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Megan McClain
Professor Jaeckle
ENG 444
28 April 2008
Oprah’s Adaptation of Their Eyes Were Watching God is Faithful
Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God is one of those interesting
novels where there is no singular central theme, but many that can be hotly contested and
are highly debatable. Some may believe it to be primarily a love story, while others see it
as one woman’s quest for self-fulfillment, however it is a novel of more than just either
of these. In the beginning of Oprah Winfrey Presents Their Eyes Were Watching God,
Oprah herself claims: “it was one of the most beautiful, poignant love stories I’d ever
read.” Oprah’s adaptation is more faithful to the novel than one might believe before
engaging in a close viewing of the film. While omitting and changing several different
scenes from the novel, which gives the film almost a sense of absurdness, overall the
adaptation does remain faithful to Hurtson’s work. The adaptation underlines the most
important themes from the novel: Janie’s quest for self-fulfillment throughout her life, the
presence of the community in Eatonville, and the southern dialect mixed with Janie’s
narration that reflects Standard English. These themes appear to be entirely separate,
however they are not, they coalesce to produce Hurston’s multifaceted novel and Oprah
demonstrates her knowledge of this by tying them together to faithfully represent the
novel in her adaptation.
Janie’s quest for self-fulfillment is conceivably an imperative theme in the novel.
The novel begins with her quest, and it serves as the foundation for the rest of the story.
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The quest can first be noticed in the third paragraph of the novel, where it suggests that a
quest is present: “So the beginning of this was a woman and she had come back from
burying the dead” (1). This sentence shows us that this is the beginning of the telling of a
story that has already taken place and that a woman has returned from somewhere, which
implies that she had already quested to another place where she presumably had to bury
the dead. We can then read on to see that Janie’s whole life is an adventure, that she
leaves her first husband for Joe Starks to find happiness and love with him, and then after
Joe’s death, she drives out of town with Tea Cake where she seeks to truly find herself.
Sigrid King writes: “Huston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God focuses on the
character Janie, whose quest for the “horizons” of herself finally leads her to a place
where she defines herself, despite a society which wants to deny her power because she is
a black woman” (117). King’s comment supports the argument that Janie’s quest is
important to the novel, and that she does it for reasons pertaining to herself. Janie wants
to start living her life, and only this will make her feel content and self-fulfilled. The fact
that King also outlines his entire article with the structure of the quest, like Hurston, lends
credence to the notion that the quest is a central theme.
Sigrid King is not the only person who has implied the importance of the quest
theme by outlining his work with it; Oprah Winfrey also recognized the importance of
this theme in the novel. More than incorporating it into her adaptation of the novel, she
also used it as structure and support for the film. The first shot of the film focuses on
Janie’s bare and dirty feet pounding the gravel as she embarks on her journey back into
the Eatonville. The film later shows her running down the road in her white, pure and
innocent-like sundress after Joe Starks, as well as her next quest when she gaily runs in
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her bright, energetic pink floral sundress to Tea Cake in the car and rides on out of town
with him. Oprah uses these shots throughout the film to visually remind the viewer of the
adventure that Janie is continuously seeking, of the journeys she is continuously
embarking on.
However, not all viewers understood Janie’s quest in the same way as Oprah had
intended: as a woman who sought her own identity. Virginia Heffernan, writer for the
New York Times depicted Janie’s quest as a shallow search for men, money and selflove. She writes: “Sure, Janie has love troubles—the first husband is unsexy and not rich
enough, the second is self important, and the third has gambling and drinking problems—
but in general she triumphs, shrewedly collecting position, money, and wisdom from
each man in succession” (3). Heffernan’s words describe what she believes Janie’s quest
to be about, and her understanding of the film does nothing to honestly represent the
character Janie from Oprah’s adaptation.
There are many different points that can be argued about Heffernan’s statement.
Firstly, the film-version of Janie leaves her first husband because he enslaves her, traps
her in the house, and coexists with her in a loveless marriage. Janie doesn’t care about
money, if she did, she would have never left or stayed with Tea Cake, who was broke to
begin with, and then lost her money gambling the second day of their adventure. Janie’s
second husband, Joe, is self-important, but that isn’t what stops Janie from loving him,
but more so, the isolation he forces her into, the physical abuse he serves her, and the
control he exerts over her. In the film, we can see Janie’s relinquish of independence
after she storms out of the house, suitcase in hand and Joe following her, cat-calling to
her, telling her how nobody would want an old woman like her, and that she had nothing
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when he found her and she’d have nothing if she left him. At this point we can see the
determined lines in Janie’s face fade away, the flame in her eyes die and then after a
moment, she retreats to the house. Every scene after this until Joe’s death we see Janie
with a headscarf covering her hair because Joe controls her and forces her to wear it.
