Women’s Studies 367.04 Emily Marlor
Critical Response #2 2/7/06
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Richard Wright was not Hurston’s intended primary audience for Their Eyes Were Watching God. Clearly, he was so accustomed to having all art and media geared toward an assumed male audience that when he read a book by, about, and for a female sensibility, he didn’t understand it at all. Because his male experience was not foregrounded and privileged in the book, he dismissed it as without theme, message, and thought.
I am also not Hurston’s primary audience, being white, but I can certainly appreciate the themes and message of the work. Perhaps that is because I, as a twenty-first century woman, am much less invested in the racist patriarchy in which I live than was even a black man in the early twentieth century. As a woman, I have been obliged to adapt to male-centered media, arts and popular culture my whole life, so I am used to putting myself in another’s place.
The message that I brought away from my first reading of Their Eyes Were Watching God was a strong one of resilience and resistance. Janie survives her 20-year marriage to Joe without losing the spark of light that makes her special. Many women facing such a marriage in those times (or these times) would find it impossible to retain any vitality or individual personhood, some even slowly wasting toward death without really noticing. My belief is that Hurston wanted to tell a story that would inspire women to hold on to their divine dreams and grasp happiness when it came their way. By having Janie meet Tea Cake relatively late in life, when most women would have been sliding into sedate matronhood, Hurston shows us that it’s never too late to live happily, even if it isn’t “ever after.”
I think that Hurston’s title reveals the main point of the story; that by keeping sight of the wonder and joy of life, Janie was able to weather the emotionally barren years of her marriage to Joe, and come out on the other side with her faith intact. The title is dramatically illustrated during the hurricane that Janie and Tea Cake live through. The folks huddled up in their flimsy shacks are helpless in the face of Nature’s fury, and all they can do is sit with big eyes straining to track the storm that might kill them. The narrator says they, “sat in company with the others…their souls asking if He meant to measure their puny might against His. They seemed to be staring at the dark, but their eyes were watching God,” (pg 187). In this way can powerless people survive the most horrible tragedies that befall them – by maintaining contact with something beyond their own lives and greater than even the most powerful earthly forces.
