Their Eyes Were Watching God
Zora Neale Hurston (1937)
“A Black woman's quest for selfhood told in the most beautiful English prose of the 20th century — dismissed by critics, buried for decades, then resurrected to become essential.”
Character Analysis
Janie is the rarest thing in American literature: a Black woman whose inner life is the novel's entire subject. She is not a symbol, not a victim, not a lesson. She is a person who wants what the pear tree promised — mutual, joyful, organic love — and spends her life measuring every relationship against that standard. She makes bad choices, survives them, and returns to herself. The novel ends not with her finding love but with her finding Janie.
Her narrated thoughts are in the narrator's lyrical standard English; her speech shifts between AAVE and a more formal register depending on context. With Tea Cake, she is relaxed and dialectal. With the court, she is formal.