Student Presentation #3: Taloria on the Reception of Their Eyes Were Watching God

The Controversy over Their Eyes Were Watching God

Richard Wright’s Condemnation of the Novel

Zora Neal Hurston’s 1937 novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God generated a lot of controversy upon its release. Several African American critics, such as Richard Wright, felt that Hurston had not been harsh enough in her critique of the white treatment of blacks in the South. They felt that she painted too rosy a picture of black life in the South, and betrayed blacks by not portraying the ill-treatment and demoralization that they had suffered. 

Wright published several controversial novels, short stories, poems, and non-fiction, most notably Native Son, that took up racial themes and the plight of African-Americans during the late 19th to mid-20th centuries. His work helped redefine discussions of race relations in America in the mid-20th century. 

In his review of Their Eyes Were Watching God, Wright excoriates Hurston for her representation of African Americans:

 “Miss Hurston voluntarily continues in her novel the tradition which was forced upon the Negro in the theatre, that is, the minstrel technique that makes the "white folks" laugh. Her characters eat and laugh and cry and work and kill; they swing like a pendulum eternally in that safe and narrow orbit in which America likes to see the Negro live: between laughter and tears. […] The sensory sweep of her novel carries no theme, no message, no thought. In the main, her novel is not addressed to the Negro, but to a white audience whose chauvinistic tastes she knows how to satisfy. She exploits that phase of Negro life which is "quaint," the phase which evokes a piteous smile on the lips of the "superior" race”.

Wright argued that the work was not radical enough in its condemnation of racism, while others felt that Hurston’s treatment of sexism weakened the novel. I would argue, however, the novel does fulfill its purpose. While the novel is not necessarily radical in its condemnation of racism, I feel that its treatment of sexism was radical because the roles of women and the perception they had during that time was properly depicted.

Alice Walker’s Celebration of the Novel

Alice Walker was born on February 9, 1944, in Eatonton, Georgia. She worked as a social worker, teacher and lecturer and took part in the 1960s civil rights movement in Mississippi. Walker won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her 1982 novel The Color Purple, and she is also an acclaimed poet and essayist. 

In 1973, when Alice Walker discovered the unmarked grave of Zora Neale Hurston, she had it inscribed: "Zora Neale Hurston, A Genius of the South”. Walker made an active choice to befriend the spirit of Hurston. Hurston was an influential writer in the Harlem Renaissance, but most of her work was out of print by the time she died in 1960. Due in large part to these protests, such as Wright’s discussed above, Their Eyes Were Watching God soon slid into a quiet obscurity, until Walker began advocating for minorities. Walker was very instrumental in bringing Their Eyes Were Watching God into the modern literary canon, thirty seven years after Richard Wright’s review of the novel.  Walker became Hurston's champion, advocating for Americans of all ethnic backgrounds to rediscover one of the finest American social commentators of the early 20th century.