The Title

Pre-reading Expectations


When I was looking through the list of books to choose the one to write a course paper on the one that caught my attention was Zora Neale Hurston’s “Their Eyes Were Watching God”. Firstly, the author’s name seemed very unusual, and then the title of the book was intriguing. It seemed like a very spiritual book. Eye is known to be a metaphor of soul, a mirror of soul, and the collocation of “their eyes” gives an impression of somebody who is distant. “They were watching God”, for example, wouldn’t have given such an impression. Also, the title makes one wonder, who can these mysterious “they” be if they can watch God? At least it’s said they were watching not his deeds, but Him. So the title made a very solemn impression, and the book was supposed to be about some spiritual issues.
After getting the first impression, I made an attempt to find out a little more about the author. Soon I learnt that Zora Hurston is actually a Afro-American novelist, folklorist and anthropologist, a star of Harlem Renaissance, and “Their Eyes Were Watching God” is one of her best works, her most highly acclaimed novel, which tells a story of a woman’s maturation and spiritual growth. All this together with the first impression got from the title was actually very exciting.
Also it seemed to me that reading a book about spiritual problems and development by such a writer would help me or at least give me some clue to understanding a different mentality, a different structure of mind ad world outlook.

Post-Reading Understanding

After reading you find out that the title is a quotation from the book, from the chapter when the storm came and Janie, Tea Cake and Motor were sitting in the house hiding from it. There was nothing else they could do, because they hadn’t made a move earlier, with the Indians and the whites. “Ole Massa is doin’ His work now. Us oughta keep quiet.”
A 20th-century psychoanalytic Jaspers concluded that “the genuineness, the authenticity of human entity reveals itself in frontier situations”. This means that the acquisition of essence, liberty, cognition of the outer world comes to a human being in the “frontier situations”: in the face of death, in suffering, through the feeling of guilt, in struggle, i.e. when a person finds himself/herself on a boarder between entity and non-entity.
This is exactly where the characters found themselves. And this is why their eyes were watching God. They were watching the will of the Powerful Master sway the destinies and they were realizing that this Power is far beyond human perception. Literally they weren’t really looking at anything; here “eyes” and “watching” come as metaphors of the souls and spirits of these humans realizing and obtaining their truth, God’s truth, the gospel truth.
“They seemed to be staring at the dark, but their eyes were watching God.”

Impressions

Personally, I found the book absolutely stunning. The first thing that is special is that everything except the author’s speech is written in slang and in the way that it sounds. This helps you to imagine events and dialogs more vividly, makes you think even on simple words and in the end you realize that those simple words can often mean much more than they seem.
The plot is just fascinating. The love that Janie finds at last after so many years of hardships and misunderstandings is what she deserved and is just what everybody is looking for. Although not always ideal, but true and corresponding with your emotions, it makes you feel you’re living through it together with Janie. Everything that happens in it – be it joy or jealousy, divine bliss or disaster, you find confirmation to all this in your heart and you really feel the characters, making projections on your own experience. When the author explains the acts of her characters you start to understand some things in the psychology of the sexes and even in the special traits of another mentality.
The ending is totally unexpected and at first unwelcome. You start asking yourself questions like “Why should bliss end, especially like this? Why can’t it last for ever, at least on paper if not in life?” And then comes the realization that it actually can’t, we get used to good things so quickly that soon we don’t know it’s bliss until we’ve lost it. It’s not the “…And they lived happily ever after” books that leave a trace in the soul, but those that have the open, questioning ends, that first open you up, and then make you ache, make you cry and make you learn lessons. This is just one of such books, you’ll never forget it once you’ve read it.
It might look a bit contradicting with all the aching and crying I’ve mentioned above, but I’m

SURE
YOU WILL

ENJOY!

Major Theme

The novel is the story of a woman's search for contentment within herself; it is probably the first American novel of its type. Janie takes her lifetime of experiences and then gathers them into herself. Janie both fully lives and transcends her experience to become a complete person. The novel is the story of how she slowly arrives at her state of wholeness.
Minor Themes
The novel also revolves around the theme of race relations. Janie's story really begins when she realizes that she has dark skin. It had never been an issue in her early childhood. Once she is aware of her difference, however, she begins to notice how differently black people are treated.
The theme is most poignantly portrayed after the hurricane, when the people are burying the dead. The white bodies are placed in separate pine boxes for burial; the black bodies are casually tossed into an open, communal grave.
The novel also brings up gender differences. Janie's three husbands see their roles as providing for their wives. Logan, Joe, and Tea Cake all work hard and apparently enjoy their work. Janie, however, is expected by Logan and Joe to stay home and do domestic chores. If she is needed as an extra pair of hands, they direct her to help and tell her what to do. Both men are harsh on her if she does not live up to their expectations. They feel it is their right as her husband to punish her both verbally and physically. Tea Cake respects Janie as a woman. He allows her to share in his life and work beside him in the fields. But even Tea Cake occasionally lowers himself to verbal and physical abuse of his wife. In the early twentieth century, this picture of black domestic life was not questioned.
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MOOD

