Review: Their Eyes Are Watching God By Zora Neale Hurston

During the 1930s there was a time period known as the Harlem Renaissance, during this time African Americans sought a newfound cultural freedom and advancements in social classes. In the novel, Their Eyes Are Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston portrays both similarities and departures from the ideals of the Harlem Renaissance. Hurston uses the main character Janie to illustrate these ideals such as the struggle to find oneself and fight against the opinions of others. In addition Hurston also depicts issues and similarities like African Americans who achieved high social classes and discriminated those below them, racial segregation, but also a new found African American confidence. She also demonstrates departures from the Harlem Renaissance

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.

In the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston the character Janie finds herself in some trouble. Her grandmother chose a man for her to marry, she finds herself a man that she fancy’s to marry. She must decide for herself to find a man that will care for her and her view of what happiness is. Even though she may have found her dream man, she still cannot find someone that is suitable for her. Logan Killicks is a man who can’t connect with Janie on an emotional level, he is very hard headed about Janie doing work around the house.

For this lesson, I have chosen the book Their eyes were watching God by Zora Neale Hurston. Human right obstacles the main character Janie will face are gender equality and freedom. In the 1930’s slavery has been banned and the colored are free, hinting towards the freedom the colored is now allowed to explore. However, gender equality I predict will also be brought out in this book. The reasoning for this prediction is from the first chapter and how the porch sisters judged Janie because she did not tell them her business. Along with the fact they judged her with evil thoughts and words out of jealousy, while the women saw women walking in overalls and all dirty that had left with a man in a satin dress. The men were still captivated by her

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.

In Their Eyes Were Watching God, the protagonist Janie had always dreamed of finding true love ever since she was a little girl. Therefore, it’s natural for Janie to jump at the first sign of her being able to love with Logan Kellick, which was an arranged marriage for Janie from her Nanny. However, Janie comes to notice that Logan just wants her to do everything and threatens to kill her if she didn’t obey him. Then Janie leaves Logan for Joe Starks but also leaves him because he points her out for acting too young for her age when she didn’t. He did that to draw attention away from his failing body so no one would notice that he is dying.

     In Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston, the reader is given a particular glimpse into Janie's life with reference to the men she has known.  Janie's three men are all very different, yet they were all Janie's husband at one point in her life.  Although they all behaved differently, in lifestyle as well as their relationship with Janie, they all shared certain similarities.

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.

Many people believe that love is a fulfilling feeling that can satisfy their wants and needs. This is not always the case in Zora Neale Hurston’s novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God. The psychological growth of protagonist Janie Crawford, which is marked by the pivotal moment when she kills Tea Cake, illustrates the idea that true love is hard to find and can force someone to make difficult, unwanted decisions. In the beginning, Janie forced herself to love both of her previous husbands, Logan and Joe, which clouded her vision of what true love was and forced her to act as a puppet to them. In Janie’s first marriage, we see the awful treatment she gets from Logan Killicks.

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.

When deciding upon something with such long lasting consequences as a lifelong mate – a husband or wife – one should consider many innumerable factors. Ideally, to ensure the longevity and the continuing mutual benefit characteristic of committed, monogamous relationships, one must essentially know the other partner as well as one knows oneself. This is, of course, impossible. In many cases, brazen audacity spurred by emotions and lust lead to the short sighted relinquishing of one’s trust over to another person. This creates situations where individuals frequently are thrust into relationships with long term effects that were doomed from the start – victims of the deceit of deliberately crafted facades. Such is the case in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, where the protagonist, Janie, seeks a particular husband to be the bee to her bloom – who through the course of three marriages spanning from her adolescence into middle age comes to learn of the true nature of love. With the passing of time, she progressively learns about herself and her place in the world as a woman with the formative experiences in each of her successive matrimonies.

Throughout history, the aspiration to accomplish one’s dreams and gain self-fulfillment has been and continues to be prevalent. Consequently, one’s reactions to the obstacles propelled at them may define how they will move forward in search of achieving their goals. Reaching one’s full potential is certainly not an easy conquest. Zora Neale Hurston, an especially noteworthy African American author, uses her astounding piece of literature, Their Eyes Were Watching God, to illuminate the path to discovering what is truly valuable in life. She uses the character, Janie Woods, who endures some of the greatest hardship imagined to elucidate the ways in which hindrance, although discouraging, only makes one stronger. Accordingly, Hurston argues

Throughout the development of the settlement of African Americans in America, they have gone through many different struggles and have come a long way from their nasty beginnings of slavery in America to modernized 2015 where African Americans have the same amount of rights that anyone else that is born in the country has. Both African American men and woman have struggled incessantly through time but each gender has had their individual struggles. Zora Neale Hurston portrays this with exquisite clarity in the novel “Their Eyes Were Watching God” sometimes using the imagery of animals to explain the hardships and adversity that African Americans had to overcome. She perfectly exemplifies how black woman in particular were treated as opposed to black men and what the expectations were that society had for them both.

The book, Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston is about Janie Crawford and her quest for self-independence and real love. She finds herself in three marriages, one she escapes from, and the other two end tragically. And throughout her journey, she learns a lot about love, and herself. Janie’s three marriages were all different, each one brought her in for a different reason, and each one had something different to teach her, she was forced into marrying Logan Killicks and hated it. So, she left him for Joe Starks who promised to treat her the way a lady should be treated, but he also made her the way he thought a lady should be. After Joe died she found Tea Cake, a romantic man who loved Janie the way she was, and worked hard

In Their Eyes Were Watching God by Lora Neale Hurston, the main character engages in three marriages that lead her towards a development of self. Through each endeavor, Janie learns the truths of life, love, and the path to finding her identity. Though suppressed because of her race and gender, Janie has a strong will to live her life the way she wills. But throughout her life, she encounters many people who attempt to change the way that she is and her beliefs. Each marriage that she undertakes, she finds a new realization and is on a never-ending quest to find her identity and true love. Logan Killicks, Joe Starks, and Tea Cake each help Janie progress to womanhood and find her identity.