Their Eyes Were Watching God

Topic 2: Compare/contrast Janie in Hurston 's Their Eyes Were Watching God & Edna in Chopin 's The Awakening in terms of conformity within a male-dominated society. (four page minimum)

Love is a life-changing event. It is an event that causes you to embrace another person in your life. It can be a positive or a negative experience for a man or woman. It is a cycle of connection then death, however; some people will not last to death due to death of divorce. In the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie explores the themes of love, beauty, and evolves into the woman that she is at the end of the novel through three different marriages. When Janie gets married to all three men, she loves them progressively as she goes from one marriage to the next;however, in the end she ends up loving Tea Cake more than any of her past husbands.

Love can be perceived as the feeling one feels under the sweetness of a blossoming pear tree, but through an unexpected path, such loving feelings are demolished.When an individual wants the perfect relationship such desires are forsaken by their way of life.Many individuals want to reach the "Horizon" where is not completely seen by the human eye but exists.In the novel "Their eyes were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston", protagonist Janie Crawford seeks for that "horizon" through her relationship with logan, Joe and tea cake.Just like the "horizon" love wasn 't attained during her relationship with logan and joe but that love existed in her relationship with Tea cake.

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.

Janie’s marriage to Logan was not anything special. In the beginning Logan was acted like a good husband and would do all the work on his land, and Janie would stay in the home, cooking and cleaning. Eventually, after a couple of months of being married, this so-called honeymoon stage was over. Logan now acted as if he owned Janie and she was his slave, commanding her to do whatever he wanted, not listening to what she wanted. Janie felt constraint; she felt like she was losing her freedom to Logan, she felt like she was not Janie anymore, she was now Mrs. Logan Killicks and she was now obligated to do whatever he commanded of her. Janie was tired of being in an unhappy marriage; she did not love Logan like Nanny said she eventually would: “She knew now that marriage did not make love. Janie’s first dream was dead, so she became a woman”, and she did not like the way she was being treated. One day while she was outside she saw a man walk by, she thought he was very attractive so she drew attention to herself and the man came over. After having a conversation

Folklorist, anthropologist, playwright, and novelist, Zora Neale Hurston 's career took off after publishing, what is, today, her most famous novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God. Unlike any other work at the time, the dialect in her novels portrayed how African-Americans speak in the deep south. Set in Southern Florida, the heroine Janie, is thought to have been modeled after Hurston, herself, if she had chose to stay in her hometown of Eatonville instead of going to college. In the novel, Janie is unable to develop a life as a New Woman through much of her adulthood due to the geographical area she lived in, basic education, financial state, grandmother 's values, history of slavery, and her marriage to Joe Sparks. Hurston, on the other hand, was able to develop her life as a New Woman due to her access to higher education, financial state, and support from her mother.

Susan B. Anthony once said there is not a women born who desires to eat the bread of dependence. In the novel Their eyes were watching god by Zora Neal Hurston, Janie Crawford depicts the life of a young African women who struggles with male dominance. As well for Mrs. Mallard in The story of an hour by Kate Chopin. Both of these women become independent, share experiences with male dominance and share an appealing perspective toward nature. They also have distinctive outcomes in their lives. Janie and Mrs. Mallard share similarities in their lives and distinctions as well.

Janie’s first marriage to Logan Killicks was an arranged marriage by her Grandmother Nanny. One day Nanny caught Janie kissing the neighborhood riff raff Johnny Taylor, and Nanny becomes convinced that Janie has entered her womanhood, and needs to marry.

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 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.

Racism is defined as the belief that members of one race, based on their physical appearances, are superior to another race of people who do not match their appearances. The common conception of racism is viewed as Caucasians against African Americans, but contrary to popular belief, racism can be committed against members of one's same race. The issue of same-race discrimination that is based on the complexion one's skin color, is hardly, if ever discussed in literature before Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God. In the novel, the mixed-race Janie begins her journey of finding a loving relationship and in the progress, encounters several instances of racism ignored by people such as Richard Wright, who believes that Hurston's

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.

At the tender age of sixteen, Janie was forced by Nanny to marry a farmer by the name of Logan Killicks who showed interest in her. This was the sprouting bud for her identity search. The relationship that Janie has with Logan is not quite her vision of the pear tree. “The vision of Logan Killicks was desecrating the pear tree. But Janie didn’t know how to tell Nanny that” (Hurston, 9).To young Janie marriage is supposed to be filled with happiness and love. With Killicks this was not the case. Nanny leads Janie to believe no matter who she marries, she will eventually learn to love them.

A question that Zora Hurston asks in “Their Eyes Were Watching God” is this: What does it take to reach a fulfilled life? Hurston places her main character, Janie, in very polar settings, to introduce the question to her reader.