Their Eyes Were Watching God

What does it mean to truly find your voice—to stand up, speak, and live by what you believe rather than what others expect of you? In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston asks that question through the story of Janie Crawford, a woman who journeys through love, loss, self-discovery, and liberation in early twentieth-century Florida. Hurston contends that selfhood for Black women requires confronting the voices of others—be they lovers, communities, or traditions—and learning to claim one’s own voice amid them.

Across its pages, Hurston presents a lyrical, unapologetically Southern world pulsing with language, laughter, and the rhythms of African American life. This is not a novel of overt social protest like the works of Richard Wright or Ralph Ellison. Instead, Hurston makes an audacious argument: that living fully—emotionally and spiritually—can itself be a defiant act of freedom, especially for a Black woman in a time that sought to silence her.

The World Hurston Builds

Hurston’s setting unfolds from Eatonville, Florida—a thriving all-Black town that became the first incorporated Black municipality in the United States. Eatonville represents a world built by Black people, for Black people—a space where identity can exist apart from the white gaze. This backdrop allows Hurston to focus on intracommunity dynamics: how people talk, joke, gossip, and tell stories. Through these oral exchanges, language becomes a house of belonging and a field of tension. For Janie, those porch conversations shape her inner landscape as much as any romantic relationship.

The Three Loves and the Horizon

Janie’s journey arcs across three major relationships that reflect distinct forces shaping her identity. First, Logan Killicks represents security and stability but emotional sterility. Her grandmother Nanny forces her into this marriage to protect her from exploitation—yet in doing so, constrains her ability to love freely. When Janie looks up at the pear tree in bloom early in the book, she imagines marriage as mutual passion and growth. Logan’s utilitarian worldview (“you ain’t got no particular place”) crushes that dream, teaching her that safety without love is imprisonment.

Her marriage to Joe Starks introduces ambition and domination. Jody—charismatic, visionary, and controlling—founds Eatonville as Mayor and soon confines Janie within his respectability politics. He insists she keep her magnificent hair tied up because it attracts other men’s attention. As mayor’s wife she becomes an ornament of authority, silenced beneath the showpiece of a perfect household. When Janie finally speaks back after years of humiliation—telling Jody in public that his manhood has withered—she breaks the silence, claiming language as liberation. Through speech, she begins to shed the imposed image of the docile woman.

Her third love, Tea Cake Woods, gives her joy and equality. He is younger, poor, and playful, and their relationship defies social norms. Together they move to the Everglades, working in the fields and joining in the music of the community. Here, the language of laughter and labor replaces hierarchy with mutual affection. Yet even in this freedom, Hurston reminds us that life resists perfection: jealousy, poverty, and a catastrophic hurricane eventually test their love to its limit. When Janie shoots Tea Cake, driven by self-defense as he succumbs to rabies, Hurston stages the tragic paradox of love and autonomy—Janie must take life to preserve her own.

Voice, Language, and Autonomy

Hurston’s art lies in the vernacular—Black Southern dialect rendered with poetic depth. Dialogue becomes both a mirror of culture and a medium of resistance. While men on the porch boast and frett, Janie listens, absorbs, and eventually speaks her truth in her own rhythm. Her storytelling to her friend Pheoby frames the entire novel: a conversation between women where Janie finally owns her narrative. The closing lines—“Two things everybody’s got tuh do fuh theyselves: They got tuh go tuh God, and they got tuh find out about livin’ fuh theyselves”—become Hurston’s credo for self-revelation.

Why It Still Matters

For readers today, Janie’s journey resonates far beyond its setting. It’s about anyone striving to break free from imposed roles—gender roles, cultural expectations, and voices that drown your own. Hurston reminds you that to live fully, you must travel “to the horizon and back.” That metaphor—found in the novel’s opening chapter and closing—captures the cyclical nature of discovery: we venture outward, suffer, love, lose, and return transformed. Janie begins by watching ships on distant horizons, wishing for a life beyond; she ends having “pulled in her horizon like a great fish-net.” This inward claim of freedom—quiet, strong, and self-defined—is Hurston’s enduring gift to literature.

