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Essay on A Critical Evaluation on "There Eyes are Watching God" by Zora N. Husrton
Black women writers have consistently rejected the falsification of their Black female experience, thereby avoiding the negative stereotypes such falsification has often created in the white American female and Black male literary traditions. Unlike many of their Black male and white female peers, Black women writers have usually refused to dispense with whatever were clearly Black and/or female in their sensibilities in an effort to achieve the mythical "neutral" voice of universal art. Zora Neale Hurston's work, particularly the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, exemplifies the immense potential contained in the Black female literary tradition for the resolution of critical aesthetic and political problems common to both the Afro-American and the American female literary traditions. Foremost among these problems is the question of how Black/female writers can create a body of literature capable of capturing the political and cultural realities of their experience while using literary forms created by and for white, upper-class men.
I believe, Hurston's novel Their Eyes offers an excellent source for demonstrating the value of an interdisciplinary approach to Black women's culture in general and the Black female literary tradition in particular. Hurston locates her fiction firmly in Black women's traditional culture as developed and displayed through music and song. In presenting Janie's story as a narrative related by herself to her best Black woman friend, Pheoby, Hurston is able to draw upon the rich oral legacy of Black female storytelling and mythmaking that has its roots in Afro-American culture. The reader who is conscious of this tradition will experience the novel as an overheard conversation as well as a literary text.
Janie's narrative in Their Eyes reflects the Black female blues esthetic the very direct use to which Black Women put language and song, in order, as criticFlorence Edwards states, to "transcend the most brutal, painful and personal of disasters in daily life and go on fighting strong and alive." (1979, 89-92).....
