University Publications

Abstract This study examines the African American women’s plight as depicted in Zora Neale Hurston’s novel ‘Their Eyes Were Watching God’ (1937), by analyzing the elements of characterization. African American women have been excluded from theory, history, and women’s rights movements for centuries. Their dilemma is shaped by issues of race, class, and gender, operating at various levels, intellectual, institutional, social and cultural. Hurston depicts the African American women’s plight which is shaped by different forms of oppression, racism, classism, and sexism in her character portrayal in ‘Their Eyes Were Watching God’. Hurston uses ‘speech’-dialogue between the characters as the major characterization technique. Equally, speech is used to reveal other elements of characterization- physical appearance, actions, reactions, and inner thoughts. These methods of characterization adequately depict the African American women’s plight. Due to the complexity of the African American women’s plight as depicted in Hurston’s ‘Their Eyes Were Watching God’, the researcher uses the interdisciplinary approach, the formalistic, post-colonial, Marxist, and feminist approaches.