PROSE
Zora Neale Hurston
Their Eyes Were Watching God
“Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men.
“Now, women forget all those things they don’t want to remember, and remember everything they don’t want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly.”
Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
Why this book?
In her introduction to Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zadie Smith describes the book as ‘One of the greatest American novels of the twentieth century’. She goes on to say ‘It is so lyrical it should be sentimental; it is so passionate it should be overwrought; but it is instead a rigorous, convincing and dazzling piece of prose, as emotionally satisfying as it is impressive. There is no novel I love more.’
This overview from the US National Endowment for the Arts echoes my own thoughts about the book: ‘To call Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God an “African American feminist classic” may be an accurate statement – it is certainly a frequent statement – but it is a misleadingly narrow and rather dull way to introduce a vibrant and achingly human novel. The syncopated beauty of Hurston’s prose, her remarkable gift for comedy, the sheer visceral terror of the book’s climax, all transcend any label that critics have tried to put on this remarkable work. First published amid controversy in 1937, then rescued from obscurity four decades later, the novel narrates Janie Crawford’s ripening from a vibrant, but voiceless, teenage girl into a woman with her finger on the trigger of her own destiny. Although Hurston wrote the novel in only seven weeks, Their Eyes Were Watching God breathes and bleeds a whole life’s worth of urgent experience.’
“The wind came back with triple fury, and put out the light for the last time…. They seemed to be staring at the dark, but their eyes were watching God.”
— from Their Eyes Were Watching God
The story
Hurston tells the story of Janie Crawford, a woman whose life is shaped by a family and community warped by the legacy of slavery. When, at sixteen, she is caught kissing shiftless Johnny Taylor, her grandmother swiftly marries her off to an old man with sixty acres. Janie has to endure two stifling marriages before she finally meets the man of her dreams – who offers not diamonds, but a packet of flowering seeds.
The writing
Hurston’s beautiful book, published in 1937 and set in a Southern American black community in the early decades of the twentieth century, weaves a culturally specific story into the realm of the universal experience with astonishing naturalism.
The cultural specificity of a Black American woman’s story draws on an incredibly rich and poignant history; but this has sometimes limited the readership. Yes, you must push through the Southern Black American dialect – but in so doing you discover the lyricism of that dialect. Yes, the reader is taken into the world of a young girl discovering her awakening sexuality – but the reader does not need to be young, nor female, to hear the tension and wonder in this awakening. Yes, you will recognize images and language from the Old Testament, but you will be illuminated as to how a culture struggling for its identity weaves these fundamental stories into its own history and imagery, revitalizing the stories of the flood and the trials of Jonah.
The reading
As with all the previous readings in the LitSalon Challenge, we recommend slow reading to appreciate the work. If time allows, re-reading – particularly of passages that may initially seem obscure – can help to illuminate meaning and enhance your understanding of and pleasure in the language.
Many readers have found that when they start reading Their Eyes Were Watching God they are initially put off by Hurston’s use of dialect. Consider whether the dialect makes you feel uncomfortable. If this were a white writer, this dialect would probably feel demeaning, farcical, even racist, so what might Hurston be doing here? What can be learned from this discomfort?
Might it be that, as she shines a light on local, rural Black cultural experience, she is also showing the reader how historical prejudices may blind us? Dialect originates in a cultural space. How and why do some forms of dialect become viewed as sub-standard or primitive? If we peel back the layers of reduction heaped on local southern Black cultural life, we may see Hurston’s celebration of this lyric local speech rather than the degradation that is a product of non-Black cultural norms.
Today, Their Eyes Were Watching God is celebrated as an enduring and important American novel. How does it transcend the simple Bildungsroman or the classic quest story? How does it defy Hurston’s contemporaries’ criticism that it was just a simple romance with no political resonance for the Black community? How is it at odds with the movement of the time – steering away from racial anger and violence – and in what ways was it ahead of its time? Why has it survived?
Recommended edition: Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston, with introduction by Zadie Smith; Virago Books (2012); ISBN-13: 978-0860685241
The author
Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) was born in Alabama to parents who had both been enslaved. The family soon moved to Eatonville, Florida, the first incorporated black town in America, where she grew up. In 1917, aged twenty-six (but claiming to be ten years younger), she gained a high school education and went on to Howard University before winning a scholarship to Barnard College, New York, where she graduated with a BA in Anthropology. In New York she discovered what she called ‘Harlem City’ and, at the height of the Harlem Renaissance, became the pre-eminent black woman writer in the USA. However, by the late 1950s her celebrity had faded and she was living in obscurity in Florida. Her work achieved its greatest acclaim only after her death and she is now acknowledged as one of the most influential and important Black American writers of the twentieth century.
Content courtesy of Toby Brothers, Salon Director.
POETRY
William Shakespeare – Sonnet 18
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date;
Sometimes too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed:
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimmed:
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st:
Nor shall Death brag though wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st.
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
Over four hundred years after his death, William Shakespeare (1564-1616) remains the foremost figure in English literature, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world’s greatest dramatist. Aside from his plays, Shakespeare’s poetry is among the most-quoted in the English language and many of us have committed lines to memory which remain with us long after the plots and characters have faded beyond recall.
Even if we can read or recite them, we may never have fully stopped to consider how profoundly Shakespeare’s lines are connected to the author or to his characters and plays – or even what they mean. Often they simply stay with us for the feelings they stir in our hearts.
The Sonnets are a collection of 154 poems, first published in 1609, addressed to an unnamed young man. Although not all Shakespeare sonnets are created equal, Sonnet 18 is generally judged to be the first of the best. It is certainly one of the best known and most quoted of his poems, and shows unusual prescience (which, in another writer, could have been hubris) in its final three lines predicting that his own words will ensure the immortality of his subject.
It is for every reader to make their own interpretation of the poem, but it is clear that it is the summer’s day that suffers by comparison. The poet highlights the challenge of finding anything – even amongst the great but often fleeting loveliness of the natural world – to match the enduring beauty of his subject.
We urge you to read the words aloud to yourself (or to an audience) to find your own meaning. There are numerous recordings available to view online, including this from Harriet Walter at the South Bank Centre.
About the Sonnet Form
Originating from Italy in the sixteenth century, the sonnet – literally translated as a ‘little song’ – is, in its most basic form (there are many variations) a poem of fourteen lines focused on a single idea or sentiment, with a clarification or ‘turn’ in its final two lines.
Sonnet 18 is written in Shakespeare’s preferred meter: iambic pentameter – each line comprises five ‘feet’ or beats, with a short or unstressed syllable followed by a long or stressed syllable – creating an effect that closely resembles the rhythm of normal speech.
