Imagery in Their Eyes Were Watching God
The novel, "Their Eyes Were Watching God" contains beautiful imagery that conveys the thoughts of the author towards the antagonist of this story, Janie Crawford. Through her four distinct lives as Janie Crawford, Janie Killicks, Janie Starks, and Janie Woods she realizes that each day the sun rises a new change is apparent in her life. The experience of each distinct life makes her realize more about herself than she ever knew before. She comes to a self-revelation about herself. Even though it takes her the entire novel to realize her sexual awakening from the blossoming pear tree to experience unadulterated love, she does so as the sun falls and rises past the years of her maturing life.
The novel starts out with Janie at the ripe age of sixteen realizing her sexual peak. "She was stretched on her back beneath the pear tree soaking in the alto chant of the visiting bees, the gold of the sun and the panting breath of the breeze when the inaudible voice of it all came to her." (Hurston: 11). Nanny realizes that Janie has become ready for marriage, after settling for a kiss from a tall and lean, yet poor boy by the name of Johnny Taylor. So, Nanny arranges a marriage between Janie Crawford and Logan Killicks to start Janie's new life as Janie Killicks before she would be able to get entangled in the humble life of a poor black man like Johnny Taylor. She was a former slave, so Nanny believed in the value of financial security and respectability. Therefore, she forced Janie into marrying Logan Killicks when she was still in her teens. A year passed by with Janie realizing that she did not love Logan and would never love him, so she felt it was time for a change. Janie left...
... middle of paper ...
...ruel journey towards a true self-revelation of herself. Starting with her teen years, she was hassled by her Grandmother to marry for stability and money, not love. She would then follow a man with a big voice to escape the laborious and unaffectionate life with Logan to marry Jody. Realizing that Jody was an even bigger nuisance for a much longer period of time, she would then go on to marry Tea Cake. Janie has returned to her own place, as her own woman, with her own memories to guide and comfort her. Although she grieves Tea Cake's unfortunate death, she has come back a wiser person and is stronger because of it. She will keep Tea Cake alive in heart to keep her company and live joyfully in the next stage of her life knowing that Tea Cake helped her realize her capacity to mature into a loving adult and actually love a person to the fullest extent possible.
Janie’s first marriage was to Logan Killicks, an accomplished middle aged farmer. Her grandmother wanted Janie to be financially set and be protected, so she pretty much forced Janie into marrying Logan. With her grandmothers rough past of being a slave and all she did not wa...
Reflecting on her journey, Janie is genuinely fulfilled. With help from Tea Cake, she has experienced the life.
...ver have been condoned had Joe still been around. Janie can say what she wants and doesn’t have to hide her true feelings. Finally, she can be herself around someone who accepts and encourages who she is. Tea Cake adds excitement and passion to Janie’s life, something that hadn’t ever existed in her previous relationships. Despite how the town feels about the new romance, Janie and Tea Cake leave the town and are bonded by the true love Janie had yearned for since she was a child. Janie finds the future she had always wanted. All because of Joe’s death, Janie became free to live out her own dreams instead of his. She was finally accepted by someone she truly loves and the conflict she faced for so long is over. She has the independence to be who she wants, love who she wants and live how she wants. Joe’s death led her to Tea Cake where she finally found who she was.
When Tea Cake enters Janie's life, Janie really starts to come out of her shell. She lets down her hair that was kept up the entire time with Starks. This symbolizes Janie letting all her inhibitions out. In finding Tea Cake, Janie has "completed her voyage" of self-discovery. Tea Cake allows her to feel exhilarated and young again. She makes more friends and becomes more social. During this time in her life Janie is an excellent role model for other black women. She does not give a second look at what other people think about her, which is very admirable. This is shown when Hezekiah Potts tells Janie that Tea Cake is too low of a man for Janie yet, she stills persists on seeing him. Many people also think that Tea Cake is courting Janie for her money only. Janie pays no regard to these onlookers though.
Janie's outlook on life stems from the system of beliefs that her grandmother, Nanny instills in her during life. These beliefs include how women should act in a society and in a marriage. Nanny and her daughter, Janie's mother, were both raped and left with bastard children, this experience is the catalyst for Nanny’s desire to see Janie be married of to a well-to-do gentleman. She desires to see Janie married off to a well to do gentleman because she wants to see that Janie is well cared for throughout her life.
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.
