About the Authoress:
Zora Neale Hurston was an author of the Harlem Renaissance, writing plays, short stories, and four novels, the best known of which is Their Eyes Were Watching God. Hurston was also an anthropologist, and her well-rounded brilliance ought to have earned her great fame and respect. Unfortunately, many of Hurston’s contemporaries criticized her for her use of idiomatic “African-American” dialect in her books, and her works fell into obscurity. She died in a welfare home in 1960 and was buried in an unmarked grave, unrecognized for her contributions to society at large. In the 1970s, Alice Walker visited the cemetery and chose an unmarked grave to be called Hurston’s, but it is not known which grave is actually the great writer’s. Today, Hurston is respected largely for the very technique for which she was once criticized. Today, she is praised for her inclusion of speech patterns such as this one, in which Janie Wood speaks about her love for Teacake: "Love ain't somethin' lak uh grindstone dat's de same thing everywhere and do de same thing tuh everything it touch. Love is lak de sea. It's uh movin' thing, but still and all, it takes its shape from de shore it meets, and it's different with every shore.”1
About the novel:
Published in 1937, Their Eyes Were Watching God is an African-American novel, and that’s unmistakably important. Just as important, however, is the fact that it’s a novel about an African-American woman, Janie. Now, before I say anything more about the book, I want to beg you to please read this book 
if you have the chance. I read it maybe 10 years ago, as a child, and it was one of my favorite books. Having read it again this weekend, I feel justified in my youthful tastes. It’s truly one of the best pieces of literature I have had the pleasure of experiencing; further, it is meaningful and relevant to a contemporary audience, as it touches on all sorts of bigotry.
The brilliance of Hurston is that she wrote about what she knew, and she writes with a sort of voice that makes her believable. Not having lived when she lived, I can’t claim that what she describes is true, but she convinces me, and that makes her story powerful in a way that captures the horrible racism of the whites as well as the counter-cultural “fighting-back” racism of the blacks that often did as much damage to innocents (oftentimes women). Paraphrasing Janie’s grandmother: “As far as I have been able to tell, it’s a white man’s world, and he tells the black man to do the work. But the black man doesn’t do it, he tells his n*** wife to do it. I’ve been trying to get a different life for you, Janie. I did what I thought was right.” Their Eyes Were Watching God is the story of Janie’s attempt to get that life; she leaves one country husband, Logan (who her grandmother forces her to marry), for a rich and ambitious second husband, Jody, who gives her all that she could want in the way of material things for almost 15 years. Yet Janie, much to the mystification of poor African-Americans around her, is dissatisfied; her husband will not allow her to speak with the others. He forces her to put on airs, he does not understand her longing for life as opposed to things.
When Logan dies, she refuses to mourn and she refuses to look for another man. But then she meets Tea Cake (actual name, Vergible Woods), who is more than 10 years younger than she, but who tells her that “she has the keys to the kingdom.” Theirs is the sort of love one cannot describe in a blog summary, and I beg you to read the book. I hate to spoil the ending, but Tea Cake dies in a way that is symbolic of oppression, and Janie goes back to live with a new wisdom and a desire fulfilled. She has known love, and she is wiser for it. She is a real woman, a real human, and no one can take that away from her.
The narrative style of the book is very intriguing, as Janie is purportedly telling the story to her friend Phoebe, but the entire narrative is given in 3rd person (and many thoughts and experiences are related which Janie could not have known). Essentially, there is an omniscient third person narrator supposedly speaking through Janie. Rather odd, and just begging analysis from those of us who are interested in narratology, narrative theory, or semiotics (such as myself).
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