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Comparison of love in their eyes watching God
Analytical essay on their eyes were watching god
Their eyes are watching god symbols of love
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In this novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie experiences different kinds of love. Throughout the novel, Janie searches for the love that she has always desired. That kind of love she searches for is represented by the marriage between a bee and a blossom. As a result of her quest for this love, Janie gains her own independence and personal freedom, which makes her a true heroine in the novel. She also deals with different types of love with her past life.
Love is different for each person. For some, like Janie, it happens much later in life after her two unsuccessful marriages. For others, it comes easy and early in life. That reason being Janie’s grandmother, Nanny raised her to be attracted to financial security and physical protection
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Her version of love is associated with innocence, openness, understanding, and equality between the lovers. For her, love is also an essential part of life; without it, her spirit practically withers and dies. Janie sees him as a "desecration" of her vision of true love, based on her experience underneath the blossoming pear tree. Her marriage with Logan she experienced being dominated being treated like an object for him to put to use. “Six months back he had told her, "If Ah kin haul de wood heah and chop it fuh yuh, look lak you oughta be able tuh tote it inside. Mah fust wife never bothered me ‘bout choppin’ no wood nohow. She’d grab dat ax and sling chips lak uh man. You done been spoilt rotten.” (Hurston …show more content…
In the end, Janie speaks out and lays out all of Joe’s crimes to him on his deathbed, but like the big voice he is, Joe refuses to listen and dies cursing Janie. Even though Tea Cake is 12 years younger than Janie, but with him she finds the true love she has dreamed of all her life. In their relationship, both sides experience bouts of jealousy, but eventually find happiness working in the fields of the Everglades and mingling with the migrant workers. Janie experienced a more protective and jealous love. As a result he gets bitten by a dog with rabies from the storm he could have avoided, but stayed for the money and is shot by
In the beginning years of Janie’s life, there were two people who she is dependent on. Her grandmother is Nanny, and her first husband is named Logan Killicks. In Their Eyes Were Watching God, “Janie, an attractive woman with long hair, born without benefit of clergy, is her heroine” (Forrest). Janie’s grandmother felt that Janie needs someone to depend on before she dies and Janie could no longer depend on her. In the beginning, Janie is very against the marriage. Nanny replied with, “’Tain’t Logan Killicks Ah wants you to have, baby, its protection. ...He done spared me...a few days longer till Ah see you safe in life” (Hurston 18). Nanny is sure to remind Janie that she needs a man in her life for safety, thus making Janie go through life with that thought process.
For a short time Janie shared her life with her betrothed husband Logan Killicks. She desperately tried to become her new pseudo identity, to conform to the perfect "housewife" persona. Trying to make a marriage work that couldn't survive without love, love that Janie didn't have for Logan. Time and again Janie referred to love and her life in reference to nature, "Ah wants things sweet wid mah marriage lak when you sit under a pear tree and think... She often spoke to falling seeds and said Ah hope you fall on soft grounds... She knew the world was a stallion rolling in the blue pasture of ether"(24 - 25). Logan had blown out the hope in Janie's heart for any real love; she experienced the death of the childish imagery that life isn't a fairytale, her first dose of reality encountered and it tasted sour.
In today’s world, many people find it difficult to see the difference between idealistic and realistic love. Idealistic love and realistic love can remain challenging to see when two people lose themselves in the moment. In a realistic relationship the two companions become a team, they work together for each other rather than themselves. This comes through as a challenge when you can’t always tell if they other person does it for themself or the relationship. On the other hand, when you look back or watch from the sidelines, it can show through easily in many ways. In the book, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Hurston does a really great job of showing the differences between realistic and idealistic
The movie and the book of Their Eyes Were Watching God both tell the story of a young woman’s journey to finding love; however, the movie lacks the depth and meaning behind the importance of Janie’s desire for self-fulfillment. Oprah Winfrey’s version alters the idea from the book Zora Neale Hurston wrote, into a despairing love story for the movie. Winfrey changes Hurston’s story in various ways by omitting significant events and characters, which leads to a different theme than what the novel portrays. The symbolisms and metaphors emphasized throughout the book are almost non-existent in the movie, changing the overall essence of the story. While Zora Neale Hurston’s portrayal gives a more in depth view of Janie’s journey of self-discovery and need for fulfilling love, Oprah Winfrey’s version focuses mainly on a passionate love story between Janie and Tea Cake.
When Nanny tells Janie the story of her life, it reaches the audience’s pathos. Where many readers would have been upset at Nanny’s harsh views, the pain and loss of her past make the audience more empathetic. It happens again near the end of the story when Janie has to shoot Tea Cake. As a woman, Janie has found her true love after finally being able to understand what it is, but the person that helped her realize it is no longer who they used to be. The emotions that the scene elicits are so strong because the audience trusts Janie as a storyteller. We are able to know her experiences and see how she goes from being an innocent, air-headed child to a strong woman, which makes her a credible character. Janie’s journey through life is also able to make the audience ponder. At times where we can’t hear Janie’s words out loud, like after Tea Cake beats her or when she was with Joe, we wonder how she’s feeling about her
Theme Analysis of Their Eyes Were Watching God Alice Walker depicts Zora Neale Hurston's work as providing the African-American literary community with its prime symbol of "racial" health - a sense of black people as complete, complex, undiminished. human beings" (1990). Appropriately, Hurston's Eyes Were. Watching God, published in 1937, provides an enlightening look at. the journey of one of these undiminished human beings, Janie.
