Zora Neale Hurston is revered today as one of the Harlem Renaissance's most talented writers. One of her extremely well known novels, Their Eyes Were Watching God, is looked upon today as a literary masterpiece. It combines the realistic dialect of the southern town in which she lived with the beautiful metaphorical and symbolic language for which Hurston is widely known. Despite such positive thoughts on the novel today, there were some very harsh reviews of the novel at the time it was written. These reviews ultimately forced Hurston to stop writing altogether.
Of the harsh African American reviewers is Richard Wright. Wright, in his 1937 review, said, “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 describes the lack of theme, message, and thought in Hurston’s novel. He says how Hurston specifically catered to the white race in the writing of this novel. Perhaps he was looking for an accurate political and social account of African American life at the time, and that was simply not what he got from this novel.
In my opinion, I strongly disagree with Wright’s, as well as other similar reviewers’, account of Their Eyes Were Watching God. Wright says the novel strongly lacks theme, message, and thought; however, I find it hard to not notice Hurston’s use of beautifully crafted metaphorical and symbolic language, as well as her vivid use of imagery. I do not think that Hurston goal in writing this novel was to give a politically and socially accurate account of African American life at the time, but rather a story about growing up, love, and coming of age. Hurston was telling Janie’s story, which was filled with the aforementioned themes, rather than the real-life aspect for which Wright longed. Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God is a literary masterpiece in my mind, as well as the minds of so many other people in the literary world.
Richard Wright review: http://people.virginia.edu/~sfr/enam358/wrightrev.html
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