Their Eyes Were Watching God By Zora Neale Hurston: An Analysis

Zora Neale Hurston is the first to discover and identify the wisdom and language buried in the black folklore of black culture. She shows a great regard for her Black folk culture. She uses her knowledge of her folklore not only to liberate women from racial and gender oppression but also inculcates a sense of ethnic pride in her people. In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston infuses the empowering aspects, of traditional African and Afro- American’s folk culture and pastoral, as these are very closely interrelated. Folk culture derives its rootedness from the pastoral. This novel reveals the priceless moral wisdom inherent in the experiences of uneducated rural southern women. A close reading of Their Eyes Were Watching God offers an insight

into the dynamics of black folk communities, their spiritual and oral traditions through which the members of the community express them. Afro-American culture is the product of adaptation and combination; there is no single African heritage to be found in Afro-American folkways. The objective of this paper is to bring out the function of folk pride and pastoral as reflected in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, in empowering oppressed people.

One can understand from the novel that Afro- Americans, though economically poor, but have a rich folk heritage and pastoral ethics. In this novel, Hurston has demonstrated the strength of her folk culture in pastoral setting. Folklores and strong pastoral values keep the Afro-American hopes alive and help them survive and escape even slavery. Blending her anthropological training and literary power she has reiterated her belief in the pastoral life values and established the priceless value of Afro-American folk culture. She asserts that Blacks could survive independent of white society with their asset of both pastoral and folklores. The novel focuses primarily on representations of nature and treatment of pastoral. Her pastoral setting is thus an evidence of black people’s survivability in America. This paper is aimed at exploring the attempts made by Hurston through (re) envisioning the pastoral in her novel by retrieving pastoral ethics and cultural heritage, which the mainstream culture has overlooked and even tried to neglect as irrelevant to the larger national

experience.
Keywords: folklore, culture, pastoral, nature, landscape.
Zora Neale Hurston, an American anthropologist, a great folklorist and writer, is well known as an initiator among Afro-American female writers for representing potential aspects of black life. She was not at all interested in introducing “sociological jeremiad” (Every Tub 68) in her writings. Through her writings she motivated Afro- Americans to value their folklore and foreground the pastoral life values in order to overcome the painful experience of enslavement to sustain their essential selves.
She uses pastoral elements in Their Eyes Were Watching God (first published in 1937), for retaining cultural values and its rich heritage as well as legacy. According to Cuddon, “Pastoral” in a broad sense is a genre in the mainstream English literature characteristically representative of "nostalgia for the past," "some hypothetical state of love and peace" which is now missing. What comprises the principal theme of almost all pastoral is the quest for "simple life" which is distant from life of the court and the city, or from "corruption, war, strife, the love of gain," earning and "spending." Pastoral is also nostalgic of the innocence of man's prelapsarian life and "harmony with nature" (490).In fact in Afro-American scenario “Pastoral” is a harmonic blend of nature and culture in addition to urban and rural.
In contrast to the mainstream nature-culture divide, Afro-African literature can be read for the culture in nature as well as nature in culture. In the novel, Hurston focuses on Pastoral elements which are a combination of cultural and spiritual values of Afro-Americans by describing how they sustain their origin, roots and identity through their relatedness with nature. She celebrates wilderness which often served as a refuge to slaves for escaping from plantations or as a meeting place for relatives and families where experiences of duress could be shared and passed along. Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God likewise deals with how human communities connect within the southern landscapes. Her primary landscape and countryside is the “Glades” of Florida. Hurston believes that pastoral exists, not only in the traditional locations of farms, plantations, or country estates, but in the wilderness and frontier settlements of North Florida also.
In choosing a pastoral retreat into the sparsely populated Florida scrub, Hurston undertakes a critical revision in the novel of the traditional pastoral mode itself, replacing the garden of the cultivated pastoral with a wilderness exhibiting values of interdependence, cooperation, and egalitarianism.

In the Southern pastoral tradition, the land inside the boundaries of the plantation is figured as the ideal middle state, a balance between the howling wilderness and the effete city that provides a stable and static refuge from the chaos of time and the outside world. The act of fencing, particularly in the pastoral tradition, helps man to symbolically domesticate land and nature by delineating boundaries and imposing a sense of order on previously “wild” terrain. It is usually assumed that in the pastoral literary genre celebration of rural provides a structural framework for exploring further binaries. Hurston, however, repeatedly shows us the double nature of fencing: fences disrupt an existing order while signaling the creation of a new order that threatens the wildness of the scrub, as well as the communal values of its inhabitants. The fences symbolize the modern society that Hurston seeks to escape, and their encroachment into the virtually uninhabited scrub region of north central Florida entails, in her view, the threat of subjugation for nature and women alike.

Hurston born in Alabama, in the first year or two of her life, her family moved to Eatonville, Florida, a

small black community near Orlando. This community shaped her life and her writing. She writes, “I’ve got the map of Florida on my tongue.” She is so much proud of her heritage as a black Floridian, she claims she born in Eatonville. Though Hurston left Eatonville, Florida, as a teenager, she returned there again and again in her fictions.
Hurston’s move to Florida was a kind of Pastoral retreat, in that it offered her a sense of liberation from their personal roles and relations she had in the North. It also provided her a chance to re-examine gender norms and conventions, among other things, through her writings on Florida. The South was arguably known for the most rigid gender norms in addition to its racial ideologies, but the liberating aspect of the Pastoral setting vis-à-vis Afro-American culture encouraged them to investigate the way to think and act outside such norms and critique them through their personal lives and their writings.
Hurston upholds Afro-American folk culture as a treasure trove of values. Their Eyes Were Watching God is decisively rooted in the black southern pastoral and folk world. She is the only key writer of the Harlem literary movement to carry out a structured study of Afro-American folklore. In Their Eyes Were Watching God, she describes her black identity as a consequent of African heritage, since her childhood in Eatonville, Hurston was nurtured by vibrant, figurative storytelling, and Hurston’s folk pride is very well documented in her portrayal of Eatonville in almost all novels. She observed this little black hamlet as a haven in the race biased US. Her characters experienced tranquility and prosperity only at Eatonville.
Hurston represents the uninhabited Florida scrub country as something of an idealized pastoral realm free from many of the complications of the civilized world. She is always aware of the deceptive nature of the pastoral ideal of the middle state as an apparently harmonic balance between nature and culture. Her pastoral settings in the novel are gifted with many of the characteristics of the middle state, but Hurston seems constantly troubled by the binary formula of traditional literary pastoralism. Hurston in her pastoral setting has Janus like face through which a person can look at both the sides. The ideal of a balanced middle ground presumes a fundamental opposition of culture and nature, a range with urban civilization at one end and unpopulated wilderness at the other. As feminist and ecofeminist critics have shown, it is precisely this type of dualism that results in the suppression of women (as well as, quite often, children and people of color) through their identification with the inferior position which nature is assigned by a dominant, masculine culture in the mainstream writing. Since the dualistic philosophy originates from the culture side of the equation, culture is always the privileged term, and any attempt at mediation, rather than bridging the nature/culture gap, merely strengthens it.