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Their eyed were watching god essay
The symbolism essay in their eyes were watching god
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In some situations, one can be confined, and be free at the same time. In Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, Janie is a shining example of that throughout the novel. As a child, she grows up with her grandmother knowing all what freedom is. Her grandmother s sets a marriage up for her, where for the first time in her life she is restricted. However, she meets a man on mission to raise a town from nothing to something, and leaves her first husband for him. Eventually, when the town is up and running, Janie has been so restricted that only her body is there, but her mind is outside of it watching over her. Soon, this beacon of hope comes where freedom finally becomes present when she is with her new man. While previous relationships …show more content…
When Janie and Joe first come to Eatonville, there is little to nothing there at all, so Joe becomes the mayor so he can fix up the town himself. Janie thinks that she has escaped that restriction with Logan by being the person in charge at the store and being able to talk with everyone on the porch. That feeling soon leaves her as Joe tells her to go inside. Joe says, “Why don’t you go on and see whut Mrs. Bogle want? Whut you wanitin’ on?” (Hurston 106). Here Joe takes away the opportunity to hear the rest of the story that had cracked everyone up because he believes the two of them should be classed off. He wants Janie to act like she’s too good for everyone else, and shouldn’t engage in any of these activities. This is one of the ways Joe restricts her because she no longer has that freedom of speech, but has to sit in silence and only observe. Once again, Janie depicts another anchor that holds her back, and reminds her of the restriction: the hair tie. Joe wants to keep Janie’s hair tied up because he becomes jealous when someone starts to sniff her hair, so he needs to feel in control of her. After Joe passes, Janie soon comes across this mysterious man who she sees as a beacon of …show more content…
After Janie finds out about Tea Cake and his gambling, they move to the Everglades where TeaCake wants to prove to Janie that he can provide for her. They buy a house, and Tea Cake acquires a job working in a green bean field. As time goes on, he eventually becomes lonely out there and asks Janie if she would come and work with him: “Ah gits lonesome out dere all day ’thout yuh. After dis, you betta come git uh job uh work out dere lak de rest uh de women—so Ah won’t be losin’ time comin’ home” (Hurston 171). Unlike before with Logan, Tea Cake desires her company in the fields because he doesn’t want to lose spending time with her. Janie also has the choice to decline a job, and it wouldn’t hurt the relationship like it did with Logan. Thus, freedom is present in this relationship. Also, Janie doesn’t have to worry about being too good for people like she did with Joe. She is able to be present in the moment, instead of her body being there, and her mind being
Janie and Tea Cake seem very happy in the swamp country. They meet other workers and make friends, while they make money. Janie stays at home for awhile, but then starts working with Tea cake, but she does it by choice, not because her husband (like Logan) is forcing her too. They are happy where they are, and with the people they are around. This lifestyle is very different from how she was living in Eatonville. It’s dirty and gross, which makes her laugh thinking about how the people back there would look at her now. Overall, Janie feels free, happy, and loved.
Scene: Tea Cake asks Janie to work with him at Everglade fields. This is an action that distinguishes Tea Cake from Janie’s previous husbands. Both her previous husbands had wanted Janie to work, but their motivation and their ways of getting her to do it were very different. Tea Cake wants her to work with him, to be closer to her, while her previous husbands wanted her to work because they thought of her as a tool to be used for their own ends. On top of this, Tea Cake asked Janie to work, while previous husbands told her to work. This illustrates Tea Cake’s role as the most progressive of Janie’s husbands, he doesn’t feel he is in charge simply by virtue of being a
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 off. The teen pleads to her grandmother with 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. Nanny has many regrets about the way her daughter’s life turned out after Janie was born. She resorted to
In Their Eyes Were Watching God by Lora Neale Hurston, the main character engages in three marriages that lead her towards a development of self. Through each endeavor, Janie learns the truths of life, love, and the path to finding her identity. Though suppressed because of her race and gender, Janie has a strong will to live her life the way she wills. But throughout her life, she encounters many people who attempt to change the way that she is and her beliefs. Each marriage that she undertakes, she finds a new realization and is on a never-ending quest to find her identity and true love. Logan Killicks, Joe Starks, and Tea Cake each help Janie progress to womanhood and find her identity.
The next man that Janie confides in is Joe Starks. Joe in a sense is Janie's savior in her relationship with Logan Killicks. Joe was a well kept man who worked for "white-folks" all his life and had earned enough money to move himself to a town called Eatonville that was run completely by black people. Janie meets Joe while she is still married to Logan and she begins to lean on him ever so slightly. She has wanted to leave Logan, and she wouldn't have if Joe had not come along. Joe convinced Janie that he would be better off for her by telling her, "Janie, if you think Ah aims to tole you off and make a dog outa you, youse wrong.
In Zora Neale Hurston’s novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, the main character, Janie, struggles to find herself and her identity. Throughout the course of the novel she has many different people tell her who she should be and how she should behave, but none of these ideas quite fit Janie. The main people telling Janie who she should be is her grandmother and Janie’s 3 husbands. The people in Janie's life influence her search for identity by teaching her about marriage, hard work, class, society, love and happiness. Janie's outlook on life stems from the system of beliefs that her grandmother, Nanny, instils in her during her life.
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston is about a young woman that is lost in her own world. She longs to be a part of something and to have “a great journey to the horizons in search of people” (85). Janie Crawford’s journey to the horizon is told as a story to her best friend Phoebe. She experiences three marriages and three communities that “represent increasingly wide circles of experience and opportunities for expression of personal choice” (Crabtree). Their Eyes Were Watching God is an important fiction piece that explores relations throughout black communities and families. It also examines different issues such as, gender and class and these issues bring forth the theme of voice. In Janie’s attempt to find herself, she grows into a stronger woman through three marriages.
