Spatial Politics and Locality in Their Eyes Were Watching God

Abstract

Zora Neale Hurston’s 1937 classic Their Eyes Were Watching God sees its protagonist Janie Crawford navigate the stormy American South through three marriages and an all-powerful hurricane in a transformative and volatile journey of self-realization. In the novel, Hurston uses the spaces Janie encounters to both construct and contest power structures, interrogating the validity and reproduction of the oppressive social hierarchies that govern her autonomy.

This essay seeks to analyze Hurston’s use of three primary spaces— sorted into the geographical, liminal, and corporeal—as a means of understanding and dissecting intersecting forms of authority. The geographical, explored through the town of Eatonville, is used to visualize class relations and the mechanisms of power. The liminal is represented by porches—key sites of performance and play in which social dynamics are both challenged and maintained—through which Hurston contends with the performativity of power and gendered roles of speaker and subject. Finally, the corporeal sees the body as an active entity through which Hurston explores how violence—both physical and sexual—reinforces ideas of identity and perpetuates subjugation, as well as how autonomy is physically embodied. Crucially, this essay explores how Hurston’s use of space is dynamic, meaning the spaces in the novel are not static, fixed entities, but transformative sites in which the rigid structures and hierarchies governing Janie’s self-expression can be not only destabilized, but dismantled.