Finally, A Woman: Initial Impressions of Janie Crawford

     The first two books we read this semester, Richard Wright's Native Son and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, both lack any sort of wholesome portrayal of women. In Native Son, every woman is portrayed either as a thorn in Bigger's path, a sexual object that he can manipulate and treat as he wants, or a motherly figure who he feels ashamed of. Invisible Man suffers the same condition - again, women are either sexual objects meant to get men excited, motherly figures whose conditions and dreams are not given any thought, or submissive wives and daughters who have to quietly suffer the conditions that society imposes upon them. However, reading the first few chapters of Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, feels like taking a fresh new breath. Finally, we have a woman character who isn't portrayed through the eyes of men who don't care about them. 

    The opening scene of Their Eyes Were Watching God starts out with the main character, Janie, coming back to her hometown without her husband. People speculate that something must have happened between them and he probably left her for another woman. However, one of Janie's friends tells her to ignore other people's gossip and Janie starts to tell her own story. 

    There are so many things about Janie that we see described in a positive way that are lacking in Native Son and Invisible Man. First of all, she's beautiful! And Zora Neale Hurston does her beauty true justice - unlike Ellison, she simply doesn't focus on Janie's breasts and sexualize her. She describes her beautiful hair and the way she walks - and that she's beautiful even in overalls. I love the way Janie is described because Hurston showed that women have both outer and inner beauty - and that beauty isn't defined by how much women's physical features can excite men around them. 

    Hurston also gives Janie a chance to tell her story from her point of view - her story's not being narrated by a fatherly figure or by another other person. She's given the agency to tell her own story on her terms through how she's seen it. Janie was conceived when her mother, just a teenager at the time, was raped by her teacher. Janie's raised by her grandmother (who also happened to be raped by her master during the Civil War, and had Janie's mother as a result), who initially raises her in the yard of a white couple and for the first couple of years, Janie doesn't even know that she's black until she sees a picture of herself. Her grandmother eventually moves them out of their yard and moves them onto some land she had bought so Janie can have a better upbringing. I'm going to pause and say that for a old, black woman at this time who was raised as a slave and witnessed the Civil War, buying land to raise her granddaughter also shows the amazing amount of agency she has over her life (obviously, this is limited because a couple of pages later, Janie's married off to an older man for financial security and so the grandmother can die in peace). So although Janie and her mother are products of rape which symbolizes taking away the autonomy of women to make decisions about their life and who they want to mate with, Janie's raised to be independent. 

    The defining scene of the first three chapters is probably when Janie's sitting under the pair tree, a teenager who's experiencing her budding sexuality in the spring. A boy comes and kisses her and her grandmother notices them, and isn't pleased to say the least. She decides to marry Janie off to an older man, which Janie is definitely not excited about. While marrying Janie off to a man she's never met is depriving her of the right to make her own choices, I still think this is a big step from the past couple of books. Firstly, Janie experiences her own sexuality - it's not defined by anyone else. In previous books, every single intimate scene is motivated by some sort of political or practical reason - Bessie is raped by Bigger because she's an inconvenience in his path, not because he truly feels any sort of love for her. That's the same with the narrator and Sybil in Invisible Man - the narrator rapes Sybil because he wants to get information out of her and not because he feels attraction or love towards her. After Janie's married, she expressed her discontent with her new husband - he doesn't wash his feet and is old. Furthermore, he expressed no love towards her. The grandmother tells Janie she should be grateful because she's probably set for life is she stays with him, but we see Janie asking for more. And she's not just asking for intimate relations, she wants more. She wants excitement in her life, something that will make her happy and fulfill her. In the books we've read in the class, this is the first time I've seen a woman character asking for more, refusing to stay content with what she's given. In a world where women aren't encouraged to express their opinion, even today when women who talk too much are told to stay quiet and not do too much, Janie yearns for more in her life. The crossroads are stacked against her - she's black and a woman. But she refuses to back down. A thought I had while reading this is that in order to truly protest oppressive norms or society, these battles don't have to be fought in court with an eloquent lawyer against a jury. One doesn't have to sacrifice their feelings and emotions and join a macho organization in order to protest. Janie doesn't even mean to protest - she's just asking for a better life; she wants to have fun and not work on a farm all day with her old, musty husband. But in asking for this, she's challenging what society has always told her what she can be. 

    These are my initial impressions of Janie and how Hurston portrays her. Compared to the past two male-dominated novels we've read so far, Their Eyes Were Watching God feels so much more wholesome. It's the story of a woman who just wants to fulfill her desires and what she wants in her life - but this truly brings out the ugliness of society. Janie asserts herself and Hurston uses this to portray the true beauty of a woman. Finally, we have a character who is not defined by men, but by herself.