In the novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston exposes the story of the love life of Janie. The relationship between Janie and her third husband, Tea Cake, was above and beyond the most positive of the three relationships with men she had and summoned forth her best assets. The relationships she had with these three men permitted her to be subjected to her first true love, expand her knowledge of working and taking care of herself, and discover a new culture/society.…
In the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God written by Zora Neale Hurston, the protagonist, Janie, and her husband for a respectable portion of her life, Jody Starks, seek courtship for entirely different reasons. Janie pursues sexual and emotional fulfillment as she journeys to the horizon and to a place of limitless possibility, while the male domineering Jody Starks seeks only after power, control, and a good place in society. These dramatic differences in ideals of love are the source of conflict between Janie and Jody and utterly shift Janie’s understanding of freedom and what it means to be free. Their different outlooks also lead to their downfall as a couple, and the downfall of Jody Starks as a man.…
Hurston continues to implement diction as a method enrich the reader's knowledge of her childhood. The author begins to mention the multitude of fruits which her family grows on their large farm complete with five…
Chapters 1 & 2 Pages 1-20 In the first two chapters, the dialect was a little unusual and odd when I started reading, but once I kept reading I got used to it. You can tell the book was set in an older time period than now, and that it is in a small town. The book begins in an omniscient, third-person narrator’s voice, and one that is decidedly literary and intellectual, full of metaphors, figurative language, and other poetic devices. Hurston splits the narrative between this voice and long passages of dialogue uninterrupted by any comment from the narrator.…
Hurston uses dialect in her novels to enable the user to have a deeper insight into the culture in which the novels are set. Dialects are used to preserve oral traditions of a particular group. She uses dialect to preserve the African-American oral traditions to be passed on to the reader. The use of dialect makes the characters more interesting, especially to the African-American society. It is obvious that the book was meant for a black audience who read using the southern dialect among blacks to spice up the story.…
When Hurston uses colloquial speech in the story, she characterizes people who are poor black citizens in the South. The colloquial speech used is taken from Hurston's own experiences growing up and, in doing so, helps Hurston use it more effectively. The main characters are poor blacks who live in the southern part of the country.…
Throughout the story Hurston uses different men to portray the continuum that men fall into in their society. Janie's marriage to Logan Killicks seems like the first stage in her development as a woman. She hopes that her forced marriage with Logan would end her loneliness and desire for love. Right from the beginning, the loneliness in the marriage shows up when Janie sees that his house feels like a "lonesome place like a stump in the middle of the woods where nobody had ever been" (Hurston 20). This description of Logan's house seems symbolic of the relationship they have. Janie eventually admits to Nanny that she still does not love Logan and cannot find anything to love about him. "She knew now that marriage did not make love. Janie's first dream was dead, so she became a woman" (Hurston 24). Janie's prayer seems like her final plea for a change in her life. She says, "Lawd, you know mah heart. Ah done de best Ah could do. De rest is left to you" (Hurston 23).…
This questions power dynamics within the novel. There is an ongoing motif of attempting to tame Janie for her own good. This is first presented with Nanny, who marries Janie off after, ‘Johnny Taylor [was] lacerating her Janie with a kiss.’ Through the choice of the word ‘lacerating’, Hurston connects the act of kissing, to whipping. To lacerate, means to tear or make deep cuts; this definition starkly contrasts the soft and vulnerable nature of a kiss. The delineation resonates with Nanny recounting the time where the slave master’s wife was whipping her, ‘but dem last lick burnt me lak fire’ . The only difference between the way Nanny explained her beatings and the brutality of Janie’s kiss, are simply a matter of linguistics; Nanny uses…
Richard Wright wrote that the characters of Hurston’s novel “live… between laughter and tears” as if it were a weakness— but as is seen time and time again, that humanity in the characters is perhaps the novel’s greatest strength. Their Eyes were Watching God serves as a testament to the power of books: one writer’s perspective molds the eyes of the characters, characters who, through a masterful author, possess the power to transform readers, forcing them to examine with their own eyes what the character revels upon himself. Hurston’s novel is definitely not written for one looking for a light read. Belying its mere one hundred some pages, the book sits heavy, probing the mind with questions for which there are no clear answers, and that is arguably where its power lies, not despite of its ambiguity, but for its ambiguity . The fact that so many people can read one book, and that one book can invoke such a diverse array of reaction and thought, however polarizing, speaks volumes to its…
In Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie learns from and matures in her marriages, growing to become a strong and independent woman. Her journey begins when she marries Logan, who wants Janie as a domestic helper; however, this is not the “marriage lak when you…
Hurston notes that women are not watchers, but are driven toward their goals. In Janies case, she seeks peace and takes many bold moves to get there. Through her trials she was able to discover who she is. Her needs, desires, and personal satisfactions. By the end of her journey, she was able to return home with a restful sense of accomplishment, giving her the same peace first experienced under the pear…
The feminist movement has exploded over the last century and Zora Hurston’s book entitled Their Eyes Were Watching God has contributed to the cause. Presented during a time where it was believed that women having any power went against the norms of society, the book shines a light on main character Janie Crawford. The complex character’s quest to find her voice and her identity in a period where women’s duties were only in the home because they were valued as less superior to men. The argument was that if women were to receive the same rights and privileges allotted to their male counterparts, chivalry would end forever.…
another writer’s suggested that Hurston’s rural dialect might be more realistic (Thompson). Her excellent ear and her “skill at transcribing” (Young 220) made the language in her first novel something new…
Hurston also uses literary devices to express Janie’s feelings and how they change throughout the novel. Janie feels as if she was some kind of joke to everyone. “Killing tools out of laughs” (Hurston 2). The author uses this specific literary device which is a metaphor to show how they treated Janie and made fun of her. They were laughing at Janie in her as if she was everyone’s joke. Janie was humiliated and embarrassed. “She had glossy leaves and hurting buds and she wanted to struggle with life but it seemed to…
In this love story written by Zora Neale Hurston, we find out that the main character, Janie saw her life as a great tree filled with many trials and tribulations. “Their eyes were watching God” was written from a woman’s point of view to tell the story of a woman desperately searching for true love and fulfilment. Janie Crawford grew up with her grandmother who forced her to marry at the age of seventeen to ensure a better life for herself. Logan Killicks was an established potato farmer and he was more than twice Janie’s age. He used her for slavery but Janie refused to accept this lifestyle. One day she met a tall handsome man name Joe Starks and ran off with him to Florida. There he established and became the mayor of a small town called Eatonville. This relationship was one of possession and power and Janie was denied any interaction with others in the town. Janie was his trophy wife; she was only allowed to work in their store until Joe became sick and died. Janie then met and fell in love with a young man called Tea Cake. He loved her and took her on picnics, hunting, fishing and dancing. Both, Tea Cake and Janie worked together on the “muck”, on a field picking crops. On a tragic trip to the Everglades, a hurricane came and Tea Cake was bitten by a wild dog while trying to save Janie and contracted rabies. In his last few months, Tea Cake began to lose his mind and tried to kill Janie so she was forced to take his life. No one could replace Tea Cake, so after his death Janie returned to Eatonville to work in her store. When she returned, people assumed that Tea Cake had run off with her money, but Janie did not care because finally she had experienced true love.…