Their Eyes Were Watching God
Theme
Many times the love that a person is looking for is the one that a person doesn't realize.
Setting
The author begins and ends the book on a porch where Janie is telling her story to her friend Pheobe Watson. The book begins in the morning on the porch and then ends at night, symbolic of beginning and end. In between these two times Janie is telling her story which travels through the state of Florida.
Style
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.
Theme
Many times the love that a person is looking for is the one that a person doesn't realize.
Characters
Lee Coker - Lee Coker lives in Eatonville. He was one of the first people to meet Jody and Janie.
Coodemay and Dick Sterrett - Coodemay and Sterrett were friends of Tea Cake and Janie in the Everglades. One night they went to Mrs. Turner's restaurant while they were drunk. When they started causing trouble, Tea Cake made a big show of throwing them out. The crowd began to take sides, so a great deal of property damage took place in the process. Coodemay survives the hurricane; Sterett does not.
Janie Crawford - Janie Crawford is the protagonist of the novel. She was raised by her grandmother, Nanny. She wanted to define her identity on her own terms, but Nanny coerced her into marrying Logan Killicks. She valued financial security over love. However, Janie was miserable in her first marriage. She left Logan to marry Jody Starks. Jody refused to allow Janie to make her own decisions, so their marriage turns out unhappily as well. After Jody's death, Janie married Tea Cake. Through Tea Cake, Janie enjoyed her first real love. She grew beyond what other people wanted her to be and experienced her first taste of real freedom.
Leafy Crawford - Leafy Crawford was Janie's mother. She was born shortly before the end of the Civil War. Master Roberts, the white slave owner who owned Nanny, was her father. When Master Roberts' wife threatened to sell Leafy and punish Nanny for her relationship with Master Roberts, Nanny fled to the swamps. She hid there with her child until the slaves were declared free. Nanny dreamed that her child would have respectability and ...
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...gh he gave her wealth and respectibility. So it seems that Nanny's worst fears and her highest hopes were realized in Janie's second marriage.
Tea Cake's courtship was different from that of Logan and Jody. Janie's first marriage was more of a contract of sale between Nanny and Logan than anything else. Janie's second marriage was an escape from the first one. Moreover, it was based on disappointed dreams. Jody courted her by talking about himself and his dreams. Tea Cake, on the other hand, pursued Janie with a more romantic flair. Also, he allowed her equal footing in negotiating the terms of their relationship.
Her attendance at the picnic with Tea Cake was an act of faith, taking the relationship into the public arena. Social condemnation was fast in coming, especially because she discarded her mourning colors. She was free of Jody, so she also took steps to defy the restrictions that social convention placed on her behavior. Gaining personal freedom was a two-fold process. First, she had to be free in her private life, but she also had to free herself from restricting social attitudes. Only then could she begin to heal the rift between her outside self and her inside self.
Tea Cake and Jim bear substantial resemblance to each other. They both carry a rather unsavory reputation around their towns, they both woo their new wives aggressively; they even take care of their women with occasional recourse to illegal improprieties such as liquor distilling and gambling (although they tend to spend their profits quite differently). Both men reduce to child-like behavior in key moments of affection with their wives; Tea Cake favors having his head in Janie’s lap, while Jim prefers his head resting on Arvay’s breast. Perhaps most crucially, both men exhibit communication and behavior that make their wives frantic with jealousy and fear. Jim, in his teasing of Arvay, and Tea Cake in his long absences, especially right after his marriage to Janie in
From Janie’s first relationship with Logan Killicks, she learns about marriage. Janie is forced to marry Logan by Nanny, Janie’s grandmother. Janie was really young and she did not have any plans on getting married, but Nanny wants Janie to marry someone soon: “Tain’t Logan Killicks Ah wants you to have, baby, it’s protection. Ah ain’t gittin’ ole, honey, Ah’m done ole. One mornin’ soon, now, de angel wid de sword is gointuh stop by here. De day and de hour is hid from me, but it won’t be long. Ah as de Lawd when you was uh infant in mah arms to let me stay here till you got grown.
Janie’s character undergoes a major change after Joe’s death. She has freedom. While the town goes to watch a ball game Janie meets Tea Cake. Tea Cake teaches Janie how to play checkers, hunt, and fish. That made Janie happy. “Somebody wanted her to play. Somebody thought it natural for her to play. That was even nice. She looked him over and got little thrills from every one of his good points” (Hurston 96). Tea Cake gave her the comfort of feeling wanted. Janie realizes Tea Cake’s difference from her prior relationships because he wants her to become happy and cares about what she likes to do. Janie tells Pheoby about moving away with Tea Cake and Pheoby tells her that people disapprove of the way she behaves right after the death of her husband. Janie says she controls her life and it has become time for her to live it her way. “Dis ain’t no business proposition, and no race after property and titles. Dis is uh love game. Ah done lived Grandma’s way, now Ah means tuh live mine” (Hurston 114). Janie becomes stronger as she dates Tea Cake because she no longer does for everyone else. Janie and Tea Cake decided to move to the Everglades, the muck. One afternoon, a hurricane came. The hurricane symbolizes disaster and another change in Janie’s life. “Capricious but impersonal, it is a concrete example of the destructive power found in nature. Janie, Tea Cake, and their friends can only look on in terror as the hurricane destroys the
Nanny let Janie believe that she would find love after she is married by saying, “‘ Yes, she would love Logan after they were married’”(21). Which in the long run distorted her view on finding love. Also, Nanny doesn’t let Janie go for someone who doesn’t have it together. She say, “‘Whut Ah seen just now is plenty for me, honey, Ah don’t want no trashy nigger, no breath-and-britches, lak Johnny Taylor usin’ yo’ body to wipe his foots on’”(27). Ever since then, Janie had the mindset of Nanny. Nanny doesn’t want Janie to settle for less than what she is worth. Nanny isn’t all to blame for giving Janie this false perception. Nanny knows what it’s like to try to make a good living in this time while being black and a woman. So she wants Janie to live in a protective
When Tea Cake enters Janie's life, Janie really starts to come out of her shell. She lets down her hair that was kept up the entire time with Starks. This symbolizes Janie letting all her inhibitions out. In finding Tea Cake, Janie has "completed her voyage" of self-discovery. Tea Cake allows her to feel exhilarated and young again. She makes more friends and becomes more social. During this time in her life Janie is an excellent role model for other black women. She does not give a second look at what other people think about her, which is very admirable. This is shown when Hezekiah Potts tells Janie that Tea Cake is too low of a man for Janie yet, she stills persists on seeing him. Many people also think that Tea Cake is courting Janie for her money only. Janie pays no regard to these onlookers though.
