Their Eyes Were Watching God Report Essay, Research Paper

Harlem Renaissance Literary Research Paper Their Eyes Were Watching God By Zora Neale Hurston Originally published by J. B. Lippincott, Inc. First Perennial Classics edition published 1998 205 pages In this report I am attempting to show a typical Harlem Renaissance writer. In that I will tellabout the authors background, works, and how they are considered a Harlem Renaissance writer. Iwill also include and analysis I may have of their works. I have learned a lot from this project and Ihope that in it I can give you a bit of information that you did not already know. According to a bit of folk wisdom which Zora Neale Hurston may have known, You cantake the boy out of the country, but you can t take the country out of the boy. In this case, for boy, read girl, and for girl, read Zora. Throughout her professional career as an anthropologist andwriter, as well as her personal life, Zora never really left the little country town of Eatonville, Florida,and its environs. Writing at a time when local color was out of fashion as an ingredient of goodliterature, Zora s writings were rich in local color, and the front porch of Joe Clarke s Eatonville storebecame Zora s symbol of hometown security. That setting could have easily been the place that RobertFrost described when he wrote Home is the place where, when you go there, they have to take youin. Eatonville was that sort of home for Zora, but she did not ask Eatonville to take her in. Instead,she took Eatonville into her life and kept it there. From the time Zora submitted her first story, John Redding Goes to Sea, in 1921 to TheStylus, Howard University s literary club, until decades later, when she wrote a query letter to apublisher in the quavering hand of an old lady, Zora Hurston was a writer. If Zora could have spokento Alice Walker as Walker searched for her grave, Zora might have said, Remember me as a writer. From Dust Tracks on a Road, we learn that Zora gave the Howard University campus, The HillTop, the name it still carries. At Howard, she became part of an exclusive literary group that includedthe prolific writer and renowned educator Dr. Alain Locke. After her story, Drenched in Light wassubmitted to The Stylus, she sent it to Charles S. Johnson in New York City. As editor ofOpportunity, he was looking for young writers, was impressed, and published it. Another story Spunk, was also published by Johnson, and these two appearances in print fueled Zora s desire to goto New York City and try her luck as a writer. Only someone like Zora would have the courage toarrive in New York with no job – and only a dollar and a half in her purse. She had friends, though. Earlier she met Mr. And Mrs. Charles S. Johnson at Howard, and she pays tribute to Johnson and hissupport of yong black writers, who really started the so-called Negro Renaissance. In New York, Zora made friends easily, and it wasn t long before she was included in literarycircles that included Margaret Walker, Claude McKay, Arna Bontemps, Aaron Douglas, Jean Toomer,and Langston Hughes. Her involvement with these writers and artists, as well as with editors andpublishers in the Harlem Renaissance movement, quickly earned her a reputation as an entertainingraconteur, sometimes to the despair of these new Negro artistic and literary elites, who often foundher earthy style displeasing. Zora didn t care; she kept on being herself. It wasn t long before FannieHurst, a successful popular novelist of that era, offered Zora a job, and another benevolent friendhelped her get a scholarship to Barnard. Hurston tells Janie s story in the form of a frame – that is, the author begins the novel andends the novel with the same two people in the same setting, with only an hour or two havingelapsed. Sitting on the steps of her back porch, Janie tells her story to her friend Peoby Watson. Thetelling only take part of the evening; Phoeby arrives at Janie s house in the early evening, and it isdark when she goes home. Within this comfortable setting of one friend talking to another, Hurstontells Janie s story. This frame becomes the first part of the structure of the novel. The rest of thestory proceeds chronologically, but it is not a first person narrative. The author quickly takes overtelling and uses a third-person point of view. The reader follows the experiences as Janie lived them,but it is the novelist who controls the story. Within the frame, there are four units: (1) Janie s early years with her grandmother; (2) aninterlude is inserted as Nanny tells her own story, then we hear about Janie s loss of childhood andthe brief months of her first marriage; (3) Janie s years with Joe Starks fill a third section, with theepisode of the mule as an interlude, but having no function in the story other than to show Janie scompassion for an ill-treated animal and an act of kindness that Joe did for his wife; of course it alsogave Hurston an opportunity to pole fun at local customs, especially funerals; and (4), we have a finalsection focusing on Janie s marriage to Tea Cake Woods. There is also an interlude in this last section,one which involves Mrs. Turner and serves to contrast Janie s open-mindedness with Mrs. Turner sbigotry. The frame is finally complete when Janie comes full circle and rests her tired feet on herown steps and spends the evening with Peoby. Sixteen-year-old Janie Crawford dreams of love and wonders if love will come with marriage. Twenty-four years and three marriages later, Janie has experienced both love and personal growth. This novel is a story of this search for love and her growth. In the first few pages, we see Janiereturning to her hometown of Eatonville, Florida, after nearly two years absence. Her neighbors are