Hurston believed that African American vernacular was not simply a tool of survival but an art form—a language capable of expressing beauty, irony, and divine truth. In Their Eyes Were Watching God, speech is the instrument through which identity takes shape. Janie’s experiences unfold in the rhythm of talk rather than in political protest. Hurston’s choice to center storytelling, dialogue, and humor among everyday people was revolutionary in a period when Black art was expected to serve activism.

Folklore and Oral Tradition

Eatonville’s porch represents a communal stage of signifying and debate. Men like Sam Watson, Lige Moss, and Stew Beef exchange boastful, witty tales—a form of play that builds cultural memory and social cohesion. Hurston, trained as an anthropologist under Franz Boas, recognized that such oral performance revealed both communal joy and moral insight. For example, the endless jokes about Matt Bonner’s mule offer comic relief but also critique exploitation and indifference. When Joe Starks buys and frees the mule—a symbolic act of liberation—it mirrors Janie’s own longing for freedom from social bondage.

Language as Power and Silence

Throughout Janie’s marriages, language becomes a weapon and a prison. Jody monopolizes speech in both home and public life; his “big voice” defines the town’s rhythm. Janie learns not to speak out because speaking threatens masculine order. After years of suppression, she discovers that silence itself can grow power—the stillness of listening becomes her preparation for agency. When she finally speaks, her words burst forth with transformative strength, fracturing Jody’s myth of control.

Community and Self-Expression

Hurston uses vernacular not to diminish intelligence but to elevate authenticity. The dialect voices carry philosophy, humor, and spirituality. Consider how Tea Cake and Janie’s love flourishes through verbal play—jokes, songs, and storytelling. Their banter is a dance of equality, not domination. Through this shared speech, Hurston shows that freedom is not found in solitude but in language exchanged with others—the joy of speaking and being heard.

(In comparison, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man later explored similar ideas of voice and invisibility, but through a man's confrontation with racial alienation in the urban North. Hurston’s lens is intimate, feminine, and rural—her revolution is spoken, not shouted.)

Ultimately, Hurston’s linguistic vision redefines literature itself. By letting dialect hold serious wisdom, she claimed ground for Black voice as literary art. You leave her novel not just hearing Janie’s story but hearing the music of a community reclaiming its spiritual language—a reminder that every personal liberation begins by speaking in your own tongue.

Love in Hurston’s world is no sentimental ideal—it is a crucible where freedom and power clash. Through Janie’s relationships with Logan, Joe, and Tea Cake, Hurston maps the politics of intimacy: how affection can entangle domination, and how equality must be fought for even in passion. Each union teaches Janie a version of love’s limits and possibilities.

Marriage as Confinement

With Logan Killicks, Janie learns that pragmatic security cannot substitute for emotional connection. Nanny’s insistence that Janie marry for protection rather than desire reflects generations of women scarred by exploitation. Hurston contrasts the pear tree’s symphony of nature—a vision of harmony and sexual ecstasy—with the lifeless routine of chopping wood and tending chickens. Janie’s rejection of Logan’s world inaugurates her rebellion against inherited fear.

Ambition and Control

Joe Starks presents a different cage: love woven into hierarchy. His vision of prosperity turns Janie into an ornament of respectability. Hurston brilliantly dissects patriarchal pride through Jody's obsession with possession—his desire to own not just a town but a woman’s silence. When Janie defies him publicly, confronting the diminishing of his virility, she performs an emotional emancipation unmatched by law or ceremony. It's not rebellion for spectacle, but reclamation of dignity.

Love as Liberation

With Tea Cake, Janie tastes equality and adventure. Their laughter and vulnerability create what philosopher bell hooks later called “love as political resistance.” Yet Hurston does not idealize romantic freedom; she makes sure love remains human—imperfect, jealous, and mortal. The Everglades symbolize this open horizon where class and gender barriers blur. Their shared labor, dancing, and storytelling render love as mutual creation. Tragically, the same passion exposes fragility when Tea Cake’s illness turns love into sacrifice. By choosing life—shooting him—Janie completes her circle: she claims agency even amid grief.