Although filled with hardships, Their Eyes Are Watching God has an incredibly inspiring mood. Told from the point of view of Janie sitting very contentedly on her porch, the story tells how she has survived various difficult experiences, including a murder trial, and flourished because of her calm bearing and strong determination to make the best of life.
Since the story is casually repeated from friend to friend, the feeling conveyed is friendly and conversational. Although the narrator's mood is serious, it is also upbeat. The language is full of sharply spirited images, unusual grammatical constructions, and dialogue filled with colloquial-phonic spellings. All of these contribute to the casual mood created in the novel.

source:http://www.pinkmonkey.com/booknotes/monkeynotes/pmTheirEyes07.asp

Their Eyes Were Watching God

"There is no book more important to me than this one." - Alice Walker

The epic tale of Janie Crawford, whose quest for identity takes her on a journey during which she learns what love is, experiences life's joys and sorrows, and come home to herself in peace. Her passionate story prompted Alice Walker to say, "There is no book more important to me than this one."

When first published in 1937, this novel about a proud, independent black woman was generally dismissed by male reviewers. Out of print for almost thirty years, but since its reissue in paperback edition by the University of Illionois Press in 1978, Their Eyes Were Watching God has become the most widely read and highly acclaimed novel in the canon of African-American literature.
With haunting sympathy and piercing immediacy, Their Eyes Were Watching God tells the story of Janie Crawford's evolving selfhood through three marriages. Light-skinned, long-haired, dreamy as a child, Janie grows up expecting better treatment than she gets until she meets Tea Cake, a younger man who engages her heart and spirit in equal measure and gives her the chance to enjoy life without being a man's mule or adornment. Though Jaine's story does not end happily, it does draw to a satisfying conclusion. Janie is one black woman who doesn't have to live lost in sorrow, bitterness, fear, or foolish romantic dreams, instead Janie proclaims that she has done "two things everbody's got tuh do fuh theyselves. They got tuh go tuh God, and they got tuh find out about livin' fuh theyselves."

"THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD belongs in the same category with [the works of] William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway, that of enduring American literature." - Saturday Review

"[A] brilliant novel about a woman's search for her authentic self and for real love." - Edwidge Danticat

Harlem Renaissance

I Introduction

Harlem Renaissance, an African American cultural movement of the 1920s and early 1930s that was centered in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City. Variously known as the New Negro movement, the New Negro Renaissance, and the Negro Renaissance, the movement emerged toward the end of World War I in 1918, blossomed in the mid- to late 1920s, and then faded in the mid-1930s. The Harlem Renaissance marked the first time that mainstream publishers and critics took African American literature seriously and that African American literature and arts attracted significant attention from the nation at large. Although it was primarily a literary movement, it was closely related to developments in African American music, theater, art, and politics.

II Beginnings

The Harlem Renaissance emerged amid social and intellectual upheaval in the African American community in the early 20th century. Several factors laid the groundwork for the movement. A black middle class had developed by the turn of the century, fostered by increased education and employment opportunities following the American Civil War (1861-1865). During a phenomenon known as the Great Migration, hundreds of thousands of black Americans moved from an economically depressed rural South to industrial cities of the North to take advantage of the employment opportunities created by World War I. As more and more educated and socially conscious blacks settled in New York’s neighborhood of Harlem, it developed into the political and cultural center of black America. Equally important, during the 1910s a new political agenda advocating racial equality arose in the African American community, particularly in its growing middle class. Championing the agenda were black historian and sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which was founded in 1909 to advance the rights of blacks. This agenda was also reflected in the efforts of Jamaican-born black nationalist Marcus Garvey, whose “Back to Africa” movement inspired racial pride among blacks in the United States.

African American literature and arts had begun a steady development just before the turn of the century. In the performing arts, black musical theater featured such accomplished artists as songwriter Bob Cole and composer J. Rosamond Johnson, brother of writer James Weldon Johnson. Jazz and blues music moved with black populations from the South and Midwest into the bars and cabarets of Harlem. In literature, the poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar and the fiction of Charles W. Chesnutt in the late 1890s were among the earliest works of African Americans to receive national recognition. By the end of World War I the fiction of James Weldon Johnson and the poetry of Claude McKay anticipated the literature that would follow in the 1920s by describing the reality of black life in America and the struggle for racial identity.

