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Their Eyes Were Watching God, a la Shmoop. Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching

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God was published near the tail end of the modernist movement.

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Is it just like all other Modernist works? Or is there something a bit different going

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on here? Well, what the heck is a modernist work? Let’s

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start there. Laser beams and flying cars?

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Not even close. Modernism is a literary movement that reached its peak between 1890 and 1940.

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It’s bleak stuff for the most part, often conveying the idea that life is chaotic and

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futile and everything must come to an end.[1]

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These aren’t books about robotic dogs. They’re book about robotic dogs dying…

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Or worse – robotic dogs never even existing. So on the one hand, There Eyes Were Watching

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God fits right in among Modernist writers' search for comfort amid existential struggles.

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Just as T.S. Eliot searched for spiritual post-war comfort in The Waste Land…

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…Eyes combines a personal quest for love with larger historical issues like racism,

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slavery, and the oppression of women.

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And hurricanes. Everyone hates hurricanes. On the other hand, there’s something else

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about modernism … it’s very… monochromatic.

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You see… modernism is mostly populated with… white males. Zora Neale Hurston is neither.

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Janie’s problems, as a black woman, don’t fall under the category of Stuff White People

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Like.

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They don’t even fall under the category of Stuff White People in the 1920s Cared About.

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The stuffy modernists were more renaissance than Harlem Renaissance.

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In that sense, Janie’s story isn’t the same as Ezra Pound’s, Eliot’s, or Thomas

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Hardy’s.

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Eliot was too busy cramming as many confusing words as possible into The Waste Land to be

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bothered with race relations and gender oppression.

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And Pound and Hardy were probably shopping for sweater vests.

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Or maybe we just need a different perspective. Perhaps the narrow lens of modernism isn’t

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the right way to look at this novel.

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Hurston wasn't just trying to overcome spiritual emptiness… she was trying to overcome the

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double-oppression of being black and being a woman in the early twentieth century.

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These were issues that no one who wasn’t black and female cared about, so it was quite

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a weight on her shoulders.

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She might have been a modernist, but at the same time, she was challenging the modern

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emphasis placed on white men and white male problems.

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So is this book like all other modernist works because it deals with depressing existential

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conflicts?

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Or is it in a different category because it discusses problems that your typical white

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male modernist couldn’t care less about?

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Or is Hurston a modernist who is challenging other modernists?

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Shmoop amongst yourselves.

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[1]I'm sure this is 100% accurate—or at least it obscures some of what's really important

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about Modernism.

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