Necessary Narration in Their Eyes Were Watching God

• Published in: The Comparatist Vol. 40; no. 1; pp. 319 - 337
• Main Author: Bailey, Amanda
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Chapel Hill The University of North Carolina Press 01.10.2016; University of North Carolina Press
• Subjects: African American literature; African Americans; American literature; Analysis; Black literature; Criticism and interpretation; Crítica literaria; Crítica textual; Female characters; Females; Feminism; Feminismo; Figuras literarias; Historical text analysis; Hurston, Zora Neale; Hurston, Zora Neale (1891-1960); Identidad femenina; Literary criticism; Literary devices; Literatura femenina; Literature; Narrador; Narration; Narration (Rhetoric); Narrative structure; Narrative voice; Narratives; Narrator; Novel; Novela; Novelists; Novels; Personajes femeninos; Textual criticism; Toomer, Jean (1894-1967); Translators; Voz narrativa; Walker, Alice (1944- ); Women's identity; Women's literature; Works
• ISSN: 0195-7678; 1559-0887; 1559-0887
• DOI: 10.1353/com.2016.0018

Popular and critical portrayals of Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God commonly depict the novel as the bold tale of a Southern black woman's discovery of her voice, her identity, and her autonomy. The novel has now held a canonically central position in American literature for several decades. Hurston, and especially her most popular novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, have been lauded for establishing a much longed-for maternal literary ancestry for black female authors. Yet despite its robust presence in academic classes, online lists of top feminist "must-read" books, and the American canon, a textual inconsistency, perhaps earning the label of "problem," endures throughout the novel's critical history. By virtue of the text's narrative structure, its black, female protagonist, Janie Woods née Crawford, appears to exhibit a perplexing and consistent need for a narrator, a translator, and a mediator both within the text and beyond the bounds of the written narrative itself. In this essay I reexamine the novel's instances of "necessary" narration, working through the critical history of the novel's portrayal of voice and story by first considering those instances located within the novel's plot and structure, followed by a consideration of the larger exegetic issues to which these intratextual instances relate and ultimately challenge.