In the early 1920s three works signaled the new creative energy in African American literature. McKay’s volume of poetry, Harlem Shadows (1922), became one of the first works by a black writer to be published by a mainstream, national publisher (Harcourt, Brace and Company). Cane (1923), by Jean Toomer, was an experimental novel that combined poetry and prose in documenting the life of American blacks in the rural South and urban North. Finally, There Is Confusion (1924), the first novel by writer and editor Jessie Fauset, depicted middle-class life among black Americans from a woman’s perspective.

With these early works as the foundation, three events between 1924 and 1926 launched the Harlem Renaissance. First, on March 21, 1924, Charles S. Johnson of the National Urban League hosted a dinner to recognize the new literary talent in the black community and to introduce the young writers to New York’s white literary establishment. (The National Urban League was founded in 1910 to help black Americans address the economic and social problems they encountered as they resettled in the urban North.) As a result of this dinner, The Survey Graphic, a magazine of social analysis and criticism that was interested in cultural pluralism, produced a Harlem issue in March 1925. Devoted to defining the aesthetic of black literature and art, the Harlem issue featured work by black writers and was edited by black philosopher and literary scholar Alain Leroy Locke. The second event was the publication of Nigger Heaven (1926) by white novelist Carl Van Vechten. The book was a spectacularly popular exposé of Harlem life. Although the book offended some members of the black community, its coverage of both the elite and the baser side of Harlem helped create a “Negro vogue” that drew thousands of sophisticated New Yorkers, black and white, to Harlem’s exotic and exciting nightlife and stimulated a national market for African American literature and music. Finally, in the autumn of 1926 a group of young black writers produced Fire!!, their own literary magazine. With Fire!! a new generation of young writers and artists, including Langston Hughes, Wallace Thurman, and Zora Neale Hurston, took ownership of the literary Renaissance.

III Characteristics

No common literary style or political ideology defined the Harlem Renaissance. What united participants was their sense of taking part in a common endeavor and their commitment to giving artistic expression to the African American experience. Some common themes existed, such as an interest in the roots of the 20th-century African American experience in Africa and the American South, and a strong sense of racial pride and desire for social and political equality. But the most characteristic aspect of the Harlem Renaissance was the diversity of its expression. From the mid-1920s through the mid-1930s, some 16 black writers published more than 50 volumes of poetry and fiction, while dozens of other African American artists made their mark in painting, music, and theater.

The diverse literary expression of the Harlem Renaissance ranged from Langston Hughes’s weaving of the rhythms of African American music into his poems of ghetto life, as in The Weary Blues (1926), to Claude McKay’s use of the sonnet form as the vehicle for his impassioned poems attacking racial violence, as in “If We Must Die” (1919). McKay also presented glimpses of the glamour and the grit of Harlem life in Harlem Shadows. Countee Cullen used both African and European images to explore the African roots of black American life. In the poem “Heritage” (1925), for example, Cullen discusses being both a Christian and an African, yet not belonging fully to either tradition. Quicksand (1928), by novelist Nella Larsen, offered a powerful psychological study of an African American woman’s loss of identity, while Zora Neale Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) used folk life of the black rural south to create a brilliant study of race and gender in which a woman finds her true identity.

Diversity and experimentation also flourished in the performing arts and were reflected in the blues singing of Bessie Smith and in jazz music. Jazz ranged from the marriage of blues and ragtime by pianist Jelly Roll Morton to the instrumentation of bandleader Louis Armstrong and the orchestration of composer Duke Ellington. Artist Aaron Douglas adopted a deliberately “primitive” style and incorporated African images in his paintings and illustrations.

The Harlem Renaissance appealed to a mixed audience. The literature appealed to the African American middle class and to the white book-buying public. Such magazines as The Crisis, a monthly journal of the NAACP, and Opportunity, an official publication of the Urban League, employed Harlem Renaissance writers on their editorial staff; published poetry and short stories by black writers; and promoted African American literature through articles, reviews, and annual literary prizes. As important as these literary outlets were, however, the Renaissance relied heavily on white publishing houses and white-owned magazines. In fact, a major accomplishment of the Renaissance was to push open the door to mainstream white periodicals and publishing houses, although the relationship between the Renaissance writers and white publishers and audiences created some controversy. While most African American critics strongly supported the relationship, Du Bois and others were sharply critical and accused Renaissance writers of reinforcing negative African American stereotypes. Langston Hughes spoke for most of the writers and artists when he wrote in his essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” (1926) that black artists intended to express themselves freely, no matter what the black public or white public thought.

