Banned book review: Their Eyes Were Watching God

Their Eyes Were Watching God (Zora Neale Hurston)

A true Bildungsroman, (sto­ry of per­son­al growth of a main char­ac­ter), Their Eyes Were Watching God has come in for cen­sor­ship and some­times harsh crit­i­cism from some per­haps sur­pris­ing sources.  Published in 1937 by an African American woman, the book has faced down its issues and is now con­sid­ered a sta­ple of fem­i­nist read­ing and required high school reading.

Janie, the African American pro­tag­o­nist, frames her tale of mat­u­ra­tion as a nar­ra­tive she relates to her friend, Pheoby, upon her return to her home in Eatonville, Florida, an all-black town.

As a young girl, Janie has an epiphany of sorts about what love real­ly should be.  That vision is repressed, first by her grand­moth­er, then by her first two hus­bands. She final­ly finds what she believes she’s always want­ed, when she mar­ries a man twelve years her junior.

The book has been denounced by some African American read­ers as pan­der­ing to the white stereo­typ­ing of black peo­ple, cit­ing Hurston’s use of idiom in her char­ac­ters’ dia­logue. The claim is that this rein­forces the idea of a lack of edu­ca­tion among all black Americans of that time peri­od.  Hurston actu­al­ly remains true to her study of anthro­pol­o­gy in faith­ful­ly using the idiom of that time and place, for her characters.

Students have com­plained the idiom is hard to trans­late (into their own idiom, one sup­pos­es wry­ly), and that Janie should not be con­sid­ered a fem­i­nist icon, cit­ing her over­look­ing being beat­en by the love of her life.

Predictably, a par­ent here and a school com­mit­tee mem­ber there have, over the years, com­plained of sex­u­al explic­it­ness in the sto­ry, though there are no graph­ic scenes and only oblique ref­er­ences to sex­u­al topics.

While I under­stand one or two of the objec­tions, I pri­mar­i­ly see this as a tale of one woman per­sis­tent­ly refus­ing to give up her dream of what love should be.  After a tru­ly cat­a­stroph­ic end­ing to her only hap­py rela­tion­ship, she returns home to her gos­sipy neigh­bors, tells her one friend her sto­ry, and is por­trayed as a woman now at peace, hav­ing real­ized her vision. 

I high­ly rec­om­mend Their Eyes Were Watching God, for the read­er who likes sto­ries with com­plex char­ac­ters, themes, and debat­able questions. 

That seems like life itself to me.