“Why she don’t stay in her class?”: Economic Re-creations
in
Their Eyes Were Watching God
I doubt it surprised Zora Neale Hurston that black men of her time denounced her modernist novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, influencing the book’s poor reception during Hurston’s lifetime. Richard Wright’s 1937 review of Their Eyes claims it lacks “a basic idea or theme that lends itself to significant interpretation…Miss Hurston seems to have no desire whatever to move in the direction of serious fiction” (Wright 17). I have to wonder if Wright saw his reflection in any of the men in the novel while he wrote his review. Today, Hurston enjoys an increasing stream of critical acclaim and readership while Wright’s books seem to lose numbers in readership each year. Similarly, Janie Crawford, Hurston’s protagonist in the novel, survives the oppression of white patriarchy with more success and resistance than the men in the novel. Hurston constructs a narrative virtually devoid of white characters, enabling her and the reader to look closely at the dynamics of black lives and relationships in the larger social parameters of white dominance and patriarchy. While inequalities of race and gender figure as central themes in the novel, Janie’s three romantic relationships demonstrate Hurston’s idea of class as the overriding divider among blacks. She believes that a relationship based on equality cannot exist when the surrounding economic structure perpetuates racial, gender and class distinctions that account for inequality in America, and for subdivisions within the black community. Although some critics, such as Susan Willis and Todd McGowan, recognize the progression of class structures in the novel, I argue that Janie’s re-creation story through her three husbands mirror the Marxist theory of social evolution: movement from feudalism to capitalism to socialism, which reflects Hurston’s belief that romantic relationships adopt the dynamics of the surrounding economic system.
Many critics praise Janie and Tea Cake’s marriage as an unprecedented black love story while others view it as an unhealthy and unequal union. June Jordan applauds the novel as “the most successful, and convincing, and exemplary novel of black love that we have” (Jordan 88). Other critics, such as Todd McGowan, question the fact that many of the articles written on this subject hail Janie and Tea Cake as perfect lovers yet do not address the abuse and domination that occurs between them (McGowan 1). Susan Willis deems the relationship “truly reciprocal” (Willis 125), yet also acknowledges Janie’s need to break out of that relationship by literally killing Tea Cake towards the end of the novel. In the three men in the novel Willis identifies three historical economic classes: sharecropper, the black bourgeoisie, and the utopian reciprocator. Although still a theory of economic representation, McGowan sees the stages of Janie’s wanderings as three phases within capitalism (McGowan 2). Janie’s stages and shifts also correlate to Marx’s theory of progression from feudalism to capitalism to socialism.
Hurston’s novel emerged the first time in 1937: the nadir of the Great Depression. Still recovering from slavery, the great depression thrust blacks into a new kind of systematic oppression—capitalism at its downfall. The class issues that pervade this novel respond to the 1930s. Its modernist narrative structure, social consciousness and emphasis on the right of passage and epiphanies of the individual lend itself to scrutiny through an analysis of class, as well as through the conflicts that exist in Janie and the other characters. In October 1933, 2,117,000 black families received government aid while in 1935, after two years of recovery measures, the census reports the number had jumped to 3,500,000 (Davis 317). During this decade the Ku Klux Klan gained momentum, blacks suffered from higher rates of poverty and unemployment than when enslaved legally, and many labor groups that questioned capitalism gained support. Hurston reflects this era in her exploration of white systems of social power and in raising questions about the great divide between classes in America that also cause divisions in personal relationships. The Great Depression in America served as a sort of leveler. Although the poor remained poor and became even poorer, many in the stratifications of middle and upper class fell to lower class status; they too became poor. Like the symbol of the flood in the novel, some survived better than others, but it changed everyone. In Janie’s biblical story of (re)creation of self, the flood indirectly poisons and kills her last and most perfect marriage; the last in the line of socio-economic systems of inequality.
With the first hint of Janie’s sexuality, figured by a sensually described scene encounter under a pear tree, literally by Janie’s first kiss, Janie’s Nanny thrusts her into the economic system of marriage. As Willis notes, “The grandmother’s immediate decision to contract Janie’s marriage clearly shows that a woman’s role in this society is to be put into the circuit of male exchange” (Willis 125). Janie becomes a means of production, making money for her first husband, and in return, receives economic stability and stature as part of the class with ownership of means of production: “ ‘Tain’t Logan Killicks Ah wants you to have, baby, it’s protection” (Hurston 14). For Nanny, whose life has consisted of unpaid domestic labor in the forms of slave, wife, mother and grandmother, Janie’s economic security and class reign over her want of a passionate romance.
