"The world in a jug and the stopper in hand": 'Their Eyes' as blues performance

African American Review, Fall, 1998 by Maria V. Johnson

The blues operate on many levels in Their Eyes. The novel's focus on love and relationship, Janie's pursuit of sexual satisfaction and self-fulfillment, and Hurston's celebration of female sexuality are themes, in particular, of vaudeville blues. The novel's sequence of three marriages provides a blues structure and presents the many-sidedness of love and relationship in much the same way that a series of blues stanzas does in performance. Janie's three marriages suggest the tripartite aa'b stanzaic structure of the standard blues piece, in which the second line (a') is a variation of the first, while the third line (b) marks some sort of resolution or contrast. Janie's relationship with Tea Cake, himself a blues singer/guitarist, is itself the love of many blues, with its pain and pleasure, jealousy and passion, short life and sudden end.(2)

In Their Eyes, Janie's marriage relationships become a structural vehicle through which Hurston explores a wide range of issues and experiences of struggle. Like the blues singer, Hurston "personifies" struggle by projecting Janie's journey to selfhood vis-a-vis relationship dynamics. By voicing Janie's responses to the oppressive conditions of each subsequent marriage, Hurston exposes underlying conflicts between prescribed beliefs and what she knows to be true from her own experience. Like the blues performer, Hurston uses contrast and oppositional structures in conjunction with repetition and variation to highlight paradoxical elements and to heighten dramatic intensity.

Hurston presents Janie's journey to selfhood as a process of sorting out her own feelings and values, freeing herself from the oppressive attitudes of others, and embracing those aspects of the culture that empower her and resonate her own voice. Through the use of blues imagery, metaphorical and rhetorical constructs, and linguistic devices, Hurston articulates an opposition between Janie's beliefs and those imposed from outside. The conflicts between inside and outside, appearance and reality, individual and community, and people and things are some of the core oppositions Hurston evokes in the language of the novel. While "inside" is the internal, personal, female, individual, and self-defined realm of Janie's feelings and sexuality associated with her path to identity and voice, "outside" is associated with external, familial, community, societal, white, and male-defined images and values, with materialism, and with the appearance of things. Core images such as the bee, Tea Cake, and the moon are connected with Janie's self-identity, whereas others like the mule are associated with external definitions. At the same time, many of the core images of the novel - such as the bee, the mule, the horizon and laughter - along with linguistic devices including personification, hyperbole, and inversion, themselves embody multiplicity and the oppositions of the novel. By repeating core means and materials - images, themes, linguistic devices, oppositions - and articulating them in various guises, Hurston the blues performer brings her readers to a deeper sense of their significance and of the novel's meaning.

Their Eyes is a multi-voiced, multilayered story-within-a-story which follows an oral-performance model. Hurston uses traditional vehicles of oral self-expression, including blues singing, signifying, and storytelling, to mark important steps in Janie's process of finding her own voice. Janie's oral telling of the story frames the novel, giving Their Eyes an overall shape which transcends the repetitions at its core. Pheoby is essential to the story, for she is Janie's witness, the audience necessary to complete the performative act of singing and telling. The Janie-Pheoby bond signifies the importance of Janie's connection to herself and her own womanness, as well as to other women. Hurston's use of Pheoby as witness/audience is similar to the female address employed by vaudeville blues singers like Bessie Smith in "Preaching the Blues," in which she sings: "Let me tell you girls, if your man ain't treatin' you right . . . I will learn you something if you listen to this song. . . ." Like the blues woman's song, Their Eyes carries a special message and significance for women. While the female-male relationship is the repeated situation and core syntactic unit, the implied female-female bond between performer/audience and writer/reader provides an overall structural and thematic framework.

Hurston draws upon what Stephen Henderson has called mascon imagery - words or phrases that contain "a massive concentration of Black experiential energy . . . [and] cut across areas of experience usually thought of as separate, but . . . [whose] meanings overlap and wash into each other on some undifferentiated level of common experience" (44).(3) A key ingredient in the poetry of the blues, mascon words and phrases, with their multiple meanings, are used to evoke a whole network of associations and relationships.

Hurston uses several mascon images to describe Janie's third husband - including "the bee," "lil' boy rooster," and "the Son of Evening Sun" - which identify him as a blues man. The name Tea Cake is itself a blues name which conveys in blues language the depth and intensity of the singer's passion. The name suggests a sweet food delicacy in the same way that the common terms jellyroll and sugar do in the blues. Janie discovers that, as a lover, Tea Cake is as "sweet as all dat" (149) and that "he turns into pure sugar just thinking about her" (174). Like the jellyroll image in the blues, the name Tea Cake simultaneously connotes sexual pleasure and affectionately signifies a lover, while evoking the multi-sensory experience of good food. Giving her character the name Tea Cake allows Hurston to signify his role in Janie's process of self-discovery and sexual fulfillment.