The character Janie from Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God showcases the unexpected ways in which a person’s various clashing identities can come to a state of harmony. By taking an active role in her dreams and desires, Janie creates a world where she can be wholly herself. However, two pieces of herself–her strong individualism in her connection with nature and community and her role as a loving wife to a mutually loving husband–only are able to converge at the end of the novel. The novel suggests that attaining harmony between these two seemingly conflicting identities comes to fruition through the uncontrollable force of God and his role in the death of marriage during its peak of love and happiness. From the story’s introduction, Janie expresses a desire for love and dreams of …show more content…
Janie struggles with fulfilling both of her identities. Being a wife in a loving marriage while expressing her authentic self simply doesn’t function as she loses the time and circumstances to connect with nature. By the end of the book, however, she can claim both identities because of God’s interference. We see this in two different instances where both Joe Stark and Tea Cake are killed by illness. Janie describes Death in a personified form as she does with all forces of nature: she says he “stands watchful and motionless all day with his sword drawn back, waiting for the messenger to bid him come. Been standing there before there was a where, a when, or a then. She was liable to find a feather from his wings lying in her yard any day now,” (84). In this case, Death takes action after receiving a message or otherwise an order from someone who can be assumed to be God, considering Death has been there since before the completion of all creation, such as the concepts of time and place. Janie recognizes the intentionality of death and through this, the intention of the early deaths in the
Zora Neale Hurston’s, Their Eyes Were Watching God tells about the life of Janie Crawford. Janie’s mother, who suffers a tragic moment in her life, resulting in a mental breakdown, is left for her grandmother to take care of her. Throughout Janie’s life, she comes across several different men, all of which end in a horrible way. All the men that Janie married had a different perception of marriage. After the third husband, Janie finally returns to her home. It is at a belief that Janie is seeking someone who she can truly love, and not someone her grandmother chooses for her. Although Janie eventually lives a humble life, Janie’s quest is questionable.
Zora Hurston’s novel “Their Eyes Were Watching God” depicts the journey of a young woman named Janie Crawford’s journey to finding real love. Her life begins with a romantic and ideal view on love. After Janie’s grandmother, Nanny, soon grows fearful of Janie’s newfound sexuality and quickly marries Janie off to Logan Killicks, an older land owner with his own farm. Janie quickly grows tired of Logan and how he works her like a slave instead of treating her as a wife and runs away with Joe Starks. Joe is older than Janie but younger than Logan and sweet talks Janie into marring him and soon Joe becomes the mayor of an all African American town called Eatonville. Soon Joe begins to force Janie to hide not only her
that they can spend more time together because she missed him when he was at work and he missed her when he was away from home.
The book, Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston is about Janie Crawford and her quest for self-independence and real love. She finds herself in three marriages, one she escapes from, and the other two end tragically. And throughout her journey, she learns a lot about love, and herself. 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, she was forced into marrying Logan Killicks and hated it. So, she left him for Joe Starks who promised to treat her the way a lady should be treated, but he also made her the way he thought a lady should be. After Joe died she found Tea Cake, a romantic man who loved Janie the way she was, and worked hard to provide for her.
Janie Crawford’s Quest in Their Eyes Were Watching God Janie Crawford, the main character of Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, strives to find her own voice throughout the novel and, in my opinion, she succeeds even though it takes her over thirty years to do it. Each one of her husbands has a different effect on her ability to find that voice. Janie discovers her will to find her voice when she is living with Logan. Since she did not marry him for love, tensions arise as time moves on and Logan begins to order her around.
Self-esteem is confidence in one’s own worth or abilities or self-respect. Janie from Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neal Hurston and Jefferson from A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest Gaines both struggle with establishing a positive self-esteem or a sense of self-worth. Both characters get so overwhelmed by the supremacy of someone or something around them that they doubt their own power, thus, creating a feeling of doubt for themselves and the voice that they have. In order to gain a sense of high self-esteem, a person must endure points of self-doubt.
In, Their Eyes Were Watching God, the author takes you on the journey of a woman, Janie, and her search for love, independence, and the pursuit of happiness. This pursuit seems to constantly be disregarded, yet Janie continues to hold on to the potential of grasping all that she desires. In, Their Eyes Were Watching God, the author, Zora Hurston illustrates the ambiguity of Janie’s voice; the submissiveness of her silence and the independence she reclaims when regaining her voice. The reclaiming of Janie's independence, in the novel, correlates with the development and maturation Janie undergoes during her self discovery.
In the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, Janie Crawford, the protagonist, constantly faces the inner conflicts she has against herself. Throughout a lot of her life, Janie is controlled, whether it be by her Nanny or by her husbands, Logan Killicks and Joe Starks. Her outspoken attitude is quickly silenced and soon she becomes nothing more than a trophy, only meant to help her second husband, Joe Starks, achieve power. With time, she no longer attempts to stand up to Joe and make her own decisions. Janie changes a lot from the young girl laying underneath a cotton tree at the beginning of her story. Not only is she not herself, she finds herself aging and unhappy with her life. Joe’s death become the turning point it takes to lead to the resolution of her story which illustrates that others cannot determine who you are, it takes finding your own voice and gaining independence to become yourself and find those who accept you.
Janie were pretty well off and had the privilege to live in the yard of white
Janie Crawford, the main character of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, strives to find her own voice throughout the novel and, in my opinion, she succeeds even though it takes her over thirty years to do it. Each one of her husband’s has a different effect on her ability to find that voice.
Zora Neal Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God describes the life of a black woman named Janie. Janie is raised by her grandmother and begins a close to life-long quest that can be viewed as a search for many things. Most scholars believe that this quest is for independence; on the contrary I believe that this quest is to find someone that she can be dependent on, the kind of dependency that "singing bees" have for pear blossoms.
Through her use of southern black language Zora Neale Hurston illustrates how to live and learn from life’s experiences. Janie, the main character in Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, is a woman who defies what people expect of her and lives her life searching to become a better person. Not easily satisfied with material gain, Janie quickly jumps into a search to find true happiness and love in life. She finally achieves what she has searched for with her third marriage.
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 Zora Neale Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, the character of Janie Crawford experiences severe ideological conflicts with her grandmother, and the effects of these conflicts are far-reaching indeed. Hurston’s novel of manners, noted for its exploration of the black female experience, fully shows how a conflict with one’s elders can alter one’s self image. In the case of Janie and Nanny, it is Janie’s perception of men that is altered, as well as her perception of self. The conflict between the two women is largely generational in nature, and appears heart-breakingly inevitable.
In the modern society, a large number of people are suffering from the effects of social isolation. Over the past decades, the most affected population has been the senior citizens who are forced to live in isolation due to their old age and a loss of contact with their friends. The results of alienation are loneliness, vulnerability, and depression. However, with the emergence of information technology, both the senior population and the younger generations have been faced with increased exposure to loneliness as people have greater access and use of different media as opposed to the traditional methods of socialization (Solove 17). Loneliness can be defined as a distressful mental state in which a person develops the feeling of being cut