Wait a second!
More handpicked essays just for you.
More handpicked essays just for you.
Their eyes were watching god love and identity essay
Their eyes were watching god and gender
Their eyes were watching God
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
Recommended: Their eyes were watching god love and identity essay
Henry David Thoreau once said, “Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves.” This excerpt of wisdom is prevalent in the journey of Janie Mae Crawford, the protagonist in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. Janie spends the entirety of the novel searching for love and companionship, and on the way she discovers her truest self. When she finally determines her own identity, she realizes that she is a strong, independent woman of color who can defy the stereotypical standards placed upon women in the early 1900s. Although she initially allowed others to place restrictions on her based on her gender and race, she overcame these boundaries and understood that she did not have to conform to the expectations of others. The most apparent theme of this novel portrays that in order to for one to understand themselves in the realest and most raw fashion, they must encounter a number of instances that shape who they are as an individual. The initial instance in which Janie encounters the idea of love and begins her journey toward self-realization is when she is lying beneath a pear tree as a sixteen-year-old in Nanny’s back yard and receives her first kiss from a boy named Johnny Taylor. On that afternoon, Janie lied on the ground observing the act of pollination between a bee and a flower on the pear tree, igniting her sexual curiosity. This sexual curiosity that she experiences is not vulgar, but rather intimate. The narrator displays Janie’s sexual perception of the pollination by describing the acceptance of the pollen from the bee as “the thousand sister-calyxes arch[ing] to meet the love embrace and the ecstatic shiver of the tree from root to tiniest branch creaming in every blossom and frothin... ... middle of paper ... ...ed for the worse, eventually leading up to Janie killing Tea Cake in self-defense. Janie experienced true grief and guilt for Tea Cake’s death, unlike the forced grief she showed everyone in Eatonville when Jody died. This grief, along with the disloyalty of her former friends during trial, makes Janie realize that she can survive on her own; Tea Cake’s death completes Janie’s journey to self-discovery. Life experiences—whether they are positive or negative—mold one’s unfiltered, most genuine self. The more experience one gains in their lifetime, the more growth this inner self will undergo. The things that Janie endured during the course of the novel is more than what most people will go through in a lifetime. Even though Janie had many trials and tribulations in Their Eyes Were Watching God, they just made her a stronger, more independent, self-aware woman.
Woods Tea Cake comes to rescue Janie from her misery after the death.
In the beginning years of Janie’s life, there were two people who she is dependent on. Her grandmother is Nanny, and her first husband is named Logan Killicks. In Their Eyes Were Watching God, “Janie, an attractive woman with long hair, born without benefit of clergy, is her heroine” (Forrest). Janie’s grandmother felt that Janie needs someone to depend on before she dies and Janie could no longer depend on her. In the beginning, Janie is very against the marriage. Nanny replied with, “’Tain’t Logan Killicks Ah wants you to have, baby, its protection. ...He done spared me...a few days longer till Ah see you safe in life” (Hurston 18). Nanny is sure to remind Janie that she needs a man in her life for safety, thus making Janie go through life with that thought process.
Janie and Arvay respond to their men in similar ways as well. Both women swing from extremes of doubt and distrust to passionate, all-encompassing love for their husbands. Moreover, both women reconfigure themselves to adjust to the man’s world, as when Janie moves to the Everglades with Tea Cake, and when Arvay goes out to sea with Jim on his fishing b...
and downs of Janie’s life have made her a stronger person. This is shown endless times
Janie is a young girl raised by her “old-fashioned” grandmother who has a fixed outlook on marriage. Her grandmother believes marriage is not for love but it is simply for protection. She accepts her limitations as a woman, having gone through slavery and having lived a difficult life. But Janie has the dreaming qualities of both men and women. She has a different vision of love, seeing it as an eternal and passionate sensation of mutual respect between the husband and the wife. Her image is like the horizon, an eternal line where the earth’s surface and the sky meet. Janie is forced into a marriage with Logan Killicks that does not display mutual respect. She is determined to leave him and continue her journey. Her first marriage leads her into her second marriage with Jody Starks; a man who seems to respect Janie at first but in reality does not. Her relationship with Jody is “mocked to death by time,” and leads her to her last relationship with Tea Cake Woods. By the end of the novel Janie has reached the line of equality with Tea Cake. Her relationships represent her journey to the horizon with the idea of love never...
