Money can’t buy happiness. People have been disputing this claim for hundreds of years. While some believe that a luxurious lifestyle, full of extravagant goods and enormous palaces, does not fulfill a person’s desire to be happy, others feel that an endless budget can satisfy all of our wants and needs. In an excerpt from Zora Neale Hurston’s autobiography Dust Tracks On a Road, Hurston describes her childhood as being empty through her comparisons between her excess of tangible substances and her lack of connection with the outside world, as well as through her depictions of her parents. Hurston lived in a home full of beauty and luxury, yet she feels the need to explore. Her backyard had a garden blooming with fruits and vegetables, so her …show more content…
She is living someplace where she has access to the necessities of life, a roof over her head, and an education. She should be overjoyed when she wakes up every morning, knowing that she does not have to work or struggle to sustain a normal lifestyle. However, she seems to be unhappy. Whenever the other children would play outside, Hurston and her siblings were limited to playing with them “once or twice a year.” Her parents attempt to shelter her from the outside world, which only strengthens her desire to leave and become independent. Hurston’s has so much available to her, yet the one thing she wants more than the others is not tangible. She wants to have freedom. Her mother claims that they had a huge plot of land in which she and her siblings could play in. Hurston seems to accept this, but never let’s go of that spark of exploration. Hurston constantly writes the word “plenty” when she claims they have “plenty of fish,” or “plenty of things.” This word is used to depict her backyard outside, yet it contradicts what she feels on the inside, empty. Hurston does not admit it, but she leaves subtle hints that as she started to mature, she began to crave freedom …show more content…
Her mother would tell her to achieve great things or “at least…get off the ground.” Her biggest desire was for her kids to not be afraid of failure. She was always trying to remain optimistic and attempted to guide her children towards the right direction. Mama was very confident and committed when she tried to teach her children and help them with their school work. However, she realized that she was limited in her ability to guide because her education was short. Thus, she is unable to teach them arithmetic and grammar and turned to the older siblings for help. Mama’s personality causes Hurston to view the world differently. Just like her mother, Hurston craves to work past the barriers that limit her; in this case it would be the front gates. Hurston’s father had differing views from her mother. Rather than telling his kids that the sky is limit and anything is possible, he told Hurston that he “predicted dire things for [her].” Rather than using positive reinforcement and praise to help motivate Hurston to work hard, he uses fear tactics to force her to change her personality. He wants to prepare Hurston for the real world where people acted violently towards blacks. Mama tries to shelter Hurston from this reality, so she doesn’t like to let her leave home and attempts to shelter her from the outside world. Her father wants her to be ready for the moment when she leaves their town, so that the
“I rather would be blind than then see this world in yellow, and bought and sold by kings that hammer roses into gold.” (King Midas Pg.462 Para.10) Many think that if they got what they wanted they would be happy, but if the world was all based on malterlistic things and everyone got what they wanted there would be chaos and no feelings just want and people would do crazy things to get what they want. Now a day’s people mistake malterlistic things for happiness. “The necklace”, “Ads may spur unhappy kids to embrace materialism”, And “Thrill of the chase” illustrates examples of materialism and show some base their happiness on it.
The novel Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston explores the life of an African American woman from the south who is trying to find herself. The protagonist of this novel is Janie Crawford. She is trying to defy what people expect of her, and she lives her life searching to have a better life. Zora Neale Hurston’s life experiences influence the book in many ways, including language, personality, and life experiences. Through her use of southern black language in the book, Zora Neale Hurston illustrates the vernacular she grew up speaking.
In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston uses colloquial language to show readers exactly why Nanny raised her granddaughter, Janie Crawford, the way she did. When Janie is sixteen years old, her grandmother wants to marry her. The teen pleads to her grandmother for claims of not knowing anything about having a husband. Nanny explains the reason she wants to see Janie married off is because she is getting old and fears once she dies, Janie will be lost and will lack protection. Janie’s mother was raped by a school teacher at the young age of seventeen, which is how Janie was brought into the world.
