Oprah Had No Eyes to See Her Make a Monstrosity

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.

She ended up living a life full of manipulation and mediocrity. While living with Joe, she had to tend to many different tasks as his wife.  She wasn't independent with him either.  She was Joe's tag-a-long.  'She went through many silent rebellions over things like that.  Such a waste of life and time.  But Joe kept saying that she could do it if she wanted to and he wanted her to use her privileges.  That was the rock she was battered against.' (Hurston, 51)  Janie always had to wear her hair a certain way, always up in a head rag, in order not to attract attention to other men and women. She was always in a state of loneliness with herself.  While married to Janie, he would not allow her to attend the people's gatherings believing that she does not belong to such a group of lower class people.  Joe was depriving Janie of her independence and sanity.  "Naw, Ah ain't no young gal no mo' but den Ah ain't no old woman either.  Ah reckon Ah looks mah age too.  But Ah'm us woman every inch of me, and Ah know it.  Dat's uh whole lot more'n you kin say.  You big-bellies round here and put out a lot of brag, but 'tain't nothin' to it but yo' big voice.  Humph!  Talkin' 'bout me lookin' old!  When you pull down yo' britches, you look lak de change uh life." (Hurston, 75)  This quote spoken by Janie proves that she was getting sick and tired of being pushed around by Joe and his stuck-up ways.  This was a slow

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.

Throughout the Novel Janie struggles with handling the opinions of others and allowing them to affect how she sees herself. For instance Hurston writes “some people could look at a mud puddle and see an ocean with ships. Here Nanny had taken the biggest thing God ever made, the horizon- for no matter how far a person can go the horizon is still way beyond you- and pinched it into such a little bit of a thing that she could tie it about her granddaughter’s neck tight enough to choke her” (Hurston 89). Here Hurston demonstrates that others will always see things differently from one's perspective and Janie’s ongoing internal conflict with doing what would make her happy or doing what will satisfy those around her. However at the end of the novel Janie ultimately departs from the beliefs of others and displays self empowerment by disregarding the opinions of others over her actions. Similarly Hurston states “so she was free and the judge and everybody up there smiled with her and shook her hand. And the white women cried and stood around her like a protecting wall”(Hurston 188). This quote from the novel indicates that Janie displays self empowerment throughout the course of the novel and individual progress. This quote also shows the ideal of equality because although Janie is mixed she has always made her African

In Zora Neale Hurston’s romantic novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, the heroine Janie, a beautiful mixed white and black woman, is on a journey to find someone who will make her feel love to find her own identity and freedom, away from her spouses. Janie’s marriages and quest for love impede her individual search for freedom, but in doing this she has discovered what exactly she wants for herself. Janie’s search for her identity and freedom is very much evident. Being abused and controlled during her marriages has made it clear how she wants to be treated and how she wants to live her life; as an individual who does not have to listen to anyone. The story opens with Janie’s return to town. Janie tells Phoebe Watson the story of her

Zora Neale Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God recounts the life and loves of a bi-racial woman in the racially charged South during the 1900s. After the death of her third husband, Janie returns to Eatonville amid judgment and gossip, prompting her to share her life’s lessons with dear friend Phoeby. As Hurston’s protagonist relives her turbulent loves, she embarks of a journey of self-discovery, her voice transforming from suppressed to empowered over the course of her marriages.

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.

Oprah Winfrey is a woman with power; power to mess up the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God in her own movie interpretation of the same name. By turning this story of a woman finding herself into a love story, many key points of the plot were left out. Character motifs and morals also dramatically changed.

Oprah took a magnum opus, Their Eyes Were Watching God, and remade it into an entirely different story that did not comply with the book. By altering Janie’s character, moral fiber, relationships, and public acts, it changed the meaning of the novel. The symbolism and the significance of the title varied from the book and the story morphed into a tale of love when made into a movie. Zora Neale Hurston’s book held a disparate meaning before it fell into the hands of Oprah, who annihilated it.

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.

In The Novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie does find herself at the end of the novel. Zora Neale Hurston displays this perfectly, with all the conflicts and struggles going on she finds her way to her true voice. All the husbands she has gone through, and what she has experienced. Hurston effectively shows Janie’s victory over oppression throughout the book. She has allowed to use her language as power, and use that power to grow into what she is at the end of the book. This movement allows her the opportunity to explore and form her ideas and voice in solitude. These external variables cause her to look inward and not depend on others as a source of survival. When she finally comes to terms with her influence, she stops fleeing. She

In the novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston, there is evidence of inequality among many of the characters. The protagonist, who is an African-American woman, is constantly oppressed throughout the story. She enters three different relationships and experiences oppression and inequality because of her gender in all of them. In this novel, Janie Mae Crawford faces inequality and hardships in her life-long search for love; when viewing her journey through the Feminist theory, readers may gain a deeper understanding.

The authors of the time did have a valid reasoning to believe that the novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, was such an uninspiring novel. An artificial reading of the novel shows the reader a few small points that came make people mad. Janie the main character lives a sheltered life. Her grandmother, an ex-slave, shelters her from such a world, and she is brought up in a rich environment. All the black people that she do see are fairly well-off. She marries her first husband, Logan, who is not financially stable and she has to do labor, so she leaves him. Her next husband, Jody brings her to an all black city, Eatonville. The city mirrors that of a white city. Jody makes all the rules in the town and soon it becomes prosperous and grows while Jody makes a lot of money. She is unhappy in this rich white society. Thus when Jody dies, she goes off into the Everglades with Tea Cake and works in the fields

Their Eyes Were Watching God was a book that presented the world with a new look on writing novels. Zora Neale Hurston’s experience in what she has seen through research was embodies in this novel. She demonstrates what data she has collected and intertwined it into the culture within the novel. While being a folklorist/anthropologist, and inspired by her life experiences, she developed a character who dealt with the issues that were not yet uncovered, female empowerment was one of them. Zora Neale Hurston defined this topic of female empowerment throughout the character Janie in Their Eyes Were Watching God.

In the film version of Their Eyes Were Watching God, Oprah shifts the original theme of Hurston’s novel. She fabricates a love story to which the film revolves around recurrently and eliminates important elements. "It was one of the most beautiful, poignant love stories I 've ever read…” (Dir. Darnell). Her theme entirely displaces Janie’s life journey, the essential idea of the work. Janie’s journey through life serves as the central theme in the story; the novel illustrates how Janie matures as a woman, how she finds herself in life, and how she finds happiness. Oprah indubitably produces the picture to her misguided interpretation despite caring what Hurston originally wrote in the story. “Their Eyes Were Watching God is a complex novel that addresses issues of color, sexuality, community, and self-fulfillment. Oprah’s television adaptation does anything but” (Ceptus). These issues that Hurston includes in her famous work