Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Introduction
Their Eyes Were Watching God is one of
the most enduring and captivating voice of an
African American woman Janie Crawford, and her
evolving selfhood through three marriages. Central to
the novel is Hurstons study of the individual struggle
for self-knowledge and expression within the folk
community, which both smothers and authorizes its
affiliates. This story is a break from the metanarratives of black women in literature and presents a
holistic worldview through the little narrative of a
woman who grew up in the American South in the
early part of the twentieth century and ventured in a
quest for self for herself defying the societal
narratives prescribed for an African American
woman in the early twentieth century.
Ships at a distance have every mans
wish on board [1]. So begins the novel about a
womans search for her authentic self and for real
love. At first it might seem contradictory that a work
whose central character is a woman Janie Crawford
should start with a dictum about the life of men.
What Hurston renders in the next few sentences is a
world complete with its codes and disciplines and
Page 22
Page 23
Page 24
Page 25
Page 26
Bibliography:
[1]Baker, Houston A, Jr. Blues, Ideology, and Afro
American Literature: A Vernacular Theory. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1984.
[2]Christian, Barbara. Black Women Novelists: The
Development of a Tradition. Westport, Greenwood Press,
1980.
[3]Hemenway, Robert. Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary
Biography. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977.
[4] Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. The Signifying Monkey: A
Theory of African-American Literary Criticism. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1988.
[5]Howard Lillie P. Alice Walker and Zora Neale Hurston:
The Common Bond. Westport Greenwood, 1993.
[6]Hurston, Neale Zora. Their Eyes Were Watching God:
Harper Collins, 1990.
[7]King, Coretta Scott. Black Americans of Achievement:
Zora Neale Hurston. New York, Chelsea House Publishers,
1991.
[8]Simone, Puff. Writing Ahead of Times? A Postmodern
Reading of Zora Neale Hurstons Their Eyes Were
Watching God. Landscapes of Postmodernity: Concepts
of Paradigms of Critical Theory. Ed. Peter Eckhard Etal.
New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publisher, 2010.
Web. 2 Jan 2016.
Page 27