Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) (edit title/settings)

Ridiculously Simplified Synopsis edit see section history

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Summary edit see section history

Characters edit see section history

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• Janie: The main character of the story. She's beautiful and "mixed"
• Logan Killicks: Janie's first husband. He is a farmer who owns 60 acres of land.
• Phoeby: Janie's best friend
• Jody (Joe) Starks: Janie's second Husband. He is a smooth-talking man with aspirations for power. Based on Mayor Joe Clarke.
• Tea Cake: Janie's third husband
• Nanny Crawford: Janie’s grandmother.
• Mr. and Mrs. Turner: Everglades residents who run a small restaurant. Mrs. Turner prides herself on her Caucasian features and disdains anyone with a more African appearance.
• Sam Watson: Pheoby’s husband.
• Leafy Crawford: Janie’s mother. Leafy was born shortly before the end of the Civil War and ran away after giving birth to Janie.
• Johnny Taylor: A young man whom Janie kisses when she starts to feel sexual desires at age sixteen.
• Matt Bonner: A man who owns an incredibly obstinate and unhealth mule about which he frequently gets teased.
• Janie: The main character
• Tea Cake: Janie's third husband, the one that Janie loved the most
• Sterrett: A man who arrives at the Turner's restaurant drunk and is the cause of a large fight that does a great deal of damage to the place.
• Walter: Add a description of this character.
• Mr. Prescott
• Hicks
• Daisy
• Dockery
• Stew Beef: One of the men that worked on the farms with Tea Cake and Janie.

Quotes edit see section history

• “Jane's first dream was dead, so she became a woman.”

• “Love ain't something like a grind stone that's the same thing everywhere and do the same thing to everything it touch. Love is lak de sea. It's uh movin' thing, but still and all, it takes its shape from de shore it meets, and it's different with every shore.”

  Janie

• “Here was peace. She pulled in her horizon like a great fish-net. pulled it from around the waist of the world and draped it over her shoulder.”

  Narrator

• “They sat in company with the others in other shanties, their eyes straining against crude walls and their souls asking if He meant to measure their puny might against his. They seemed to be starting at the dark, but their eyes were watching God.”

  Narrator

• “An envious heart makes a treacherous ear.”

  Pheoby

• “Two things ereybody's got to do for they selves, the got to go to God and they got to find out about living for they selves”

  Janie

• “Ah wanted to preach a great sermon about colored women sittin’ on high, but they wasn’t no pulpit for me.”

  Nanny

• Popular Highlights from Kindle Customers

• They seemed to be staring at the dark, but their eyes were watching God.

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• Love is lak de sea. It’s uh movin’ thing, but still and all, it takes its shape from de shore it meets, and it’s different with every shore.”

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• She knew now that marriage did not make love. Janie’s first dream was dead, so she became a woman.

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• Two things everybody’s got tuh do fuh theyselves. They got tuh go tuh God, and they got tuh find out about livin’ fuh theyselves.”

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• There is a basin in the mind where words float around on thought and thought on sound and sight. Then there is a depth of thought untouched by words, and deeper still a gulf of formless feelings untouched by thought.

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• All gods who receive homage are cruel. All gods dispense suffering without reason. Otherwise they would not be worshipped. Through indiscriminate suffering men know fear and fear is the most divine emotion. It is the stones for altars and the beginning of wisdom. Half gods are worshipped in wine and flowers. Real gods require blood.

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• Us colored folks is too envious of one ’nother. Dat’s how come us don’t git no further than us do. Us talks about de white man keepin’ us down! Shucks! He don’t have tuh. Us keeps our own selves down.”

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• Janie saw her life like a great tree in leaf with the things suffered, things enjoyed, things done and undone. Dawn and doom was in the branches.

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• An envious heart makes a treacherous ear. They done ‘heard’ ’bout you just what they hope done happened.”

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• Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men. Now, women forget all those things they don’t want to remember, and remember everything they don’t want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly.

