Toni Morrison’s Their Eyes Were Watching God

Abstract

Abstract I argue 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 heated scholarly debates over Janie Crawford’s suitability as a representative of what Jennifer Jordan terms “modern black feminism.” Morrison recasts the early twentieth-century Janie Crawford as the contemporary Jadine Childs and, availing herself of the descriptive and explanatory resources of her post-civil rights moment, renders Jadine’s capacity for self-determination undeniable, thus calling into question contemporaneous critiques of Janie as Hurston’s failed attempt to write, in Hortense J. Spillers’s words, “new” and self-determined “female being.” The novels, read together, reject the foundational paradigm of Black women’s literary succession—built as it has been around models of accretive, intergenerational possibility, wherein each successive generation of Black women characters attains new heights of self-determination—which posits Hurston and her characters as the necessary precursors of but regressive foils to Morrison and her characters’ political and literary self-actualization. Given Janie’s and Jadine’s shared experiences, reactions, and choices across drastically differing sociohistorical contexts, this polarization, Tar Baby suggests, is more a consequence of critics’ entrenched presuppositions than any tangible failings on Janie’s part. As a pair, Tar Baby and Their Eyes Were Watching God exhort readers to forgo the quest for what Jordan calls an “ideologically correct literature” on narrowly contemporary terms and, instead, to pursue recognition of Black women’s agency and truth-telling on malleable terms, even (and especially) amid the historical constraints placed upon these characters’ voices and upon representations thereof.