THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD: JANIE CRAWFORD AND THE ATTAINMENT OF INDIVIDUALITY
For many years, Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) was dismissed by critics such as our Alain Locke and Sterling Brown for being devoid of ‘social content’ and displaying a ‘lack of militancy’; despite the novel being seen nowadays as a ‘proto-feminist book’ and a ‘pillow book for feminist readers all over the United States’, there are still those who dispute its value, in particular in its portrayal of women. Anne L. Rayson, for example, states that ‘in Their Eyes, as in all of Hurston’s novels, women live only for men and are subservient to them’. The black male critic Darwin Turner is similarly damning describing Hurston’s work as ‘artful, coy, irrational, superficial and shallow’; Barbara Smith, in her article Sexual Politics and the Fiction of Zora Neale Hurston, disagrees; these remarks, she states, ‘bear no relationship to the actual quality of Hurston’s achievements and result from the fact that Turner is completely insensitive to the sexual political dynamics of Hurston’s life and writings.