Their Eyes Were Watching God
There are years that ask questions and years that answer.
Why read it
A Black woman in the American South returns home in muddy overalls, and the porch gossips whisper. She tells her friend the story of three marriages and the long road to a self, and a voice, that are finally her own.
Their Eyes Were Watching God follows Janie Crawford's search for love, independence, and her own inner life across three very different relationships. Zora Neale Hurston writes a woman's journey toward self-possession in richly musical Black vernacular that was radical for its time. It is a story about coming to voice and refusing to live through anyone else.
Zora Neale Hurston, a trained anthropologist of the Harlem Renaissance, wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God in seven weeks in 1937 while doing fieldwork in Haiti. It was criticized by some contemporaries for its use of dialect and lack of racial protest, and fell out of print for decades. Alice Walker's 1975 essay helped spark its revival as an American classic.
- 01
Coming to voice
Janie's growth is measured by her slow movement from silence to speaking her own truth.
- 02
Love versus security
Each marriage tests whether Janie will settle for safety or hold out for genuine feeling.
- 03
The horizon as self
The recurring image of the horizon marks Janie's expanding sense of her own possibility.
- 04
Community and its judgment
The porch-talkers show how a community both sustains and polices a woman who wants more.
The young Janie lying under a blossoming pear tree, seeing the bees and the bloom, and awakening to a vision of what love could be.
Janie's final defiance of her domineering second husband Joe Starks, when she publicly answers his contempt and shatters his authority.
