Romance

Zora Neale Hurston is almost certainly a very well-read author. Her seminal work, Their Eyes Were Watching God breaks new ground in its subject matter and location, but it uses themes and modes common to many previous canon works. One prime example of this is the somewhat Romantic theme of true love in a marriage as opposed to marriage by necessity. Janie Starks marries a man at the very young age of 16, and due to the awakening of the desire for true passion within her, is unhappy in her marriage. She feels that romance and a man she loves is vital for a marriage, while her grandmother believes that stability and safety is the most important part of a marriage. Based on this ideological difference, Janie runs away from her husband and goes through the events depicted in the novel. Yet for some reason, even though such themes are commonly accepted as standard fare for a Romantic novel, I have never liked Romantic novels like this, and for the same reason I so far dislike Their Eyes Were Watching God.

My distaste for novels like this began in Sophomore English. The broad subject was British literature, and of course the Romantic era covered a large part of British literature, so we read several books from this time. Some of them, such as Frankenstein, were alright, and I read these with some difficulty but got through them. However, others, such as Wuthering Heights, were just not to my liking at all. I am pretty good at struggling through books that I don’t like when I need to, but this book just stood like a brick wall before me. Heathcliff and Catherine’s eternal love was supposed to be the driving force of the whole book, but it never seemed important to me, and the novel just seemed so small. There was so little happening, so little in the characters that I could identify with, that I just couldn’t finish the book. Maybe I am not particularly romantic, but the theme of lost love was not enough for me to work with.

                Their Eyes Were Watching God of course takes a different perspective on this theme. Janie does not simply want to be with a man and exist as his wife; she wants to be in true love, but she realizes that this requires personal freedom on her part and she doesn’t want to be subservient to a man. However, the novel is still in many ways about love, in a somewhat Romantic light, and I have a lot of trouble identifying with this. Maybe my scope of reading is a little limited, but something about this theme seems so limited itself, compared to the grandeur of a book like Invisible Man. A novel about how each person fits into society (or doesn’t) that takes its protagonist through a variety of ridiculous situations and that is wry in the levels of metaphor that implies just seems more interesting to me. I just don’t connect with the quest for love as a theme in a novel

Freedom

Many people see Their Eyes Were Watching God as one of the seminal works in African-American literature. Given Hurston's relentless dedication to depicting Southern black life in rural communities, this is a reasonable light to view the book in. However, others make the case that this novel is primarily a racial novel, and this a point that I would have to dispute. While there are certainly racial elements of Their Eyes Were Watching God, the main character is not constantly seeking to understand her life in the context of race. Indeed, the topic of race and racism is not brought up often at all, and only in passing. One modern reading of the novel that does align with Janie's struggles, though, is a feminist context. Janie is perpetually in a struggle between her desire to find "true love" and her desire to remain independent and not be subjugated by any man she is with. Every large event that Janie experiences ties into this quest to be a free woman, and for this reason, I believe that Their Eyes Were Watching God is one of the first feminist novels.

                The first indication that this novel gives us about its gender themes is in the opening passage. The narrator of the novel begins with a broad statement about men and women. Men are constantly looking for boats on the horizon, seeking their destiny afar and by travel and experience. Women, meanwhile, stay at home and watch men leave. With this statement, the narrator is affirming rather poetically traditional gender roles. Men are adventurers, explorers, and they are the ones doing all the action. Women simply wait. However, this idea is almost instantly subverted by the introduction of the protagonist, Janie Starks. She is introduced as attractive, yet scorned by many in the community for having a relationship with a younger man. She has mud-caked overalls, and she has returned from hard work in the Everglades. This is clearly not a woman anything like the gender divide specified in the opening paragraph.

                However, when the narrator shows us the chronological beginning of the story, with Janie as a young girl, she is much different than the character shown in the first chapter. She simply is a young teenager, just hit puberty, who instantly becomes enamored with the idea of true love, and wants to have a relationship with a man that will be idealized, romantic, and will knock her off of her feet. Her grandmother, her guardian, instantly bucks at this when she sees Janie kissing a boy over the fence. In her mind, Janie should not be concerned with true love, because she grew up in slavery, and her idea of the perfect life for her granddaughter was a stable husband, who could provide for her. Janie (and many readers) disagree strongly with her idea of freedom as a providing husband, but in some ways this lays the background for Janie's development into a woman. Janie's grandmother is clearly an independent woman, having escaped slavery and raised Janie's mother on the run. Their disagreement on true love is indicative of the further freedom Hurston believes a woman needs, i.e. the ability to love who she wants to love and not just the man who can give her a house, but Janie arguably would not have been able to run away and seek her fate at all had she not had a grandmother as a role model who did a somewhat similar thing: escaping a situation that she believed prevented her freedom.

