Legal Narratives of Self-Defense and Self-Effacement in Their Eyes Were Watching God

Abstract

Surprisingly little close attention has been paid to legal nuances of climactic scenes in Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, in which Janie Woods crosses shots with her rabid husband, Tea Cake, killing him, then is tried and acquitted of murder later same day. If we turn legally-informed critical lens on Hurston's handling of killing and trial, novel's central concerns with problematics of selfhood and relation of narrative construction to individual identity come into view in new way. Though not legal expert, Hurston brilliantly orchestrates scene of crossed shots to demonstrate how acts of intentional, lethal violence, from which one would ordinarily infer subjective hostility and for which individuals would ordinarily be held responsible, can be performed without legal culpability by actors whose deepest feelings for each other are unconditional love. She then uses law's insistence on transforming antecedent events into morally-inflected, responsibility-assigning narratives to show how Janie's role in death scene is serially reinvented. The narrator's initial description of her as an assertive, fully agentic woman who preserves her life in an act of self-defense, is, in rapid succession, reformulated first by black community which casts Janie as treacherous, cold-blooded killer, then by both Janie herself and judge as self-effacing wife who commits mercy killing out of compassion for her husband's suffering, and finally by jury, whose verdict that killing was entirely accidental erases Janie's agency completely and renders her shot no more her own rationally-chosen act than was Tea Cake's. Taken together, these scenes and ideas require us to rethink novel's handling of selfhood, love, violence, and narrative. Of those critics who have looked at killing and trial scenes in Their Eyes Were Watching God, most have focused on such questions as whether Tea Cake's death is symbolic revenge for his earlier beating of Janie, whether decision to render Janie's testimony through summary description by third-person narrator impairs her achievement of selfhood by depriving her of voice, or how trial demonstrates white legal authority's enforcement of power over black men. (1) Or, filling in for themselves what text aggressively refuses to delineate, critics have applauded Janie's triumphant eloquence in proving her need for self-defense, declared trial to be conversion experience for whites, who are forced to acknowledge sexual-relational feelings (the 'humanity') of their social, and racial 'inferiors,' or concluded that it illustrates the depth of Janie's discovery of self, degree to which she has become a complete woman ... at home with cycles of birth and death, love and loss, knowledge and selfhood. (2) By focusing on voice, race, and fact that Janie's testimony is followed by her acquittal, critics have not only overlooked Janie's utter self-effacement and absence of any mention of self-defense at her trial, but, more generally, have failed to attend to novel's extraordinary dissection of agency and its relation to narrative. The scene of crossed shots renders very idea of coherent selfhood problematic, especially assumption that behavior expresses self in any simple way. Act and mental state may be consistent, or they may not. What seems to be mental may really be physical; what seems to be purposeful may really be diseased body's miming of intentionality. Indeed, gap between mind and act is so extreme in shooting scene that it forces us to question easy confidence with which we make inferences about personality, character, or motivation from evidence of an individual's behavior. Shifting grounds of analysis in this way transforms troubling question of Janie's ultimate achievement of independence and autonomy into more general question about purposes and circumstances under which we create narratives of autonomy or dependence that define our own identities. …