their eyes were watching god by zora neale hurston

She yearns for wider horizons, and the passion their marriage was once built on erodes. Jody loves Janie, but puts her on a pedestal and denies her equal participation in their life together. He is a man Janie cannot learn to love, and she absconds with Jody Starks, a man bound for Eatonville, a town that is to be made for and by African Americans. Out of a desire to give her granddaughter the security her own daughter never gained, the grandmother insists on marrying Janie to a much older, and well-established, propertied man. The grandmother works as a cleaner for a white family, and Janie grows up with their children, unaware of herself as Black until she sees herself one day in a photograph. Her grandmother, a freed slave, raises her after her mother is raped by a schoolteacher and runs away. The book is set in early 20 th century Florida, and tells the story of Janie, a woman utterly determined to go her own way. Writers including Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison and Alice Walker have cited her as a literary forebear. And despite being a writer of exceptional talent, she passed away in relative obscurity, having worked as a cleaner for the last part of her life. Hurston, who appears to have been a bit of a rock-star writer type, is said to have written this, her most well-known novel, in seven weeks.

Their eyes were watching God, published in 1937, is widely regarded as a classic of the Harlem Renaissance. Hurston’s prose is startling in its beauty and insight, funny in its casual observations of human behaviour and conversation, and entirely unapologetic. There is an episode, in which Hurston describes her protagonist Janie, a girl about to become a young woman, lying under a pear tree and watching the comings and goings of bees, which has stayed with me ever since I read it. Some books have the capacity to sketch a scene, develop a character or deliver a passage in a way that just stays with you, and Zora Neale Hurston’s Their eyes were watching God has just this ability.

Scholar of literary & cultural studies, editor of poco.lit.

Their eyes were watching god by zora neale hurston