Zora Neale Hurston’s long novel written in a short period of seven weeks is a veritable handbook of social philosophy mouthed by a not-so-literate woman, Janie Crawford. Janie had switched her surname to Killicks, Starks and Woods after the three husbands she had. It is little wonder that she was playfully called “Alphabet” by her childhood friends as she had many names at once even then. Her lack of learning is eventually her wisdom. Her communion with Nature was her true learning, the primordial learning of every sensitive being. She undergoes a thorough transformation as she travels to the muck with Tea Cake because the civilized society of Eatonville was so corrupt and malicious and a very threat to peaceful life. She discovers the real Tea Cake, husband and lover, in this part of the world where she sees his all-forgoing, sacrificing and devoted love. Here they are beholden to no force but Nature for their survival and joy. Even the human faces the two meet here are an extension of the landscape. Janie’s grandmother Nanny had been prophetic of this when she told her, “Honey, de white man is de ruler of everything as fur as Ah been able tuh find out. Maybe it’s some place way off in de ocean where de black man is in power.” (Hurston 17). This novel which universalises the feminine consciousness through a black woman’s tale is full of images: from the example of Janie we are forced to admit that women respond more readily to images and sweet strains than to hard facts. Tea Cake’s guitar makes a huge difference in Janie’s life which was crushed by purposeless toil when she lived with Killicks and drained of substance when wrapped by creature comforts in her life with Starks. There is a theological twist towards the end when all-seeing heaven gives sanction to their love, which means that this story bound to inspire the whole land should end in the most dramatic way with the hurricane. It is then that their eyes, in recognition of the divine intent, are seen “watching God” (Hurston 187). What follows is a near-Sophoclean tragedy wrought by heaven to put a seal on earthly fortune.
Janie Relates Marriage to Nature
The adolescent Janie reclines under the fully blossomed pear-tree and sees the intertwining of the boughs. This is the first education she gets on marriage. When Nanny who had seen her in a kissing scene with John Taylor tells her that she must marry, she shies away saying she is not ripe for it. Nanny’s harrowing tales of how white racism destroyed her family and her health in doing odd jobs for survival result in a temporary change in her attitude and she unwillingly relents. Thus she marries Logan Killicks whom Nanny had chosen for her. Soon she realizes that marriage is not a beautiful union like the lilting branches of the pear-tree holding together in an embrace. Logan is unhappy about Janie not joining him in hard work on his land and her losing herself in reverie. He says that she is too high-brow for a colored woman. Janie suffers her lot in silence till she surreptitiously meets Joe Starks, a man who lives by dreams but alongside has the strange verve to make his dreams come true. She is fascinated by the promise of change and adventure offered by him and elopes with him, and they get married. Starks is shrewd in business and has great skills of negotiation. Soon he becomes Mayor of Eatonville where they settle and he has a great following. The porch of their house is the favourite haunt of those who visit for business and also for malicious spying. Janie’s looks provoke sly comments. Janie finds her life devoid of that thing that makes a complete woman. Joe dies after seventeen years of wedded life. It is then that Tea Cake comes to the store Janie was looking after and the two take to each other. Defying all public criticism the two go their way to get married. Tea Cake captures Janie’s heart as a fine guitarist and a life-loving mate, who has an infectious influence on all in their surroundings. But he soon gets into a scrape with his gambling and they move to the muck in the Everglades. There the two work in vegetable and cane-growing estates. Tea Cake is least domineering, unlike Janie’s other husbands. Besides, he is a few years younger, for which the two had been severely criticized. The fiasco of Janie’s failed marriages makes her slapdash and reckless in following her heart. She is convinced that she has not chosen wrong with Tea Cake. Defying patriarchal society again, Tea Cake urges Janie to wear overalls, in total deviation from the patriarchal imposition of feminine virtue with a prescribed dress code. It is this costume again that provokes the women sitting on Janie’s porch, a rendezvous for gossip-mongers, when she returns to Eatonville after Tea Cake’s death. Tea Cake symbolises the freedom of the muck and anti-patriarchal existence and the muck without Tea Cake loses its identity. Eatonville on the other hand is a hub of gossip, of penny-pinching and self-seeking people, and not a place to live with one like the hilarious and magnanimous Tea Cake. Thus Eatonville and the muck mean two strikingly different and contrastive things for Janie, both taking Tea Cake as the point of reference. In the muck Janie reunites with Nature that been her first guide and chosen marriage bed. Thus the images of the pear-tree, the muck and the eternal lovers coincide. Janie refers to Tea Cake as the life of the muck, pulling crowds in large numbers with his vivacity. After Tea Cake dies Janie feels that the soul of freedom and romance too has gone and she decides to come back to Eatonville to resume her life of routine. But she knows at her core that the best part of her life has been lived. She has also learned to distrust prosperity and security, things that her other husbands embodied, as the determiners of happy life.
