Bending the tree, building the woman: A stylistic approach to voice and vision in 'Their Eyes Were Watching God'

Zora Neale Hurston, in TEWWG, deconstructs the image of two important literary tropes that were deeply embedded in the African American literary tradition: the dispirited black female and the tragic mulatto. Both of these characters, Nanny as the dispirited black female and Janie as the tragic mulatto, are haunted by their traumatic histories. This study analyzes Hurston's use of African American Vernacular English, free indirect discourse, cultural metaphors, and lexical cohesion to show how Hurston constructs a novel that produces a new vision for two female characters who were often blinded by their tragic pasts.;Extensive research on Janie is a significant part of the scholarship for TEWWG, however, few scholars have focused on how the language of the dispirited female and the tragic mulatto, when analyzed concurrently, constructs a view of how these two characters are re-visioned in this novel. An extensive stylistic study of the language in TEWWG is constructed to argue that Hurston creates a new language for African American women, or more specifically, the dispirited black female and tragic mulatto.