Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale HurstonMy rating: 2 of 5 stars
"One of the most important works of twentieth-century American literature, Zora Neale Hurston's beloved 1937 classic, Their Eyes Were Watching God, is an enduring Southern love story sparkling with wit, beauty, and heartfelt wisdom. Told in the captivating voice of a woman who refuses to live in sorrow, bitterness, fear, or foolish romantic dreams, it is the story of fair-skinned, fiercely independent Janie Crawford, and her evolving selfhood through three marriages and a life marked by poverty, trials, and purpose. A true literary wonder, Hurston's masterwork remains as relevant and affecting today as when it was first published -- perhaps the most widely read and highly regarded novel in the entire canon of African American literature."
~~ back cover
Did I read the same book? Apparently I did -- the names of the characters are all the same.
I just never figured this book out. To begin with, I had trouble with the dialect. It didn't flow for me, so whenever any of the characters were speaking, I had to slow down and really concentrate on what they were saying. Not that I don't understand dialect -- I didn't live in NAwlins for 5 years for nothing. Hearing it is much different than reading it -- it doesn't flow off the written page, the way it does when you're hearing it. And losing that flow, having to stop and wade through it -- the lightness, quickness, native intelligence of the speakers is lost. This dialect is made to move, to twist and turn in on itself and the speakers, twine around them and the audience, swoop and swirl and carouse. I don't profess to know how to represent dialect on the written page without losing that wonder and joy. I do know that the way Ms. Hurston chose didn't work.
There was an awful lot of philosophizing about what makes lives worth living, etc. Heavy-handed philosophizing, to my way of thinking. I do hate being preached at from the mouth of a character in a novel. Just as in real life, the most effective sermon is doing by example.
There was indeed a contrast between Janie's three marriages, and certainly she was happier in the last than in the first two. Her grandmother married her off young to an older man, "to protect her". Janie chose her second husband, and the 20 year duration of that marriage as it soured and shredded provided some small arena for Janie to evolve her selfhood. Perhaps she did, subterraneously, as she seemed to emerge from it more sure of herself, more comfortable in her own skin.
The story tried too much I think. There was the background, but important in its own right, thread about what life was like for black people in the South in the 1930s. Janie seems to have escaped the worst of it, not that her life was a bed of roses. But there was no mention of the tensions between white and black, of the grinding poverty, of the circumscribed lives blacks in America were forced to live during that time. With the exception of the thread of her grandmother's dilemma for bearing the owner's child, any interaction between the races was painted as one of common respect and caring for one another.
The dramas of Janie and her marriages were the romantic theme of course, but it isn't romance as we generally think of it. Marriage more often was a financial survival tool, and a necessity to be placed in the social fabric. Love and/or friendship generally didn't enter into it. Janie's third marriage turned that standard on its ear, and outraged most of the community because of it. The words are there describing how much she loved Tea Cake, but for me they stayed just words on a page -- never igniting into a love that caught my heart.
I think the book should have stuck with one or the other, and not tried to take on both arenas. Neither was done a service.
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