Analysis Of Their Eyes Were Watching God By Zora Neale Hurston

The importance of controlling language

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston: create a pictorial world by telling

Lead author of the Harlem Renaissance and first African-American anthropologist studying his own culture, Zora Neale Hurston is, in many ways, an exceptional writer. Indeed, unlike others such as Robert Wright or Alain Locke, Hurston does not deny the cultural legacy that represents the black folklore, folklore that will influence both the form and substance of his art. As a trained anthropologist, Hurston has been able to capture the American black culture and use it through vernacular oral transcriptions. In Their Eyes Were Watching God, we will analyze the mobilization of language that Hurston uses in order to

create a pictorial world. We will firstly explore the use of vernacular language. We will then define the different types of narration and the imagery of rhetorical figures of speech.

Finally, those analyses will help us to analyze the courtroom scene, source of much debate about the novel.
From the very beginning of the book, the language takes an essential responsibility in Hurston’s novel. Indeed, the story is more an act of telling than an act of writing. For instance, even before our protagonist Janie start to speak, the author relates us the gossips on the porch: “What she doin’ coming back here in dem overhalls?” (p.10). Those murmurs take part of an unrelenting utilization of vernacular African Americans language Hurston makes in Their Eyes Were Watching God. This dialect mobilization serves as a framework for approaching an entire culture during the whole story, but it also has a visual impact on the reader. Henry Louis Gates, an American literary scholar, defines the specificity of Hurston’s novel as a “speakerly text”, which he defines as “a text whose rhetorical strategy is designed to represent an oral literary tradition”. The vernacular language finds its meaning not

only in what is spoken, but also more importantly in how it is spoken. Thereby, it is not only how the dialogues are written, but the transfer of parole that shows us a world and culture we want to know more about. The fact the language is written the same way it would be spoken by an African American help the reader visualize the scene where it takes place. Indeed, those dialogues full of colloquial aphorisms search to characterize a situation under a singular aspect that only the reader can visualize. Furthermore, it brings the story, as well as the characters, to life. Because they seem to speak “normally”, or rather like the reader expect them to speak, they seem real and believable. Once we familiarized with this difficult dialect, the barrier falls and we are able to see the story that Janie is telling us. In a way, the reader starts the novel as an outsider and as soon as he discovers patterns in the language of the characters, he takes his own place in their life and is capable to hear them as if he were a part of the story.
Nevertheless, there is not only Janie’s story that the reader is able to visualize, but also the narrator’s. The dialogues retransmitted by our protagonist are indeed interspersed with Standard Written English. Thereby, one of the most commented characteristic of the novel is the split style of narrative made by Hurston. The book begins with an omniscient, third-person narrator’s voice. The language used is not vernacular, but an intellectual and figurative one, full of rhetorical figures of speech and poetic devices such as metaphors. This split of narrative allows the author to depict a vivid picture of the décor, but it also add a voice which anchors the entire novel without denaturing the vernacular dialogues of Janie’s story with elements of context or details. The alternation between Standard Written English and Black Vernacular English reflects one of the novel’s central themes: the importance of controlling language. The scene of the pear tree is a concise example of this oscillation:
from barren brown stems to glistening leaf-buds; from the leaf-buds to snowy virginity of bloom. It stirred her tremendously. How? Why? It was like a flute song forgotten in another existence and remembered again” (p.23).
The narrator mobilizes a heavy imagery thanks to metaphors, describing the nature, but he also let place to Janie’s thoughts written in direct discourse. Thereby, by assigning literary English to the narrator, Hurston Is allowed to control language and describe a universe full of details. It follows thereby, a hypotyposis phenomenon that make the décor appear before the eyes of the reader. Moreover, it allows us to understand that Janie already sees her life through different images of the world, here for instance: the tree.
Furthermore, the importance of showing more than telling is set since the beginning of the book. Indeed, when Janie is going to tell her story to Phoebe, she explains that relating her life-events will not suffice: “so ’tain’t no use in me telling you somethin’ unless Ah give you de understandin’ to go ’long wid it.” (p.19). Janie, having already lived the story that we are going to hear, has now understood that she needs to make Phoebe see things in order to transmit her narrative correctly. Furthermore, she uses a metaphor of vision: “Unless you see the fur, you can’t tell a mink from a coon” (p.19). She is here telling to Phoebe, but also to the reader, that without defining visual characteristics, the story does not have the same impact on the auditor. This knowledge of storytelling, Janie learned it progressively during her whole life, but one of the most telling examples seems to be her stay at Eatonville. Indeed, while she is married to Joe and works at his store, the men of the town liked to sit on the front porch and tell imaginative and exaggerated stories:
“Dat mule uh yourn, Matt. You better go see ’bout him. He’s bad off.”
“Where ’bouts? Did he wade in de lake and uh alligator ketch him?”
“Worser’n dat. De womenfolks got yo’ mule. When Ah come round de lake ’bout noontime mah wife and some others had ’im flat on de ground usin’ his sides fuh uh wash board.”
The great clap of laughter that they have been holding in, bursts out. Sam never cracks a smile.
“Yeah, Matt, dat mule so skinny till de women is usin’ his rib bones fuh uh rub-board, and hangin’ things out on his hock-bones tuh dry.” (p.82)

