Their Eyes Were Watching God: Literary Analysis

Being a black woman in a society where the world doesn’t see much or even care much about her, can be a bit cumbersome. She is labeled as a double minority and because of this, she has to work a lot harder than most people. She has to show other people that she is just as capable of something just everyone else, but alas she is still overlooked for somebody else. “Visibility is the cornerstone of the black female identity, without which we cannot truly live.

” - Audre Lorde. And after a while, she gets tired of being overlooked, underestimated, or mocked and decides to speak out. To use her voice because she knows how powerful her voice truly is. “Black women are the more often visualized in the mainstream American culture...they are allowed to speak their own words and speak about their conditions as women of color.” -Michelle Wallace. But what does this have to do with the novel? This is one of the few messages that Zora Neale Hurston’s “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” has to give.

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The novel addresses the strict gender roles and the search for self-actualization.

Before we get into the hard details of the book, let’s talk about the author of this novel. Zora Neale Hurston was born on January 7, 1891, in Nostasulga, Alabama. Hurston became well-known during the famous Harlem Renaissance Period, a period dating back all the way to the 1920s or better known as the Roaring 20s. In her writing, she portrayed racial struggles in the early 20th century in America in the Deep South.

Before she passed, Zora has written at least seven novels those being: Mules and Men, Jonah’s Gourd Vine, Moses: Man of the Mountain, Sweat, Dust Tracks on a Road, Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo”, and last but not least “Their Eyes Were Watching God”. However, the focus will only be on the last-named book.

A fun fact about the novel was that it was written in three weeks in the year 1936 and then was published a year later on September 18, 1937. One one of the biographies about Zora said that “Hurston is interested in far more than the development of one woman’s journey to self-knowledge; she seeks to find a discourse that celebrates both the voices and the bodies of African-Americans,” - Deborah Clake. Which goes along with the synopsis of the book being about a woman named Janie Crawford, whose life is a quest to find true love. She narrates about her marriages, during her quest, to her close friend Pheoby. Overall, the novel has an array of hard-hitting themes that someone would have to through to find. With that in mind, the two main themes that are one of the most obvious are the strict gender roles and self-actualization.

This book takes place in the 1930s, which is around the end of the lavishness of the Roaring 20s and into the train wreck that would be called the Great Depression. Women during this time do not have as good as their male counterparts. They are encouraged or even told to say at home because back then men thought -- and even other women thought -- that was the proper place for a woman to be. Hurston, in her novel, plays off this trope, empowered men and underpowered women, extremely well because that is what life was like. A prime example of this would be a character named Jodie Starks, a wealthy man who desires nothing but power and to have control over other people. He even decides to marry Janie because he wanted something he could show off to the townspeople. Jodie is such an infuriating character because of how well he was written. He displays how men in power often treat their wives. Jodie only wants an image, not a speaker he even says this, “Thank yuh fuh yo’ compliments, but mah wife don’t know nothin’ bout no speech-makin.’ Ah never married her nothin’ lak dat. She’s uh woman and her place is in de home.” He tries to take away her voice, change the way she looks, the way she acts, where she goes, and probably the people that she hangs around. It’s all about for the man here and if the wife looks bad so does the husband. In conclusion, this drives home that some men during this time enforce that women have a place in the house and that they should be quiet and submissive.

Janie begins to grow and finds her own self-actualization throughout the book, however, it begins to show it’s true colors when Jodie starts to become weak in his health and when Janie begins to get a little tired of Jodie telling her what to do. “You sho loves to tell me what to do, but Ah can’t you nothin’ Ah see.” and “Ah knows uh few things, and womenfolk think sometimes too!” In response to what Janie said, Jodie slaps to “put her back in her place” and Janie doesn’t do anything else, but you can see develop true hate for this man. Here, “Janie shows a desire for self-expression,” and soon realizes the importance, need, the urgency of searching for her own voice.