55 pages • 1 hour read
Zora Neale HurstonTheir Eyes Were Watching God
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1937A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 1-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary
Content Warning: The novel mentions incidents of rape, forced pregnancy, and domestic abuse; describes the lives of enslaved people, racism, and colorism; and portrays mental illness. Although the novel uses the n-word as a historically accurate representation of speech, this guide does not reproduce this slur and instead obscures it in direct quotation.
The “gossips” who sit on the porch of the general store in the all-Black town of Eatonville, Florida, are curious when Janie Starks, the widow of the former mayor, returns from a mysterious trip. In a well-remembered scandal, Janie left with a much younger man, “Tea Cake,” after her husband’s death. The men observe how beautiful she still is, while the women seem envious and a little glad to see her shabbily dressed.
Impatient with this talk, Janie’s best friend, Pheoby Watson, decides to bring Janie a meal and find out where she has been. Janie tells Pheoby that she married Tea Cake, who has since died. Pheoby is shocked: The current gossip is that Tea Cake took all of Janie’s money and then left Janie for a younger woman. Pheoby encourages Janie to end the scandal around the relationship by telling the town about the marriage, but Janie doesn’t care what the town thinks; she’s seen the world and she still has money. Instead, Janie decides to tell Pheoby her story. If anyone wants to know the truth of what happened, they can ask Pheoby.
Chapter 2 Summary
Janie was raised by her grandmother, referred to as “Nanny,” on the plantation of the Washburns, an affluent white family in West Florida. She ran around the grounds with both African American children and the family’s white children. Janie didn’t even know she was Black until she saw her darker face in a photo of the group. Jealous of the clothes and attention lavished on Janie by Mrs. Washburn, the other Black children used to bully Janie about her origins: Janie’s father was hunted with bloodhounds presumably after raping Janie’s mother, Leafy. Leafy’s mother, Nanny, removed Janie from this bullying situation by buying a plot of land and a house.
As a teenager, Janie’s “conscious life commence[s]” one afternoon after she watches the bees come and go to the blossoming pear tree in her backyard (10). She is 16 years old, and watching life perpetuate itself in the natural world arouses her innate sexual desire: “She saw a dust-bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom; the thousand sister-calyxes arch to meet the love embrace and the ecstatic shiver of the tree from root to tiniest branch” (11).
When she sees Johnny Taylor, a boy she’d previously considered inconsequential, she sneaks out the gate of her yard to kiss him. Nanny, ever protective of her granddaughter, catches them kissing and angrily calls Janie back into the house. This, observes Janie, “was the end of her childhood” (13).
Nanny gives Janie a stern lecture about the reality of her situation: Nanny is old, and she wants Janie to marry immediately to secure her future. Nanny suggests as a potential husband Logan Killicks, an old, somewhat coarse, and prosperous man with 60 acres to his name. Janie responds with petulant silence; angered, Nanny slaps Janie but then immediately repents. Nanny tells Janie that Black women are expected to bear the burdens of everyone else.
Born enslaved on a plantation in Savannah, Nanny gave birth to Leafy, whose father was Nanny’s enslaver. After he left to fight in the Civil War, his jealous wife threatened to whip Nanny to death and sell off Leafy, whose light skin and eyes made her parentage obvious, so Nanny ran away. Fortunately for Nanny, Sherman’s army invaded at the same time, saving her and Leafy. She eventually ended up with the Washburns.
Nanny refused to marry because she wanted to avoid the possibility that a man would mistreat her daughter. Nanny wanted Leafy to be a teacher, but her plans for her daughter came crumbling down when Leafy was 17: Leafy’s teaching instructor raped and impregnated her. Leafy never recovered her mental health after the assault. Nanny thus declares herself too old and fragile to survive the idea of a man sexually exploiting Janie.
Chapter 3 Summary
Shortly after her talk with Nanny, Janie marries the uncouth Logan. She talks herself into the marriage despite her misgivings; she feels no love for Logan. The adults in Janie’s life think it a good match, assuming that married people eventually find a way to love one another, but no one feels joy when Janie rides off with Logan on their wedding day.
