Review: Their Eyes Were Watching God

Full version first published on An Elsewhere Anthropologist.

"Their Eyes Were Watching God" cover art.

If you’re into literature, you’ve probably heard of Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960) (and if you hadn’t before, now you have). She’s a classic author of American literature, especially African American literature. But writing literature didn’t seem to be her first plan. While putting herself through college, she’d published some short stories, a play, and started a college newspaper, The Hilltop. But it was anthropology she was studying, not literature. She came up with early giants of the discipline at Columbia University, including Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, and Franz Boaz (often credited as creating the field of cultural anthropology).

This was at a time when many anthropologists insisted on travelling out there – to far-flung places. But Hurston wanted to study the folklore and culture of African Americans in the US South, where she was from. She wanted to do insider anthropology. While at Columbia she lived in Harlem, where she met African American authors of the Harlem Renaissance. This movement had been growing over the years, producing art, music and literature that fundamentally challenged stereotypes about African Americans during the time of Jim Crow South.

Hurston found it difficult to make it as an anthropologist at the time (thanks to inherent racism and sexism). But rather than let herself be curtailed, she chose to merge her two passions of literature and anthropology and create something wholly different. To her colleague Countee Cullen, a poet of the Harlem Renaissance, she wrote:

I have the nerve to walk my own way, however hard, in my search for reality, rather than climb upon the rattling wagon of wishful illusions.

What reality was she seeking, through fictions?

Her blending of ethnography and fiction was considered suspect at the time, cementing her difficulties in finding work in the academe. Neither was Hurston considered a greatly successful author during her lifetime. Some African American literary scholars and critics thought she wasn’t politically motivated enough while anthropologists didn’t think her work was reliable or objective enough.

She beat her own path, but this path was only widely recognised for its importance after her death. One of her key contributions – both to literature and anthropology – is the ethnographic novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God.

Their Eyes Were Watching God

Hurston's second novel, Their Eyes was released in 1937, two years after her autoethnographic folklore collection, Mules and Men (1935) and three years after her first novel, Jonah's Gourd Vine (1934). Their Eyes follows the life of Janie, from West Florida, and her three marriages.

Here’s a brief summary of the plot (spoilers):

As a sixteen-year-old, Janie's grandmother arranges for Janie to marry Logan, a local landowner. Initially resistant, Janie eventually agrees. But the marriage quickly sours as Logan attempts to control her independent spirit, ultimately threatening her life.

When Janie meets the charming and successful Jody Starks, she abandons Logan to follow him to Eatonville, the first town formally established by African Americans. When they arrive, Jody uses his wealth to buy property, open a shop, and position himself as a community leader. Though rarely physically violent, Jody controls Janie by silencing her and confining her to the shop. His stubbornness eventually gets him killed, though, and Janie is left a wealthy widower.

Numerous suitors come calling for Janie’s hand, but she isn’t interested in any of them. Not until Tea Cake starts turning up at the store. A younger man with a less than stellar reputation, Tea Cake is handsome and charming, and seems enamoured with Janie. Everyone warns her he isn’t the type to be trusted, but despite her early doubts Janie soon agrees to leave Eatonville and build a life with him.

What follows is love, hardship, and a devastating cyclone.

For the full review and other writing that explores the overlaps between fiction and anthropology, check out An Elsewhere Anthropologist.