curious to know where she has been and what has happened to her. They wonder why she s returningin dirty overalls when she left in bridal satin. Janie tells the whole story to her friends Pheoby Watson, and after the story is over, thenovelist returns to Janie s back steps. Thus, the story , which actually spans forty years of Janie s life, is framed by an evening visit between two friends. The story Janie tells Peoby is about love – how Janie sought love in four relationships. First,she looked for love from the grandmother who raised her. Next, she sought love from Logan Killicks,her first Husband, a stodgy old potato farmer. Her third relationship was with Joe Starks, a unionwhich lasted nearly twenty years and brought her economic security and an enviable position as themayor s wife. Janie endured this marriage in the shadow of charismatic, ambitious Joe, a man whoknew how to handle people, money, and power, but who had no perception of Janie s simple wish tobe respected and loved. Janie s final relationship was with the migrant worker Tea Cake, who gave Janie the love shehad always dreamed about. As a widow, Janie would sell Joe s crossroads store, close up hercomfortable home, and go off with her new husband to share his life as a happiness lasted abouteighteen months – until a powerful hurricane devastated the land, and Tea Cake became a victim of it. A few weeks later, now a satisfied woman, Janie returns to Eatonville, her quest for sincere lovehaving been fulfilled by Tea Cake. Early in Chapter two of the novel, Hurston tells her readers what to expect in the language ofher characters. She states that Janie will tell her story in soft, easy phrases. Readers are unfamiliarwith such phrases often see Hurston s language as a strange dialect and a barrier to enjoying the novel. The easiest way to become comfortable with the speech of Janie and her friends is to read it aloud,carefully practicing the soft, easy phrases and establishing the cadences of the basic iambic pattern ofspoken English. It is unfair to the people of Eatonville and the muck to consider heir language to bedifficult or a problem. Dialect is usually defined as a spoken version of a language, and it possesses certaincharacteristics. It is a regional and often a class language with distinctive features of vocabulary,grammar, and pronunciation. The dialect of uplands Georgia would not be understood by a SeaIslander. Pronunciation depends on both preceding and following sounds, with liaisons so close thatan unfamiliar might miss the words. There is also a tendency to elide troublesome consonants, thussoftening and smoothing the language to make it, in Hurston s words, so delightfully easy for singers. Hurston Suggest three distinct aspects of Negro speech which are validated in the language ofJanie, Pheoby, Tea Cake, and the other residents of Eatonville and the muck. First, every phrase ofNegro life is highly dramatized, and some of that drama can be seen in social encounters with muchposing and posturing. Youths in the 90s use the term prolifin to describe elaborate rituals ofshowing off clothing, a car, or just one s self. Hurston gave her characters a language she was familiar with and the language she wantedthem to speak. There is no reason to doubt that the speech of her characters is the speech sheremembered from her childhood and, with her flamboyancy, may have reverted to as a story tellingadult. Finally, the use of metaphors and similes actually supports her first statement aboutdramatizing language and actions. She finds a pervasive tendency to create verbal nouns and makethem act like verbs. An unattractive woman is uglyfying away. The suffix -fy or -fying is aconvenient but overlooked way of adjusting the meaning and use of a root word. Jooking is anoun-verb or possibly a descriptive word as it means to play the piano in the style of pianists in jookjoints. Hurston s most readily perceived metaphors are the blossoming pear tree, the mating bees andthe horizon, which she describes in some of her most poetic language. Yet the reader may find othermetaphors. Lake Okeechobee, for example, is a threat in a hurricane-prone area. For the reader wholives on a flood plain or in coastal areas where storm-driven tides ravage and destroy, the lakeimmediately becomes significant. For Tea Cake and Janie, however, the lake is just a lake, and theyoccupy a home perilously close to it. For the reader who has endured a flood, however, of ahurricane, the lake becomes an omen – as well as a symbol – of natural disaster. The most sustained metaphor is the horizon. Sundown at the horizon occurs at the end ofeach day, a time at which the porch sitters can sit out on a bench at the end of their working day andwatch the sun set. Thus, there is a link between time and the horizon. They may not be looking at it,but Janie is. She wants to make a trip to the horizon and her journey becomes a principal metaphorin the story. Janie s figurative trip to the horizon occupies only a scant two years of her life. Her years as awell-protected mule in joe Starks store in Eatonville are stifling to her dreams. She is little betteroff than the mule who trudges blindfolded around the sugar cane press. She goes down the road atsunrise to the train station to meet and marry Tea Cake, hoping this experience will take her to thehorizon. When she finishes this story, her friend Pheoby is ready to seek her own horizon, even if it sno farther away than the nearest fishing pond. Hurston s fiction appeared between the time of the freed women in Sterling s accounts andthe fictional women in Walker s stories. Hurston and Walker present wife beating as a way of life, yetwife-beating is not limited to age, social or economic status, color, or nation. Nor is verbal abuse onthe part of the husband or wife bound by any limits. Janie s experiences represent a small part of auniversal circumstance.