Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God

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A caterpillar is born from a cocoon. With fuzzy legs, it crawls from its silky case and ventures into the world. At the first hint of Spring, a flower unfurls its lustrous petals. Father and daughter amble down the street hand in hand. Grandma strokes her granddaughters hair. Somewhere a girl wants to love and wonders how. Zora Neale Hurston examines and identifies the complexities of such relationships throughout her novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). With intertwining but individual stories, she explores the worlds of social class, race, and gender. Eloquently and poetically, she reveals the multifacetedness of connections, illustrating the many layers that constitute a relationship.
Parents present themselves in a multitude of forms. …show more content…

Often it seems one may not even know they have wanted something until they have found it. In the aftermath of Janie and Jody’s debilitating relationship, she finds this something on a sweltering summer day. He struts into Janie’s store with an air of indifference and an intoxicating presence. His name is Tea Cake and Janie falls instantly in love: “He drifted off into sleep and Janie looked down on him and felt a self-crushing love. So her soul crawled out from its hiding place” (128). Janie’s action of “looking down on him,” alludes to the nature of their relationship. She wants to gaze tenderly at Tea Cake while he sleeps. She also has the ability to “look down” upon a man. Further, this action is followed by her feeling a “self-crushing love.” A love that inches inside of her veins and corrodes her arteries. A love that awakens her soul and probes it to “crawl out from its hiding place.” This display of vulnerability exhibits Janie’s undeniable and unequivocal love for Tea Cake. Also, as her soul “crawls,” like a baby or young child, the fresh sweetness of their love becomes apparent. It pokes its head out from hiding and ventures out into a new world. A world where love crushes Janie’s body and heart. A world where this pain is brilliant and

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