INTRODUCTION:

The Harlem Renaissance encapsulated freedom, propaganda and the surfacing of the black aesthetics. As propagandait advocated the voice of the once silenced and deliberatel made-invisible identity of the Black American. The movement extended solidarity to authentic self-expression from the aesthetics of Black artists. Alain Locke defined Harlem as the site of an early twentieth century New Negro culture with originality and uniqueness. “In Harlem, Negro life is seizing upon its first chances for group expression and self‐determination” (Locke7). The Renaissance promised a spirit of confidence and independence for the New Negro. It heralded a new age for creativity, pride, race consciousness and better opportunities after the Great War and the Great Migration.

Harlem became an antidote for Black diasporic dispersion: people of the same Black origin but dispersed by history. Charles Reason writes, “The Spirit Voice; Or Liberty Call to the Disfranchised,” “Tis calling you, who now too long have been Sore victims suffering under legal sin, To vow, no more to sleep, till raised and freed From partial bondage, to a life indeed. (Reason)

Zora Neale Hurston was one of the leading figures who carved a space for women during the Harlem Renaissance. Hurston’s novel, TheirEyes were Watching Godwas written in the early twentieth century America, focusing on the central character of a black woman, when the life and experience of such characters were marginalized in both life and fiction. Her text authenticates the life of Black women while placing them on the central stage. Hurston, as well as other women artists of the Harlem Renaissance had begun a mission of reclaiming a lost history, a memory and signature of identity that was once denied to their race and gender. Janie Crawford, the protagonist of Hurston’s Their Eyes were Watching God (1937), is a captivating character in the history of African American literature. The novel celebrates Janie’s flight towards her unquenching desire for true love and freedom. Janie’s sanguinity is the central idea of the novel. The love she desired demanded a connection between her bodily and her spiritual world. As her parents left her at a very young age, most of Janie’s childhood was spent within in the yards of Mrs. Wash Burn.Janie was raised by her grandmother Nanny who believed love to be “de very prong all us black women gits hung on” (Hurston 30). Her father was a white man but she was brown skinned. Hence Janie always faced a duality in her life. In the eyes of the white community she belonged to the trivial group of the ‘colored’and in the eyes of her people, she was different. Janie’s mixed heritage tied her identity within the chains of her class and race. Throughout the novel she is seen trying to direct her own life. She grew up playing with the white children and her classmates who always taunted her as an outsider. Janie realizes her true self when she sees a photograph of herself. She recognised that she is different and then comments, “aw, aw! Ah’mcolored!”, and continues, “Before Ah seen de picture ah thought ah wuz just like de rest” (Hurston 13). From this moment Janie breaks her cocoon of her ostracized identity and paves a path for her journey.

One of the powerful metaphors in the novel is that of the horizon. Janie sees the horizon while she climbs the pear tree. All throughout the novel Janie wishes to make a trip to the horizon which becomes a symbol of ambition and happiness in her life. The image of a tree is also recurring motif in the novel. According to Hurston, “Janie saw her life like a great tree in leaf with the things suffered, things enjoyed, things done and undone. Dawn and doom was in the branches” (Gates 201). As Janie matures, the woman in her is surfaces. The oddities and the imperfections she experienced as child till date gets erased. The evolution of Janie from a child to a woman is a beautiful moment of completion like a flower blossoming. The time Janie spent under the pear tree had significantly shaped her naissance as a new woman. Pear is always associated to female subjectivity and body. As a sixteen-year-old girl, lying under a pear tree at the time of spring, she watches the bees gathering pollen from a pear blossom. The experience becomes a symbol to Janie’s concept of an ideal relationship, where two souls unite in harmony and satisfaction. When Janie kisses the young man Johnny Taylor, the reader gets the image of Janie as a child entering the realm of the symbolic order, where she is acquainted with intersubjective relations, ideological conventions and the Name-of-the-Father. But Janie names this moment to be the beginning of her ‘conscious life’.

