Janie's Motif

Zora Neale Hurston is considered one of the most unsurpassed writers of twentieth-century African-American literature. Published in 1937, Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God depicts the life of Janie Crawford, an African-American woman, who is in search of true love and ultimately her true self. In the novel, Janie shows us that love comes in all shapes and forms, and love is different with each person you choose to love. In the opening of the novel, Hurston uses a metaphor to say that, while men can never reach for their dreams, women can direct their wills and chase their dreams. Hurston uses this metaphor to make a distinction of men and women gender roles, and Janie went against the norms that were expected of her.

Feminism and gender equality is one of the most important issues of society today, and the debate dates back much farther than Zora Neale Hurston’s novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God. To analyze Janie’s existence as a feminist or anti-feminist character requires a potential critic to look at her relationships and her reactions to those relationships throughout the novel. Trudier Harris claims that Janie is “questing after a kind of worship.” This statement is accurate only up until a certain point in her life, until Janie’s “quest” becomes her seeking equality with her partner. In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie’s main goal pertaining to her romantic relationships undergoes multiple changes from her original goal of a type of worship to a goal to maintain an equal relationship with her husband.

Their Eyes Were Watching God is a novel by Zora Neale Hurston about Janie, who relates her life story of three marriages to her friend Phoeby. Throughout the novel, Janie embarks on a journey to find the limits of her personal horizons and expand them. Janie’s clothing varies from wealthy to poor, and from traditionally masculine to feminine, enriching the narrative with symbolism and supplementary information. Her femininity, actualized in her hair and clothing, is an integral part of her identity. The changing images of clothing throughout the novel exemplify Janie’s developing maturity and gradually show Janie creating a personal identity.

Love and Light In Their Eyes Were Watching God In Zora Neale Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston writes about Janie Crawford and how she navigates her three marriages and additionally the death of two of her husbands. Janie’s love for her second husband Joe fades over time, which is the definition of “real love” that Hurston uses in the novel.

Joe doesn't like this so he criticizes Janie daily about how she looks he makes her put her hair up. In the store Janie cuts tobacco for Steve Mixon but she cuts it wrong and Joe gets angry, and he yells at her “I god amighty! A woman stay round uh store till she get old as Methusalem and still can’t cut a little thing like a plug of tobacco! Don’t stand dere rollin’ yo’ pop eyes at me wid yo’ rump hangin’ nearly to yo’ knees!” (Hurston 92-93). Janie gets mad also and replies, “Stop mixin’ up mah doings wid mah looks, Jody. When you git through tellin’ me how tuh cut uh plug uh tobacco, then you kin tell me whether mah behind is on straight or not”(Hurston 86). Janie sticks up for herself after years of Joe controlling her and beating her. Janie waxes stronger and learns that the way she feels is just as important as the way Joe feels or anyone else. While Joe is dying Janie goes into his room and tells him that he isn't the same person that she ran away with that he changed for worse. After he dies she does something for herself, Hurston writes “The young girl was gone, but a handsome woman had taken her place. She tore off the kerchief from her head and let down her plentiful hair. The weight, the length, the glory was there. She took careful stock of herself, then combed her hair and tied it back up again”(103-104). Janie letting her hair down is symbolic of her freedom and independence she is done with Joe

In Zora Neale Hurston's novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, the reader is taken on an expedition through the life and love of Janie, which provides the reader different levels of imagery and symbolism. “Hurston… use the journey motif to structure and enhance their heroines‘quests as well as lyrical image patterns to evoke and communicate the processes of growth, regeneration and intimations of the Divine within each character.” (Sullivan 1364) Through this expedition Janie strives to achieve her principles about what love was and how she should be living her life. Hurston chose to introduce the reader to the return of Janie as the opening of the book. “Janie’s existence will become a continuous struggle to bring her own experience into harmony with her initial vision of the pear tree” (Maroto 72) Janie was not focusing on what is wrong in her single life, but what was good in it. “Now, women forget all those things they don't want to remember, and

In Zora Neale Hurston’s novel, Their eyes were watching God the main character Janie is on a quest for self-fulfillment. Of Janie’s three marriages, Logan and Joe provide her with a sense of security and status. However, only her union with Teacake flourishes into true love.

