Their Eyes Were Watching God Rhetorical Devices

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.

Janie’s Grandma plays an important outward influence from the very beginning. Her perspective on life was based off of her experience as a slave. “Ah was born back due in slavery so it wasn’t for me to fulfill my dreams of whut a woman oughta be and to do.” (16) She felt that financial security,

The beginning part of a novel is one of the most important parts, as it sets the stage for what’s to come for the remainder of the novel. Thus, it is imperative for authors to address significant aspects in the beginning of their novels, which is an idea that is exemplified by both works by Hurston and Austen. In the two novels, Their Eyes Were Watching God by Hurston and Pride and Prejudice by Austen, the opening sentences shape meaning to the novels by foreshadowing the eminent events of the novels and using figurative language to emphasize the importance of the polarized views and ideas of men and women that enflame the conflict throughout the novels.

Oprah took a magnum opus, Their Eyes Were Watching God, and remade it into an entirely different story that did not comply with the book. By altering Janie’s character, moral fiber, relationships, and public acts, it changed the meaning of the novel. The symbolism and the significance of the title varied from the book and the story morphed into a tale of love when made into a movie. Zora Neale Hurston’s book held a disparate meaning before it fell into the hands of Oprah, who annihilated it.

She then marries a man named Tea Cake and that love proceeds long after his death, which is how Hurston expresses and implies “true love”. Hurston uses the motif of light and the horizon to explore how the “true love” Janie feels for Tea Cake differs from the “real love” with Joe. Hurston first uses the visual imagery of the horizon to convey how much Janie is in love with Joe. Janie

From her first kiss to the tragic death of her soul mate, each quest for love and enlightenment lends shape to Janie’s emerging voice. For example, at the beginning of Hurston's narrative, Janie quiets her inner voice by succumbing to Nanny's influence

In many novels, authors have implemented social constructs in order to shape the mood of the books. In Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, Hurston alludes to social class, especially race, subtly. Hurston’s background of anthropology and growing up as an African-American woman clearly plays a role in the social makeup of the novel. The main character of the novel, Janie, has various experiences in which readers can discover the social structures in her life. Through Janie’s story of self-discovery, Hurston reveals social constructs of the time, especially race and wealth, by including anecdotes, complex characters, and thought-provoking scenes that highlight controversial issues.

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.

Janie’s relationship with Logan, her first husband, is seen as unacceptable to her due to his old age and the fact that Janie did not have any say in the marriage. Due to Janie’s opposition to being with Logan, he “seem(s) violent without actually committing violence”. Hurston uses Tea Cake’s youth and the fact that Janie was not forced into a relationship with him to make Tea Cake appear to be a ‘better’ person than Logan. However, Tea Cake is the one who actually whipped Janie. Tea Cake commits many violent acts, but because of his attractiveness, Tea Cake is excused “even when he executes violence” (Harris, 92). Tea Cake had shown signs of abuse and had a gambling addiction, whereas Logan was verbally cruel to Janie, but never physically hurt her. Hurston emphasizes the faults of society through Tea Cake and his effect on Janie. Tea Cake is the cruelest of Janie’s husbands, but the way he is presented makes it seem as if he is the best of them. Tea Cake, representing society, initially encourages Janie to be strong, then molds her into an object of his pleasing. In Janie’s mind, Tea Cake is perfect and cannot make mistakes, even after he whipped her. Mrs. Turner, who lives in the Everglades, believes that Tea Cake is too colored for Janie and that she needs to be with a lighter skinned man, like her brother. She pushes her brother

Tah’jai Graves Mr. Weber Ap Language 26 January 2016 Their eyes were watching God Zora Neale Hurston used elements of folk culture as well as figurative language to create a sense of a community, delineate character, and create atmosphere in her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. She used these tools to her advantage to draw the reader in to believe that they were not just reading the book, but actually experiencing the book as the story progressed, such as if you were in the book with the characters, speaking their dialect. By doing this Hurston created af feel that few stories of capable of doing.

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

Through the ‘death’ of Janie’s dream, Hurston argues that one cannot move forward until she has accepted the truth. Janie’s Nanny had constantly reminded her that she needed a husband to one day rely on when Nanny was not around anymore. Nanny claimed that if Janie were to get married to a financially stable husband, she would be prosperous. Therefore, Janie believed marriage automatically results in love. Correspondingly, Hurston writes,

In the film version of Their Eyes Were Watching God, Oprah shifts the original theme of Hurston’s novel. She fabricates a love story to which the film revolves around recurrently and eliminates important elements. "It was one of the most beautiful, poignant love stories I 've ever read…” (Dir. Darnell). Her theme entirely displaces Janie’s life journey, the essential idea of the work. Janie’s journey through life serves as the central theme in the story; the novel illustrates how Janie matures as a woman, how she finds herself in life, and how she finds happiness. Oprah indubitably produces the picture to her misguided interpretation despite caring what Hurston originally wrote in the story. “Their Eyes Were Watching God is a complex novel that addresses issues of color, sexuality, community, and self-fulfillment. Oprah’s television adaptation does anything but” (Ceptus). These issues that Hurston includes in her famous work

At the beginning of the novel, the reader is greeted with a seemingly innocent little girl named Janie Crawford. “She was stretched on her back beneath the pear tree soaking in the alto chant of the visiting bees, the gold of the sun and the panting breath of the breeze”(Hurston 16) That just screams innocence. This little girl is just like a normal little girl, she is fanaticizing over the idea of being in love, and finding her prince charming. While she was growing up, Janie did not have a very good example, or an example at all, of what true love is. Janie never met her parents, and was raised by her “Nanny”, a woman with very old timer beliefs. Janie’s nanny was very strict about these things as well, she wanted Janie to be better than her peers, and have more material possessions than anybody else. This is a very selfish way to raise a child up, but Nanny knew no better, she was just doing what she considered best for Janie. The selfish beliefs that Nanny instilled in Janie were not what made Janie’s life tough, it was Nanny’s views on

“The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others" (Mahatma Ghandi). In order to successfully achieve self-discovery and happiness in life one must serve and love others. Janie in Their Eyes Were Watching God moves around from place to place in order to find happiness. Author Zora Neale Hurston's life parallels with this story, as she attended four different schools after growing up in Eatonville, Florida, America's first African-American town, where Janie first escapes for a new beginning (McLeod). Hurston studied cultural anthropology and started writing her books during the Great Depression (McLeod). The negative portrayal of blacks in the novel could allude to the sad times of prejudice when she grew up. Hurston struggled when growing up from her mother's death at an early age, her father's quick remarriage, and two of her own marriages that ended in divorces (McLeod). The serious matters of life and death in the novel might have stemmed from Hurston's rough childhood and early adulthood. From these tough experiences, Hurston has written many books on her ideas of living with love (McLeod). This life brought Hurston’s struggles into the novel where she teaches how to find true identity. Crabtree explains how "Hurston did not want Janie to find fulfillment in a man, but rather in her new-found self." Paradoxically, she exhibits the lesson of how one can receive self-knowledge through loving others selflessly.