                When Janie left her first husband, a humble, homely farmer with a respectable sixty-acre plot, she left him for a smooth-talking man passing through town, and she ended up still not being free. However, time passed, and she began to understand more exactly what it was that she wanted. As a sixteen-year-old, she frankly had almost no idea of what love was, other than that her marriage had none. It took years of marriage to a man almost the polar opposite of her first husband for her to realize what was missing from both marriages: her agency to do things. In the first marriage, she was required to work the land with her husband to survive. This was not out of the ordinary for a farmer's wife, and the requests he was making were not unreasonable, but his sweet-talking ended quickly and she was left with a man who she didn't love that made her work hard. She felt like she had no freedom. In contrast, her second husband pampered and wooed her, but it soon became apparent that she was supposed to exist as his wife, not as a human being. She wasn't allowed to talk to the people or even let her hair down, and she had no agency in this relationship either. When her husband eventually died (after twenty years) she knew that all she wanted was agency. She was going to be beholden to no man.

                This idea, while easy to grasp now, was somewhat radical in Hurston's time. Feminism was not a household word, and a woman free to enter relationships with multiple men and seek her own destiny was not a woman that society would readily accept. However, strangely enough, much of the concern about the novel's feminism was almost totally overshadowed by the novel's purported racial content. Richard Wright was so furious about the novel's "shameful" depiction of the modern black person that the novel failed in all aspects in his eyes. Because the novel was written by a black woman, about black people, critics analyzed the novel almost entirely in a racial context and missed the budding sense of female identity and self-determination. These themes, not the racial themes so commonly touted in Their Eyes Were Watching God, are the themes that stick.

Dialect

                Zora Neale Hurston wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God in part as an attempt to document and capture the lives of African-American men and women in the deep South. These people, having  remained in the South instead of emigrating to the North, and leaving much of their culture and tradition behind when they did emigrate to the city, existed in a world largely unseen by the average American reader. Hurston received funding to travel throughout the South and document their traditions, partially to preserve them for future generations and partially as material for her fiction. Their Eyes Were Watching God reflects many of these traditions, but the most instantly apparent and often confusing aspect of Southern life in this book is the pervasive use of dialect. The novel's characters speak quite fluently in vernacular, and the text depicts their often nonstandard grammar, accents, and complex idioms. Even the third person narrator takes on aspects of the vernacular at points during the book, when following characters particularly closely.

                The first question that Hurston's contemporary readers, and indeed many modern readers ask, is "Why dialect?" The contractions, omissions of letters, and word choices force the reader to analyze sentences audibly instead of visually, and many of the sayings are so obscure and removed from their meaning that they cannot be understood without close attention to context. At the beginning of the novel, the reader is almost instantly confused by the conversations, and must read them multiple times to figure out what the characters are saying and how they are saying it.

                However, by midway through the book, the dialect is almost unnoticeable. It seems almost as if the characters are speaking aloud in the reader's head, and most of the difficulties aforementioned have slipped away as the grammar has been seen to be consistent and the dialogue reflective of actual speech patterns. At some point, the dialect stops removing us from the scene and starts bringing us in closer, by creating a somewhat film-like attention to depict exactly what the characters are not saying, and not paraphrasing it in any way.

                Another example of a book which uses its own confusing lexicon is A Clockwork Orange. The protagonist and narrator, Alex, speaks in a British-Russian slang that employs religious use of Cockney rhyming slang, Russian loanwords. When the novel begins, the reader is literally incapable of understanding half of the words (most of the slang is not English), but the reader quickly catches on to the patterns of the language and by the end, the reader and the narrator are using the same vocabulary entirely. One side effect of this is that the protagonist, who is quite a morally reprehensible man, in some ways pulls us into his world and makes us understand him in a way that we would not if he were speaking standard English. A parallel can be drawn here with Their Eyes Were Watching God: Hurston's contemporaries, especially white ones, might not understand or be willing to immerse themselves in Southern black culture. By using dialect, the reader is implicitly drawn into the conversations the characters have, and by making the effort to learn the speech patterns and expressions, can identify with the characters more readily.

                Dialect also possesses another quality that must have appealed to Hurston. In many ways, the vernacular present in Southern communities is an artifact just as much as their folklore and customs are. As an anthropologist, Hurston made note of the games that the people played, the ceremonies for weddings and religion, and the stories that they told. If she wanted to fully capture the extent of Southern culture, representing the language that they spoke must have also been vital, for it is as likely to disappear as the other customs people leave behind when they leave the South. To preserve it, she likely felt it important to include the dialect in her novel. Their culture might have been preserved, but without the language, it would be almost impossible to place yourself in their shoes.