The book begins in the southeastern United States maybe at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. (The final events of the book happen around 1928, one might say on the eve of the Great Depression.) Janie is born into poverty, raised by a grandmother who wants her granddaughter to live in genteel circumstances, substituting her granddaughter's dreams for her own. She is more or less sold off to an older man whom she does not love, a marriage that kills her youthful dreams and illusions. He wants to assert his control over her, since he cannot command her respect or love, so his character is a little pitiable; but I think it's clear that the marriage in itself was an act of abuse too.
***At this point I will put a Spoiler Alert, since I will be detailing pretty much the rest of the plot:***
Then the first husband dies, and she marries an ambitious man who exudes prosperity and optimism. As he works his way up to the mayoralty of a town, and she becomes more and more well-dressed, respected and prominent in the community, she becomes increasingly miserable. Her husband demands that she fulfill roles that will boost his social and economic standing, even though she hates them. And he is too jealous of attention to want her to receive any. He is, I think we'd definitely say nowadays, emotionally abusive. Yet again she is shut in. Then he, too dies.
A wayward spirit, Tea Cake, is one of the cloud of aspirants to Janie's hand after the fancy funeral. Tea Cake is a younger man than Janie, and Janie's neighbours and at first even Janie herself aren't sure if he is a gold-digger, a bit of a charlatan, and a skirt-chaser, or just a genuinely disinterested man who deeply loves Janie. Whatever he may be, he revives the inner girl and the dreams in Janie. Not without fear, she finally decides that this revivification outweighs her doubts, and runs away with him to escape the yoke of her neighbours' judgment and try to earn their bread, however precariously, together.
Janie is not a passive, saintly figure; she hates her earlier husbands pretty thoroughly, keeping a sense of what is owed to her as a human being.
Moreover, I do think that there's a hard Darwinistic touch about the times that are described in Their Eyes Were Watching God. Men had to live by their bodily labour, though sometimes women worked alongside them as for example in the bean fields of Florida that are mentioned in the book; and as such it seemed likelier that middle-class women, or any women who weren't expected to work outside the home — socially, financially and legally subjugated though they were, and clear though the author makes it that spousal abuse was expected — might outlive and outlast them. There's something about the horrible waiting-for-a-spouse-to-die scheme of respectably waiting for social and romantic independence that is quite reminiscent of the rural English world of George Eliot, for example.
Their Eyes Were Watching God is, I think, a labour of love on the part of the author. The dialect, the characters, the occupations, the worries and jokes and fears of the characters, are probably all the fruits of her anthropological observations. While her writing was spectacularly good, I don't know if it was as polished as it might be. For example, as with Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings's The Yearling, it can be hard to weave a major natural disaster into a novel without making it seem like a melodramatic deus ex machina — even though that natural disaster was a real historic event and the role of racism in the aftermath is also described importantly in this book.
I liked the book in a way, but as I mentioned at the beginning of this review, it is so grim it isn't something I'm likely to read during a pandemic again.
(Apologies if I've misremembered details; I started reading Their Eyes Were Watching God last year and so they're hazy again.)
Moreover, I do think that there's a hard Darwinistic touch about the times that are described in Their Eyes Were Watching God. Men had to live by their bodily labour, though sometimes women worked alongside them as for example in the bean fields of Florida that are mentioned in the book; and as such it seemed likelier that middle-class women, or any women who weren't expected to work outside the home — socially, financially and legally subjugated though they were, and clear though the author makes it that spousal abuse was expected — might outlive and outlast them. There's something about the horrible waiting-for-a-spouse-to-die scheme of respectably waiting for social and romantic independence that is quite reminiscent of the rural English world of George Eliot, for example.
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| "Farm, farm workers, Mt. Williamson in background, Manzanar Relocation Center, California." (1943) by Ansel Adams (1902-84) via Wikimedia Commons |
Their Eyes Were Watching God is, I think, a labour of love on the part of the author. The dialect, the characters, the occupations, the worries and jokes and fears of the characters, are probably all the fruits of her anthropological observations. While her writing was spectacularly good, I don't know if it was as polished as it might be. For example, as with Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings's The Yearling, it can be hard to weave a major natural disaster into a novel without making it seem like a melodramatic deus ex machina — even though that natural disaster was a real historic event and the role of racism in the aftermath is also described importantly in this book.
I liked the book in a way, but as I mentioned at the beginning of this review, it is so grim it isn't something I'm likely to read during a pandemic again.
(Apologies if I've misremembered details; I started reading Their Eyes Were Watching God last year and so they're hazy again.)
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