Hurston reminds you that every relationship, whether protective or passionate, tests your voice and boundary. Love may connect, but it can also consume. True freedom, she suggests, is not found in being loved, but in loving without losing yourself.

Hurston’s novel is framed by questions of God, nature, and destiny. The title itself—Their Eyes Were Watching God—appears during the hurricane scene, when Janie and her friends gaze toward an indifferent storm, waiting for divine judgment. Rather than promising salvation, Hurston’s God is vast, silent, and unknowable, a force that mirrors life’s unpredictable beauty and cruelty. The lesson is not obedience but awareness: the divine does not speak to humanity; it waits to be seen through experience.

The Hurricane and the Cosmic Test

When Tea Cake, Janie, and others face the monstrous hurricane in the Everglades, Hurston shifts the novel’s tone from social realism to mythic vision. The storm becomes a living metaphor for fate’s impartial destruction. “They seemed to be staring at the dark, but their eyes were watching God”—in that sentence, Hurston portrays humanity’s helpless grandeur. No hierarchy remains; Black and white workers, rich and poor, stand equal before mortality. It’s a transcendental moment reminiscent of the existential storms in Hemingway or the divine silences in Toni Morrison’s Beloved.

Nature as Mirror and Teacher

From the pear tree’s erotic bloom to the lake’s wrath, nature in Hurston’s hands is both nurturing and terrifying. Its beauty awakens desire; its violence forces humility. Janie’s spiritual vision emerges from her communion with the natural world—a sacred relationship to life’s rhythms rather than church doctrine. Hurston redefines faith as attention to the living cosmos. For Janie, revelation arrives in moments like sunlight after storm, not through sermons.

God as Horizon

Hurston’s God is not the patriarch Nanny prays to nor the preacher Joe invokes for control. Her God is the horizon itself—the infinite beyond that calls you to live truly. When Janie tells Pheoby, “You got tuh go tuh God and you got tuh find out about livin’ fuh theyselves,” she’s defining faith as experience, not creed. To watch God, in Hurston’s sense, means to face life’s immensity with courage and curiosity. You don’t wait for salvation; you participate in creation.

Through the hurricane, Hurston suggests that divine vision is not comfort but clarity: seeing the world as it is, vast and indifferent, yet full of meaning through the lives we create within it.

Hurston wrote at a time when many Black intellectuals—such as Richard Wright and Alain Locke—demanded that literature expose racial injustice. She took another route: to depict Black life beyond victimhood. Through Eatonville’s independence and the diverse characters of the Everglades, Hurston creates a vision of cultural wholeness, not chronic grievance. Her genius lies in revealing the fullness of being Black—work, laughter, desire, and resilience—without apology.

Eatonville as Sanctuary

Eatonville’s existence as an all-Black town represents self-governance and community. Here, Hurston establishes a counter-narrative to the white-dominated South. It is not paradise but possibility—a place where Black humanity defines itself. Joe Starks’s ambition to build a modern town highlights the complexity of uplift, where progress risks pride. Within Eatonville, Hurston celebrates cultural autonomy yet warns against internal hierarchies that replicate oppression.

Beyond Racial Protest

Hurston’s refusal to write social protest drew criticism from her peers. Richard Wright accused her novel of making a minstrel show of Black life. Yet Hurston’s intent was radical in another sense: she offered a human-centered narrative where race existed but did not define every gesture. Her characters do not need to be explained to outsiders—they simply are. This claim of normalcy was, in its way, revolutionary.

Fluid Identity

Janie’s mixed heritage (her grandmother was enslaved, her mother assaulted by a teacher of the white elite) situates her between worlds. She never denies her color but seeks a larger horizon beyond racial categorization. In the Everglades, Hurston imagines multicultural labor camps—Black, Bahamian, Caribbean—working and dancing together. Their brief utopia collapses under the hurricane, a sobering reminder that nature disregards human divisions. Still, for Hurston, identity remains fluid, not fixed by race alone.

