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.