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It is well known that there must be a body of waived matter, let us say, things accepted and taken for granted by all in a community before there can be that commonality of feeling. The usual phrase is having things in common. Until this is thoroughly established in respect to Negroes in America, as well as of other minorities, it will remain impossible for the majority to conceive of a Negro experiencing a deep and abiding love and not just the passion of sex. . . . [T]hey can and do experience discovery of the numerous subtle faces as a foundation for a great and selfless love, and the diverse nuances that go to destroy that love. . . . - Zora Neale Hurston, "What White Publishers Won't Print"
Zora Neale Hurston's 1950 essay on the lack of published representations of African American love speaks to the concerns of her best-known novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, published thirteen years earlier. Hurston's piece suggests that despite her skepticism about protest fiction, she was deeply engaged with the political landscape of the early to mid-twentieth century in America as an author and intellectual. As Joel Pfister notes in an article designed to highlight Hurston's political efficacy, her racial politics were relational, not deterministic: "She depicted [African American] life and culture in relation to but not as decisively scripted by racially and economically motivated oppression." "What White Publishers Won't Print" confirms Hurston's interest in the connection between racist assumptions about black people and fictional representations of African American love. She argues that publishing complex and subtle stories about heterosexual relationships between black people promotes interracial "commonality of feeling." Crucially, Hurston specifies that such stories should also include how and why love relationships are destroyed. This essay proposes to investigate Their Eyes Were Watching God on these terms. What "diverse nuances ... go to destroy" the "great and selfless love" between Janie Crawford and Tea Cake Woods (621)?
It is difficult to talk about Their Eyes without talking about Janie and Tea Cake's relationship. Though Hurston's heroine, Janie Crawford, is fully realized, masterfully characterized, and deliriously complicated, the plot and the problem of the novel revolve around her finding, losing, and eulogizing this great love of her...