Janie’s relationship with her first husband, Logan Killicks, represents a feudal agreement between lord and serf, and can even be interpreted as that between master and slave, based on ownership and property. Logan lives in the largest house in town, recluse and separate from the rest of society. Although Logan works his own land, his house exists as its own sub-society and makes money independent of the surrounding town through his “often-mentioned sixty acres” (Hurston 20). The name Logan calls up Mount Logan, a mountain in Canada and the second largest mountain in North America, supporting the notion of Logan as a lord distanced and independent from the rest of society in his ownership of means of production and comfort. His last name, Killicks, suggests domination and resonates slavery with the combination of the words “kill” and “licks.” The reader also infers that Logan keeps to himself and profits singularly off of his land through passages such as “It was a lonely place like a stump in the middle of the woods where nobody had even been” (Hurston 20). Here, we see that Logan’s financial security benefits only himself; he separates his earnings from society and the lower classes, similar to the relationship between a lord and his peasants. Logan creates dominance and oppression modeled from the traditionally white feudal system in his own economic survival, which also penetrate his relationship with Janie.
Soon after their marriage, which Janie hopes will blossom into love and passion, Logan loses all interest in her as a sexual being: “Long before the year was up, Janie noticed that her husband had stopped talking in rhymes to her. He had ceased to wonder at her long black hair and finger it” (25). Janie’s hair figures repeatedly as a symbol of her sexuality; when Logan stops noticing her hair, it seems she loses all the power she once held in the relationship and transforms into a means of production under Logan’s ownership and for his benefit. He expects Janie to add fieldwork to the housework she does without raising her compensation: “ ‘Ah aims tuh run two plows, and dis man Ah’m talkin’ ‘bout is got uh mule all gentled up so even uh woman kin handle ‘im’”(26). Logan dehumanizes Janie further in this relationship by connecting her to a mule. Janie refuses to take on this role, and asserts her place in the domestic realm of unpaid labor, where at least her role does not take on characteristics of animals, serfs or slaves. Soon after this exchange, Janie leaves Logan and his land in search of a more equal union in Joe Starks.
Freeing herself from the confines of a feudal, owner/owned relationship, Janie moves to the next socio-economic system in Marx’s theory of progression: capitalism. Joe Sparks, Janie’s next lover, represents capitalism in his so-called self-made manhood, in making money through the work of other people, and in making money from money. As McGowan notes, “Through the character of Joe, Hurston presents the ideological form of domination endemic to monopoly capitalism: a totalized whole organized around a legitimating and controlling center” (McGowan 7). As with Logan, Janie, along with other townspeople, becomes a tool by which Joe profits and earns money in the microcosmic, all black society of Eatonville: “ ‘…but, Sam, Joe Starks is too exact wid folks. All he got he done made it offa de rest of us. He didn’t have all dat when he come here’”(Hurston 46). McGowan mirrors Leo Huberman’s idea of capitalism in America: “It means that a few persons have the key controls of the most important part of the economy” (Huberman 267). In Eatonville, Joe enjoys the roles of mayor, store owner, and even receives praise that compares him to royalty or deity: “ ‘Our beloved mayor,’ it was one of those statements that everybody says but nobody actually believes like ‘God is everywhere’” (Hurston 45), and “ ‘He’s got a throne in the seat of his pants’” (46). The people’s acceptance of Joe as the leader enables him to live off of their work. When Coker states, “ ‘Us talks about de white man keepin’ us down! Shucks! He don’t have tuh. Us keeps our own selves down” (Hurston 37). Hurston suggests that Joe represents the selfish figure in the capitalist system that keeps the rest of the community oppressed.