Hurston’s portrayal of racial dynamics encourages you to see culture as creativity, not constraint. Her Eatonville teaches pride; her Everglades teaches empathy; both affirm that belonging is built from shared experience, not prescribed categories.

Hurston’s portrayal of Janie is one of the earliest and most complete depictions of a Black woman seeking autonomy in American literature. Janie’s story defies stereotypes of passivity or tragedy. She is shaped by patriarchal pressures yet ultimately chooses her path. Hurston uses Janie’s voice—her storytelling to Pheoby—as an instrument of reclaiming selfhood from silence.

Breaking the Silence

Through Nanny and Joe Starks, we see how institutions silence women under the illusion of protection. Nanny’s theology of caution born from slavery turns into control; Joe’s authoritarianism demands obedience. Janie’s defiance—speaking up to Joe, leaving Eatonville with Tea Cake—marks her spiritual awakening. Her voice becomes a means of survival, not rebellion for rebellion’s sake.

Storytelling as Healing

The novel’s circular structure is itself liberation. When Janie returns home after Tea Cake’s death, she tells Pheoby everything—her failures, joys, and revelations. This act of narration transforms pain into wisdom. Hurston empowers women’s friendship as sacred space, where experience becomes legacy. Pheoby’s promise to tell others what she learned echoes Hurston’s call to share truth beyond judgment.

A Feminist Vision Ahead of Its Time

Hurston’s feminism is earthy and existential, rooted in the freedom to live emotionally on one’s own terms. Janie’s physicality—her long hair, her sexuality, her capacity for pleasure—defies puritanical standards. Hurston reclaims the sensual body as a site of divine expression. In the closing scene, Janie “pulls in her horizon,” choosing solitude not as loss but fulfillment. She has lived, loved, and spoken without apology. For every reader, especially women navigating expectations, her triumph whispers: find your horizon and claim it.

Hurston’s vision of female voice stands as a precursor to later feminist icons—from Alice Walker’s Celie to Toni Morrison’s Sula—where speaking truth aloud reshapes what it means to be whole.

Hurston’s work was dismissed, forgotten, and later resurrected as a cornerstone of Black feminist literature. Understanding this legacy illuminates not just one author’s fate but how society often silences voices that refuse simple definitions. For nearly thirty years after its publication, Their Eyes Were Watching God languished out of print, criticized by male contemporaries like Richard Wright for lacking racial protest. Yet by the 1970s, writers such as Alice Walker saw in Hurston a “genius of the South”—a woman who had depicted freedom through joy.

The Critical Rebirth

Walker’s pilgrimage to find Hurston’s unmarked grave sparked a scholarly renaissance. Black women writers from Walker to Edwidge Danticat elevated Hurston as literary matriarch. Her blend of anthropology and art—using folklore to reveal psychological truth—redefined what fiction about cultural identity could be. Modern critics recognize Their Eyes Were Watching God as a synthesis of lyricism, feminism, and ethnography.

A Tradition Within the Tradition

Hurston’s influence radiates through successors like Toni Morrison, Gayl Jones, and Gloria Naylor. They extend her project of exploring how Black women find language to express desire, solitude, and community. As Henry Louis Gates Jr. later observed, Hurston’s vernacular artistry opened a “black woman’s voice within the tradition.” Her characters speak in rhythms that became musical patterns for later generations.

Why Her Story Still Resonates

Hurston’s rediscovery reminds you how easily creative genius can be silenced by conventional expectations—social, racial, and political. Her insistence that joy, laughter, and speech matter as much as protest reclaims humanity from the language of suffering. To read her now is to rediscover what freedom sounds like when spoken in everyday voices.

Hurston’s story teaches that art not born of bitterness can still be radically political—in its tenderness, humor, and celebration of being. In her own words, “The dream is the truth.” She gave that truth to Janie, and by extension, to anyone daring to listen.