Watson's Theory and Their Eyes Were Watching God

  Wallace’s theory of moving away from ‘default mode’ can only be done once a person acknowledges and processes experiences shared by or read about other people’s lives. This ties to Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God because this story follows the experiences of a young girl who, in the pursuit of finding love, finds many hardships in her path that she learns to move on from and learn from. Hurston describes how a person may feel trapped in their own body by social norms and ideals, which is shown through Janie’s bullying and Nanny’s talk to her about how black women are never safe. From this, the audience is able to understand the hardships of a black woman in that era when blacks had just gotten out of slavery. Even though people in this era do not understand those struggles, Hurston provides us the information to begin to see the world in a new light. For example, in many abusive relationships, the woman is usually seen as weak and too forgiving of her lover. Although, Hurston, through Janie and Jody’s relationship, gives us another perspective of how women in these abusive relationships are not actually weak, but may have grown up with ideas and people who have warned them against doing things the ‘wrong’ way, like Nanny and Killicks did to Janie, or even the women do not want to ‘ruin’ their relationship so sacrifice their freedom to try to stay happy with the one they had fallen in love with. We see Janie’s journey of struggle in this particular relationship as she slowly becomes silent and obedient to her husband, leaving behind her old, bright self. Then, at his death, we see how free she feels, as though it was a blessing her husband died. This experience alone gives the audience the idea of how suffocating abusive relationships are and how hopeless they seem to be. It is from this that we see Wallace’s theory of drawing away from our ‘default mode’ to instead begin to understand others, even if they seem to not understand you.