... 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.
She would eventually find that Joe needed to have control. The head rag was one of Joe’s ways of confining Janie, and a way he could keep her to himself and under his control. Hurston wrote, “This business of the head-rag irked [Janie] endlessly. But Jody was set on it. Her hair was not gong to show in the store… She was there in the store for him to look at, not those others” (6.31). Joe’s jealousy traps Janie, keeping her from being free to express her true self. Taking away her greatest display of beauty prevents her from having her own identity as a beautiful woman. Janie’s life became so confined, “she sat and watched the shadow of herself going about tending the store and prostrating itself before Jody, while all the time she herself sat under a shady tree with the wind blowing through her hair and her clothes” (7.5). Janie was so restrained by Joe’s jealousy she could only find freedom in her thoughts. She imagined a shadow of herself confined in the store while her true self was free to wonder under a tree, like she wondered under the pear tree, which defined her idea of love as teenager. After Joe died Janie “burnt up every one of her head rags and went about the house next morning with her hair in one thick braid swinging well below her waist” (9.3). This was an expression of Janie’s joyful liberation and defiance of Joe’s restrictive ways. After years of
Tea Cake, in this moment, takes the initiative for Janie allowing her to move forward in her life. Through his actions, Tea Cake breaks these boundaries set by Joe thereby creating a new impression of gender
The first time Janie had noticed this was when he was appointed mayor by the town’s people and she was asked to give a few words on his behalf, but she did not answer, because before she could even accept or decline he had promptly cut her off, “ ‘Thank yuh fuh yo’ compliments, but mah wife don’t know nothin’ ’bout no speech-makin’/Janie made her face laugh after a short pause, but it wasn’t too easy/…the way Joe spoke out without giving her a chance to say anything on way or another that took the bloom off things” (43). This would happen many times during the course of their marriage. He told her that a woman of her class and caliber was not to hang around the low class citizens of Eatonville. In such cases when he would usher her off the front porch of the store when the men sat around talking and laughing, or when Matt Boner’s mule had died and he told her she could not attend its dragging-out, and when he demanded that she tie up her hair in head rags while working in the store, “This business of the head-rag irked her endlessly. But Jody was set on it. Her hair was NOT to show in the store” (55). He had cast Janie off from the rest of the community and put her on a pedestal, which made Janie feel as though she was trapped in an emotional prison. Over course of their marriage, he had silenced her so much that she found it better to not talk back when got this way. His voice continuously oppresses Janie and her voice. She retreats within herself, where still dreams of her bloom time, which had ended with Joe, “This moment lead Janie to ‘grows out of her identity, but out of her division into inside and outside. Knowing not mix them is knowing that articulate language requires the co-presence of two distinct poles, not their collapse into oneness’ ” (Clarke 608). The marriage carries on like this until; Joe lies sick and dying in his death bed.
The book, Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston is about Janie Crawford and her quest for self-independence and real love. She finds herself in three marriages, one she escapes from, and the other two end tragically. And throughout her journey, she learns a lot about love, and herself. 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, she was forced into marrying Logan Killicks and hated it. So, she left him for Joe Starks who promised to treat her the way a lady should be treated, but he also made her the way he thought a lady should be. After Joe died she found Tea Cake, a romantic man who loved Janie the way she was, and worked hard to provide for her.
In the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, Janie Crawford, the protagonist, constantly faces the inner conflicts she has against herself. Throughout a lot of her life, Janie is controlled, whether it be by her Nanny or by her husbands, Logan Killicks and Joe Starks. Her outspoken attitude is quickly silenced and soon she becomes nothing more than a trophy, only meant to help her second husband, Joe Starks, achieve power. With time, she no longer attempts to stand up to Joe and make her own decisions. Janie changes a lot from the young girl laying underneath a cotton tree at the beginning of her story. Not only is she not herself, she finds herself aging and unhappy with her life. Joe’s death become the turning point it takes to lead to the resolution of her story which illustrates that others cannot determine who you are, it takes finding your own voice and gaining independence to become yourself and find those who accept you.
In the beginning of the story, Janie is stifled and does not truly reveal her identity. When caught kissing Johnny Taylor, a local boy, her nanny marries her off to Logan Killicks. While with Killicks, the reader never learns who the real Janie is. Janie does not make any decisions for herself and displays no personality. Janie takes a brave leap by leaving Killicks for Jody Starks. Starks is a smooth talking power hungry man who never allows Janie express her real self. The Eatonville community views Janie as the typical woman who tends to her husband and their house. Janie does not want to be accepted into the society as the average wife. Before Jody dies, Janie is able to let her suppressed anger out.
She was first brought down by her first husband that her nanny liked for her. He hid her true ambition by being a non-sanitized human being, who did not really care for her as a woman, and tried to get her to work on his land. The next man is the man she thought would give her youth, happiness, and joy to her life. The man Joe seemed to care for her inhibitions at first but as soon as she ran away with him to Eatonville, he became more self centered and only worried about being the mayor of the town. He is the one person who sustained her from the being the actual woman she wanted to be. He made her work in his store that he opened and made her tie up her hair. The moment where she lets her hair go is the moment her and Joe have an argument, and the moment he dies, the first thing she does is to look in the mirror to make sure she knows she is there. She realizes that she is still that woman. A woman’s hair represents her beauty and youthness. Making a woman tie up or hide her hair is impeccable. When Janie looked in the mirror and saw her beauty through the wrinkles. she knew that it was time for her to shake off the past from her shoulders, and find a life suited just for