What Heffernan writes about Tea Cake is true, he does have gambling and drinking
problems, but she omits that he also has so much more to offer Janie. He gives her true
love for the first time in her life, he shows her how fun living can be, and he takes her to
the horizon. However, more than all of this, the most problematic aspect of Heffernan’s
statement is that she accuses Janie of ill intentions, of being manipulative, calculating,
and greedy. Janie is simply questing to find her happiness and love, two things no
woman should be guilty of securing, and Heffernan paints her in such a light that through
her quest she seems more like a man-eating user, taking what she can get from each man
along the way. Janie never wanted to marry Logan Killicks but even after she was she
looked for love, she never wanted to be treated like a slave or animal by Joe but she tried
to crack his shell, and she graciously and generously gave everything to Tea Cake. She
killed him to save herself, and it can certainly be argued that she did it for Tea Cake,
because Tea Cake would never have wanted to kill Janie if he hadn’t contracted rabies.
Oprah doesn’t omit any of these aspects of Janie’s character from the novel in her
adaptation so it is startling that Heffernan interprets the film in such a different way.
In addition to Oprah’s translations of so many character details from the novel to
plot, she also invented three different shots that relate to Janie’s quest by demonstrating
Janie’s independence and her need for self-fulfillment. Although they aren’t born from
the novel, while playing on the title of the movie, they do emphasize the theme of the
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questing heroine. At different points in the film, when it appears that Janie is overcome
with emotion, she runs to a lake or pond, jumps in fully clothed, and floats on her back
with her eyes to the sky, and in every scene this happens Janie includes the phrase “I’m
watching God.” Janie is alone in each of these scenes, which demonstrates her
independence. She doesn’t need to be stuck to the hip of Nanny, Joe Starks, or Tea Cake,
and she cherishes time to herself. These scenes demonstrate her quest for self-fulfillment
because she finds herself connected to God and fills content watching him. These shots
further support the fact that Oprah wished to adapt Their Eyes as faithfully as possible by
focusing on Janie’s quest to connect with God and discover who she is.
Writer Missy Kubitshchek supports the argument that Janie’s quest is a central
theme, but she also goes beyond that and confirms that the presence of the community in
the novel is also pivotal. She writes: “Their Eyes Were Watching God focuses on Janie
and her community, of which Tea Cake is only one important member. Detailing her
quest for self-discovery and self-definition, it celebrates her as an artist who enriches
Eatonville by communicating her understanding” (22). Kubitschek argues that when
concentrating on the individual quest, which secures a boon, the community can both
enjoy and benefit from the quester’s prize. This relates to when Janie reveals new-found
knowledge of herself and the world around her, acquired through her quest to Phoeby.
She imparts her wisdom and story to others in the community, and the community can
both learn from Janie and enjoy her story. In the film version, after Janie walks past the
gossiping community of Eatonville, Phoeby comes to her house with a plate of food and
Janie promptly begins telling her the story of her life, and what she has learned thus far.
The film flashes back to Janie as a young girl, still living with Nanny and then doesn’t
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return to the present time until the end, where Phoeby states that she feels as if she is
indebted to Janie for having the opportunity to listen to the story, to know where Janie
has been. She claims that she grew ten feet just listening to Janie and that she won’t let
anyone in Eatonville say mean things about Janie. She intends to have her Sam take her
fishing at night sometime. Phoeby demonstrates that she, a member of the community,
has benefited from Janie’s quest as Kubitschek argues is possible.
Throughout the film whenever Jody and Janie are in public they are visibly
surrounded by the community, and often times the community is gossiping about them.
At one point in the film the town of Eatonville holds a picnic outdoors and Jody had
given a very fancy red dress to Janie and asked her to wear it to the picnic after the
women of the town had already spent a great deal of time preparing a different dress.
Janie wanted to wear the dress her friends made, but Jody wouldn’t hear of it because she
should dress as a mayor’s wife should. While Janie is enjoying herself at the picnic, she
is standing near a house and she overhears some women of the community claim that the
dress they made wasn’t good enough for “Missus Mayor Starks” and they continue
speaking ill of Janie. This perfectly exemplifies many of the different examples from the
novel where the presence of the community affects Janie by overshadowing her fun
simply because they don’t feel like Janie is an equal.
