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How did Janie Crawford become a strong woman? Imagine how big a woman’s life changed after she went through three marriages. In most cases, she would learn many valuable lessons from each marriage. In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston succeeded in creating the heroine as well as the protagonist in Janie Crawford. When Janie was married to three different men who each has distinct perspectives, she realized that she gradually became more mature. Janie Crawford truly broke typical gender boundaries, and some of her words and her actions proved to society that she was a strong woman. Throughout her first and second marriage, Janie showed the readers her great endurance. At the age of sixteen, she loved spending every afternoon …show more content…
In fact, she was tempted by Joe’s words. He would gave her what Logan could not: power, fame, and the promise of a prospering life. Once again, life didn’t go as she expected. Joe earned back all his money by selling land to people who wanted to move to the town. Soon afterwards, he became a prestigious man in the town and was elected mayor. Unfortunately, he valued his ambition and power more than Janie. Although she lived a luxurious life, Janie never felt happy since “A feeling of coldness and fear took hold of her. She felt far away from things and lonely” (Hurston 46). Additionally, Janie suffered under his strict rules sorrowfully. For instance, Joe never let her to speak up her mind. As a mayor’s wife, she was not allowed to associate with the locals or attend social events because Joe always tried to shape her into his imagination of a mayor’s wife should be. Moreover, she also resented him bitterly for one simple reason: he forced her to keep her beautiful hair tied up and hide it from public. Actually, he took away all of her freedom. Consequently, Janie was only the suitable ornament to his power and his wealth no more no less. Joe once slapped her face for preparing a bad meal. At that moment, Janie realized she could no longer love Joe and she would save herself for another man. Meanwhile, their relationship continued to break down. Janie’s second marriage was even worse than her first one since she had to live with Joe in almost two decades. She lived with him long enough to stop fighting. For Janie, marriage without love equals life without emotions. In fact, what he did to her caused her a profound trauma psychologically, however she was still suffering his iron rules without
After a year of pampering, Logan becomes demanding and rude, he went as far to try to force Janie to do farm work. It was when this happened that Janie decided to take a stand and run away with Joe. At this time, Janie appears to have found a part of her voice and strong will. In a way, she gains a sense of independence and realizes she has the power to walk away from an unhealthy situation and does not have to be a slave to her own husband. After moving to Eatonville and marrying Joe, Janie discovers that people are not always who they seem to be.
In Their Eyes Were Watching God and Seraph on the Suwanee, Zora Neale Hurston creates two protagonists, Janie and Arvay, and depicts their rich relationships with Tea Cake and Jim, respectively. This brief paper compares these two women and their interaction with their husbands. Contrasting the similarities of these relationships helps underscore deeper themes that Hurston draws from two ostensibly different women.
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.
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. The teen pleads to her grandmother for 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.
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.
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.
Janie in her first marriage is her far from mesmerized with her husband's 60 acre land. The incompatibility between her and Logan ultimately cause the marriage to fail. Logan being described as old and ugly is in contrast to the beautiful young Janie. With the age difference comes the difference in perspectives. Logan's first wife obviously held her own weight: "Mah fust wife never bothered me 'bout choppin' no wood nohow. She'd grab dat ax and sling chaps lak uh man" (Hurston 26). He implies that Janie should be more like his first wife and that she needs to be more helpful around the house. Janie thinks otherwise: "You don't need mah help out dere, Logan. Youse in yo' place and Ah'm in mine" (Hurston 31). Janie thinks this way because that is the way she was taught. At this point, she starts realizing that he is seeing her more as an object rather than a person. Granny really took care of her and so Logan implying that she needs to work harder is something that bothers her. Janie fails to experience the love that she expects comes with marriage especially when Logan stops "talking in rhymes" (Hurston, 26 ) to her not far into the relationship. As a young woman, feeling...
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
Those living in today’s world are constantly bombarded with the stereotypes and distorted images of a consumerist society. As a result, they often struggle with a loss of identity because mass media try to dictate what they should want to be and do. Zora Neale Hurston tackles this age-old search for self-discovery in her fictional frame story Their Eyes Were Watching God. Janie Crawford tells her best friend, Pheoby, about her quest for her own voice, despite setbacks in the form of relatives, two husbands, and entire towns that attempt to silence her. From a young age, Janie yearns for enlightenment; however, the roles Nanny, Logan Killicks, and Joe Starks force upon her prevent her from reaching selfhood until she meets and falls in love with Tea Cake, her equal.
In Zora Neale Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, the character of Janie Crawford experiences severe ideological conflicts with her grandmother, and the effects of these conflicts are far-reaching indeed. Hurston’s novel of manners, noted for its exploration of the black female experience, fully shows how a conflict with one’s elders can alter one’s self image. In the case of Janie and Nanny, it is Janie’s perception of men that is altered, as well as her perception of self. The conflict between the two women is largely generational in nature, and appears heart-breakingly inevitable.
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.
One of the underlying themes Zora Neale Hurston put in her book, Their Eyes Were Watching God was feminism. Hurston used each of Janie’s three marriages to represent Janie moving closer to her liberation and freedom from male dominance. She finally found her liberation and became truly independent after graduating from her final relationship with Tea Cake by killing him.
Through her use of southern black language Zora Neale Hurston illustrates how to live and learn from life’s experiences. Janie, the main character in Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, is a woman who defies what people expect of her and lives her life searching to become a better person. Not easily satisfied with material gain, Janie quickly jumps into a search to find true happiness and love in life. She finally achieves what she has searched for with her third marriage.
Zora Neal Hurston’s book, Their Eyes Were Watching God, reveals one of life’s most relevant purposes that stretches across cultures and relates to every aspect of enlightenment. The novel examines the life of the strong-willed Janie Crawford, as she goes down the path of self-discovery by way of her past relationships. Ideas regarding the path of liberation date all the way back to the teachings of Siddhartha. Yet, its concept is still recycled in the twenty-first century, as it inspires all humanity to look beyond the “horizon,” as Janie explains. Self-identification, or self-fulfillment, is a theme that persists throughout the book, remaining a quest for Janie Crawford to discover, from the time she begins to tell the story to her best friend, Pheoby Watson. Hurston makes a point at the beginning of the novel to separate the male and female identities from one another. This is important for the reader to note. The theme for identity, as it relates to Janie, carefully unfolds as the story goes on to expand the depths of the female interior.