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  • 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 were 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.

  • [Theme Music]

  • Great books can stand up to multiple readings.

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

  • MFTP: Mr Green, Mr Green, no no no, you said that authorsbiographies 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 were studying literature, were not just thinking about texts.

  • Were 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?

  • Or only look at the book itself?

  • 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 asthe 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 pressurewhile 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.

  • Which wasn’t going to happen.

  • 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:

  • between Laughter and tears.” Wow.

  • 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.

  • Which involves politics and race.

  • As Hurston wrote in her autobiography, she didn’t really want to write about what she called theRace 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.

  • Like, the narrator’s first words are:

  • 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.

  • That is the life of men.”

  • Whereas, Janie’s first words are,

  • Aw, pretty good, Ah’m tryinto 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

  • to record local songs and stories.

  • And she placed a value in how people expressed themselves

  • the humor, the inventiveness, the liveliness of languageand 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,

  • even if the voice is different.

  • So, the story begins with a 40-year-old Janie returning to Eatonville and telling the story of her life to her best friend, Pheoby.

  • Janie grows up as the pet of a white family for which her grandmother worked.

  • Her grandmother, a former slave, marries Janie off to a much older man at 16.

  • Both Janie and her mother were conceived in rape, so when Janie shows signs of sexual awakening,

  • her grandmother wants to get her married immediately to the richest man around.

  • A lot of this sexual awakening takes place while Janie is lying dreaming under a pear tree and sees, quote:

  • the ecstatic shiver of the tree from root to tiniest branch creaming in every blossom and frothing with delight,”

  • which is pretty much as sexy as botany gets.

  • But Janie is disgusted by her first husband.

  • And it doesn’t matter that he owns 60 acres of land, and has an organ in his parlor.

  • His feet smell and he’s no pear tree in general.

  • So when she meets another man, Joe Starks, also somewhat older,

  • but more stylish and a smooth talker, she runs away with him.

  • Joe takes her to Eatonville where he soon becomes mayor and Janie get to enjoy the high status ofMrs. Mayor.”

  • But he belittles her in front of others.

  • He beats her at least once and this, and in one of the book’s great metaphorical gestures,

  • Joe frees a mule, but he never frees Janie.

  • And then, after Joe’s death, Janie takes up with a much younger man called Tea Cake.

  • Tea Cake isn’t rich and he isn’t powerful,

  • but he offers Janie a lot of what's been missing from her earlier marriages: fun.

  • He makes her laugh, he plays songs for her on the guitar,

  • he teaches her how to drive, he brings her to the Everglades, because, quote:

  • Folks don't do nothin' down dere but make money and fun and foolishness.”

  • And they have a great time until that hurricane and that rabid dog and Tea Cake going crazy

  • and Janie having to shoot him to save herself while he’s busy biting at her arm.

  • After being acquitted of Tea Cake's murder, she throws him a lavish funeral,

  • and then heads home to Eatonville in her muddy overalls, happy because,

  • as she tells Pheoby, she's been "to the horizon and back."

  • Which is a fascinating phrase, because the horizon, of course,

  • definitionally is a place that you can’t get to, let alone get back from.

  • It’s one of the most discussed lines in the book.

  • Some take to mean she has finally achieved her own selfhood.

  • Others take it to mean that she’s about to die of rabies.

  • Once the book was rediscovered, early critics, following Alice Walker, mainly chose the empowerment reading.

  • Walker even wrote a poem that begins, “I love the way Janie Crawford left her husbands.”

  • This reading suggests that Janie eventually comes into her own voice and her own authority,

  • and that it’s separate from her husbands.

  • She doesn’t get it from her first husband’s wealth, or from her second husband’s power,

  • but instead, through love.

  • And then, In recounting her life story to Pheoby she has learned to speak for herself,

  • to put herself at the center of her own story,

  • and it’s suggested that Pheoby might become empowered in turn.

  • Or at least a little. I mean, Pheoby says she’s become 10 feet higher just from listening to Janie.

  • But in the last couple of decades, there’s been some push back against those earlier readings.

  • Some critics note that Janie is more often passive than active.

  • I mean, she only leaves one husband. The others have a way of dying.

  • I mean I guess she had agency in her relationship with Tea Cake,

  • but only in the sense that she was choosing between killing him and dying of rabies.

  • And also, if were going to say that Janie establishes authority over herself by telling her own story,

  • then we need to acknowledge that Janie herself discounts the power of the spoken word.

  • I mean, in one of my favorite lines in the book, she tells Phoebe that you've gotta go there to know there.

  • And there are also questions about Tea Cake as a romantic hero.

  • I mean yes, he seems like a fun guy, but he takes Janie’s money without asking,

  • and uses it to throw a party that he doesn’t invite her to.

  • Later he beats her, out of a desire to prove his ownership of her.

  • So life with Tea Cake has a deeply ugly side.

  • And it’s worth remembering that Tea Cake has to die before Janie can return to Eatonville on her own terms.

  • I’m not going to try to argue for one reading over another,

  • because I think what makes Their Eyes Were Watching God such a major American novel is its complexity.

  • It doesn’t offer an easy answer for how a woman with Janie’s life can achieve complete independence, or full selfhood.

  • I mean her last thoughts of the novel are not, “finally, I have achieved selfhood!”

  • Instead, she’s thinking about Tea Cake.

  • Will she go through life alone, will she find another man or will she remain wedded to Tea Cake’s memory?

  • Or because of his dying, rabid gesture, biting her in the arm,

  • there are some very skeptical critics who think it won’t be long before she Janie dies herself.

  • And yet, Their Eyes Were Watching God is one of the very few novels of this period that is

  • centered around a woman speaking for herself and achieving an understanding of her own life

  • complete with the feet, and the mules, and the hurricanes, all of it.

  • And it is that richness and complexity that makes the novel so special.

  • Thanks for watching, and watch out for rabid dogs. Also sexy pear trees.

  • Crash Course is made by all of these lovely people and it exists because of your support on Patreon.

  • Patreon is a voluntary subscription platform that allows you to support Crash Course directly,

  • so we can keep making it free, for everyone, forever.

  • Thanks again for watching, and as we say in my hometown: don't forget to be awesome.

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

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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)

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    羅紹桀 に公開 2021 年 01 月 14 日
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