Examples Of False God In Their Eyes Were Watching God

When he was little his mom died, and his dad remarried to a woman named Thula. Thula did not like joe and she kicked him out when he was only ten years old. “She declared that she would not live under the same roof as joe, that Harry must choose between him and her. She said Joe would have to move out if she were to stay in a godforsaken place. Joe was only ten years old” (Brown 86,87). I never could understand how someone could kick a child out of the house and force them to live on their own when they are ten years old. As Joe grew up the more he needed his family, but his family was not there for him, at least not his biological family. When Joe made the rowing team that's the day that he got a new family, even if he did not know it at the time. So was Joyce, a beautiful girl who loved joe and they were going to get married and start a family of their own. “When joe stopped playing they talked about what it would be like when they were married and had a hoe and maybe kids” (Brown 102). Making the rowing team and meeting and falling in love with Joyce might have been the best thing that has ever happened to Joe. As soon as everything start going good for Joe, Thula gets an infection and dies. Not that it was a good thing that she died, it was very sad, but it brought Joe and his dad back together again. Harry wanted Joe to move back home with him and the kids. “I’m going to build a house where we can all live

In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston portrays the religion of black people as a form of identity. Each individual in the black society Hurston has created worships a different God. But all members of her society find their identities by being able to believe in a God, spiritual or other. Grandma’s worship of Jesus and the “Good Lawd,” Joe Starks’ worship of himself, Mrs. Turner’s worship of white characteristics, and Janie’s worship of love, all stem from a lack of jurisdiction in the society they inhabit. All these Gods represent a need for something to believe in and work for: an ideal, which they wish to achieve, to aspire to. Each individual character is thus

Joe grows as a character throughout the book, his life began at a very young age when his mother Nellie died of throat cancer, this left Joe growing up without having a good mother figure in his life. Not only that, but Joe was also really sick at a young age by contracting scarlet fever. So he would be staying at his aunt Alma’s home, where he was raised as a young child. Later on when he turned five years old, he went to go back to living with Harry and his newly wedded wife Thula. “Harry Rantz packed his family into his Franklin touring car and headed northeast, to the mining camp where he had been working as a master mechanic for the past year.” (Brown 71). The longer Thula and Joe lived together, the bond between them

In Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie, the protagonist, tells the story of her ascension to adulthood and several of the lessons she learned along the way. Though married three times, her second marriage to Joe Starks had the most formative impact on her transition to maturity. Given that Joe played such a crucial role in this affair, we can classify him as a type of parent to Janie. Later, after her final marriage, Janie reflects on her life and is at peace. By that point, she came to realize how to be truly happy.

Janie recollects her image on love when she leaves with Joe which signifies that she values love over the stable life that she had already possessed.

Therefore, both Joe and Janie are looked up to by the townspeople. To some extent, this could be considered a form of equality. Unfortunately, this is about where the equality stops. While Joe gains prominence through his own actions and words, Janie gains some prominence by doing what she is told to do. She is not permitted to voice her own opinions or join in the lighthearted gossiping which occurs outside of their store. Janie is expected to be the dutiful wife. If she makes a mistake, then she should have known better and therefore should accept her punishment quietly. Joe holds the obvious upper hand in the relationship until his death whereupon Janie inherits a large amount of money and learns to enjoy the freedom of living as her own person.

Tea Cake has saved Janie’s life but not his. The bite from the dog gave Tea Cake rabies. Tea Cake later dies and Janie has now reached rock bottom again and cannot pick herself up anymore. Nature has once proved how it feeded Janie with her ambitions of love but crushed her dreams and ended her adventure in the most catastrophic way

First, Janie, the main character, starts off living and being taken care of her grandmother, Nanny. She later grows up to become married, but their relationship is not genuine because her grandmother wanted her to marry the man. Janie meets a man called Joe Starks and they run off to a town called Eatonville where Joe becomes Mayor and blinded by his power. He becomes violent and domestically abuses Janie. Joe would be manipulative and isolate her from the rest of the town because she was "high-class." They live on to become older, and he eventually dies due to a sickness he needed to have checked two years earlier, but it was too late.

Throughout the book “Their Eyes Were Watching God” (written by author Zora Neale Hurston and published in September 1937) multiple motifs (a recurrent image, symbol, theme, character type, subject, or narrative detail that becomes a unifying element in an artistic work or text) have appeared amidst the chapters. Furthermore, motifs have played an excruciatingly important role overall throughout the book, whether it be a place, a person, the weather, or simply just a personʻs possession(s). Therefore, in this prompt I will explain the various motifs exhibited in the passages.

