Their Eyes Were Watching God By Nora Zeale Hurston

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Nora Zeale Hurston is an excellent feminist novel and an even better speakerly text. Speakerly texts speak to the readers with an authentic black voice. This authentic black voice can only come from an African-American himself or herself, which in this case, is Hurston. Speakerly text is defined as â€Å"a text whose rhetorical strategy is designed to represent an oral tradition† (Harriss). Throughout Hurston’s novel, Janie, an African-American woman, is narrating her past experiences to her good friend, Pheoby. Through her life journey, Janie faces difficult times, but times that ultimately help her find her voice and identity. Hurston’s novel is written through Janie’s point of view, making the story have a black narrative voice. An online article states that according to Gates, â€Å"this speech based and racially inflected aesthetic that produces a ‘black poetic diction’ requires that the writer acknowledge and reproduce in the text a significant difference between the spoken and written language of African-Americans and that of other Americans† (Mullen). In chapter nineteen of Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie meets with a white doctor. The conversations between these two show the difference between the spoken language of African-Americans and that of other Americans. This difference in language between these two races is described in Deborah Clarke’s â€Å"The Porch Couldn’t Talk for Looking.† Clarke explains that black men’s words are pictures and