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Setting & Locations edit see section history

• Eatonville, Florida: A town boarding Maitland, Florida in which Zora Neale Hurston grew up, Eatonville was founded as an all black town following the end of slavery in the United States from land a white man sold to blacks. Although the history of Eatonville has some muddy documentation due to illiteracy, Their Eyes Were Watching God presents the history of the town as disorganised until Jody Starks became the mayor and expanded the town by purchasing several acres of land, which he sold to new citizens. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eatonville,_Florida and http://www.townofeatonville.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=26&Itemid=87

First Sentence edit see section history

Table of Contents edit see section history

Themes & Symbolism edit see section history

• Love and Relationships versus Independence: Their Eyes Were Watching God is the story of how Janie achieves a strong sense of self and comes to appreciate her independence. But her journey toward enlightenment is not undertaken alone. The gender differences that Hurston espouses require that men and women provide each other things that they need but do not possess. Janie views fulfilling relationships as reciprocal and based on mutual respect, as demonstrated in her relationship with Tea Cake, which elevates Janie into an equality noticeably absent from her marriages to Logan and Jody.Although relationships are implied to be necessary to a fulfilling life, Janie’s quest for spiritual fulfillment is fundamentally a self-centered one. She is alone at the end yet seems content. She liberates herself from her unpleasant and unfulfilling relationships with Logan and Jody, who hinder her personal journey. Through her relationship with Tea Cake, Janie experiences true fulfillment and enlightenment and becomes secure in her independence. She feels a deep connection to the world around her and even feels that the spirit of Tea Cake is with her. Thus, even though she is alone, she doesn’t feel alone.
• Power and Conquest as Means to Fulfillment: Whereas Janie struggles to assert a place for herself by undertaking a spiritual journey toward love and self-awareness, Jody attempts to achieve fulfillment through the exertion of power. He tries to purchase and control everyone and everything around him; he exercises his authority hoping to subordinate his environment to his will. He labors under the illusion that he can control the world around him and that, by doing so, he will achieve some sense of profound fulfillment. Others exhibit a similar attitude toward power and control; even Tea Cake, for example, is filled with hubris as the hurricane whips up, certain that he can survive the storm through his mastery of the muck. For both Jody and Tea Cake, the natural world reveals the limits of human power. In Jody’s case, as disease sets in, he begins to lose the illusion that he can control his world; the loss of authority over Janie as she talks back to him furthers this disillusionment. In Tea Cake’s case, he is forced to flee the hurricane and struggles to survive the ensuing floods. This limit to the scope of one’s power proves the central problem with Jody’s power-oriented approach toward achieving fulfillment: ultimately, Jody can neither stop his deterioration nor silence Janie’s strong will.
• Language: Speech and Silence: Their Eyes Were Watching God is most often celebrated for Hurston’s unique use of language, particularly her mastery of rural Southern black dialect. Throughout the novel, she utilizes an interesting narrative structure, splitting the presentation of the story between high literary narration and idiomatic discourse. The long passages of discourse celebrate the culturally rich voices of Janie’s world; these characters speak as do few others in American literature, and their distinctive grammar, vocabulary, and tone mark their individuality. Hurston’s use of language parallels Janie’s quest to find her voice. As Henry Louis Gates Jr. writes in the afterword to most modern editions of the book, Their Eyes Were Watching God is primarily concerned “with the project of finding a voice, with language as an instrument of injury and salvation, of selfhood and empowerment.” Jody stifles Janie’s speech, as when he prevents her from talking after he is named mayor; her hatred of him stems from this suppression of her individuality. Tea Cake, on the other hand, engages her speech, conversing with her and putting himself on equal terms with her; her love for him stems from his respect for her individuality.After Janie discovers her ability to define herself by her speech interactions with others, she learns that silence too can be a source of empowerment; having found her voice, she learns to control it. Similarly, the narrator is silent in conspicuous places, neither revealing why Janie isn’t upset with Tea Cake’s beating nor disclosing her words at the trial. In terms of both the form of the novel and its thematic content, Hurston places great emphasis on the control of language as the source of identity and empowerment.
• Race and Racism: Love Myself When I Am Laughing . . . and Then Again When I Am Looking Mean and Impressive: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader, “I think we are better off if we think of Zora Neale Hurston as an artist, period—rather than as the artist/politician most black writers have been required to be.” Along the same lines, it is far more fulfilling to read Janie’s story as a profoundly human quest than as a distinctly black one.But issues of race are nonetheless present. Janie and Tea Cake experience prejudice from both blacks and whites at significant moments in the book. Two moments in particular stand out: Janie’s interactions, in Chapter 16, with Mrs. Turner, a black woman with racist views against blacks, and the courtroom scene, in Chapter 19, after which Janie is comforted by white women but scorned by her black friends. In these moments, we see that racism in the novel operates as a cultural construct, a free-floating force that affects anyone, white or black, weak enough to succumb to it. Hurston’s perspective on racism was undoubtedly influenced by her study with influential anthropologist Franz Boas, who argued that ideas of race are culturally constructed and that skin color indicates little, if anything, about innate difference. In other words, racism is a cultural force that individuals can either struggle against or yield to rather than a mindset rooted in demonstrable facts. In this way, racism operates in the novel just like the hurricane and the doctrine to which Jody adheres; it is an environmental force that challenges Janie in her quest to achieve harmony with the world around her.
• The Hurricane: The hurricane represents the destructive fury of nature. As such, it functions as the opposite of the pear tree and horizon imagery: whereas the pear tree and horizon stand for beauty and pleasure, the hurricane demonstrates how chaotic and capricious the world can be. The hurricane makes the characters question who they are and what their place in the universe is. Its impersonal nature—it is simply a force of pure destruction, lacking consciousness and conscience—makes the characters wonder what sort of world they live in, whether God cares about them at all, and whether they are fundamentally in conflict with the world around them. In the face of the hurricane, Janie and the other characters wonder how they can possibly survive in a world filled with such chaos and pain.

