Their Eyes Were Watching God: Folk Speech and Figurative Language

Born in Alabama and raised in Eatonville, Florida, the locale of her main character Janie’s second marriage, Zora Neale Hurston left home to study at Howard University and earned a B.A. in anthropology from Barnard College. As a trained ethnographer and folklorist, she traveled to Jamaica and Haiti and returned to her own environs of Florida to collect folktales, songs, and anecdotes, which found their way into her fiction and nonfiction. An online exhibit from Rollins College, Zora Neale Hurston and the Harlem Renaissance: Searching for Identity, connects Hurston’s works with other artists of that movement’s remarkable surge of African American poetry, music, theatre, and books in the 1920s and 1930s. It also identifies major themes in her writing. This is an excellent resource for exploring links between Zora Neale Hurston and contemporary artists.

In spite of her popularity during the years between the two world wars, Hurston’s political views were not in sync with the times. By the 1950s she was living in obscurity; her works were out of print and in 1960 she died largely forgotten. Novelist Alice Walker realizing the importance of Hurston’s work, made a literary pilgrimage to Florida in 1973 to locate her grave. Walker’s persistence revived Hurston’s work and caused it to receive new and richly deserved attention from English teachers and the reading public.

Hurston’s masterwork, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), which forms the basis of this lesson, is important for several reasons. The tale of Janie’s three marriages is the pre-eminent novel written by a woman who participated in the Harlem Renaissance. The protagonist of this early feminist “manifesto” liberates herself from the expectations of society and particularly from the men in her life. At the same time, the novel celebrates and preserves a particular time, place, and way of life with the accuracy of an anthropologist.

Further background and resources to place Zora Neale Hurston’s life and work in context can be found at the University of Minnesota’s Voices from the Gap. More comprehensive biographical material is available on her official website, Zora Neale Hurston.

CCSS.ELA-Literacy.CCRA.R.4 Interpret words and phrases as they are used in a text, including determining technical, connotative, and figurative meanings, and analyze how specific word choices shape meaning or tone.

CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.11-12.3 Analyze the impact of the author’s choices regarding how to develop and relate elements of a story or drama.

CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.11-12.4 Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in the text, including figurative and connotative meanings; analyze the impact of specific word choices on meaning and tone, including words with multiple meanings or language that is particularly fresh, engaging, or beautiful

CCSS.ELA-Literacy.L.11-12.5 Demonstrate an understanding of figurative language, word relationships, and nuances in word meanings.

CCSS.ELA-Literacy.L.11-12.5a Interpret figures of speech (e.g., hyperbole, paradox) in context and analyze their role in the text.

CCSS.ELA-Literacy.L.11-12.5b Analyze nuances in the meaning of words with similar denotations.

• Worksheet 1. Folklore: some useful terminology
• Worksheet 2. Folk groups
• Worksheet 2.1. Suggested answers: folk groups
• Worksheet 3. Figurative language in Their Eyes Were Watching God
• Worksheet 3.1. Suggested answers: figurative language
• Worksheet 4. Zora Neale Hurston’s writing techniques in the short story “Spunk”
• Worksheet 4.1. Suggested answers: writing techniques
• “Spunk”: 1925 short story by Zora Neale Hurston, available from EDSITEment-reviewed History Matters
• Refer to EDSITEment’s Literary Glossary for definitions of key literary terms

Activity 1. Folklore as Literary Genre; Folk Groups as Literary Device

Have students learn the specialized vocabulary of folklore and apply it to Hurston’s fictional writing in the novel. Analyze the impact of Hurston’s choices regarding how she integrated folk groups and folk genre into her narrative.

Distribute Worksheet 1. Folklore: Some useful terminology to students for homework the night before the lesson and ask them to read through it carefully.

When students have a solid understanding of the meanings of these terms, remind them that, broadly defined, a folk group is any two or more people who share some common identity or cultural expression.

Distribute Worksheet 2. Folk groups and have students work in small groups to complete the first page. When they have finished, give student groups an opportunity to share their ideas and make suggestions for additional groups.

For classwork or homework, assign the second page of Worksheet 2. Give the entire novel for review or break it up into sections, depending on the number of students you have and their ability to work with the text. You may assign the same sections to two or more groups so that they can cross-check their findings.

Assessment

Have students write in response to the following prompt:

Identify a folk group you recorded on Worksheet 2 that had the most impact on Janie’s life. Write a one-page essay in which you describe that impact. How did contact with the folk group change her? What impact in turn did she have on the folk group?

Activity 2. Folk Speech

Have students identify examples of Hurston’s “eye dialect”—a technique used by writers to simulate speech as it is actually spoken rather than in its polished, abstract, “correct” form. Students use Worksheet 3 to analyze the impact of specific word choices on Hurston’s meaning and tone, including words with multiple meanings and language that is powerful.

Ask students:

• To turn to the last paragraph of Chapter 3 in the novel, beginning with “So Janie waited a bloom time …” Have a student read the passage aloud;
• To identify the sentence that sounds different from all the others. (“Ah hope you fall on soft ground.”)

Explain that this is an example of dialogue. Then tell students that it is also an example of dialect. Check students’ understanding of the terms and provide examples. Point out that not all people from a particular region speak with a regional dialect; generally people are expected to write in Standard English in formal situations no matter how they pronounce the words. There is considerable leeway for authors of fiction who choose to integrate dialect into their narrative.

Explain that Hurston switches back and forth in the book between Standard English and “eye dialect.” (Bring up examples of this in the novel as necessary.)

