Their Eyes Were Watching God: Setting 1 key example

Next, Janie goes with Joe Starks to Eatonville, the real all-Black Florida town outside of Orlando. Zora Neale Hurston, though she was born in Alabama, grew up in Eatonville and considered it her home, and she would sometimes even call it her birthplace. Her father was the mayor and, later, the minister at the town's largest church. Eatonville features in many of Hurston's stories as a place for Black people to live a free life outside of the purview of white-controlled power structures.

Janie and Tea Cake leave Eatonville, go briefly to Jacksonville in northern Florida to marry, then move to Belle Glade, "the muck," on the coast of Lake Okeechobee in the Everglades. Hurston wrote much of the book while living in one of the labor camps in Belle Glade (as well as while on a research trip to Haiti). After this, Janie returns home to her town, still unnamed.

The three main locations—home, Eatonville, and Belle Glade—have a few notable distinguishing factors: first, Hurston makes the dialect slightly different in each place, each with different quirks showing different communities and cultures. Janie also has a different husband in each place, connecting each place to a part of her life. Janie's position in society is also dependent on the particular character of each place: Janie is the wanton pleasure-seeker in her old-fashioned small hometown; she is the adored trophy-wife mayoress in Eatonville; and she is the surprisingly strong outsider-turned-farmhand in Belle Glade. 

In its historical setting, it's possible to infer that the book takes place from about 1908 to 1928. The hurricane at the end of the book is, without doubt, the famous 1928 Okeechobee hurricane, which destroyed much of central Florida. Janie's three marriages last a little more than 20 years in total, so the book begins around 1908. Though this is the full range of time that passes in the book, the temporal setting is quite sporadic, as the narrative frequently jumps forward many months or years at a time.

Also relevant is the historical context of the setting in which Hurston sets her novel: the post-reconstruction, Jim Crow south. Nanny talks about this time in history, the early 20th century in the south, where Black people, decades after the abolition of slavery, still are not free: “You know, honey, us colored folks is branches without roots and that makes things come round in queer ways. You in particular. Ah was born back due in slavery so it wasn’t for me to fulfill my dreams of whut a woman oughta be and do.” Much of the story is inflected by this historical setting. Janie's relationships are often influenced by her desire for some opportunity to sit on the "master's chair" (as Pheoby describes it). But Janie still is a woman in a prejudiced world. Even in the Black towns of Eatonville and Belle Glade, with which Hurston was so familiar, Janie is still influenced by the legacy of slavery.