From Conflict to Identity: Main Issues Explored in US Literary Education - Sykalo Eugen 2023

How does the character of Janie Crawford explore the concept of self-discovery in “Their Eyes Were Watching God”?

I know. Talking about self-discovery in literature today feels like attending a funeral where the deceased has already been reborn three times on Instagram Live. The concept is worn — dragged by centuries of Bildungsromane, motivational posters, and TED Talks. But then there’s Janie Crawford. And Janie, thank God, doesn’t discover herself like a shiny coin in the sand. She becomes. Or rather — she keeps becoming, as if refusing to sit quietly in the chair the reader has prepared for her.

Is that not, in itself, a rebellion?

Zora Neale Hurston doesn’t hand us a self-contained, morally triumphant “arc.” What she offers instead — with that tricky, honey-thick prose — is a woman whose identity is not a revelation but a performance-in-progress, fragile and real as breath in cold air. Janie isn’t discovering anything new about herself — she’s peeling away the noise, brushing the dust off old longings, stepping barefoot over broken social prescriptions.

(The first time I read it, I underlined every sentence where Janie didn’t speak. There were so many.)

And yes, she speaks eventually — but even more fascinating are the silences. Not all of them are empty. Some are full of resistance. Others are full of someone else’s words in her mouth. Her silence with Logan Killicks isn’t passivity; it’s an ache too strange for speech. With Joe Starks, it becomes strategy. With Tea Cake… ah, with Tea Cake, language dances again. But not like in a musical. More like in a quiet jazz bar, where the saxophone is both mournful and sexy, and you can’t tell which part of the song is about love and which is about loneliness.

Wait — before we fall too deeply into the man-shaped shadows of her story (the husbands, the townsfolk, the porch-sitters with their chicken-scratching gossip), let’s pause. Because this isn’t a love story. Or it is — but not in the genre sense. It’s a story about voice. About what happens when a Black woman speaks from the center of her own weathered mythology, not from the margins of someone else's polite fiction.

Janie’s “I” is stitched together through heat and labor and sexual tension and dreams that taste of overripe pears. The pear tree scene, of course — we can’t avoid it. But what most high school essays get wrong is treating it like a soft-focus epiphany. It’s not. It’s confusing. It’s hormonal. It’s beautiful and vaguely disturbing. That tree — grotesque in its sensuality, dripping with sap and symbol — sets a standard for love that no one in Eatonville can survive.

(It reminds me — very inappropriately — of how teenagers project divinity onto pop singers, and then scream when they fall off the pedestal. Janie’s pedestal is botanical, but the fall still hurts.)

What follows that dream is not fulfillment but a long string of half-lives. Logan, with his mule and his dry logic — marries her “for protection,” like an insurance policy against loneliness. But Janie, bless her naivety, wants a soul. Not just a roof. She doesn’t want to be useful; she wants to matter. And isn’t that the real sin in a world ordered by patriarchy — wanting to matter on your own terms?

Joe Starks is a smarter illusion — the dream in a tailored coat. He gives her a store, a position, a place on the porch — except not on the porch, with the men, but inside, behind glass, a doll in a respectable cage. Joe loves the idea of Janie. The performance of her. He loves her hair but makes her tie it up. He loves her beauty but won’t let it breathe.

(Personal aside: I have known that relationship. Haven’t we all — in some form? Where you are the trophy of someone else’s ambition, dusted off for display but never truly heard?)

And then there’s Tea Cake — not the savior, not the solution. Let’s not mythologize. He’s charming, yes, but he’s also violent. He gambles. He hits her. He dances with the light and the dark of what it means to be a man without power in a white supremacist world — and sometimes he misdirects that pressure onto Janie. It’s not fair, and Hurston doesn’t pretend it is. But what Tea Cake gives — strangely, miraculously — is space. Space for Janie to talk, to laugh, to fish, to shoot, to joke, to be. It’s not about him “giving her a voice” — how colonial is that idea? — but about not muting her when she already has one.

And maybe that’s the most radical thing about the novel. Janie’s self isn’t built through resistance alone; it’s built through play, through improvisation, through the mess of desire. She’s not a political pamphlet. She’s a woman who kills the man she loves because he’s become a danger to her body. And she survives it. And she talks about it.

Who tells her story? She does. In the frame narrative, Janie takes the reader (through Phoeby) into confidence, spinning her tale like Scheherazade, not to entertain, but to reclaim. She doesn’t justify. She articulates. And that’s power.

Now — a detour. I know, I know. But I’ve been thinking lately about how Western literature treats female protagonists as either martyrs or madwomen. We fetishize their suffering or dismiss their rage. But Janie doesn’t collapse into either trope. She isn’t broken at the end — she’s tender. And perhaps that’s even more dangerous to the canon. A Black woman who remains intact, thoughtful, emotionally textured, even after the storm, the death, the hurricane, the courtroom?

(Did I mention the hurricane? Let’s return there. Not just as a plot device — although Hurston’s refusal to anthropomorphize it is glorious — but as metaphor. Nature, in this book, doesn’t bend to human will. It kills without reason, and leaves behind ruins and ghosts. It reminds us that identity, like weather, is never static.)

Janie’s return to Eatonville — alone, barefoot in overalls, carrying a story instead of a man — is not a closure. It’s a gesture. A punctuation mark with no fixed meaning. “She pulled in her horizon like a great fish-net,” Hurston writes, and we nod, not because we understand, but because it feels true. What else can the self be but a net — catching fragments of desire, pain, memory, history, and the occasional pear blossom?

And the title — “Their Eyes Were Watching God.” Whose eyes? Why “watching” and not “seeing”? Hurston’s choice is deliberate, elliptical. These aren’t eyes that witness justice or find peace. They watch. With awe, with fear, with hunger. Watching God — as if waiting for divine permission to become what they already are. But Janie? She doesn’t wait anymore. She walks into her story and dares to live it, in all its unfinishedness.

Is she free? Maybe not. But she’s awake.

And in a world where the female voice is so often ventriloquized, that might be the closest thing to liberation we get.

(One last thing — I still think about her hair. Long, unbound, resting on her shoulders like a banner. Not just beauty, not just sex — sovereignty. I wish literature gave us more hair like that. Less metaphor, more matter.)

Janie Crawford doesn’t discover herself. She remembers — again and again — who she refuses to be. And in that refusal, in that rhythm of no-no-yes-maybe-later — a life takes shape. Not a perfect one. But hers.

That’s enough. That’s everything.