Janie and Celie: Voice and Identity in Two Landmark Novels

Introduction: Two Voices on the Margins

The main character and narrator of Zora Neale Hurston's novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), Janie, has much in common with the narrator and main character Celie in Alice Walker's novel The Color Purple (1982). Each speaks authentically, in her own voice — the too-often ignored voice of an African-American female in a white male-dominated society. For both characters, however, authenticity of voice has come at great cost, and through the surmounting of numerous obstacles, the greatest of these being fear and a lack of confidence within themselves.

As Henry Louis Gates, Jr. suggests, fear and hesitancy by African-Americans, male and female alike, to speak authentically has deep roots: "For just over two hundred years, the concern to depict the quest of the black speaking subject to find his or her voice has been a repeated topos" (p. 29). Both Janie and Celie are young African-American women, essentially alone and unprotected in the world. Each character is therefore forced to find her own path in life and her authentic voice entirely on her own, through a combination of trial and error, observation, internal courage, and intuition. Often both characters' processes of learning who they truly are include facing painful realities about the weaknesses and limitations of others — and of men in particular.

Although Their Eyes Were Watching God and The Color Purple were published nearly forty-five years apart, both Janie and Celie live in an equally white, male-dominated world. Within that world, due not only to their race but to their gender, each character exists — nameless, voiceless, and essentially unimportant (female versions, in that particular sense, of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man) — on the fringes of society.

Zora Neale Hurston and the African-American Female Voice

Zora Neale Hurston (c. 1891–1960) is sometimes called the grandmother of African-American literature. Hurston participated in the post-World War I Harlem Renaissance, a period of flowering in African-American artistic and literary expression within the United States, unprecedented before or after, occurring in the years between the two world wars. Hurston is best known for Their Eyes Were Watching God, which is, much like The Color Purple, a young, inexperienced African-American woman's coming-of-age story. Hurston was the first writer ever to produce a novel featuring an African-American woman as the coming-of-age main character — that is, she was the first to validate, within fiction, such an individual's experience as something other than an extension of white and/or male experience. As Sherley Anne Williams observes in her "Foreword" to Their Eyes Were Watching God:

"Black women had been portrayed as characters in numerous novels by blacks and non-blacks. But these portraits were limited by the stereotypical images of, on the one hand, the ham-fisted matriarch, strong and loyal in the defense of the white family she serves . . . and, on the other, the amoral, instinctual slut." (p. vii)

Hurston was also the first African-American novelist to describe African-American female experience without somehow degrading that experience. According to the encyclopedia entry "Hurston, Zora Neale":

"As a fiction writer, Hurston is noted for her metaphorical language, her story-telling abilities, and her interest in and celebration of Southern black culture in the United States. Her best-known novel is Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), in which she tracked a Southern black woman's search, over 25 years and 3 marriages, for her true identity and a community in which she can develop that identity. Hurston's prolific literary output . . . was not political, but her characters' use of dialect, her manner of portraying black culture, and her conservatism created controversy within the black community. Throughout her career she addressed issues of race and gender, often relating them to the search for freedom."

Hurston's fictional works — of which Their Eyes Were Watching God remains the most widely read — deal often with universal themes, including the conflicts and difficulties caused by a young African-American woman's struggle to define her own self: in relation to men, her community, and the outside world. From the start, Hurston's main character Janie is, as she states, "full of that oldest human longing — self revelation" (p. 18).

Most typically within Hurston's works, a young woman is led away from her own self (as Janie is, for example, by her well-meaning grandmother into her first loveless marriage to the plodding Logan Killicks) through either external circumstances — such as naivety, youthfulness, or others' wish to assure her security — her own weak judgment, or a combination of all these factors. The young woman is then left to struggle on her own to find her authenticity, often hurting herself and others along the way.

As another example, in Hurston's short story "The Gilded Six-Bits" (1933), a young, recently married woman named Missy is seduced away from her loving husband Joe by an apparently wealthy newcomer, Otis Slemmons. After Joe struggles within himself and finds a way to forgive his wife, Missy must learn, by working through her own guilt, to accept Joe's forgiveness and to forgive herself as well. When she hears Joe at their front door again — meaning that all has been forgiven — Missy, with their new baby in her arms, "couldn't run to the door, but she crept there as quickly as she could" (Hurston, "The Gilded Six-Bits," p. 1072).

