Themes In Zora Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God

Their Eyes Were Watching God jealousy analysis

In Zora Neel Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, many of the women in Janie’s town show that they are jealous of Janie and her looks. Janie is described as having a “firm buttocks like she had grape fruits in her hip pockets; the great rope of black hair swinging to her waist and unraveling in the wind like a plume; then her pugnacious breasts trying to bore holes in her shirt.” All the men in the town look at Janie as an object and the rest of the women are jealous of her for that. To present the emotion of jealousy to her readers, Hurston uses a very sarcastic tone and uses rhetorical questions within the passage. In the story, Hurston describes the differences in the men and women’s opinions as Janie walks by the front porch by writing “They, the men, were saving with the mind what they lost with the eye. The women took the faded shirt and muddy overalls and laid them always for remembrance.” In this quote, the overalls and faded shirts are referring to back when Janie would wear those along with all the other women and girls instead of the now tight dress that she always wears. The other women are jealous that she is able to wear dresses like that and that other men look at her the way they do. Later in the passage, Janie’s best friend Pheoby defends her by saying (2)” The worst thing ah ever knowed her to do was talking a few years offa her age and dat ain’t never harmed anybody” when the women sitting with her on the front porch start to bad mouth Janie and try to make her sound worse than she is. This is important to the story because it shows that Pheoby really cares about Janie and would not get jealous even when she has the other women talking in her ear about Janie. ...

... middle of paper ...

... within the length of the story; it is shown that Logan, Joe Starks, Tea Cake, and Judy do not have the same amount of trust in Janie as she has in them. As far as having evidence of love during the story there is not much to show. In the beginning of the story, there is no love being shown when Janie’s grandmother forces her to marry Logan Killicks because she believes that it would benefit her and she would be provided for. On the contrary, when under the tree, earlier in the story when Janie meets Joe Starks, she beings to love him, thus there is evidence of both love and the opposite. In conclusion, Janie is not only trapped the jealousy of her husbands, but there is not a whole lot of love being shown throughout the story. With the little love that is shown to Janie and that is she is giving, she eventually ends up growing to be a very strong women for her age.