Book Review: Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
Goodreads Description: Fair and long-legged, independent and articulate, Janie Crawford sets out to be her own person—no mean feat for a black woman in the '30s. Janie's quest for identity takes her through three marriages and into a journey back to her roots.
My Review: When it was originally released in 1937, Their Eyes Were Watching God drew considerable backlash for its depiction of "average" black Americans, especially from other prominent writers of the Harlem Renaissance. The authors of this movement used art to argue for social change by depicting black people as educated, artistic, and activist - bucking against long-held racist beliefs that black people were intellectually or culturally inferior. However, these authors were largely trapped within, and often conformed to, white standards of success in order to gain equality and approval in America. Zora Neale Hurtson's book took a completely different approach. Hurston worked as an anthropologist as well as a writer, and was more interested in examining what made black communities unique. She depicted "average" black Americans without judgement -- reveling in various accents and speaking habits, depicted communal storytelling and humour that some might consider Vaudeville-esque -- and even critiqued the educated black characters within her text for their condescension and arrogance. This drew a fair bit of backlash from other black writers who argued that the book resembled caricaturesque minstrel shows, however, this feels like a grave misunderstanding of the nuance within Hurston's book. When analyzed today, we can see how Hurston's book is a celebration of black culture in America, with its insistence to see these people fully realized, with all their jokes, language, and culture accepted as is. While respectability politics has had its uses throughout civil rights movements, Hurston's book reminds us that if people of colour only measure their success through white standards, it ultimately leaves them isolated from themselves and their community. In that way, Their Eyes feels ahead of its time, pushing for a radical acceptance of people as they are rather than purposing an ideal for what they should be.
As you can tell from the short summary, it's difficult to pin down the exact plot of Their Eyes. This book is a lot of things. It's a love story, a coming-of-age tale, it's a feminist text, a story of self-actualization, it's an anthropologic and linguistic exploration of black culture, with a profoundly optimistic look on race relations. It focuses on Janie Crawford as she grows up through her three marriages, coming to understand the meaning of love, marriage, and agency. As many coming of age stories are, the book is slow paced, focusing on slow-burning character arcs and mundane plot events over dramatic twists. Over the course of the book, Janie subtly moves away from the expectations of white culture and finds self-actualization and agency through embracing "blackness." Janie's first husband unquestioningly follows white culture and heteronormativity, expecting Janie to fall into her "wifely" role. Despite living in a black community, her second husband pushes both himself and Janie towards classist elitism that pits "respectable blackness" against the "common folk," and ends up isolating Janie from her community and culture. Janie resists this influence, and through her third husband, connects with the black community and finds more happiness, passion, equality, and agency, despite living closer to poverty and instability. In this way, Hurston bucks against respectability politics and shows that if black people "behaved like whites wanted them to," it would leave them isolated from each other, their culture, and themselves.
Hurston's novel also showcases a profound optimism when it comes to race relations - focusing very little on racism and instead showing black people living their lives, largely unhindered by oppression. She features the town of Eatonville as a major setting, which was a real town and the first self-governing all-black municipality in the United States (incorporated in 1887). Eatonville in the book faces no trouble from white people and exists unremarkably. Hurston doesn't fluff up the town's importance or incite any racist drama, it's just another setting. The book still features racism in pieces, such as when one of Janie's husbands is forced by the Red Cross to do manual labor and he has to run from gunfire to escape, but the book doesn't linger on these moments, giving it a strange sort of optimism and freedom, despite the time period it's set in.
The book features a lot of heavy accents, phonetic spelling, and slang to really capture the "language" these communities spoke, and don't get me wrong, Hurston does an excellent job with these accents. She captures their mannerisms and culture in a way that feels rich, realistic, and nuanced, but every character speaks with a heavy accent. Every. One. Not to mention, this book is very dialogue heavy. There are whole pages where two or more characters are talking, wherein the conversation is lobbed between two speakers without much to break it up. Even white characters, when they appear, speak in their own heavy, difficult-to-read accents. While this dialogue is fascinating from an anthropological/sociological/linguistic point of view, I really hated reading it. Just trying to decode what characters are actually saying, with all the dropped letters, creative spelling, and phonetic sounds was a nightmare. I read this book at a snail's pace and all the decoding left little energy to actually enjoy the story. Many words had to be sounded out aloud, because they were spelled to recreate a sound, rather than a real word. "Ah" is used almost exclusively instead of "I," for example. Despite that, I have a hard time imagining this book without the accents. It feels like something would be lost without them, which reminds me of the saying, "it's not about the destination, it's about the journey." For these characters, it's not so much what they say, but how they say it.
Aside from the heavily accented dialogue, the narrative is written in gorgeous prose that's littered with wise insights on the world, love, marriage, and growing up. Hurston especially has a lot to say about the intersection of race and gender (and to a lesser extent, class), commenting often on how oppression affects black men versus black women, while also exploring the power dynamics between married couples. The book culminates in a storm and legal trial that tests Janie's beliefs about love and marriage, both in personal and legal frameworks, and pushes her to establish agency and self-advocacy. The climax feels believable but dramatic. It fits in well with the humdrum normalcy of married life, but also instills the larger-than-life, once-in-a-lifetime type of conflict that elevates the text to the next level - pushing Janie to fully embody what she's learned about love, marriage, and agency in order to survive and thrive going forward.
TL;DR: 3/5 stars. A fascinating text that analyzes the intersection of race, gender, and class from a black feminist perspective.
