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Significance of Female Voice in Their Eyes Were Watching God

Explore the importance of the female voice in Zora Neale Hurston's novel, focusing on Janie as she navigates society's expectations. Language and dialogue play a vital role in shaping the characters and their experiences.

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Significance of Female Voice in Their Eyes Were Watching God

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  1. Unit 3: Hurston 11.13.2013 Prof. Kingsley ENGL 123

  2. First reactions/observations • What do you think of the text? • What were your initial observations? Questions? Reactions? • Take 10 minutes to write, reflect, think, and look back to your markings, notes, or underlined quotes…. • Questions?

  3. What’s happened so far? Charting plot points (to help us all!) • In groups, chart out the major plot points! This is a challenge for you to understand what are the major turning points, places, characters, and events in the text!

  4. Character analysis • Janie (2, 21, 25, 31, 32, 46, 70, 71, 76, 87, 89) • Nanny (the grandmother)(12, 14, 16, 17, • Logan Killicks (24, 31, 32) • Joe (Jody) Starks (28, 41, 72, 80, 85, 87) • Who is this person? • How do they see the world? What’s their perspective or world view? • What language does Hurston use to describe them? • What is their voice? (or do they have one?)

  5. Presentation walk through • Pre-Presentation: Forming a question • What do you notice? What do you observe? • My initial observation: Language use • In this reading of Hurston’s novel, I have been intrigued by the presence of these folk sayings or idioms: • “She ain’t even worth talkin’ after”(3) • “Tain’t no use in your tryin’ to cloak no ole woman”(3) • “ah got the house all opened up to let dis breeze get a little catchin’”(7) • “Ah hope you fall on soft ground”(35) • These colloquial or local sayings are also set next to Hurston’s own poetic language: • “There is a basin in the mind where words float around on thought and thought on sound and sight. Then there is a depth of thought untouched by words, and deeper still a gulf of formless feelings untouched by thought”(24).

  6. Forming a question: • What is the importance of language and/or voice in the text? What kind of voice does the language of the local (the dialogue/dialect) give to the community? What kind of voice does Hurston’s language create? • (DRAFT OF QUESTON—there are a lot of holes in this….)

  7. Research • Key words: • Hurston and Voice • “Their Eyes Were Watching God” and Voice • Findings: • “Celebrating the Black Female Self: Zora Neale Hurston’s American Classic” by Julie Roemer • “Porch Talk: Reading Their Eyes Were Watching God” Lisa Garrigues • “’The Porch couldn’t talk for looking’: Voice and Vision in ‘Their Eyes Were Watching God” Deborah Clarke • “You heard her, You ain’t Blind”: Seeing What’s Said in “Their Eyes Were Watching God” Stuart Burrows • “From mules to muliebrity: Speech and silence in Their Eyes Were Watching God” Julie Haurykiewizc • “The Erotics of Talk: The Oldest Human Longing in Their Eyes Were Watching God” Carla Kaplan

  8. Narrowing & Reading Research • After reading through the research, I notice that there is a lot of discussion about the female voice (particularly Janie’s) • So, now I revise my question “What is the significance of the female voice in Their Eyes Were Watching God?” • Final Research Selection: • (1) “Celebrating the Black Female Self: Zora Neale Hurston’s American Classic” by Julie Roemer • (2) “The Erotics of Talk: The Oldest Human Longing in Their Eyes Were Watching God” Carla Kaplan • (3) “From mules to muliebrity: Speech and silence in Their Eyes Were Watching God” Julie Haurykiewizc

  9. Presenting! • “What is the significance of the female voice in Their Eyes Were Watching God?”

  10. “Time came when she fought back with her tongue as best she could, but it didn’t do her any good. It just made Joe do more. He wanted her submission and he’d keep on fighting until he felt he had it. So gradually, she pressed her teeth together and learned to hush”(71) • Take 5 minutes and look for a quote that you feel most captures Janie’s “voice”… • When you find it, think about why it captures Janie’s voice for you.

  11. Reading the “female voice” • “[Janie’s] long, and ultimately successful, struggle for her authentic self compels her to confront and overcome a gauntlet of limiting expectations of ‘Whut a woman oughta be and to do’ (Hurston 31). Hurston structures Janie’s story as a classic hero’s quest, transcribed to the feminine. Janie’s geography is principally an inner one; the obstacles in her path are the loud voices of others which drown out the sound of her own inner voice”(Roemer 70).

  12. “Logan, however, is actively engaged in silencing Janie, and he refuses to hear the real meaning behind her words when Janie asks what he'd do if she "wuz to run off and leave [him] sometime" (29). Because he has already made his plan to put Janie to work behind a mule, he fails to hear her feelings in regard to this issue. […] • When she tries to make her voice heard, and reasserts that her place is in the domestic sphere, he tells her, "You ain't got no particular place. It's wherever Ah need yuh" (30). Logan attempts to further silence Janie by yelling, "You better dry up in dere!" (30). He means for her to be quiet and stop talking back to him, but the irony is that she is literally drying up and withering inside in this loveless marriage in which her voice is continually silenced.” • (From: “From mules to muliebrity: Speech and silence in Their Eyes Were Watching God” Julie Haurykiewizc)

  13. “It is only in telling her story to Pheoby that Janie finally is able to satisfy ‘the oldest human longing—self revelation’(18). Only in telling her story to Pheoby does she fulfill her quest for satisfaction she beheld under the pear tree. Telling her story to Pheoby supplies the erotic fulfillment Janie misunderstands as ‘marriage,’ and in this sense Pheoby, whose ‘hungry listening helped Janie to tell her story,’ is the ‘bee’ to Janie’s ‘blossom’”(116). From “The Erotics of Talk: The Oldest Human Longing in Their Eyes Were Watching God” Carla Kaplan

  14. Passage reading! • Page 72 • “Janie stood where he left her for unmeasured time and thought. She stood there…. • What stands out to you in the passage? What language is used to describe Janie’s world? What do we know about her struggle for voice? What is revealed here?

  15. Take away • Janie is searching for her voice • Marriage deflates and fails to give her voice, but storytelling with her friend does give her agency • Tension between outside and inside worlds (outer dialogues and inner dialogues) • “Blossoming” of voice is a unification between her inner consciousness and silence and her outer forms of expression and empowerment

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