Integration of Folklore

In the 1930s, Alabama author, anthropologist and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston returned to her “native village“ of Eatonville, Florida to record the oral histories, sermons and songs dating back to the time of slavery which she remembered hearing as a child. Hurston’s love of African American folklore and her work as an anthropologist are reflected in her novels and short stories – where she employs the rich indigenous dialects of her native rural Florida as well as the African tradition of oral story telling. As Hurston’s deep interest in the folkloric practices of the Southern black folk became the basic of her novels, a close reading of Their Eyes Were Watching God reveals that folklore pervades all the main levels of the novel – the story passed down through words of mouth, characters are stereotypes and plot is repetitive in nature.

To start of, the practice of passing story through generations by words of mouth is a prominent folkloric trait that the novel embodies. Their Eyes Were Watching God, written by American folklorist Hurston, represented the options and dynamism of the culture and folklore of the Southern Black folk, given the novel’s “textualization of oral traditions” form. This method is simply translating the mostly oral folklore into fictionalized written text and, although it challenges the tradition of oral story telling; however, did not undermine the authenticity of folkloric embodiment throughout the book. For instant, the novel’s frame story, brought about by Janie sharing her story with her friend Phoebe by word of mouth, is in fact based on the oral tradition of storytelling. Furthermore, though Janie did not share her story with the town, given her complicated status within the community; yet, te...

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...fying, or more effective than other numbers of things…A series of three often creates a progression in which the tension is created, built up, and finally released.” (Reynolds, Storytelling In Jazz: The Rule Of Three). In the novel, repetition of threes in folklore is found twice throughout the content, first being in Janie’s three marriages, second being her movement out of the rural community of Nanny – the grandmother, and her first husband, to the town where she keeps a store with Joe Starks, and finally to the “muck” of Everglades where she experiences joy and bereavement through Tea Cake, her third husband. These repetitions, the three marriages and the three communities in which Janie moves, in the end have represented the increasing wide circles of experience of opportunities for expression of personal choice and self-determination of the female protagonist.