Expectation In Their Eyes Were Watching God

In Zora Neale Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, she sets the protagonist, Janie Mae Crawford as a woman who wants to find true love and who is struggling to find her identity. To find her identity and true love it takes her three marriages to go through. While being married to three different men who each have different philosophies, Janie comes to understand that she is developed into a strong woman. Hurston makes each idea through each man’s view of Janie, and their relationship with the society. The lifestyle with little hope of or reason to hope for improvement. He holds a sizeable amount of land, but the couple's life involves little interaction with anyone else.

In Zora Neale Hurston’s novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie Crawford, the protagonist in the novel, returns home after a long period of time. She is welcomed back by unfriendly faces and vicious rumors and gossip about her past relationship with young Tea Cake, her third husband. The novel continues with Janie telling her friend, Pheoby Watson, her story in flashback form starting from when she was younger and lived with her grandmother. Janie retold her story about her three marriages with Logan, Jody, and Tea Cake. She explained everything she has experienced and learned from her journey in finding happiness and finding her voice. Their Eyes Were Watching God is full of figurative language, the majority of which derives from nature. The natural forces in which the characters struggle against, guide their lives and assist them in self discovery. Examples of the natural forces that are brought up throughout the novel include the horizon, the pear tree, and the hurricane. In the novel, the natural forces are what guide the characters, especially Janie, to find happiness in their lives and find their true identity. As the characters develop and experience their lives through the comparisons of life and nature, the novel celebrates those relationships in order to provide the room to allow the character to keep growing and learning..

At the beginning of the chapter Janie was coming back to Eatonville. From a relationship with Tea Cake. Janie and Tea Cake decided to be together.She entered the relationship knowing what to expect.The previous marriages. Almost demolished her hopes at achieving true love and marriage. Tea Cake turned out perfect for her. Allowing her the freedom she craved along with the support she needed.Janie felt a different kind go love from Tea Cake. Differently fro her other marriages.This is the first relationship Janie actually chose to be without being extremely desirable conditions.She had already begun to develop a strong, proud sense of self, but Tea Cake accelerated this spiritual growth. Tea Cake was much younger than Janie.He allowed her to experience real love and happiness. Tea Cake shared all his wealth with Janie. He wouldn't even let Janie seen the money inherited form Joe. He wanted to be the only one providing for her. Tea Cake treated Janie the best. He allowed her to follow her interests and be happy. He shared everything with her. Janis was truly in love with Tea Cake.IN the relationship Janie was truly equal. What was hers was Tea Cakes, and what was Tea Cakes was hers. She was beyond happy with

Janie’s concept of marriage relates to an interaction between bees and a pear tree, during which time Janie witnessed “the thousand sister-calyxes arch to meet the love embrace and the ecstatic shiver of the tree...so this was a marriage” (Hurston 11). Because she recognizes that Logan will never be able to fulfill her ideal of marriage, Janie eagerly absconds to Eatonville with Joe Starks. In Eatonville, Janie’s marriage is initially characterized by passion and affluence. However, Joe’s desire to control Janie leads him to coerce her into repressing any personal characteristics that others may find attractive; as an act of dominance Joe convinces Janie to fasten her hair. By doing this, Janie represses her strength and sexuality. As time passes, Janie realizes that she will not become the person that she dreamed of becoming while remaining in Eatonville. After Joe’s death, Janie decides to liberate herself from the constraints thrust upon her in Eatonville. Janie’s newfound freedom is symbolized when she decides to burn the rags that Joe forced her to wear over her hair. Because Eatonville represented oppression to her, Janie escapes to discover herself. Conversely, the Everglades represent the cessation of Janie’s journey to self-discovery. Janie and Tea Cake initially move to “de muck” for Tea Cake to seek employment (Hurston 122). However, Janie becomes infatuated with the atmosphere, and decides to permanently settle with her new

In Zora Neale Hurston’s novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie, the hopeful heroine, is on a journey to find true love. Growing up, Janie starts with a foundation of love, as her grandmother takes on the role of raising her. She provides protective care for Janie, assuring her that no “menfolk white or black is makin’ a spit cup outa [Janie]” (37), the way that Janie’s mother had experienced. After her grandmother “saw Johnny Taylor lacerating her Janie with a kiss” (29), she shows her protective quality by arranging her marriage with Logan Killicks and sending her on the start of her journey to find true love.

Zora Neale Hurston’s book Their Eyes Were Watching God, is a novel about one young black woman’s journey to find her own self-worth in an unfriendly world. The story takes place in Eatonville, Florida, from Janie’s youth to adulthood. The author’s intentions was to explain how Janie Crawford after three marriages, finally achieves what she craved all of her life, independence and a strong self-worth.