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
In the novel "Their Eyes Were Watching God" written by Zora Neale Hurston, Janie the protagonist is seen by critics as having no voice. For all women silence knows no boundaries of race or culture, and Janie is no exception. Hurston characterizes Janie with the same silence that women at that time & period were forced into, (complete submission.) "Women were to be seen and not heard." Janie spends forty years of her life, learning to achieve/find, her voice against the over-ruling and dominate men in her life. But in the end Janie comes out the victor, breaking the silence. In her essay "What do Feminist Critics Want?" Gilbert states, "Like Wagner's master singers....men had the power of speech,[but]....women like Emily Dickinson, knew that they had, or were supposed to have, the graceful obligation of silence."(34) To question the male voice in "Their Eyes" is an important aspect of the genre which contributes to the story as a whole. Furthermore it is to discover the ways in which the male voice affected Janie's. Weather it be physical or mental, the reader [if reading close] can surpass Janie's verbal silence and allow just her presence to speak for her. Janie's actions are what makes her someone to pay attention to. By first understanding that Janie was silent (verbally)through most of the novel, does not mean she was not heard. Her presence demands respect and by doing so, the reader will find and appreciate Janie as a whole, and not just a "Black Woman" whose voice had been hindered by societies bias. Mary Helen Washington states in her critical essay on Their Eyes, "Ourattentiveness to the possibility that women are excluded categorically from the language of the dominant discourse should h...
In the novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, Janie Crawford the main character goes through some big changes. Throughout this book Janie struggles to find her inner voice and purpose of love. She looks high and low for a sign of what love really is and she finds it as being the pear tree. The pear tree is very symbolic and ultimately shows Janie what love is and how it should be in a healthy relationship. This tree, with the bees pollinating the blossoms, helps Janie realize that love should be very mutual and each person needs to provide for the other equally. Janie tries to find this special kind of love through her three husbands, but she comes to realize it is going to be much harder then she expected. Each one of Janie’s husbands are a stepping stone for her finding her voice.
"Janie saw her life like a great tree in leaf with the things suffered, things enjoyed, things done and undone. Dawn and doom was in the branches" (8). When Janie was a teenager, she used to sit under the pear tree and dream about being a tree in bloom. She longs for something more. When she is 16, she kisses Johnny Taylor to see if this is what she looks for. Nanny sees her kiss him, and says that Janie is now a woman. In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie, the main character, is involved in three very different relationships. Zora Neale Hurston, the author, explains how Janie learns some valuable lessons about marriage, integrity, and love and happiness from her relationships with Logan Killicks, Joe Starks, and Tea Cake.
Though Janie had three marriages in total, each one drew her in for a different reason. She was married off to Logan Killicks by her Grandmother who wanted her to have protection and security. “Tain’t Logan Killicks Ah wants you to have baby, its protection.” (Hurston 15) says Janie’s grandmother when Janie said she did not want to marry Logan. Though Janie did not agree with her grandmother, she knew that she just wanted what’s best for her. Next, she married Joe Starks, Janie was unsatisfied with her marriage to Logan so Joe came in and swept her off her feet. Janie did not like the fact that Logan was trying to make her work, so Joe’s proposition, “You ain’t never knowed what it was to be treated like a lady and ah want to be de one tuh show yuh.” (Hurston 29) was too good to pass up, so she left Logan and married Joe. Janie’s last marriage was to Tea Cake. Fed up after having been treated poorly by Joe, Janie finally found someone who liked her for who she was. “Naw, ...
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston is a profound novel, which shows the journey of what a strong beautiful woman went through to find her happiness. This novel starts off with Janie coming back from burying the dead. Her journey starts of from her grandmother’s house to a huge farm land then Eatonville to the Everglades. It isn’t until the Everglades when Janie found true happiness in the love she had for Tea Cake. The central theme of this novel is love and happiness. This theme is portrayed when Janie shows love to her grandma by doing what would make her happy. The theme is also shown when Janie still comforts Joe in his deathbed even after all the stuff he did to her she still showed him love till the end. Another way this theme is showed is when Janie seeks her happiness with Tea Cake without caring what anyone thought of her.
In “Their Eyes Were Watching God”, the various settings often reflect and affect Janie’s progress on her journey to self-discovery. From Eatonville and its toxic social values, to the Everglades in a destructive hurricane, the setting is not just a descriptor but also an actor in the plot. The author’s portrayal of the settings highlights the theme of the novel that surrounding, environmental forces such as social values, jealousy, and even nature frequently conflict with the struggle to find one’s own self and voice.
Through her three marriages, the death of her one true love, and proving her innocence in Tea Cake’s death, Janie learns to look within herself to find her hidden voice. Growing as a person from the many obstacles she has overcome during her forty years of life, Janie finally speaks her thoughts, feelings and opinions. From this, she finds what she has been searching for her whole life, happiness.
color of her eyes. Janie was worked hard by Logan. He made her do all