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  • Necessary Narration in Their Eyes Were Watching God
  • Amanda Bailey

Popular and critical portrayals of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God commonly depict the novel as the bold tale of a Southern black woman’s discovery of her voice, her identity, and her autonomy. The novel has now held a canonically central position in American literature for several decades, thanks in large part to Alice Walker’s tribute, “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston” (1975) and Robert Hemenway’s Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography (1977). Both works have had the effect of refocusing the eyes of writers and critics on Hurston’s long overlooked contribution to fiction, folklore, and the Harlem Renaissance. As a result, Hurston, and especially her most popular novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, have been lauded for establishing a much longed-for maternal literary ancestry for black female authors. Walker refers to the novel as “one of the sexiest, most ‘healthily’ rendered heterosexual love stories in our literature” (88). Oprah herself has called it her “favorite love story of all time” and produced the 2005 made-for-TV-movie adaptation starring Halle Berry as Janie. In the academy, Their Eyes is taught extensively in undergraduate and graduate classes in colleges and universities (and even high schools) around the nation, classes including: African American Literature, Women’s Literature, American Literature, Black Women Writers, Folklore, Literature of Self Discovery, Southern Literature, and many others. The novel’s popularity in such diverse classrooms has more recently prompted the conception of materials aimed at teachers of the novel, such as editor John Lowe’s Approaches to Teaching Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God and Other Works (2009), and innumerable web-based teaching guides and lesson plans. Outside the classroom, Hurston’s novel has been well established as a legitimate impetus of scholarly work, especially following The American Novel Series’ New Essays on Their Eyes Were Watching God (1990) edited by Michael Awkward. All told, the chances of an American student, teacher, or scholar’s not encountering this novel—or at the very least, having heard something of it—have become slim indeed.

Clearly with the recommendations of teachers of literature, literary critics, and Oprah’s Book Club backing it, Their Eyes surely “possesses a power and insight that should continue to compel, inspire, and fascinate readers of American novels,” as [End Page 319] Awkward predicts in his introduction to the New Essays collection (21). Yet despite its robust presence in academic classes, online lists of top feminist “must-read” books, and the American canon, a textual inconsistency, perhaps earning the label of “problem,” endures throughout the novel’s critical history. By virtue of the text’s narrative structure, its black, female protagonist, Janie Woods née Crawford, appears to exhibit a perplexing and consistent need for a narrator, a translator, and a mediator both within the text and beyond the bounds of the written narrative itself. Even in her intimate, isolated telling of her story to her “bosom friend,” Pheoby Watson, Janie’s first-person narration disappears for nearly two hundred pages and only reappears in the last few pages of the novel (TEWWG 82). Altogether Janie speaks only about seventy lines of actual story-telling dialogue out of almost two hundred pages of text, the rest of which continues in free indirect discourse with the understanding that it is derived from Janie’s perspective and memories, even though the narrative’s logic does not always follow this assumption. Even more troubling for some critics is that Janie will need an intermediary to retell her story to the Eatonville community after the novel’s close. It is Pheoby, the reader is led to believe, who will go on to be the true narrator of Janie’s tale to a wider audience.

In 1990, Awkward assessed that roughly half of Their Eyes’s criticism at the time was made up of inquiries into Hurston’s narrative choices, adding that “the most effective responses” have attempted to explain them “in terms of [Hurston’s] innovative employment of Afro-American expressive paradigms and practices” (19). Despite the critical questioning of the connections between feminism/womanism and voice, as...

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