TONI MORRISON'S THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD

MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, 47.1 (2022): 107–129. https://doi.org/10.1093/melus/mlac020.

Winner of the 2022 Katharine Newman Best Essay Award

​

"Toni Morrison's Their Eyes Were Watching God" argues that Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby (1981) is a deliberate rewriting of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) and was, at the time of its publication, a critical intervention into the heated scholarly debates over Janie Crawford’s suitability as a representative of “modern black feminism” (Jordan 1988: 107). Tar Baby catalogs the social limitations that Janie—and Hurston—faced in representing Janie’s agency while exhorting readers to embrace an interpretive practice that seeks out agency’s operations amidst the historical and social complexities of Black women’s lives. As a critical-fictional work, Tar Baby demands a rethinking of foundational models of Black women’s literary succession—built as they have been around models of accretive, intergenerational possibility, wherein each successive generation of black women characters attains new heights of self-determination—and posits an alternate interpretive paradigm for reading Black women’s texts and characters: a paradigm that forgoes the quest for an “ideologically correct literature” (Jordan 1988: 115) to meet the representational needs of any socio-historical moment and pursues, instead, recognition of black women’s agency and truth-telling on malleable terms, even (and especially) amidst the historical constraints placed upon their voices and the representations thereof.

​

Jordan, Jennifer. “Feminist Fantasies: Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, vol. 7, no. 1, 1988, pp. 105–17.