Joe recreates the American dream for himself, but he does it at the expense, and through the work, of other people. Although he helps to create an all-black town, he uses the white cultural history of capitalism to achieve his aims, and to earn his money. From the start of the interaction between Joe and Janie, we see Joe as a man with noble goals in wanting to be a part of the all-black town, but with a cultural consciousness that has already been inundated with white understanding: “But when he heard all about ‘em makin’ a town all outa colored folks, he knowed dat was de place he wanted to be. He had always wanted to be a big voice, about de white folks had all de sayso where he come from and everywhere else, exceptin’ this place dat colored folks was buildin’ themselves” (Hurston 27). Joe distances himself from the black community in Eatonville to become the untouchable capitalist: “Take for instance that new house of his. It had two stories with porches, with banisters and such things. The rest of the town looked like servants’ quarters surrounding the ‘big house’”(Hurston 44). Susan Willis concurs: “Joe Starks represents the nascient black bourgeoisie, hell-bent for progress and ready to beat white society at its own game” (Willis 124). None of his profits benefit the good of the whole. He also buys up a large part of the land in the town as an investment; he later sells it to townspeople and new arrivals for profit. Along with investment, Eatonville presents the Marxist notion of the lack of balance between the amount of work that people perform and the amount of money they earn in a capitalist system.
In his role as the owner of the means of production—the store and most of the land in the town—we see that Joe performs little work. He mainly talks with the other men in town and plays games in front of the store: “No sooner was he all set as the Mayor—post master—landlord—storekeeper, than he bought a desk like Mr. Hill or Mr. Galloway over in Maitland with one of those swing chairs around it” (Hurston 44). Here, we see Joe with power but no work, supporting the notion that Joe has white power structures in mind for Eatonville. We know that he spent the earlier part of his life working for whites, so we can deduce that the bosses that Joe mimics are white. While it appears that Joe does very little of the actual work, we see him constantly pushing labor on the other townspeople, and on Janie.
Although Janie does not enjoy working in the store, specifically because she does not want to “sell things” (Hurston 48), she works because Joe requires it of her and scarcely works himself: “…Joe would hustle her off inside the store to sell something. Look like he took pleasure in doing it. Why couldn’t he go himself sometimes” (Hurston 51). Although the class systems differ in Janie’s relationships between Logan and Joe, Hurston again enters Janie into the system of productivity with her second marriage. One of the townspeople, Tony Taylor, makes a direct link between Janie the means of profit: “It’s uh pledger fuh her tuh be heah amongst us. Brother Starks, we welcomes you and all dat you have seen fit tuh bring amongst us—yo’ belov-ed wife, yo’ store, yo’ land” (Hurston 39). Here we see Janie transformed from a woman into an object, a commodity and a means of production.
In Eatonville, where such drastic stratifications exist between the townspeople and Joe, and also between husband and wife, Joe’s treatment of Janie’s sexuality and her voice also exemplify these stark inequalities. Joe ceases to allow Janie to speak her mind. Due to his jealousy, he also forbids her to wear her hair down after he notices the attention it draws from other men. Joe subjects Janie to be on display in the store, seemingly to bring in more business, while also dictating that she tie her hair back to contain her sexuality and other men’s attention. As Willis notes, “With her second marriage, Janie’s sexuality enters into a system of display and exchange defined by the market under capitalism” (Willis 126). Joe turns not only Janie, but also her sexuality into means of production, and her opinion becomes inconsequential:
So gradually, she pressed her teeth together and learned to hush. The spirit of the marriage left the bedroom and took to living in the parlor. It was there to shake hands whenever company came to visit…She wasn’t a petal-open anymore with him. She was twenty-four and seven years married when she knew. She found that out one day when he slapped her face in the kitchen. (Hurston 67)
In her first two marriages, initially husbands treat Janie passionately, even lovingly, but after a time she becomes merely a means of profit for them; her sexuality, happiness, and even treatment not only as a woman but as a human get lost under the omnipotent need to make money and to oppress that exist in white socio-economic structures.
Joe’s ultimate demise, at the figurative hand, and at the literal reclaimed voice of Janie, represents a fall of capitalism—or the nosedive that occurred in 1929. Capitalism and male sexuality have similarities in their fated termination. Impotence, common in older men, and the inability to endure or continue after climax in men both young and old mirror the inevitable crash after a period of prosperity in a capitalist society. Huberman ‘s description of the Great Depression could also refer to Joe’s downfall and death:
The economic system had become senile. It had performed its gigantic task of liberation and developing the forces of production to a point never before reached—and it had nowhere else to go. It could no longer continue on its own momentum. The drive for more profits, more capital, more profits, more capital…had reached the stage where it became harder and harder to make more profits and invest more capital. There was no way out in these terms of more and more for the sake of more and more. The economic system had performed its function. It had exhausted its potentialities. (264)
Joe’s sexual failures do not directly cause Joe’s death; however, Janie’s revealing his weakness to the rest of the town does. In this way, Janie turns Joe into the object of the gaze to which she has been subjected by working in the store, into the means of production that has ceased to produce. After Joe’s death, Janie enjoys working in the store, not for the profit, but for the agency, the activity, and lets her powerful, still sexual hair flow down.
