( Hurston, 11). Thus, we see two forms of speech, one which speaks in the standard written English style and the other which speaks in the vernacular English, peculiar to the southern blacks. In the second chapter Hurston paints the picture of a pear tree which represents Janie’s blooming sexuality and also represents Hurston idea of true love and fulfillment, where the male and female complement each other and gives what the other lacks, creating a perfect embrace and union. In chapter 3, when nanny and Janie converse, we notice the differences in their perspectives. To nanny, love is being practical, while to Janie, love means having an emotional and physical connection. She cannot connect to her first husband Logan emotionally or physically, so decides to leave him for Jody, who, “spoke for far horizon” (Hurston, 37). The horizon is another symbol which Hurston uses often in the novel and represents a life that Janie hopes for, full of imagination and endless possibilities. Jody in this book represents power that speaks of male aggression and dominance and it is for this very reason that he fails to make Janie happy. In chapter five, we come face to face with the power that Jody exudes and his dominating nature which soon alienates everyone. Here we notice how he tries to dominate Janie by disregarding her individuality and trying to mould her into something that he wishes to see. He tries to suppress her sexuality by ordering her to tie her beautiful straight hair into rags and hide it from other men. Here Hurston represents Janie’s long braided hair as a phallic symbol and effectively uses it to break down all traditional forms of representations. Her hair also represents her mental strength with which she defies all male dominance and aggression. As their marriage disintegrates, Janie survives the breakup but it leads to the destruction of Jody. In chapter 7, the outburst by Janie again shows the importance that language plays in this novel. As she speaks, she wields power and asserts her strong position. After Jody dies, when Janie unties her hair from the rags, it represents her liberation from an unhappy union. She also lets free her voice, feelings and emotions, which had been hidden under Jody’s shackles. As she introspects and tries to understand herself more, she hates everything her grandmother taught her. She realizes that it is the fault of our social values, which place materialism and social status of a person at the forefront. In this book, Hurston very effectively points out that the fault does not lie in the mind of an individual, but lies collectively within the spheres of cultural beliefs and environmental happenings. When she meets Tea Cake, 12 years her junior, she falls in love with him, as he seemed to represent everything that Jody lacked. She also realizes that her quest is for spiritual freedom and has nothing to do with the material world. As these revelations come in the course of dialogues, we again understand the importance of speech in Hurston’s novel. Janie’ thirsts to find her own voice and finds happiness with Tea Cake as “He done taught me the maiden language all over” (Hurston, 139). Tea Cake also dominates Janie to a certain extent but in general, he respects her much more, thus giving her true happiness. Here Hurston expresses the sentiment that males tend to dominate. Chapter 16 deals with racism in the various interactions between Janie and another character called Mrs. Turner. However, Hurston manages to keep this under control by representing racism as a way of thinking, affecting black and white alike, and does not turn into it a diatribe of hate and politics. As we progress near the end, we find that now silence has become Janie’s power. The voice which she strove to find when with Jody has now been controlled by her. While silence represented her weakness when with Jody, it later became her strength when dealing with Tea Cake. In chapter 18, we face the storm that represents the title, and also signifies the conflict that lies at the center of the novel. Hurston likens the storm to all social evils, which causes pain, but does not destroy Janie completely. After the storm, again, Hurston very subtly paints a picture of racism where only the dead whites get coffins for burial. Later, when Tea Cake is dying of rabies and gets violent with Janie, she kills him, realizing this to be her only mode of escape. She is later acquitted by an all white male court, and though shunned by the black people is received warmly by the whites. Here in the second half of the story we find that Janie speaks almost nonstop as she explores herself and her surroundings, but strangely, during the trial she remains silent. Here again Hurston portrays Janie’s strength in silence. At the end when we find the white population welcoming her, we realize the importance of Hurston’s message. For Hurston, racism is only a perspective that may color any one’s vision. Therefore, her story rises above the realms of gender, skin color and race differences, and speaks only of humanity. Conclusion Hurston’s story and representation of Janie is thus unequivocal in its search for self-identity and in the narrative style that Hurston chooses to story tell, by using two different voices. It is also distinct because Hurston refused to compromise to the dictates of the writing style of those days. She managed to keep her novel free from sending out any political messages and refused to put in elements of racial hatred. Her novel portrays everything of her age, from the social evils to dominance of men, to racial discrimination and slavery, yet these negative forces never took over. As Goldstein points out “As both a realist critique of slavery and its aftermath and a modernist evocation of Black dialect and myth, the forgotten ‘Their Eyes’ achieves greater depth than Jane Austen’s realist ‘Pride and Prejudice’…”(Goldstein, 182). Her novel speaks in a beautiful language describing a woman’s fight against social norms and traditions, and finding her self-identity within herself. As Foner and Garraty aptly sums it up “its mixture of formal rhetoric and black idiom is poetic without being folksy; its retrospective narrative structure is loose without being disjointed; its dynamic characters are stylized without being exotic; and its romantic quest for personal wholeness and female autonomy is centered on egalitarianism without exploitation in living and loving” (Foner and Garraty, 528). Works Cited Awkward, M. New essays on Their eyes were watching God. New York: Cambridge University Press. 1995. Print. Carby, H. Metaphor Metonymy and Voice in ‘Their Eyes Were Watching God’. In Wall, C. (ed.) Zora Neale Hurstons Their eyes were watching God: a casebook. New York: Oxford University Press. 2000. Print. Foner, E and Garraty, J. The Readers Companion to American History. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 1991. Print. Goldstein, P. Communities of Cultural Value: Reception Study, Political differences, and Literary History. Oxford: Lexington Books, 2001. Print.  Hurston, Z and Pinkney, J. Their Eyes Were Watching God. Illinois: University of Illinois. 1991. Print. Lester, N. Understanding Zora Neale Hurstons Their Eyes Were Watching God: A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources, and Historical Documents. Westport: Greenwood Publishing Group. 1999. Print. Fox, R and Kloppenberg, J. A Companion to American Thought. Massachusetts: Wiley- Blackwell. 1998. Print. Read More