Janie is first married off to Logan Killicks, who treats her like a child. He expects her to listen and obey to his desires without hesitation or complaint. This is desecrating to Janie’s dream. Instead of pushing her along the path of self reliance, Logan

At first, Janie thought that loving someone meant you were married to them. Janie believed that she would love Logan because they were married as that was what Nanny had told her. In the few days before she would be with Killicks, Janie thought “Yes, she would love Logan after they were married… Husbands and wives always loved each other” (Hurston 21). Since Nanny had always told her that a marriage would make her happy, that’s what Janie thought. She had no feelings towards Logan, yet she held on to the hope that they appear once they were husband and wife.

Zora Neale Hurston’s life consists of a devotion to novelizing, recording, preserving, and analyzing patterns of speech and thought of rural black south and related cultures. Hurston’s research on rural black folklore heavily influenced her writing and lead to the creation of one of her most famous work Their Eyes Were Watching God. In the novel, Hurston displays the Black culture in the South as “a representation of distinct cultural tradition and a place for spiritual revitalization” (O’Banner 35). Such depiction of the South in the novel is particularly seen in the journey of the character Janie Mae Crawford and the influences of the community on her choices, thoughts, and individuality. Hurston demonstrates in Their Eyes Were Watching God

Zora Neale Hurston’s novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, is packed with a plethora of themes and meanings. With each reading of the novel the most significant themes become more apparent. The main character Janie goes through a lifelong quest searching for something she can not quite put her finger on. She grows and develops as a woman and finds her voice in an era where men heavily ruled over women and during a time where black women (such as Janie) were often times not listened to. Through the novel, there are a few reoccurring themes that seem to be the main idea. The quest to find an encompassing love is one of them. Another prevalent theme in the novel was for Janie to find her voice and to do what she truly wants to do. However,

Zora Neal Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God is a work of fiction based upon true events of her childhood (Jones). The novel was written in just seven short weeks, and is set in early twentieth century Florida. Throughout the novel, Janie Crawford embarks on a quest for love that comes to dominate her life, allowing Janie to persevere through the judgement of others and become a self-actualized woman in a time when African-American women were the “mules” of society (Hurston 14).

In Zora Neale Hurston’s famous novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston explores the life of a southern black woman, Janie Crawford whose three marriages of domineering control of men make her acknowledge her independence and self-satisfaction as an African-American woman. Set in the early 1900s, Hurston reveals the dominant role of men in southern society and one woman’s journey toward finding herself and God.

Their Eyes Were Watching God surrounds the life of Janie Crawford, a woman who was of mixed heritage. Janie had beautiful, long hair which was admired by most people that she met. Janie was raised by her grandmother since her own mother and father where absent in her life. Since a teen, she was obsessed with true love. Her first marriage was to Logan Killicks, a much older and unattractive man. Janie’s marriage to Logan was forced upon her by her grandmother and Janie resented her grandmother for this. Even though Logan took care of Janie, she was very unhappy with Logan and tried to love him but could not. While living with Logan, Janie meets Joe Starks. Joe is charismatic and full of ambition and promises Janie the life she knows she can’t have with Logan. She soon runs away with him to Eatonville, a town that Joe invests in and builds from the ground up. In Eatonville Janie is known as the “mayor’s wife” and is constantly belittled by her husband, Joe. He forces her to tie her hair up with a head rag in public and sometimes physically assaults her. After twenty years of marriage, Janie is sick of Joe and his constant attempts to make her subordinate to him. On Joe’s death bed, Janie finally speaks her mind to him and he dies. After Jody dies, Janie feels a new sense of freedom and liberation.

“I love the way Janie Crawford left her husbands,” begins one of Alice Walker’s poems, alluding to the heroine of Zora Neale Hurston’s iconic Their Eyes were Watching God. Following the perspective of a black female in the 1930s and more importantly, written by a black female in the 1930s, today, Hurston’s work is one of the most influential books from the post-Harlem Renaissance. What ultimately makes the narrative so compelling is that her characters resonate with culture and complexity. Through the complex, deeply intimate narrative, Hurston writes about what is personal to her, making her novel— and thus, her values— personal for her readers as well.

Janie realizes that in order to keep herself alive and to have some sense of being, she would have to store little pieces of herself away. Throughout the novel, Janie is looking for something or someone that she has never known and attempts to find this union between love and marriage that she so idealized when sitting under the pear trees seeing the symbiosis of the bee’s and the tree. Because she did not know what it was that she was looking for, she made some mistakes along the way. This includes meeting men such as Logan Killicks, she found that he did not appreciate her the way she wanted to be appreciated, as a woman, finding that marriage does not equate to love thus killing a sense of innocence she has. Also her marriage with Jodie