The Eyes Were Watching God By Zora Neal Hurston

However, upon further speculation of the novel, it can be said that even though Wright argues that Hurston did not make enough of a conscious effort to make a political statement with her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, she did; she just did not employ violence to demonstrate that racial oppression does not control her life.

Throughout life, everybody makes sacrifices that may become more beneficial to him or in ways they could not foresee. A sacrifice may be simply giving up an object or giving up something deeper in meaning. Their Eyes Were Watching God is a prime example of a book that reflects this theme. In Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, the main character, Janie, struggles to figure out her identity and what she desires in life. As she matures in her relationships and in life, she learns to make sacrifices in order to seek what she really needs. In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston illuminates Janie’s values and the text’s emphasis on self-actualization is demonstrated through Janie leaving stability with Logan to marry Joe,

In life, there are many types of people that are spread throughout the world (5). People often have specific tendencies that can be attributed to their individual community. For example, the pronunciation of words and their vocabulary can change when entering different states. Bostonians tend to drop their r’s and New Yorkers usually accentuate every letter, and the South is famous for their charming drawl. This is a type of Regionalism; although, not everyone participates in these commonalities within their state, there are many other forms of Regionalism that take place in life and in Zora Neale Hurston’s, Their Eyes Were Watching God. In this novel, Regionalism plays a prime role in the dialect used by the characters, how a woman is treated by her husband, and how African Americans must be thought of as inferior because of popular opinion.

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.

     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.

The novel Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston explores the life of an African American woman from the south who is trying to find herself. The protagonist of this novel is Janie Crawford. She is trying to defy what people expect of her, and she lives her life searching to have a better life. Zora Neale Hurston’s life experiences influence the book in many ways, including language, personality, and life experiences.

In the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston a young girl named Janie begins her life unknown to herself. She searches for the horizon as it illustrates the distance one must travel in order to distinguish between illusion and reality, dream and truth, role and self? (Hemenway 75). She is unaware of life?s two most precious gifts: love and the truth. Janie is raised by her suppressive grandmother who diminishes her view of life. Janie?s quest for true identity emerges from her paths in life and ultimatly ends when her mind is freed from mistaken reality.

Zora Hurston focuses on many themes throughout her novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, one of them being the development of gender roles. While it may seem that the novel is a story of one woman discovering herself on her own, an underlying theme is how people’s identities are determined by their relationships. Through a multitude of relationships in the novel Hurston develops the different roles of men and women within a relationship. In Zora Hurston’s novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston emphasizes the development of gender roles to suggest that society views the people involved based on the role they play in their various relationships.

In the production of Their Eyes Were Watching God, Oprah Winfrey transforms the work of Zora Neale Hurston, creating many differences from the novel. By altering the overall focus along with Janie’s relationships, depleting all of the rhetorical devices, and changing the characteristics of the town of Eatonville, Winfrey creates an opposition between the plot of the book and movie. The diverse side of Oprah’s interpretation causes the contrast of her ideas and Hurston’s.

In order for an individual to effectively rebel against an established society, he or she must maintain some degree of power. If leaders or majority groups intend to revolt against an aspect of society, they simply speak or act against their issue. A member of marginalized group does not have the liberty of rebelling so directly, as he or she would be immediately isolated. In addition, taking a stand through an unappreciated aspect of one’s status in society would be futile. Therefore, an individual must find his or her value to society and utilize it as their method for rebellion. This is exemplified in both Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston and The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, as women rebel against society without using their voices. The main characters, Janie and Hester, defy gender roles through external appearances, maintaining silence, and accepting sexuality. Both Hawthorne and Hurston reveal society’s value of women’s external persona through female characters’ nonverbal rebellion.

Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God further demonstrates the author’s perspective of colored women. The main

Although many readers have found Hurston's book Their Eyes Were Watching God a good book because of its cultural background, some believe it should be banned due to its racism and sexual descriptions.

Many times when I read a piece of literature, I immediately look for the first signs of symbolism. I analyze that particular symbol and how I believe it is to be presented throughout the narrative. In the case of Their Eyes Were Watching God, I recognized that Janie’s hair would have a significant place in the themes of the novel. Within the opening paragraphs, Janie stares at herself in a picture and her identity arises from her hair “seen it was mah dress and mah hair” Her identity then shifts to the color of her skin “Aw, aw! Ah’m colored!” (9), however the symbolism of her hair would be more powerful than the color of her skin. After this particular passage, I realized that this is not a novel so much about race as it is what it means to be a woman. Zora Neale Hurston is writing to an audience of women who will identify with Janie the definition of femininity wrapped up in the hair. Even after her marriage to Logan, she still has a thread of the passion for life and yearns for adventure. Logan reinforces the beauty of her flowing hair because he runs his fingers through it and only after he stops she begin to dream of flight. Many women enjoy having their beauty adored and when the adoration ceases they might begin to question the sense of self. Janie begins to question her place in life and her freedom comes in the form of a whistle from Joe Starks. She notices Joe Starks walking down the road and runs to the water pump to gain his attention. Her “heavy hair” falls down

I can see how their would be controversy over the “dialect” of the black characters in the book Their Eyes Were Watching God and whether or not they are authentic to how blacks were speaking at that time period, because at time the wording and vocabulary can appear as extreme. However, I have not done any studying on dialect or the origin of ebonics to say whether or not the dialect is accurate or not. I personally would assume that because Zora Neale Hurston herself was a black woman, would write the book in the most authentic manner and raised the image of blacks as much as possible, especially in the 1937 when Their Eyes Were Watching God was published. Although, I also agree that the dialect really helps the characters and the stories

In the society and world we live in we all want to be accepted and feel like we belong. Zora Neale Hurston goes through trials and tribulations as being a twenty-century African American such as slavery and feeling like she belongs. Imagine every time you think you are finally happy with whom you are and it turns out that wasn’t the case. In Their Eyes Were Watching God Janie embarks on journey in search for her own identity where each of her three husbands plays an important role in her discovery of who she is.