Female Elements in Their Eyes Were Watching God

Introduction

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston depicts a sense of ambivalence about black women's limited opportunities to assert themselves in a male-dominated and commodity-obsessed world. True to this conflicted outlook, placing blame is not within the purview of this work. Instead, it depicts one of the central tensions that define the diasporic experience as lived by women of color in America, thereby critiquing the distinctly American privilege of individualism that forces these women to negotiate the rift between individual and communal aspirations.

This research paper discusses the female elements in Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston. The author focuses on the aspects of the novel related to femininity. The novel depicts a woman's desire for autonomy — especially within an exiled community reliant upon each person's upholding of common bonds — as a threat to the fabric that sustains that community's sense of identity, purpose, and viability.

Story of Women's Struggle

Their Eyes Were Watching God is, in many respects, the life story of its author, Zora Neale Hurston. Despite the novelization and ancestral biography, the main character lives a life similar to Hurston's own. Finding the perfect match, failing several times, the efforts, the regrets, and the achievements all tell the story of an African-American woman in a society that discriminates against her not only on the basis of male chauvinism but also white racism. Hurston herself is well known for her work in the field of women's rights. Having witnessed the historic Harlem Renaissance firsthand, she understood the importance of equality and justice regardless of creed, color, caste, or gender. Being the granddaughter of a preacher and the daughter of a mayor, she was, by inheritance, a political and social reformist. During her time at Howard University, she co-founded The Hilltop, the student newspaper. She was a born writer, and her most critically acclaimed work, Their Eyes Were Watching God, is the focus of this paper (Jones, 2009).

Their Eyes Were Watching God tells the story of Janie Crawford, who was born after her mother was raped by a teacher — a mother who herself had a similar birth history. When her mother runs away, Janie's grandmother, Nanny, is determined that Janie will not suffer the same fate. Nanny reacts sternly when she sees Janie kissing a neighborhood boy. Fearing that history will repeat itself, Nanny arranges Janie's marriage to an older farmer who treats her more as a co-worker and farm helper than as a wife. Disappointed by the absence of love and respect and by being treated like a slave, Janie runs off with Jody Starks to Eatonville. Starks is shrewd enough to buy land there and establish a store, and he is soon elected mayor. Janie quickly realizes, however, that Starks is treating her merely as a trophy wife — he allows her to manage his business but forbids her from participating in social activities. When Starks dies, Janie finally finds herself free enough to live on her own terms. At this point in her life, she chooses to marry a man without high social status, having had enough of ambitious men. She selects a drifter and gambler who goes by the name Tea Cake as her life partner.

The novel illustrates the rift between individual and communal aspirations and depicts how a woman's desire for autonomy — especially within an exiled community reliant upon each person's upholding of common bonds — is perceived as a threat to the fabric that sustains that community's sense of identity, purpose, and viability (Ramsey, 41).

Taking into account the Edenic imagery in the novel, which delineates a corrupted world, readers can see how Hurston establishes parallels between the redemption narrative of her protagonist and that of the archetypal wanderer-laborers, Adam and Eve. The author conveys within the text the prospect for the same hard-won salvation that God makes available to Adam and Eve. In accordance with the felix culpa view of the fall, mankind's disobedience enables this salvation to be earned, in the sense that the introduction of the imperative to labor is a painful yet fulfilling consequence of self-assertion.

Thus, an act of self-assertion — although potentially self-interested — can open the opportunity for redemption, because self-assertion is both a form of labor and a means of growth. Elaine Scarry explores this paradox in The Body in Pain: "[work] has been repeatedly placed by the side of physical suffering yet has, at the same time and almost as often, been placed in the company of pleasure, art, imagination, civilization — phenomena that in varying degrees express man's expansive possibility, the movement out into the world that is the opposite of pain's contractive potential" (Scarry, 169).

Jane as a Radical Model of Women's Self-Assertion

Within the critical discussion of Their Eyes Were Watching God, views range from the belief that Janie is a radical model of women's self-assertion who rebels against the institution of marriage, to a felix culpa, or "fortunate fall," interpretation. The felix culpa reading extends the idea that the fall enabled mankind to be redeemed by Christ: the parallel with feminine agency is that an act of seeming disobedience could, in fact, bring about an opportunity for a woman to exert herself and act upon her desires (Scarry, 205).

Elaine Scarry (1985) explores this paradox in The Body in Pain, stating that "work has been repeatedly placed by the side of physical suffering yet has, at the same time and almost as often, been placed in the company of pleasure, art, imagination, civilization — phenomena that in varying degrees express man's expansive possibility, the movement out into the world that is the opposite of pain's contractive potential" (p. 169).

The perception that Janie made selfish choices stands in contrast to the more evenhanded analysis that she, at times, simply submitted to easy choices, yet eventually recognized that she must make a deliberate effort to perform an act of self-rescue. Some critics share the view that she is merely a willing participant in the subjugating roles of wife and obedient lover. For example, Pearlie Mae Fisher Peters (1998), focusing on how Janie harnesses "the law of verbal authority," equates Janie's "talking and fighting" with survival and "gaining self-respect" (pp. 127, 148).

These points of contention aside, the novel seems most interested in objectively depicting the consequences — both positive and negative — of a woman's so-called disobedience in the context of humanity's fallen condition. This disobedience takes the form both of defying the expectations of others and, more significantly, of being untrue to one's authentic self. The consequences of this disobedience are what prompt the painful process of self-discovery and self-rescue.

Conclusion

Their Eyes Were Watching God is a story of radical self-interest, in the sense that the text depicts the will of a woman to survive on her own terms. Through such tropes as a diasporic woman's labor, her rhizomatic pursuit of desire, and the fallacy of authentic blackness, it demonstrates how an African-American woman can achieve salvation by successfully negotiating the status of her body. At the point at which these three tropes intersect, the body is a key source of knowledge and empowerment. Accordingly, reclaiming the body from patriarchy's ideas about the type of work women should do and the manner in which they should express their sexual desires becomes the means by which Janie achieves salvation. In order to represent this particular form of physical redemption through her narrative, Hurston invokes an archetype of post-Edenic labor, in which reclaiming the body in this way requires self-rescue in the form of one's labor and sacrifice.

The novel's structure — from the dissemination of knowledge to an act of self-rescue — brings into focus the mythic tone of the story. This circumstance of mankind adrift within the context of paradise lost constructs a paradigm of diaspora that necessitates sacrifice for survival.

Due to humanity's conception of paradise and the pervasive sense of displacement from it, a cycle exists of degradation, exile, and the possibility for redemption. Weathers describes the tradition of aligning diaspora with biblical narratives, indicating that any narrativization of the diasporic experience ultimately relies on reference to Edenic imagery in order to embed, through symbolism, the prospect for redemption. The novel ultimately suggests that the central character is better off having foregone what she thought she wanted — romantic love — in order to lay claim to what is of utmost importance: self-knowledge and self-sufficiency. After killing Tea Cake, Janie can make peace with her roots and hold onto the purest distillation of Tea Cake's positive, edifying love.