Reading Native Son and Invisible Man, it seems unnervingly easy to forget about women entirely. The real characters, the real struggles, the real search for identity seems to be always with the men. Bigger and Clifton and the nameless narrator and Dr. Bledsoe are the ones who matter, while the women are at best homemakers and at worst just a tool to influence men. It’s the brotherhood, after all. The “Women Question” is just a way to get the narrator out of the way of the real issues.
So it’s kind of strange to start reading Their Eyes Were Watching God, written by a woman about a woman, and even stranger to see how in just the first seven chapters there are probably more women than in Native Son and Invisible Man combined. But it’s immediately obvious that the main character Janie Crawford is very different from every woman we’ve encountered so far this year, and it’s interesting to consider how her struggles to live in a racist society will compare to those of the male protagonists we’ve already read about.
In just the first few chapters, it’s clear how Janie’s life is dictated by both race and gender. She marries Logan Killicks not because she loves him, but because it’s her grandmother’s dying wish to protect Janie from being raped like so many other women in her family. Even after she leaves Killicks to marry Jody, who she thinks she loves, Jody just becomes more and more controlling to try and make her fit his vision of a perfect wife. And no matter what she does, the male gaze is always there to watch her, judge her body and make her into an object of competition between men.
It’s hard to say so early in the book what will happen to Janie over the course of her life, but it’s clear that although the challenges she faces will undoubtedly be similar to those in Invisible Man, being a woman will also heavily influence her struggles. And judging by the character of Janie as she walks into town in the beginning of the novel, she ends up far from the passive and insignificant female character so common in other novels.
