Their Eyes Were Watching God

Is Janie or Tea Cake a Christ figure? Choose one and argue for or against this, providing details from the novel to support your answer.

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)

Thereafter, she meets and falls in love with Tea Cake. He is significantly younger than her; however, he is the first man to listen to her and treat her as an equal. For example, the day she met Tea Cake, he shocked her when he taught her to play checkers. The fact that someone thought it was natural for her to play pleased Janie. They both enjoyed caring for and helping each other feel relaxed and satisfied. Therefore, Janie, once again, leaves to start a new life despite warning from her friend, Phoebe, and the risk that Tea Cake could be using her for her money. Happily, she adjusts to a new life working alongside Tea Cake in the Everglades. Later, a hurricane tears through the Everglades, forcing them to leave. While they flee, Tea Cake rescues Janie from a wild dog and is only a scratch is left on his cheek. Until he becomes horribly ill, they think nothing of it. The doctor tells Janie she can’t sleep with him and she must stay away when he has ‘fits’. Due to this, Tea Cake believes she has grown tired of caring for him. The disease affects his behavior and in his crazed state he points a gun at Janie. He forces her to shoot him. While she weeps, Janie holds his head and thanks him for the opportunity to love him. Later that day, she is tried for his murder and acquitted. Afterwards, she cannot bear to live in the Everglades without Tea Cake; so, she moves back to

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.

In Catholic doctrine, the seven cardinal sins are the basis from which all the “sins” of humanity stem. In this system, any moral infraction a person may commit would be categorized under one of these seven sins (also known colloquially as the “seven deadly sins”). This system has been widely adapted throughout culture over the centuries, and is a common tool utilized to examine the actions of humans. In the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, the main character, Janie, enters into three marriages, two of which fail based on the failings of her husbands, and the third of which succeeds in spite of the failings of her husband. Each of these husbands, in fact, displays traits which fall under the cardinal sins, and the sin of pride in particular; even the third husband, Tea Cake, displays the very same sin, leading to the downfall of their marriage.

In Their Eyes Were Watching God, love plays a pivotal role in the life of the protagonist, Janie. Janie is exposed early in life to all the facets of love. From an early point in the novel until the very end, Janie searches for a man to fulfill her childhood concept of love. It is through this search for love that Janie finds the confidence and security in herself to become independent. Therefore, Janie’s quest to find love is not only a fulfillment of a childhood dream, but also a journey to find who she really is.

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.

In their relationship, they both experience their times of jealousy, but by working in the Everglades Janie and Tea Cake find mutual joy. A hurricane comes, Tea Cake is given plenty of warnings and even an opportunity to flee, but instead he chooses to stay. While trying to get away from the storm, Tea Cake saves Janie from a dog but gets himself bitten instead. Tea Cake gets rabies from the bite, and develops an aggressive behavior over Janie. At the end, Janie has shoot Tea Cake to save herself. She's is then accused for murder, but found innocent. After Tea Cake’s funeral, Janie returns home to Eatonville. She cannot bear to remain in the Everglades because all the memories that remind her of the love of her life. Once is Eatonville she meets up with an old friend, Pheoby Watson, and tells her the whole story of her life. Thus, the story, which actually spans nearly 40 years of Janie's life, is "framed" by an evening visit between two friends. This frame becomes the first part of the structure of the novel. The rest of the story is told chronologically in order of Janie’s

In both Zora Neale Hurston’s short story “Sweat” and novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, the focus is on women who want better lives but face difficult struggles before gaining them. The difficulties involving men which Janie and Delia incur result from or are exacerbated by the intersection of their class, race, and gender, which restrict each woman for a large part of her life from gaining her independence.

Zora Hurston focuses on many themes throughout her novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, one of them being the development of gender roles. While it may seem that the novel is a story of one woman discovering herself on her own, an underlying theme is how people’s identities are determined by their relationships. Through a multitude of relationships in the novel Hurston develops the different roles of men and women within a relationship. In Zora Hurston’s novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston emphasizes the development of gender roles to suggest that society views the people involved based on the role they play in their various relationships.

In Zora Neale Hurston’s novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie Crawford, the protagonist in the novel, returns home after a long period of time. She is welcomed back by unfriendly faces and vicious rumors and gossip about her past relationship with young Tea Cake, her third husband. The novel continues with Janie telling her friend, Pheoby Watson, her story in flashback form starting from when she was younger and lived with her grandmother. Janie retold her story about her three marriages with Logan, Jody, and Tea Cake. She explained everything she has experienced and learned from her journey in finding happiness and finding her voice. Their Eyes Were Watching God is full of figurative language, the majority of which derives from nature. The natural forces in which the characters struggle against, guide their lives and assist them in self discovery. Examples of the natural forces that are brought up throughout the novel include the horizon, the pear tree, and the hurricane. In the novel, the natural forces are what guide the characters, especially Janie, to find happiness in their lives and find their true identity. As the characters develop and experience their lives through the comparisons of life and nature, the novel celebrates those relationships in order to provide the room to allow the character to keep growing and learning..

However, Tea Cake appears pretty quickly, and proves himself as different than Janie’s previous husbands even quicker. The first indicator of his superiority to the other husbands is when he teaches checkers to Janie and tells her that she will be good at it. She immediately compares him to Joe, thinking “Somebody wanted her to play. Somebody thought it natural for her to play” (96), implying that before no one acted like they wanted her to play. Tea Cake does not try to force Janie into his own vision of her, and instead lets her develop her own character. Soon after, when they move to work on the fields, Janie socializes and talks to many different people, differentiating herself from the Joe’s Janie, who could not talk to people unless Joe allowed it. Her transformation from the quiet mayor’s wife to an active member of a community reflects her change in character as a submissive wife into someone with almost equal grounds in her marriage. Tea Cake and Janie’s relationship, unlike the others, stays constant until the very end, when Tea Cake dies, and Janie is left as an entirely independent woman, having completely changed since marrying each

In her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, author Zora Neale Hurston suggests that mutual respect and equality are necessary components of love.

Their Eyes Were Watching God is a novel written by Zora Neale Hurston in 1937 that tells the story of the life of a woman named Janie. When another man shows interest in Janie, her husband Tea Cake decides to beat her to scare him off. Although he believes his intent was pure he still finds himself justifying his actions to his co-workers the next day. In Othello, a play written in 1622 by William Shakespeare Roderigo is in love with Othello’s wife Desdemona and Iago has convinced Roderigo that Desdemona loves Cassio and that he should fight Cassio to win Desdemona. Although it seems as though these speeches are completely different as Tea Cake’s intent is pure, and Iago’s is malicious, both speeches support the conclusion that the way to a woman’s heart is by exerting physical dominance.

In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston uses imagery to show how going anywhere in life keeps being unobtainable to Janie due to her position as a black woman. “She had glossy leaves and bursting buds and she wanted to struggle with life but it seemed to elude her” (Hurston 11). This descriptive imagery helps one to picture how there is no opportunity for Janie to develop outside of this gorgeous backyard. She is stuck with her desires and has nowhere to accomplish them. “One of the pivotal moments in Janie’s life occurs when she views a pear tree as a teenager; this is one of several occasions where Hurston uses tree imagery to enrich the scene” (S. Jones 184). This marks a period of realization, as Janie recognizes her own desire for growth and how she wants to be her own person. However, she also knows that power and the ability to grow has been evading her and is impossible here under these circumstances.