Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God: A Casebook

Scholarly Essays On A Classic Novel

I first read Zora Neale Hurston's novel "Their Eyes were Watching God" (1937) several years ago for a book club and recently reread the work for another book group devoted to Black literature. The novel has become one of my favorites. For readers of this review who may be unfamiliar with the novel, "Their Eyes are Watching God" tells the story of a young woman, Janie Crawford, and her three marriages. Janie, a fair-complectioned African American woman with long, straight hair is raised by her grandmother in Georgia. At the age of 16, Janie has a sexual awakening, and her grandmother feels she must marry her off. The Grandmother arranges a marriage with a stuffy, elderly widower, Logan Killicks whom Janie cannot love. She leaves Killicks and without getting a divorce marries a man named Jodie Starks, enterprising and ambitious. Starks takes her to the famous African American town of Eatonville, Florida where he becomes prosperous. Although Starks and Janie are materially comfortable, Starks is chauvanistic, possessive, and mean spirited. The marriage is unhappy. When Starks dies, following brutally angry words between the couple, Janie marries again. Her third husband, Tea Cake, is much younger than Janie and owns little more than his guitar. The couple move to the Everglades, the "muck" where they work together in the fields and play and are erotically happy until a hurricane and a flood which results in Tea Cake's death. Janie returns to Eatonville and recounts her story to Pheobe, an old friend.

After its initial publication in 1937, the book received little attention until its rediscovery by readers, including many with feminist orientations, in the late 1960s. The book has now become part of America's literary canon. In rereading and rethinking the book, (and it reviewing it here and on Amazon/UK) I realized how enigmatic this novel is and how it is susceptible to many different readings. One question, of course, is the relationship between what Hurston wrote and current varieties of feminism. There are many other interesting questions about the book, including Hurston's attitude towards traditional African American southern rural communities as as opposed to African American migration northward for jobs, education, and entrance into the middle class. There is an ever-present issue of sexuality and men and women. The book is about the growth of an individual and the nature of her relationship to the community. It is interesting to ask what the source is for the universal appeal of "Their Eyes were Watching God" when the story is set almost entirely among the group of rural Southern African Americans. There are ambiguities in the book about what Janie learns from her experience and about the extent to which she finds herself and her own voice. And while the book is beautifully written, the narration shifts voices from first to third person in a way that is seemingly inconsistent with Janie recounting her story to a friend.

I love this book and wanted to explore some of the critical responses to the questions I had about it. Thus I read this "casebook" on "Their Eyes were Watching God" published in 2000 and edited by Cheryl Wall, a distinguished scholar who has edited the two Library of America volumes of Hurston's writings. Zora Neale Hurston : Novels and Stories : Jonah's Gourd Vine / Their Eyes Were Watching God / Moses, Man of the Mountain / Seraph on the Suwanee / Selected Stories (Library of America) ; Zora Neale Hurston : Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings : Mules and Men, Tell My Horse, Dust Tracks on a Road, Selected Articles (The Library of America, 75) The book consists of a valuable overview of Hurston's writing by Wall followed by a short autobiographical sketch of Hurston's and seven essays by as many scholars offering varying readings of and approaches to Hurston's text. Wall describes the essays as among the most thoughtful, widely-recognized academic studies of the book.

The essays are fascinating to read and offer a variety of approaches. The authors have read the book closely, and the essays point out many details of the story that are important and easy to overlook, even after several readings. At times, some of the essays become overly pedantic and full of literary, post-modernist jargon. They still repaid the effort it took to read them. The overriding theme of the book is the structure of the novel and Hurston's unusual narrative form. Other issues are discussed as a function of the form of the work. A good deal of attention is paid to the nature of Janie's personal quest, the extent to which she succeeds, and about whether the result is a matter of finding one's voice or understanding one's experiences.

The central essay in this collection is by Henry Louis Gates: "Zora Neale Hurston and the Speakerly Text". This is a lengthy, detailed study which examines Hurston's work and narrative by placing it in a continuum of other African American writers, including Frederick Douglass, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Sterling Brown, James Weldon Johnson, Jean Toomer, Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison. The essay includes a painstakingly detailed analysis of Hurston's text to show how it captures something both of an individual and a communal voice. Gates writes (p. 75)

"The narrative voice Hurston created, and her legacy to Afro-American fiction is a lyrical and disembodied yet individual voice, from which emerges a singular longing and utterance, a transcendent, ultimately racial self, extending far beyond the merely individual. Hurston realized a resonant and authentic narrative voice that echoes and aspires to the status of the impersonality, anonymity, and authority of the black vernacular tradition, a nameless, selfless tradition, at once collective and compelling, true somehow to the unwritten text of a common blackness. For Hurston, the search for a telling form of language, indeed the search for a black literary language itself, defines the search for the self."

Gate's learned essay makes this volume worth reading; and the companion essays can be viewed as variations upon it. Of the remaining essays, I will comment on those I found most interesting. Mary Helen Washington's, "I love the way Janie Crawford Left her Husband" shows the author taking a second, more critical look at Janie and her achievement in attaining a sense of self and independence than Washington did in first encountering the book. In "The Politics of Fiction:Anthropology, and the Folk", Hazel Canby critcizes the novel and the stature it has attained by returning to the cricism of the book offered by African American male authors when the novel first was published. These authors found the book a retreat into stereotypes which failed to address the problems African Americans faced from racism and from life in the city. Carla Kaplan's essay "The erotics of talk: that oldest human longing" finds ambiguity in the sexual orientation of the novel, and of Janie's relationship to Pheobe, and a tension in the book between writing and experience.

Most readers will find other approaches to the novel besides those presented in this volume. I found this volume helpful to my reading. As with any criticism, it does not substitute from the reader's engagement with the text for himself or herself. This book will be of obvious use to college students writing a paper on Hurston. It will also be valuable for those readers who are interested in broadening their understanding of this wonderful novel.

Robin Friedman