Janie's outlook on life stems from the system of beliefs that her grandmother, Nanny instills in her during life. These beliefs include how women should act in a society and in a marriage. Nanny and her daughter, Janie's mother, were both raped and left with bastard children, this experience is the catalyst for Nanny’s desire to see Janie be married of to a well-to-do gentleman. She desires to see Janie married off to a well to do gentleman because she wants to see that Janie is well cared for throughout her life.
Janie’s first attempt at love does not turn out quite like she hopes. Her grandmother forces her into marrying Logan Killicks. As the year passes, Janie grows unhappy and miserable. By pure fate, Janie meets Joe Starks and immediately lusts after him. With the knowledge of being wrong and expecting to be ridiculed, she leaves Logan and runs off with Joe to start a new marriage. This is the first time that Janie does what she wants in her search of happiness: “Even if Joe was not waiting for her, the change was bound to do her good…From now on until death she was going to have flower dust and springtime sprinkled over everything” (32). Janie’s new outlook on life, although somewhat shadowed by blind love, will keep her satisfied momentarily, but soon she will return to the loneliness she is running from.
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...
Nanny's biggest mistake is that she never consults with Janie about what she wants in life. Janie's second husband, Joe Starks, is a repeat of Janie's unhappiness in marriage. At first, Janie looked at Joe as a man who would offer her an escape from her loveless marriage with Mr.
... She tells Pheoby, "'Dis house ain't so absent of things lak it used tuh be befo' Tea Cake come along. It's full uh thoughts, 'specially dat bedroom'"(284). Janie transforms her experiences with renaming: Tea Cake becomes the "son of Evening Sun" (281), and the lamp in Janie's hand is a "spark of sun-stuff washing her face in fire" (285). Janie Crawford Killicks Starks Woods has survived a succession of marital and other identities, and at the end of the novel, empowered to tell her own story, she has become a sort of goddess who pulls "in her horizon like a great fish-net" (Gilbert and Gubar 238-39). Janie's last act is an invocation of her self: "She called in her soul to come and see" (286). Janie is the final one who names in Hurston's novel, and with her call to herself, Janie becomes a model of powerful self-identiflcation for later Afro-American women writers."
Nanny was determined that Janie would break the cycle of oppression of black women, who were "mules for the world". (Both of Janie's first two husbands owned mules and the way they treated their mules paralleled to the way they treated Janie. Logan Killicks worked his mule demandingly and Joe Starks bought Matt Bonner's mule and put it out to pasture as a status symbol.) After joyfully discovering an archetype for sensuality, love, and marriage under a pear tree at sixteen, Janie quickly comes to understand the reality of marriage in her first two marriages. Both Logan Killicks and Joe Starks attempt to coerce her into submission by treating her like a possession (Killicks worked her like a mule and Starks used her like a medal around his neck). Also Janie learned that passion and love are tied to violence, as Killicks threaten to kill her and Starks beat her to assert his dominance. She continually struggled to keep her inner self-intact and strong in spite ...
... and scratching the dandruff from her scalp.” Tea Cake and Janie obviously shared a special love between them as their relationship grew. The things he did for her made her feel unbelievable. They did things she had never even thought of. Tea Cake took her places she had never been. “To Janie’s strange eyes, everything in the Everglades was big and new.” Janie went to many new places and met many new people that she would’ve never met had she stayed with Logan or stayed in Eatonville with Joe. She would’ve just kept on living the same life...never doing anything new with the same boring people. With Tea Cake, Janie began to work, and to feel a certain freedom she had never felt before.
her to be somebody that she wasn't. Tea Cake let her be herself. He loved
Janie’s three marriages were all different, each one brought her in for a different reason, and each one had something different to teach her. In summary, she married Logan because of her grandmother, Jody because she wanted to escape from Logan, and Tea Cake because they had true love. The marriages were different in that Logan treated Janie like a Slave, Joe was moulding her into what he wanted her to be, and Tea Cake just wanted to be with her. As a result, Janie learned many things from each marriage Tea Cake taught her to be herself and do what she wanted to, her marriage with Logan taught her to make changes in her life, and her marriage with Joe taught her to stand up for herself. In conclusion, her experiences in her marriages shaped her into the person she became, and were an important part of her life.
...d feels that she is lucky to have him. Joe Starks, Janie's second husband, seems to be her singing bee when they first meet but she realizes that he is not. When Joe becomes what he strived to be, he tried to control Janie and change her into what he expected and thought for her to be. Only Tea Cake, Janie's final husband, truly cared for the person that she really was and treated her as his equal. He encouraged her to speak her mind and tell him her opinion so that they can gain a better understanding of each other. In the course of these marriages, Janie is lead toward a development of self and when she arrives back in her hometown she has grown into a mature, independent woman who was still left with the warm memories of love and laughter with Tea Cake.