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

by Zora Neale Hurston (Author) (edit contributors)

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One of the most important works of twentieth-century American literature, Zora Neale Hurston’s beloved 1937 classic, Their Eyes Were Watching God, is an enduring Southern love story sparkling with wit, beauty, and heartfelt wisdom. Told in the captivating voice of a woman who refuses to live... read more

Summary edit see section history

(using Wikipedia Creative Commons License):
The main character, an African American woman in her early forties named Janie Crawford, tells the story of her life and journey via an extended flashback to her best friend, Pheoby, so that Pheoby can tell Janie's story to the nosy community on... read more (warning: may contain spoilers)

(using Wikipedia Creative Commons License):
The main character, an African American woman in her early forties named Janie Crawford, tells the story of her life and journey via an extended flashback to her best friend, Pheoby, so that Pheoby can tell Janie's story to the nosy community on her behalf. Her life has three major periods corresponding to her marriages to three very different men.
Nanny, Janie's grandmother, was a slave who became pregnant by her owner and gave birth to a daughter, Leafy. Though Nanny tries to create a good life for her daughter, Leafy is raped by her school teacher and she becomes pregnant with Janie. Shortly after Janie's birth, Leafy begins to drink and stay out at night. Eventually, she runs away leaving Janie with Nanny. Nanny transfers all the hopes she had for Leafy to Janie. When Janie is sixteen, Nanny sees her kissing a neighborhood boy, Johnny Taylor, and fears that Janie will become a "mule" to some man. Nanny arranges for Janie to marry Logan Killicks, an older man and farmer who is looking for a wife to keep his home and help on the farm. Although Janie was not interested in marriage at that time, her grandmother wanted her to have the kinds of things she never had the chance to have, and by marrying Logan Killicks Janie's grandmother thought it gave her the opportunity to make this possible.<15> Janie has the idea that marriage must involve love, forged in a pivotal early scene where she sees bees pollinating a pear tree, and believes that marriage is the human equivalent to this natural process. Logan Killicks, however, wants a domestic helper rather than a lover or partner, and after he tries to force her to help him with the hard labor of the farm, Janie runs off with the glib Jody (Joe) Starks, who takes her to Eatonville.
Starks arrives in Eatonville to find the residents devoid of ambition, so he arranges to buy more land from the neighboring landowner, hires some local residents to build a general store for him to own and run, and the people of the town appoint him mayor. Janie soon realizes that Joe wants her as a trophy wife. He wants the image of his perfect wife to reinforce his powerful position in town, as he asks her to run the store but forbids her from participating in the substantial social life that occurs on the store's front porch.
After Starks passes away, Janie finds herself financially independent and beset with suitors, some of whom are men of some means or have prestigious occupations, but she falls in love with a drifter and gambler named Vergible Woods who goes by the name of Tea Cake throughout the story. She falls in love with Tea Cake after he plays the guitar for her. She sells the store and the two head to Jacksonville and get married, only to move to the Everglades region ("the muck") soon after for Tea Cake to find work planting and harvesting beans. While their relationship has its ups and downs, including mutual bouts of jealousy, Janie now has the marriage with love that she had wanted.
The area is hit by the great Okeechobee hurricane, and while Tea Cake and Janie survive it, Tea Cake is bitten by a rabid dog while saving Janie from drowning. He contracts the disease himself. He ultimately tries to shoot Janie with his pistol, but she shoots him with a rifle in self-defense. She is charged with murder. At the trial, Tea Cake's black, male friends show up to oppose her, while a group of local white women arrive to support her. The all-white jury acquits Janie, and she gives Tea Cake a lavish funeral. Tea Cake's friends forgive her, and they want her to remain in the Everglades. However, she decides to return to Eatonville, only to find the residents gossiping about her.

Characters edit see section history

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Quotes edit see section history

  • “There are years that ask questions and years that answer.”
    Janie
  • “The sun was gone, but he had left his footprints in the sky.”
    Narrator
  • “You can't beat nobody down so low till you rob 'em of they will.”
    Nanny
  • “Janie's first dream was dead, so she became a woman.”
    Narrator
  • “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
  • “She had been getting ready for her great journey to the horizons in search of people.”
    Narrator
  • “An envious heart makes a treacherous ear.”
    Pheoby
  • “Ah wanted to preach a great sermon about colored women sittin’ on high, but they wasn’t no pulpit for me.”
    Nanny
  • “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 like the sea, it's a moving thing.But still and all it takes its shape from the shore it meets and it's different with every shore.”
    Janie
  • “...'cause dey's parched up from not knowing things.”
  • “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
  • Popular Highlights from Kindle Customers
  • They seemed to be staring at the dark, but their eyes were watching God.
    Highlighted by 481 Kindle customers
  • 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.”
    Highlighted by 413 Kindle customers
  • She knew now that marriage did not make love. Janie’s first dream was dead, so she became a woman.
    Highlighted by 352 Kindle customers
  • 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.”
    Highlighted by 338 Kindle customers
  • 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.
    Highlighted by 310 Kindle customers
  • 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.
    Highlighted by 301 Kindle customers
  • 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.”
    Highlighted by 270 Kindle customers
  • 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.
    Highlighted by 250 Kindle customers
  • An envious heart makes a treacherous ear. They done ‘heard’ ’bout you just what they hope done happened.”
    Highlighted by 219 Kindle customers
  • 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.
    Highlighted by 215 Kindle customers
Show all 22 quotes from this book

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
  • Palm Beach: The place the characters ran to due to the storm.
  • The Glades, Florida: A place where Tea Cake and Janie worked to muck beans. This is where they meet a majority of their friends at the end of the book.

First Sentence edit see section history

Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board.

Table of Contents edit see section history

< Foreword by Edwidge Danticat (Copyright 2000) >
< Foreword by Mary Helen Washington >
20 Chapters
< Afterword by Henry Louis Gates, Jr (Copyright 1990) >

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

This book is in TIME Magazine Top 100 English-Language Novels. (community list)
This is book 83 of 91 in The Novel 100: A Ranking of the Greatest Novels of All Time, 2004. (authoritative list)
This is book 609 of 1286 in 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. (authoritative list)
This book is in Book Lover's Cook Book, The. (authoritative list)
This book is in National Endowment for the Arts The Big Read Books. (authoritative list)
This is book 31 of 100 in 20th Century's Greatest Hits: 100 English-Language Books of Fiction. (authoritative list)
This book is in Guardian 1000 Novels Everyone Must Read. (authoritative list)
This is book 28 of 213 in Best English-Language Fiction of the 20th Century. (authoritative list)

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

Original Language: English
Publisher: Harper Perennial Modern Classics
Country: United States
Publication Date: 1937
ISBN: 978-0061120060
Page Count: 256

Classification edit see section history

  • Library of Congress: 89-45674
  • Dewey: 813.52

Notes for Parents edit see section history

Reading Level: Young Adults

Best for secondary school students

Books with Additional Background Information edit see section history

   
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