Their Eyes Were Watching God Compare And Contrast

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.

“Their Eyes Were Watching God” had Janie face several conflicts throughout the book, conflicts that relate to the real world and real world human rights issues. “Their Eyes Were Watching God” covers human rights issues such as gender inequality, the right to marry the person you love, the right to be an equal within a marriage, and racism. The novel’s ending, where Janie returns back to Eatonville after having to kill Tea Cake, is surprising, to say the least, and creates a sense of shock and slight confusion within the reader. The resolution of the novel shows that the author intended to show each of the aforementioned human rights issues, and how none of the issues are guaranteed to have a happy ending. Zora Neale Hurston also seems to imply,

In the novel “Their Eyes Were A Watching God” by Zora Neale Hurston she uses a great variety of literary devices such as symbolism, figurative language, and characterization to engage the reader in her writing; and to help establish the theme she’s trying to portray. In the book, late teen Janie Crawford who is African-American, who happens to be pleasing to the eye returns back to Eatonville after leaving for a long period of time. She was being raised by her grandmother who then married her to a more mature and older farmer Logan. In this relationship Janie is very depressed and unhappy. Logan treated her like a slave and animal. This was until she met a man named Jody and she then run off with him. Getting in this relationship she believed she would be free and able to voice herself. But when they get into an argument Jody beats her. But Janie soon gets a glimpse of freedom once Jody dies. She thens meet Tea Cake and marry him nine months later. They had few hiccups but naturally they fell in love. So much love Tea Cake unknowingly gives his life away just to save Janie from a rabid dog. Janie felt empty returning back to Eatonville but then became one with Tea Cake. It took a long journey for her to find the real love she was looking for. The theme of Their Eyes Were Watching God is it takes trials and tribulations to find true love.

Their Eyes Were Watching God is a novel by Zora Neale Hurston about Janie, who relates her life story of three marriages to her friend Phoeby. Throughout the novel, Janie embarks on a journey to find the limits of her personal horizons and expand them. Janie’s clothing varies from wealthy to poor, and from traditionally masculine to feminine, enriching the narrative with symbolism and supplementary information. Her femininity, actualized in her hair and clothing, is an integral part of her identity. The changing images of clothing throughout the novel exemplify Janie’s developing maturity and gradually show Janie creating a personal identity.

The novel Their Eyes Were Watching God follows the life of a beautiful female named Janie Crawford. Throughout the story, Janie demonstrates the struggle to escape being shaped into becoming a submissive woman. She encounters three men who each attempt to make her a submissive wife. In each of her relationships with these men, she is either obliged or pressured to follow their orders. Although Janie struggles to hold on to her independence, she manages to persevere every time. Janie is a strong independent woman who does not allow herself to be suppressed.

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.

Their Eyes Were Watching God is a story that is centered around sexuality, power, and gender discrimination. The main character, Janie Crawford¸ is a mulatto. She was raised by her grandmother, a former slave, since the day she was born, “Ah was born back due in slavery…” (Hurston 16). She and her grandmother, Nanny, lived in West Florida on where they lived in the house in the Washburns’—the family that Nanny worked for--back-yard. Nanny scraped together and bought a house that had a pear tree in the back-yard. It was there under the pear tree in her grandmother’s back yard that Janie saw herself as sexual being that began her journey, “She was stretched on her back beneath the pear tree soaking in the alto chant of the visiting bees, the

Zora Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God follows protagonist Janie Mae Crawford’s journey into womanhood and her ultimate quest for self-discovery. Having to abruptly transition from childhood to adulthood at the age of sixteen, the story demonstrates Janie’s eternal struggle to find her own voice and realize her dreams through three marriages and a lifetime of hardships that come about from being a black woman in America in the early 20th century. Throughout the novel, Hurston uses powerful metaphors helping to “unify” (as Henry Louis Gates Jr. puts it) the novel’s themes and narrative; thus providing a greater understanding of Janie’s quest for selfhood. There are three significant metaphors in the novel that achieve this unity: the

In Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, the protagonist, Janie, endures two marriages before finding true love. In each of Janie’s marriages, a particular article of clothing is used to symbolically reflect, not only her attitude at different phases in her life, but how she is treated in each relationship.

Janie, in Their Eyes were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, was a unique individual; as a half-white, half-black girl growing up in Florida in the early 1930's, a lifetime of trials and search for understanding was set for her from the start. As the main character she sought to finally find herself, true love, and have a meaningful life. Growing up, in itself, provides a perfect opportunity for finding that essential state of self-realization and ideal comfort. Michael G. Cooke reviews Their Eyes Were Watching God in his article "The Beginnings of Self-Realization"; within the article it is falsely criticized that every time Janie is negatively impacted she grows to become more

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

The novel Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston portrays important to possess traits of self-revelation, maturity, and courage through Janie’s relationship with Joe Starks. These traits are revealed through both marriage and death in the Floridian setting of Eatonville, all taking place in the early 1900’s. Through this marriage, Janie is not only defined as a major character in the book, but she is turned into an independent but loving woman by both the beneficial and deterring effects of Joe Starks. Although being the Eatonville mayor, Joe Starks does everything but help Janie towards the end of their twisting marriage.

In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie Mae Crawford, the Protagonist, is involved in three diverse relationships. Zora Neale Hurston, the author, explains how Janie grows into young woman through marriage, integrity, and love and happiness from her relationships with Logan Killicks, Joe Starks, and Tea Cake.

The overall theme of Their Eyes Were Watching God, a journey, was desolated by Oprah Winfrey who morphed it into a love story. Oprah perceived the book to have to do with Janie Crawford going through life to find love and not a journey of Janie going through her life and experiencing various events. “’…it was one of the most beautiful, poignant love stories I’ve ever read’” (Dir. Darnell). Oprah misconceived the theme when reading and portrayed the theme of her movie to encase love and Janie’s progress for love. “Oprah’s rendition of Their Eyes Were Watching God reduces the novel’s complexities of race, gender, and history to pretty costumes, lush backgrounds, and sexy bodies” (Ceptus). The change in theme creates an overall change in the movie, making it into a movie of love and romance and takes the true meaning away from the story in the book. Oprah carelessly produced this movie, distorting the theme, focusing it on Janie and her searching for love as opposed to her journey and experiences through life.

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.