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Hurston builds upon the rich tradition established by regional storytellers in the late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century.
As white male predecessors Mark Twain, Josh Billings, Augustus B. Longstreet, and Artemus Ward do in their humorous sketches, Hurston chooses familiar regional settings as background; however, she does not settle for a superficial plot and stereotypical characters as do the raconteurs who draw their humor with broad strokes. Nor does she aim for social, political, and moral satire. She uses the cultural patterns and dialect of rural areas—western Florida, Eatonville in central Florida, and the Everglades in south Florida—to create a realistic story with believable characters. The regional setting itself adds to the local color as the writer depicts the communities surrounding Eatonville—Orlando, Winter Park, Maitland, Altamonte Springs, Sanford, Apopka—once-small towns that today are merged into a huge, sprawling metropolitan Orlando area. Into the fabric of regionalism and African-American heritage, with its black dialect, folklore, and cultural traditions, Hurston weaves threads of gender, social, and racial relationships. Consequently, Their Eyes Were Watching God has a depth unknown in earlier local color classics of the South and Southwest.
Rooted in the oral tradition of frontporch storytelling and gossiping, Their Eyes Were Watching God blossoms forth with its modern feminist themes of women's selfdiscovery and independence. In this respect, Janie is somewhat reminiscent of Kate Chopin's two protagonists, Louise Mallard in "The Story of an Hour" (1891) and Edna Pontellier in The Awakening (1899). The difference is that Janie succeeds in becoming free and self-assertive, having courageously survived two abusive husbands and a third gone mad. Writing some forty years after Chopin, Hurston thus broke the stereotype of having the victimized woman die at the end of the story.
Just five years before the publication of Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston's contemporary (and later, friend) Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings set new precedents about a woman's journey to independence in her story "Gal Young Un" (1932). She depicts the middle-aged widow Mattie Syles, who triumphs over her opportunist husband, Trax Colton, interested only in Mattie's money. Rawlings, best known for The Yearling (1938), the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel set in central Florida, portrays Mattie as strengthened by adversity. The woman remains "strong and whole. . . . fixed, deeprooted as the pine trees. They leaned a little, bent by an ancient storm. Nothing more could move them." This story might serve as a companion text for Hurston's novel, because Mattie, like Janie, changes from an intimidated wife into a self-assured woman.
Also, Mattie reaches out to "gal young un," similar to the way Janie helps her confidante Pheoby reach a higher level of selfknowledge.
With her contributions to both women's literature and black culture, Hurston became a major influence on the next generation of black feminist writers, such as Alice Walker and Toni Morrison. In fact, Janie may be seen as a literary sister of Walker's Celie in The Color Purple, and Walker has acknowledged that there is "no book more important to me" than Their Eyes Were Watching God. Instead of imitating literary predecessors, Hurston was revolutionary in the way she blazed new trails for black women writers.
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