Sites of Resistance: The Subversive Spaces of Their Eyes Were Watching God

Understanding the relationship between space and political power is crucial to any reading of Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). Although recent critical work has begun to focus on the spaces that Janie Crawford inhabits, the concept of spatiality—a theoretical approach that helps to resolve the problem of how exactly she arrives at her complex sense of self—has been given little attention in the critical work on Zora Neale Hurston’s notoriously slippery novel. Indeed, what Hazel V. Carby has described as an entire industry of scholarship thriving on the novel’s contradictions and problematic stylistics (72) cannot adequately account for Janie’s transformation from the beginning of the novel to its conclusion. Approaches to the novel have focused on speech and vision as vital means of empowerment for Janie as she contests the gender politics of marriage in the South, and these approaches—most notably Deborah Clarke’s and Michael Awkward’s—correctly designate Janie as a figure of feminine empowerment. Janie achieves self-awareness not by the changed circumstances of her marriages—Tea Cake, after all, mistreats her in the same ways that her first two husbands did—but rather by her ability to engage in critical subversive activity (Miller 84). Understanding the politics of space, however, helps to explain how and why she embraces this behavior; Janie’s evolution as a character—her journey “tuh de horizon and back” (Hurston, Their 191)—is as much dependent on her participation in space as it is on her ability to cultivate voice, vision, and agency. In fact, these concepts are fundamentally dependent on the spatial practices that the novel describes. For Janie, locating and producing subversive spaces that move beyond physical place allow her successfully to challenge hegemonic white patriarchal authority.¹

Péter Szabó’s recent work on the spatial politics of Their Eyes Were Watching God and Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934) offers the most comprehensive and productive application of spatial theory to Hurston’s writing. Focusing predominantly on the relationship between individuals and “transparent space” (a term Szabó uses to describe the hegemonic masculine spaces of Eatonville), he traces Janie’s movement from the oppressive masculine spaces that surround her to the less regimented spaces of the muck and the back porch (“Transparent”). For Szabó, Janie’s self-fulfillment comes from her ability to remove herself from static, transparent spaces and to embrace mobility through open spaces (such as the muck and the roads in and around Eatonville) (“Interplay” 149-50). Although Szabó correctly designates space as Janie’s medium for self-definition, he does not give adequate attention to the porch as a distinct spatial locus that initiates the transformation that we witness over the course of the novel, nor does he explore the larger implications of space in the production of narrative. Janie’s ability to enter and produce subversive spaces—both materially and psychologically—directly results from her understanding of the porch as a liminal space and a Foucauldian heterotopia, a theoretical concept of great importance to this essay. Furthermore, Janie’s character and indeed Hurston’s novel move us beyond rigid conceptions of discourse situated in physical place. The spatializing potential of the porch allows Janie to negotiate her interiority and finally her narrative in ways that the bulk of Hurston criticism has not adequately confronted; this approach opens the door for continued discussion on the production of space both within and without the novel.

Hurston presents three distinct spaces in the novel—material, psychological, and narrative—that allow Janie and the reader to challenge the dominant discourses of race and gender. These spaces complement one another in critical ways. For instance, it is Janie’s encounter with the public and private dimensions of porch space—embodied by the front porch and the more intimate back porch—that reveals the critical connections between physical space and the interior and exterior dimensions of her psyche, which finally she projects through her body as a rhetorical site of performance.² The novel’s heteroglossic narration complicates our understanding of these spatial binaries and invites...