Illustration of the profile of Janine Crawford and another person facing each other

Their Eyes Were Watching God

by Zora Neale Hurston

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Critical Overview

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When Their Eyes Were Watching God first appeared, it was warmly received by white critics. Lucille Tompkins of the New York Times Book Review called it “a well-nigh perfect story—a little sententious at the start, but the rest is simple and beautiful and shining with humor.” But many of Hurston’s fellow writers of the Harlem Renaissance criticized the novel for not addressing “serious” issues, namely strained race relations. Alain Locke, reviewing for Opportunity, recognized the author’s “gift for poetic phrase, for rare dialect, and folk humor,” but he asks, “when will the Negro novelist of maturity . . . come to grips with motive fiction and social document fiction?” Richard Wright, in his review in New Masses, had even more scathing objections to the novel. According to Wright, “Miss Hurston voluntarily continues in her novel the tradition which was forced upon the Negro in the theater, that is, the minstrel technique that makes the ‘white folks’ laugh.” Wright felt that instead of taking on “serious” subjects, she writes to entertain “a white audience whose chauvinistic tastes she knows how to satisfy.” Many objected to the use of dialect in the novel, a difficult subject for Harlem Renaissance writers who felt that Black speech had been exploited and ridiculed by mainstream theater and literature. As a result, many were reluctant to try to realistically depict the speech patterns of the Black folk, and they saw in Hurston’s use of dialect a degrading picture of rural Black people.

As a result of such criticisms, Their Eyes Were Watching God soon disappeared from print. But in the late 1960s, when interest in African American and women’s studies began to take hold, a number of Black women across the country rediscovered the book and made it an underground sensation. Photocopies of the novel circulated at conferences, and Alice Walker’s essay “Looking for Zora,” published in Ms. magazine in 1975, galvanized efforts to get the novel back into print. Since 1978, it has been widely available, and the scholarly interest in it has been intense. In fact, previous judgments against the novel have been overturned by a number of respectable critics who have helped establish Their Eyes Were Watching God as a classic of Black American literature and helped procure it a prominent position in the American literary canon.

Most significantly, recent critics have recognized a celebration of Black culture in the novel that belies any notion that Hurston is pandering to a white audience. As Cheryl Wall explains, in her article “Zora Neale Hurston: Changing Her Own Words,” she asserted that Black people, while living in a racist society that denied their humanity, had created an “alternative culture that validated their worth as human beings.” And, she argues, by invoking this culture, Hurston shows us that Black men and women “attained personal identity not by transcending the culture but by embracing it.” One way that Hurston embraced the culture of rural, southern Black people was to depict its folklore and language in a way that relished its creativity. Contemporary critics praise her for this above all else, for in her search for a suitable language for Black American literature, she initiated an effort to free Black language from domination by the white culture. Henry Louis Gates Jr. explains the significance of this act: “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.” In this way, critics have been able to show that Hurston, far from ignoring the serious social issues of her day, was engaged in a serious project of resuscitating a language and culture that was in danger of being corrupted by racist oppression. In fact, Gay Wilentz argues, in Faith of a (Woman) Writer, that the novel is one of “resistance” because it portrays “the pressure of the dominant culture on the thoughts and actions of the all-black community of Eatonville as well as blacks as a whole.” In other words, although she largely ignored the overt racism that critics of the Harlem Renaissance wanted her to address, she explored the more subtle and perhaps more dangerous kind of racism that infects the Black culture and makes it despise itself. The racial pride that Hurston preached, then, was as radical a statement as any of the Harlem Renaissance, contemporary critics argue.

Although scholars have been eager to embrace the novel’s celebration of Black culture, much more problematic has been understanding and accepting its perspective on gender. With the book’s rediscovery in the 1960s, feminists lauded it as an expression of female self-development and empowerment. More recently, though, many scholars have begun to question such a reading. Jennifer Jordon argues, for example, in her article in Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, that “Janie’s struggle for identity and self-direction remains stymied. She never defines herself outside the scope of her marital or romantic involvements.” Furthermore, as Mary Helen Washington insists in her article “ ‘I Love the Way Janie Crawford Left Her Husbands’: Emergent Female Hero,” Janie never becomes a speaking subject, because “Hurston’s strategy of having much of Janie’s tale told by an omniscient third person rather than by a first person narrator undercuts the development of Janie’s ‘voice.’ ” But most troubling to critics has been the fact that Janie seems to discover herself in the context of a relationship with a man, Tea Cake, rather than on her own, a defect that many see as remedied by Janie’s killing of Tea Cake. “As a feminist,” Claire Crabtree argues, Hurston “did not want Janie to find fulfillment in a man, but rather in her new-found self.” But for others, the book does not end there, rather with her return to Eatonville, which seems to signal an end to her self-exploration, according to Washington, who claims that “left without a man, she [Janie] exists in a position of stasis.” But Wall refuses to read the ending as “tragic.” “For with Tea Cake as her guide, Jan[i]e has explored the soul of her culture and learned how to value herself.”

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