Series & Lists edit see section history

Preceded by Oblomov, and followed by Waverley.

Preceded by Of Mice and Men, and followed by The Hobbit.

Preceded by 1984, and followed by Absalom, Absalom!.

Preceded by My Ántonia, and followed by The Old Man and the Sea.

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

1. Zora Neale Hurston (Author)

Other Contributors:

1. Edwidge Danticat (Foreword)
2. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Afterword) - Henry Louis Gates, Jr's father was a friend of Zora Neale Hurston
3. Robin Bilardello (Cover Artist) - Cover design by Robin Bilardello in the P.S. (division of HarperCollins) edition derived from a photograph by Brad Wilson/Photonica.

First Edition edit see section history

Classification edit see section history

• Library of Congress: 89-45674
• Dewey: 813

Notes for Parents edit see section history

Best for secondary school students

Subjects edit see section history

• Books › Literature & Fiction › World Literature › United States › African American › Gates, Henry Louis
• Books › Literature & Fiction › World Literature › United States › African American › Hurston, Zora Neale
• Books › Literature & Fiction › World Literature › United States › Classics
• Books › Literature & Fiction › Authors, A-Z › ( H ) › Hurston, Zora Neale
• Books › Literature & Fiction › Literary
• Books › Literature & Fiction › Classics
• Books › Literature & Fiction › Contemporary
• Books › Literature & Fiction › Classics
• Books › Mystery & Thrillers

Links to Supplemental Material edit see section history

• SparkNotes
• CliffNotes
• Wikipedia Page
• GrAdeSaver.com Study Guide & Essays
• BookRags Notes & Analyses

Movie Connections edit see section history

• Their Eyes Were Watching God (IMDb): 2005

Books with Additional Background Information edit see section history