It’s no wonder that “[t]he hurricane scene in Zora Neale Hurston’s novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, is a famous one and [that] other writers have used it in an effort to signify on Hurston” (Mills, “Hurston”). The final, climactic portion of this scene acts as the central metaphor of the novel and illustrates the pivotal interactions that Janie, the protagonist, has with her Nanny and each of her three husbands. In each relationship, Janie tries to “’go tuh God, and…find out about livin’ fuh [herself]’” (192). She does this by approaching each surrogate parental figure as one would go to God, the Father; she offers her faith and obedience to them and receives their definitions of love and protection in return. When they threaten to annihilate and hush her with these definitions, however, she uses her voice and fights to save her dream and her life. Hurston shows how Janie’s parental figures transform into metaphorical hurricanes, how a literal hurricane transforms into a metaphorical representation of Janie’s parental figures, and how Janie survives all five hurricanes.
In the beginning, the author explains how this young girl, Lizabeth, lived in the culturally deprived neighborhood during the depression. Lizabeth is at the age where she is just beginning to become a young woman and is almost ready to give up her childish ways. Through this time period she was confused and could not quite understand what was happening to her. In the end she rips Miss Lottie’s marigolds among the ugly place in which she lived. The marigolds were the only things that make the place a bit beautiful to the eye. In this scene the marigolds represent the only hope the people had for themselves in this time of depression. This could reveal how the author has experienced a loss of hope in times of need. In her explanation of how Lizabeth had torn up the flowers and destroyed all hope in that time of depression, might explain that she has also destroyed hope in a time of pain and grief. Later she writes, “And I too have planted marigolds.” This could mean she has learned from her experiences and that she has finally found hope and always tries to seek the good within the bad and the ugly. On another note, it could mean she just wants to act out on something, but she can’t, so she writes about her...
During her marriage to Joe, Janie reflects on how Nanny’s strict upbringing has influenced her life and concludes that “Nanny had taken the biggest thing God ever made, the horizon-- for no matter how far a person can go the horizon is still a little way beyond you, and pinned it in...” (89). Hurston emphasizes the vastness of the horizon as a way of alluding to the countless possibilities it holds. In saying that Nanny “pinned it in”, Hurston argues that Nanny was too narrow-minded to appreciate the opportunity held by the horizon, scared of the freedom it held. Nanny breeds this fear in Janie by imposing her own values on her without allowing Janie to discover what was important for her. Clogging the horizon provided the control she inherently craved, a desire implanted in her by the materialistic beliefs she held. A smaller horizon made Nanny feel as though she was closer to achieving her dreams, but in reality, all it did was narrow her options. By clogging the horizon and its limitless possibilities, Nanny clogged her “veil” as well, making it more difficult to sift through (what she valued in life?) good and
“Money doesn’t buy happiness.” Most children learn this proverb and immediately try to disprove it, or simply do not believe it. However, age allows one to see the truth in this phrase. In My Antonia, a novel by Willa Cather, the protagonist, Jim Burden, reflects on his childhood in the American frontier. Despite achieving wealth and an elevated social position, benefits most associate with attaining the American Dream, Jim Burden eventually realizes that true success, and happiness, is found in strong emotional connections.
By presenting the competing sets of industrial and rural values, Jewett's "A White Heron" gives us a rich and textured story that privileges nature over industry. I think the significance of this story is that it gives us an urgent and emphatic view about nature and the dangers that industrial values and society can place upon it and the people who live in it. Still, we are led to feel much like Sylvia. I think we are encouraged to protect nature, cherish our new values and freedoms, and resist the temptations of other influences that can tempt us to destroy and question the importance of the sublime gifts that living in a rural world can bestow upon us.
Happiness is a feeling adults experience when they receive a gift, win something, and various other reasons, but does money buy this happiness everyone experiences? Don Peck and Ross Douthat claim money does buy happiness, but only to a point in their article which originally appeared in the Atlantic Monthly (252). Throughout their article, reasons on why money can sometimes buy happiness are explained. While some of the reasons given are effective, not all are satisfying answers for adults working diligently to make a living. Money is a part of everyone’s life, yet it is not always the cause of happiness.
