Addressing Robert Stepto's criticism of "Their Eyes"

It still annoys me that I have to use quotations in the post title...

Anyways, as per the foreword, one of the major criticisms of Their Eyes is Zora Neale Hurston’s decision to tell the courtroom scene in third person. By not letting Janie speak for herself at that critical juncture, some argue that the novel’s efforts to show Janie finding her voice are undermined. Personally, I think there are practical reasons why Hurston takes Janie’s voice away in the courtroom.

Essentially, my thinking is that Hurston was making a different point. The courtroom scene wasn’t about Janie finding her voice—the rest of the novel focused on that aspect plenty. Rather, I see it is as Hurston making a final statement about both racial and gender inequality, through a concrete example. One man comments after the trial, “aw you know dem white mens wuzn’t gointuh do nothin’ tuh no woman dat look lak her.” The point of not letting Janie speak, then, is to demonstrate that it doesn’t matter what she would have said. Society would not punish her for killing a black man regardless her justification.

 Sure, she may have found her voice, but what good was it if everybody made their decision based on the skin colors of the victim and perpetrator? Hurston expresses that simply finding one’s voice is only half the battle—people have to listen and care about what you are saying for your voice to have any value. In 1937, when the novel was originally published, women were very much struggling with this problem. Women were newly given rights and social statuses they never before possessed, but those things didn’t do much good if men didn’t acknowledge their worthiness in these new positions. It’s difficult to think about now, because the days of students doing a double-take when they walk into their class and see a female teacher are long since passed, but there was certainly a time when women struggled to make use of their new rights and social positions. Some feminists would argue that society as a whole still doesn’t take women seriously enough.

Thus, the man’s comment on page 180, “Well, you whut dey say ‘uh white man and uh nigger woman is de freest thing on earth.’ Dey do as dey please” is obviously ironic. Continually throughout the novel, Hurston demonstrates that black women, even if they “do as they please,” are never free. Constantly, Janie had other people’s thoughts and opinions projected on to her. The courtroom scene drives the point home emphatically. She was free to say whatever she wanted, but it didn’t matter, because the jury was going to vote the same way regardless. In that sense, Janie had no freedom whatsoever, and neither did many women at that time, even if given the superficial appearance of freedom.

So it may require a little reading between the lines—and hey, my reading might not be what Hurston intended—but it seems to me that she said a lot more by not letting Janie talk than she ever could have with Janie talking at her trial. My interpretation of the courtroom scene, if correct, doesn’t provide solutions as such, but it lays the problem out starkly, and sometimes that’s a solution in itself.