When Janie finally frees herself from the reigns of this second parasitic relationship by figuratively breaking Joe, we hope that Janie has finally found a mutual, equal relationship with the playful, loving and socialist minded Tea Cake. When Janie and Tea Cake first meet, everyone else in the town is at the ball game. Hurston immediately places Janie and Tea Cake outside of the dominant society—the traditionally all American white sports culture of baseball. With the young and impetuous Tea Cake, Janie breaks all the rules that Nanny set for her in finding a husband. Tea Cake’s and Janie’s differences in financial situation and class also concern the townspeople: “Dat long-legged Tea Cake ain’t got doodly squat. He ain’t got no business makin’ hissef familiar wid nobody lak you” (Hurston 98). Tea Cake sets himself apart from her former husbands by teaching Janie things her other husbands would have forebade her to learn, like driving her a car and hunting. Hurston sets up our expectations for Janie’s final transcendence to a reciprocal relationship.
Janie and Tea Cake run away to the muck, another predominately black environment, to work the land. This initially seems to represent an existence closer to the roots of black culture than the towns Janie lived in with Joe and Logan. The workers all live in close quarters, spend their evenings in ways of traditional black heritage: communally singing, dancing and storytelling, as opposed to the more white activities that occur on the porch in Eatonville, such as checkers. “Only here, she could listen and laugh and even talk some herself if she wanted to. She got so she could tell big stories herself from listening to the rest” (Hurston 128). Janie also enters labor, though this time out of choice, and this time paid, in the fields to put herself on the same level as the rest of the people on the muck. She does not want to seem as if she’s “classing off” (Hurston 107), as she’s accused of doing with Joe. Janie need not work due to her inheritance in the bank. Tea Cake, whose livelihood comes predominantly from gambling, could also choose not to work:
So the very next morning Janie got ready to pick beans along with Tea Cake. There was a suppressed murmur when she picked up a basket and went to work. She was already getting to be a special case on the much. It was generally assumed that she thought herself too good to work like the rest of the women and that Tea Cake “pomped her up tuh dat.’ But all day long the romping and playing they carried on behind the boss’ back made her popular right away. (Hurston 127)
For Janie and Tea Cake, work satisfies a Marxist view about socialism; everyone works but has his/her needs met regardless of what s/he produces or how hard s/he works. Work on the muck, at least for Janie and Tea Cake, enjoys freedom from the usual necessity of survival.
Although Janie seems to finally break free from the boundaries of wage labor, she never finds an equality-based romantic relationship; one that does not reflect power structures of white patriarchy. The women on the porch of gossip and judgment in Eatonville foreshadow this when “the town” notice what Janie does not: “Tea Cake and Janie gone to a dance. Tea Cake and Janie making flower beds in Janie’s yard and seeding the garden for her. Chopping down that tree she never did like by the dining room window. All those signs of possession” (Hurston 105). Even in the socialist minded Tea Cake there exists possession, jealousy and domestic violence: “Being able to whip her reassured him in possession. No brutal beating at all. He just slapped her around a bit to show he was boss” (140). Tea Cake may not mirror white hegemonic power structures in all aspects of his life, but he does in his possessive treatment of Janie. Throughout the novel we see the oppressed oppressing those beneath them in the social hierarchy. Tea Cake beats Janie not just to show who’s boss, but also just because he can; the way the white men could rape Janie’s mother, the way Logan and Joe put Janie to work, and the way the white men force Tea Cake to assist in burying the bodies after the flood scene. Hurston asserts that no matter the idealism of the socio-economic system, women’s power always remains marginalized and secondary.
Although most aspects of Tea Cake’s character in regards to his ideas and his role in the muck subculture are classified as socialist, we see evidence of white hegemonic structures in his economic existence as well as in his abusive treatment of Janie. Tea Cake’s livelihood results mainly from gambling—a capitalist form of making money. Gambling turns the individual into a means of production, and always at the expense or gain of someone else. Gaming demonstrates the capitalist view that money can evolve into more money: “Honey, since you loose me and gimme privilege tuh tell yuh about mahself, Ah’ll tell yuh. You done married one uh de best gamblers God ever made. Cards or dice either one” (119). Along with violence towards Janie, one instance of Tea Cake’s gambling includes violence—a physical assertion of power and dominance over another. Again we see violence as a result of economic relations and imbalances of power based on white patriarchy.
