Their Eyes Were Watching God Analysis

The difficulties Hurston experienced during her travels throughout the South and the Caribbean—being a lone, black, woman on the road in the Jim Crow South, meeting the reluctance of some people to share stories, information, and customs while collecting folklore—are reasons that assimilation into these communities proved difficult. This placed her in the “twilight” of all the societies she chronicled, and this also positions her, significantly, as the prototypical migrant stranger. Because of her failure to adhere to northward moving patterns of migration, Hurston descended into relative obscurity before being rediscovered by Alice Walker in the late 1970s.
Several factors led to this decline into obscurity. First, Richard Wright felt that her major work Their Eyes Were Watching God lacked any real themes and messages that shed light on the social, political, and economic status

However, there are several other considerable forces which led to Hurston’s descent into obscurity. Hurston was accused in 1948 of molesting a ten-year-old boy, and was not acquitted of the crime until she presented her passport, which placed her in Honduras at the time the crime was allegedly committed. Nonetheless, it would be years before she escaped the negativity surrounding the event. All the while, Hurston battled the criticism of members of the Harlem Renaissance who claimed that Hurston’s work lacked any real political purpose. As Hazel Carby states, the “dominant way of reading the cultural production of what is called the Harlem Renaissance is that black intellectuals assertively established a folk heritage as