Her final love isn’t intended to appease another person, values respect, and pushes past trials while exemplifying kindness (1 Corinthians 13:4). This outward expression of Janie’s maturity and faith allows her to lessen her dependence on a husband. On the final page of the novel Janie finally finds peace, without a man standing by her side (193). She recognizes that in her first two marriages, abuse, conformity, and pride were rampant and that these characteristics strongly oppose the marriage she viewed in nature. However, Janie finds a love with Tea Cake that “never gives up, never loses faith, is always hopeful, and endures through every circumstance,” which she remembers and refuses to let die (1 Corinthians
As the novel begins, Janie walks into her former hometown quietly and bravely. She is not the same woman who left; she is not afraid of judgment or envy. Full of “self-revelation”, she begins telling her tale to her best friend, Phoeby, by looking back at her former self with the kind of wistfulness everyone expresses when they remember a time of childlike naïveté. She tries to express her wonderment and innocence by describing a blossoming peach tree that she loved, and in doing so also reveals her blossoming sexuality. To deter Janie from any trouble she might find herself in, she was made to marry an older man named Logan Killicks at the age of 16. In her naïveté, she expected to feel love eventually for this man. Instead, however, his love for her fades and she beco...
Janie Crawford - Janie Crawford is the protagonist of the novel. She was raised by her grandmother, Nanny. She wanted to define her identity on her own terms, but Nanny coerced her into marrying Logan Killicks. She valued financial security over love. However, Janie was miserable in her first marriage. She left Logan to marry Jody Starks. Jody refused to allow Janie to make her own decisions, so their marriage turns out unhappily as well. After Jody's death, Janie married Tea Cake. Through Tea Cake, Janie enjoyed her first real love. She grew beyond what other people wanted her to be and experienced her first taste of real freedom.
Janie who continually finds her being defined by other people rather than by herself never feels loved, either by her parents or by anybody else. Her mother abandoned her shortly after giving birth to her. All she had was her grandmother, Nanny, who protected and looked after her when she was a child. But that was it. She was even unaware that she is black until, at age six, she saw a photograph of herself. Her Nanny who was enslaved most of her lifetime only told her that a woman can only be happy when she marries someone who can provide wealth, property, and security to his wife. Nanny knew nothing about love since she never experienced it. She regarded that matter as unnecessary for her as well as for Janie. And for that reason, when Janie was about to enter her womanhood in searching for that love, Nanny forced her to marry Mr. Logan Killicks, a much older man that can offer Janie the protection and security, plus a sixty-acre potato farm. Although Janie in her heart never approves what her Nanny forced her to do, she did it anyway. She convinced herself that by the time she became Mrs. Killick, she would get that love, which turned out to be wrong.
Janie found what she was looking for. She searched all her life to find what was within herself, and one special person was all that was needed to bring it out in her. Even though her and Tea Cake’s relationship ended in a tragedy, she knew that he really loved her for who she was. She didn’t need to be with him for protection, or she didn’t need to be the leading lady of a town or a mayor’s wife, she just needed the right kind of love and affection to bring out what was best in her.
The movie Real Women have Curves gave insight to a first generation Latina girl Ana Garcia who struggles to balance her family's culture and heritage. Ana is expected to work in her sister's dress warehouse, find a husband, and have children while forgetting her dreams of a college education. However, one of her high-school teachers Mr. Guzman tries to convince her parents to give her an opportunity allow her to attend college. Both parents' refuse point blank. Her mother Carmen states that Ana's sister Estela is a spinster and she'll never marry, so it was Ana's duty to give her grandchildren. As this film is evaluated through the lens of human behavior, it is important to define the word family and what this meant to Ana throughout
Janie’s three marriages were all different, each one brought her in for a different reason, and each one had something different to teach her. In summary, she married Logan because of her grandmother, Jody because she wanted to escape from Logan, and Tea Cake because they had true love. The marriages were different in that Logan treated Janie like a Slave, Joe was moulding her into what he wanted her to be, and Tea Cake just wanted to be with her. As a result, Janie learned many things from each marriage Tea Cake taught her to be herself and do what she wanted to, her marriage with Logan taught her to make changes in her life, and her marriage with Joe taught her to stand up for herself. In conclusion, her experiences in her marriages shaped her into the person she became, and were an important part of her life.
At the beginning of the novel Janie is forced into marrying Logan Killicks by Nanny who claims that, “Tain’t Logan Killicks Ah wants you to have, baby, it’s protection” (Hurston 15). Janie’s dreams of falling in love are crushed and all she can do is hope that in marrying
They have their hair up due to the immense heat and are sweating. Carmen and Pancha are older than the other women while Ana is the youngest with an elder sister (Estela since she owns the factory). Since Carmen is the mom, she would sound strict and would voice her opinion on all matters. Meanwhile Ana can sound like the regular teenager that is stubborn and doesn’t care of other people’s thoughts. Estela is mature and sounds hopeless of one day meeting the man that will like her for her intelligence in the same for Rosali, who is truly insecure with her appearance and has curves. Pancha would sound similar to Carmen and be blunt. All the actors must be capable of speaking the Spanish language and sound with imperfect