Oral Narrative and Literary Text: Afro-American Folklore in Their Eyes Were Watching God

Abstract

When Their Eyes Were Watching God was first published in 1937, two earlier books had already proved Zora Neale Hurston's particular interest in black oral culture: Mules and Men (1935) and Jonah's Gourd Vine (1934). Hurston had collected the material for Mules and Men, compilation of folk tales, folk songs, folk speech, conjure formulas, root prescriptions, and various hoodoo rituals, during two-year stay in Florida under the supervision of Franz Boas, then one of the leading anthropologists in the United States. This book, dealing for the first time with Afro-American folklore from the perspective of the black rural community, is notable because it ties together the numerous stories in an overall narrative structure and thus gives the reader sense of the original context that produced them. But although this leads to certain fictionalization of the text, Mules and Men still retains an anthropological approach. It was not until Jonah's Gourd Vine that Zora Neale Hurston tried to embed her experience of black oral culture in an elaborate literary form, the modern novel.' Both Jonah's Gourd Vine and Their Eyes Were Watching God are set in Eatonville, Florida, Hurston's birthplace, which, in the words of Robert Hemenway, was a proud, self-governing, all-black village that felt no need of integration and, in fact, resisted it, so that an Afro-American culture could thrive without interference. Furthermore, both texts are in some ways related to incidents and persons in Hurston's life. Although this autobiographical impulse is less perceptible in Their Eyes, she tells us in Dust Tracks on Road that after receiving Guggenheim Fellowship and leaving for Jamaica, she took the opportunity to come to grips with muddled love-affair and wrote new novel: So I sailed off to Jamaica and pitched into work hard on my research to smother my feelings. But the thing would not down. The plot was far from the circumstances, but I tried to embalm all tenderness of my passion for him in Their Eyes Were Watching God.3 The result, however is no ordinary love-story. Janie not only struggles against the anxieties and expectations of slave-born grandmother who raised her, but also tries to resist the violent attempts of her later husbands to break her will to self-determination and to restrict her behavior to traditional female roles. Only with Tea Cake, her third husband, is Janie able to arrive at something like romance. But even this relationship, far from being harmonious all the time, is not free from oppression and violence. Finally, after shooting Tea Cake in self-defense, Janie returns to Eatonville where she sits down on the veranda to tell her story to Pheoby, an old friend. At first glance, it looks as if Their Eyes is the story of woman's resistance to male