You Got tuh Go There tuh Know There”: The Inversion of Public and Private in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God

Abstract

Kyung-Sook BooZora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God traces Janie's constitution and growth of self through her relationship to the private, which is negotiated mainly through space. Janie presents a mode of understanding that is based on first-hand experience, and more importantly, that is articulated in terms of movement to and from places. For Janie, to know something is to have gone to a place and to have occupied that space; thus, the choice to enter/leave a space or of which space to occupy becomes crucial to achieving understanding, especially about the self. Such choices become more complicated for Janie in comparison to the men in her life or whites, as the spaces accessible to African American women were limited in the 1930s; both Janie's race and gender necessitate different strategies of accessing and occupying space that will allow the constitution and growth of self that Janie seeks and that is assumed to be a prerequisite to being acknowledged as an individual, which in turn, is integral to one's participation in American society as a full citizen. For Janie, all three conceptualizations of the private--as physical space and body, as property ownership, and as interiority and subjectivity--need to become merged and accessible for her to reclaim her individual voice. Hurston reverses the typical relationship between white master and black slave, or rich owner and poor servant, or man and woman, into a new hierarchy that values the private over the public. She shows Janie achieving personal satisfaction and happiness through the retrieval of her voice that is only possible once she escapes all the trappings of public expectation and is able to participate as a private individual in the public sphere.