Their Eyes Were Watching God Sparknotes Literature Guide: Volume 60

"There Eyes Were Watching God," by Zora Neale Hurston, is widely acknowledged as a beloved classic of American literature. This novel is truly one of those great works that remains both entertaining and deeply moving; it is a book for classrooms, for reading groups of all types, and for individual readers.In "There Eyes," Hurston tells the life story of Janie, an African-American woman. We accompany Janie as she experiences the very different men in her life. Hurston's great dialogue captures both the ongoing "war of the sexes," as well as the truces, joys, and tender moments of male-female relations. But equally important are Janie's relationships with other Black women. There are powerful themes of female bonding, identity, and empowerment which bring an added dimension to this book.But what really elevates "Their Eyes" to the level of a great classic is Hurston's use of language. This is truly one of the most poetic novels in the American canon. Hurston blends the engaging vernacular speech of her African-American characters with the lovely "standard" English of her narrator, and in both modes creates lines that are just beautiful."Their Eyes" captures the universal experiences of pain and happiness, love and loss. And the whole story is told with both humor and compassion. If you haven't read it yet, read it; if you've already read it, read it again.

THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD is a haunting story told in the black vernacular about one woman's search for true love and independence. At age 16, Janie Crawford believes that she has every right to find true love on her terms. The day she lay beneath a pear tree in her grandmother's backyard and witnessed a bee pollinating there was the day she realized the sensual pleasures she wanted very much to experience in her life. But instead of her being able to explore these feelings and find her soul mate, she is confined to a couple of loveless marriages. The first was to a much older man, Logan Killicks, out of financial security and respectability (under the advisement of her randmother). The second marriage to Jody Starks was out of desperation to escape her first marriage and for security. But it will be Janie's third marriage to a much younger man, Tea Cake, which allows her to feel a sense of freedom in choosing someone to love openly for the very first time. Of course when the Eatonville community she lives in shows their displeasure over her relationship with Tea Cake, Janie throws caution to the wind by marrying and moving away with him to start a new life in the Everglades. Even though her third marriage ends tragically with her killing Tea Cake in self-defense, she doesn't seem to regret her experience. In fact, she makes peace with all that has happened in her life and returns to Eatonville in spite of the envious stares and gossip from the people speculating what happened between her and Tea Cake. She comes back no longer under the ownership of a man, but as a self-assured independent woman who owes no one any explanations. After reading this novel and discovering that Zora Neale Hurston was the recipient of 2 Guggenheims, the author of 4 novels, 12 short stories, 12 essays, 2 musicals, and 2 black mythologies, I could not help wondering how this literary giant disappeared from us for nearly 3 decades. To my disappointment I learned that her disappearance was due to her peers (mainly Richard Wright) criticizing her openly and publicly for not writing about the so-called "serious social trends" of the time. But what I cannot understand is how her peers could not think what happened to Janie Crawford (and women like her) by husbands and the community at large was not a serious social trend of the time. Just because Zora chose to write about the injustices done within the black community rather than the injustices done to the black community did not make her works any less poignant. The appeal and rediscovery of this novel by scholars, women writers, and the American public in general has definitely made THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD into a timeless classic of the Harlem Renaissance era.

At the end, I closed the book and I cried. Then I wanted to open it and start reading all over again from the beginning. Janie is a woman who has endured oppression, suppression, and tragedy. She found love and she found herself. She not only survived but discovered her own strength and accepted life without self-destructing. Janie, is every woman's hero, most certainly mine.

Other modernists, such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Edith Wharton, tore apart the classical love story, dependant as it was on outer union, on a coupling of circumstance and fate. Age of Innocence is a biting parody, exposing the superficiality of, for example, Jane Austen's society romances (despite their unsurpassed wit). Gatsby buys into classical script, but the carefully constructed narrative of Romantic love he tries to realize is shattered by the realities of a modern age. He is left, staring at an empty window because he cannot believe that Daisy is not behind it gazing at him, but downstairs coming to terms with her husband. Their Eyes Were Watching God, however, fills the void left by others' criticism. At first, romantic love sweeps Hurston's heroine too off her feet: "From now on until death she was going to have flower dust and springtime sprinkled over everything. A bee for her bloom." But this is unsatisfying, and eventually the book reveals a love story for the modern age, which finds as its essence not external union, but inner, personal fulfillment and genuine partnership. This is not to say Hurston's vision is more 'realistic,' or less rare, but that, as an ideal, it is far more relevant than its predecessors. Hurston's lovers find in each other not alabaster idols, but a mutual epiphany. "They seemed to be staring at the dark, but their eyes were watching God."