Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)

Zora Neale Hurston was among those authors who remodeled the Bildungsroman by appealing to Southern folkloric romanticism to narrativize how modernization would impact the region's peasant classes, as opposed to simply wondering how folk culture might serve modernists searching for the authenticity of ancestries and places. Although scholars have routinely described Hurston's 1937 Bildungsroman in more universalizing terms as an “individual quest for fulfilment” that “becomes any woman's tale” (Wall “Zora,” 76), Their Eyes Were Watching God was suggestive of the author's commitment to correcting the perception of Southern regionalism as faulty and backward, blending elements of a regionally neutral biographical realism with appeals to folkloric authenticity rooted in idiosyncratic local cultures and the fact of land. The universalizing impulses in protagonist Janie Crawford's individual quest for fulfillment forms the narrative conceit by which Hurston, who was also an ethnographer, mapped the effects of capitalist development upon the preindustrial Black folk cultures of the early twentieth-century South. As a work that blends elements of the classical Bildungsroman's generic scaffolding—including its themes of labor, courtship, and domesticity—with oral dialect and folkloric storytelling conventions and appeals to Florida's sublime natural environment, Hurston's novel thematically and formally perpetuated an ideology of regional cosmopolitanism. The protagonist's ethnic identity expands, as does her appreciation for and affiliation with the many heterogeneous rural Black folk cultures she encounters as she traverses different communities and modes of living. In this way, Hurston's ethnographic window onto the region's labor and folk-cultural history in ways offered a corrective both to the official discourses of the Jim Crow South, and to Northern critics who misconstrued those communities as primitive and backward. As Janie searches for personal fulfillment in a variety of settings—from household, to farmstead, to township, to “de muck” (the fertile Everglades, on Florida's southernmost tip)—her experiential geographical education widens in a southward direction. Her romantic view of the sheltered South of her childhood is habitually tested at these different locations by national and global forces that threaten the self-sustaining Black folk cultures of the region. Hurston's critical regionalist geography furthermore drew knowingly upon Florida's proximity to the extended Black South of the Bahamas and Haiti, where the novel was composed while its author conducted fieldwork for the ethnographical study, Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica (1938).