African American musicians and other performers also played to mixed audiences. Harlem’s cabarets attracted both Harlem residents and white New Yorkers seeking out Harlem nightlife. Harlem’s famous Cotton Club carried this to an extreme, by providing black entertainment for exclusively white audiences. Ultimately, the more successful black musicians and entertainers, who appealed to a mainstream audience, moved their performances downtown.

IV Ending and Influence

A number of factors contributed to the decline of the Harlem Renaissance in the mid-1930s. The Great Depression of the 1930s increased the economic pressure on all sectors of life. Organizations such as the NAACP and Urban League, which had actively promoted the Renaissance in the 1920s, shifted their interests to economic and social issues in the 1930s. Many influential black writers and literary promoters, including Hughes, James Weldon Johnson, Charles S. Johnson, and Du Bois, left New York City in the early 1930s. Finally, a riot in Harlem in 1935—set off in part by the growing economic hardship of the Depression and mounting tension between the black community and the white shop-owners in Harlem who profited from that community—shattered the notion of Harlem as the “Mecca” of the New Negro. In spite of these problems the Renaissance did not disappear overnight. Almost one-third of the books published during the Renaissance appeared after 1929. In the last analysis, the Harlem Renaissance ended when most of those associated with it left Harlem or stopped writing, while new young artists who appeared in the 1930s and 1940s never associated with the movement.

The Harlem Renaissance changed forever the dynamics of African American arts and literature in the United States. The writers that followed in the 1930s and 1940s found that publishers and the public were more open to African American literature than they had been at the beginning of the century. Furthermore, the existence of the body of African American literature from the Renaissance inspired writers such as Ralph Ellison and Richard Wright to pursue literary careers in the late 1930s and the 1940s. The outpouring of African American literature of the 1980s and 1990s by such writers as Alice Walker and Toni Morrison also had its roots in the writing of the Harlem Renaissance. The influence of the Harlem Renaissance was not confined to the United States. Writers McKay, Hughes, and Cullen, actor and musician Paul Robeson, dancer Josephine Baker, and others traveled to Europe and attained a popularity abroad that rivaled or surpassed what they achieved in the United States. South African writer Peter Abrahams cited his youthful discovery of the Harlem Renaissance anthology, The New Negro (1925), as the event that turned him toward a career as a writer. For thousands of blacks around the world, the Harlem Renaissance was proof that the white race did not hold a monopoly on literature and culture.

Source: http://encarta.msn.com/encyclopedia_761566483/Harlem_Renaissance.html

Zora Neale Hurston's biography

BIRTHDATE: Jan. 7, 1891?

EDUCATION: Graduated from Morgan Academy (high school division of Morgan College (now Morgan State University) in 1918. Attended Howard University and received her B.A. in anthropology from Barnard College, Columbia University in 1928.

FAMILY BACKGROUND: Her father was a Baptist preacher, tenant farmer, and carpenter. At age three her family moved to Eatonville, Fla., the first incorporated black community in America, of which her father would become mayor. In her writings she would glorify Eatonville as a utopia where black Americans could live independent of the prejudices of white society.

DESCRIPTION OF ACCOMPLISHMENTS: A novelist, folklorist, and anthropologist, Zora Neale Hurston was the prototypical authority on black culture from the Harlem Renaissance. In this artistic movement of the 1920s black artists moved from traditional dialectical works and imitation of white writers to explore their own culture and affirm pride in their race. Zora Neale Hurston pursued this objective by combining literature with anthropology. She first gained attention with her short stories such as "John Redding Goes to Sea" and "Spunk" which appeared in black literary magazines. After several years of anthropological research financed through grants and fellowships, Zora Neale Hurston's first novel Jonah's Gourd Vine was published in 1934 to critical success. In 1935, her book Mules and Men, which investigated voodoo practices in black communities in Florida and New Orleans, also brought her kudos.
The year 1937 saw the publication of what is considered Hurston's greatest novel Their Eyes Watching God. And the following year her travelogue and study of Caribbean voodoo Tell My Horse was published. It received mixed reviews, as did her 1939 novel Moses, Man of the Mountain. Her autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road was a commercial success in 1942, despite its overall absurdness, and her final novel Seraph on the Suwanee, published in 1948, was a critical failure.
Zora Neale Hurston was a utopian, who held that black Americans could attain sovereignty from white American society and all its bigotry, as proven by her hometown of Eatonville. Never in her works did she address the issue of racism of whites toward blacks, and as this became a nascent theme among black writers in the post World War II ear of civil rights, Hurston's literary influence faded. She further scathed her own reputation by railing the civil rights movement and supporting ultraconservative politicians. She died in poverty and obscurity.

DATE OF DEATH: Jan. 28, 1960.

PLACE OF DEATH: Fort Pierce, Fla.

Source: http://www.lkwdpl.org/wihohio/hurs-zorx.htm