Their Eyes Were Watching God — voice, dialect, and Janie's coming into speech

Zora Neale Hurston · 1937

Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God is the masterpiece of the Harlem Renaissance's most formally ambitious novelist. It is a small novel — fewer than 200 pages — that does several things no novel before it had done: it uses African American Vernacular English (AAVE) as serious literary medium throughout, it tells a Black woman's coming-into-self story in a register that refuses both white expectation and respectability politics, and it makes the act of speaking the novel's central subject. To read it well is to read it for the voice.

The doubled narrative voice

The novel is told in two voices interlaced. A formal, literary, third-person narrator opens and frames the book:

Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing, until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation…

This narrator's prose is high-literary and conscious of its tradition. But once Janie begins to tell her own story to her friend Pheoby, the narration moves into a register closer to AAVE — though still using the third-person framing. The novel shifts between the two voices without comment. Hurston's argument is structural: there is no contradiction between literary command and Black vernacular; the novel can move between them as freely as a person actually does.

African American Vernacular English as literary medium

Most pre-Hurston Black characters in American fiction had spoken dialect (often clumsily transcribed by white writers), but the dialect was used as marker — to signal class, region, or race — not as full literary instrument. Hurston, trained as an anthropologist, did fieldwork in Florida and the Caribbean in the 1920s and 30s and brought back a fully developed sense of AAVE as a complete language with its own grammar, idiom, poetic resources, and registers. In Their Eyes Were Watching God, AAVE is the language of the deepest emotion the novel reaches. The famous closing line — "She pulled in her horizon like a great fish-net… so much of life in its meshes" — is in the literary register; many of the novel's most insightful moments are in the vernacular.

Janie's three marriages

The novel's plot is structured around Janie's three marriages, each of which advances her self-understanding:

Logan Killicks — the older, secure farmer her grandmother arranges. Janie marries him for practical reasons; he treats her as a labourer. She leaves.
Joe ("Jody") Starks — the ambitious, eloquent entrepreneur who takes her to the all-Black town of Eatonville and becomes mayor. He confines her to the back of his store and silences her in public. The marriage lasts seventeen years; the novel's middle section is a study in slow domestic erasure.
Tea Cake (Vergible Woods) — younger, poorer, charismatic, dangerous. He treats her as an equal in a way the previous men did not. He also (the novel makes clear) hits her once, jealously. He dies of rabies after saving her from a rabid dog.

The novel does not romanticise Tea Cake. He is the love of Janie's life and he is also, briefly, a man who hits his wife. Hurston refuses to soften the contradiction. The marriage is the truest of the three because Janie has learned to choose, not because Tea Cake is morally pure.

The pear tree as symbol

The novel's central image — Janie under the blooming pear tree in her grandmother's yard, watching a bee work the blossoms — is the novel's symbol for the fully integrated life of body and spirit she spends the rest of the book seeking. The image returns at intervals; each return measures how far Janie has moved toward or away from it. Joe Starks's marriage is the distance from the pear tree; Tea Cake's marriage is closer to it; the closing solitude is where she has finally arrived at something the tree promised.

The hurricane

The hurricane sequence — Janie and Tea Cake in the Everglades when the storm hits — is one of the great set-pieces of American fiction. The chapter's title sentence ("They seemed to be staring at the dark, but their eyes were watching God") is the novel's title and its theological centre. In the storm, the question of who is watching whom is the only question that matters. Hurston is making a specific religious argument: in extremity, the watchful relationship between human and God is the relationship that survives.

The frame narrative

The novel opens with Janie returning to Eatonville after Tea Cake's death and ends with her finishing the story she has told her friend Pheoby. The whole novel is, in this sense, a single conversation between two women on a porch at sunset. The frame is doing political work: the novel insists that the story of Janie's life is the kind of story that gets told between Black women, in private, in vernacular — and asks the reader to listen in.

Themes worth tracking

Voice as freedom. The novel tracks Janie's recovery of speech — her right to talk back, to tell her own story, to be heard.
The risks of black communal respectability. Hurston is willing to depict Black community as surveilling and judgmental in ways more politically cautious novelists would not. Eatonville's gossip is one of Janie's antagonists.
Land, work, and the Everglades. The novel's geographical movement from white-owned land through the all-Black town to the muck of the Everglades is the novel's map of where freedom lives.
The relationship to God. The title's ambiguity (their eyes were watching God, or God was watching them) is the novel's deepest theological note.

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