Their Eyes Were Watching God Reflection (1)
Zora Neal Hurston presents a view of community much different than either of the ethnographies we have studied up till now. Rather than try to understand and fit into a well established community, as anthropologists have done, Janie appears to be in a society that is anything but organized or established. Not even one hundred years after the end of the Civil War, Florida is still looking for an identity other than that in which “de white man throw down the de load and tell de nigger man tuh pick it up. He picks it up because he have to, but he don’t tote it. He hand it to his womenfolks” (Hurston, 15). This is also the reason everyone seems to be gossiping about Janie as she returns to the city. In this transient society, nothing she does is truly right or wrong. Janie is trying to find herself just as the South is trying to distinguish its own identity.
The stylistic vantage of first person story-telling that Hurston utilizes is connected to another characteristic of the community. Janie tells her story to Phoebe, relating within it the story Janie was told by her grandmother. This literary license illustrates and highlights the South’s respect for the elder generation. It also demonstrates the Negro tradition of verbal history inherited from African tribes.
From the first reading of Their Eyes Were Watching God, I saw the greater effect this fiction writer has on her audience than that enjoyed by other anthropologic authors. The platform of fiction allows her to approach specifically the topics of her choice rather than be limited by the scientific perspective of a particular community.