Analysis Of Their Eyes Were Watching God By Zora Neale Hurston

The Harlem Renaissance was a movement characterized by the flourishing of literature mostly, but also art and music by African Americans who sought self-expression, and to dispel the myth that blacks were incapable of producing creative and thought provoking works. Zora Neale Hurston was an African American novelist, short story writer, folklorist, and anthropologist known for her contributions to African-American literature, her portrayal of racial struggles in the American South, and works documenting her research on Haitian voodoo. Of Hurston's four novels and more than 50 published short stories, plays, and essays, she is best known for her 1937 novel “Their Eyes Were Watching God”. The novel narrates main character Janie Crawford's "ripening

“Yes, she would love Logan after they were married. She could see no way for it to come about, but Nanny and the old folks had said it, so it must be so. Husbands and wives always loved each other, and that was what marriage meant. It was just so. Janie felt glad of the thought, for then it wouldn’t seem so destructive and mouldy. She wouldn’t be lonely anymore.” Simply because Nanny tells her so, Janie assumes that marriage entails love. She assumes that after she marries Logan, she will magically wake up one day and love him. Some might read this as a defense mechanism, something to help her justify the obvious unfairness of being forced to marry someone she doesn’t love. However, when love does not come after three months, Janie begins to doubt. “Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men. Now, women forget all those things they don’t want to remember and remember everything they don’t want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly.”For men, dreams are lofty and constantly out of reach. Men have no problem distinguishing reality

Women are not only considered the weaker sex, but they're fundamentally defined by their relationship to men. This is why marriage is such a big deal in the world of Hurston's novel: women can only gain power through marriage to powerful or ambitious men. Because of this, women are confined by men to positions of passivity, pleading, domesticity, and as objects of desire. Men impose these standards on women by silencing their voices, limiting their actions with notions of propriety, and insulting their appearances and sexuality. When women show any traditional male characteristics—ambition, intelligence, and authority—they're stigmatized as too masculine and, thus, unattractive. Men, on the other hand, are expected to always be dominant. Male characters prove to their peers that they are real men by showing their wives who’s "boss." “The sun was gone…It was the time to hear things and talk. These sitters had been tongueless, earless, eyeless conveniences all day long. Mules and other brutes had occupied their skins. But now, the sun and the bossman were gone, so the skins felt powerful and human. They became lords of sounds and lesser things. They passed nations through their mouths. They sat in judgment.” The narrator cites the black people of Eatonville’s lack of confidence during the day, which dissolves by night when the white "bossman [is] gone." With the departure of the white men, the black