Their Eyes Were Watching God Bildungsroman Analysis

The novel Their Eyes Were Watching God is considered to be a bildungsroman (SparkNotes Editors). A bildungsroman is a coming-of-age story, often dealing with a character’s “moral and psychological growth” (Marriam-Webster.com). Janie’s growth as a person is discernable from the beginning to the end, and follows a different formula than that of most coming-of-age characters. When people are young, they often try to do adult things, and when they are an adult, they often take pleasure in doing things children enjoy doing; Janie follows a similar model , as exemplified in her attitude and actions as a child, as an adult, and in her relationship with Tea Cake. When Janie was a young child, she grew up playing mostly carefree with other children

They sometimes went to jook joints, and other times stayed at home where Tea Cake played his guitar and people gathered together. “The house was full of people every night. That is, all the doorstep was full. Some were there to hear Tea Cake pick the box; some came to talk and tell stories, but most of them came to get into whatever game was going on or might go on… outside of the two jooks, everything on that job went on around those two” (Hurston, 133). Like Eatonville, “The men held big arguments here like they used to do on the store porch. Only here, she could listen and laugh and even talk some herself if she wanted to” (Hurston, 134). The way she now lived her life, at least to her, seemed simpler. “Clerkin’ in dat store wuz hard, but heah, we ain’t got nothin’ tuh do but do our work and come home and love” (Hurston, 133). Tea Cake, shortly before his death, said to Janie, “You’se uh lil girl all de time. God made it so you spent yo’ old age first wid somebody else, and saved up yo’ young girl days to spend wid me” (Hurston,

Lewis puts into words much of how Janie developed. “Critics who treat 'adult' as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves… Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown