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Consistent critical attention focuses on Janie's voice because, as Michael Awkward has stated, "Perhaps the dominant image in the recent creative and critical writing of Afro-American women [is] the struggle to make articulate a heretofore repressed and silenced black female's story and voice" (Inspiriting 1). For women, silence has crossed every racial and cultural boundary; and silence characterizes Hurston's Janie, who spends the first forty years of her life learning to achieve her voice against the op position of men and, sometimes, against the opposition of other women. But in the end, she succeeds where many have failed, her essay "What Do Feminist Critics Want?" Sandra Gilbert says, "Like Wagner's master singers,...men had the power of speech, [but]...women, like Emily Dickinson, knew that they had, or were supposed to have, the graceful obligation of silence" (34). It is important to question the internal consciousness of each character in Their Eyes, including the purpose behind the male voices, and to examine the ways in which the male voices affect Janie's.
The term interiority refers to an author's relatively full and non-judgmental rendering of the internal consciousness of a character. Hurston, as an informing narrative consciousness, uses interiority in Their Eyes to characterize those who are silent and lack their own voices, as well as to add dimension to those with voices. Throughout the course of the novel, the evolution of the male voices seems to parallel the evolution of Janie's: Increasingly, Janie's men have voices, and her voice develops as her relationships improve. It also seems that Janie's consciousness and the narrator's consciousness fuse into one, which may explain the reason that the reader does not hear Janie's speech at a crucial moment near the end of the novel, during her trial for murder. If the narrator's voice and Janie's voice have melded throughout the novel then perhaps there is no need for Janie to speak to the reader; her voice is evident through the narrator's (Du Plessis 107-08). Hurston creates this "speakerly text" by using "black poetic diction" with "a received but not yet fully appropriated standard English literary tradition" (Gates 174).
Furthermore, passion and control directly correspond to voice and silence as expressed by the four influential men in Janie's life, three of whom...