Another instance where one can see that Oprah’s adaptation is loyal to the novel
by showing how the community affects Janie is when she places emphasis on the theme
of community and how it revolves around the store. One example from the novel that
Oprah includes focuses on incident when Janie insults Joe’s penis after he continuously
harps on her looks. The dialogue of the film version varies only slightly from novel and
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action is the same. In this scene we can see Janie injure Joe’s pride, Joe injure Janie’s
face, and equally important, the people sitting on the store’s porch and their reaction to
the whole ordeal. Janie tells Joe that there isn’t anything big about him but his voice and:
“Hell, pull down ya britches an it look like ya hit the change of life.” While she spits
this out at him she walks away sideways from him and toward the part of the community
sitting on the porch, looking him up and down contemptuously. He races after her firing:
“Whud you say to me?” with only the back of his body showing to the camera and the
sides of the bodies and faces of the people sitting on the porch. Immediately following
this, a man on the right side of the shot in a shirt and tie (possibly implying his
importance in society, which may add to Joe’s embarrassment) bursts out: “You heard
her. You ain’t blind.” This comment has an effect on Jody, he turns back to the speaker,
acknowledging that he hears it, and then another man sitting further on the porch claims:
“Ah ratha be shot dead than hear that about my own self.” This scene shows how truly
significant the presence of the community is to the novel because had this exchange taken
place within the confines of Joe’s home, perhaps his rage would not be quite as explosive
and he may not have slapped her across the face. Because the community was present,
Joe was humiliated and had no choice but to reprimand Janie publicly. After Janie falls
to the ground, the next shot is of her hand griping the light pole, while we can hear her
heavy, staggered breathing and then we see her bloodied lip, cut forehead and shocked
eyes. The screen flashes to Joe’s seething face, and then it cuts to a shot of the infamous
porch with five different people staggered upon it, all silently gaping as the action
unfolds between Joe and Janie. Phoeby, yet another member of the community runs over
to rescue Janie and walks back to the house. This scene contains so many different
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issues, and it vividly and accurately portrays the theme of community and the possible
effects of their presence.
Heffernan proves that Oprah’s adaptation is true to Hurston’s theme of the
presence of community when she briefly touches on the role of the community in the
film. When reviewing the film she writes: “Gossips in the middle-class town hiss that
she looks all wrong for the wife of a mayor, and that she should never have left with that
scamp” (3). She has picked up on the exact sentiment that Hurston offers in the novel
and Oprah adapts in the film. The gossips are present throughout the whole novel,
constantly complaining about one aspect of Janie’s character or another.
Lisa Minnick connects the presence of the community with another central theme
of the novel, which is Hurston’s use of language and southern dialect. She writes: “The
celebration of a shared culture, and perhaps more importantly, one that is a uniquely oral
culture, is a major component of Hurston’s use of dialect in her fiction” (132). She
sustains the argument that language and dialect are crucial aspects of the novel. The
celebration of the shared culture takes place through the interaction of the community
with the main characters, where the reader and viewer can witness the southern dialect
resulting from the communication of the community. This southern dialect is shared by
all members of Eatonville community, and it is mixed with third person narration
throughout both the novel and the film.
Klaus Benesch also finds the language of the novel to be a fundamental idea in
the novel. He writes: “Dialogue and oral communication are heavily emphasized, and
authorial voice, using a so-called standard English, is frequently reduced to a mere
introductory function while meaning and content are constituted in the subsequent
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conversation rendered in a transcription of black rural speech” (628). Hurston writes the
novel with much of the action taking place between the phonetically-spelled dialogues of
the characters, with the narration only adding details that can’t be naturally expressed
through the characters’ communication with each other. One example that demonstrates
what Benesch is describing occurs when a keg of pig feet can’t be accounted for and Joe
starts looking for it. After chastising Janie for not putting the bill on the correct nail he
asks Janie why she can’t do as he tells her. She replies:
“You sho loves to tell me whut to do, but Ah can’t tell you nothin’ Ah see!”
“Dat’s ‘cause you need tellin’,” he rejoined hotly. “It would be pitiful if Ah
didn’t. Somebody got to think for women and chilun and chickens and cows. I god, they
sho don’t think none theirselves.”
“Ah knows uh few things, and womenfolks thinks sometimes too!”
“Aw naw they don’t. They just think they’s thinking’. When Ah see one thing Ah
understands ten. You see ten things and don’t understand one.”
“Times and scenes like that put Janie to thinking about the inside state of her
marriage. Time came when she fought back with her tongue as best she could, but it
didn’t do her any good. It just made Joe do more. He wanted her submission and he’d
keep on fighting until he felt he had it” (71).
