Author Archives: lchang

Night and Day

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In Their Eyes Were Watching God, when Janie runs away with Joe, she has a fresh start in life. However the sun does not rise on the horizons of her newfound dreams, instead she watches “the sun plunge into the same crack in the earth from which the night emerged” (33). One reading of this can be  negative: foreshadowing her future days with Joe.

However, earlier passages night’s have more positive associations. Twilight’s coming actually brings people to life: “The sun was gone, but he had left his footprints in the sky. It was time for sitting on porches beside the road. It was time to hear things and talk” (1). During the day they were animals, “mules and other brutes…But now, the sun and the bossman were gone, so the skins felt powerful and human” (1). Nights are often thought to be an end of something, but in Their Eyes Were Watching God, it seems nights are figured in as the beginning. After all, it is during nights when dreams are most vivid.

Maybe this is stretching the metaphor a little too far, but I remember that the sun is traditionally gendered male, while the moon is seen as female. I wonder if this somehow ties into the fact that the book opens with the statement of men of having no control over their dreams, while for women, “the dream is the truth” (1). Anyways, it’s interesting to keep these different binaries (man and woman, sun and moon, day and night) in mind while reading the book.

Staring

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Deemed a “monstrosity” (192) by his own mother, Alva Junior is an unfortunate, misshapen creature, with “a shrunken left arm and a deformed left foot.” (192). Even the narrator refers to Alva Junior as an “it” (192), rather than using the more humanizing pronoun “he.” Alva Junior is presented as an object, a product of the shallow, loveless union between Alva and Geraldine. To further develop Alva Junior’s role as an object, the child is completely static and lifeless, for “it neither talked or walked.” He is both figuratively and literally a burden and for people who place such a premium on physical appearance, Alva Junior  is a cruel and ironic existence– a bad joke with “thick grinning lips” (192). If Alva Junior has inherited anything from his parents, its is  perhaps his “insanely large and vacant eyes” (192), for that empty gaze is reminiscent of how Alva, Geraldine (and perhaps their peers) live: forever fixated on someone’s appearance and the color of the color of his or her skin.

Let us now turn to Alva Junior and Emma Lou. As readers, we can’t help but shake our heads in disapproval when she decides to return to Alva Senior. She takes responsibility of Alva Junior, and under her care, manages “to make little Alva Junior take on some of the physical aspects of a normal child” (208). At first glance, he seems to be getting better, yet the one thing that doesn’t change is “his abnormally large eyes” which “still retained their insane stare” and “appeared frozen and terrified as if their owner was gazing upon some horrible yet fascinating object or occurrence” (208). What is the “horrible yet fascinating object” that the child is looking at? Emma Lou? His father? The society that he will have to grow up in? If children are the future, than the future seems to be portrayed as horribly grotesque.

We can explore another dimension to Alva Jr’s symbolism if we agree that Alva Junior is a caricature of Black society and its obsession with skin tone (as discussed in the first paragraph). If this true, then can’t we also say that his relationship with Emma Lou is metaphorical of her relationship with the rest of society? Her decision to stay with Alava Junior is in a way self destructive because although she “loved to fondle [Alva Junior’s] warm, mellow-colored body, loved to caress his little crooked limbs” (211),  her actions and affections place her in the stereotypical role of “a black mammy,” something that she even admits to on page 218. This is perhaps analogous to the catch 22 of wanting to be part of a system that will only spurn and marginalize you in the end.