Their Eyes Were Watching God

What I found interesting about Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God was the way critics and other authors perceived this novel. I thought this would be a good topic for this week’s blog because we have been focusing on author’s writing styles and themes.

It’s amazing to me that books now, such as Their Eyes Were Watching God and Passing, are so highly praised and seen as such influential books from the Harlem Renaissance, even though they were criticized years ago. I always read the foreword to get a better sense of the author, book, and critics ideas of the book.

When this book was first published in 1937, Hurston was criticized for not depicting the true life of southern blacks. “Hurston made black southern life appear easygoing and carefree” (x). Years later she was noted for her writing and as “a woman on a quest for her own identity and, unlike so many other questing figures in black literature, her journey would take her, not away from, but deeper and deeper into black traditions” (xi).

Surprisingly in 1937 a white reviewer favored Hurston’s book, but “had difficulty believing that such a town as Eatonville, ‘inhabitated and governed entirely by Negroes,’ could be real.” This doesn’t surprise me because racist ideas and beliefs were still a huge part of society then. While some celebrated Hurston’s achievement, others disapproved of Their Eyes Were Watching God because it didn’t follow the way fictional literature was traditionally written, mainly black male critics. When I read this I was not surprised because it seems that people of the same race can be harsher when critiquing an author. We saw this with Langston Hughes’ “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” where he disagrees with Cullen’s style of writing. He states that Cullen shouldn’t be a free poet and that he should stand up for his race. I think Hughes was over analyzing Cullen’s work and being extremely contradictory. He wants black writers to stand up for their race, but at the same time they should stand up for themselves and create new and different works of literature if they chose. I think this applies with Hurston as well, as black critics were harsher on her because she too was of the same racial background. I also think that her unique writing is one of the main reasons why she eventually received praise for Their Eyes Were Watching God.