Their+Eyes+Were+Watching+God

 = //Their Eyes Were Watching God// Novel Analysis  =

The life of Janie Crawford, the heroine of //**//Their//** **//Eyes//** **//Were//** **//Watching//** **//God//**//, is shaped by bourgeois values—white in origin. She finds love and self-identity only by rejecting that life and becoming a wholehearted participant in black folk culture. Her grandmother directs Janie’s entrance into adulthood. Born into slavery, the older woman hopes to find protection and materialistic comforts for Janie in a marriage to the property- owning Logan Killicks. Janie, who has grown up in a different generation, does not share her grandmother’s values. When she finds she cannot love her husband, she runs off with Jody Stark, who is on his way to Eatonville, where he hopes to become a “big voice,” an appropriate phrase for life in a community that highly values verbal ability. Jody becomes that “big voice” as mayor of the town, owner of the general store, and head of the post office. He lives both a bourgeois and a folk life in Eatonville. He constructs a big house—the kind white people have—but he wanders out to the porch of the general store whenever he wants to enjoy the perpetual storytelling which takes place there. Even though Janie has demonstrated a talent for oratory, however, he will not let her join these sessions or participate in the mock funeral for a mule which has become a popular character in the townspeople’s stories. “He didn’t,” the narrator suggests, “want her talking after such trashy people.” As Janie tells a friend years later, Jody “classed me off.” He does so by silencing her. For several years, Janie has no voice in the community or in her private life. Her life begins to seem unreal: “She sat and watched the shadow of herself going about tending store and prostrating itself before Jody.” One day, after Stark insults her in front of customers in the store, however, she speaks out and, playing the dozens, insults his manhood. The insult causes an irreconcilable break between them. After Jody’s death, Janie is courted by Tea Cake Woods, a laborer with little money. Though many of her neighbors disapprove of the match, Janie marries him. “Dis ain’t no business proposition,” she tells her friend Pheoby, “and no race after property and titles. Dis is uh love game. Ah done lived Grandma’s way, now Ah mens tuh live mine.” Marriage to Tea Cake lowers her social status but frees her from her submissive female role, from her shadow existence. Refusing to use her money, Tea Cake takes her down to the Everglades, where they become migrant workers. She picks beans with him in the fields, and he helps her prepare **//their//** dinners. With Tea Cake, she also enters into the folk culture of the Everglades, and that more than anything else enables her to shed her former submissive identity. Workers show up at **//their//** house every night to sing, dance, gamble, and, above all, to talk, like the folks in Eatonville on the front porch of the general store. Janie learns how to tell “big stories” from listening to the others, and she is encouraged to do so. This happy phase of Janie’s life ends tragically as she and Tea Cake attempt to escape a hurricane and the ensuing flood. Tea Cake saves Janie from drowning but, in the process, is bitten by a rabid dog. Sick and crazed, he tries to shoot Janie. She is forced to kill him in self-defense. Not everything she has gained during her relationship with Tea Cake, however, dies with him. The strong self-identity she has achieved while living in the Everglades enables her to withstand the unjust resentment of **//their//** black friends as well as her trial for murder in a white court. Most important, she is able to endure her own loss and returns to Eatonville, self-reliant and wise. Tea Cake, she knows, will live on in her thoughts and feelings—and in her words. She tells her story to her friend Pheoby—that storytelling event frames the novel—and allows Pheoby to bring it to the other members of the community. As the story enters the community’s oral culture, it will influence it. Indeed, as the novel closes, Janie’s story has already affected Pheoby. “Ah done growed ten feet higher from jus’ listenin’ tuh you,” she tells Janie. “Ah ain’t satisfied wid mahself no mo’.” In her novels, **//Hurston//** did not represent the oppression of blacks because she refused to view African American life as impoverished. If she would not focus on white racism, however, her novels do oppose white culture. In //**//Their//** **//Eyes//** **//Were//** **//Watching//** **//God//**//, Janie does not find happiness until she gives up a life governed by white values and enters into the verbal ceremonies of black folk culture. Loving celebrations of a separate black folk life **//were//** **//Hurston’s//** effective political weapon; racial pride was one of her great gifts to American literature. “Sometimes, I feel discriminated against,” she once told her readers, “but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How //can// any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It’s beyond me.” //Essay by:// Deborah Kaplan

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Below is a creative project that symbolically represents Janie's journey to find love. While it misses many key aspects of the novel, it certainly captures a great deal about Janie's journey.