Their Eyes Were Watching God

Their Eyes Were Watching God is a bildungsroman (or coming-of-age novel) that follows Janie’s development from teen to mature woman and raises significant issues related to the representation of African American women. Janie increasingly rejects the racial and gender norms of her community, chooses love over material prosperity, and seizes a freedom rarely achieved by any woman of the day, regardless of her race.

Her first marriage to Logan Killicks, a crude but relatively prosperous man, fulfills Nanny’s dream that Janie secure her future by marrying a property owner. For Nanny, a woman who has owned little—not even herself during her enslavement—the idea of property as security is irresistible. Nanny’s experiences include being sexually coerced by her enslaver and then threatened by his jealous wife, and seeing her daughter exhibit untreatable psychiatric symptoms after being raped. Nanny hence believes that love and desire are threats best neutralized by conventional morality. Through Nanny’s story, Hurston demonstrates the lasting and damaging impact of sexual exploitation on African American women, even after the arrival of freedom. Despite having escaped slavery, Nanny never feels secure enough to value love, romance, and the free play of sexual desire in the way Janie eventually embraces. Through Nanny, Hurston conveys how the double oppression of racism and misogyny affect Black women’s identity.

Janie marries Joe Starks, seduced in part by his expansive vision of what a Black man could achieve and by his grand plans for Eatonville. As “Mrs. Mayor Starks” (110), Janie conforms to the expectation of the townspeople, who see her as an embodiment of their material aspirations and nothing else. She also accepts the dominance of her husband, who values her primarily as a possession that elevates him above his peers because of her light skin. After decades burying her voice to fulfill this image of middle-class respectability, Janie’s voice erupts in the store after one too many of Joe’s public humiliations. This makes the point that a Black woman’s identity can be about more than her proximity to whiteness or her relationship to her husband.

Hurston constructs Janie as a portrait of what this identity might be. Joe’s death makes Janie financially independent; her rich widow status is more freeing because she has no children. As she does not need to sacrifice her life and dreams for her offspring, Janie at last engages in increasingly overt self-expression. She courts and marries a poor younger man with darker skin, who satisfies her sexually and feeds her desire for adventure. In Jacksonville and the muck with Tea Cake, Janie escapes the rigid domestic space that has confined her for much of her life.

The ending of the novel and the frame narrative—Janie telling a story to her friend, Pheoby Watson—show the power of a Black woman claiming her identity. Janie’s story does not end in a respectable marriage or self-sacrifice to uplift the race. Instead, Janie claims an identity without reference to men. In the end, Janie becomes a storyteller who has earned her rightful place on the porch. In the courtroom, her telling of the story of her love of Tea Cake and the tragedy of his death is so powerful that it seemingly overcomes institutional racism and the disapproval of her own community, as an all-white jury acquits her. Pheoby’s reaction to Janie’s story—that listening to it has made her “10 feet higher” (192)—shows that Janie’s voice has expanded Pheoby’s own notions of what it means to be an African American woman.