Confused and disappointed by a lack of love and sexual desire after three months of marriage, Janie seeks advice from her grandmother: Although Logan provides for all her material wants, he is poorly groomed, unattractive, and unlovable. Nanny warns Janie that a man will only put a woman on a pedestal for so long. She scoffs at Janie’s desire for love: Chasing after love and the fulfillment of sexual desire leads to the downfall of Black women because it keeps them poor. Janie insists that she wants “things sweet wid [her] marriage lak when you sit under a pear tree and think” (24).
Nanny feels so worried that she forced Janie into a loveless marriage that she dies a month later. Having finally realized that Logan will never deliver the vision of love she saw under the pear tree, Janie begins looking outward again. She waits with expectation by the gate of her house, almost as if she thinks the thing she wants will find her.
Chapter 4 Summary
The honeymoon period between Logan and Janie ends after six months. Logan grows weary of pampering Janie and begins to demand that she do work outside of the house, including plowing the fields. One day while Logan is away, Janie sees a stylishly dressed man named Joe Starks walking down the road. A 30-year-old African American man, Joe set out for South Florida to help create an all-Black town: Eatonville. They get to know each other over two weeks; his ambitions, plans, and flattery intrigue Janie.
Attracted to Janie, Joe sees her as someone who could help him become an important man in the new town. He asks her to come with him, and Janie initially hesitates; doing so would violate all the moral standards Nanny taught her. Logan, meanwhile, becomes convinced that Janie does not love him. He brings up her illegitimate birth and tries to convince her that she is lucky to have him. After one more bitter argument with Logan, Janie decides to take Joe up on his offer. She leaves home with nothing but her apron, and Joe takes her south, where the two marry.
Chapters 1-4 Analysis
In these first four chapters, Hurston establishes the novel’s cultural context and introduces one of the novel’s central themes: the way their quests for love shape Black Women’s Identity.
The initial scene juxtaposes the silent Janie returning to town against the chorus of the “porch,” a group of townspeople who pass judgment on Janie for violating their values. The voices of the porch bring forth the conservative values of this sleepy Southern town, while the dialect and the rich idioms reflect the importance of oral culture to residents of the Black South. Hurston’s portrayal of the porch highlights how Janie’s choice to date a younger man, marry him, and leave town violates the then-prevalent gender and racial norms for Black women. The varied reactions also set up the novel’s central conflict: whether Janie would bow to societal expectations or pursue her own desires, no matter the consequences.
Hurston uses several nested narrative frames to portray the similarities and differences between the experiences of Black women of several generations. The outer frame is Janie telling Pheoby her story; the middle frame is Janie’s past, and within that is the story Nanny tells about her own youth. Nanny’s story borrows from the genre of the enslaved person narrative—the autobiographies written by enslaved people about their lives. She describes surviving sexual exploitation by her enslaver and the threat of violence from his wife, plot points that allowed Hurston to fill in details about slavery frequently missing from the historical record, since enslaved men had written most of these kinds of memoirs at the time. Nanny’s innermost narrative also contains Leafy’s story, which shows how vulnerable African American women still were to sexual assault even after the end of slavery. Both stories demonstrate the extraordinary challenges African American women faced as they navigated difficult economic and racial terrain.
Janie’s story also begins with unwanted sexual contact through her marriage to Logan; however, her narrative contains seeds of agency and self-determination. Janie’s quest for self-expression and love begins with an epiphany beneath the pear tree, establishing The Importance of Romantic Fulfilment. By painting Janie’s desire in lyrical terms, through descriptions of the natural world that play on the colloquial associations between bees pollinating flowers and human sexuality, Hurston portrays Janie’s desires—and by extension, those of all African American women—as completely natural, despite the societal pressure to deny them. Black women writers of Hurston’s time often feared that discussing female desire would confirm the harmful stereotype that Black women were, by default, “promiscuous”—a pernicious idea that was used to justify their sexual abuse and assault. By centering this story on an African American woman’s quest for love, Hurston broke new ground in the early 20th century.
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