'Their Eyes were watching God'

Introduction

The novel 'Their eyes were watching God' is a captivating novel that chronicles the life and journey of an African American puerile girl in search of love, self fulfillment and happiness. In this novel, the author who is no doubt Hurston uses various metaphors such as Jane's hair, the tree, and the bee to symbolism or illustrates various aspects of the narrative. Metaphors are some of the literature and language techniques that enable the writer to explain or tackle a concept in a hidden meaning. Hence, they symbolize an aspect in any given works of literature more so poetry and narratives (Johnson, 157).

This novel is an attempt to capture the mythic, spiritual and psychological legacy of a people oppressed and subjugated by another race. Hurston, a cultivated woman who studied cultural anthropology at Barnard College and Columbia University, in the American New York of the 1920s, was aware that if the elements and values of a culture, existing only in oral narratives, were not transcribed into literature and art, it would cease to exist. This novel gets interesting as the story move forward to the climax.

Discussion

In 1937, author Richard Wright reviewed Their Eyes Were Watching God and wrote: “The sensory sweep of her novel carries no theme, no message, and no thought. In the main, her novel is not addressed to the Negro, but to a white audience whose chauvinistic tastes she knows how to satisfy.” In particular, Wright objected to the novel's discussion of race and use of black dialect (Henry, 35).

Although the shape of the novel is flawed and unwieldy, with Hurston having to kill 2 of Janie's husbands to accommodate her personal growth, we do see the change in black fortunes in the 60 years since the end of the Civil War and slavery (1865). Nanny represents the ex slave's obsession with security; Logan is the failure to think outside the life of a beast of burden; Joe Starks the new black with ambition, drive and vision but who is a sexist with the spirituality of a stone.

With his death at the end of the novel, we sense the heroic has gone from the world, but Janie has lived to experience the real thing, unlike Phoebies, and we leave her wrapping her memories of love around herself and vowing to stay true to his memory (Awkward, 82).

Black woman

Her novel creates a once upon a time” framework for Janie's story in order to bring out the latent hopes and dreams of a people who gave freedom, only to find their dreams of a fulfilling life to be illusions. Despite Hurston's middle class black upbringing and her flourishing in a sophisticated, urban environment where she led a free and uninhibited existence, she dedicated her life to capturing rural black culture's post slavery richness in philosophy, spirituality and resilience. Instead, white values, systems and institutions had denied access to personal and relational fulfillment to 90 percent of American blacks. A black female university student was a rarity, a performing ...