Ask students:

• To explain why Zora Neale Hurston used so much dialect in her book;
• (To record the authentic speech of African American groups in Florida in the 1920s and 1930s);
• To determine whether her use of dialect helps or interferes with their understanding of the story, the time, and the place.

Have students go back a page or two to the conversation between Janie and Nanny about Logan Killicks.

Ask students:

• To read aloud the dialect in the paragraph that begins “If you don’t want him, you sho oughta.”
• To analyze how the dialect is created. (Dropping of final consonants, grammar alterations like “onliest” and pronunciation of “th” as “d”.)

Assessment

Have students select one additional descriptive passage in the novel where Hurston switches back and forth between Standard English and dialect. In one or more paragraphs, have students analyze the difference between the impact of folk speech and Standard English on the reader’s understanding of the narrative.

Activity 3. Figurative Language

Tell students that regardless of whether Zora Neale Hurston was using dialect or Standard English, she employed many figures of speech in her writing. Instructing students to complete a close reading of several passages will uncover some of these figurative elements. Have students to evaluate the effectiveness of these elements in creating Hurston’s unique “voice.”

Define hyperbole. Have student find an example of hyperbole in the paragraph they have just read. (“… some dressed up dude … make it across.”)

Ask students:

• To evaluate the effect of this hyperbole;
• To elaborate on what it says about Nanny’s attitude toward Janie’s marriage;
• To share what they think Janie feels about Nanny’s comment.

Distribute Worksheet 3: Figurative language in Their Eyes Were Watching God and ask students to answer Question 1. List the words and phrases they have identified on the board. Review the concept of imagery (images within a literary work, which serve as figurative language that conveys sensory perceptions).

List the types of imagery on the board as follows:

• Visual (sight)
• Auditory (sound)
• Tactile (touch)
• Gustatory (taste)
• Olfactory (smell)
• Kinesthetic (movement)

Have students identify the types of images they have found in the three paragraphs from Chapter 2.

• Which type predominates? (visual and tactile)
• Ask how these images combine to suggest Janie’s sexual awakening;
• Ask students to consider how the pear tree in these paragraphs serves as a symbol.

Continue working through Worksheet 3 with students to accustom them to locating and analyzing the effect of Hurston’s figurative language and other literary techniques.

Assessment

Instruct students to select one additional descriptive paragraph in the novel that contains an arresting figure of speech. In one or more paragraphs, students analyze the figure of speech and its impact on the passage to report on the next day.

Zora Neale Hurston’s first short story, "Spunk,"already had many of the characteristics that would later define her style of writing: the use of folk language; folk groups; and figurative language. Explain to students that they are going to write an essay analyzing the techniques Zora uses in the story. Have them read the story and complete the graphic organizer on Worksheet 4 to organize the evidence to be cited in the essay. (Worksheet 4.1 contains suggested answers) Then have students respond to the prompt below:

Have students write a well-organized essay in which they discuss how Zora Neale Hurston used elements of folk culture as well as figurative language to create a sense of a community, delineate character, and create atmosphere in her story “Spunk.” Be sure that they supply adequate evidence to prove your assertions. Have them check their work to be sure it is correct in grammar, spelling, and usage before submitting it.

1a. Their Eyes Were Watching God, written during the 1930s, is widely considered an example of black literature. In a 1926 essay "The Negro Art Hokum," available from EDSITEment-reviewed History Matters, African American critic and reporter George Schuyler denied that there was  such a thing as “black art” or a black sensibility.

(Note: “Negro”, considered a proper term through the era of Martin Luther King, Jr., generally went out of use in the late 1960s and was replaced by the term, “black” and then by “African American.”)

After carefully reading Schuyler’s article and discussing his thesis, ask students to imagine that George Schuyler read and reviewed a copy of Their Eyes Were Watching God when it appeared in 1937 (eleven years after his article was written). Have them write a well-developed letter addressed to Schuyler in which they argue that Hurston’s novel, with its literary techniques discussed in this lesson (folk groups and folk language), can be considered an example of a distinctive black literature. Instruct students to provide evidence from the text of the novel and the article to support their answers.

1b. Poet and writer Langston Hughes responded to Schuyler’s article a week after it appeared, in “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” available from EDSITEment-reviewed Poetry Foundation. After they carefully read Hughes’ response, have students write an informational essay in which they compare and contrast the main ideas, arguments, and assumptions that underlie the two essays by Schuyler and Hughes, as well as their style of writing.

(Note: If necessary, refer students to the biographical entry on Langston Hughes. Hughes employed the infamous “n-word” once as part of a quote in his rebuttal.)

2. Read examples of nonfiction works by Zora Neale Hurston, such as the autobiography, Dust Tracks on the Road, or her collection of African American folklore, Mules and Men, which includes a famous essay, “How It Feels to Be Colored Me.” Instruct students to report to the class about how these nonfiction texts support or contrast with the “voice” of Hurston as it is manifested in Their Eyes Were Watching God.

Additional Resources:

In The Greene Space at WNYC and WQXR, Alice Walker appears in video clips defending Hurston’s love for her people and joy in life against her more political critics. (See: Walker reading the courtroom scene aloud.)

See Alice Walker’s essay, “Looking for Zora,” (a reprint of the 1975 Ms. Magazine article, “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston.”) in In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose (1985).

A film version of Their Eyes Were Watching God starring Halle Berry as Janie was produced by Oprah Winfrey in 2005. (It is not rated, so preview it first to see if it is appropriate for your class.)

• National Endowment for the Arts
  • The Big Read:Their Eyes Were Watching God
• New York Times Learning Network
  • “A Well Untapped: Black Folktales of the Old South”