Name: 彼らの目は神を見ていたクラッシュコース文学301 (Their Eyes Were Watching God: Crash Course Literature 301)
Uploaded: 2021-01-14T06:21:27.000Z
Duration: 11 min 24 s
Description: VoiceTubeの動画で発音を聞きながら英語表現を覚えよう！学べる英語：

Hi, I’m John Green, this is Crash Course Literature

and your eyes are watching me, but Their Eyes Are Watching God.

I’d like to apologize to my friends and family for that joke.

Anyway today we’re discussing Zora Neale Hurston’s brilliant novel

of a woman’s self-realization and empowerment.

Or, possibly, a cautionary tale about the importance of the rabies vaccine. Your call, really.

Great books can stand up to multiple readings.

Anyway, today we’re going to be discussing a little bit of Thurston’s biography.

MFTP: Mr Green, Mr Green, no no no, you said that authors’ biographies don’t matter,

because the author is irrelevant. Only the text matters.

Oh, Me From The Past, how I haven’t missed you.

So, OK. When we’re studying literature, we’re not just thinking about texts.

We’re also thinking about how to think about texts.

Like, should we read a novel in its historical context, or consider the life of its author?

In considering a book’s meaning should we privilege character, or plot, or symbols, or language?

And also how do our own experiences and biases shape our readings?

Now, I often argue against focusing too much on the life of an author,

not least because I am one, and don’t enjoy people peering too much into my personal history.

But in this particular case we are going to consider the life of Zora Neale Hurston,

both because it’s important to take many different perspectives when trying to learn to read critically,

and because her life was uncommonly important to her masterpiece.

So, Zora Neale Hurston was born in Alabama in 1891, but her family soon moved to Eatonville, Florida,

the first all-black incorporated township in the United States

and the model for the town of the same name in Their Eyes Were Watching God.

You know what? Let’s just go to the Thought Bubble.

Hurston described Eatonville as “the city of five lakes, three croquet courts, 300 brown skins,

300 good swimmers, plenty guavas, two schools, and no jailhouse.”

After her mother died and her father remarried, she was sent away to school,

but her father stopped paying her tuition.

As a teenager, Hurston did a bunch of odd jobs,

and then signed on as a maid for the lead singer for a traveling theatrical troupe.

And a decade later, she surfaced in Baltimore, erased 10 years from her age and finished high school.

She enrolled in Howard University, then transferred to Barnard College.

And after graduating in 1928, she began coursework for a PhD in anthropology at Columbia University,

while also contributing to the the Harlem Renaissance with our old friend Langston Hughes.

Hurston wrote short stories, plays, a few novels, two highly regarded works of anthropology,

and an award-winning autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, some of which she almost certainly made up.

But her books never sold that well during her lifetime,

and in later life she returned to Florida and worked as a substitute teacher and a maid.

She died of a heart attack in 1960 and was buried in an unmarked grave.

In 1973 the novelist Alice Walker found that grave and paid for a headstone inscribed:

“Zora Neale Hurston: A Genius of the South.”

Walker then wrote an article about it in Ms. Magazine, which helped spur renewed interest in Hurston’s work.

According to her autobiography, Hurston wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God in seven weeks, quote,

“under internal pressure” while on a Guggenheim Fellowship to Haiti to study the local folklore.

Oh man, seven weeks! I hope that’s one of the lies in her autobiography.

But actually Hurston didn’t think much of the novel.

She wrote,“I wish that I could write it again...I regret all of my books.”

Thanks, Thought Bubble. So, one last biographical note:

The internal pressure she mentions probably refers to an unhappy love affair with

a much younger Columbia student who wanted her to give up her career to become a pastor’s wife.

OK, now to the book. So, Their Eyes Were Watching God straddles at least a couple of genres.

It is part bildungsroman. But it can also be read as a romance,

in which the heroine, Janie Mae Crawford finally finds perfect love with her third husband Tea Cake.

Well, it’s perfect love until Tea Cake is bitten by a rabid dog in the middle of a hurricane,

and then Janie has to shoot him. Classic love story.

The book initially received mixed reviews, including a pretty damning one from the great novelist Richard Wright,

who wrote that it wasn’t political enough:

“The sensory sweep of her novel carries no theme, no message, no thought…

Miss Hurston seems to have no desire whatsoever to move in the direction of serious fiction…

Her characters eat and laugh and cry and work and kill;

they swing like a pendulum eternally on that safe and narrow orbit in which America likes to see the Negro live:

So, I think what Wright missed in the novel is that,

as a later generation of feminists would insist, that the personal is political.

Their Eyes Were Watching God has a few moments of explicit political commentary,

like in the aftermath of the hurricane when white men order black workers to bury the white corpses in coffins

and throw the black ones in a hole with quicklime.

But this book isn’t story about politics or race as much as it is about Janie’s emancipation —

or if you read the book skeptically, her inability to emancipate herself.

As Hurston wrote in her autobiography, she didn’t really want to write about what she called the “Race Problem.”

Quote: “My interest lies in what makes a man or a woman do such-and-so, regardless of his color,”

But, of course, Thurston also understood, that the in the America she was writing about,

race was part of what made a man or a woman do such and so.

The novel was also initially criticized for its use of vernacular speech and nonstandard spelling.

As you can see reading it, Hurston uses a very different authorial voice from the voice that she gives to Janie.

“Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board. For some they come in with the tide.

For others they sail forever on the same horizon, never out of sight,

never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time.

“Aw, pretty good, Ah’m tryin’ to soak some uh de tiredness and de dirt outa mah feet.”

So Hurston isn’t trying to brag about how much smarter and better educated she was than her characters.

Don’t forget, her academic background was in anthropology

and a lot of her fieldwork involved going into communities in the South and in the Caribbean

And she placed a value in how people expressed themselves —

the humor, the inventiveness, the liveliness of language — and her work can be read as a tribute to that.

But the different kinds of speech are also, as the scholar Henry Louis Gates points out,

a way of acknowledging that there is often a gap between what characters think and how they express themselves.

As Gates writes, “[Hurston’s] is a rhetoric of division, rather than a fiction of psychological or cultural unity.”

Still, just because the words the characters use are simple, and sometimes misunderstood,

that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a great depth of feeling behind them.

And, in fact, I’d argue that Janie’s level of sophistication matches the author’s,