In Zora Neale Hurston’s powerful feminist novel, “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” she tells the story of Janie Stark and her journey into becoming a powerful black woman during the time when those words were not spoken together. Hurston uses Janie as an archetype for what we should all aspire to be, because in Hurston’s eyes, and the eyes of many others, Janie is the only character in the novel that gets it right. The thing about Janie that set her apart from everyone else, the reason that she got it right, was not because she was just born that way, but it was because she used all of the trials and hardships in her life to her advantage. She never crumbled or quit, but she continued to move on and use her life experiences to help mold to her
When Janie was a young girl, she allowed her grandmother’s opinions and beliefs on happiness dictate how she lived her life, which ultimately led to her misery. When Janie was caught kissing Johnny Taylor under the pear tree at the age of sixteen, Nanny told Janie how she wanted her to live her life: “Ah wanted yuh to school out and pick from a higher bush and a sweeter berry. But dat ain’t yo’ idea, Ah see” (Hurston 13). Since she was young, Janie had been mesmerized with the pear tree, the emblem of natural harmony and contentment. She had come to the realization that her dream was to wrestle with life, and just as she was experiencing this freedom, Nanny, the only family she was in contact with, challenged her plans. Nanny took her own experiences as a malnourished slave and condemned Janie to the life in which she was never able to have; Nanny wanted her granddaughter to marry a man with money so that he could support her; she believed that whatever Janie’s assertion of happiness was, was wrong and pointless. When Nanny told Janie that she wanted her to marry a rich man, she spoke with a superior tone that revealed her belittlement towards Janie. She claimed that Janie didn’t know what was best for herself,...
Through her use of southern black language Zora Neale Hurston illustrates how to live and learn from life’s experiences. Janie, the main character in Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, is a woman who defies what people expect of her and lives her life searching to become a better person. Not easily satisfied with material gain, Janie quickly jumps into a search to find true happiness and love in life. She finally achieves what she has searched for with her third marriage.
Within the story of Their Eyes Were Watching God, the young protagonist, Janie, is faced with hardships life and how to deal with them. Through her three marriages the reader can see a change in Janie as a person and how it affects her. When one sits down and analyzes how Hurston wrote each of Janie’s three husbands one can see how they vary from class, to goals and even their treatment of Janie. With each husband came a life changing event that would
Mama, as a member of an older generation, represents the suffering that has always been a part of this world. She spent her life coexisting with the struggle in some approximation to harmony. Mama knew the futility of trying to escape the pain inherent in living, she knew about "the darkness outside," but she challenged herself to survive proudly despite it all (419). Mama took on the pain in her family in order to strengthen herself as a support for those who could not cope with their own grief. Allowing her husband to cry for his dead brother gave her a strength and purpose that would have been hard to attain outside her family sphere. She was a poor black woman in Harlem, yet she was able to give her husband permission for weakness, a gift that he feared to ask for in others. She gave him the right to a secret, personal bitterness toward the white man that he could not show to anyone else. She allowed him to survive. She marveled at his strength, and acknowledged her part in it, "But if he hadn't had...
When Janie is growing up, she is eager to become a woman and is ready to dive into the strain, maturity, and exhilaration of adulthood. In the beginning of Janie’s life story, Hurston introduces the metaphor of the pear tree, a symbol of Janie’s blossoming, and describes how “she had glossy leaves and bursting buds and she wanted to struggle with life but it seemed to elude her,” which successfully captures her excitement and perplexity of entering the adult world (11). Janie’s anxiety of growing up is also articulated with the image of her “looking, waiting, breathing short with impatience. Waiting for the world to be made” (Hurston 11). In her teenage years, it seems as if her life revolves around the anticipation of womanhood. Even as Janie grows older, she continues to hold on to her aspiration of living an adventurous, invigorating, and passionate life. In criti...