Their Eyes Were Watching God By Zora Neale Hurston

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.

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 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 highly acclaimed novel Their Eyes Were Watching God demonstrates many of the writing techniques described in How to Read Literature like a Professor by Tomas C. Foster. In Foster’s book, he describes multiple reading and writing techniques that are often used in literature and allow the reader to better understand the deeper meaning of a text. These of which are very prevalent in Hurston’s novel. Her book follows the story of an African American woman named Janie as she grows in her search for love. Hurston is able to tell Janie’s great quest for love with the use of a vampiric character, detailed geography, and sexual symbolism; all of which are described in Foster’s book.

In Zora Neale Hurston’s famous novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston explores the life of a southern black woman, Janie Crawford, whose three marriages of domineering control of men make her acknowledge her independence and self-satisfaction as an African-American woman. Set in the early 1900s, Hurston reveals the dominant role of men in southern society and one woman’s journey toward finding herself and God.

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.

During the 1930s, Americans were experiencing social and economic change during the Great Depression. In Their Eyes Were Watching God, African American Zora Neale Hurston sets the novel in the 1930s in Eatonville, Florida, and demonstrates the emotional growth and maturity of the African American protagonist, Janie Crawford, who reflects Hurston’s own life. Through her three marriages, Janie Crawford experiences the hardship many women face during her time, such as gender roles and traditional customs. However, she learns to break free from most of them. As a result, this novel empowers women through Janie’s voice that challenges social norms, her pursuit of achieving her dreams, and her confidence to stray from the traditional role of a woman.

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.

Love is something that everyone hopes to find at some point in their life. On the journey to find true love, we may find that love can come in many different forms. Few people ever find the kind of passionate love that seems to exist mostly in fairytales. The main character in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie, spends most of her life in search of that same genuine, unpretentious fairytale love; a love that she compares to the marriage between bees and the blossoms on pear trees. On her journey to find that kind of love, Janie discovers that there is more than one way to love someone.

Zora Neale Hurston’s “Their Eyes Were Watching God” confronts many social issues of its time. Though not evidently political, the identification of gender race and social class is paramount in the novel. Women’s rights and roles in the house and society as well as femininity are elemental. Hurston’s work is a response to social questions. Whether the assessment be of her own or of fictitious origins.

In Zora Neale Hurston’s novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, the concept of love is explored through several of Janie’s relationships which define not only how societal-cultural norms affect relationships, but also how emotionally fulfilling love ascends over the bounds of society into its own basis. The setting of the book is the early 20th century in the South of America, which spawns Janie into a society of inequalities: primarily generation, gender (along with race), and class. Amongst the obstacles of inequality, Hurston establishes Janie’s idea of a perfect love symbolically with her moment under the pear tree: “She saw a dust-bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom; the thousand sister-calyxes arch to meet the love embrace and the ecstatic shiver of the tree from root to tiniest branch creaming in every blossom and frothing with delight. So this was a marriage!” (11). Although one might initially believe the metaphor serves to mirror the cultural norm that the (female) tree waits for the aggressive (male) bee to penetrate its blossoms, the careful wording “arch to meet the love embrace” indicates that Janie’s idea of love is actually reciprocal and mutual. The choice to have Janie make this belief involving two different species suggests that within this mutual love, there should be no barriers in terms of race or class, for both the bee and the tree possess neither

The non-stop, brazen, over-lapping gossip is evidenced in Hurston’s dialogue as a constant stream of steady rambling, with an imagined cacophony of bass, tenor, and alto voices that bend and weave in the rhythm of Janie’s stroll. The porch sitters, with all of their individual solos, come together as one collective mind as the narrator says, “When she got to where they were she turned her face on the bander log and spoke….The porch couldn’t talk for looking” (Their Eyes 2). Hurston presents her protagonist as an ordinary woman who rises above the circumstances of her environments to attain an extraordinary wealth of personal autonomy and the discovery of her voice. In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie Mae Crawford is relegated to and dependent upon finding a man, preferably one of respectable status, who can provide the adequate comforts of home and a good name within the community. All of Janie’s marriages are full of strife and abuse, but eventually she finds one full of reciprocal love that becomes the springboard to self-reclamation and empowerment. However, the evolution to selfhood is not straightforward, requiring the rejection of social propriety and inculcated familial heritage, and the brave journey into the unknown in order for Janie to recover her personal

In a time period which covers the era that saw the first generation African-Americans come of age without any memory of being slaves to just shortly before American women could stand up alongside Soviet women and say they had the right of self-determination through the acquisition of suffrage, the history of colored women was one distinctly different from everyone else. If African-Americans could honestly and accurately be said to hold any particular type of freedom or even a particular right in the American society inhabited by the characters of Zora Neale Hurston’s, “Their Eyes were Watching God,” it might well be true to suggest that they had the right to decide which method of domination they preferred at the hands of their black husbands.

“He wanted her submission and he’d keep on fighting until he felt he had it.” The consistent women oppression and need to make less of women is just one of the motifs in the novel “Their Eyes Were Watching God” by Zora Neale Hurston have been sought as non-significant to how they relate to real-world issues and topics. The novel however, contains many values that are important to study in schools, as they show the true struggles of women, more specifically black women, in the United States directly after the freeing of slaves, many of which are also very applicable to life today. Hurston displays the hardships of this time period for a young black women through the life of Janie by addressing her struggles with gender equality, love, and

Women have struggled with the issue of empowerment throughout their history, and it can be seen that every women has a choice either to live a life enchained by the domineering power of men or women have the choice to break free of their chains. In literature, the representation of society’s neglect of the power of women is seen readily and is especially emphasized in Their Eyes Were Watching God, in which Hurston inspires the audience of her time to realize that even though women were mistreated, they hold their power in a different way than men, and have the ability to find independence and self-identity if they choose to lead their path to freedom. Hurston explores the traditional roles of women, and the possible growth and progress through