Janie’s childhood was influenced by her grandmother, Nanny, who along with her suggestions and orders catered to the sustenance of the white-male dominated society. She instilled the ideas on a further division of gender within the race to which they belonged. According to Nanny, “De nigger woman is de mule uh de world so fur as Ah can see. Ah been prayin’ fuh it tuh be different wid you” (Hurston20). Hence Nanny dismisses Janie’s ideas on romance and love, and drives her to marry to a middle aged man, Logan Killicks, with the belief that she would get a lawful husband and a secured life. When the novel progresses Janie is adorned with the ‘security’ that her grandmother desiredwhich pulled her back into the tide of gender and racial hegemony. Logan Killicks, the old hardworking farmer with no zest in life buys a second mule to tie Janie tohis field and to his kitchen. And like her grandmother’s prediction Janie becomes a mule to be commanded and exploited. When Janie finds her marriage to Logan Killicks unyielding to her desires, she protests in tears to her Nanny, “Ah wants things sweet widmah marriage, lak when you sit under a pear tree and think” (31). In this marriage, Logan desecrates the ideal of the pear tree from Janie. Hence Janie decides to abandon her life with Killicks and run away with Joe Starks, a “citifyied” man, who seemed worldlier than Janie herself. Joe brought to her mind the potential of “change and chance” (41).With Joe, she once again began dreaming that, “she was going to have flower dust and springtime sprinkled over everything” (41). But soon after their wedding they reached Eatonville, a “colored town” and Logan’s sweet words on love changed its argument to commerce and power.

Joe instituted himself as a successful man and gave Janie the best of what money could buy. Very soon Janie became one of Joe’s possessions that he valued as a commodity of spectacle. He held Janie like a jewel and insisted her to sell goods at their store or work in their post office, but with a ‘head-rag’ to cover her hair. Joe had forbidden Janie to doeverything that she loved, especially to participate in the storytelling business that her neighbours engaged in. A representation of male ego, Joe belittles Janie at every opportunity he gets. At one instance when Janie tells him, “Ah knows uh few things, and womenfolks thinks sometimes too!” And Joe replies, “Aw naw they don’t. They just think they’sthinkin’. When ah see one thing Ah understands ten. You see ten things and don’t understand one” (Hurston 86). To the men around Joe describes his wife, “a woman and her place is in de home” (53). After Joe’s death, Tea Cake arrives in Janie’s life. And Janie tells Pheoby that, “Tea Cake ain’tno Jody Starks.” Their relationship was, “ain’t no business proposition, and no race after property and titles. Dis is uh love game. Ah done lived Grandma’s way, now I meanstuh live mine” (137). Though Tea Cake arrives at Janie’s door as a liberating force with the promise of good life, but he also dominates her in a newly contrived way. He dictates in a more pernicious method different from that of Logan and Joe. Readers are made to belief that it was not for money that Tea Cake pursued Janie. But when he finds two hundred dollars in Janie’s pocket, “he was excited and felt like letting folks know who he was” (147), and spends it all on a party. Tea Cake also slaps her in anger, and “being able to whip her reassured him in possession. No brutal beating at all. He just slapped her around a bit to show he was boss” (176).To this domination Janie revoltsand attempts to shoot him.

Henry Louis Gates in The Signifying Monkey notes that Janie’s first two marriages are thoroughly bourgeois and are hence characterized by a formula of capitalism and possession. When Logan had forced Janie into labor, Joe had devised another method or organized control on Janie. He had turned Janie herself into a commodity. Sarah Grand coined the term, “the New Woman”, who is “consumed with a desire for new experiences, new sensations, new objects in life” (Pykett 138). She is personification of many complex social tendencies. The New Women is different creature who sits apart from the “cow-kind of woman”, the “scum” women, “in silent contemplation... thinking and thinking, until at last she solved the problem and proclaimed for herself what was wrong with the Home-is-the-Woman’s-Sphere, and prescribed the remedy” (Grand 30).

