Their Eyes: End of the Book Notes
Critics on Janie’s attainment of voice
· Mary Helen Washington: Hurston “puts Janie on the track of autonomy, self-realization, and independence, but she also places Janie in the position of romantic heroine as the object of Tea Cake’s quest”
Contemporary critics
· Richard Wright: “quaint” and “not serious”
Does Janie attain her voice?
· Nanny says “So de white man throw down de load and tell . . . woman is de mule uh de world as far as Ah can see. Ah been praying fuh it tuh be different wid you.” 14
· Nanny “I wanted to preach a great sermon about colored women sitting on high, but they wasn’t no pulpit for me. Freedom found me wid a baby in my arms . . . Ah said I’d save the text for you.” 16
· Joe Stark’s power and voice.
o 35 “Dat man talks like a section foreman . . . he’s mighty compellment.”
o 35 “sat upright at the tone of his voice. They stared at Joe’s face, his clothes, and his wife.”
o 43 – Joe’s first speech where he becomes mayor. “And now we’ll listen to a few words uh encouragement from Mrs. Mayor Starks.” But Jody won’t let her speak “She had never thought of making a speech, . . . It must have been the way Joe spoke out without giving her a chance to say anything . . .”
o 49 – “He loves obedience out of everybody under de sound of his voice.”
o 49 – “He’s de wind and we’se the grass. We bend every which way he blows.”
· Many admired for their ability to tell a story: big story talkers, p. 51. Janie is forbidden to participate with the porch talkers. 54
· Janie gives her first speech: 58 “Jody, dat wuz a mighty fine thing fuh you to do. ‘Taint everybody would have thought of it . . .Freein’ dat mule makes uh mighty big man outa you. Something like George Washington and Lincoln. . .”
o “Your wife’s uh born orator, Starks.”
o Why speaks well and on the surface it’s supportive, but what is she really saying to Jody?
o Why does she have to tear him down in order to gain her voice?
· Joe cuts down Janie with his voice. ““Dat’s ‘cause you need tellin’,” he rejoined hotly. “It would be pitiful if Ah didn’t. Somebody got to think for women and chillun and chickens and cows. I god, they sho don’t think none theirselves.” 72-crushes Janie and her self image
· 75 – Janie finally speaks up :“Sometimes God gits familiar wid us womenfolks too . . . It’s so easy to make yo’self out God Almight when you ain’tgot nothin’ tuh strain against but women and chickens.”
· 79 - Janie finally retaliates “You big-bellies around here and put out a lot of brag, but ‘tain’t nothin’ to it but yo’ big voice. Humph! Talkin’ ‘bout melookin’ old! When you pull down yo’ britches, you look lak de change uh life.”
o Joe hits her, drives her from the store, and nothing is the same after that. He literally gets sick. She has decimated his manhood, publically emasculated him.
· 87 – “And now you got tuh die tuh find out dat you got tuh pacify somebody besides yo’self if you wants any love and any sympathy in dis world. You ain’t tried to pacify nobody but yo’self. Too busy listening tuh you’ own big voice.”
· 88 – “She thought back and forth about what had happened in the making of a voice out of a man.”
· 115 - Tea-cake, is different. “He done taught me de maiden language all over.”
Pear tree metaphor:
Beginning: young, fecund, and blossoming: just asking for pleasure
End: mature tree in leaf with “dawn and doom” in its branches, provides its knowledge and experience for others
8 – “Janie saw her life like a great tree in leaf . . .”
11- “She was stretched on her back beneath the pear tree soaking in the alto chant of the visiting bees, the gold of the sun and panting breath of the breeze when the inaudible voice of it all . . . So this was marriage.”
24; “Ah want things sweet wid mah marriage lake when you sit under a pear tree and think.”
25- “She know now that marriage did not make love. Janie’s first dream was dead, so she became a woman.”
29 – “he did not represent sun-up and pollen and blooming trees, but he spoke for far horizon.”
106 – Tea-cake is different
Opening and closing sentences
· 1 - “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.”
· 88 “Here Nanny had taken the biggest thing God ever made, the horizon—for not matter how far a person can go . . . and pinched it in to such a little bit of a thing that she could tie around her granddaughters neck tight enough to choke her. She hated the old woman. . .”
· 193 “She pulled in her horizon like a great fish-net. Pulled it from around the waist of the world and draped it over her shoulder. So much of life in its meshes! She called in her soul to come and see.”
What does Janie learn from her husbands? As a heroine what does she need to learn and how do they help educate her?
Jody will not complement Janie, must be destroyed
Why does Janie have to kill Tea Cake (literally and figuratively)? Tea Cake let her control her own mind, but does still control her body—needs just the spiritual, like at the end of the book
What does Hurston suggest about men and women by ending the book with a solitary heroine without a hero? The Black community needs the voice and strength of Black women to repair it and to lead in the proper direction: only a heroine can rescue the community.
Trial scene
· Janie’s voice matters, only place where white have a role in the novel
· Janie persuades the all white, make jury and the white women in the audience
· Does not convince the Black men
· Black men are silenced, are not important (Sop de Bottom’s statement cut off by white men)
· Janie proves her actions just through proper speech
· The personal becomes political
· Janie’s voice is not quoted, but no persuasive voices are shown in this scene outside of the Black community
· By not forcing Janie to speak, Hurston suggests a force beyond words, an indescribable speech beyond the realm of words on the page
Janie’s return: they are awed by her presence” “The porch couldn’t talk for looking . . . nobody moved, nobody spoke, nobody even thought to swallow spit until after the gate slammed behind her” (2)
She doesn’t need words, her presence speaks her worth
p.192 "Lawd! . . . Ah done growed ten feet higher from jus' listenin' tuh you, Janie. . ."
Final scene: a silent show of power: pulling in the horizon to her shoulders
The fish net symbolizes the power of men and women, echoes the distant ships on the horizon’s of men and the woven dream of women
Not sitting on high above her community, but bringing the horizon to the level of her community
Frame of the novel, structure
Narrative mode
Weaving of third person, dialogue, and first person vernacular in what Barbara Johnson and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. call “free indirect discourse”
Direct and indirect speech
Oral sense, not just words on a page
3rd person omniscient is the narrative mode
but this is added to with:
more dialogue than usual in Janie’s voice, in vernacular (dialect, like spoken speech, not writing), in quotations
also get other voices in quotations
narrative in standard English
narrative description in vernacular, that is sort of Janie’s voice, but not in quotations
this is the place where Hurston’s voice is combined with Janie’s
Intermingling of voices
Truer sense of Black voices and storytelling
Orality of the community
Janie’s voice is the novel, a more powerful voice of the omniscient narrator, speaks from the community, of the community, and for the community, authorial
Combined voices of Janie and Hurston
Janie’s voice gains power because it is more authorial
Hurston is able to make a political assertion through Janie’s voice about the place of Black women in society and the importance of their voices to healing the community
Dreamlike, “the dream is the truth”
“The dream is the truth” – the power of the author, the power of Janie, the power of women
Romance terms