Janie's attraction to Joe Starks' charisma quickly diminishes when his overdose of ambition and controlling personality get the best of him. Although he is a big voice in the town, Janie only sees him as a big voice. All his money and power have no effect on her when all he does is ridicule and control her. He makes it clear where Janie belongs: "Ah never married her for nothin' lak dat. She's uh woman and her place is in de home" (Hurston 43). This is ironic because when she is with Logan, she wants to be in the house doing her own thing, but Joe is making it sound like confinement. It's as if she has no choice in the matter and Joe intends to make his power over her known. People have different desires and sometimes when we get caught up in our success, we can end up hurting others. Joe's reply to Janie is a great example of the insensitivity that can form from the pride we can possibly inherit when we achieve success: "Ah told you in de first beginnin' dat Ah aimed tuh be uh big voice.

The Hurricane and flood in the novel, “Their Eyes Were Watching God” by Zora Neale Hurston illuminates the similarity between the novel and the natural disaster that occurred in south Florida in 1992. In the novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, the protagonist Janie marries and remarries three times in hope of finding the right man who can help her find her voice. As can be seen, Hurricane Andrew and the hurricane in the novel are similar in that they both correlate with one another. Janie walks through a hurricane that symbolizes of all the troubles she faced in life which is similar to Hurricane Andrew and the hardships it caused for many people living in south Florida at the time. The hurricane being a metaphor for her other struggles, helps us get a clear understanding of the hardships she faced in life. Once the storm ends, all these troubles Janie had to face in life come to an end as well because now she gets to live a new life back in Eatonville without any of these marriages or anything else that caused her troubles in life previously. The claims made by Steinberg help analyze the similarities between Janie and Hurricane Andrew which gives us a clear understanding of how Hurricane Andrew is a representation of Janie’s hardships in life.

He does not understand why his own mother would do such a thing to him. During this moment, Joe begins to transition from precociousness to the confrontation stage. After he kills his mother, he is confronted by Shola, who tells him that his mother is good and she is not the devil. Joe arrives at the Church with his mother’s body being carried in his arms. He lays her at the alter and begins to pray for forgiveness and to say his final goodbyes. His father rudely suggests that he removes Nunu’s body from the church. Joe’s will for his mother and his emotions got the best of him when he confronted his father about the truth and him being his child. Joe was intensely outraged and sat the church on fire burning himself and his father. At the moment of Joe’s death, Joe was in the internalization stage of black consciousness. Joe began to have positive attitudes about his mother’s culture and beliefs.

Joe Starks is an admirable person. He promises Janie beautiful material things and happiness unlike Logan who only tried to control her and offered her no love. Janie is overwhelmed by this proposal and believes that Joe may be the bee that has come to fertilize her and make her happy, but she is proven wrong. After she runs away from Logan, Joe and Janie travel to a new town that is only occupied by African Americans. There, Joe becomes mayor and is well respected by all. He gains wealth and gives Janie the material things that he promised her, but forces her to work in his local store all day long. He does not allow her to attend parties or have any fun and makes negative comments about her constantly. He says,

In Zora Neale Hurston’s, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie goes through three marriages, discovering herself along the way. At one point in her life, Janie marries Joe, an important leader for the town of Eatonsville, a large contributor to the town and well respected by many. Afterwards, she marries Tea Cake, a younger man but also well respected by his fellow workers. While both of their funerals may have the basic similarities of being funerals themselves, having many people, and being somewhat fancy, upon a closer look Joe’s funeral is an outreach of his being controlling others, while Tea Cake’s funeral is a memorial to him created by his friends and family, which reveals how much better of a husband and friend Tea Cake was.

Janie initially sees Joe Starks as an enticing option to better her life; however, his frequent use of the phrase "I god" emphasizes his commitment to living under the white hierarchy (Hurston 34). Joe's dialect reveals that he sees himself as a god-like figure, but never able to fully able to achieve the power of a white man, shown by the lack of capitalization of "god." However, this pursuit leads him to dominate Janie's life, most notably her appearance in public. Contrasting with the relative physical inactivity of Joe Starks, the sight of another man touching Janie's hair spurs him to "[feel] like rushing forth with the meat knife and chopping off the offending hand" (Hurston 55). Hurston's dialect here, not in the typical spoken dialogue, but the biblical allusion of cutting off an offending body part to maintain the safety of the whole suggests that Joe considers Janie's beauty a foil to his greatness. Julie Newman argues, "He clearly represents an aggressive, white-identified capitalism, consuming Janie" (821). In ridding himself of his African American heritage and dialect in favor of white culture, Joe elevates himself above the other citizens of Eatonville, including Janie. After nearly twenty years of oppression, Janie rebukes Joe's control on her life: "When you pull down yo' britches, you look lak de change uh life" (Hurston 79). Hurston's use of "you" amidst other more familiar dialect suggests Janie noticed Joe's infatuation with white hierarchy, yet still used traditional African American speech to break publicly with Joe's rule. However, Janie already criticized a male representative of the white culture, Logan Killicks. While in bed, representative of the most intimate part of marriage, Janie wonders