Harlem Renaissance, and a powerful African-
American feminist bildungsroman.
Hurston completed the manuscript in less
than two months. At the time, she was living in
HAITIon a GUGGENHEIMFELLOWSHIPand, as her
biographers suggest, also recovering from what she
regarded as “the real love affair of my life” with a
West Indian man whom she had met first in New
York in 1931 and with whom she reconnected
briefly some time later. Their respective career
goals, his idealized vision of her as wife who would
devote herself to him wholly, and her increasingly
ambitious professional desires tested the relation-
ship. It was with much sadness that Hurston ended
the affair with the man whom she identifies in
DUSTTRACKSonly as A. W. P. In her autobiogra-
phy, Dust Tracks on a Road(1942), Hurston re-
called that the novel was “dammed up in me, and I
wrote it under internal pressure in seven weeks.”
She later regretted that she could not “write it
again. In fact, I regret all of my books,” she contin-
ued dramatically. “It is one of the tragedies of life
that one cannot have all the wisdom one is ever to
possess in the beginning” (Hurston, 155).
The novel’s protagonist is Janie, a young woman
who returns to her hometown of EATONVILLEafter
living intensely and surviving tragic and traumatic
events that have given her a powerful foundation
on which to construct and to reconstruct the story
of her life. The narrator establishes immediately
that Janie is a survivor and witness; her story will
be as much autobiography as it will be testimony:
“[T]his was a woman and she had come back from
burying the dead. Not the dead of sick and ailing
with friends at the pillow and the feet. She had
come back from the sodden and the bloated; the
sudden dead, their eyes flung wide open in judg-
ment.” Over the course of 20 chapters, Janie re-
lates her gripping and evocative tales to Phoeby
Watson, her dear friend.
The major stories in Their Eyesrevolve around
domesticity, desire, and marriage. Janie Crawford is
being raised by her God-fearing grandmother, who
aspires to situate Janie in a marriage that will save
her from the oppressive circumstances that all too
often overwhelm women of color. That plan even-
tually collides with Janie’s romanticism, a sensibil-
ity that comes alive during a powerful epiphany
beneath the pear tree on her grandmother’s prop-
erty. In this most memorable scene of the novel,
Janie spends as much time as she can over a three-
day period watching a blossoming pear tree come
alive. She is unable to resist the call “to come and
gaze on a mystery” that emanates from the tree. As
she watches, it changes from “barren brown stems
to glistening leaf-buds; from the leaf-buds to snowy
virginity of bloom.” Janie watches the bees polli-
nate the buds and is overwhelmed by the sensual
nature of the natural process. “So this was a mar-
riage!” she concludes after watching “the dust-
bearing bee sing into the sanctum of the bloom”
and the “thousand sister-calyxes arch to meet the
love embrace and the ecstatic shiver of the tree
from root to tiniest branch creaming in every blos-
som and frothing with delight.” Her grandmother
quickly interrupts Janie’s dewy-eyed vision of the
world and overtures to a young man whom she re-
gards as a less than satisfactory match for her
granddaughter. Nanny marries Janie off to Logan
Killicks, owner of some 60 acres, a man whom she
thinks will provide the best “protection” of her
charge after she passes away.
Marriage, which can function as an alternat-
ing symbol of high domesticity and the institution-
alized oppression of women, is central in the novel.
Janie has three marriages to very different men.
She leaves Logan Killicks when he ceases to treat
her adoringly and takes up with the en-
trepreneurial, bossy, and loquacious Joe Starks.
The two travel to Eatonville, where Starks pur-
chases some 200 acres and proceeds to install him-
self as the most powerful man in town. That
marriage disintegrates as their mutual desire sub-
sides, and Hurston suggests that Starks dies when
Janie challenges him in public about his perceived,
and perhaps actually nonexistent, all-powerful
manhood. With the death of Starks, Janie is free to
revel in the attentions of Vergible “Tea Cake”
Woods, a man younger than herself and the most
enlightened of the men she has met. Janie does not
hesitate to accompany Tea Cake as he lives his
itinerant laboring life. Their bliss is savagely un-
done when they are endangered by a hurricane in
the Everglades, and in the dreadful days following
the natural disaster, Tea Cake is attacked by a
rabid dog. He contracts rabies, and in his delusion
he attempts to shoot Janie. She fires back in self-
defense and, tragically, kills him. She journeys back510 Their Eyes Were Watching God