While the novel is written about Black people in the South, it is not primarily a book about a racist society. Nanny is the first character to discuss the effects of slavery. "Ah was born back due in slavery so it wasn't for me to fulfil my dreams of whut a woman oughta be and to do. Dat's one of de hold-backs of slavery."[35] The novel is mostly concerned with differences within the black community. Starks is compared to the master of a plantation, as he has a huge house in the centre of the town. "The rest of town looked like servants' quarters surrounding the 'big house'.[36] Starks becomes a figure of authority because he has money and is determined to create the first black town. But his plans seem to result in a town where people impose their own hierarchy. "Us talks about de white man keepin' us down! Shucks! He don't have tuh. Us keeps our own selves down."[37] When Janie marries Tea Cake and moves to the Everglades, she becomes friendly with Mrs. Turner. This woman compliments Janie on her light skin and European features, from her mixed-race ancestry. Turner disapproves of her marriage to Tea Cake, as he is darker skinned and more "African" looking.
Hurston wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God while living in Belle Glade, at the home of Harvey Poole, who, as manager of one of the local labor camps, informed her tremendously about bean picking, and the labors of African-Americans on the muckland. The book was also written while on a Guggenheim Fellowship in Haiti to research Obeah practices in the West Indies.[46]
eye of the god book review
Not all African-American critics had negative things to say about Hurston's work. Carter G. Woodson, founder of The Journal of Negro History wrote, "Their Eyes Were Watching God is a gripping story... the author deserves great praise for the skill and effectiveness shown in the writing of this book." The critic noted Hurston's anthropological approach to writing, "She studied them until she thoroughly understood the working of their minds, learned to speak their language".[51]
Meanwhile, reviews of Hurston's book in the mainstream white press were largely positive, although they did not translate into significant retail sales. Writing for The New York Times, Ralph Thompson states:
The New York Times' Virginia Heffernan explains that the book's "narrative technique, which is heavy on free-indirect discourse, lent itself to poststructuralist analysis".[59] With so many new disciplines especially open to the themes and content of Hurston's work, Their Eyes Were Watching God achieved growing prominence in the last several decades. It is now firmly established in the literary canon.[55]
Robert A. Heinlein, while giving the authors extensive advice on a draft manuscript, described it as "a very important novel, possibly the best contact-with-aliens story ever written".[5] Theodore Sturgeon, writing in Galaxy, described The Mote in God's Eye as "one of the most engrossing tales I have encountered in years", stating that "the overall pace of the book [and] the sheer solid story of it" excuse whatever flaws might remain, with the one complaint being that he found it unlikely the Moties would not have used genetic engineering at some point to curb their population growth.[6] Don Hawthorne, one of the creators of the related "War World Series" and creator of the Saurons in those books, has pointed out that "This, of course, is the "beam" in the Moties' own "eye"; their inability to see a solution to their problem because of a lack of objective understanding of their situation, a result of cultural and environmental pressures which have shaped their own personal prejudices."
Eighty years after its introduction to the world, Their Eyes Were Watching God continues to challenge readers to find themselves again and again, just like Janie does. With every return to the book, I learn a bit more about the importance of the radical embrace of love and new ways to imagine freedom.
Alcohol: Several characters drink alcohol throughout the book. Janie is told her mother started drinking after Janie was born. Several of the migrant workers get in a drunken brawl at a restaurant.
Scholarly articles about Their Eyes have appeared over the years in journals and other publications, yet not many have focused on its presentation in the undergraduate classroom. The well-structured article, "Teaching Their Eyes Were Watching God and the Process of Canon Formation," by Genevieve West describes an interesting and broad approach to this novel. Her approach to teaching Their Eyes "uses book reviews to trace the ways in which cultural changes have influenced responses to the novel and Hurston's place in the canon" (21). She asks her students to read reviews that concern Their Eyes and some of Hurston's other works from before she wrote this novel in order to introduce students to the politics of popular and scholarly interest (22-24). Her approach is too detailed to describe in a review, but West enables the students to understand and follow the fall of Hurston's reputation with the literary critics as the nation moved toward the social crisis of the Depression and toward an interest in the literature of social protest. As a supplement to the reviews, some lectures and articles regarding the rise of protest literature, the Black Arts movement, the feminist movement, and the rise of black studies programs may help students to appreciate Hurston's literary marginalization and her eventual recovery away from the margins and into the center of the canon. Such an approach would appear to require a great amount of effort to assemble the materials and to coordinate the lectures and discussions. However, West maintains that most of the reviews may be taken from [End Page 113] a single volume: Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and K.A. Appiah's Zora Neale Hurston: Critical Perspectives Past and Present (22). Conducting an analysis of the reviews and recognizing the values held by the critics could give the students an excellent understanding of how literature serves the needs and desires of special interest groups in our society.
Joyce Meyer is the author of more than 130 books, including Battlefield of the Mind, The Confident Woman, and Authentically, Uniquely You. Her broadcast, Enjoying Everyday Life, reaches an international audience daily through hundreds of radio stations and television networks. She and her family live in St. Louis, MO.
This Modern Language Association volume, Approaches to Teaching Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God and Other Works provides insights for teaching the works of Zora Neale Hurston, an "iconic figure on a par with Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, and F. Scott Fitzgerald" (1) according to the volume's editor, John Lowe. Hurston's works--including novels, nonfiction, plays, and short stories--occupy the attention of Lowe and fifteen other Hurston scholars in this volume with a central focus on Their Eyes Were Watching God. This volume, within the Approaches to Teaching World Literature Series, is presented in two main parts. "Part One: Materials" follows the volume's preface. Here the volume's editor presents the editions and anthologies where Hurston's published work may be found. "The Instructor's Library" includes a list of books and critical articles that almost any instructor who teaches Hurston would desire to consult as useful information for research and teaching.
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For more from the Luskos, check out Levi's book Through the Eyes of a Lion: Facing Impossible Pain, Finding Incredible Power, and Jennie's book The Fight to Flourish: Engaging in the Struggle to Cultivate the Life You Were Born to Live.
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