Women In Their Eyes Were Watching God By Zora Neale Hurston

Throughout life, everybody makes sacrifices that may become more beneficial to him or in ways they could not foresee. A sacrifice may be simply giving up an object or giving up something deeper in meaning. Their Eyes Were Watching God is a prime example of a book that reflects this theme. In Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, the main character, Janie, struggles to figure out her identity and what she desires in life. As she matures in her relationships and in life, she learns to make sacrifices in order to seek what she really needs. In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston illuminates Janie’s values and the text’s emphasis on self-actualization is demonstrated through Janie leaving stability with Logan to marry Joe,

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 the late nineteenth century, the New Woman time period emerged after World War I. Women began to cast away the domestic stereotypes and they became “independent [women] who [sought] achievement and self-fulfillment beyond the realm of marriage and family” (Miller 1). Straying away from the typical image of women staying and maintaining the home, women started attending universities, receiving professional jobs, and becoming involved in politics (1). The transition of women from the domestic sphere to the public sphere is a notion Zora Neale Hurston uses in Their Eyes Were Watching God. Hurston’s use of dominant characters in society reveals her theme that experiences and relationships are the roots of finding independence and identity despite the obscurity caused by sexism.

Throughout many years in the early 19th century, people were forced to work in very poor environments. From working for long hours on fields and plantations, they did not have an opportunity to have a free and self-fulfilling life. Their lives were very similar to that of a mule where they had to perform very tiring and hard jobs for most of the day. In many instances, people lived their whole life working towards freeing themselves from the work but were never able to accomplish their goal. In Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston, the mule is used as a symbol of the way Janie is treated in each of her relationships except when she is with Teacake, demonstrating that it is more worthy to work like a mule with a lover than live a leisurely life without one.

  In 1937, upon the first publication of Their Eyes Were Watching God, the most influential black writer of his time, Richard Wright, stated that the novel "carries no theme, no message, [and] no thought."  Wright's powerful critique epitomized a nation's attitude toward Zora Neale Hurston's second novel. African-American critics read a book that they felt satisfied the "white man's" stereotype of African-American culture and the humor which Caucasians saw in that prejudice. However, those critics and most of America overlooked the wonderful use of imagery, symbolism, and thematic application of one African-American female's journey into womanhood and

     In Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston, the reader is given a particular glimpse into Janie's life with reference to the men she has known.  Janie's three men are all very different, yet they were all Janie's husband at one point in her life.  Although they all behaved differently, in lifestyle as well as their relationship with Janie, they all shared certain similarities.

Their Eyes Were Watching God is set during a time where women were at the lowest point of the social hierarchy. Women had no economic, social, or political power to make their lives better. Some women, feminist women, worked to gain power in these areas of their lives. In the novel, Hurston depicts Janie as an oppressed woman working against a strict patriarchal society and towards her empowerment and independence.

In Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston discusses the topic of women oppressed in marriage by exploring themes of arranged marriage, gender roles, and abuse. In the early 1900’s, marriage was seen as the way to gain protection and a purpose in life. For many young women, marriage meant that they would be seen as a cook, a maid, and a nanny. The protagonist of Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie Starks, is a young African American woman who recounts her marriages and young life to a friend. In her first marriage, we see how she is oppressed by her grandmother and her husband’s inability to love her. Joe, her second husband, resorted to physical violence and emotional abuse to control Janie. After Joe’s death, Janie is finally free to live her life as she chooses, and in that process, she meets Tea Cake, a charming young man whom she eventually marries. In that marriage, Tea Cake and Janie start strong and happy, their lives filled with love and joy. However, eventually, the influence of gender roles and possession that were common at that time took control of Tea Cake. Through reading about these experiences we explore the way she was treated in each of her marriages, how she was oppressed, and how she found freedom.

Love plays a very important role in “Their Eyes Were Watching God” by Zora Neale Hurston. Janie thought of love just as she thought of the elements of springtime: Sunny days, bright skies, and a bee pollinating pear tree blossoms. She searched far and wide for this kind of perfect love. “Their Eyes Were Watching God” mainly referred to how Janie discovered her identity and the true meaning of love from her past three marital experiences. However throughout all of her marriages, she became independent and lost the desire to be attached to a man. Hurston used this to show Janie 's progression as a woman.

Their Eyes Were Watching God: Research Paper In Their Eyes Were Watching God, African Americans weren’t treated equally, and were looked at as slaves even though slavery had already been abolished. Women were looking for wealthy men to take care of them. Janie, is seeking to find out what true love is and through her experiences in her three different types of marriages, she eventually attains her goal. She ends up discovering who she is as a person, and what the most important components are that define her and make up her life.

Love may blind some but for others it opens eyes. In the book Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Kneale Hurston, the main character Janie, lives an arduous life of trying to find what love really is. Throughout her three marriages, Janie develops into a strong woman due to her own ignorance, being submissive, and love.

The Harlem Renaissance was an artistic and cultural movement that took place in Harlem, New York after World War I until the 1930s. During this time many African-Americans including Zora Neale Hurston, used the movement to express their views on race and gender and used their voices to speak out for their rights and beliefs. By developing Janie’s relationships and how they affect her, Hurston demonstrates through Their Eyes Were Watching God that many factors can limit or influence man’s decision to speak out. Janie’s grandmother Nanny, who acts as Janie’s major female influence in her childhood, authoratively tells Janie how to live her life.

Give an inanimate object the ability to walk. Compare an idea to an image. Exaggerate a concept. Each person has a different poetic style, and each poetic style uses different poetic techniques: personification, simile, hyperbole, imagery, or irony. Zora Neale Hurston reveals her unique poetic style through Their Eyes Were Watching God, the story of Janie Crawford and her journey to finding unconditional, true love. Her journey begins with an arranged marriage to Logan Killicks, a physically unappealing man with a considerable house, to an elopement with Joe Starks, a power-hungry and egocentric leader, and ends with Tea Cake, the man that loves Janie, despite the consequences that come with marrying an older and wealthier woman. Janie’s

Zora Neal Hurston’s ‘Their Eyes Were Watching God’, was published in 1937 and is often celebrated for it’s realistic use of language and dialect of the black American south. However, as Wright pinpoints, there is a sense of Hurston catering to the white audience in her use of language, and prompts the question of whether ‘Their Eyes Were Watching God’ should be considered a ‘community text’ or comparable to minstrelsy. This essay will explore the ways in which Hurston creates a community text through her use of vernacular, as well as addressing some of the other points Wright made in regards to the lack of a clear theme or message in the novel.

In a time period which covers the era that saw the first generation African-Americans come of age without any memory of being slaves to just shortly before American women could stand up alongside Soviet women and say they had the right of self-determination through the acquisition of suffrage, the history of colored women was one distinctly different from everyone else. If African-Americans could honestly and accurately be said to hold any particular type of freedom or even a particular right in the American society inhabited by the characters of Zora Neale Hurston’s, “Their Eyes were Watching God,” it might well be true to suggest that they had the right to decide which method of domination they preferred at the hands of their black husbands.