Leo Rosten once said, "Money can't buy happiness." Janie from Zora Neale Hurston's, Their Eyes Were Watching God, would agree with this famous quote. Janie's first husband is financially stable and her second husband is powerful; but it is with her third marriage where she finally experiences happiness and receives respect. Through the first two marriages, we see how worldly desires and pride can ruin a relationship. Ultimately, Hurston portrays that equality in a relationship truly nourishes a bond far more valuable that materialistic possessions or reputations. Janie in her first marriage is her far from mesmerized with her husband's 60 acre land. The incompatibility between her and Logan ultimately cause the marriage to fail. Logan …show more content…
This makes Janie feel like he does not care about her and that she is wasting her time with him. His lack of communication with Janie symbolizes the despair and emptiness she feels in their marriage. He does not open up to her and so of course the marriage will not work out. Hurston ultimately portrays how unhappy Janie is when she leaves Logan so easily the day after she brought up the topic of her leaving: "Janie hurried out of the gate and turned south" (Hurston 32). Janie's attraction to Joe Starks' charisma quickly diminishes when his overdose of ambition and controlling personality get the best of him. Although he is a big voice in the town, Janie only sees him as a big voice. All his money and power have no effect on her when all he does is ridicule and control her. He makes it clear where Janie belongs: "Ah never married her for nothin' lak dat. She's uh woman and her place is in de home" (Hurston 43). This is ironic because when she is with Logan, she wants to be in the house doing her own thing, but Joe is making it sound like confinement. It's as if she has no choice in the matter and Joe intends to make his power over her known. People have different desires and sometimes when we get caught up in our success, we can end up hurting others. Joe's reply to Janie is a great example of the insensitivity that can form from the pride we can possibly inherit when we achieve success: "Ah told you in de first beginnin' dat Ah aimed tuh be uh big voice.
Companionship is a fundamental necessity for human beings to function. People thrive off of social interactions and without companionship, loneliness and alienation would prevail. Everyone wants the same things in life which are love, social acceptance and companionship, in the hope that once these things are obtained one will feel complete. In the novels Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston and Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck, readers witness the characters struggle to find their identity while also trying to meet the need for partnership. In the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, readers see the main character Janie, grow as a women while showing that marriage does not always mean love and that until
At the beginning of their marriage they have a few ups and downs but they then promise to share everything with each other. In chapter fourteen, because of Tea Cake, Janie decides to start working in the fields on her own free will. This was something neither Logan nor Jody were able to get her to do, but now because of how in love with Tea Cake she is, she works in the fields so she can spend more time with him. She actually enjoys this work and tells him that “Ah laks it. It’s mo’ nicer than settin’ round dese quarters all day” (pg. 133). Her character has changed significantly at this point since the beginning of the novel since, while hanging out with the towns people, she “could tell big stories herself” which she would never have imagined doing while with
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.
Janie's marriage to Logan Killicks was the first stage in her growth as a woman. She hoped that her obligatory marriage with Logan would
Janie's first marriage is to Logan Killicks. Logan enters the marriage with a large portion of land. However, Janie enters the marriage with practically nothing. This ends up becoming a relationship based on inequality because Logan starts to use
She doesn’t feel married to him, she feels like his worker. Logan is incapable of giving her love, belonging, and encouragement, the next stage in the theory, cornering Janie and preventing her from moving forward in her process towards self-fulfillment. She is unable to move on because Logan only meets her physiological needs, not her psychological
In the first marriage Janie was a 16-year-old girl who was forced into marriage with a man in his 50’s. She lives with Logan on his potato farm, where Logan is very set in his ways and does not care what Janie has to say or think. Being that Janie is only 16years old she allows her outer personality to submit to whatever Logan wants even though her inner self, her true self is miserable. She believed that because they were married that just being married would bring love. So she continues to submit to Logan’s
Janie’s quest begins with her grandmother forcing her to marry Logan Killicks; her compliance demonstrates her need to follow what others expect of her. Although she believes "[Logan] look like some ole skullhead in de graveyard", she marries him, simply because her grandmother tells her she will love him with time (13). She compares him to a “skullhead”, literally likening him, and subsequently their relationship, to death. Although she knows she wants to find love, and that she does not love Logan, she marries him to appease her grandmother. This shows how much Janie cares about what other people think of her, and what lengths she is willing to go to keep others pleases with her.
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 the novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston, a young woman travels through difficult life experiences in order to find herself. Hurston portrays the protagonist as an adventurous soul trapped in the binds of suppressing marriages. Janie experiences three different types of marriage learning from each one what she values most. From these marriages she learned she values love and respect, finally achieving them in her last marriage. Each new marriage brought something new to the table for Janie and no matter the situation or the outcome of the relationship Janie grew into her own independent individual because of it.
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.
Janie was forced to get married to Logan by her Nanny when she was just seventeen years old. Logan defined marriage as someone who could be a helping hand around in the house and farm. “Ah aims tuh run two plows, and dis mah Ah’m talkin’ ‘bout is got uh mule all gentled up so even uh woman kan handle ‘im” (Page 27). Logan plans to buy another mule, so that Janie and him can both work around in the farm.
Janie’s relationship with her second husband, Joe Starks, is perhaps the most damaging. In the beginning of their marriage, Janie is proud and admiring of the successful, strong man she marries and runs off with. At first, it seems as though Janie has executed a successful breakaway from her unfulfilling life with Logan Killicks, and transitioned to an exciting, happy life with Joe Starks. Unfortunately, Janie and Joe’s marriage retracts from the infatuated love it once was, into a
Throughout a fair part of Zora Neal Hurston’s novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie’s low class create problems when it comes to men. She lives with men she does not love because they give her the financial stability she cannot have yet on her own. Janie marries Logan Killicks at a young age even though she does not want to
At first, Janie thought that loving someone meant you were married to them. Janie believed that she would love Logan because they were married as that was what Nanny had told her. In the few days before she would be with Killicks, Janie thought “Yes, she would love Logan after they were married… Husbands and wives always loved each other” (Hurston 21). Since Nanny had always told her that a marriage would make her happy, that’s what Janie thought. She had no feelings towards Logan, yet she held on to the hope that they appear once they were husband and wife.