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.”
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Their Eyes Were Watching God
Zora Neale Hurston (1937) · 219pages · Harlem Renaissance · 9 AP appearances
Summary
Janie Crawford returns to Eatonville, Florida, after burying her third husband, Tea Cake, whom she shot to save her own life. She tells her story to her best friend Pheoby: two loveless marriages — to the old farmer Logan Killicks and the ambitious mayor Joe Starks — then a third marriage to the younger, joyful Tea Cake, which ends in the Florida Everglades when a rabies-maddened Tea Cake tries to kill her. Janie has lived fully and returns to herself.
Why It Matters
Published in 1937 to mixed reviews — dismissed by Richard Wright as 'quaint' and by many Harlem Renaissance critics as insufficiently political. It went out of print and Hurston died poor and forgotten in 1960. Alice Walker found her grave in 1973 and wrote 'In Search of Zora Neale Hurston' (1975...
Themes & Motifs
Diction & Style
Register: Radically dual: Hurston's narration is formal, dense, metaphor-rich; her dialogue is transcribed African American Vernacular English. These two registers operate simultaneously and are equally valid.
Narrator: Third-person omniscient but intimately aligned with Janie's consciousness. The narrator's voice is lyrical, metaphor-...
Figurative Language: Extremely high in narration. Metaphor-based, not simile-based. The pear tree, the horizon, the mule, the head rag, the 'inside and outside self'
Historical Context
Harlem Renaissance / Jim Crow South, 1920s-1930s: The Harlem Renaissance context is essential for understanding the novel's reception: male writers (Wright, Ellison) believed Black literature must be directly confrontational with white oppression....
Key Characters
Talking Points
- Hurston uses two distinct languages in this novel: a formal, lyrical narrator voice and transcribed African American Vernacular English in dialogue. What is she arguing about language by keeping these two registers separate but equal?
- Richard Wright dismissed the novel as 'quaint' and said it didn't address the 'real' problems facing Black Americans. How would you respond to Wright using evidence from the text?
- Nanny says 'De nigger woman is de mule uh de world.' Is the novel an argument against this statement, a confirmation of it, or something more complicated?
- Janie's pear tree vision is the novel's governing metaphor. Find three moments where the pear tree is explicitly or implicitly invoked. How does each reference measure Janie's current relationship against the original standard?
- Joe Starks silences Janie in public, makes her cover her hair, and prevents her from joining the porch storytellers. Why is each of these acts of control significant in this specific community and culture?
Notable Quotes
“Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of ...”
“Now, women forget all those things they don't want to remember, and remember everything they don't want to forget. The dream is the truth.”
“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 t...”
Why Read This
Because no one else writes like this. The prose is so beautiful it will make you stop and reread sentences just to hear them again. Because Janie Crawford is the most fully human female protagonist in the American literary canon — not defined by w...