Conclusion

With this project, I set out to give an extensive analysis of Their Eyes Were Watching God that shows how Hurston mixes her social and political concerns with her creative concerns.  While the novel’s main focus is the story of Janie Crawford’s coming of age situated in a southern African American community, Their Eyes Were Watching God also explores the challenges faced by African Americans in their attempts to build a sense of community after slavery.  Through her novel, Hurston says one of the drawbacks of slavery is that African Americans only have the slave master as a role model for success.  The slave master provides a model for material wealth but doesn’t help African Americans build race pride.  Thus, the story of Janie’s experiences as she struggles to find herself as a woman is the vehicle through which Hurston sympathizes with and criticizes a community struggling to find itself after years of oppression and abuse.

        By comparing Their Eyes Were Watching God to Gayl Jones’ Corregidora in this project I hoped to inspire for Jones’ novel the same kind of widespread critical attention given to Hurston’s novel over the last twenty years.  Like Hurston, Jones is interested in how a history of oppression has affected the African American community.  Also like Hurston, Jones blends her social concerns with her creative concerns.  The story of Ursa Corregidora’s struggle to make sense of her family’s legacy of slavery and sexual abuse in her own life is the filter through which the angst-ridden voices of a working class African American community, with its own memories of abuse, can be heard.  

Despite their similarities, the two novels are rarely analyzed in the same work.  When Jones and Hurston are mentioned in the same source, Jones is relegated to a brief sentence or paragraph in a larger chapter devoted to Hurston.  In addition, I found considerably fewer sources related to Corregidora and Gayl Jones as compared to the number of sources related to Their Eyes Were Watching God and Hurston.  Therefore, this thesis is my way of leveling the literary playing field between Their Eyes Were Watching God and Corregidora and giving Gayl Jones the focus she deserves as an author.

        Though I have tried to give a close reading of how Hurston and Jones weave their concerns about slavery, racism, and sexism into the body of their novels, there are some issues that could not be covered within the limits of my project.  For instance, my second chapter claims that Hurston and Jones use the history of slavery as the development of a motif or theme.  In Their Eyes Were Watching God, the theme is that the history of slavery is responsible for encouraging a materialistic, classist attitude in the African American community.  In Corregidora, the theme is that years of sexual abuse in slavery have made African American women prisoners of their own sexuality, which hampers their relationships with men.  

Although I feel that my chapter maps the thematic development in both novels fairly well, I wonder where Their Eyes Were Watching God and Corregidora fit into the history of other modern novels written by African American women that see slavery as a key to understanding the psyche of their characters?  How do these two novels differ from or speak to novels like Dessa Rose, Beloved, and others?

        Also, in my analysis of Their Eyes Were Watching God, I don’t mention that Tea Cake, the catalyst for Janie’s awakening, may offer an alternative to the slave master model of success as it relates to African American liberation.  Tea Cake’s vision of freedom is grounded in art, nature, and community rather than in material possessions.  As a migrant farmer, Tea Cake seems to silence Nanny and Joe who believe that happiness is living like the slave master and mistress on the plantation.  Yet, Hurston does not idealize Tea Cake.  When he and Janie run off to Jacksonville to get married, Tea Cake steals $200 from her and spends it on a lavish party to impress some people he meets locally.  Later, threatened by the thought of Janie leaving him for Mrs. Turner’s light-skinned brother, Tea Cake slaps “her around a bit to show he was the boss” (140).  

        Tea Cake’s need to portray himself as a man who has money and to prove his manhood by hitting a woman sheds doubt on his status as an example of African American artistic liberation.  In some ways, Tea Cake is the “breath-an-britches” man Nanny warned Janie about.  Therefore, Tea Cake’s character deserves careful scrutiny.  Is he really instrumental in Janie’s awakening as a woman or is her growth as a person the natural result of her growing older?  Furthermore, in what way is Tea Cake similar to Joe in his treatment of Janie?

        For Jones, the slave owner and rapist Corregidora becomes the model after which most of the male characters in her novel are patterned.  An exception to this is Ursa’s father Martin.  He begins the relationship with Ursa’s mother as an amiable man. In fact, Ursa’s mother says, “It was like we got along real well, like I wouldn’t believe you could get along with a man that well” (116).  When he finds out Mama is pregnant, Martin marries her and moves in with her and her family to handle his responsibilities as Ursa’s father.  

Eventually, Martin leaves the Corregidora home realizing that Mama wanted him as a breeder and not as a lover.  Mama becomes a victim, not of Martin’s sexual desires, but of her mothers’ obsession with making generations.  Her mothers’ are angry that Ursa is not born having long hair.  Mama refuses to have sex with Martin while her mother’s are at home.  They do not approve of Martin because he is dark skinned, which is ironic in that Corregidora did not allow Dorita to be with dark skinned slaves.  

So, Great Gram and Gram are more like the slave master than Martin.  For this reason, I am puzzled as to why Jones reduces Martin to a violent misogynist.  Some years later after their relationship ends, Martin and Mama are reunited. Offended that Martin has sent her child support money, Mama goes to return the money to Martin in person.  Instead of greeting Mama with open arms upon seeing her for the first time in years, Martin beats her and makes her walk down the street “lookin like a whore” with torn clothes (121).  In hindsight Mama says, “I carried him to the point where he ended up hating me…That’ what I knew I’d do with any man” (121).  

Mama’s suggestion that she drove Martin to violence with her inability to have a healthy sexual relationship is in keeping with Jones’ argument that African American women are destined to be sexual victims.  However, I question the believability of the beating scene.  Why would Jones empower Mama to stand up to Martin and then undermine her strength by subjecting her to a humiliating beating?  Furthermore, why is it necessary for Martin to harbor those violent feelings toward Mama years beyond the duration of their relationship?

Thus, my artistic juxtaposition of Their Eyes Were Watching God and Corregidora ends, hopefully, with beginnings to other studies to come.  The fact that I am able to formulate new questions about these novels proves, in my opinion, the literary merit of their authors.  Both Hurston and Jones have created novels that deserve continued critical focus.