Beautiful or Ugly?

Reading Their Eyes Were Watching God was a challenge for me. It wasn't just that the dialect was difficult, it was that I couldn't decide how I felt about it. Do I really like it? Do I look upon it with indifference? Perhaps even disgust?

The truth is, there are many not so nice parts in this book, such as physical abuse. Take Tea Cake when he is speaking with Sop-de-Bottom about beating Janie. Tea Cake's friend is envious and replies with, "Ah lov tuh whip uh tender woman lak Janie! Ah bet she don't even holler. She jus' cries, eh Tea Cake?"

Tea Cake then goes on to agree and state that he didn't beat Janie this time because she had done something wrong, but to prove a point to Mrs. Turner! He doesn't seem particularily proud of having beaten Janie, but then again, he doesn't say he's sorry.

Besides the physical abuse sprinkled throughout, by two of her husband's, Janie gets cut down by snide remarks, by Jody in particular. Then there's the mistreatment of the animals and of course, of the other women who we know were looked down upon not only for their sex but for their race.

On the other hand, Zora Neale Hurston is a terrific writer. There are some parts in the book that are so moving, so beautifully written that they make me, a writer, think, "I wish I'd written that." Some of my favorite lines and sections are so poeticly crafted. Hurston is very good at saying things in a new way, a way that you might not think of yourself. For example, when Janie is thinking about Tea Cake's illness, you can sense the passion and terrible grief she's going through by this on page 178:

Well, she thought, that big old dawg with the hatred in his eyes had killed her after all. Sh wished she had slipped off that cow-tail and drowned then and there and been done. But to kill her through Tea Cake was too much to bear. Tea Cake, the son of the Evening Sun, had to die for loving her. She looked hard at the sky for a long time...It wasn't anything she could fight. She could only ache and wait.

The reader can really sense her pain without Hurston coming out and saying, "Janie was devestated that Tea Cake was going to die." We don't need that. We can understand through Hurston's powerful use of language. One of the most lovely sections in the book comes at the beginning, when Janie is still a young woman, full of hope and wishes for life.

Oh, to be a pear tree- any tree in bloom! With kissing bees singing of the beginning of the world!

This same idea is repeated when Janie falls in love with Tea Cake, later in the story.

She couldn't make him look just like any other man to her. He looked like the love thoughts of women. He could be a bee to a blossom- a pear tree blossom in the spring.

There, not only did Hurston use some pretty words to show a pretty picture, she lets the reader know that Tea Cake is what Janie has been looking for, since she was just sixteen. It doesn't have to make sense to the rest of her world or to the reader. It makes sense to Janie and that's all that matters. TEWWG is terrible in many ways, but it's also honest and vivid. I think I like it more than I thought...