Their Eyes Were Watching God follows Janie Crawford from her teenage years through three marriages, each of which teaches her something different about love, power, and what it means to live on her own terms. The novel is framed as Janie telling her story to her friend Pheoby after returning to the town of Eatonville, Florida, where much of the action takes place.
Janie’s first marriage, arranged by her grandmother, teaches her that security without love is not enough. Her second marriage, to Jody Starks, an ambitious man who becomes the mayor of Eatonville, teaches her that being married to a powerful man is not the same as having power yourself. Her third relationship, with Tea Cake, a younger, less respectable man, is the one where Janie finally finds both love and freedom, though at a cost that becomes clear in the novel’s final act.
Hurston writes much of the dialogue in Black Southern dialect, which gives the novel a musical quality that standard English could not produce. The town porch scenes, where the residents of Eatonville sit and tell stories and pass judgment, are some of the most lively and entertaining passages in American literature. Hurston was a trained anthropologist, and her ear for how people actually speak and the social functions of storytelling shows on every page.
The book was largely ignored when it was first published in 1937, partly because it was criticized by other Black writers of the era, including Richard Wright, who felt it was insufficiently political. It was rediscovered in the 1970s, largely through the efforts of Alice Walker, and has since become a standard text in American literature courses.
For founders and readers thinking about independence and self-definition, Janie’s story is about learning to distinguish between other people’s ideas of who you should be and your own understanding of who you are. Each marriage strips away a layer of external expectation until Janie arrives at something genuinely her own.
The book is short and reads quickly. The dialect can slow non-Southern readers at first, but most people adjust within a few pages and find that it adds rather than subtracts from the experience.