Janie describes those “pictures” as “crayon enlargements of life” (p.81). The poverty represented in them is contrasted and replaced by humor. Indeed, the images such has the sides of the mule serving as a wash-board, or its bones used as a hanger are comical enough to forget the sadness of this hungry animal. The porch is then a place reserved for “big-picture talkers”, and Janie likes how they “pass around the pictures of their thoughts for the others to look at and see […] (p.81). Within this space, the storytellers exhibit their creative capacities and our protagonist would like to share with them. Unfortunately, even if “she thought up good stories on the mule, […] Joe had forbidden her to indulge. He didn’t want her talking after such trashy people” (p.85). If Joe does not want Janie to hang out with these people, it is because he does not control his voice in the same way the “big-picture talkers” do. Indeed, Joe has the ability to control the people of Eatonville by haranguing them with discourses. For instance, in chapter 5, Joe uses the words “let it shine, let it shine, let it shine” (p.73) at the end of his speech to refer to the street lights he bought for the town. It could be a reference to a gospel hymn about Jesus as the Light of the World, or even as the Genesis when God says “Let there be light” (Genesis 1:3). In each case, the religious reference that Joe makes in his speech is not destined to create any kind of pictures for the people to see, but a way to create a parallel between him and God. Thereby, with his money and ambition, he positions himself as superior to the rest of the town and demonstrates a form of hubris that differentiates him from the other storytellers. Thereby, Joe’s utilization of language hints us that is not destined to become a great part of Janie’s quest about her voice, because as Maria Tai Wolff says: “for telling to be successful, it must become a presentation of sights with words. The best talkers are big picture talkers”. Moreover, Hurston clearly shares this vision about language and transmit it through Janie’s voice. Indeed, in chapter 20, Janie tells to Phoebe : “ talkin’ don’t amount tug uh hill uh beans when yuh can’t do nothin’else”. Thereby, in contrast to Joe who seeks to be a “big voice” only to assert a form of dominance over Janie or the town’s people, our protagonist pursues a voice which can picture, which can make you see. Moreover, she demonstrates this vision when she confronts Joe in chapter 7 and tells him :”you big-bellies round here and put out à lot of brag, but ‘tain’t nothin’ to it but yo’ big voice” (p.123). By telling Joe what she thinks about him and his big mouth, she finally assert herself and take confidence in her voice.
Thereby, the language can also be a way to visualize the figures’ character. One of the most important gap we can find in the book is the importance allowed by the narrator to Janie’s lovers. Indeed, the significant part that Hurston dedicates to Tea Cake’s dialogues establishes a prominent parallel with the meeting of Joe in chapter 4. Indeed, their meeting is brief and mostly transmitted by the narrator instead of direct discourses: “Every day after that they managed to meet in the scrub oaks across the road and talk about when he would be a big ruler of things with her reaping the benefits” (p.49). On the contrary, when Tea Cake and Janie first meet, they fill numerous pages with real dialogue without being interrupted by the narrator. This shows that not only the narration can reflect features of the décor and individualities of people, but also the way the text is organized and arranged on the page.
With all these characteristics about how the language is controlled by our protagonists and the narrator, we are finally able to analyze one of the most commented scene of the novel: Janie’s trial.

After she has to kill her beloved husband whose health has deteriorated because of the rabies, Janie is put on prosecution. In the court room, all of her former black friends are there to testify against her. Janie’s doctor, Dr. Simmons, helps her in her defense but Janie is the one who succeed in telling the facts that find her innocent. Surprisingly, Hurston employs an unusual narrative device to expose us those facts. Indeed, while we are all expecting Janie to make a long statement in direct discourse, the speech is summarized indirectly by the narrator: “she had to go way back to let them know how she and Tea Cake had been with one another so they could see she could never shoot Tea Cake out of malice. She tried to make them see […]” (p.278). We can firstly assume that Janie, by going “way back”, is telling the audience the story of her whole life leading to her love with Tea Cake. This is probably the practical reason why Hurston uses the narrator to tell us about this scene, in order to avoid redundancy. Nevertheless, at this stage of the novel, Janie learned to control her voice and is now capable of making people see in order to be rightly understood. Therefor, the narrator put a great emphasis by repeating for the third time: “she made them see how she couldn’t ever want

to get rid of him” (p.278). We can then assert that it is by her mastery of storytelling that our protagonist is able to convince the jury and win her freedom against a whole audience that wanted to charge her for a wrongful murder.