Their Eyes Were Watching God Literary Analysis

Throughout History there have been many eras of reinvention for people of all types. The Harlem Renaissance was such an era. It spanned from the 1920s to the mid-1930s and was an intellectual movement that helped create a new cultural identify for African American people. The movement fought to create pride for African American culture through literary works. (History.com) In opposition to the empowerment of the Renaissance, there were Minstrel shows, which was a form of theater that pandered to white people at the expense of the Black population. Some considered the works of Zora Neale Huston to have parallels to the Minstrel shows in her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God and thusly should not be considered a part of the Harlem Renaissance. This idea is false because while Hurston exposes the internal racism in

“Richard Wright excoriated their Eyes as a novel that did for literature what minstrel shows did or theater, that is, make white folks laugh” (Washington viii), but Richard Wright is actually Richard Wrong. Hurston “analyzes black idioms” (Gates 203) like “nature got so high in uh black hen she got tuh lay uh white egg” (Hurston 79) in order to keep that culture alive. She is not using the idioms and situations to make people laugh; she’s instead documenting them. The novel has an “investment in black folk traditions “(Washington viii) that has clearly payed off. She preserved a culture that others were trying to change to be more ‘white’. She didn’t want to be ‘white’ because she loved her culture. She liked that “the jooks clanged and clamored. Pianos living three lifetimes in one. Blues made and used right on the spot. Dancing, Fighting, singing, crying, laughing, winning and losing every hour. “ (Hurston 159). She is most definitely not ”pandering to a condescending white readership.” (Gates 204) because if she was, she did it