One of Richard Wright’s complaints about Zora Neale Hurston’s Their
Eyes Were Watching God was that “the sensory sweep of her novel carries no
theme, no message, no thought” (Wright). Having read Their Eyes Were
Watching God, I have to disagree. The novel is definitely thoughtful and deliberate,
it just doesn’t convey the message that Wright wanted to hear. Unlike in Wright’s
later novel, Native Son, race and racial tensions do not play a key role
in Their Eyes Were Watching God, or really much of a role at all. Wright
and other critics used this to claim that Hurston’s novel was not “serious
fiction” and that it was “not addressed to the Negro, but to a white audience
whose chauvinistic tastes she knows how to satisfy” (Wright). However, though
Hurston is not protesting the same things as Wright, I think it would be a
mistake to say that she is just passively telling a story.
An idea that many people had at the time that Hurston was writing
was that African American literature had to protest racial inequality. As we
saw in the documentary, Hurston disagreed, saying she was tired of writing
about race and of having people tell her what to write about. After watching
the documentary, however, I began to see that Their Eyes Were Watching God
can in fact be read as protest fiction and that although Hurston does not
directly make race an issue in Their Eyes Were Watching God, she is
still protesting racial inequality. The difference between her protest and the
protest novel people wanted her to write is that Hurston addresses racism as
she encounters it in her own profession instead of the wider systematic oppression
of African Americans throughout the country. Instead of asking society to grapple
with the issues of systematic racism and inequality, Hurston is simply asking
why she should be confined to a specific genre because of her race when she has
so many additional things to say.
I very much agree with what you've written--it seems unfair to claim that her writing is without substance. Their Eyes Were Watching God is very clearly a love story, which is a powerful universal theme for writing that should not be exclusive to non-minorities. There is also a more subtle message about womanhood and possibly feminism, which Wright is wrong to invalidate.
ReplyDeleteYou're right that although racism isn't made a main theme in the novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God still subtly pushes for racial equality. I was quite infuriated by the fact that Wright immediately dismisses the novel as having no substance when she doesn't follow the theme many writers did at that time, discouraging racism through presenting to the white readers the pain and struggle of being African American.
ReplyDeleteGreat post, I think one of the key aspects is how, like you say, Hurston's novel is a protest in its own way, it's just not the protest novel other people wanted her to write. One of the interesting things to me is how this same theme seems to come up in The White Boy Shuffle as well. Gunnar kind of reminds me of Hurston in that he feels like he's forced to make everything he writes about social change, and then it becomes a kind of entertainment for other people, instead of writing about what he really wants and being able to be himself.
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