55 pages • 1 hour read
Zora Neale HurstonTheir Eyes Were Watching God
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1937A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Background
Literary Context: The Long Harlem Renaissance
Zora Neale Hurston published Their Eyes Were Watching God in 1937 during the Great Depression and long after the 1920s height of the Harlem Renaissance, an artistic and cultural movement during which Black artists asserted their right to self-representation. Nevertheless, Hurston, who was an active writer in Harlem in the 1920s, expanded the umbrella of the Harlem Renaissance to cover not only Black lives in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic but also the South.
During the Harlem Renaissance, writers and artists sought to celebrate the beauty, creativity, and originality of African American culture. Writers like W. E. B. DuBois and Alain Locke saw these artistic contributions as proof that African Americans were full citizens during an era when Jim Crow laws and mob violence prevented the full exercise of their rights. Some artists and critics who embraced the political program of the Harlem Renaissance felt pressure to present positive images to white audiences in an effort to transform the image of Black Americans from the rural, uneducated stereotype that dominated the white imagination. Of particular importance was changing the representation of Black women from either the sexless enslaved “Mammies” or promiscuous “Jezebels” who tempted virtuous white men into sin.
As an antidote, some writers depicted Black characters as respectable, virtuous, and middle-class to counter bias. Other artists, mostly from a younger generation, wanted to present more rounded representations of Black people under the pretext that they deserved respect regardless of their class or education level. Writers like Langston Hughes presented African Americans as modern people who created jazz and used slang that marked them as city dwellers. In one essay, he wrote, “We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. […] We know we are beautiful. And ugly too” (Hughes, Langston. “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.” Nation, June 23, 1926). Some of the tension between older and younger generations is evident in Their Eyes Were Watching God when Janie’s grandmother punishes Janie for kissing a young boy, the implication being that it is Janie’s responsibility to maintain decorum to earn respectability.
However, 20th-century patriarchal gender norms meant that Black women characters written by male authors of the era are often either absent, or objects who do not speak for themselves, or one-dimensional domestic goddesses who give up everything for others. Hurston pushed back against the pressure to represent African Americans in this mold, and her female protagonist ultimately refuses to sacrifice herself for the men in her life or to middle-class respectability.
Hurston’s novel is a bookend to the Harlem Renaissance. Her novel went out of print for decades but was rediscovered by Alice Walker and other African American women during the 1960s as an important forerunner for Black feminism.
Cultural Context: Black Folk Culture and Language
Hurston, a native of Eatonville and a Columbia University-trained anthropologist, did fieldwork in the Deep South and Haiti, and unapologetically pushed against representations of African Americans as city dwellers or sophisticates at home in modern culture. In Their Eyes Were Watching God, she makes rural, Southern, African American culture the most significant cultural context for the work, using dialect and language that celebrates the richness of African American folk life. Although she did write short fiction set in the city, Their Eyes Were Watching God legitimizes the Black culture of this locale. The characters’ dialect is presented without condescension as a valid and aesthetically interesting communication style.
There are three distinct forms of language in the novel: direct discourse, usually in the form of dialect; the voice of the narrator, a direct presentation to the reader in standard American English; and free indirect discourse that blends the voices of the narrator and Janie—this discourse is generally in standard American English that also includes idioms and imagery associated with Black American folk culture. Hurston thus bridges the perceived gap between literary language and the vivid but frequently disrespected colloquial language of Black Southerners. Her inclusion of the outrageous stories of the porch-sitters in Eatonville argues that this form of artistic expression and its language should be celebrated and documented.
The use of standard American English by the narrator, especially for exposition and commentary, connects this culturally specific story and universal themes. The novel’s opening lines, for example, show that although this is a story about African Americans, it is also about the distinct experiences of men and women. The use of free indirect discourse shows that African American folk idioms and imagery drawn from the rural South have a home in American literature.
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