Their Eyes Were Watching God Gender Roles

During the 1900’s, women, specifically black women, were considered to be property of men in the United States, especially down south, in states such as Florida and Georgia. Legally, women had no voice. For example, if a woman was abused by her husband, the court system would not acknowledge it even if it did really happen. In the article “Sexism in the Early 1900’s”, Becca Woltemath states that “…a woman’s job is to take care of the house and to bear children. She’s no good for anything else. She’s just a simple thinker.” Women were forced into submission and there was nothing they could do about it. In the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston shows the

Their Eyes Were Watching God is sometimes classified as a feminist novel, but that is not so. Feminism is often associated with men and women being equal without a doubt. This passage establishes a fundamental difference between genders. Chapter six is a prime example of these gender differences. Chapter six shows Joe’s need for control. During an argument between Janie and Joe, Joe states, “Somebody got to think for women and chillun and chickens and cows. I god, they sho don’t think none theirselves” (71). Hurston’s statement here suggests that men during that time period needed to feel superior to

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

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.

In the novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston directed her writing towards both men and women, but for different reasons. She wrote to men to make them conscious of how they treated women and that women can do manual labor too. She wrote to women to make them realize that they are equal to men even though they are women. In her writing, she mainly expresses the theme of feminism through the female protagonist, Janie Crawford. Throughout the book, Janie is victimized by several men by being told to do what a women was expected to do, which means that the men thought of her as weak and as a woman that they can tyrannize into doing woman roles. Jody Starks is a major example of a man who thinks that women are not anything other

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 the book Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, Tea Cake is killed by Janie, which shows, at the end of the book, that Janie is a strong, independent woman who can make the choice to choose herself over a damaged Tea Cake, despite her love for him. Also, during the trial, which wouldn’t have been possible if he had died from natural causes, Janie is accepted by white people, which is an instance of irony with regard to racism. Additionally, Hurston appears to be very pro-women, and allowing Janie to kill Tea Cake is her way of showing sexism does not dictate her anymore. The author chose Tea Cake’s fate to show Janie has arrived at a place where her own self expression and independence can coexist, and ultimately, be put above love in a novel where a primary theme revolves around her attempting to find her independence.

On December 6, 1894 the short story “The Story of An Hour” was published in the weekly newspaper Vogue. The story features the protagonist, Louise Mallard who discovers her husband is dead. The story was instantly regarded as highly controversial because it went against the standards of the 1890’s and features a female protagonist that feels liberated by the news of her husband's death. Although the idea that women were able to survive without men was a foreign concept at the time, the story resonated with many women. In Zora Neale Hurston’s novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie the female protagonist also experiences liberation through the death of her husband and faces the stereotype of women needing men in order to survive. This stereotype along with many other gender roles/stereotypes are present in Their Eyes Were Watching God and requires Janie and the many other characters to either adhere or break free of the gender roles/stereotypes they come across. Some of these gender roles/sterotypes is that women need to be married in order to be seen as decent and woman should remain quiet and not be outspoken or attract attention. Jaine breaks free of the respective gender roles by her unwillingness to conform to man in her relationships and succeeding in breaking many of the conventional gender roles. Other characters like Jody, Logan, and Janie’s grandmother adhere to the gender roles/ stereotypes and enforce them.

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

Every woman dreams of finding the right guy that will treat her amazing and equal; Many women will having trouble when obtaining true love. The main character, Janie, has much trouble with men. Janie dreams of finding true love, to be treated well, and loved unconditionally. Although, the men do not treat her how she wants to be treated. Hurston shows us that Janie's first two husbands needed a little adjusting. Tying into How to Read Literature Like a Professor, Janie goes on a quest...a quest for

Hurston’s main way of inspiring a sense of feminism in her novel, is through the relationships of Janie including her Nanny, Logan Killicks, Joe Starks, and Tea Cake. She addresses Janie’s role differently in each of these relationships using motifs and stereotypes. Janie begins her journey of self-discovery following the dreams of her Nanny to becoming a strong, independent woman who makes her own decisions. All of the roles that Janie obtains stem from the distinct

Feminism is the fight for equality. But there are still some women who think that it serves for impairment of men’s rights. What is feminism? Feminism is the belief that both sexes should have equal rights and opportunities. Janie is a mixed-race girl looking for true love; Jane marries Logan, as planned by her grandmother.

Their Eyes Were Watching God, is a novel written in 1937 by the African American author Zora Neal Hurston. In this novel, the main character, Janie Crawford, is the narrator and takes the reader on a journey to find her horizon and true love. Janie goes through numerous situations that make her find her true love. Hurston, uses many symbols in this novel that relate to Janie and when she uses these symbols, she also relates them to themes. For example, when she she is represented as a mule in the novel, this symbol goes best with gender. It helps the reader identify the mule as Janie and relate it to gender inequality of women. Janie identifies as the mule when Nanny tells her, she marries Logan and when she marries Joe Starks.

This paper is discusses on the novel Zora Neale Hurston in the light of Patriarchy. The protagonist of the novel, Janie is taken for analysis. This paper also involves in delineating characteristics traits of the male characters in the novels. Further, the paper studies the treatment that is meted out to the protagonist at the hands of men in the selected novel. The paper studies the novel in terms of the violence, subjugation and oppression that the male characters pose to the protagonist in the novel. The paper discusses on the various levels of suppression that Janie undergoes at the hands of the people who are highly patriarchal in mind set. Further, this paper details on how the protagonist stands as a model to shun suppression at the