Their Eyes Were Watching God is a story about one woman’s search for independence and true love. Metaphorically, the phrase, their eyes were watching God mean the creation of a new form of humanity--one that is no longer based on the master-slave dialectic. (Curren, African American Review) When Janie Crawford was only 16 years old, she believed that she could find true love on her own. Janie Crawford believed true love was all about each partner having equal love for each other. Janie experienced sensual pleasures she wanted to experience in her life the day she witnessed a bee pollinating a peer tree. Zora Neale Hurston uses the pear tree in this novel to indicate a symbol of love.
John Laudun says “ this character of Hurston’s work explores an important dimension of the nature of identity and community and the relationship between the two, a dimension highlighted in the in the growing body of scholarship on the nature of dialogue and the dialogic nature of subjectivity. (Laudun, African American Review)
Janie is enclosed by a couple of loveless marriages, because she was not able to express those sensual pleasures, and find her true love. Janie’s grandmother believed that a woman should marry a man for financial security, then love would come later on. So therefore, Janie’s grandmother wouldn’t allow her to fall in love with just any one. This made Janie grow furious of her grandmother. She didn’t like the lifestyle her grandmother wanted her to love. Janie’s first marriage was under the influence of her grandmother. She was married to a greatly older man by the name of Logan Killicks. Killicks showers Janie in fine things for a long time before he ask her to work on his farm. Janie then felt like she was being used, bu...
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...MAS Ultra - School Edition. EBSCO. [Library name], [City], [State abbreviation]. 26 Sep. 2009
King, Sigrid. "Naming and power in Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God." Black American Literature Forum 24.4 (Winter90 1990): 683. MAS Ultra - School Edition. EBSCO. [Library name], [City], [State abbreviation]. 26 Sep. 2009
Laudun, John. "Reading Hurston Writing." African American Review 38.1 (Spring2004 2004): 45. MAS Ultra - School Edition. EBSCO. [Library name], [City], [State abbreviation]. 26 Sep. 2009
Curren, Erik D. "Should their eyes have been watching God?: Hurston's use of religious experience and gothic horror." African American Review 29.1 (Spring95 1995): 17. MAS Ultra - School Edition. EBSCO. [Library name], [City], [State abbreviation]. 26 Sep. 2009
Hurston, Zora Neale. Their Eyes Were Watching God. New York, N.Y. J.B. Lippincott
Hurston, Zora Neale. Their Eyes Were Watching God. Harper Perennial Modern Classics: Reissue Edition 2013
Zora Neale Hurston’s, Their Eyes Were Watching God tells about the life of Janie Crawford. Janie’s mother, who suffers a tragic moment in her life, resulting in a mental breakdown, is left for her grandmother to take care of her. Throughout Janie’s life, she comes across several different men, all of which end in a horrible way. All the men that Janie married had a different perception of marriage. After the third husband, Janie finally returns to her home. It is at a belief that Janie is seeking someone who she can truly love, and not someone her grandmother chooses for her. Although Janie eventually lives a humble life, Janie’s quest is questionable.
I first read the novel during my Junior year of high school, during which time our main focus was merely to include African American authors in the canon, not to search their writings for their social and political implications. For this reason, I left my first reading of Hurston's novel with glazed-over eyes and a lifelong quest, if not an obsession, for a man like Tea Cake.
In, Their Eyes Were Watching God, the author takes you on the journey of a woman, Janie, and her search for love, independence, and the pursuit of happiness. This pursuit seems to constantly be disregarded, yet Janie continues to hold on to the potential of grasping all that she desires. In, Their Eyes Were Watching God, the author, Zora Hurston illustrates the ambiguity of Janie’s voice; the submissiveness of her silence and the independence she reclaims when regaining her voice. The reclaiming of Janie's independence, in the novel, correlates with the development and maturation Janie undergoes during her self discovery.
"Janie's Learning Experiences in Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston :: Their Eyes Watching God Hurston." 123 Help Me. N.p., n.d. Web. 22 Apr. 2014. .
By comparing her life to a tree, it also gives the reader more information about Janie. They seemed to be staring at the dark, but their eyes were watching God.” Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God. (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2006), Chapter 18, page 160.
In this book, Hurston writes in the dielect of the black community of the time. Many of the words are slang. Hurston begins the story with Janie telling it, but then it becomes a third person narrative throughout most of the story.
Rosenblatt, Roger. “Roger Rosenblatt’s Their Eyes Were Watching God.” Rpt. in Modern Critical Views of Zora Neale Hurston. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 1986. 29-33. Print.
Hurston begins the essay in her birth town: Eatonville, Florida; an exclusively Negro town where whites were a rarity, only occasionally passing by as a tourist. Hurston, sitting on her porch imagines it to be a theatre as she narrates her perspective of the passing white people. She finds a thin line separating the spectator from the viewer. Exchanging stances at will and whim. Her front porch becomes a metaphor for a theater seat and the passers
“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,” (11). The novel, Their Eyes Were Watching, God by Zora Neale Hurston, tells a story of a woman, Janie Crawford’s quest to find her true identity that takes her on a journey and back in which she finally comes to learn who she is. These lessons of love and life that Janie comes to attain about herself are endowed from the relationships she has with Logan Killicks, Joe Starks, and Tea Cake.
Hurston does not concern herself with the actions of whites. Instead, she concerns herself with the self-perceptions and actions of blacks. Whites become almost irrelevant, certainly negative, but in no way absolute influences on her
Hurston counters the argument that black people have been given “a lowdown dirty deal” by nature and that their past defines who they are now. She is colored, but not “tragically colored”—she is unapologetic about her race. She believes that her accomplishments, not her race, define her, but at the same time, she is not ashamed of being black. Her ancestors
As a teenager, Janie dreamed of love and compared it to blossoms of a pear tree. Since Janie’s grandmother insisted that she marry for security, Janie agrees to marry Logan Killicks with the promise that love will develop over time. Times passes on with no change of feelings, and Janie is trapped into a loveless marriage with the conditions of that arrangement deteriorating. Memory recalls that period of time as one of anger toward her grandmother for forcing Janie to give up her dream of true love. To Janie, security does not replace love. When Janie realizes that those feelings of love will never come, she begins to look for a means of
As the novel begins, Janie walks into her former hometown quietly and bravely. She is not the same woman who left; she is not afraid of judgment or envy. Full of “self-revelation”, she begins telling her tale to her best friend, Phoeby, by looking back at her former self with the kind of wistfulness everyone expresses when they remember a time of childlike naïveté. She tries to express her wonderment and innocence by describing a blossoming peach tree that she loved, and in doing so also reveals her blossoming sexuality. To deter Janie from any trouble she might find herself in, she was made to marry an older man named Logan Killicks at the age of 16. In her naïveté, she expected to feel love eventually for this man. Instead, however, his love for her fades and she beco...
This excerpt from Zora Neale Hurston’s book, Their Eyes Were watching God, is an example of her amazing writing. She makes us feel as if we are actually in her book, through her use of the Southern Black vernacular and admirable description. Her characters are realistic and she places special, well thought out sentences to keep us interested. Zora Neale Hurston’s art enables her to write this engaging story about a Southern black woman’s life.