The Lessons of the Hurricane
The last lights of their home going out with the hurricane in Chapter 18 sends a shiver down Tea Cake’s spine. The couple are having a strange premonition. Tea Cake is the first to speak about the suggestion of death. “Him-with-the square-toes” (Hurston 197) that Janie visualises seems to her to be getting closer. Again Janie’s mind is at work framing images to tackle reality. Images seem to afford some theatrical felicity that take the dread away from reality. When Tea Cake talks of death, Janie tries to bring the doused lights of the home back to life despite the hurricane. She tells Tea Cake that those who have seen light at daybreak will not fear to see it fade at sundown. It is in “seeing” the light that the glory of life or love remains. Seeing is synonymous with “watching,” be it God or love or the angels of love. They have watched God and seen the light. The fury of the hurricane is to them the tranquil serenity of blessed love.
Viewing Through the Senses
Janie tells Tea Cake who is dying after his desperate attempts to rescue her in the calamity, ‘God snatched me out of de fire through you. And Ah loves yuh and feel glad” (Hurston 212). She calls Tea Cake “the son of the Evening Sun” (Hurston 209). Tea Cake too is adept at creating fine images to reach the heart of the woman he loves: he compares her to “a patch uh roses” to whom he would say, “Ah want yuh tuh see mah Janie sometime” (Hurston 212). This is a kind of metalanguage critiquing the subjective expression of humans. Subjectivity seldom has linear expression. It is at best spatial, most often audio-visual. The first attempt to unite a concrete object and an abstract thought is seen in the very first line of the novel, Ships seen at a distance have every man’s wish on board” (Hurston 1). This is explained in terms of cognitive perception of reality by Patrick S. Bernard in “The Cognitive Construction of the Self in Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God” (2007). According to Bernard, “Janie uses the self-as-nature metaphor to consider both as a material object and an abstract entity combined by language, human mind and memory” (Bernard 4). Bernard calls the concrete image with which the correlation is done the “cognitive paradigm.” Seeing is the most pervasive cognitive paradigm used in the novel (Bernard 4). The notion of visibility again comes for analysis in the study of Daram and Hozhabrsadat, “Invisibility of I’s in Their Eyes Were Watching God” (2012). The seeing process is at work wherever Janie goes: “Janie is watched and gazed at by her community members; she is visible in terms of body and invisible in terms of power” (Daram 84). Finally Janie demonstrates her power visibly when she gives her statement before the Court with white and black audiences, a complete narrative of her life.
The Language of Feeling
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. refers to the use of language in this novel as “not merely ‘adornment’ as Hurston described a key black linguistic practice; rather manner and meaning are perfectly in tune: she says the thing in the most meaningful manner” (Afterword to the novel). The metaphor of the ship with which the novel begins becomes the permanent metaphor for the black whose life in the American continent began with the slave ships coming from the Dark Continent. Critics like Anna Lillios have also examined the destructive power of Nature playing foul transforming into the spiritual and ecstatic catharsis of the two lovers in her article, “The Monstropolous Beast: The Hurricane in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God” (Lillios 89-93). It is also interpreted from the feminist angle in terms of the coming to age of a woman in crisis. The novel flouts the belief of the brute majority that feminine power is a fiction, and thus it becomes a subversive metafiction.
Works Cited
Hurston, Zora Neale. Their Eyes Were Watching God. Accessed March 7, 2016 from https://www.cnusd.k12.ca.us/cms/lib/domain
Bernard, Patrick S. “The Cognitive Construction of the Self in Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God” 2007 CLCWeb (Purdue University Press), Vol.9, 2, 4-13. Accessed March 14, 2016 from https://www.docs.lib.purdue.edu/cgi/viewcontent
Daram, Mahmood and Hozhabrsadat, “Invisibility of the I’s in Their Eyes Were Watching God” 2012 International Journal of English and Literature, Vol. 3, 4, 84-90. Accessed from https://www.academicjounals.org/IJEL/artic
Gates Jr., Henry Louis. “Zora Neale Hurston: A Negro Way of Saying” (Afterword to novel)
Lillios, Anna. “The Monstropolous Beast: The Hurricane in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God” 1998 The Southern Quarterly, 36, 89-93. Accessed March 14, 2016 from https://www.connection.ebscohost.com/monstropolous
