Main Themes and Ideas
Their Eyes were Watching God is almost an ideal African American society where issues such as slavery and prejudice aren’t the main focal point of the story. Alice Walker depicts Zora Neale Hurston's work as providing the African-American literary community with its prime symbol of "racial health - a sense of black people as complete, complex, undiminished human beings". Rather than self-destruct under the constant realities of racism and misogyny she receives throughout her life, Janie Crawford does the opposite at the close of Their Eyes Were Watching God. The novel's final image states what Janie does throughout the story - taking her difficult past in and growing stronger and wiser as a result of it. Author Zora Neale Hurston believed that freedom "was something internal….The man himself must make his own emancipation". Janie grows as a person and as a woman, and this self-definition is the main theme.