Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Husrton

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 Crawford is surrounded by outward influences that contradict her independence and personal development. These outward influences from society, her grandma, and even significant others contribute to her curiosity. Tension builds between outward conformity and inward questioning, allowing Zora Neal Hurston to illustrate the challenge of choice and accountability that Janie faces throughout the novel.

Janie’s relationship with Nanny provides Janie with her first views on her role in society and the assertion of men’s power over women. After Janie’s sexual awakening with the pear tree and her kiss with Johnny Taylor, Nanny warns Janie that “de nigger woman is de mule uh de world” (Hurston 14). In Nanny’s prospective, the Negro woman is especially subservient to others, and when Janie goes to Nanny to ask how to love Logan, Nanny dissolves Janie’s notion of love and affirms that love only complicates things. Nanny is seen as Janie’s mother figure and she “dismisses Janie’s romantic ideal of love, feeling that marriage serves a strictly pragmatic purpose, on in which the woman is passive and taken

Their Eyes Were Watching God was written in 1937 by Zora Neale Hurston. This story follows a young girl by the name of Janie Crawford. Janie Crawford lived with her grandmother in Eatonville, Florida. Janie was 16 Years old when her grandmother caught her kissing a boy out in the yard. After seeing this her grandmother told her she was old enough to get married, and tells her she has found her a husband by the name of Logan. Logan was a much, much older man. This book later follows Janie through two more marriages to Jody Starks, and Tea Cake. All three marriages extremely different from one another, along with Janie’s role in each marriage. Janie always had her own individual personality, her true self, but she also had an outer personality, the person she would pretend to be for each of her husbands. The Book took us through a journey of each of these marriages and through the journey of Janie finding herself.

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.

     The plan for Janie’s future begins with her lack of having real parents. Hurston builds up a foundation for Janie that is bound to fall like a Roman Empire. Janie’s grandmother, whom she refers to as “Nanny” takes the position as Janie’s guardian. The problem begins here for Janie because her Nanny not only spoils her, but also makes life choices for her. Nanny is old, and she only wants the best for her grandchild, for she knows that the world is a cruel place. Nanny makes the mistake of not allowing Janie to learn anything on her own. When Janie was sixteen years old, Nanny wanted to see her get married. Although Janie argued at first, Nanny insisted that Janie get married. “’Yeah, Janie, youse got yo’ womanhood on yuh… Ah wants to see you married right away.’” (Page 12). Janie was not given a choice in this decision. Her Nanny even had a suitor picked out for her. Janie told herself that she would try to make the best of the situation and attempt to find love in her marriage to Logan Killicks. But, as time went by, Janie realized that she still did not have any feelings of what she had considered to be love in her husband.

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

Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God tells the story of Janie’s journey towards spiritual enlightenment and her development of individuality, largely through Janie’s relationships with others. Hurston uses the themes of power, control, abuse, and respect, in Janie’s relationships with Nanny, Killicks, Starks, and Tea Cake, to effectively illustrate how relationships impact identity and self-growth.

The world of Janie Crawford in Their Eyes Were Watching God was one of oppression and disappointment. She left the world of her suffocating grandmother to live with a man whom she did not love, and in fact did not even know. She then left him to marry another man who offered her wealth in terms of material possessions but left her in utter spiritual poverty. After her second husband's death, she claims responsibility and control of her own life, and through her shared love with her new husband, Teacake, she is able to overcome her status of oppression. Zora Neale Hurston artfully and effectively shows this victory over oppression throughout the book through her use of

In Zora Neale Hurston’s novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie, the protagonist, experiences relief at the end of the novel. The novel begins at the end, emphasizing the importance of her moral reconciliation. Though at the beginning, it appears she returns home defeated, it is contrary. She returns home triumphant in finding her peace and fulfillment. When Janie starts to take things into her own hands instead of relying on her faith of others, she finally finds herself and joy. She needed to experience love in her own way to find what she was missing and what she needed in her love and her life.

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston is about a young woman that is lost in her own world. She longs to be a part of something and to have “a great journey to the horizons in search of people” (85). Janie Crawford’s journey to the horizon is told as a story to her best friend Phoebe. She experiences three marriages and three communities that “represent increasingly wide circles of experience and opportunities for expression of personal choice” (Crabtree). Their Eyes Were Watching God is an important fiction piece that explores relations throughout black communities and families. It also examines different issues such as, gender and class and these issues bring forth the theme of voice. In Janie’s attempt to find herself, she

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

Their Eyes Were Watching God, authored by Zora Neal Hurston, tells the story of an African American woman named Janie living in the 1900s who spends her life trying to find self-fulfillment through love. She marries two men before she finds her one true love. Hurston uses symbols such as the pear tree and the horizon, Janie’s hair, and the hurricane to define Janie. Judgment is also a reoccurring element used by Hurston to show Janie's quest for love and the independence that she gains in her journey. Throughout her life, Janie also has to fight the stereotypical role that is expected of her by other people.

Zora Neale Hurston wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God focusing on Janie’s personal growth through the trials and relationships throughout her life. “She recognizes that she has lived her life for everyone else and now that she is about to be free for the first time in her 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.