Race and Gender in Their Eyes Were Watching God

In last Friday's class we discussed some critical responses from three black scholars to Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God that focused on the book's status as a great work of African-American literature. Two of those responses, written by Richard Wright and Alain Locke, both contemporaries of Hurston, criticize the book for what they perceive to be its failure to live up to their expectations of what a great black novel should be. I would argue that in doing so they have misread the intentions of the novelist: Their Eyes Were Watching God is primarily concerned with issues of gender, not with issues of race.

In having Janie's grandmother refer to the black woman as "de mule uh duh world," Hurston sets up a tale not about the struggle of the black American living in a prejudiced society, but the struggle of a woman to find independence and self-worth in a rural black community. June Jordan is correct when she argues that "whites do not figure in [the novel] . . . white anything or anybody is not important". The only white characters to appear in the novel do so during flashbacks, specifically to times before Janie's grandmother purchased her own property. The rest of the novel is focused purely on Eatonville and the other all-black communities that Janie finds herself in. By choosing her settings in this way, Hurston de-emphasizes racial themes and puts the focus on Janie's quest for self-affirmation as a woman.

Other evidence for this reading of the novel comes from the fact that the hardships Janie faces in the novel come to her not because of her race, but because of her gender. As a woman, Janie is forced to marry the first man her grandmother deems correct for her, then spends the majority of her life being ignored and abused by the men society says she has to rely on. Only through finding her own self-worth does Janie realize that she deserves to live life the way she believes she should live it, and though she chooses to rely on Tea Cake even after inheriting money from Jody, it is made clear in the novel that she is making a conscious choice to do so.

Locke in particular is incorrect in his assertion that Hurston's novel is not one of social document fiction. With Janie's story Hurston presents the ongoing efforts of a woman trying to make her own place in the world and does so in a way that equates it with those of other oppressed groups struggling to claim an equal standing in the society in which they live.