In her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God Zora Neale Hurston depicts the way of its protagonist Janie to self-fulfilment, i.e. she traces the different stages of Janie´s develop-ment from the emergence of her dreams up to their belated fulfilment.

When Janie is 16 years old an inner development takes place inside of her. She discovers new and exciting feelings and becomes conscious of her own sexuality. She has longings for romance and love and still rather diffuse dreams of an exciting live, which are expressed by her wish "oh, to be a pear tree - any tree in bloom". But Janie is also confused, because she is too young, naive and inexperienced to understand what is going on inside of herself. She is just about to discover her new consciousness and femininity and has not any concrete plans for her life yet.

Nanny however has already fixed ideas about how Janie´s life should be. She immediately destroys Janie´s newly discovered dreams, because she wants to save Janie the life and the sad experiences that she, her daughter and presumably many other black women had. Nanny wants Janie to have a better life and in her she wants to fulfil her own dreams, which she could nerver fulfil herself: "Ah wanted you to ... pick from a higher bush and a sweeter berry".

So Nanny forces Janie to marry Logan Killicks to gain material safety and a respectable social standing. This is of course far from being a fulfilment of her dreams, but Janie has no choice but subordinating her dreams and wishes under the will of her grandmother. The fact that she thinks she will automatically love Logan when they are married shows how naive she is; however she soon loses her naivety and realizes her mistake: she becomes aware that she could not love Logan and that this is not the life she wants.

2. Janie and Joe

When Janie runs away with Joe she is not really in love with him, but he stands for "change and chance" and for "far horizon", i.e. Joe gives her the opportunity to flee from the confinement of her marriage with Logan and hope for a more fulfilling life. But after they have settled in Eatonville Janie´s hopes are soon betrayed. Joe becomes mayor and the most prosperous and powerful man in town, but as the only things he is after are "positions and possessions", Janie misses emotional affection and feels lonely. In addition to that Joe turns out to be very dominat, egocentric and domineering and it seems that he regards also Janie as one of his possesions. He loves to give her orders, to mess her around and to decide everything for her. Furthermore he has very fixed ideas about how and what Janie has to be: she is the first woman in town and she has to keep herself away from the ordinary people, i.e. Joe confines her to his house and his store and isolates her from the communtiy life, which takes place on the porch of his store.

After they have been married for seven years Janie finally realizes that Joe could never have been the fulfilment of her dreams, but "just something she had grabbed up to drape her dreams over". She becomes aware of the fact that she does not love him any more and she discovers that she has inwardly turned away from him, i.e. she has inner feelings and thoughts which she hides inside of her. Only to the outside she is forced to submit herself to Joe´s oppression, but in her inside she is longing for romantic love and a different life with an other man. So in her inside she keeps her dreams, which are symbolized by the leitmotif of the tree awake in order to endure her submission to Joe: "She ... watched the shadow of herself going about tending store and prostrating itself before Jody, while all the time she herself sat under a shaddy tree". Just about 15 years later when Joe´s power is decreasing she is able to rebel against his dominance and free herself from his oppression. And shortly before Joe´s death she finally realizes that Joe has never left her any freedom for self-fulfilment, because he always oppressed it by deciding how she should be and what she should do: "Mah own mind had to be squeezed and crowded out to make room for yours in mine".

3. Janie and Tea Cake

After Joe´s death all the confinement and oppression that he had put on her melt away from Janie and she enjoys her newly obtained freedom. For many years other people, namely Nanny, Logan and Joe have made the decisions for Janie. She has lived the way of life that her grandmother wanted her to live and she has submitted herself to Joe, but now at last Janie is able to live her own, new, free and independent life. As a girl she did not have the chance to fulfil her dreams, but as the second paragraph of the novel indicates already earlier, she has not forgotten them: "Years ago, she had told her girl self to wait for her in the looking glass". And now finally the time has come for Janie to release her confined and oppressed girl self. Her youthful dreams of romance and love are fufilled when she falls in love with Tea Cake. He is the man she has always been longing for and he embodies the wishes she had as a girl. Again this is expressed by the leitmotif of the tree: "He [Tea Cake] could be a bee to a blossom - a pear tree blossom in the spring", i.e. her dream of being "a tree in bloom" and "singing bees" visting her has come true.

