28/10/24
‘Their Eyes Were Watching God’ - Zora Neale Hurston - Modern Fiction Lecture 9
● Landmark text of African American Literary Tradition
● Classic novel of the Harlem Renaissance - movement in New York in between the World
Wars e.g. Langston Hughes
● Refers to the place where it was written, the culture that fostered and encouraged it, the
publishers and the publishing culture.
● Describes Janie’s movement from mid Florida down to the tropical world to the tip of the
Florida peninsula.
● Modern culture as a metropolitan audience which is apparent in the wide, variant
transnational culture of modern literature.
● Link to Stuart Hall and the burden of representation. Hurston wrestles with this idea of the
burden of representation that the audience of New York or metropolitan America is imposing
upon her.
‘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. Now, women forget
all those things they don't want to remember, and remember everything they don't want to forget. The
dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly. So the beginning of this was a woman
and she had come back from burying the dead.
Not the dead of sick and ailing with friends at the pillow and the feet. She had come back from the
sodden and the bloated; the sudden dead, their eyes flung wide open in judgement. The people all
saw her come because it was sundown. The sun was gone, but he had left his footprints in the sky. It
was the time for sitting on porches beside the road. It was the time to hear things and talk. These
sitters had been tongueless, earless, eyeless conveniences all day long. Mules and other brutes had
occupied their skins. But now, the sun and the bossman were gone, so the skins felt powerful and
human. They became lords of sounds and lesser things. They passed nations through their mouths.
They sat in judgement.’
● Transportation to a different space and a set of explanations to describe this.
● Northern readership can recognise some of the allusions to the racism of the deep South
which are stitched into this.
● Referring to Jim Crow segregation in the American South and disenfranchisement.
● Might also detect a political interest that Hurston is hinting at and critiquing.
● Self-conscious storytelling mode and title of the novel. Allows us to slip into the story - the
presence of the storyteller herself is palpable, using storytelling devices from childhood which
creates a presence. Narrator escorting us through the novel.
‘Queensboro Bridge’ in ‘The Great Gatsby’
‘Over the great bridge, with the sunlight through the girders making a constant flicker upon the moving
cars, with the city rising up across the river in white heaps and sugar lumps... The city seen from the
Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery
and the beauty in the world. A dead man passed us in a hearse heaped with blooms, followed by two
carriages with drawn blinds, and by more cheerful carriages for friends. The friends looked out at us
with the tragic eyes and short upper lips of southeastern Europe, and I was glad that the sight of
Gatsby's splendid car was included in their sombre holiday. As we crossed Blackwell' Island a
limousine passed us, driven by a white chauffeur, in which sat three modish negroes, two bucks and
a girl. I laughed aloud as the yolks of their eyeballs rolled toward us in haughty rivalry."Anything can
happen now that we've slid over this bridge," I thought; "anything at all… Even Gatsby could happen,
without any particular wonder.’
● Racist moment signifies the state of Manhattan during the Jazz Age of the 1920s.
‘Their Eyes Were Watching God’ - Zora Neale Hurston - Modern Fiction Lecture 9
● Landmark text of African American Literary Tradition
● Classic novel of the Harlem Renaissance - movement in New York in between the World
Wars e.g. Langston Hughes
● Refers to the place where it was written, the culture that fostered and encouraged it, the
publishers and the publishing culture.
● Describes Janie’s movement from mid Florida down to the tropical world to the tip of the
Florida peninsula.
● Modern culture as a metropolitan audience which is apparent in the wide, variant
transnational culture of modern literature.
● Link to Stuart Hall and the burden of representation. Hurston wrestles with this idea of the
burden of representation that the audience of New York or metropolitan America is imposing
upon her.
‘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. Now, women forget
all those things they don't want to remember, and remember everything they don't want to forget. The
dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly. So the beginning of this was a woman
and she had come back from burying the dead.
Not the dead of sick and ailing with friends at the pillow and the feet. She had come back from the
sodden and the bloated; the sudden dead, their eyes flung wide open in judgement. The people all
saw her come because it was sundown. The sun was gone, but he had left his footprints in the sky. It
was the time for sitting on porches beside the road. It was the time to hear things and talk. These
sitters had been tongueless, earless, eyeless conveniences all day long. Mules and other brutes had
occupied their skins. But now, the sun and the bossman were gone, so the skins felt powerful and
human. They became lords of sounds and lesser things. They passed nations through their mouths.
They sat in judgement.’
● Transportation to a different space and a set of explanations to describe this.
● Northern readership can recognise some of the allusions to the racism of the deep South
which are stitched into this.
● Referring to Jim Crow segregation in the American South and disenfranchisement.
● Might also detect a political interest that Hurston is hinting at and critiquing.
● Self-conscious storytelling mode and title of the novel. Allows us to slip into the story - the
presence of the storyteller herself is palpable, using storytelling devices from childhood which
creates a presence. Narrator escorting us through the novel.
‘Queensboro Bridge’ in ‘The Great Gatsby’
‘Over the great bridge, with the sunlight through the girders making a constant flicker upon the moving
cars, with the city rising up across the river in white heaps and sugar lumps... The city seen from the
Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery
and the beauty in the world. A dead man passed us in a hearse heaped with blooms, followed by two
carriages with drawn blinds, and by more cheerful carriages for friends. The friends looked out at us
with the tragic eyes and short upper lips of southeastern Europe, and I was glad that the sight of
Gatsby's splendid car was included in their sombre holiday. As we crossed Blackwell' Island a
limousine passed us, driven by a white chauffeur, in which sat three modish negroes, two bucks and
a girl. I laughed aloud as the yolks of their eyeballs rolled toward us in haughty rivalry."Anything can
happen now that we've slid over this bridge," I thought; "anything at all… Even Gatsby could happen,
without any particular wonder.’
● Racist moment signifies the state of Manhattan during the Jazz Age of the 1920s.