Zora Neale Hurston had an intriguing life, from surviving a hurricane in the Bahamas to having an affair with a man twenty years her junior. She used these experiences to write a bildungsroman novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, about the colorful life of Janie Mae Crawford. Though the book is guised as a quest for love, the dialogues between the characters demonstrate that it is actually about Janie’s journey to learn how to not adhere to societal expectation.

Nanny controls Janie’s love life, her first marriage with Logan at least, because of her experiences with slavery in the past. Her purpose is to have readers acknowledge Janie’s background and take that into consideration when the setting fades into the town in Florida with Joe as the mayor. Janie does show minimal resistance against the marriage between her and Logan because she does not yet have the experience of what love is supposed to be like and “asked inside of [herself] and out” (25). By not just superficially contemplating the idea if “marriage [ended] the cosmic loneliness of the unmated” or if “marriage compel love like the sun the day”, the concept of love and marriage is something that deeply troubles Janie. The pear tree symbolizes sexuality and it functions as a catalyst for Janie’s curiosity regarding what love is. With the imagery of the pear tree and the bee, it shows that love to Janie is interpersonal for the most part. However, this interpretation Janie has from seeing the pear tree and the bee changes as the novel progresses. At this point in the novel with Nanny attempting to inflict her own values and mentality onto Janie, Janie is viewed as the mule at the moment because Nanny is brought up in the slavery time period with patriarchal system to run their society and the ideas of women being independent and having their own voice are just

Early in the text of Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston employs imagery and syntax to show Janie uncovering the growth and power she has over her own life. This sort of revelation comes to Janie as Hurston describes that “It had called her to come and gaze on a mystery. From barren brown seems to glistening leaf-buds; from the leaf-buds to snowy

In Zora Neale Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, she sets the protagonist, Janie Mae Crawford as a woman who wants to find true love and who is struggling to find her identity. To find her identity and true love it takes her three marriages to go through. While being married to three different men who each have different philosophies, Janie comes to understand that she is developed into a strong woman. Hurston makes each idea through each man’s view of Janie, and their relationship with the society. The lifestyle with little hope of or reason to hope for improvement. He holds a sizeable amount of land, but the couple's life involves little interaction with anyone else.

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

Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God tells the story of Janie’s journey towards spiritual enlightenment and her development of individuality, largely through Janie’s relationships with others. Hurston uses the themes of power, control, abuse, and respect, in Janie’s relationships with Nanny, Killicks, Starks, and Tea Cake, to effectively illustrate how relationships impact identity and self-growth.

In Zora Neale Hurston’s novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie is depicted as a seeker searching for a sexual and spiritual awakening, which suggests seekers must discover, in nature, their emerging thoughts of sexuality. Janie’s first encounter with nature occurs immediately after she kisses Johnny Taylor. Her initial experience concerning love is provoked by Janie’s budding thoughts of sexuality while she “was stretched on her back beneath the pear tree”, indicating nature is the only place to discover endearment. Prior to Janie’s new thoughts of sexuality, she was under the strict care of Nanny; living under stringent rules constantly prevented Janie from being exposed to love. Janie broke the overbearing ties of her Nanny and came to

However, she later realizes she has made another mistake with this marriage, leaving her to imagine “the shadow of herself going about tending the store and prostrating itself before Jody, while all the time she herself sat under a shady tree with the wind blowing through her hair and her clothes. Somebody near about making summertime out of lonesomeness.” (77). The reader can easily see the disconnect between Janie’s current life and the life she wants to live. For her dream to be a “reality”, she needs to escape her real life in order to do so, which she sees as a lonesome task.