Their Eyes Were Watching God

Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, shows the development of an African-American woman living in the 1920s and 1930s as she searches for her true identity. Janie was a half-white, half-black girl growing up in Florida in the early 1930 's, living with her grandmother, struggling to find her place in life. Janie’s transformation throughout the book shows a change through language and the development of Janie’s voice through the different stages of her life. Their Eyes Were Watching God is a narrative about one woman’s quest to free herself from repression and explore her own identity; this is the story of Janie Crawford and her journey for self-knowledge and fulfillment. Hurston’s narrative focuses on the emergence of a female self in a male-dominated world, she tells her magnificent story of romantic love against the background of church and extra church modes of expression. Understanding this fact helps to explain those sections of the narrative that have been said to have no meaning beyond their entertainment value (Hemenway 218). Janie’s life is like a sermon waiting to be told to the African-American women, Nanny states this in the beginning of the novel. “Ah wanted to preach a great sermon about colored women sittin’ on high, but they wasn’t no pulpit for me. Freedom found me wid a baby daughter in mah arms, so Ah said Ah’d take a broom and a crook-pot and throw up a highway through de wilderness for her. She would expound what Ah felt. But somehow she got lost offa de highway and next thing Ah knowed here you was in the world. So whilst Ah was tendin’ you of nights Ah said Ah’d save de text for you (16). Janie transforms many times as she undergoes the process of self-discovery as she changes through her experiences with three different men. Through her marriages with Logan, Joe, and then Tea Cake she figures out who she is and what she wants in life. Every one of her marriages has a different outcome on her capability of finding that

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