The two things Janie wanted were freedom and true love. While she accomplished both of these by the end of the novel, it took some time and a lot of struggle to get there. Going through years of abuse and repression from her first and second husbands would be enough to make anyone crack under pressure, but not Janie. She managed to stay strong through all of it, and near the end she was rewarded with Tea Cake and the love he and she shared with each other. Needless to say, relationships aren’t perfect, and their relationship was not excused from this, but they were in love and made things work out. From the beginning to end, Tea Cake and Janie treated each other the way they deserved to be treated, and things were fine until the day he caught rabies from a dog while saving Janie’s life. Sadly, she did have to shoot him, but that’s OK because she started to realize that she had finally “been to the horizon and back with Tea Cake.” Her second goal was freedom. This was achieved after Tea Cake had died, and she was by herself thinking about her life and everything she had gone through. It’s somewhat sad to think about what she had to go through in order to fully achieve her dream. Three husbands and one death would take a toll on the average person, but she managed to come out of everything
In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston portrays the journey of Janie Crawford as an African American woman who grows and matures through the hardships and struggles of three different marriages. Although Janie is an African American, the main themes of the novel discusses the oppression of women by men, disregarding race. Janie gets married to three different men, aging from a young and naive girl to a mature and hardened women near the age of 40. Throughout the novel, Janie suffers through these relationships and learns to cope with life by blaming others and escaping her past by running away from it. These relationships are a result of Janie chasing her dreams of finding and experiencing true love, which she ultimately does in the end. Even through the suffering and happiness, Janie’s journey is a mixture of ups and downs, and at the end, she is ultimately content. Zora Neale Hurston utilizes Janie’s metaphorical thoughts and responses of blame and escape, as well as her actions towards success and fulfillment with her relationship with Tea Cake, to suggest that her journey
One of the most important things in life is finding one’s self. Although this may be difficult to achieve, it is necessary. In the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, the protagonist, Janie, struggles with finding her true identity. This led to her round and multi-layered character. Janie has trouble finding herself due to other characters depriving her from the opportunities she has; she allows other characters to take advantage of her. Although Janie has a very independent personality in the novel, she is dependent on others to make important decisions for her.
As Janie realized her desires for love, she became engaged in several relationships in an attempt to fulfill her ideals of marriage as expressed by the pear tree. Near the beginning of the novel, Janie is a young girl, but on the verge of becoming a woman. One spring day, when she was outstretched under a pear tree, “[s]he saw a dust-bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom,” leading her to exclaim, “[s]o this is marriage!” (Hurston 11). It is at this point that Janie discovers her first sexual awakening, evident through the suggestive symbolism of the statement. The “bloom” of the pear tree represents herself, while the “dust-bearing bee” represents her love interest. The symbiotic relationship between the bee and flower indicates her ideals of marriage, where
Watching God is a narrative about Janie’s quest to free herself from repression and explore
"Janie saw her life like a great tree in leaf with the things suffered, things enjoyed, things done and undone. Dawn and doom was in the branches" (8). When Janie was a teenager, she used to sit under the pear tree and dream about being a tree in bloom. She longs for something more. When she is 16, she kisses Johnny Taylor to see if this is what she looks for. Nanny sees her kiss him, and says that Janie is now a woman. In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie, the main character, is involved in three very different relationships. Zora Neale Hurston, the author, explains how Janie learns some valuable lessons about marriage, integrity, and love and happiness from her relationships with Logan Killicks, Joe Starks, and Tea Cake.
Zora Hurston was an African American proto-feminist author who lived during a time when both African Americans and women were not treated equally. Hurston channeled her thirst for women’s dependence from men into her book Their Eyes Were Watching God. One of the many underlying themes in her book is feminism. Zora Hurston, the author of the book, uses Janie to represent aspects of feminism in her book as well as each relationship Janie had to represent her moving closer towards her independence.
Imagine living in the life of a girl who is searching for her dreams or what she wants in life and what she has to go through. In the book “Their Eyes Were Watching God” by Zora Neale Hurston, Janie is a strong woman who went through a lot when things didn’t turn out to be what she wants it to be. This book mainly tells how Janie has been searching for love throughout her whole life and she’s usually involved with sexuality. Sometime she doesn’t think before she makes decisions. Also, this book consists of mortality which deaths seem to occur one after another. The author use some themes to help us understand more about what Janie is going through and what she’s looking for in life. The themes that the author uses are love, sexuality, and
Janie’s attempts at achieving her own pear tree and fails, nevertheless this is done so that she can find for herself that adventure and life experiences are more important than love alone. It didn’t take Janie long to learn her first lesson but after she left Logan “She knew now that marriage did not make love. Janie’s first dream was dead” (Hurston 25). Janie sought to have her own “pear tree” which meant that she wanted a perfect relationship with a man, defining her as a dependant early on. Once Logan began demanding more of Janie and stretching that thin fabric that is Janie’s loyalty she left him, Janie will experiment with Jody and learn the same lesson. Hurston personifies the extent of Janie’s dream by stating that it is “dead” showing that Janie chases her dreams extensively and she will do this continually until she achieves her own horizon. When Janie lives with Jody she is suppressed and her search for perfect love is shattered once more except this time she learns how to defend herself from this malice, “You ain’t tried tuh pacify nobody but yo’self. Too busy listening to yo’ own big voice.” (Hurston 87). We see once more that Janie is denied of her grand dream and is taught another valuable lesson, how to defend herself. Janie demonstrates her independence as a woman by living without a man for the
“She was stretched on her back beneath the pear tree soaking in the alto chant of the visiting bees, the gold of the sun and the panting breath of the breeze when the inaudible voice of it all came to her. She saw a dust-bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom; the thousand sister-calyxes arch to meet the love embrace and the ecstatic shiver of the tree from root to tiniest branch creaming in every blossom and frothing with delight. So this was a marriage! She had been summoned to behold a revelation. Then Janie felt a pain remorseless sweet that left her limp and languid.” This occurrence undeniably introduces Janie sensually to sex and builds the romantic ideal which Janie’s future lovers must live up to in order to satisfy her. This passage does not describe simple sex, but displays loving intimacy. The pollinated bee careful...