Their Eyes Were Watching God

Like many great novels Their Eyes Were Watching God was effectively lost from the time of its publication in 1937 until the 1970s.  Its revival reflected the growing interest in Feminist and Black literature, and the scholarship surrounding it. 

The novel is about Janie: finding her way, finding her voice, and finding an understanding of herself.   Hurston devotes the entire book to her main character, a young black women in the American South.  Janie starts her story as the daughter of a sharecropper and finds her way through different relationships, classes, and gender roles as she ages and searches for meaning in her life.

I was expecting the book to deal with race relations in the South, but they are strangely absent.  The conflicts instead are between the sexes, with Janie struggling with her role as a woman and wife.  Hurston gives her a voice so clear that I feel like I understand her better than most literary characters despite the barriers of time, place, race, and gender that separate us.  I really understand what Janie was going through.    

This book is a remarkable portal into a time and place which is long gone but certainly still important to our understanding of modern American culture.