Similarly, in Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie must learn to accept herself as she is and forgive herself — and others — for past weaknesses and mistakes. Only then can she fully appreciate Tea Cake's love for her: love given to her as she is, rather than as he would like her to be — unlike either Logan or Joe Starks, Janie's previous husbands.

Alice Walker's Debt to Hurston

Alice Walker, author of The Color Purple, frequently acknowledges her debt to Zora Neale Hurston and Hurston's literary influence on her characterizations of African-American women. According to Harold Bloom, quoting Walker on Hurston's novel: "There is no book more important to me than this one" (p. 1). Walker also stated, in another tribute to Hurston:

"We live in a society, as blacks, women, and artists, whose contests we do not design and with whose insistence on ranking us we are permanently at war. To know that second place, in such a society, has often required more work and innate genius than first — a longer, grimmer struggle over greater odds — and to be able to fling your scarf about dramatically while you demonstrate that you know — is to trust your own self-evaluation in the face of the Great White Western Commercial of white and male supremacy, which is virtually everything we see, outside and often inside our own homes. That Hurston held her own, literally, against the flood of whiteness and maleness that diluted so much other black art of the period in which she worked is a testimony to her genius and her faith." (Qtd. in Bloom, "Introduction," pp. 1–2)

Moreover, according to Lauren Berlant, Walker's The Color Purple expands on many ideas and themes initially described four and a half decades earlier in Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God:

"The Color Purple problematizes tradition-bound origin myths and political discourse in the hope of creating and addressing an Afro-American nation constituted by a rich, complex, and ambiguous culture. But rather than using patriarchal languages and logics of power to describe the emergence of a postpatriarchal Afro-American national consciousness, Celie's narrative radically resituates the subject's national identity within a mode of aesthetic, not political, representation. These discursive modes are not 'naturally' separate, but The Color Purple deliberately fashions such a separation in its attempt to represent a national culture that operates according to 'womanist' values rather than patriarchal forms. While political language is laden with the historical values and associations of patriarchal power, aesthetic discourse here carries with it a utopian force that comes to be associated with the spirit of everyday life relations among women."

Within Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie is essentially a free spirit; within The Color Purple, Celie yearns to be. Both are prohibited, however, from expressing their authentic identities by their families, their communities, and their society.

Conclusion

As both Walker and Hurston imply in the conclusions of their respective novels, happiness within oneself must come first, if one is ever to find happiness with another. Janie finds happiness with a younger man who loves her as she is. Celie finds happiness after years of abuse and silence, once she has claimed her own voice and her own place in the world. Both novels insist that self-acceptance is not a luxury but a necessity. Celie's final words capture this renewal perfectly: "[D]on't think us feel old at all. . . . Matter of fact, I think this the youngest us ever felt." (p. 251)

Hurston and Walker, writing four and a half decades apart, arrive at the same conclusion: that for an African-American woman navigating a world that routinely denies her selfhood, the act of finding and speaking in one's own authentic voice is both an act of survival and an act of profound courage. The parallel journeys of Janie and Celie stand as enduring testimony to that truth.

Works Cited

Berlant, Lauren. "Race, Gender, and Nation in The Color Purple." In Modern Critical Interpretations: Alice Walker's The Color Purple. Harold Bloom (Ed.). Philadelphia, PA: Chelsea House, 2000. 3–11.

Bloom, Harold. "Introduction." In Modern Critical Interpretations: Alice Walker's The Color Purple. Harold Bloom (Ed.). Philadelphia, PA: Chelsea House, 2000. 1–2.

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. "Color Me Zora: Alice Walker's (Re)Writing of the Speakerly Text." In Modern Critical Interpretations: Alice Walker's The Color Purple. Harold Bloom (Ed.). Philadelphia, PA: Chelsea House, 2000. 29–52.

"Hurston, Zora Neale." Microsoft Encarta Online Encyclopedia. Retrieved May 22, 2005.

Hurston, Zora Neale. "The Gilded Six-Bits." In The Harper American Literature, Vol. 2, 2nd ed. Donald McQuade et al. (Eds.). New York: Longman, 1993. 1064–1072.

Hurston, Zora Neale. Their Eyes Were Watching God. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1978.

Walker, Alice. The Color Purple. New York: Pocket, 1982.

Williams, Sherley Anne. "Foreword." In Hurston, Zora Neale. Their Eyes Were Watching God. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1978. v–xv.