193:

• What two common perceptions about Their Eyes Were Watching God does Washington refute in the first paragraph?

• Explain:  "Janie's relationships with men deprive her of community and of her voice" (194).
• Explain:  "Her friendship with Pheoby, occurring apart from the community, encapsulates Janie and Pheoby in a private dyad that insulates Janie from the jealousy of other women" (194).
• Explain:  "When the voice of the black oral tradition is summoned in Their Eyes, it is not used to represent the collective black community, but to invoke and valorize the voice of the black male community" (194).

• Explain:  "Speech does not lead Janie to power, however, but to self-division and to further acquiescence in her status as object" (197).

• Explain: "There are critical places in Their Eyes where Janie's voice needs to be heard and is not, places where we would expect her as the subject of the story to speak" (199).

• Does Washington agree with Stepto's claim, as she paraphrases it, that "Hurston creates only the illusion that Janie has achieved her voice" (200). Explain. (see also footnote 12)

• Explain:  "[Tea Cake] exists in death in a far more mythical and exalted way than in life" (204).
• How, according to Washington, is Janie more like a heroine than a hero?

• Explain:  "Unable to achieve an easy integration into society . . . , [Janie] stands on the outside and calls into question her culture's dependence on externals, its lack of self-reflection, and its treatment of women" (205).

• Explain: "[W]omen are excluded categorically from the language of the dominant discourse" (194).
• Explain: Women's exclusion reveals "the inadequacy of language, its inability to represent female experience, its tendency not only to silence women but to make women complicitous in that silence" (194).
  

196:

• Explain: "As a symbol of male sexuality [especially in Jonah's Gourd Vine], the train suggests power, dynamism, and mobility" (196).  Discuss a relevant example from Their Eyes.

202:

• Explain:  "Janie Starks is almost the complete antithesis of John Pearson" (202).

• Explain: "Janie's final comment that experience is more important than words is an implicit criticism of the culture that celebrates orality to the exclusion of inner growth" (203).