Similarities Between A Rose For Emily And Their Eyes Were Watching God

Love, loss, death, and suffering are just a few of the many themes within one or both of the stories Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston and A Rose for Emily by William Faulkner. While each is distinctive in its own way, they still have several similarities, both between the main characters and the themes throughout the works. Class tensions and female roles are two significant themes in these works, which are exhibited through the lives and experiences of the leading female characters, Janie Mae Crawford and Emily Grierson, respectively. Even though the two stories are different, they still embody similar themes, which is important because the leading ladies are so unlike each other on the surface. In understanding these two

In the case of A Rose for Emily, it is because she is rarely out of her house. The only time the townspeople see her is when she is out for a brief period on Sundays with Homer. Then in the case of Their Eyes Were Watching God, it is because barely anyone really cared to get to know Janie, and instead they talked and gossiped about her. In both cases, all they people knew of the women was what they saw. Despite what everyone was saying about them, they don’t really care about what the townspeople think of them, which is a big way in which they are similar. Emily isolates herself from everyone except for her servant for a good part of the story, and has her own reality where things happen how she wants them to. She refuses to pay her taxes, and she murders Homer to keep him with her. In her world, this is okay, and in her world, she is all that matters. Janie is more a part of the community, but still not what they people would see as ideal. In both stories, the women are talked about and judged harshly. The town talks about them and thinks they are disgracing themselves, either in how they are presenting themselves, what they do, how they act, or the men they are involved with. In the case of Janie, she is more concerned with what is going on in her own life than what other people think about her. She grows as a person through the course of the story due to all of the experiences she had to go through, and the same cannot be said for Emily. Janie is able to find herself, and realize who she is as a person. She breaks away from what she is ‘supposed’ to be and learns a great deal from all of her