The life that Janie leads with Tea Cake contrasts very much with her former life with Joe. Joe was able to give her material prosperity and a high social standing, but he could not give Janie the love and affection she was longing for. Instead he confined her self-fulfilment, he oppressed her and isolated her from the community life. Tea Cake on the other hand cannot give her any material prosperity; he can only offer her a simple life among ordinary workers, but unlike Joe he is able to give Janie what she really wants: full integration into the communtiy, freedom, romance, wedded bliss, and intensive love. And although they only spend about two years together and their love ends in a very tragic manner, nevertheless these two years with Tea Cake are much more fufilling and exciting to Janie than the forty years before. When she returns to Eatonville after Tea Cake´s death her life is described as "a great tree in leaf" and she tells Phoeby that she has been to her horizon, i.e. Janie has gained self-fulfilment and maturity and she has explored and experienced the possibilities of her life.

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II. Modes of Representaion

A distinctive stylistic feature of the novel is that the direct speech is not written in standard English, but imitates in terms of syntax, pronunciation and idiomaticity the dialect spoken by afro-americans in rural southern regions of the United States. Furthermore the direct speech is used quite frequently. There are many longer passages in the novel that consist nearly only of direct speech, i.e. there are relatively few comments and reporting clauses by the authorial narrator (who mainly narrates Janie´s story, although it actually should be a first person narration).

On the one hand these stylistic devices serve to create the atmosphere of a rural, southern, afro-american environment. The use of dialect has a realistic effect on the reader, because the characters become more life-like and natural. And the fact that the authorial narrator is slightly covert in many dialogues makes them appear more immediate, i.e. one gets the illusion of listening directly to them.

On the other hand the frequent use of direct speech and dialect has a further function. It is used to portray the afro-american people with their own independent culture, which differs from the prevailing euro-american culture and makes up an important part of their identity. A central aspect of the culture and identity of the afro-american people ( and in general of any other social or ethnic group) is their language. They did not just take over the standard English or other dialects spoken by the whites, but they developed their own language. This afro-american English has its own typical grammatical and phonological characteri-stics (e.g. mixing up person and number, using contractions, double negatives) as well as some distinctive stylistic features like the frequent use of particular images, metaphors, similes and idioms and it is able to give the afro-american people their own identiy, because it distinguishes them from the white people. In order to portray this afro-american language Hurston has to imitate its characteristics and resort to the use of direct speech.

In addition to that Hurston uses the direct speech to deal with a further aspect of the afro-american culture. She digresses several times from the main plot of Janie´s way to self-fulfilment in order to portray the forms of communication and the oral culture of the afro-american community. There is, for example, the episode of Lige, Walter and Sam, who lead endless discussions while making fun of eachother and who repeatedly tease Matt Bonner about his skinny mule. Or there are Jim, Dave and Lum, who are playing their games with the women of Eatonville by "acting-out courtship". The place for such discussi-ons or games are porches like those in front of Joe´s store or Tea Cake´s house in the Everglades. They are the centre of the community life and there people meet for gambling, singing, story telling, making jokes, prattling and gossiping and there is the place where the oral culture of the afro-american people is put into practise. And again these oral forms of communication and culture are able to give the afro-american people, which are depicted in the novel a feeling of an own identity, because it is a part of their distinctive way of life.

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III. Racism

Slavery in the United States was abolished after the civil war in 1865, but nevertheless racism and segregation continued to exist especially in the Southern States up to the 1960s. So if a black author writes about black people living in rural Florida in the 1920s, one might expect that she deals with the theme of racism and the conflict between black people and white people.

But Hurston surprisingly does so only to a far slighter extent than one might have thought. The theme of racism certainly plays a role in the novel. Throughout the whole novel there are again and again passages and examples such as Nanny´s story about her past, Mrs. Turner´s hate against black people or the fact that the flood victims are buried seperately that show that the black people suffer from racism and are regarded as inferior to the whites, but this is not the main plot of the novel. The main plot is Janie´s way to self-fulfilment and the conflict between whites and blacks plays rather a secondary role. It surrounds like a background the whole story about Janie´s life, but apart from that the world of the whites and the conflict between blacks and whites is mainly faded out.

And instead of portraying the black people in the novel as oppressed victims of racism and segregation Hurston gives a positive example. She portrays the people of Eatonville as independent and self-governing people, who do not suffer from racism, but who have their own community, their own way of life and their freedom. The example of Eatonville is probably a too positive example and was presumably a rather a rare exception in those times, but in general it can be said that the novel almost completely disregards the negative aspects of the relationship between blacks and whites. Even the workers in the Everglades are portrayed as happy, proud and independent people, who have their own identity and culture and not as people living in poverty and suffering from white oppression. So it seems that Hurston does not portray the reality in representative way as it is, but transfigures the reality, i.e. she excludes all the negative aspects and gives a positive example of how it could or should be.

Patrick Kübler

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