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Thematic Overview |
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Written by Administrator
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Thursday, 12 January 2006 |
Thematic Overview
Their Eyes Were Watching God celebrates a woman's awakening to her own place in the world and learning how to love herself after years of oppression. Having endured abandonment, betrayal, powerlessness, and entrapment, Janie achieves independence.
Her long journey toward self-discovery takes her to a mutually loving relationship with Tea Cake, who shows her love's power to transform. Like the sea, love is never the same as it moves and takes its shape from the shore. When her marriage to Tea Cake ends, Janie remains fulfilled with fond memories to sustain her. Without a mate, she enjoys her solitude and freedom, for she has finally found love, light, and peace within herself.
The journey to reach this peace of mind has not been easy, so Janie and Tea Cake's passionate romance is even sweeter after her having endured decades of abuse. At sixteen, Janie protests being forced to marry Logan Killicks, an old man who looks like "some ole skull-head in de grave yard," but Nanny insists he is a good man who will protect her from harm in the cruel world where "de white man is de ruler of everything." When the white man throws down the load, he tells the black man to pick it up; then, the black man hands the load over to his woman, making her "de mule uh de world." Years later Janie recalls with hatred how her grandmother sold her out and how her first two husbands abused her as their work mules. Yet her soul survives being trampled on. "She was a rut in the road.
Plenty of life beneath the surface but it was kept beaten down by the wheels."
Janie's survival tale of self-discovery and romance is intertwined with the triumph of the black woman in a racist society. Although racial prejudice and conflict do not overshadow the novel's predominant themes of love and self-awakening, racial issues do occasionally surface to explain characterization and plot elements. Janie's grandmother's mistrust of white men comes from her bitter memories of slavery. After Nanny is raped and bears her white master's child, the man's enraged wife beats her and threatens to have her whipped with hundred lashes on her bare back until blood gushes. She also plans to sell the baby, Janie's mother. To avoid this punishment, Nanny escapes.
Years later she instills in Janie the lessons of enslavement. However, Nanny also tells her about the Washburns, "quality white folks," for whom she worked. In fact, because Janie was born in the house in the Washburns' backyard and raised with white children, she considered herself just like them. At six, however, she becomes aware of being different. While Janie does not suffer the blatant discrimination her Nanny did, the legacy of slavery remains as the novel's subtext about brutal oppression.
The teacher who rapes Nanny's seventeenyear-old daughter, Leafy, is not identified as white or black, but Nanny distrusts all men: "Ah can't die easy thinkin' maybe de menfolks white or black is makin' a spit cup outa you."
Racism darkens the novel's thematic landscape in more subtle ways than Nanny's slave narrative and her warnings to Janie.
For instance, Joe Starks, who dazzles Janie with his stylish airs of success, had worked for whites and emulates their superiority in dealing with other blacks. His house is painted a "gloaty, sparkly white." Another African-American character who has internalized the white race's superiority in the social hierarchy is Mrs. Turner. Being lightskinned, she approves of Janie's "coffeeand-cream complexion" and loathes darker blacks. Mrs. Turner's vicious harangue against blacks and especially Booker T.
Washington shocks Janie, but when she tries to persuade Janie to leave Tea Cake for her light-skinned, out-of-work brother, Janie rejects her fanatic prejudice. A few other references to the caste system intrude on Janie and Tea Cake's nearly all-black world.
After the devastating hurricane, when two white men force Tea Cake to help bury the dead, they instruct him to identity the corpses' race, because only the whites get coffins. Later, after Janie kills Tea Cake in self-defense, she finds herself at the mercy of an all-white judicial system, but the testimony of the white doctor saves her.
Hurston acknowledges the reality of slavery's horrors without vilifying the entire white race and without demanding retribution. Some critics have felt that Hurston unduly limits her portrayal of racism, because she profited from white patronage, as many Harlem Renaissance artists did. Writers such as Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Wallace Thurman, and Darwin T.
Turner have attacked her writing because they thought she tried too hard to please white readers. Others, especially feminist writers like Alice Walker, go beyond the novel's racial dimensions to praise the universal qualities of human endurance and love.
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