courted by Vergible “TEA CAKE” Woods, a gambler
and wandering BLUES man. As an Afromystical god
of the woods and mythic figure of springtime re-
generation, he loves Janie and leads her back into
axial relation to Nature, the folk community, and
her own body. Within this spiritually enlivening
folk life of love, hunting, shooting, fishing, wear-
ing overalls, freeing her hair, dancing, singing, and
juke jointing on the fertile ecotone of the Muck,
Janie completes this phase of her regenerative pro-
cess. However, her initiation rites involve learning
not just the revitalizing powers of love and na-
ture but its destructive potential as well. Now she
must negotiate a devastating flood, mass deaths,
shooting the rabid Tea Cake, community betray-
als, and trial for Tea Cake’s murder. Her final rites
of passage, therefore, involve transcending society
and nature. Having “been to the far horizon” of
human testing, Janie returns as a priestly wisdom
giver, a powerful female griot capable of spiritu-
ally initiating other women.
In 1936, while in Haiti on a Guggenheim fel-
lowship to study Obeah practices, Afromysti-
cism, and medicine, Hurston instead wrote Their
Eyes Were Watching God. This love story took its
impetus from her extensive study of voodoo in
both New Orleans and Haiti and from her love
affair with a West Indian whom she had first
met in New York in 1931. Written in just seven
weeks, the book underwent little revision before
its publication in 1937. Critics, black and white,
were unprepared for it, calling it unfashionable,
anachronistic, a minstrel performance, folksy, ro-
mantic, and socially irrelevant to struggling urban
blacks. Virtually ignored from 1947 until ALICE
WALKER’s rediscovery of it in the 1970s, Their
Eyes is now hailed as one of the great women’s
texts in American literature and has generated an
avalanche of critical response. It has been called
a vital precursor to RALPH ELLISON’s THE INVISIBLE
MAN, a pivotal female Künstlerroman, an icon of
the HARLEM RENAISSANCE, a critique of African-
American women’s psychic history from slavery
to the present, a critique of the emerging black
middle class, an aesthetic and political “rup-
ture” in American literary history, a precursor
womanist text, and a parable of race and gender
relations. By 1990 more than 200,000 copies of
Their Eyes Were Watching God had been sold. It
has been hailed as a typically modernist novel
about alienation from one’s ancestral roots and
celebrated as the key text in the development of
a genuine black literary aesthetic. Some see it
as the watershed female Künstlerroman that en-
abled contemporary black female literary careers
such as those of Alice Walker and TONI MOR-
RISON. The immense popularity of this book in
the 1980s and 1990s has been attributed to sup-
port from the Modern Language Association, the
book trade, women’s studies programs, and the
burgeoning of African-American cultural studies.
As the most widely taught black gateway novel in
America’s schools, it is of concern to many black
critics that white readers may find it entirely too
assuring of black well-being in the troubled con-
temporary African-American moment.
Gloria L. CroninThere Is Confusion
Jessie Redmon Fauset (1924)
The first of four novels by JESSIE REDMON FAUSET
(1882–1961), There Is Confusion, along with the
three novels that follow it—Plum Bun: A Novel
without a Moral (1929), The Chinaberry Tree: A
Novel of American Life (1931), and Comedy, Ameri-
can Style (1933)—positions Fauset as the most pro-
lific woman novelist of the HARLEM RENAISSANCE
and adds to her renown as an editor and a sharp
judge of literary talent. The novel was written as
a corrective to the negative portrayal of the black
middle class in T. S. Stribling’s Birthright (1922)
and unfolds in the urban settings of Philadelphia
and New York. These cities, while indispensable to
the action that takes place in the novel, seem sim-
ply to serve as a background to this hurried but
lengthy narrative of the lives of a number of black
bourgeois residents. Fauset sets up a triangle of
young lovers—Joanna Marshall (the main charac-
ter), Peter Bye, and Maggie Ellersley—whose lives
and stories become entangled. There Is Confusion490 There Is Confusion