| Since its recuperation in the mid 1970’s, there has been an abundance of literary
criticism on Hurston’s use of black vernacular speech in her 1937 novel, Their Eyes Were
Watching God. Much less has focused on Hurston’s equally important use of the form
and content of the blues music in the shaping of her characters and narratives. Hurston
spent years in the rural South observing and participating in the blues and jazz rituals of
the “jook.” Her writing especially shares with the blues its emotional complexity and its
capacity for “compelling insinuation,” a term that Hurston coins to describe the sense of
calculated restraint and understatement in black performance. Using a blues theory of
compelling insinuation, this paper focuses on Hurston’s shaping of the protagonist as
lyrical storyteller in Their Eyes Were Watching God. Reading Their Eyes with the blues
in mind sheds a new light on critiques of the novel that have focused on its alleged
primitivism and its “silencing” of its female protagonist. |