Before the Harlem Renaissance and various other revolutions organised by the Blacks to fight against segregation and slavery, their worlds were dominated by the White ideology and tyranny. With the title the novel deconstructs the potential source of gaze directed by racism and patriarchy. The gaze is reverted when the black woman (Janie) and her mate (Tea Cake) resolves to direct their gaze back at the god during the hurricane.Women writers and artists of the Harlem Renaissance dealt with issues of both gender and race. They experienced racial as well as gender prejudices from other working artists who limited their ability from obtaining opportunity and training. According to Helen Cixous and Catherine Clement,“Women are double. They are allied with what is regular, according to the rules, since they are wives and mothers, and allied as well with those natural disturbances, their regular periods, which are the epitome of paradox, order and disorder. (Cixous and Clément 8)

Hurston’s character, Janie is the epitome of The New Woman.The New Woman is the beacon of progress and a harbinger of social change. It is the profound defence that Janie holds in front of her that has made her an extraordinary pillar in the history of black writing. “She tore off the kerchief from her head and let down her plentiful hair. The weight, the length, the glory was all there. She took careful stock of herself, then combed her hair and tied it back up again” (Hurston 106). Janie is one among the literary predecessors that waved the flag for all the women’s rights activism that followed in the twentieth century. Even though she was made helpless by fate, the hope in her encouraged her to strike back for the life she wanted. The beauty of Hurston’s novel lies in its open ending. She makes it a writerly novel while she leaves the question of Janie’s ‘liberation’ unsolved. It is left to the readers to designate whether Janie is liberated or not. The obvious reading would be that the woman here is liberated as she is seemingly left free from the shackles laid down by her male partners and those who previously represented the patriarchy. But it is to be once again taken into consideration the predicament of a woman like Janie, who is a representation of a new woman. The open ending of the novel leaves the gates open for multiple interpretations for the reader to decipher how Janie’s life progressed towards the end.

Hurston has employed the use of ambiguous imagery and symbols that metaphorically signify contradictory meanings. She begins the novel with the image of the horizon which symbolises endless possibilities, dreams and desires for any individual. But when an individual attempts to advance his way towards it, the horizon simultaneously recedes farther back. Hurston here points to the endless possibilities and hope that the world gives, along with the limitations. In the novel, Janies’s ambitions are also emblematic of the horizons. The more she tries to near them, the more they retreat. Similarly, water is another motif in the novel. It is both a nourishing as well as a dangerous energy. Hurston had begun the novel with a paragraph on sea that stands as a metaphor for human life.

Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men. (Hurston 1)

In the novel Hurston perceives water as the giver of life and as a symbol ofdanger. The hurricane that strikes Jacksonville is the strongest example of how man is defenceless under the destructive powers of nature. The writing of the text is carefully planned by Hurston in a way that oral tradition had crossed over to written expression in an effortless fashion.Hurston’s language has carried the culture of the African-American narrative which provided unique forms and subjects that helped to establish the personal and group identity. The novel employs creative use of Southern dialect with its distinct features of narrative, vocabulary and grammar. Moreover Hurston has synthesized English with the African American culture and left the character of Janie to be commemorated by all the Womanist and Feminist movements that followed.

REFERENCES:

1. Locke, Alain. The New Negro: An Interpretation.Simon and Schuster, 1997, p. 7.

2. Reason, Charles Lewis. “The Spirit Voice; Or Liberty Call to the Disfranchised”.Poem Hunter. Accessed on 29 March 2018.<www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-spirit-voice-or-liberty-call-to-the-disfranchised/>

3. Hurston, Zora Neale. Their Eyes were Watching God.U of Illinois P, 1991.

4. Gates, Henry Louis. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism. Oxford UP, 1988.

5. Pykett, Lyn. The "Improper" Feminine: The Women's Sensation Novel and the New Woman Writing. Routledge, 1992.

6. Cixous, Hélène, and Catherine Clément.The Newly Born Woman. U of Minnesota, 1993.

7. Bloom, Harold. Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God. Chelsea House, 1987.

8. Bracks, Lean'tin L., and Jessie Carney Smith.Black Women of the Harlem Renaissance Era.n.p., n.d.

9. Grand, Sarah. "The New Aspect of the Woman Question."JSTOR, n.d. Web. 13 Oct. 2016.

10. King, Lovalerie. The Cambridge Introduction to Zora Neale Hurston.Cambridge UP, 2008.

11. West, Margaret Genevieve. Zora Neale Hurston & American Literary Culture. Gainesville: U of Florida, 2005.

12. Awkward, Michael.New Essays on Their Eyes Were Watching God. Cambridge UP, 1990.

Received on 20.06.2018 Modified on 02.07.2018

Res. J. Humanities and Social Sciences. 2018; 9(4): 759-762.

DOI: 10.5958/2321-5828.2018.00127.4