Their Eyes Were Watching God Diction Analysis

In the novel Their Eyes were Watching God, written by Zora Neale Hurston, Janie searches for comfort in the world by exploring herself and others as she becomes a prudent woman. Hurston cleverly uses diction to portray Janie’s attitude towards any given person. Wright denigrates the author’s language for having no theme, message, or thought, he does this with unjust reason, for Hurston’s syntax brilliantly immerses the audience into Janie’s culture and perspective as it directly addresses her affinities with beautiful diction and her dislikes with grotesque and gritty lingo.

The ideology of superior classes roots itself in this novel as Janie initially judges people based on their social position. Grammar and slang stand out as it acts as

a direct correlation between intelligence and class. Blacks, at the time, receive less education than caucasians, this results in blacks speaking with less coherent sentences and more slang. People often speak with dropped final consonants. “You” becomes “yuh,” as “I” becomes “Ah,” and words ending with “r” become “uh”. Vowel changes also occur as well as tense changes. The complex amalgamation of grammatical errors and slang contribute to the common ideology of the ontological inferiority of blacks. Janie describes the inferiority and social class of the black as the “de mule uh de world so fur as Ah can see” (Hurston, 17). Her grammar and language show the intelligence and class of the speaker: Tea Cake spoke very poorly, alluding to the Tea Cake’s poor social class and lacking intelligence. The grammar and notion of the mule disproves Wright’s claim of a weak syntax and diction as they serve as deeper symbols in the novel, expressing Janie’s perspective of the social hierarchy that persists in this time period.
Janie’s dialect synchronizes with her opinion of the character she describes. when she describes something or someone that she loves she uses a romantic syntax expressing her love towards that character. When Janie begins to fall in love with Tea Cake she uses the sensual imagery of the fertile pear tree to vocalize her love to the audience. Her marriage to Joe started off in the same loving way but ended up breaking, she “stood there until something fell off the shelf inside her. Then she went inside there to see what it was. It was her image of Joe tumbled down and shattered” (Hurston, 85). Her syntax becomes more gritty and surreal as the situation intensifies. Her words begin to mirror her perspective in the novel when Joe starts to act up. When he becomes angry Janie says he “had crawled off to lick his wounds,” retreating like and animal he does not hide or cover his wounds but much like an animal he tends to it by licking it (Hurston 96). She continues to describe hims as giving a “deep-growling sound like a hog dying down in the swamp” to further install the gruesome and crude mannerism hosted by Joe (Hurston, 101). The intensity of Janie’s diction allows the read to accurately intemperate Janie’s emotion towards events and people and therefore possesses great thought and a deep message disproving Wright’s claim.
Janie’s choice of words becomes her most powerful tool to express herself as they so cleverly reveal the deepest meaning behind her feelings. Write ignorantly summarizes the novel as transparent without and message or theme. When taking the effect of Hurston’s word choice into consideration, Wright’s claim becomes void due to the vernacular’s hidden meaning relating to Janie’s view of black people and their role as members of society.