Analysis Of Their Eyes Were Watching God By Zora Neale Hurston

The importance of controlling language

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston: create a pictorial world by telling

Lead author of the Harlem Renaissance and first African-American anthropologist studying his own culture, Zora Neale Hurston is, in many ways, an exceptional writer. Indeed, unlike others such as Robert Wright or Alain Locke, Hurston does not deny the cultural legacy that represents the black folklore, folklore that will influence both the form and substance of his art. As a trained anthropologist, Hurston has been able to capture the American black culture and use it through vernacular oral transcriptions. In Their Eyes Were Watching God, we will analyze the mobilization of language that Hurston uses in order to

Finally, those analyses will help us to analyze the courtroom scene, source of much debate about the novel.
From the very beginning of the book, the language takes an essential responsibility in Hurston’s novel. Indeed, the story is more an act of telling than an act of writing. For instance, even before our protagonist Janie start to speak, the author relates us the gossips on the porch: “What she doin’ coming back here in dem overhalls?” (p.10). Those murmurs take part of an unrelenting utilization of vernacular African Americans language Hurston makes in Their Eyes Were Watching God. This dialect mobilization serves as a framework for approaching an entire culture during the whole story, but it also has a visual impact on the reader. Henry Louis Gates, an American literary scholar, defines the specificity of Hurston’s novel as a “speakerly text”, which he defines as “a text whose rhetorical strategy is designed to represent an oral literary tradition”. The vernacular language finds its meaning not

After she has to kill her beloved husband whose health has deteriorated because of the rabies, Janie is put on prosecution. In the court room, all of her former black friends are there to testify against her. Janie’s doctor, Dr. Simmons, helps her in her defense but Janie is the one who succeed in telling the facts that find her innocent. Surprisingly, Hurston employs an unusual narrative device to expose us those facts. Indeed, while we are all expecting Janie to make a long statement in direct discourse, the speech is summarized indirectly by the narrator: “she had to go way back to let them know how she and Tea Cake had been with one another so they could see she could never shoot Tea Cake out of malice. She tried to make them see […]” (p.278). We can firstly assume that Janie, by going “way back”, is telling the audience the story of her whole life leading to her love with Tea Cake. This is probably the practical reason why Hurston uses the narrator to tell us about this scene, in order to avoid redundancy. Nevertheless, at this stage of the novel, Janie learned to control her voice and is now capable of making people see in order to be rightly understood. Therefor, the narrator put a great emphasis by repeating for the third time: “she made them see how she couldn’t ever want