Their Eyes Were Watching God (1847 words)

Their Eyes Were Watching GodNeale Hurston’s work provides the African-American community with a one of the
first literary symbols of racial health – a sense of black people as complete,
complex, undiminished human beings. Appropriately, Hurston’s Their Eyes Were
Watching God, published in 1937, provides an enlightening look at the journey of
one of these undiminished human beings, Janie Crawford. Janie’s story – based on
principles of self-exploration, self-empowerment, and self-liberation – details
her loss and subsequent attainment of her independence of her own reality, as
she constantly learns and grows from her difficult experiences with gender
issues and racism in Their Eyes Were Watching God. Hurston’s grasp on the
reader’s imagination is demonstrated with her masterful use of imagery and
phrasing. Janie’s dialogue and vernacular carry the reader along with
seemingly innocuous pieces of vivid perception. In reality Hurston has put the
reader in such a position that they hardly realize they are ingesting something
deep and true. Their Eyes Were Watching God recognizes that there are problems
to the human condition, such as the need to possess the fear of the unknown and
the result of stagnation. Hurston does not leave us with the hopelessness;
rather, she extends a recognition and understanding of humanity’s need to escape
emptiness. The truth of life, as with death that it is done alone and at the end
of it all there should be a sense of self with a positive resolve. Janie’s
search begins in her Nanny’s yard, as Janie lies beneath the pear tree when;
“the inaudible voice of it all came to her. She saw a dust-bearing bee sink
into the sanctum of a bloom; the thousand sister-calyxes arch to meet the love
embrace and the ecstatic shiver of the tree from root to tiniest branch creaming
in every blossom and frothing with delight. So this was a marriage! She had been
summoned to behold a revelation” (11). Janie’s youthful idealism leads her
to believe that this intense sensuality must be similar to the intimacy between
lovers, and she wishes “to be a pear tree – any tree in bloom!” (11).

The image suggests a wholeness – as bees pollinate blossoms paralleling human
sexual intercourse – which Janie finds missing in her marriages to both Logan
Killicks and Joe Starks, but finally discovers in her relationship with Tea
Cake. After joyfully discovering an archetype for sensuality and love under the
pear tree at age sixteen, Janie quickly comes to understand the reality of
marriage when she marries Logan Killicks, then Joe Starks. Both men attempt to
coerce Janie into submission to them by treating her like a possession: where
Killicks works Janie like a mule, Joe objectifies her like a medal around his
neck. In addition, Janie learns that passion and love are tied to violence, as
Killicks threatens to kill her, and both Joe and Tea Cake beat her to assert
their dominance. Yet Janie continually struggles to keep her inner Self-intact
and strong, remaining resilient in spite of her husbands’ physical, verbal, and
mental abuse. Janie’s resilience is rewarded when she finally meets and
marries Tea Cake, who represents the closest semblance to her youthful idealism
regarding love and marriage. Rather than self-destruct under the constant
realities of racism and misogyny she receives throughout her life, Janie
Crawford does the opposite at the close of Their Eyes Were Watching God. The
novel’s final image states what Janie does throughout the story – taking her
difficult past in and growing stronger and wiser as a result of it. Author Zora
Neale Hurston believed that freedom “was something internal?. The man
himself must make his own emancipation” (199). Likewise, in her defining
moment of identity formation, Janie “pulled in her horizon like a great
fish-net. Pulled it from around the waist of the world and draped it over her
shoulder. So much of life in its meshes! She called in her soul to come and
see” (183). At the end of a novel focusing on self-revelation and
self-formation, Janie survives with her soul – made resilient by continual
struggle – intact. Janie’s grandmother was one of the most important
influences in her life, raising her since from an infant and passing on her
dreams to Janie. Janie’s mother ran away from home soon after Janie was born.

With her father also gone, the task of raising Janie fell to her grandmother,
Nanny. Nanny tells Janie ?Fact uh de matter, Ah loves yuh a whole heap
more’n Ah do yo’ mama, de one Ah did birth? (15). Nanny’s dream