Zora Neale Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God can be described as a Quest narrative in which the novel’s main protagonist, Janie, searches for fulfillment through a meaningful and loving relationship while gaining self-knowledge of what it means to be a woman in a predominantly patriarchal society.
The story that Janie tells Pheoby encompasses the novel itself and expresses how Janie has finally found her voice and is willing to tell her story to a future generation of women. This process of finding her voice is a difficult journey in which she endures two loveless marriages and experiences social oppression that causes her to curb her speech and consequently hinders her personal development. Janie’s first realization about marriage is that it does not “compel love like the sun the day.” (25) Janie wanted a love “sweet…lak when you sit under a pear tree” (29) but instead receives Logan, a man who wants her to “chop and tote wood” and calls her “spoilt rotten.” (31) Her compulsion to be married to a man that she never loved comes from her Nanny, a woman who knows the social obstacles that a woman has to overcome such as gaining financial stability, and wants Janie to be able to “sit” or have the luxury to refrain from working due to a well-to-do husband. This compulsion that Janie’s nanny feels for Janie to be married reveals the expectation that women depend on men for financial security and that at this moment, Janie is willing to succumb to these social expectations.
Janie’s second marriage begins with a personal choice that Janie makes to leave Logan and follow Jody, a “citified, stylish” man whose plan was to build “a town all outa colored folks” and become a leader in the new city. Janie shows a bit of her natural spirit and voice by leaving Logan and telling him that he “ain’t done [her] no favor by marryin’ [her.]” However, her voice is quickly suppressed by her new status as Jody’s wife, a mayor’s wife, when she learns that her high society status demands submission. When they argue about Janie’s tendency to enjoy typically “lower class” entertainment such as the mule funeral, Janie “took the easy way away from a fuss. She didn’t change her mind, but she agreed with her mouth.” This suggests that Janie disagreed with her husband, but she chose not to speak up. During her years with Jody, she “learned how to talk some and leave some…she got nothing from Jody except what money could buy.” (91) Janie finally speaks up when Jody begins to attack her appearance in the store and Janie “robbed him of the illusion of irresistible maleness” by telling him that he looked like “de change uh life” instead of keeping her mouth shut. It is at this pivotal moment that Janie rejects social norms and speaks candidly to her husband instead of curbing her speech. The irony in this exchange is that it did not seem shocking that Jody would call out his wife in public, but to have a wife call out her husband was scandalous and clearly against social norms in this scene. This suggests that the oppression that Janie is under as a woman has implications in regards to how she speaks even to her own husband and that her place in society is expected to be a silent one.
Janie truly finds her voice when her husband Jody dies from kidney disease and instead of mourning for a “suitable” length of time for a high-society woman, Janie lets her hair down and proclaims that “mourning oughtn’t tuh last no longer n’grief” (113). This suggests that she is no longer preoccupied with the opinions of the townspeople in regard to her behavior as a mayor’s wife, and she intends to live her life without the pressure of society’s judgment against her. Janie has the freedom to marry who she likes due to her inheritance from Jody and she exerts her freedom by yoking herself to a poor man that she truly loves. This suggests that although she is defying social norms by marrying a man like Tea Cake, she really gained the freedom to do so by accepting the inheritance of her late husband Jody, which suggests that she still retains some dependence on her previous marriages because of the financial fall-back plan that Jody provided her. There is room for debate as far as what this says about her status as a woman in general in this society and whether her inheritance gives her power or leaves the power in the patriarchy. However, Janie makes the decision to leave the money alone and depend on Tea Cake for their living. The final scene in which Janie really finds her voice is when Tea Cake is sick and threatens her life when he is not in his right mind. Janie could have been shot by Tea Cake since she knew that he had a “pistol under the pillow” (222) and gone down with him. However, she chooses her own life and instead commits the most heinous act possible, which a wife could commit, in the eyes of society by shooting her husband when he threatens her immediate life. This intentional choice of Janie’s to choose her own life over defining her life by her husband’s fate is the final choice in Janie’s process of finding her voice and defying social norms.
Janie’s progress in finding her voice is one that leaves plenty to debate about the status of women in her era, but it leaves nothing up to debate as to whether or not Janie found her voice in particular. Her decision to choose to live her life without a man is a climactic scene in which Janie displays the results of her life’s journey. As a woman, she may still be under the thumb of a patriarchal society, but the novel ends on a hopeful note with Janie sharing her story with a younger generation and spreading the desire to find a woman’s free voice in a primarily patriarchal society.
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