Analysis Of Their Eyes Were Watching God

When Janie is about sixteen her grandmother finds her in the act of kissing a boy, and afraid for Janie, she arranges for Janie to be married to Logan Killicks, who is an older man with vast property to his name. Nanny, as Janie calls her, is unable to wrap her mind around the idea of marrying for love and mocks Janie saying, "So you don't want to marry off decent like, do yuh? You just wants to hug and kiss and feel around with first one man and then another, huh?" (Their Eyes Are Watching God, 13). Her grandmothers’ gift of life is different from the life that Janie wants to live. She tells Janie, “De nigger woman is de mule uh de world so fur as Ah can see.'” (Their Eyes Are Watching God, 11). Nanny doesn’t believe that trying to find love and make a better life for you will succeed, she tells Janie that marrying and older man with land to his name will bring security, and she shouldn’t want more than that. Because of this Janie agrees and goes along with the plan. She is depicted as very compliant and rarely speaks her mind, even saying “But Ah hates disagreement and confusion, so Ah better not talk. It makes it hard tuh git along” (Their Eyes Were Watching God, 90).

The film Their Eyes Were Watching God, based off of the novel by author Zora Neale Hurston, is a story of a young woman named Janie who spends the film narrating her life story to a friend. Janie’s story is one of self-exploration, empowerment, and the ability to express her freedoms both as a maturing woman and African American, throughout her life experiences. As she navigates through sexism and racism to find herself it becomes more evident that it will be more difficult than she initially thought to reach a point of happiness.

Many people believe in marrying for love and they spend most of their life searching for it. In the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Nora Zeal Hurston, Janie Crawford goes through three marriages, and as a result, she learns who she wants to be and how to become that woman. Janie has her idealized view of marriage that depicts that you marry for love, and everything is like a fairytale. Through Janie’s three marriages, she learns what she truly desires in life and finds herself along the way. As each marriage comes to a close, Janie becomes stronger and surer of herself.

Topic 2: Compare/contrast Janie in Hurston 's Their Eyes Were Watching God & Edna in Chopin 's The Awakening in terms of conformity within a male-dominated society. (four page minimum)

Folklorist, anthropologist, playwright, and novelist, Zora Neale Hurston 's career took off after publishing, what is, today, her most famous novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God. Unlike any other work at the time, the dialect in her novels portrayed how African-Americans speak in the deep south. Set in Southern Florida, the heroine Janie, is thought to have been modeled after Hurston, herself, if she had chose to stay in her hometown of Eatonville instead of going to college. In the novel, Janie is unable to develop a life as a New Woman through much of her adulthood due to the geographical area she lived in, basic education, financial state, grandmother 's values, history of slavery, and her marriage to Joe Sparks. Hurston, on the other hand, was able to develop her life as a New Woman due to her access to higher education, financial state, and support from her mother.

In Zora Neale Hurston’s famous novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston explores the life of a southern black woman, Janie Crawford, whose three marriages of domineering control of men make her acknowledge her independence and self-satisfaction as an African-American woman. Set in the early 1900s, Hurston reveals the dominant role of men in southern society and one woman’s journey toward finding herself and God.

In Their Eyes Were Watching God, love plays a pivotal role in the life of the protagonist, Janie. Janie is exposed early in life to all the facets of love. From an early point in the novel until the very end, Janie searches for a man to fulfill her childhood concept of love. It is through this search for love that Janie finds the confidence and security in herself to become independent. Therefore, Janie’s quest to find love is not only a fulfillment of a childhood dream, but also a journey to find who she really is.

Zora Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God follows protagonist Janie Mae Crawford’s journey into womanhood and her ultimate quest for self-discovery. Having to abruptly transition from childhood to adulthood at the age of sixteen, the story demonstrates Janie’s eternal struggle to find her own voice and realize her dreams through three marriages and a lifetime of hardships that come about from being a black woman in America in the early 20th century. Throughout the novel, Hurston uses powerful metaphors helping to “unify” (as Henry Louis Gates Jr. puts it) the novel’s themes and narrative; thus providing a greater understanding of Janie’s quest for selfhood. There are three significant metaphors in the novel that achieve this unity: the

In Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, the protagonist, Janie, endures two marriages before finding true love. In each of Janie’s marriages, a particular article of clothing is used to symbolically reflect, not only her attitude at different phases in her life, but how she is treated in each relationship.

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston is about a young woman that is lost in her own world. She longs to be a part of something and to have “a great journey to the horizons in search of people” (85). Janie Crawford’s journey to the horizon is told as a story to her best friend Phoebe. She experiences three marriages and three communities that “represent increasingly wide circles of experience and opportunities for expression of personal choice” (Crabtree). Their Eyes Were Watching God is an important fiction piece that explores relations throughout black communities and families. It also examines different issues such as, gender and class and these issues bring forth the theme of voice. In Janie’s attempt to find herself, she

In both Zora Neale Hurston’s short story “Sweat” and novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, the focus is on women who want better lives but face difficult struggles before gaining them. The difficulties involving men which Janie and Delia incur result from or are exacerbated by the intersection of their class, race, and gender, which restrict each woman for a large part of her life from gaining her independence.

In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie Mae Crawford, the Protagonist, is involved in three diverse relationships. Zora Neale Hurston, the author, explains how Janie grows into young woman through marriage, integrity, and love and happiness from her relationships with Logan Killicks, Joe Starks, and Tea Cake.

We grow up to the adults in our life telling us we are "unique", to be "ourselves" but when we practice that distinctive trait, we get labeled as weird; in other words "not normal". In the book, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie, the protagonist, favors the idea of love and freedom but in the town she is leaving in, those two are considered taboo to women. Janie being able to think for herself is the distinctive trait that sets her apart from the other women in her town. This is a problem because Janie got mad at her grandmother (nanny) for suggesting an arranged marriage but the grandmother was just voicing everyone's thoughts and expectations. So through janie's journey to self discovery, she shows us that we need to break away from

It is a commonly held belief that our childhoods have at least some effect on our adult life. For Zora Neale Hurston, she presents that view in her novel, Their Eyes were Watching God. While Hurston does not give too much insight into Janie’s childhood, one can perceive how her adult life has been affected by what Hurston gives. Janie was raised by her Nanny, used to enduring things that were out of her control in her childhood (specifically started when she was young and married off.) It seems as if Janie is never in full control, despite making decisions that should alter her life. Janie also possesses a sort of innocence, especially when it comes to love, as she grows older. Comparing that to Ernest Hemingway’s The Nick Adams Stories, Nick shows a different aspect of how a childhood can impact adulthood. He is a character that grows up learning to be independent and having an ability to take care of himself. And that stems from the experiences he has a child.

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston rests upon a standard of incredible excellence. An account of the coming of age and maturation of Janie Mae Crawford, a strong, resilient, black woman, the novel boasts a beautiful depiction of the complex feelings of love, compassion, and liberation. The work’s success with its themes is largely due to Hurston’s phenomenal writing. She exercises marvelous skill in the narration of the characters and their innermost thoughts. Regardless of gender or race, one becomes invested in each character’s feelings and easily relates to their struggles. Additionally, the way the story is presented to the audience in vernacular dialect allows the novel to be told as a story, rather than a lengthy