In placing his trust in the white folks, who fail to recognize the flood as a threat, Tea Cake also demonstrates the trust and belief he places in the white system. In disbelieving the Native Americans, Tea Cake shows his need to oppress those with a social position lower than his. “Indians don’t know much of nothing’, tuh tell de truth. Else dey’d own dis country still. De white folks ain’t gone nowhere. Dey oughta know if it’s dangerous” (Hurston 148). The fact that the flood does come, and ultimately destroys Tea Cake, reasserts Hurston’s idea that groups in the lower stratosphere of power will not gain from imitating or following the structure and division of the groups in power. A truly equal relationship cannot exist between a man and a woman when the surrounding socio-economic system is based on inequality because it imitates that system. This is similar to the way in which an individual cannot stay true to the ideals of socialism when confronted with the need to live in a capitalist society; survival necessitates some compromise.
Tea Cake and Janie’s marriage ends unexpectedly; not in the life threatening flood that sweeps through the muck, but in its aftermath. During the flood, a rabid dog bites Tea Cake as he fights the dog off of Janie. The flood represents the great equalizer. In times of natural disaster, all distinctions between race, gender and class become obsolete. Even the animals have an equal chance of surviving: “They passed a dead man in a sitting position on a hummock, entirely surrounded by wild animals and snakes. Common danger made common friends. Nothing sought a conquest over the other” (Hurston 156). Hurston’s decision to have Tea Cake die indirectly as a result of the flood and directly at Janie’s hand reveal that Janie’s search for equality and recreation of self could not conclude with a man.
Janie’s movement through the three relationships in the novel relate to her movement through the Marxist socio-economic systems—feudalism, capitalism and socialism. From her journeys, and from the biblical imagery and the theme of Janie’s (re)creation, this book has an epic, urgent sense. Janie’s final passage brings her back to Eatonville, where she ultimately finds a relationship based on real reciprocity, but not in marriage or in a romantic relationship with a man. Janie finds her utopia in her self and in her friendship with Pheoby. In all of her past migrations she looked something like Cinderella—Prince Charming carries her off from an evil man (or grandmother). But in her return to Eatonville, she travels alone. Her experiences teach her that she has to learn by doing. “It’s a known fact, Pheoby, you got tuh go there tuh know there” (Hurston 183), constitutes the final bit of dialogue in the novel. The encompassing position of the dialogue in the scenes of the two women that figure at the beginning and the end of the novel enhance the epic, cyclical feeling of the novel. Some of the strongest moments in the dialogue also occur during the scenes that bookend the novel. Many critics, including Richard Stepto in his well-known speech referred to in Mary Helen Washington’s Introduction to Their Eyes, question Hurston’s decision to silence Janie by omitting sections of dialogue in between the narrative in some of the most climatic scenes in the novel such as the courtroom scene and following incidences of domestic abuse. (Hurston xi). In the beginning and end of Janie’s story when she returns to a women’s space based on true reciprocity, Janie’s voice and power come through assertively, as they never can in the social institutions of courtroom and marriage.
Janie continues evolves. She is progression. She is continuity. She survives the climaxes and crashes. She succeeds where the men fail in her ability to recreate herself out of each of the three socio-economic systems. She transcends to something much more equal than any of her relationships with men; something much more primitive and simple even than life on the muck: existence defined by connection between women and storytelling. Janie and Pheobe find a place where they reject class boundaries and speak openly and honestly. It is not in the store or on the porch, but in the intimate domestic spaces of yard and kitchen that Janie’s search ends: “When she arrived at the place, Pheoby Watson didn’t go in by the front gate and down the palm walk to the front door. She walked around the fence corner and went in the intimate gate with her heaping plate of mulatto rice. Janie must be round that side” (Hurston 4). Pheoby and Janie have a secret entrance, a secret code. They find a place of equality where they share food and cook for each other without recompense, without possession or ownership, without the need seen throughout the novel to treat each other “like the pecking order in a chicken yard” (Hurston 138) as do Janie’s husbands, as black male critics did to Hurston. It is interesting that Hurston chose to have Janie return to Joe’s created capitalist town at the close of the novel. It suggests that the capitalist system in the 1930s in America was unavoidable. It still is, but women can hope to find equality in their friends’ moufs and mulatto rice.
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