Through the dialogue in this excerpt we can see the action of Janie standing up to Joe and
defending not only herself, but women in general. We can also see the action of Joe
refusing to acknowledge any value or worth in Janie’s words and opinions, continue his
headstrong ideas about women, children, chickens and cows, and we see him elevate
himself once more in society, even above his wife. The narration at the end shows us
what their dialogue cannot, because it wouldn’t be in keeping with the novel if Janie
admitted to Joe that she started considering the make-up of her marriage. They simply do
not have a relationship with open communication where Janie is free to express her
thoughts and feelings. Hurston uses speech and the southern dialect as a deliberate way
to show action in the novel rather than act as accompanying details. The dialogue is so
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fundamental to the novel that if it had been removed from this scene, the reader would be
unable to understand what action had occurred.
Oprah’s adaptation underlines the premise that the dialogue and southern dialect
is vital to authentically representing the novel. One can observe that the dialect is kept
intact when viewing the scene where Janie first meets Tea Cake and he offers to buy her
a drink. He hands her the bottle and she says: “Well thank ya mista…you ain’t even told
me yo name” and he responds “Mah mamma name me Virgible Woods but most
everybodah call me Tea Cake.” Janie retorts: “Tea Cake, huh? You as sweet as al’ dat?”
The dialect can be heard plainly when watching the film, in words where a “y” should be,
there is a short “a” sound. Some words are missing their endings, like “name,” which
should have the past tense ending on it: “named.” The collection of these variations from
Standard English in the film helps to produce the southern dialect similar to what Hurston
used in her novel. Most viewers won’t experience a sense of loss due to what they deem
to be a lack of dialect or as some have put it, the presence of “accessible language,”
however some have and will.
Virginia Heffernan doesn’t find that the film accurately adapts the southern
dialect, one of the predominant themes of the novel. She asserts: “the movie forgoes
many of the regionalisms and much of the dialect that make the novel both irregular and
stimulating. (Ms. Winfrey has said she hopes the movie, by appearing on television, will
reach a large audience.)” (3). Although the film does omit a great deal of the novel, after
viewing and listening to scenes like the aforementioned and many others, it is credible to
argue that that film is better than what Heffernan claims. Almost every scene in the film
is shot with the southern dialect, including lines that represent the narration. In one
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moment of narrating, Janie recounts: “Dere’s two things everybodah got tuh find out for
de selves: life and livin’.” This spoken sentiment somewhat contrasts Hurston’s beautiful
written prose that serves as narration: “Here was peace. She pulled in her horizon like a
great fish-net” (193). Oprah’s adaptation goes so far as to promote the use of the original
dialect that they use it even in places where Hurston wrote Standard English in the novel.
Because Oprah included these three major themes in such detailed and charming
ways from Hurston’s novel in her adaptation, the film can easily be accredited as a
faithful representation. Many scenes and smaller story lines were omitted but
screenwriter Suzan Lori-Parks explains: ''You have to pick the biggest story line and let
the other things go,'' (Lee 4). It would be nearly impossible to include every scene and
detail from Hurston’s beautifully written work, so in order to adapt the novel and
preserve the most important facets of it, Oprah and Parks had to make some decisions,
and their choices were excellent. Oprah’s adaptation stressed the significance of Janie’s
quest for self-fulfillment, the presence of the community throughout the novel, and the
striking combination of the southern dialect and the Standard English narration. She
highlighted these separate themes but united them in such a way to truthfully present the
fundamental concepts in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God.
Works Cited
Benesch, Klaus. "Oral Narrative and Literary Text: Afro-American Folklore in Their
Eyes Were Watching God." Callaloo 36 (1988): 627-635.
Heffernan, Virginia. "A Woman on a Quest, Via Hurston and Oprah." The New York
Times 4 Mar. 2005, Late Edition ed. Proquest. MSU Main Library, East Lansing.
10 Apr. 2008.
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King, Sigrid. "Naming and Power in Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching
God." Black American Literature Forum 24 (1990): 683-96.
Kubitschek, Missy D. "Tuh De Horizon and Back": the Female Quest in Their Eyes
Were Watching God." Black American Literature Forum 17 (1983).
Lee, Felicia R. "A Woman's Journey Toward Herself." The New York Times 6 Mar.
2005, Late Edition ed., sec. 13: 4. Proquest. MSU Main Library, East Lansing. 27
Apr. 2008.
Minnick, Lisa C. Dialect and Dichotomy: Literary Representations of African American
Speech. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama P, 2004. 122-147.