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Their Eyes Were Watching God

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The Preface

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a la Shmoop

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All right, and welcome to Shmoopversations,

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Their Eyes Were Watching God.

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Zora Neale Hurston's great book

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about Janie. A coming of age story that's

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seminal in that it, for the first time or maybe a very early time,

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took a young, Black woman,

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treated her like a real human being

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with normal human emotions and dreams

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and everything else, and humanized a whole

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coming of age experience for a Black teen in America

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in the early 20th century.

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So we're talking here as usual with Dr. Deb,

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who's gonna unravel the stories and tell us why their eyes were watching God

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at the very end.

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So, Deb, tell us a little bit about Zora Neale. Start there.

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How does she anchor herself structurally in this story?

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So Zora Neale Hurston grew up in an all-black town in the South.

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And she went to high school,

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made her way through college.

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Wasn't easy, but she got herself there.

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And then she moved to Harlem at about 35 years old.

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And this was right smack dab in the middle of the Harlem Renaissance.

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So that's how she got involved with that movement.

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And she really is known as

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the only prominent female figure in the Harlem Renaissance

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that you read about in all the canonical textbooks.

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And give us a sense for what Harlem was like,

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because Harlem has had like 18 lives

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as it's gone through. So in that era, contextually,

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what was it like?

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So Harlem was a place where,

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at that point, all of these black artists

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and artists of all kinds: writers, musicians, et cetera,

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came together. And this word "renaissance" means rebirth,

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and that's exactly what was happening

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is they were kind of reclaiming Black culture

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as a legitimate art form, which it had been understood not to be previously.

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And that's kind of what Their Eyes Were Watching God is all about,

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reclaiming Black folk culture as a legitimate art form.

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And that's what was happening in the Harlem Renaissance.

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The Harlem Renaissance is the reason we have access

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to so much amazing Black art and culture

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today, even. Everything that came after that was influenced by these folks.

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[ pen writing ]

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Who was Zora Neale Hurston?

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What was the Harlem Renaissance?

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All right, here we go.

Full Transcript