Metaphors in Their Eyes Were Watching God

In Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God uses figurative language to demonstrate that love is not always how it seams. Janie Crawford is a young woman trying to find her voice or the first time but counters many obstacles growing up as a child to an adult. Zora Neale Hurston through a world of mss leading of love as well as sadness. The author uses different types of figurative language to describe Janies fairy tail love is not what it really seems to be.

The mule metaphorically showed oppression and cruelty towards Janie for both situations. For example, when she was with Logan, he was going to buy her a mule so Janie could forcefully work with him on the farm. When Janie was married to Joe, the entire community bonded over mocking a mule someone owned. Joe then bought the mule himself and instead of relieving of its pain, he further ridiculed it just as he had his wife. Ironically, Joe’s egotism and aspirations subjugated Janie to his will leaving her with no escape except of Joe’s passing.

As Zora Neale Hurston once said “If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it”. During the 1930’s, it was socially acceptable for men to hit his wife, but not the wife to hit her husband. The husband’s motivation was most likely because a man looks like he is in control of his wife or he is jealous. Janie, in Their Eyes Were Watching God, is beaten by all three of her husband's and suffers for most of her life . She was always in pain. In Zora Neale Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, she uses imagery to show how much Janie suffered throughout her life.

During the hurricane Tea Cake asks Janie if she regrets leaving Eatonville to which she replies, “Naw, We been tuhgether round two years. If you kin see de light at daybreak, you don’t keer if you die at dusk. It’s so many people never seen de light at all.” At daybreak there is a horizon- this connects to the situation as Janie implies that she has seen and captured her horizon, she has obtained her dream. Dusk happens after sunset, it’s the coming of darkness. Janie does not care if she has to die in the terrible hurricane. Janie notes that there are people who never “seen the light”- meaning they’ve never seen or captured their own horizon and dreams. Just by being with Tea Cake Janie believes she has a part of her horizon. This is expressed as a point that Tea Cake is expressed as “the sun of the Evening Sun.” During sunset in the evening, the evening sun is part of the horizon. This symbolizes that Tea Cake is part of the dream of Janie in becoming free and being able to love. After trial, Janie thinks “The sun was almost down and Janie had seen the sun rise on her troubled love and then she had shot Tea Cake and had been in jail and had been tried for her life and now she was free. Nothing to do with the little that was left of the day but to visit the kind white friends who had realized her feelings and thank them. So the sun went down.” This quote represents more than that given day- it represents the life of Janie. In the end, Janie had gone through 2 marriages as the sun rose on her “troubled love”, Janie had to kill her lover and be tried in court. Now, the sun would go down and the horizon would arise. This shows how Janie had to go through all her struggles and sacrifices in order to reach her horizon. Now Janie is free- she is free from having to be in pursuit of her

To them, the dream is not on the horizon and out-of-reach, “the dream is the truth.” This means that they can make their dreams becomes a reality, instead of hoping that it will happen. This difference is ironic, as it is a role reversal of the stereotype that men are superior to women as demonstrated by social norms. With this being said, however, it becomes evident throughout the novel that in this setting, women, like Janie, are able to shape their own world, although they must ignore certain traumatic memories, while the major male figures (Logan Killicks, Joe Starks, and Tea Cake) are either dead or defeated by the end of the novel. Thus, the women have more authority than it may seem at first glance, especially with their limited amounts of speech. The men have the ability to speak constantly, but do not use their language to further any noble cause. When it comes to women in the novel, however, especially Janie, their speech moves mountains. For example, Janie made a difference with the town mule. When she saw the mistreatment, she spoke out and saved the mule from a torturous

Janie tells Pheoby about her childhood and about how she witnesses love for the first time. When Janie was a teenager, she sees the erotic tension between a bee and a pear blossom. The narrator remarks, “Oh to be a pear tree- any tree in bloom. With kissing bees singing of the beginning of the world! She was sixteen.”

Thus, when considering the sexualized symbolism of the pear tree blooms, Janie reveals she comprehended the idea of what a marriage should be through witnessing the pollination of a bee into the blossoming pear tree.

In Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, symbols are implemented to help the readers Identify and understand the leitmotif of the novel. One commonly found symbol is Janie’s hair, which represents her personality, individuality, and character. The state of her hair changes as the novel progresses and Jamie goes through different stages of life, struggling to find true love. Using Jamie’s hair to express her feelings and emotions throughout the novel, Hurston highlights the theme that finding true love and happiness requires one to be free and adventurous in life without letting any obstacles or events alter one’s character.

The United States is a notoriously patriarchal society in which men view women as objects and their own possessions. Through history, men consistently constrained the rights women have to equality and self-expression because they deemed women as inferior. As a result, feminist movements erupted and propelled the importance of self-identity in victims of oppression, not just in females. One element of these movements was the use of literature as social protest. Zora Neale Hurston is an author who predominantly wrote through the Great Depression to advocate for equality, specifically for African American women. In her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston employs the symbolization of hair and the motif of speech to substantiate that one must be confident in making decisions to have individual power.

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.

In Zora Neale Hurston’s novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, she uses figurative language to show how people in Janie’s life are judgemental of her, from being judged on her appearance to being judged on her life. At the very opening of the novel the author shows that Janie’s entrance into the story was even judged, this foreshadows judgement throughout the novel. “But now the sun and the bossman were gone, so the skins felt powerful and humans. They become lords of sound and lesser things. They passed nations through their mouths.

In the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, Janie Crawford has three different husbands, each with his own unique characteristics. Logan Killicks, her first husband, is very wealthy but neglects her. She then marries Jody Starks, who is less affluent than Killicks, very powerful in his community, and outright abusive towards her. Janie’s final husband Tea Cake is the one she loves the most despite his lack of wealth. In spite of the varying storylines throughout the tenure of her marriages and the novel in general, one recurring thread is the use of the metaphor of the horizon: how men wait for their wishes to come true like ships on the horizon that need to come to shore. Janie’s struggles over whether love or wealth is more important to her happiness is described throughout the novel through the use of the horizon metaphor.

In Zora Neale Hurston’s novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, she utilizes an array of symbolism such as color, the store, and her husbands to solidify the overall theme of independence and individuality. Their Eyes Were Watching God is considered by many a classic American Feminist piece that emphasizes how life was for African Americans post slave era in the early 1900s. One source summarizes the story as, 1 ”a woman's quest for fulfillment and liberation in a society where women are objects to be used for physical work and pleasure.” Which is why the overall theme is concurrent to independence and self.

Books aren't written or read in a vacuum. They're woven by writers and consumed by readers with the influence of centuries of writing behind us. Whether we're conscious of it or not, reading a book is never an isolated incident but part of a tradition. The classics are the milestones of our literary tradition. One of these “milestones is a book by the name of “Their Eyes Were Watching God” written by Zora Neale Hurston. The book is mainly popular due to the story and theme that are expressed throughout the book. However, one thing many people do not think about is the title and its meaning. Although the precise meaning of the title is up for hot debate, it does touch upon many of the book’s important themes.

In the excerpt "Their Eyes Were Watching God", the author, Zora Neale Hurtson, uses a variety of rhetorical devices to highlight Janies feelings toward an arrange marriage. As a result, the author begins the excerpt with personification. "She had been spending every minute that she could steal from her chores under that tree for the last three days. " It is impossible to physically steal from chores. The authors purpose is to highlight that Janie has things to do, like chores, but decide, to do nothing for 3 days.