A comparison between Their Eyes Were Watching God and the color purple From Zora Neale Hurston's novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, Alice Walker says "it doesn't tell me about a novel, past or present, has ever done." Although there are 45 years separating Their Eyes Were Watching God and The Color Purple, the two novels embody many similar concerns and methods. Hurston and Walker write about the experience of uneducated rural Southern black women. They find wisdom that can transform our community relationships and our spiritual lives. As Celie says in The Color Purple, referring to God: "If he ever listened to poor black women, the world would be a different place, I can tell you." Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God describes a woman's process of consciousness-raising. , finding her voice and developing the power to tell her story. This fresh and much-needed perspective was met with incomprehension by the male literary establishment. In his review of New Masses, Richard Wright said that the novel lacked "a basic idea or theme that lent itself to meaningful interpretation". Hurston's dialogue, he said, "succeeds in capturing the psychological movements of the Negro folk mind in their pure simplicity, but that is all. . . . The sensory breadth of his novel carries no theme, no message, no thought. . . " Many male reviewers and critics have reacted with similar hostility and incomprehension to The Color Purple. But to be blind to the definitions these and other writers give to women's experience is to deny the validity of that experience. For Hurston's heroine, Janie, self-discovery and self-definition are about learning to recognize and trust her own inner voice, while rejecting the formulations that others try to impose on her. Increase...... middle of paper......: 181-202.Tate, Linda. "There's No Place Like Home": Learning to Read the Maps of Two Writers // A Twist of Southern Women. Contemporary Southern fiction. The University of Georgia Press, Athens, Georgia and London, 1994Wade-Gayler, Gloria. Black, Southern, Womanizer: The Genius of Alice Walker // Southern Writers. The new generation. Ed. By Tonette Bond Inge. The University of Alabama Press, Touscaloosa & London, 1990 Critical essays on Alice Walker. Ed. By Ikenna Dieke. Greenwood Press, Westpoint, Connecticut, London, 1999Modern critical views. Alice Walker. Ed. by Harold Bloom. Chelsea House Publishers. New York and Philadelphia, 1989Walker, Alice. The color purple. Harcourt Bruce Jovanovich, Publishers. New York, San Diego, London, 1992--. "Finding Celie's Voice," Ms., December 1985, 72--. Meridian. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1976.